Free Philosophical Discussions

Things I learned in 2011

2012-01-01T13:13:00.000-05:00

Things I learned in 2011, or in some cases already knew but had reinforced.

Buying a 45 year-old car that doesn’t even run has been one of the best investments of my life. Even if I could remove the car from the equation, I’d gladly spend every dime again just to have all the memories of hanging out in the garage with my daughters, my wife, extended family members and good friends.

Most people don’t understand the difference between involvement and commitment. I sincerely thank those that do understand.

I have a whole lot more in common with my wife that I thought I did. Among other things, this is evidenced by the shocking number of times I’ve gone to the library and found that we both had the same book on hold.

Some people will still love and support you no matter how you disappoint them.

Some people will still disappoint you no matter how you love and support them.

Some people will never see the elephant in the room and insist on having nothing but superficial conversations.

Sitting in a living room while one child reads a book, another plays piano and my wife crochets is better than any entertainment a cable could ever bring into my home.

Living without a gall bladder is much nicer than living with a defective one. I really got tired of missing a whole night of sleep once a week.

Old friends will bend over backwards to make you feel welcome for no other reason than you happen to be on their side of the country.

Sometimes those who agree with you don’t understand when to speak up.

Sometimes those who disagree with you don’t understand when to shut up.

Sometimes those who agree with you don’t understand when to shut up.

Sometimes those who disagree with you don’t understand when to speak up.

This is by no means a complete list. I hope to add even more to it in 2012. Happy New Year.

Rog Tales

2011-12-30T06:31:00.000-05:00

When dad died ten years ago we all got together and shared stories about him. I was intrigued by the responses that some of the younger members of the family had to the stories. They had never heard many of them. At the time I promised my youngest sister that I’d do a better job of telling the stories and keeping them alive. I haven’t done a very good job of that but suffice it to say that this is my first attempt.

A couple weeks ago I went through a drive-thru with Rachel and a memory of my dad popped into my head. It was nothing really profound, just a funny event that had happened.

It was the early 80s and Rog and I were in a hurry to get somewhere. We were in “Thumper” our brown 76 VW Rabbit, we were both hungery but didn’t have a lot of time. Rog pulled into the Wendy’s in Tucker, drove right past the microphone and straight over to the pick-up window. The girl at the window looked out and said, “That’ll be $8.75” Dad paid, handed me the bag and the drinks and drove off. As soon as we got on the road he looks over at me and asks, “What did we get?”. I don’t remember what we actually ended up with. I was just stunned by his breach of drive-thru protocol. I can only imagine the conversation that followed when the next driver came to pick up his order.

Happy Carl Sagan Day

2011-11-09T07:48:00.000-05:00

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
Carl Sagan

The King Swing

2011-10-04T16:55:00.002-04:00

(Warning!! This post is of a very personal nature and may offend some readers.)
This is a video from a very popular rock climbing route in Yosemite. This technique is called a pendulum traverse. Climbers call it "The King Swing” and it takes place on a route called “The Nose” on the 3000’ feature called El Capitan. About halfway up this particular route the cracks and features kind of peter out once you get to the top of that flake the photographer is standing on. Since the rock doesn’t have any little cracks or bumps there is subsequently nothing to pull up on or stand on. Therefore, no way to climb it. The only solution is to go back down and see if you can find another path. Sometimes you see another path but there really isn’t any way to get to it from underneath. The only feasible solution is to do a pendulum traverse. Just as the name implies you lower down as far as you have to and swing back and forth until you can grab a section of rock that is will allow you to climb it.

I’ve done several pendulum traverses, although not this one. They can be quite intimidating. Sometimes you’re not quite sure if you’re swinging into a section that will be just as unclimbable as where you were. One time it was an emergency situation and this was the safest technique to get off the rock during a thunderstorm. But every time I was more than a little apprehensive. The technique requires much more planning than it appears and things have to be done just right in order to stay safe.

Even though the route ahead seems insurmountable it’s quite a weird feeling to hang your butt on the end of a rope and run back and forth hoping to grasp something better, something that will allow you to keep progressing. It’s not exactly the safest thing to do. The times I’ve done them were only in situations where I was absolutely sure that it was the only way to keep on progressing. The risks can be high, but the rewards can be even greater if this leads you to better climbing or a way out of the current predicament.

I’m at a point in my life where I need to take the King Swing. I’ve been on a path that has provided me with much joy and happiness up to this point. I felt like I was growing, learning and progressing. But for the last several years I’ve been stuck on a ledge looking for ways to keep moving up and not finding anything to hang on to. It has taken me quite a while to even consider looking for another path. I’d been raised to believe that the path I was on was perfect and there was no reason to stray from it. But I just couldn’t see where or how to continue. Consequently, I’ve lowered down a little bit and begun to swing back and forth looking for another path.

I believe I’ve found a path. I’m not quite sure how good the climbing will be over there but I’m sure it is more promising than where I am now. Who knows? This new path may lead me back onto my original path from a different angle. Or I may end up having to lower back down this new route too and look for yet another path. I just don’t know right now.

To those of you who aren’t having any problems negotiating the blank sections of the original route, I have no criticism at all. Congratulations. You are better skilled at finding the route than I am. Simply because I am looking for a different path I have no criticism at all if you are making it work for you.

I’m not suggesting that anybody take the steps that I about to without doing at least as much thorough research, soul-searching and earnestly looking for all of the answers. This decision, to take the swing, has not be reached casually. In my case it has been years and years of agonizing study and prayer that has brought me to when I am now.

It’s time to set the metaphor aside. This post has nothing to do with rock climbing. I’m talking about my membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the past several years I’ve been stuck on a ledge and could find no way to keep moving forward. I’ve discussed some of the specifics on this blog numerous times, but I don’t wish to get into them today. To my friends and family who are members of the church I hope that you will take this with the spirit with which it is intended. I am very grateful that you are in my life and I mean absolutely no disrespect to you at all. I have never felt that absolute agreement on everything was necessary for me to love you and this decision will not stop that. I hope that you can see it in your heart to still love me. The most apprehensive part of this decision has been the considering, reconsidering and re-reconsidering the effects it will have on my family.

I fully expect that many of you will not understand my decision. I’m under no delusion that this will be easy. But I believe it will be better in the long run. I’ve seen other friends and family members struggle with some of the same issues that I have. It’s been very selfish of me to let them struggle alone while I conceal my struggles and go through some of the same things they have been.

I am grateful for everything that I have learned so far on my path. Please don’t think that I am going to consider abandoning all of the progress and the good things that I’ve learned in the process. I have no plans to start stopping by liquor stores or breaking any other of the moral and ethical codes the church has taught me. Quite the opposite; I cherish those values and I look forward to continuing to incorporate them into my life.

The private answers to the questions I have asked in my prayers have led me in an unexpected direction, a spiritual path which, at least for now, has proven incompatible with Mormon doctrine. This search for a new route has brought me some of the most profound surprises and also the deepest sadness of my life. It is very hard for me to leave a path that I love so much.

Prophet's Prey

2011-09-20T13:01:00.001-04:00

One of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. If you think that Big Love and Sister Wives represents a realistic depiction of what it’s like to live in a polygamist sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints you could not be more mistaken. If anything these programs are convenient distractions from horrors that are really going on behind the walls of most FLDS communities.

Yes, popular TV programs like to portray modern polygamist groups as just a bunch of quirky little consenting adult Christians who live normal healthy lives, they just all consented to being married to the same guy. However in most FLDS areas, especially those under the control of Warren Jeffs, these shows couldn’t be further from the truth. Most live in squalor because they consecrate everything they earn back to the church. They live on church owned land with no legal lease arrangement so the “prophet” can kick them out for any perceived infraction, the most common of which is just happening to have been born male because that means they will eventually be a competitor for the little girls in the group. Yes I said girls, not women or females. These are little girls that are being married off to much older men to gain political clout within the community. Some of these girls are as young as 12 and most are married off well below the legal age of consent.

So if you happen to be born as a girl in a FLDS community the odds are that you will be denied to play with dolls because the prophet has said that girls “should learn to raise real children”. You won’t have any other toys. You’ll be home-schooled but most of that will be only church sanctioned propaganda, like the fact that we never landed on the moon. Then in your early teens you’ll be married off to some man three times your age and brutally raped before you’ve even had the basics of sex education (see comment above about propaganda). You see if girls knew what normal sex was supposed to be like they’d surely resist what the men in the FLDS culture force on them. Now you’d just better hope that your husband overts his eyes from the prophet fast enough ‘cause if he's too slow he might get banished from the cult and you and your sister wives are doled out to the prophet’s political cronies and you just have to submit to him and his abuse and hope the cycle doesn’t repeat itself.

Being born male isn’t exactly an easy life either. You’ll be put to work on church projects when you are so young that the hammer you’ll be given reaches all the way to the ground when you sling it in your work belt. The only way the church elites can maintain their high number of wives is to restrict the number of men in the community. So the odds are pretty good that right about the time you start thinking about starting your own family that you’ll be driven out of town and dropped off on the side of the road adn told never to return. If you get lucky enough to be allowed to stay well hog dog, You will be allowed to follow in your indoctrination and become a serial child abuser. But don't get too comfortable in your role as abuser/rapist. You still could lose all that at the drop of a hat if the prophet decides he doesn't like you anymore.

No matter what your gender your odds are the greatest in the world to develop serious genetic defects due to inbreeding. FLDS geneologies boggle the mind. There are only about four suranmes and they recycle a lot of the same given names and middle names. Wives are sometimes taken from a father and given to his son, or from one brother to another. So you'll have children growing up in the same house whose father is also an uncle or a brother or a cousin. The CDC has estimated that over half of the world’s cases of fumarase deficiency are in Short Creek UT/AZ. So you may be stillborn or only live a few weeks.

The author of this book is LDS. Not FLDS, just LDS. He lived only an hour away from where much of these atrocities were taking place but just didn’t give it much thought. The FLDS were just the red-headed step children of the “true” church. Not until he got involved as a private investigator on a simple eviction did he come to understand the lawlessness and church sanctioned abuse that was taking place in his backyard.

As American’s we are proud of our First Amendment. We like the government to stay out of our worship. People should be able to believe or not to believe what ever they want to and the government is supposed to let that be. But when beliefs turn into actions there is something that the government does care about and does make laws to prevent. You can believe that god will bring destruction on the world, but if you try to fly a plane into a building to start the process then we should expect some intervention, not against the belief, against the action.

Somehow religions that profess a link to Jesus get a little more of a pass than others. If I were to tell you that the Taliban had taken control of a small city in Utah had completely converted to Sharia law all hell would break loose to end the process and establish order. However since the FLDS claims a link to Jesus’ teachings all the same Taliban-like behavior is tolerated now and has been tolerated for almost a century. It’s a serous double standard.

As if he had a chance before, this book more than convinced me to vote against Rick Perry. When close to 500 children were in the custody of the state of Texas Perry went before cameras and read all his talking points about, "safety of the children" etc. etc. Yet the Department of Child Protective Services was pressured from above to release all of these kids back to their abusers for no logical reason except that it was costing too much. Just confirmed my suspicions about him. He'll say whatever he has to to look good, but not offer any real support where it is really needed. I'd like to see how he would have responded if it had been a Taliban group and not an FLDS sect.

Polygamy would not exist to the extent it does in the United States if it were not for one man, Joseph Smith. Joseph took his desire for sexual impropriety and canonized it. Officially the mainstream LDS church has since stopped practicing polygamy a century ago, however the FLDS still claim Joseph as their justification for continuing.

Read this book. It’s not a pleasant read. It will challenge a lot of what you believe and think you know about polygamy in the United States. Bower had unique access to the facts that put Warren Jeffs behind bars. It’s quite an eye-opener. Far from just being a quirky little sub-culture, in every measurable way FLDS communities are the most lawless cities in the United States and generation after generation of children are being taught that this is normal and god’s way.

Just Kidding

2011-08-02T12:07:00.000-04:00

What follows is just a little bit of a rant about the way a certain phrase is being used lately.

I get more than a little irritated when people misuse and abuse language. Here’s an example that I’ve seen happen a few times a week for the last several months and even been the unwitting victim of the exchange quite a few times too.

Person A, “Hey I’ll trade you that watch for this used popsicle stick.”

Person B, “No way!”

Person A, “Yeah I was just kidding.”

The watch and the popsicle are just examples. Substitute the watch with anything of value and the popsicle stick for anything of substantially less value or no value at all. The conversation typically takes this form. Person A proposes a very lopsided deal. Once rejected A then attempts to camouflage the scam as if it was just a joke. My irritation comes at the use of the phrase “just kidding”. I wonder if B had accepted the deal would A have accepted the watch. If so, then was A really kidding? I think not. In every situation I’ve seen A was completely serious and would have followed through with the lopsided deal if B had accepted. So they were not kidding. They only chose to claim that they were kidding once they had been caught. “Just kidding” seems to be used as a poor substitute for “I’m sorry to have even proposed such a lopsided deal. Please forgive me.”

I recently had somebody propose a deal to me that was very much not in my favor and opened me up to some serious liability. I promptly declined the offer. They followed by saying, “I don’t blame you. If I were you I wouldn’t have done it either.” Really? They openly confessed that they knew the deal was not fair but they followed through with it anyway.

Yeah I know this is kinda petty. I just find it irritating. Whether you call it The Golden Rule, Kant ‘s Categorical Imperative or any of the other names that it goes by treat others the way you would like to be treated. If you would accept the deal if it went in your favor then you were not “just kidding” you were being manipulative. And if you wouldn’t accept the deal if it was offered to you then don’t offer a deal that you know is unfair.

Cherry Picking

2011-07-26T14:36:00.000-04:00

I had an interesting thing happen at church on Sunday. Before I get into specifics I wanted to talk about the rhetorical tool of cherry-picking. Cherry-picking is the process of picking only the data the supports your position while ignoring or under emphasizing the data that goes contrary to your point.
To illustrate my point today I took a Wikipedia article about an individual and picked only the positive and neutral points. From the information below see if you can identify the subject of the article.

An avid downhill skier while in high school.
He studied law at Utah State University.
In college he was baptized a member of the LDS church.
He worked on Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign.
He liked Volkswagens.
He enjoyed spending time outdoors.
He died at age 43.

Okay. He sounds like a pretty good guy, doesn’t he? Well yeah. Anybody would if you only use the details that make him seem like a nice guy. Now take a look at the rest of his profile and see if I left out anything important.

Big difference isn’t it? Even though everything above was technically true by cherry-picking the data, only picking the positive, I was able to create a false picture of who this man really was.

Now back to my experience Sunday. July 24th is Pioneer Day. It’s a Mormon holiday to celebrate those who made the trek west to help settle the Salt Lake valley. It’s typical for the Sunday talks to tell personal anecdotes about ancestors who made the trek and have them make comparisons to their own lives. This Sunday it became a textbook example of cherry-picking. The closing speaker did indeed have an ancestor who crossed the plains and helped settle the west. As he began to list the positive attributes of his great-great-great-great grandfather his name rang a bell. I pulled out my iphone and did a quick search for him. Now here is a short list of the details that the speaker shared with us.

He learned to hunt as a boy.
He converted to the church as an adult.
He was a close confidant on Joseph Smith.
He crossed the plains with Brigham Young and was one of his most trusted friends.
He was a proud defender of the LDS Church.
He was shot several times and eventually died from complications of his gunshot wounds.

I’m going to spare the actual name of the ancestor mentioned because I don’t want to identify the speaker. However, Suffice it to say that the comparison I made to Ted Bundy is not unfair. He was Danite and essentially a hired assassin. This speaker’s ancestor actually confessed to killing more people than Bundy is suspected of killing. Yes, he was a member of the church but he was excommunicated and became an opponent of the church.

My point here is not to criticize Sunday’s speaker. I just seriously am intrigued by the amount of cognitive dissonance that it takes to spin this character into a hero. It’s one thing to cherry-pick data in order to convince somebody else. But I think that more often than not people unconsciously sort that data. They just actually do not even see the disconfirming evidence. Or if they do they minimize it or rationalize it to the point that even a negative becomes a positive.

Surgery

2011-07-25T18:51:00.000-04:00

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in. As usual this isn’t because nothing has been going on. Actually it’s quite the opposite. I just haven’t been able to slow down enough to give a report.

Emergency Surgery

A year or so ago I was having some recurring abdominal pains so I went to the doctor. She did a CT scan and noticed that I had a few kidney stones and a gall stone. I passed the kidney stones and then the real fun began. I started having gall stone attacks. For the most part they were just an annoyance that made me lose a lot of sleep and consequently vacation days. But after a few months they started getting rather intense. Went to the doctor again and she gave me some drugs for the pain and told me to try to manage it with diet. Well anything with any fat at all could trigger it and after further reading I found out that just laying on your left side could also trigger an attack.

Well the first weekend in July I came home from work a little early because I couldn’t stand sitting in my chair. It was getting painful but I was trying to tough it out. I knew exactly what the problem was and exactly what the solution was. I just didn’t have time for it. I had multiple projects in the works and my house was still substantially less than complete. Plus I didn’t have much of a buffer on vacation days if we were going to be able to go at all.

I tried to make it get better and nothing would work so Victoria called our neighbor over, she’s and EMT, and she persuaded me to go to the ER. After painfully waiting for hours in the ER they finally saw me. They kept asking me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I had a hard time with this and kept thinking about the Brian Regan comedy routine. So I told the nurses, “Well a broken femur is supposed to be a 10 and I did that in ’97. This is far worse so how about 35.” An x-ray, EKG, and ultrasound later they admitted me. They gave me some morphine so I could sleep and scheduled me for surgery Saturday morning.

The next morning the doctor came in and explained what was going on. She used the phrase, “If you want to keep on living…” and the word “gangrenous” in the discussion. As if I needed more persuasion, but I was even more convinced after that.

The surgery was laparoscopic so I have 4 little scars that look like bullet holes. The doctor said that my gall bladder had a large stone and showed significant scarring. So it was good that I didn’t wait any longer. I healed up pretty quickly and only missed a few days of work the next week. The next Friday the doctor approved me for driving so our vacation could go on as scheduled. We left pretty much as soon as I got back from her office.

It’s been three weeks since the surgery and three weeks without an attack. That’s the first time in about a year that I can say that. At its worst the attacks were coming about every 5 days. I sure hope those days are all behind me.

I doubt any of them are reading this but I just wanted to give a tremendous thank you to all of the staff at the hospital. Everybody, without exception, was very nice and pleasant. I don’t ever want to have to do something like that again, but if I do I’ll pick the same folks to help me out.

Conflicts

2011-06-23T12:40:00.002-04:00

Many years ago I played saxophone in my middle school band. I wasn’t very good at all. Typically I was either 3rd or 4th chair. That depended entirely on how many saxophones there were that semester, 3 or 4. In band if you wanted a promotion to a higher chair you had to “challenge” the chair in front of you. Friday’s were challenge days. We would go around the band and listen to each challenge. Typically the 2 players would each play the same piece and they were judged by the band director. If that challenger played it better they advanced to that chair. Sometimes challenges would be issued to show an expertise in a specific technique. I remember challenges issues entirely on breathing at the correct spots in a piece.

I will always remember one particular challenge. I was in the flute section. Our band director had been working with us on keeping our fingers close to the keys; basically not wasting energy and time by completely straightening your fingers when a smaller motion will get the job done. So the 3rd chair recognizes that she had an advantage in this area and challenges the 2nd chair to a piece. Here’s where it got interesting. She challenged him based on two criteria, accuracy and keeping fingers on the keys. Both musicians played the piece and then the director had to make a decision. The 3rd chair flutist clearly had mastered the concept of keeping her fingers near the keys. However the 2nd chair played the piece with more accuracy. So what do you do? Which of the 2 challenge criteria trumps the other? Without any ground rules in place before the challenge he decided that a tie meant no change in the positions.

No you’ve probably already realized that this post isn’t really about who sits where in a middle school band class. At our company we have a long standing safety creed. Until a few years ago it read,
“No job is so important and no service is so urgent that we can not take time to perform our work safely."
I have no problem with that at all. It’s simple and to the point. When I would get spot checked while on site my supervisor would ask me what it meant in my own words. I would typically say something like, “It’s just your phone or your internet. Nobody should have to get hurt to make this work.”
Well a few years ago we were bought out by a larger company. And that company made a slight change to the safety creed. It now reads,
“No job is so important and no service is so urgent that we can not take time to perform our work safely and in an environmentally responsible manner."
Hmmm. Now like our band director I am presented with a possible conflict. I have no problem with either of the goals expressed in this creed as long as they don’t conflict with each other. But what about when they do conflict? I can think of several cases where the most environmentally responsible thing to do would not be the safest thing to do in the short term. What if a coworker is being attacked by a Canada Goose? Whose side do I take? The coworker’s or the threatened migratory bird? While I have no criticism of either goal, I just think that bringing up environmental issues in the context of a safety creed waters down the creed and could actually make a situation more dangerous.
Now on to other issues. How many times do we find ourselves in situations like this? Do I swerve to miss the animal in the road and endanger my passengers in the process? Or make a professional decision without considering the family? I guess my only point is that you need to be clear which goal would trump the other before you get into that situation.

Bittersweet

2011-06-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

We’ve started making the plans for our biannual family adventure. Every other year our family does a reunion. This year it’s in Utah. We do our best to attend and we also try to make a big road trip out of it. The kids really look forward to it. This year we plan on hitting several of the National Parks in California as well as some old favorites, possibly Yellowstone and Carlsbad again. We’ll see. The hardest part about planning these trips is reminding the family that we only have two weeks to get everything in.
The bittersweet part of this adventure comes because we are going to have to leave one of the family home. If he wants to graduate on time Aaron’ll have to take a summer school class which means that he will not be going with us. While I recognize that he has to sleep in the bed he made, it’s still rather tough to make plans like this knowing that we won’t all be going.

Judy

2011-06-09T15:00:00.001-04:00

I bought another car last week. That’s actually the errand we were running last Sunday when we noticed the water coming out of the house. A few months ago I noticed a cute little VW bug parked in a driveway about 2 miles from the house. Every time I drove past I became more apparent that it hadn’t move for quite some time. I checked some online aerial shots and based on some other clues in the area it had been there for several years. So after work one day the last week of May I stopped by and talked to the owner. We talked for a little bit and I made him an offer and he accepted it.

The owner and his family are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Just a treat to talk to. He actually owns a tool rental company and when he found out what happened to the house he loaned us a carpet blower to help dry things out until the abatement people showed up. So if you need to rent a tool consider using Temporary Tools in Lilburn. A good friend of mine from the bug club loaned me tow bar and a wheel and helped me get her home. The previous owner and his son were also very helpful in getting her rolling so we could move her.

She’s a 1967 zenith blue VW Beetle . 1967 is a one of kind year for Beetles. Sometime in ’66 VW made the decision to completely overhaul the design by the ’68 model but the still had to get a new model out for ’67. Many VW aficionados think this is the best year for the Beetle. It still had a lot of the old body style and quaint features like the overrider bumpers, longer hood and the horn grills. But it also has some of the modern technical features like the 2-speed wipers and upgraded 12 volt electrics. Before ’67 they were only 6 volt.

Rachel decided to name her Judy, or Jude for short. She’s very much a work in progress and I’m probably going to have to learn to weld to get her fixed right. I’m not holding my breath that she’ll be on the road any time soon. Every day reveals some positive surprises and well as a few let downs. I’m very happy that most of the ’67 only features are still intact and very salvageable. It’s gonna be fun to work with my girls to help get her back on the road. I already have a set of replacement doors and Rachel wants to keep her the same color. First priority is to get the foundation solid enough that we can drive her safe. Then we’ll worry about cosmetic details.

Water Water Everywhere

2011-06-09T14:00:00.001-04:00

We had a little excitement last week that made for a very stressful Memorial Day week. Sunday after church we’d gone over to the in-laws for a dinner. Around 3:00 or so Victoria, Rachel and I left to run an errand. We stopped by the house for just a second. I hadn’t even planned on going in the house, just needed to get some tools out of the truck. Well when I got out of the car I noticed that the driveway looked wet. I then noticed that the water seemed to be coming out of the garbage can. I moved the can saw it coming from under the garage door. I quickly dashed inside and it sounded like somebody had left the shower on. I ran up stairs and the steps were splashing as I ran. When I opened the bathroom door water was spraying everywhere. My first instinct was to check the shower but it was fine. The pipe behind the toilet had sprung a leak and was spraying water everywhere. I shut the water off there but it was still leaking. So I went into the garage and shut it off at the house too. When I opened the door to the garage it sounded like it was raining. The ceiling had become completely saturated and was buckling in several places. I backed Victoria’s car out just a few minutes before pieces of the ceiling began to fall.

So it was chaos for several days at the house. Plumbers, electrician, water abatement companies, insurance adjusters etc. for most of last week the house was around 110degrees inside. The water abatement folks had 3 of these mini-fridge sized dehumidifiers that were very effective but they were like little ovens. On top of that there were 18 high volume fans. The place sounded like an airport during a vintage prop plane air show with all those rotors turning at once. The kids and Victoria stayed with family most of the week. Personally I was afraid to leave the house unsupervised with all that heat and that many electrical appliances running.

We got somewhat back to normal on Friday when the insurance adjuster showed up and the water abatement company left. The house is now dry and the air conditioning is back on. All the flooring in most of the rooms is damaged beyond repair but they’re taking care of that for us. We didn’t have much damage besides the house. Everything in the garage got wet but not much was damaged. Now we just start the long process of dealing with flooring contractors to get everything taken care of. So far the insurance company has been great to deal with. It isn’t quite like the commercials (i. e. the agent standing side by side with you seconds after the damage occurred looking at the home owner saying, “We’ll make this right”) but I don’t have many complaints.

Banned

2011-06-09T13:13:00.002-04:00

So I haven’t blogged for a while. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s because nothing has been happening worth talking about. Actually quite the opposite. Life’s been throwing a lot at me lately. I’ll try to catch up a little bit but I may have to break it down into a few posts.

Banned

Last month sometime my blog was tagged as offensive on Facebook. Somebody who calls themselves a friend of mine, at least as far as facebook’s definition of “friend” goes, reported my blog as offensive. I had to appeal it to the powers that be at facebook in order to get unlabelled. Every since then I’ve been really wondering what specifically I said that was offensive. I’ve never intended to offend, disagree? Certainly. But never offend. I’ve since brushed it off as just somebody who doesn’t know the difference between offensive speech and disagreement. It’s just taken me a little bit to get motivated to actually post something again.

2011-05-10T10:45:00.000-04:00

Awe

2011-04-07T12:52:00.001-04:00

I've posted this before but I just felt like posting it again today.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

2011-04-05T08:37:00.003-04:00

Last night Atlanta had some pretty rough storms roll through town. High winds, rain, hail, and lightning made quite a mess outside. My 11 mile commute to work had four detours from roads blocked by trees, utility lines and debris. About half of the neighborhoods I drove through were pitch black because they had no power.

The FM DJs on the station I was listening to were being pretty factual about their reporting. They were just stating the facts. Roads x, y, and z are blocked. Power out in x, y and z areas of town. But when I get in to work a coworker is complaining about how bad the am stations were reporting the storm. In his short commute he heard the aftermath compared to a “war zone” several times. Really? A war zone? Really? Were they bodies in the streets? Gunfire? Burning buildings? Sure there were trees down and leaves and crap spread everywhere, but a war zone? Come on. I remember as a kid being told the story of the boy who cried wolf. Apparently some people need a refresher course.

The boy who cried wolf caused the public to ignore his pleas. He had changed the definition of the word “wolf”. It no longer meant the same thing and was now something that could be ignored. Same goes for calling the storm damage a “war zone”.

A few years ago a gas pipeline blew up in California and completely blew up or burned an entire subdivision. I did not criticize anybody for saying that looked like a “war zone”. Now, if something like that were to happen today in Georgia what words are left to describe it? “War zone” now just means limbs and stuff spread around. You have diluted the words and they no longer have their original meaning.

It hit me today that the problem I have with this type of exaggeration is the same problem I have with the political inflammatory rhetoric. Suppose a real Socialist, a real Nazi, or a real Fascist were to run for election. What words are you left with to describe them? The past few years people have been throwing the words around without understanding that they are diluting the meaning. The three term are used as synonyms, they aren’t, and they are all used to mean “anybody who wants to control something I don’t want them to”.

Perhaps we could all benefit from asking an elementary school kid to retell us the story of the boy who cried wolf. Remember the moral to that story? He used scary words when there really wasn’t anything to be afraid of and people stopped listening and stopped caring when the real wolf showed up.

Proofiness

2011-03-31T12:17:00.006-04:00

Years ago I my dad had a book laying around the house called How to Lie with Statistics. The book took the form of a how-to book. The entire premise being that people don’t really understand statistics or even math very well so it presented some tongue in cheek suggestions on how to spin your numbers to say something that they don’t really. The book was intended to be used as a defensive tool to teach the readers how to notice when somebody else is lying to them with numbers.

If How to Lie with Statistics was the 101 course then Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife is the masters level course. If you are uncomfortable with uncertainty you might want to avoid this book. Seife successfully shows that many of the numbers that control our lives are at best gross estimations and at worst deliberate fictions. Instead of saying "Hey there are a bunch of Communists in the Justice Department.” Joseph McCarthy knew that we would give more credence to a number so he made one up, 205. Where did he get that number? He just made it up. And people bought it. Seife shows that people tend to believe numbers even if there is no reasonable expectation that the number is even correct. This reminds me of the story of the surveyors who were measuring Mount Everest and found out that it was exactly 29,000’. The supervisors in charge altered the data because 29,000’ looked like and estimate so they added a few feet to the mountain and called it 29,029’.

Seife shows how pervasive our trust of numbers are in everyday life. Most people accept that 98.6F is the normal temperature for a human. Is this number really accurate to one decimal point? No it isn’t. The doctors who determined the average normal temperature for humans only claimed it was accurate to the decimal point in Celsius and even then it could vary by person. 37C is the normal temperature, but when you convert that to Fahrenheit you get a number that appears more accurate than the number you started with. The real average temperature for humans is somewhere between 36C and 38C or 97F to 100F but we really can’t be more accurate than that. Yet how many times have you assumed that you had a fever at 99.0F? Not to say you weren’t really sick, but you don’t need the artificially accurate number to tell you that. This is Proofiness.

Seife explains case by case how proofiness has been used to free the guilt; O.J. Simpson, execute the innocent, elect Presidents and Congressmen, justify military action, justify backing out of arms treaties, support just about every type of legislation on both sides of the aisle on issues ranging form abortion to gun control etc. etc. etc. The abuses of math in our society were very disheartening. Personally I think Seife had his own bias as to which side of the aisle was more guilty of proofiness than the other. That being said he was just as thorough in his rebuke of the right as he was the left.

Many parts of the book were quite depressing. The specific cases, especially those were lives were lost seriously caused me to question the motives of some of our elected official. However, overall I thought the book was an excellent primer on what to look for and what follow up questions to ask when you are given information, especially information that involves counting , math and statistics.

The whole time I was reading this book I keep thinking about this one joke. 5/4th of American’s have problems with fractions. Seife has convinced me that this number may even be higher.

The Panic Virus

2011-03-03T10:31:00.004-05:00

When Seth Mnookin and his wife found out they were expecting their first child they got all sorts of unsolicited advice form friends and family about vaccines and their safety. He decided to investigate for his personal reasons and in the process felt it would be an intriguing topic for a book. In an interview he stated that his original intent was to just present the controversy. However, after finding that all of the evidence was on one side he turned the book into an expose’ on those that preach fear at the expense of logic, evidence and children’s safety. The Panic Virus is that book.

The anti-vaccination groups out there are really good at getting you to ignore the logic and the lack of evidence. They focus on a few heart breaking stories of kids who were diagnosed with autism at roughly the same time they were vaccinated and then try to get use to connect the dots and link the two. The stories are truly heart-breaking but no matter how sad they are that doesn’t prove that the vaccines caused these kids’ conditions. What makes Mnookin’s book stand out over the many others out there is that he fights fire with fire. Rather than just focus on the statistical and epidemiological evidence that shows absolutely no casual link with vaccines, Thimerosal or mercury; Mnookin bests the antivaxers at their own game. He tells much more emotional stories of children being crippled or dying of Polio, Pertussis and Measles because they were not vaccinated. Jenny McCarthy has stated that she is just fine with this kind of collateral damage.

The Panic Virus is a brilliant and timely history about the manufactured controversy about vaccine safety. From the initial Lancet report all the way to Dr. Wakefield’s complete and thorough discreditation, Mnookin shows that vaccines are safe and effective and do not cause autism.

My only criticism of the book is the same that I’ve had with others too. I have become so familiar with this topic that I was waiting for him to tell me something new. I‘ve grown used to reading articles daily on autism and vaccines. I have news aggregators send me any story with the word Andrew Wakefield in the body. But I had to take a step back and look at the book from the perspective of somebody not as familiar as I was. It is a great resource.

I encourage anybody who has an questions at all about the safety of vaccines to please read this before you hesitate to vaccinate your children. You should be convinced by the evidence that getting vaccinated is much safer than not vaccinated. And if that’s not enough the evidence of fraud, shoddy research, dishonesty, conflict of interest and foul play by the anti-vaccination community should sway you the rest of the way. And if there is still any doubt left in your mind the heart-breaking stories of children dying from easily preventable illness should completely tip the scales.

Semantics

2011-02-28T08:45:00.003-05:00

A few years ago I was having a theological discussion with a friend of mine. He was really impressed that the English word son and sun were homophones. It really appealed to him that Christ, the son, brought light into the world and Sol, the sun, also brought light to the world. Now I realize that this wasn’t the format for textual criticism so I just bit my tongue. I was tempted to point out that the significance of his revelation only applied to English. I didn’t know for sure but I was pretty sure that son and sun were not homophones in the original Greek or Hebrew. If this doctrine were so profound why would it be left for only those who spoke English to understand? But it wasn’t my job to take the air out of his sails. So, I just listened patiently and encouraged him to continue his studies.

Yesterday at church I had a similar tongue-biting experience. In Sunday School we were discussing the New Testament and somehow we started talking about the words thee, thou and thine. For quite a while we talked about the importance of using these words when we are talking about deity. Begin tongue biting. Personally I think this type of language says more about England at the time King James version was translated than it does about anything contemporary to Jesus. But I continued to listen.

Then the discussion centered on the fact that thee, thou and thine were more familiar and casual forms of the more formal pronouns for you and your. More tongue biting. One member of the audience even challenged that claim, saying that the instructor had it backwards. Thee was the more formal not you. But he stood his ground and correctly stuck to his point that thee was the familiar form and you the formal.

Then two other members of the class shared personal experiences about the formal and familiar tenses in different languages. And how when they learned the different language they were trained to use the familiar forms when referencing deity, in Spanish and Portuguese just like King James’s contemporaries did with English.

One good thing about have a wife that is so understanding of my condition is that I can quietly vent a little bit to her rather that completely sever my tongue. So I asked her, “Does anybody here know if the original Greek or Hebrew had rank distinctions like Old English, Spanish or Portuguese?” My point was the same as my point to my friend a few years ago. If we were to be having this lesson in the language the original text was written in would there be a distinction at all? It was my suspicion that we were spending valuable lesson time discussion the particulars of doctrine on a subject that quite possibly was just an artifact of translation. Until somebody could verify that Greek and Hebrew had rank distinctions in their pronouns we were just wasting time.

So once I got home I turned to the interwebs and the Google helped me answer my questions in only a few minutes. The instructor was correct. Thou, thee and thine are the familiar form and not the causal form.

“Following a process found in other Indo-European languages, thou was later used to express intimacy, familiarity, or even disrespect, while another pronoun, you, the oblique/objective form of ye, was used for formal circumstances.”

And, as I suspected, Greek and Hebrew do not even have rank distinctions in their pronouns.

“Emphasis in biblical languages was on the noun, subject, or name, whether referring to God, man, a spiritual being, or an inanimate object. There were not two or three sets of pronouns used: for example, one to convey the significance of God's name and another when referring to Abraham. Hebrew and Greek do have pronouns that distinguish between singular and plural and between subject pronouns (referring to the one performing the action of the verb); and object pronouns (the one receiving the action of the verb or joined with a preposition); but they are used without any reference to rank. In Biblical Hebrew and Greek pronouns were a matter of precision not piety.”

I guess what concerns me about issues like this is that it distracts from time that we could be using to discuss truly important things. Rather than talking about how we can help other in the congregation we were nit-picking over our choice of pronouns.

As soon as church was over we loaded up the truck and headed up to visit my new nephew and his parents. He’s still in the NICU since he was born rather small. It was inspiring to see this tiny little soul struggling to survive and seeing his parents do everything they can to help him get started right in this world in spite of his bumpy landing. I really enjoyed the time spent with him, his parents, and the nurses showing him so much love in his first week of life. The drive home gave me pause and really got me thinking about what it means to be spiritual.

Internets Polls and other Cons

2011-02-09T07:52:00.001-05:00

The book I’m currently reading has a whole chapter on opinion polls. Specifically, it focuses on how systematic errors in the polls can cause error bars so broad that the data is completely worthless. Unless your goal in the first place isn’t to measure public opinion but to shape it, then they aren’t worthless at all.
Yesterday on my facebook feeds I got a request to answer a survey about where I get my news. Sounds good on the surface, but then the problems start popping up.
What’s wrong with this kind of a survey? Well first off, it’s voluntary. They aren’t gonna get any mediocre opinions. People don’t log on to a volunteer survey to say that they really don’t have an opinion. So right off the bat the survey will be artificially polarized, since it will only take responses from people passionate enough to participate.
Second, I didn’t see this same survey come across any other media; radio, TV etc. This isn’t a problem by itself. They may have been specifically looking for the opinions of facebook users. It’s only a problem if they then try to extrapolate from there out to the general population. Many surveys often do exactly that.
But the big death nail in this survey’s credibility is the surveyed audience. This came across my NPR feed. Yup, this survey was only sent out to people who are already self declared fans of NPR. Are you kidding me? You’re taking a survey of people who are already fans of NPR and want to know where they get their news? Gee, I wonder how that will turn out.
Of course this is nothing new. Fox news can’t seem to go a whole hour without asking you to log in and tell them what you think. Then they come back with some ridiculous misinterpretation of the data like, “55% of Americans think Obama is Muslim.” As if the opinions of their viewers makes it reality. I’ve grown to expect this kind of meaningless polling from most news outlets. I was just a little bit surprised the see if from NPR. In fairness to them, I don’t think they were being partisan. They were just trying to create a poll that disproportionately favored NPR itself.
So If you’re ever around me when somebody tells me about a recent poll, you’re liable to hear sigh or a snicker and then a series of follow up questions about things like statistical errors v systematic errors, controlling for sample bias, error bars, etc. You see polls themselves aren’t news. At best, they are what news organizations talk about while they are waiting for real news to happen. At worst they are an attempt to manipulate opinion or politics.

Hypocrisy

2011-02-01T11:52:00.003-05:00

It snowed in the Southeast a few weeks ago. Since Atlanta has no appreciable snow response plan other than to just wait for it to melt, most of Atlanta was stuck at home burning vacation days as fast as they were their Kroger bought firewood. Nothing pulls out the deniers of Global Warming more than a colder than average day. Never mind the fact that most of them were conveniently silent during the records highs of only a few months ago, 87 degrees on October 11th and I didn’t hear a peep out of any of them Saturday and Sunday when it was in the 70s. I could do a whole post on confirmation bias here. If you only look at the data that supports your conclusion and ignore the rest the world looks just like you imagine it would. But I’ve done that before.
Of course a few hot days in October or a few days in the 70s in January don’t prove it is happening any more than a few cold days in January proves it isn’t. If you are talking about a global issue increasing over the long term you have to average all of the data for the long term.
My post today is to issue a challenge to those who honestly believe that a few cold days mean that the general trend is not increasing. Let’s put your money where your mouth is. Do you believe the same thing about your stock portfolio? I propose that we take all the stocks in your portfolio and every time one hits a localized low you sell it to me at that low price. If we apply the same logic to your portfolio that you apply to the weather then a localized low must mean that the general trend is not increasing. So why would you want to hang on to it anyway?
Any takers? No I didn’t think so. Because most people are smart enough to realize that when it comes to their stock portfolio it’s the long term trends that are important not the localized highs and lows. Sure there are bad stocks out there that are not performing well. But if you look at all of them all and average them out, it’s still a pretty good place to invest. Why, because in spite of localized events the trend is generally increasing.
I think that most people who deny the evidence of global climate change are smart enough to realize this point. They obviously accept the same logic when applied to their portfolio. They just choose to deny it because they don’t like the political implications that accepting the evidence would have. And they know that a cold day in January doesn’t prove anything except that it’s a cold day in January, yet they deliberately play on the emotions of those that follow them to lead you to a fallacious conclusion. They think their listeners are that easily manipulated. Unfortunately, many of them are.

Trust

2011-01-25T06:43:00.002-05:00

Every now and then I like to watch the Barrett-Jackson auto actions. I’m never going to be able to afford any of the cars they sell but I still enjoy looking at beautiful cars. Week after week people will show all sorts of cars and the commentators will give you explanations of what kind of restorations the car has been through, the history of the car and even focus on some of the details that may be either custom or were specific to that year and model. I don’t pretend to be an expert on any of the cars they show. I can guess the decade of most cars and on a few I might be able to get a little bit more detailed, but not much. The only possible exception to this would be air-cooled Volkswagens. I’m still not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I know more about them than any other make.

Well a few months ago they did a show that had quite a few classic VWs come across. I missed the show but I read quite a bit about it on a VW chat room that I visit frequently. From the discussions in the chat room it became quickly apparent that the commentators just had no clue what they were talking about when it came to the VWs. But that didn’t stop them from repeating nonsense with the same confidence that they did with other cars.

Now I don’t fault anybody for not being completely familiar with the brand that I choose to take particular interest in. People like different things and I’m completely OK with that. What bothers me is something different. Up until know I had taken them at their word that they knew what they were talking about. It is clear that at least in one category they were clueless. Sure the guys talking were probably just the talking heads recycling the facts that somebody was telling them about in their ear bud, but up until now I had trusted them. And the confidence with which they gave the facts was partially to blame for my lack of skepticism.

The show has been somewhat disillusioning since then. How do I know if what they are telling me about the Mustang currently on the block is true? Considering how much hogwash they dished out when it was the VWs up there, how do I know? Up until now they had my trust, but now I find myself asking questions. How much of this do they really know? How much are they just making up out of whole cloth and hoping that nobody will call them on it? I still watch the show periodically. The cars are no less amazing. I just have to take the narrations with more than a few grains of salt.

I had a similar event happen recently. A friend was telling a story about another subject that I know quite a lot about. In telling his story he messed up a few of the details with which I am familiar. I can look at the point of his story and his overall point is unaffected by the slight deviations. That being the case I found myself analyzing every detail. If he got that wrong, what else is not quite the way he told it?

As always when these things happen to me I get introspective rather quickly. Do I do this too? How many times have I embellished what I considered to be a minor detail? Have I sacrificed somebody’s trust in me just to tell a little bit better story? Am I doing it right now? Perhaps I need to take better care to be sure that I’m not guilty of the very same thing that I find disillusioning in others.

Totally Looks Like...

2011-01-23T13:05:00.004-05:00

So there is this website where people post pictures of two things that look similar called totallylookslike and a few weeks ago a friend had an experience where he found two book covers that looked really similar. Well the same thing happened to me last night. I was in bed Reading Proofiness by Charles Seife and Victoria comes up stairs and puts her book on the nightstand next to mine, Slights of Mind by Stephen L. Macknik. You be the judge.

Memories

2011-01-07T13:28:00.000-05:00

Although the numbers are little off in the third verse this song always reminds me of my folks.

Comments

2011-01-07T13:01:00.004-05:00

Recently I've had a few comments come to me via email because they didn't want to create a blogger account. So, I've turned back on the anonymous comments. We'll see if this works...

"A Whole Bunch of Blind People"

2011-01-04T13:23:00.003-05:00

I have no idea what exactly started this conversation. Sunday evening Noah and Eve were down in the den watching Dr. Who and Noah comes up and begins to pontificate. This is a common occurance. Victoria and I have learned to listen closely when he's at the podium.
“Hey, Dad. The way I see it if somebody pucks your eyeball out and you go pluck out theirs pretty soon you’re just gonna have a whole bunch of blind people.”
I assured him that he was exactly correct and then pulled up a quote that sounded very similar to Noah’s epiphany.
“An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” Mohandas K. Gandhi
Noah though it was cool that somebody else had the same idea. What I thought was so cool is that this basic philosophy seems like complete common sense to a ten year old. Yet it was also rather sad that this logic completely escapes most politicians.
As I read this over I think I prefer Noah’s phrasing to Gandhi’s. Something about the childish use of the word eyeball and pluck reminds me that it came from a ten year old and makes it seem whimsical yet no less profound.

What’s in a Name?

2010-12-29T17:35:00.004-05:00

Except for a few years of my life we have always had Volkswagen’s in the family. I have fond memories of camping in the green 1970 transporter that my folks bought new while my dad was in graduate school. I remember the day in 1976 when my brothers and I tried to talk them into getting a VW Campmobile, a yellow one just like Pippi, but we ended up coming home with a Rabbit. Later we bought another Rabbit and then I bought a ’67 Beetle while I was in High School. Shortly after Victoria and I got married we found Pippi, our 1976 VW Campmobile. I’ve always had an affinity for the brand.

VW stopped making the Beetle for the US market in the late 70s. But in the mid 90s they announced that they were going to start production of their New Beetle. We were living in Salt Lake City at the time and Victoria and I made a trip to the dealership to see one. We weren’t in the market for another car. I was just curious about it.

After only a few minutes at the dealership I was ready to go. The car was nice but it just wasn’t what I had expected. The car was so different from the original Beetle that it left me pondering why they even continued to call it a Beetle. The Beetle, the original one designed by Dr. Porsche, had a flat-four air-cooled engine in the rear and was rear-wheel drive. All of those things are significant defining characteristics of the car. Yet this New Beetle had a straight-four, transversely mounted water-cooled engine in front of the car and was front-wheel drive. The New Beetle would resemble the original more if you drive it around backwards everywhere. Except for the rounded body styling it did not resemble the original at all. It was much more similar to the Golf, which I later found out the car was based on. Mechanically it was a Golf with just a throwback body styling. Don’t get me wrong, the Golf is a great car. It just ain’t a Beetle.

On the way home from the dealership I complained to Victoria and waxed philosophic about our experience. So how many details could they have changed and still made me comfortable with calling it a Beetle? I’ve blogged a little bit about this once before. I don’t know the answer to that question. But clearly they had changed too many for me. As cute as this new car was I just could not get comfortable with how drastically different it was. Why didn’t they just call it the VW Retro or something else? But as far as I was concerned it sure wasn’t a Beetle anymore.

For the past several years I’ve been going through a transformation too, not completely dissimilar to the example above.

For my whole life I’ve been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mormons to most of the world. Mormons have a set of core beliefs that define them. Since I was a young child most of my beliefs have fallen well within the guidelines of the church. I was comfortable calling myself a Mormon and they were comfortable with me.

Like any healthy mind should, I continued to learn. A calling I had teaching Aaron’s Sunday School class got me really studying about the church. I read just about every history and biography I could about the church. After finding more questions than answers using the official, church sanctioned materials I was prompted to look elsewhere for some of my answers. I just couldn’t make certain aspects of the church’s history and doctrine line up without digging a little deeper. As I uncovered new truths, new to me at least, I did my best to incorporate them into my set of beliefs and still continue to call myself a Mormon. One issue at a time and little by little I found myself having to really bend over backwards to make myself fit into the mold that the church was providing. (I’ll spare the specifics of the changes for other posts. I’ve already detailed many of them over the last few years.) How many defining characteristics of being a Mormon could I change and still identify with the name? Like VW did with their Beetle I was rearranging and redesigning massive amounts of technical details while still doing my best to keep a rough tribute to the original.

A few months ago I was in another teaching position at church. The lesson for that day called for me to teach a principle that I no longer believed. In fact I found the whole Old Testament story of genocide difficult to even read. Yet I was being asked to tell the story and then give the official position of the church as if I believed it. I just couldn’t do it. It was an eye-opening experience for me. Just as if I had walked to the back of the car, popped the latch and sat there looking at a spare tire and an otherwise empty trunk rather than the engine compartment I had expected to be there. Things had changed. And I couldn’t stand at the back of the car and pretend that there was an engine back there anymore.

The next week I asked to speak to our Bishop and I told him what I was going through. This would be the third Bishop I’d conveyed my struggle to. At the time I just asked to be released from the teaching position. I just couldn’t be honest with myself and still teach from the official lesson plan.

So on the cusp of this new year I look back at where I was and where I am now. I no longer have so many of the characteristics that used to defined me as a Mormon. My beliefs have changed. Like the Beetle, do I still deserve the name? Am I still a car with a flat-four air cooled engine in the rear with rear-wheel drive? Or have I evolved into something else that deserves a different name? Here’s a little bumper sticker philosophy for you. “If you were accused of being a Christian would there be enough evidence to convict?” or in my case, “If I were accused of being a Mormon would there be enough evidence to convict?” I just don’t know anymore. So that round car based on the Golf that VW came out with in the 90s, I’m just not comfortable calling it a Beetle. And whatever I have evolved into in the last several years probably deserves to be called something else too. I’m just not sure what it is yet.

Obedience?

2010-12-16T14:01:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago at church we had a guest speaker present a talk on the subject of obedience. Obedience is a common theme lately in LDS meetings. Despite the scriptural support to the contrary you’d think it was the greatest commandment in the law.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to express my puzzlement with a motivational story that was given during the talk. This speaker closed his 20 minute talk with a story about a boy who was lost in a mine. A group of boys had gone into a mine and one of the boys got separated form the rest of the group. When he didn’t come out they went back and retraced their steps. When they still didn’t find him the authorities were called and a full search was initiated.

A local man felt the need to go volunteer his services since he was familiar with the mine. When he showed up on site he was sent back home by the authorities, who assured him that they had it under control. This happened a few days in a row. The local man offered his services and was sent home every time.

On something like the forth or fifth day of the search the authorities were no closer to finding the boy and announced that they were going to call off the search. One last time the local man went and pleaded with the authorities to be allowed to look for the boy. They reluctantly agreed. Being more familiar with the mine than any of the other searchers so, far he was able to check out a little known passage and he found the boy in about 20 minutes.

Now here is my question. How in the world is a story about the virtues of obedience? If the boy had been obedient to his leaders in the first place he wouldn’t have been alone. If the leaders had been obedient to scout policy they wouldn’t have been in a mine in the first place. But they were not the focus of the story. The most glaring problem I had with it was the prime focus of the story, the local man’s actions. Since he knew the mine better if he had been disobedient and defied the so-called authorities the boy would have likely been found days earlier. I saw this as a story about perseverance to do what you know is right in spite of what you are being told, but obedience?

Sometimes I really enjoy the talks at church. Sometimes I may disagree with the concept but still understand it from their perspective. But this one just eluded me completely. I just couldn’t see how in the world this story would support the idea that we need to be obedient.

Merchants of Doubt

2010-12-09T14:43:00.003-05:00

So the other day I was trying to convince one of my kids to stop playing video games and get studying one of the school subjects in which they aren’t doing very well. No response. So I looked at their grades so far and did my best to persuade them that if they didn’t do a remarkable job in the last few weeks of the semester that they likely would not pass the course. Again, no response. At this point I was getting more than a little irritated at the lack of action. “Why aren’t you doing anything about this?” The response I got, “You don’t know for sure that I’ll fail if I don’t study today and you can’t guarantee that I’ll pass if I do study right now.” This little logical fallacy is one that has bugged me for years. While it is true that I could not know for sure the outcome of doing homework it’s ridiculous to argue that playing video games is a better use of that time.

We see this type of fallacious reasoning all the time. Sometimes it is accidental. I know people who avoid the interstates because don’t know if there will be any construction work going on and they can’t be 100% sure that the off ramps will be open. Other people turn off all passenger side airbags because they can’t be 100% sure that theirs won’t be the one that goes off accidentally. I have even heard of one friend of mine who never wears his seat belt because he can’t be 100% sure that he won’t drive off a bridge and drown because he can’t get out of his car. All of these situations are based on an emotional response to something that had happened to them or a persuasive story they heard or saw on the news. Despite ample evidence to the contrary they still stick to that emotional assessment of risk and a desire for 100% surety.

What really bothers me is when others recognize this fact that you can never be 100% sure and exploit it for political and personal gains. Merchants of Doubt is the history of just such political exploitation of science and the public’s misunderstanding of certainty, statistics and risk.

Industry funded scientists focused on and magnified the uncertainty when dealing with the link between cancer and cigarette smoking. The implication being that since they can’t prove 100% that smoking is what gave this guy cancer then we don’t know what did. And therefore smoking is safe. Later on Industry funded scientists focused on and magnified the uncertainty when dealing with the consequences of the arms race. Then after that it was the link between industries and acid rain. Etc, etc, etc. Time and time again Industry funded experts have used the same tired script to justify their in action. What I found most surprising in this book is that time and time again it is the very same scientists pushing this uncertainty on the public, even when the topics are far afield of their area of training and expertise.

I took this book as a warnign to be skeptical anytime somebody encourages action or inaction just based on the fact that we can't be 100% certian. Do the research and weigh the risks. Sure, absolute certianty is rare, but relative certianty is much more common. I many not no for sure if I'm gonna get driven off a bridge, but I'm far more likely to get into an accident that does not involve a bridge and so I'm gonna continue to wear my seat belt. And the same goes for the other controvertial issues detailed in Merchants of Doubt.

2010-11-15T19:52:00.001-05:00

What Happend to Civility?

2010-10-20T12:59:00.003-04:00

Here’s a not entirely hypothetical situation I’d like to discuss.
Suppose a friend came over to your house unannounced. You invite them in and they begin to tell you their views on what is wrong with everything from your politics to how to you raise your children. They quote celebrities and politicians to back up their position. You listen politely for a while. Then when they are finished you attempt to point out a few misquotations and other errors in the facts they presented to you. They then get insulted and react as if you are personally attacking them. They make one last speech and storm out of your house telling you that they never want to hear from you again.
The above example is an amalgam of several different events that have actually happened to me in the last couple months. It sounds absurd doesn’t it? But they really happened, several times. If this had happened to you how would you feel? Suppose this was a beloved family member, who you had great respect for, you just disagreed on politics? In my situation each time I just sat there stunned. Where did that come from? Why did they bring this to me?
Now I have concealed one small detail until now. These encounters didn’t happen in person. They happened via email. Yet other than that the details are correct. Why does the fact that their message came via an email excuse them the civility they might have granted me in person? Is it really so all or nothing with some people? What has happened to this world that we are so readily willing to cut all ties with people because we don’t march in lock step with them? Is their value as a person so contingent upon me accepting the premises of the email that they mass forwarded to everybody in their address book?
I share this because I am truly saddened. There are people that I have known for decades who have abandoned having any relationship with me because we disagree. What happened to having a civil disagreement? In many of my cases I didn’t even get around to stating my opinion. I was just correcting the facts they presented. It doesn’t bother me that we disagree on some points. But why can’t we discuss the issue civilly?
In stark contrast to these examples I do have a few close friends with whom I frequently disagree. I enjoy discussing things with them. I know that neither one of us is likely to have a complete change of opinion but the conversation is stimulating. And I believe that we are willing to accept when our opinions are based on flawed data and reconsider. I want to thank these friends for accepting me as one who is still looking for answers. I enjoy the search. I hope I never get so many answers that I no longer need the search. And I hope that no matter how much we may disagree you will still walk away knowing that I still value you as a person.

Different Monitors

2010-10-13T11:24:00.002-04:00

I’ve been looking at buying a flat panel monitor for my wife’s computer. I had a friend of mine email me a link to the monitor he has. In the email he was bragging about the color definition on his monitor. I looked at the monitor online and then, with tongue firmly planted in my cheek, responded, “The color definition doesn’t look any better than my monitor.” He laughed and thought it was pretty funny and then suggested we head over to a computer store and look at one in real life.

The incident reminded me of the TV commercials where you’d see a whole bank of other TV’s and you get to compare the picture quality. As a kid I remember remarking to my dad about how stupid those ads were. We never even had a color TV so I got a kick out of a Magnavox commercial showing a bunch of color TVs and I only saw 6 relatively identical black and white images. Today it’s the same thing. You can brag about your 1080P HD images all you want. Showing me a picture of it is not going to convince me unless I already have a 1080P HD TV. And in that case I don’t need the advertisement.

Well y’all know how I think. I couldn’t help but take this experience and extrapolate it out to other aspects of life. How often do we try to relate to somebody else and not take into account how they would see it? Each of us has certain filters that we view the world through. Expose somebody to a new idea and they are going to experience it differently than we are based on those filters. Suppose a friend were confined to a wheelchair. She would likely see a youtube video of a rock climber with a whole different attitude than I would. It would remind me to get off my butt and work out a little bit more, but it may bring nothing but discouragement to her.

I see this same thing come up all the time in discussions. Take the topic of climate change. Many people are only looking through the filter of politics. And it is a very political issue. I have many friends who refuse to accept the science behind climate change because they are afraid of what the political ramifications might be, higher taxes, increased cooperation with other countries, etc, etc. All of these are honest political concerns and there is nothing wrong with debating them. When I put on my political filter I see much the same image that they do. But if we could look at it with another monitor, if we could set the political filters aside and look at the science alone, ignoring the politics for now, I think it’s much easier to see the real image.

Lately there has been a lot of press about some remarks that were made by an LDS general authority at last week’s General Conference. I think we have the same thing going on to a great extent with this issue too. Those in the gay community have their filter that they are looking through and the faithful members of the church and church leaders are looking through another. Both sides seem to be talking about the same event yet they each see it in completely different colors. I have my own opinions about this issue too. But I recognize that my perspective may not be any better than the others.

It’s all too easy to jump to conclusions based on just our perspective. I’m not going to completely dismiss purchasing the monitor that my friend sent me until I check it out in person. Similarly I try not to completely dismiss anyone’s opinion or idea until I’ve at least attempted to view it through the same filters that they have. Now I still may not buy the new monitor or accept the other opinion. But at least I have made a solid attempt to view it in the most realistic way before I dismiss it or accept it.

2010-10-05T13:05:00.003-04:00

"His gentle means of sculpting souls took me years to understand"

I really miss you, Dad. I could use some help with your legacy.

Qualifiers

2010-10-04T09:52:00.003-04:00

I had an interesting discussion with a coworker last week. He had just driven back from out west and was relating his trip details to a few of us. Having driven across the country more times than I can count I threw my two cents into the conversation. I was curious as to which route he had taken. It turns out that he had taken one of the same stretches of road that I always take. He commented on how much he liked the road and I remarked about how annoying the road is.
Hwy-78 from Birmingham to Memphis will someday be incorporated into the interstate system. But currently the road is incomplete. The divided hwy part of it starts about 12 miles north of Birmingham and ends a few miles south of Memphis. Consequently if you hit either section at rush hour it can be miserable. Even if you miss rush hour your average speed is severally limited due to the miles of traffic lights.
Well this coworker commented that he just loved the road and I said it was moderately annoying because of the incomplete sections.

Him, “I just drove it yesterday. They’ve completed it.”

Me, “Well they must have completed it since I drove it in July”

Him, “It’s complete all the way except for those 12 miles in Birmingham and a few miles in Memphis.”

At this point he threw his elbows back and was waiting for me to respond.

Me, “I don’t know what else to say. You’ve just completely conceded my only point and you act like we still have something to disagree over.”

This was just a recent dramatic example, but I see people attaching qualifiers to statements and not realizing that the qualifier removes most if not all of the original meaning from the statement. A generic example would be something like, “All psychic predictions come true except those that don’t.” Okay? The statement would seem to be rather powerful, at first. Then the qualifier removed all of the bite. Such was the discussion with my coworker. The road is complete except for the parts that aren't. Once he had qualified the statement to exclude all the annoying parts of hwy-78 we were left with only the nice parts to discuss.

What I find frustrating is that in these types of situations I always feel like the other party walks away feeling like we still have some disagreement when we don’t. In this case we both enjoy the completed sections of hwy-78 and find the traffic lights through both big cities rather annoying.

Trying Not to be Cynical

2010-09-13T07:22:00.002-04:00

So this morning I was approached by a woman at the gas station claiming her car had broken down and her kids were sleeping in the car. Yeah I know, it’s a typical panhandler line, but I was feeling charitable so I tried to help her and her kids out. I’d had a really bad week and I was projecting a little bit. If her week was half as bad as mine she could use someone to trust her.
Well to make a long story short: I never saw the kids or the truck and I got cussed out when I wouldn’t pay for a hotel room. I told her she could get out of my truck here or I could drop her off at the police station a block away.
Yeah I know it had all the signs of a scam from the beginning, but don’t they all? So here’s my question. How do you give people the benefit of a doubt without setting yourself up for being scammed? I stuck to my rule of helping rather than just giving them a handout. And I’m glad I did. But how do I now prevent this experience from jading me for next time? What tools do you use to tell who really needs help?

2010-09-10T12:05:00.001-04:00

This a beautiful song to start with. This arrangement is just amazing.

Delivering Cakes

2010-09-10T07:11:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago a friend of mine gave a great talk at church. He brought up an example of a empathy that I thought was both funny and very profound. Have you ever been behind somebody in traffic who seemed to drive far too cautiously? As my wife would say, “Come on, what do you need, an embossed invitation to make a right turn?” From the perspective of everybody around them it may seem that they are doing things wrong. And our criticism of them may seem justified. But what if we don’t’ quite know the whole story? What if there is something going on inside the car that we are not privy to? What if they are responding completely appropriately considering the facts that they have before them?
In his talk my friend gave the example of how his wife likes to bake and decorate cakes. Occasionally he is asked to deliver the cake. Doing so he tends to take it very easy on the road, giving a lot of space fro braking if needed, avoiding quick starts at lights, and even seeming to need an embossed invitation to make a right turn. I could relate to this analogy pretty easily. Victoria and I also decorate cakes every now and then and I know how frustrating it can be when something doesn’t make it to the destination intact.
Lately I’ve been going through some struggles in my life and I feel like people are shouting at me and giving me the bird because they disagree with how I’m driving through them. If they only knew that I had a cake in the car and I’m trying to get it to its destination in one piece…

Mandatory

2010-09-08T12:15:00.002-04:00

Earlier this year I blogged about the logical fallacy “begging the question”. Take a second to re-read that post.
I had another rather frustrating example of begging the question today. At work we frequently get sent email notifications telling us to take some online training. It’s a great way for us to get covered on company polices and procedures at our own pace and without having to get together for a group meeting. So normally I don’t have any complaint.
Today I got one such email. The training class was scheduled to take 45 minutes and there was a quiz at the end that I had to pass in order to get credit. This is about average for these classes. Well after I looked at the class description it was clear that it didn’t pertain to me at all. It was about using a specific company program that I don’t use to track my corporate travel that I don't do and expenses that I don’t have. So I fired off an email essentially asking, “Why do I have to take a 45 minute course that does not apply at all to my job?” Now comes the logical fallacy. The answer that came back, “This course in mandatory for all managers.”
How’s that for a non-sequitor? I asked why is this course mandatory and the response, because it is mandatory.
So rather than debate the concept of begging the question with them for 45 minutes I just took the course and then, of course, blogged about it on my lunch hour.

Common Nonsense

2010-09-04T10:40:00.004-04:00

A few months ago I heard a great podcast interview with Alexander Zaitchik about his new book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. The interview was very eye opening and inspired me to read the book.
I’ve always felt that Glenn Beck was just a failed shock jock who couldn’t keep up with the likes of Howard Stern. So he switched to am radio and started using the same shock jock strategies and even some of the same skits to shock am listeners.
Zaitchik successfully illustrates that Beck is a brilliant marketer. He is always looking at how he can spin anything to promote himself. As a FM DJ he called and taunted the wife of a competing station on the air because she had recently had a miscarriage. When other people are genuinely distraught about a national tragedy, Beck is trying to figure out how he can make the event improve his brand. And for those of you who would like to claim that this was the “old Glenn” before he found Jesus and converted to Mormonism, I have seen no change at all in his strategies since. He switched sides on the Teri Schiavo case after he realized that siding with Michael Schiavo would be a death nail for his new am gig. He vilified liberals for opposing Bush’s polices “..while we have troops in harm’s way” yet didn’t think twice to compare Obama to Stalin and Satan while pretty much all of those troops are still “in harm’s way”.
I’ve always felt that’s Beck’s tears were just a tool to manipulate. Sure they may have been genuine at first, but they have grown to be a great marking strategy. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that his emotional outbursts started shortly after he converted to Mormonism. Anybody who has attended an LDS, first Sunday service will recognize the pattern. You go up and stand before everybody and the firmness with which you believe something replaces logic, facts and evidence. Tears are just the ace in the hole. There can be no further argument on that issue once somebody has cried. I am sure that most of what happens on Sunday is genuine. With Beck I’m not so sure. Zaitchik interview several of Beck’s co-workers who detail examples of him getting all choked up before a commercial break then ordering a pizza on the phone and then turning the tears back on when he’s back on air. I’m just not buying it.
Another little strategy of Beck’s that he has commandeered from the LDS is church is his persecution complex. If people picket him or criticize it only can mean one thing. He is doing the right thing. Beck capitalizes on protests and disagreement and he has no desire for them to go away. His books are literally covered with quotes from those who oppose him. He eats it up.
His claim that his 8-28 rally was just “coincidentally” scheduled for the anniversary of Dr. Kings speech is very hollow. In my mind there are two options: 1. He didn’t know it was the same date. In which case he’s a moron and should have known. Or option 2. He knew full well and was planning on capitalizing on the controversy. Considering his history of doing things that upset his opposition and using their protests as free advertising I have to accept the later. As a shock jock he worked up PETA supporters into a lather and then relished the free publicity they gave him.
The really disgustng part of Beck’s rally and his whole “reclaim the civil rights” rhetoric is that it’s just patently false. Had he been a contemporary of King's he’d have been standing right beside his John Birch Society role models W. Cleon Skousen and Ezra Taft Benson condemning King as a communist.
In the book Zaitchik was referring to a couple Cleon Skousen books and he called them, “…elaborately imagined, feverishly argued, and poorly researched.” I think the same could also be said for everything I’ve hear come out of Glenn Beck’s mouth. I think Beck is counting on the ignorance of his audience. He expects them to just connect the dots the same what his conspiracy theory mind connects them on that chalkboard without any further research.

Selfishness

2010-09-02T06:09:00.002-04:00

Victoria asked me to stop by the credit union to get a few buck to pay Eve’s piano teacher. There is only one teller open since they are trying to close. The guy at the teller is on his cell phone talking asking about his accounts and trying to figure out what he needs to do at the teller. The teller politely asks him to step aside so she can assist other customers while he gets what he needs form the call. So, I step up and give my account information to the teller. At this point the guy has finished his call and is standing only a few inches from me. He looks at my uniform shirt, sizes me up and says, “AT&T huh? I just wanna say that your phone service SUCKS!!” I was a little irritated from some other events of the day already but I forced some restraint. I simply turned to him, put my hands on my hips and stared. At this point he said, “No offense.” and took a step back. I turned back to the teller shaking my head and finished my transaction.
Then on the way home this kid in a little sports car is treating Hwy-78 like it’s Talladega and he’s Richard Petty. He gets so close behind my truck that I completely lost him in all of my mirrors. He passed me and began drafting this minivan next to me with less than a foot to spare. I honk to signal my displeasure at his driving and he returns by giving me a universal hand gesture and telling me to “go vacuum”. At least that’s what I think he said. My hearing isn’t what it used to be. I see him again about two miles down the road and he’s still only about 100 feet in front of me. Apparently all his NASCAR driving strategy gets him about 50 feet per mile.
This morning Aaron and I are headed to seminary. We stop at the light a the front of the subdivision. It turns green. I pause for a second and then start to make my left turn. Then out of nowhere going about 70 MPH a little 2-door comes in from the left and has to swerve all the way into the other lane to avoid us. We clearly had the light but, I lock the brakes and hit the horn. Again with the hand gesture.
I could go on and on. I actually have several more not-so-uplifting stories about society. But the common theme that I believe ties all of them together is selfishness. All of these people were soley focused on their own needs. I wish I could say that I saw changes in the future, but I don't. Increasingly our social and political world is dominatite by selfishness. Now, I full admit that there are some valiant exceptions to the rule. The last 24 hours have jsut seemed to have been dominated by the selfish.

Proceeding from a False Premise

2010-09-01T06:31:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite lines from all of the Star Trek movies was in Star Trek 4. Spock was technically the Capitan. Kirk, then an Admiral, wanted to take command of the ship. He was tip-toeing around Spock’s feelings in even bringing up the subject. Spock responded,
“You proceed from a false assumption. I have no ego to bruise.”
I’ve always remembered that lesson from the fictional master of logic and tried to apply it in my life. Before I make something more difficult than it has to be or before I take something for granted I should make sure that all the information that I’ve used to make my decision is correct.

Suppose I was always losing my keys. If I had already accepted the premise that leprechauns exist then it would be easy for me to conclude that leprechauns were to blame every time I misplaced my keys. Accepting this solution would likely prevent me from identifying and correcting the real problem. Obviously the existence of leprechauns is a pretty far-fetched example. However, less silly examples happen all the time. People make assumptions that are based on no more proof than the evidence for existence of our little green Irish friends.

The other day I was listening to a speaker give a presentation about a new program that was available for those fighting various forms of addiction. He lost me early in his presentation because he proceeded from a false premise. He proudly announced that the program was “based on the proven effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous”. His false premise? That Alcoholics Anonymous has been proven effective. It’s very hard to objectively measure such results. It’s even more difficult when AA is very tightlipped about their effectiveness and resistant to outside studies to evaluate it. Some studies show that 95% of those who start AA end up drinking again. This makes me wonder what the rate is for those who just try to quite without AA. A recent study determined that,
“No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems.”

Now all this AA business aside; I have no idea how effective the program that was presented really is. I have no evidence either way. The point of this post was not to discredit that program at all. I only wished to point out the logical fallacy in the reasoning used to promote it.

Bumper Sticker logic

2010-08-30T11:52:00.003-04:00

Friday on my lunch hour walk I saw a car with the following two bumper stickers.

I felt like taking a sharpie to the reamaining blank space and adding, "ergo the driver of this car sucks."

Political Cartoons

2010-08-26T06:59:00.003-04:00

I've always been a big fan of political cartoons. It's nothing less than genius that they can make a point so succinctly that would take me paragraphs of rambling on. Here are a few recent examples:

Tools

2010-08-25T07:19:00.001-04:00

I saw this on one of the VW forums and thought it was funny enough to share.

Enjoy

DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beverage across the room, denting the freshly-painted project which you had carefully set in the corner where nothing could get to it.

WIRE WHEEL: Cleans paint off bolts and then throws them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprints and hard-earned calluses from fingers in about the time it takes you to say, ’ "insert your favorite curse word"!’

SKIL SAW: A portable cutting tool used to make studs too short.

PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads. Sometimes used in the creation of blood-blisters.

BELT SANDER: An electric sanding tool commonly used to convert minor touch-up jobs into major refinishing projects.

HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle… It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes.

VISE-GRIPS: Generally used after pliers to completely round off bolt heads. If nothing else is available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the palm of your hand.

OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for lighting various flammable objects in your shop on fire. Also handy for igniting the grease inside the wheel hub out of which you want to remove a bearing race.

TABLE SAW: A large stationary power tool commonly used to launch wood projectiles for testing wall integrity.

HYDRAULIC FLOOR JACK: Used for lowering an automobile to the ground after you have installed your new brake shoes , trapping the jack handle firmly under the bumper.

BAND SAW: A large stationary power saw primarily used by most shops to cut good aluminum sheet into smaller pieces that more easily fit into the trash can after you cut on the inside of the line instead of the outside edge.

TWO-TON ENGINE HOIST: A tool for testing the maximum tensile strength of everything you forgot to disconnect.

PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Normally used to stab the vacuum seals under lids or for opening old-style paper-and-tin oil cans and splashing oil on your shirt; but can also be used, as the name implies, to strip out Phillips screw heads.

STRAIGHT SCREWDRIVER: A tool for opening paint cans. Sometimes used to convert common slotted screws into non-removable screws and butchering your palms in the process.

PRY BAR: A tool used to crumple the metal surrounding that clip or bracket you needed to remove in order to replace a 50 cent part.

HOSE CUTTER: A tool used to make hoses too short.

HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a kind of divining rod to locate the most expensive parts adjacent the object we are trying to hit.

UTILITY KNIFE: Used to open and slice through the contents of cardboard cartons delivered to your front door; works particularly well on contents such as seats, vinyl records, liquids in plastic bottles, collector magazines, refund checks, and rubber or plastic parts. Especially useful for slicing work clothes, but only while in use.

("Insert your favorite curse word") TOOL: Any handy tool that you grab and throw across the garage while yelling, "(Insert your favorite curse word)"! ’ at the top of your lungs. It is also, most often, the next tool that you will need

Many Hats

2010-08-11T08:22:00.003-04:00

While we were off at Philmont last month many of the camps that had historical significance also had reenactors. The staff would dress in early 1900s clothing and pretend that it was actually the early 1900s. I though it was a nice touch. When we showed up to the Miranda campsite they welcomed us as if we were a band of mountain men who had just showed up for their annual rendezvous. They had tepees set up and were wearing buckskin pans and shirts. Everything added to the feeling that it really was the early 1900s.

Later on that day I was very impressed with one particular reenactor. Caleb, the same guy who welcomed us to the mountain man rendezvous, led us over to the range to shot black powder rifles. As son as we were all on site he began to instruct us. “Let’s get something straight right up front. Until know I have been wearing the hat of a historical reenactor. I also wear the hat of a certified NRA range safety officer. I will not attempt to stay in character while we handle these firearms.”

I was comforted that Caleb had his priorities in order. Sure the historical part was fun but historically they wouldn’t have likely had eye protection or ear protection. And historically I’ll bet there were a bunch more injuries than I’d be willing to accept. I later learned that all of the camp staffers were Wilderness First Responders, backcountry EMTs. Just one more hat they wear and I’m sure that they have no reservation about again abandoning their historical reenactor roles and pulling out their CB radios when that need arises.

Caleb’s judgement about when it was appropriate to wear which hat got me thinking about the many hats that I wear. Husband, father, son, brother, scout leader, Sunday school teacher, co-worker, friend, etc. etc. Sure all of these roles are important. It would be nice if there was never any time when we had to choose one over the other. But the realities of life are such that we frequently have to choose. Wisdom comes in knowing when to take off one hat in favor of another. I thank Caleb for reminding me of this.

Bad Universe

2010-08-10T16:53:00.002-04:00

So one of my favorite astronomers, yes I have more than one favorite astronomer, appears that he is getting a series based on his book and blog.

Very cool! I might have to actually get something besides broadcast TV.

Being in the Woods

2010-08-05T14:12:00.005-04:00

I recently got back from a two week backpacking trip with Aaron and some of the guys from his scout troop. Hence the complete lack of blog posts for so long. When I got back to work I made a comment to a friend that It was taking me quite a while to remember how to do my job after being in the woods for so long. He responded, “Isn’t it interesting how little time it take you to get used to being out in the woods?” I couldn’t agree more.
Here are a few pictures from the trip.

Political Calls

2010-08-05T12:44:00.000-04:00

Me: Hi.
Caller: Mr. Taylor?
Me: This is Michael
Caller: Mr. Taylor?
Me: How can I help you?
Caller: I’m calling on behalf of the Linda Carsten for Congress campaign. Are you aware that Carsten’s opponent , B. J Pak opposes the Arizona immigration law that…
Me: Well good for him.
Caller: Excuse me?
Me: I said “good for him”. I too disagree with the Arizona law.
Caller: Can we count on your vote for Linda Carsten in November?
Me: Well I just stated that I disagree with her position on immigration. What else do you have to persuade me?
Caller: Thank you for your time.

I guess since I frequently vote in the Republican primaries that these callers just assume that I’m going to be an easy audience when they call. I really was serious when I wanted him to tell me what else the candidate he represented had to offer.

2010-07-12T13:59:00.000-04:00

Priorities

2010-07-06T12:52:00.001-04:00

One of the reasons I really enjoy rock climbing is because so much of what you learn on the rock carries over into our daily activities. Maybe this is just me but hear me out for a little bit.
A few weeks ago I guided a small group of boys form our church on a rock climbing trip. We went to a place that I know better than any other climbing area, Mount Yonah near Cleveland Georgia. After spending half the day climbing some relatively easy stuff a few of the guys wanted to do something harder. So I took Aaron and another boy, Alex, up to help me set up a few top ropes on the harder stuff. They had both shown considerable interest in learning how to safely set up the anchors. In order to get to the anchors for these routes we had to rappel off of the top of the rock which was over 200 feet tall and down to a ledge in the middle of the rock. I let Aaron rappel down to the ledge first since he had a little more experience than Alex. Alex would go next and I would come down to the ledge last. That way I could inspect everybody’s set-up before they rappelled.
So Aaron gets his rappel set and heads down to the ledge with no problem. That’s when all the drama started. You see the ledge was home to hundreds of biting ants. They were big red things with black abdomens. No sooner than Aaron got on the ledge and they were attacking his legs. It also seemed that the death of their sisters brought out even more worker ants to join in the attack. As bad as the ants were Aaron really had no choice but to stay on the ledge until Alex and I could get down to him, bring down the ropes and rappel the rest of the way to the ground.
So we did just that. Alex, knowing full well what he was getting into, rappelled down to the ledge, safely clipped into the anchors and proceeded to help Aaron slap off the ants until I could get down. I followed as quickly as I safely could and set up the ropes to get us off the rock. The whole process took about half an hour and we all had quite a few ant bites when the event was over.
I was very proud of Aaron and Alex for keeping their cool. It was a very stressful place to be. My biggest concern was that in spite of the ants they would abandon the relative safety of the ledge, unclip from the anchors and try to go over to another ledge without as many ants. They both realized that the ants were annoying but they weren’t deadly. Yet unclipping from the anchors to get away from them could be deadly. It’s in exactly these types of situations that it is even my important to do things correctly. Both the boys realized this and did everything they could to help me set up the anchors as fast a possible yet also as safely as possible.
As their guide for the trip I regret that they had to learn this lesson in such a stressful way but I’m glad that they learned that some things in life just aren’t worth the gamble. Many times in life what may seem like the quick and easy way to solve a problem may in fact be risking a whole lot more than if you patiently solved it the correct way.

VW engine swap

2010-06-10T07:32:00.002-04:00

We put the motor back in in about 30 minutes. We need to practice a little more.

Left at the Red Light

2010-06-02T12:43:00.003-04:00

If you’ve ever asked for directions in Georgia it is very likely that you have been told at least once to “turn left at the red light”. I used to respond by saying something to the effect of, “How about I stop and wait until it turns green and then turn left?” This usually is met with a puzzled look on their face, as if they don’t even realize that they had encouraged me to break the law and potentially risk my life. You see in the south when you ask for directions the term “red light” actually means the next intersection with a traffic signal no matter what color it happens to be showing when you get there. I’ve learned to just enjoy this little colloquialism. I don’t bring it up to criticize well-meaning people who are just trying to help out, but I do get a little chuckle when I hear it.
Yesterday a friend showed me this story. This lady took the advice of Google Maps at the expense of her own common sense. She got hurt. And now she thinks it’s Google’s fault? I’d be willing to bet that this same person would “turn left at the red light” and then insist that it was the well-meaning guy at the Citgo’s fault for using a southern colloquialism that got her hurt.
It really amazes me how frequently people completely turn off thier brain and then think it's somebody else's fault.

Martin Gardner

2010-05-24T10:40:00.004-04:00

When I was about 10 or 12 I went to my Dad’s office with him at CDC. He had to work on a project and I thought it was cool to hang out at his office in a real laboratory. I have a feeling that I was a lot like Noah an I was probably asking him far too many questions. Rather than just shut me out completely he looked for something that would keep my interest and yet still allow him to have an independent thought. He had a book on his desk that he handed me to read while I waited for him to finish his project.
The book was Aha Gotcha by Martin Gardner. It was a really fun read about several mathematical paradoxes and logical fallacies. Gardner used some very simple stick figures to illustrate each problem. This made it very appealing for a geeky little boy. The science was very deep but the cartoons made it fun to read.
This book was my first introduction to the concept of critical thinking. I frequently fall back on the lessons I learned by reading it. Gardner teaches us to not accept things at face value and look a little deeper into the problem and try to find the real solution and not just the paradox that you first perceive. I get a little chuckle when I see a magic trick and realize that I know the core of trick thanks to Gardner.
I was saddened by the news that Martin Gardner had died this weekend. I need to be sure that I do my part to make sure his legacy lives on. Yesterday I pulled my dad’s copy of Aha Gotcha off the shelf and thumbed through it. I’m gonna make a point to share it with my kids tonight.

Riding in Cars with Boys

2010-05-22T22:43:00.004-04:00

This conversation took place while driving three ten year-old boys who are unapologetic geeks to the movies.

Noah: I'm telekinetic
Me: Oh really? Well if you're telekinetic raise my hand.
pause
Me: But I really am telekinetic.
Boy1: Oh Yeah, prove it.
Me: I can make everybody in this car suddenly lurch forward.
At this point I was coming to a stop anyway so I hit the brakes a little harder that I normally would have.
Noah, Boy1 and Boy2: (in unison) That's not telekinetic. That's just kinetic.

No Apology

2010-05-20T12:59:00.005-04:00

I try to make it a habit to read books that are outside of my comfort zone. I just don’t think it’s healthy to walk around and only accept input that just reinforces what you already know or want to believe. So that’s why I decided to read No Apology: The Case for American Greatness by Mitt Romney.

Some have accused me of being an antagonist who just goes against the grain of those around me because I enjoy that. I’ve done a fair amount of introspection on this subject and I can completely accept why they might come to that conclusion. I do have a tendency to play devil’s advocate just for sake of a discussion. It often gets interpreted as having opinions that I don’t necessarily have. I find that I have to careful not to adopt an opinion or belief just because I took that position in a discussion. A few weeks ago I had a discussion about organic gardening with a friend. He took one side and I took another. My real views on the subject are on the same side of the aisle as the position I took with him, but I do not share some of the extreme positions that I used rhetorically in our discussion. Those points were just brought up to get both of us to think about the issue.

Spending so much of my life around other Mormons I get a lot of people who just assume that I’m a fan of Romney. I personally believe that many of these people would vote for him just because he was a Republican and a Mormon without doing any further research on his positions and views. So quite a few times I’ve asked people leading questions worded something like “How do you feel about Romney’s position on X?” They then give me their view on X and assume that since they are Mormon and Republican that the two must jive. All too often they do not and it is apparent that they haven’t really done their research on the positions of the man they trust with their vote.

So with this in mind I read No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. Now that I’m finished I think I’ve probably spent more time vetting this one particular candidate than I have ever spent on any other. I’m sure it’s the frequent subtle and not so subtle encouragements to give him my vote that have caused me to really be sure that I understand him. I just felt like I had to be sure that my opinions on Romney were based solely on the fact that I had gathered the facts on his positions and weighed them on their merits. I felt I had to make a conscious attempt to resist the knee-jerk reaction of going against the grain.

Had this book omitted the introduction I would have been able to accept it easier. Before chapter one even started Romney gives a list of things that the book is and what it is not. One thing he claimed that it was not was an attack on his opponents. Unfortunately, much of the book is exactly that, an attack on the policies of President Obama. As Seinfeld would say, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” I think many of the President's positions deserve criticism. It’s just a little misleading when your introduction says you weren’t going to go down that road. The very title of the book is thinly veiled criticism of what he and other conservative have dubbed President Obama’s apology tour. I think an honest admission of fault is a sign of greatness and not a sign of weakness. I think we all know how hard it is to patch thing up with a friend or a family member when one side refuses to admit any wrong-doing. That being said I too think the President took it a little too far by showing up everywhere with his heart on his sleeve. I would add that all through this section I was very proud of Romney for always referring to the President as “President Obama” and not by a pejorative like so many other conservative writers do. Romney is a class act and his respect for the office even when he disagrees with its policies is something more of us could learn from.

If I were ever to vote for Romney it would be because of his profound understanding of finance and economics. His track record has proven this again and again. He has also showed that he has a clear ability to explain his position. The man is articulate and truly brilliant. I can’t for the life of me figure out how he lost the nomination. Perhaps it was that he was too articulate and didn’t have the folksy charm or the “wanna sit down and have a beer with” image.

I took a little bit of issue with his criticism of the Fair Tax. He has a different strategy for tax reform, actually one that I agree with more than the Fair Tax. But I was disappointed with how he defended his position. A common way to attack the Fair Tax has been, rather than to judge it on what it really is, to quote a few critics’ opinions of what it might look like once implemented and them destroy that straw man. He took the same tired path of ignoring the reduction in cost once the imbedded tax is removed and even increasing the new tax to a percentage that isn’t even proposed. Now, as I said, I actually like Mitt’s plan a little better since it doesn’t create such a huge windfall for the extremely rich. He just could have defended his position without having to take the same, logically flawed position that so many others have taken before him.

While speaking about Islamic fundamentalism Romney praised Jefferson for helping to create a form of government that is separate from religion. I found his praise of Jefferson comforting but also a little hypocritical from someone who so frequently uses his own religious views to attract votes and even thinks he is a better candidate because of his Mormon faith.

The chapters that I really found the most disheartening were the several chapters where he kept repeating the call for the U.S. to go back to its Cold War military strength. Romney’s foreign policy is little more than "peace through superior firepower" and might makes right. If we aren’t the world’s police officers then who would you choose? I found this false question amusing, and a little sad.

With these criticisms you might find it hard to believe that I am actually a little swayed towards voting for Romney based on reading this book. Right now his economic positions might be just what we need. I also was swayed by his immigration position (i.e. doing more to keep the most qualified immigrants in as well as protecting the borders). Despite my serious disagreements with his foreign policy right now his economic policies and tax reform ideas may be just what this country needs. I sure don’t see myself voting for him yet, but thanks to this book I’m more open-minded about him and I feel like I understand his views.

Fragile

2010-05-17T10:51:00.004-04:00

A great version of a great song.

Dad, Can we listen to another one of those “I’m Brian Dunning” programs?

2010-05-11T14:50:00.004-04:00

I don’t remember what exactly prompted it, but Sunday evening we were on the way home from my mom’s house and the kids got started talking about evolution. At some point one of the younger two said that we evolved from monkeys. Then they got into a debate over whether it was monkeys or apes. I had to interject and tell them both that they were on the right track, but that neither one of them were technically correct. I did my best to explain that monkeys, apes and humans all had a common ancestor, but that it wasn’t a modern ape or monkey.
I got my wife hooked on listening to the Skeptoid podcast a year or so ago. She suggested that we let the kids listen to Brian Dunning’s explanation of this common misconception. So with a little searching on the iPhone I downloaded a few episodes. The kids enjoyed the first so I just let it run through a couple episodes. It made for a very nice and educational ride home.
Well yesterday I had Noah and Eve in the car and I had the radio on. Noah piped up and asked, “Dad, Can we listen to another one of those ‘I’m Brian Dunning’ programs?”. Not to be one to stand in the way of a 9 year-old and a 7 year-old who are curious about science, I handing him the iPhone and let him listen to a few episodes. After we got home he kept my phone and ran upstairs and listened to a few more. He was really excited that Brian actually had a video podcast too. So he probably spent and hour watching and listening to Skeptoid and InFact before he went to bed.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, particularly a lot of podcasts that focus on science and skepticism. I enjoy them all but several of them are not safe for children. It’s a shame because as I’ve demonstrated with this little story there is a market for at least a few kids. I want to thank Brian Dunning for doing such a great podcast and keeping it accessible to all ages. I encourage you all to check it out too, no matter how old you are.

That’s Not Fair

2010-05-10T15:24:00.002-04:00

So last week Victoria was reading aloud a news article about some of the budget cut that the state is implementing for Georgia schools. Some of the cuts I agree with and others I think are really cutting to deep in the wrong areas. Anyway, not to get off track on a political discussion, one of the budget cuts called for cancelling a certain test that is currently required in 2nd grade. I think this is a good thing. I just feel that we have too much testing in order to qualify for federal moneys, etc, and not nearly enough teaching. Apparently the state agrees and felt that this test really wasn’t needed.
Well as Victoria was reading this article to me my 6th grader, upon hearing that her sibling will not have to take this 2nd grade test exclaimed, “That is so unfair!”. Hmm. This got me thinking. Why did she feel this way? So I asked her. Did she think the test was meaningful? No. Did she herself benefit from the test? No. Then why did she think it was unfair? After a little discussion I discovered that she thought the change was actually for the better but she was upset that they hadn’t done it while she was in 2nd grade.
I wonder how many times we have continued a tradition, a ritual, or anything that we didn’t like when we went through it just because we think it would be unfair for us to have to do something that those coming behind us didn’t have to do. How often do we put our kids through things just because that’s the way we had to do it? I wonder how deep this mindset penetrates our society. Last year Victoria read a book that had Chinese foot binding as a major theme. I wonder how many of these women did these to their daughters just because they felt it would be unfair for them to not go through it after they had. I wonder if there were any salve owners in the south who felt that slavery was wrong but that it would be unfair for them to try to work without them. I could go on but I think you get the point.
I’ve given my kids the “walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways” argument several times. When I do it I hope they are taking away from it that I think it’s cool that they have access to cell phones, the internet, and other modern conveniences. They should be thankful that they have all of these things. I sure hope they don’t think that I’m crying foul. Yes, I wish that I’d have had some of the benefits as a kid that they have now. But I would hate for them to think that I’m putting them through something that I disagree with just because I had to do it.

Argument From Final Consequences

2010-05-03T17:09:00.006-04:00

Today's logic fallacy comes to us courtesy of Rush Limbaugh. The Argument From Final Consequences is when someone attempt to prove that whoever benefited from something must have caused it. Not long after the terrorists attacks of 9-11-2001 several conspiracy theorists noticed that many of the civilian contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan were going to Haliburton. Dick Cheney had financial interest in this company. Therefore, without any other evidence the conspiracy theorists concluded that Dick Cheney caused the attacks on the World Trade Center. It's ridiculous.
Now sure it may look suspicious if a man dies a few days after his wife takes out a larger life insurance policy. And that is definitely a red flag that should be investigated. But the timing of the benefit alone is not enough to prove anything.
Well today Rush Limbaugh is claiming that extremist environmentalists blew up the BP drilling rig in order to affect the upcoming vote on energy policy. Sure the timing is suspicious and if there is any evidence supporting it it should be seriously looked into. But the timing alone is not proof.
The logic is fallacious when it's left wing conspiracy theorists attacking Cheney. It's just as fallacious when it's Limbaugh attacking environmentalists.

More Noahisms

2010-04-26T10:59:00.003-04:00

Noah: Dad how long have we had Earth Day?
Me: I think I saw somewhere that this was the 40th year.
N: And who invented Earth Day anyway?
M: I don't know, Noah. Why don't you look it up when we get home and then let us know what you found out.
N: Naaa. It was probably just some hippy.

The Line Drawing Fallacy

2010-04-24T11:23:00.003-04:00

Take a second and look at these four pictures:
image1 image2 image3 image4
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the cars here, there is a Volkswagen Thing and a Jeep. The question now is “Which is which?” The one that looks like a jacked up thing actually is 4-wheel drive and has the motor in the front and the one that looks like the Jeep has the motor in the rear.
These pictures reminded me of a logical fallacy called the Line Drawing Fallacy. I’m going to modify it from the way I first heard it in order to fit these pictures. Let’s suppose that I have two cars in the garage. A Volkswagen on the right and a Jeep on the left. One day I decide it would be fun to start swapping parts form one car and sticking them on the other. I start with a bumper. Then I move to fenders. Then on to the to more serious stuff, the suspension, the wheels, drive train, frame and on and on. When I’m finished I will have a complete Jeep on the right and a complete Volkswagen on the left. Now for the big question. At what point in the process did the Jeep become the VW and the VW become the Jeep? Was it when they swapped the frame? The motor? The hood emblem? So far there isn’t a logical fallacy, just a philosophical conundrum. But what if I challenged the identity of the cars like this? Since you can’t exactly answer when the VW became the Jeep then the car on the right must still be the VW even though it now has every single part of the original Jeep.
It kind of sounds absurd when you are talking about cars. Nevertheless, people make this fallacy of reason frequently. I hear it frequently in the debate about the definition of life. Some argue that since you can’t really define when a person became alive then we must have always been alive. The most egregious abuse of this concept came years ago during the trial of the officers who assaulted Rodney King. An attorney asked the question, “At what point did the officers use excessive force? Was it after the first hit, the second, the third?” He then went on to tell the jury that if they couldn’t define exactly when it became excessive then they couldn’t accurately define what excessive force meant and the officer was not guilty. The other attorney, recognizing the fallacy, approached the jury and took a book and slammed it against the table the exact number of times that King was hit. I think it was 23 times. He then said, “I don’t care exactly when their actions became excessive. It was somewhere between the first hit and the 23rd.” And that’s the correct answer here too. There are multiple shades of gray in our world. But that doesn’t mean that black is the same as white or that Jeeps are the same as VWs.

Your Inner Fish

2010-04-19T17:01:00.004-04:00

At the recommendation of Teacherninja I recently read Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Thanks for the recommendation. I really enjoyed it.
Shubin is a paleontologist and it was his research that discovered Tiktalik, a fossil animal that was almost exactly what was predicted to have existed halfway between fish and land animals. Much of the book describes that expedition and the others that lead up to it.
The book does not stop at just Tiktalik. He builds on the similarities and spends a great deal of time showing how so much of biology is based on remarkably similar structures. He show how early in the development of nearly every embryo, chicken, fish, squirrel or human the same organs form from the same rows of cells in each species even though they may have drastically different uses in the final creature. I found these chapters very fascinating.
Shubin avoids pretty much entirely that political debate that is currently going on about teaching evolution in schools. I guess from his perspective evolution via natural selection is such an established fact he felt no need to defend it. I agree with this position. It was a science book and I don’t fault him for setting all politics aside and just speaking to the science. I would like to point out that Shubin’s discovery of Tiktalik was predicted by evolution and that Tiktalik made his appearance during the middle of the Dover school board’s attack on teaching evolution in school. I’m sure Shubin didn’t plan it this way, but at the same time the Dover school board had “experts” testifying that no transitional fossils had ever been found, Shubin was uncovering yet another transitional fossil.
I listened to this book on CD while working. I plan on going back and reading it for real when I get a chance. Some of the details in the middle of the book deserve more attention than I could give them just listening while working.

Fear of Science Will Kill Us

2010-04-15T19:30:00.001-04:00

Our '76 VolksWagen Westfalia

2010-04-04T18:28:00.005-04:00

I had a couple people ask why I hadn’t posted anything for a while. So I figured a little bit of an explanation was in order.
I have a confession to make. I've been having an affair with a high maintenance 34 year-old. She's really cute but she need a lot of attention. I've had to run errands for her on my lunch hours and she's made me spend most of my evenings with her lately. So she's been getting in hte way of some of typical blogging time.
Here are a few pictures.

Here she is. She's a 1976 Volkswagen Campmobile.

Eve loves to help me work on her. She's helping me change the fuel lines in this picutre.

Sibling Solidarity

2010-03-25T08:37:00.005-04:00

(This is another personal post that will likely upset some readers.)

I love my kids. Sure they can frustrate the hell out of me sometimes but I still love them. I didn’t enjoy being a teenager and I can tell that my two teenagers aren’t exactly digging it either. It seems that most of their troubles come from peer pressure; so-called friends attacking them, frequently physically, for their opinions and beliefs and trying to get them to just go along with the crowd. What’s really upsetting to them is that most of this criticism comes from people whom they think should know better, members of our church. As a parent few thing make me more proud than when one kid stands up for the other, especially in a situation where they really don’t have anything to gain my doing it. We had just such a situation last night. And although it was very traumatic for her, I couldn’t have been more proud of my oldest daughter.
A little back history: Aaron hasn’t been attending church at our ward for the better part of a year now. He has been arranging, on his own, to get rides back and forth from the Brocket Ward. He gets along with the kids in that ward better, they accept him and genuinely love him. In stark contrast, the kids in our ward tease him, call him a Satanist and frequently physically assault him. In his own words it is rather ironic that the least spiritual hours of his week are spent at church. He doesn’t participate in the Varsity scout program on Wednesday night. We’ve moved him to another troop that is a real community troop where sharing the same religious upbringing is not a requirement to hold positions. He gets along much better with these guys. On Wednesday he even arranges for rides over to Brockett to hang out with the kids from that ward that he gets along with so well. In the entire time that he has been attending that Ward only one person from our ward has asked about Aaron. He was genuinely concerned and I thanked him for caring and not forgetting about him. Not a single other person has given us the slightest clue that they’ve even noticed his absence. In stark contrast, the leaders from Brockett comment to us about how they enjoy having him there and miss him when he’s gone.
Well last night I dropped Rachel off at the church for her Young Women’s activity. She typically doesn’t have the same issues as Aaron so I was a little surprised when Victoria brought her home and she was in tears. I asked her what was wrong. Rachel then proceeded to ask if she too could attend Brockett Ward rather than our ward. Apparently even in his absence Aaron is still a topic of conversation. A few of the kids were making fun of him and it really upset Rachel. I found a bit odd that their primary criticism of Aaron is that he “believes in evolution”. Rachel has never been one to gossip and hence she refused to tell me which kids were involved. But she did say that it really surprised her because she had though that these kids were above that. Apparently she had spent half of the meeting outside crying and just waiting for us to come pick her up.
Rachel didn’t openly defy these kids, that’s just not her style, but she did refuse to be a part of what they were doing. They still fight like, well brothers and sisters, but when the chips are down it’s really nice to see them standing up for what they know is right. Rachel didn’t want to tell anybody, especially Aaron, about what happened. I thought that he needed to hear it. After he was dropped off from his activity at Brockett we talked about it and he gave his little sister a nice big hug.

I chose to post this in order to add my name to Rachel’s. I stand behind my family. You criticize one of us you criticize us all. And we won’t tolerate it.

As far as the chief complaint lobbied again Aaron goes, Evolution is a fact. Get used to it. It used to be a theory but it has long ago graduated to a fact as far as I am concerned. I would even go so far as to say that evolution is more of a fact than gravity. Gravity is still lacking a clear definition of how it works. Like evolution gravity has been tested and tested and tested thousands of times but gravity is still lacking a carrier. We don’t quite know how it works. We have hypothesized the existence of the graviton, but haven’t actually seen one. In contrast we have found DNA and natural selection, the elements that make evolution work. So in a very real sense there is more evidence supporting evolution than gravity. In the past when people have asked me if I “believe” evolution I’ve had to rephrase their question in my answer. Because belief requires faith I don’t think it applies to evolution. Faith is a belief without evidence or even in spite of the evidence. You just aren’t looking if you don’t see evidence of evolution. So I respond something like this, “I accept the overwhelming evidence that life evolved via natural selection.”

"If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality." The Dalai Lama
Wise words. It's a shame more people don't apply this same idea to thier own beliefs. I'm glad my kids are.

How Stuff Doesn't Necessarily Work

2010-03-22T09:39:00.002-04:00

Years ago I had a friend try to explain to me how a clutch-less manual transmission works. I wasn’t quite getting the picture so I googled it. The first website that was suggested was http://www.howstuffworks.com/. The explanations were sufficiently “dumbed down” that you didn’t need to be a mechanical engineer to understand them, but technical enough that they satisfied my curiosity. The pictures and even the animations worked very well to give supporting explanations and imagery. So I bookmarked the site on my browser and began using it for just about any topic when I needed to break things down to more easy to understand terms. I was even pleasantly surprised that their section on telecommunications has come in handy in explaining to other engineers certain aspects of our job. So I signed up for their email newsletter. A couple times a week I would get updates to the site. It was a neat way to keep up on the latest technology and other topics.
Well I recently sent an email requesting that they unsubscribe me from that newsletter. I don’t know if they hare under new management or what but the focus of the site seems to have drastically changed. I’m kind of a stickler for certain things. Staying on topic is one of them. I don’t like it when politics strays into religion. Nor do I like it when religion strays into politics. I got annoyed when a channel called the History channel started airing programs about UFOs and ghosts. How in it world does either qualify as history? I now have a very similar criticism with howstuffworks.com.
In my mind, before you give any pixel space at all to a topic on a site called How Stuff Works you have the burden of proving that it works. So I really got annoyed when last week they did a feature on the most compelling ghost photos. Huh? Why in the world would this qualify as how stuff works? So I got poking around and also found that they had a whole sections on complimentary and alternative medicine, the paranormal, and even reincarnation and other religious and mythological topics. I decided to read a few to see if they gave more than just the token sceptical treatment on the last few paragraphs. In a few instances they did give some skeptical treatments. One even gave a link to a lecture by Michael Shermer. But I still felt they gave these topics too credulous coverage.
In today’s page they had a cover story about acupuncture and hypnosis treatments for infertility. The benefits to infertility are only based on the fact that hypnosis and acupuncture reduce stress levels. Perhaps I missed it but nowhere in the article did they point out that just about anything else that lowers your stress levels would have that same effect, yoga, meditation, or just playing with a puppy.
I’m not gonna be one of those who disingenuously claims that I’m “never gonna go to this site again.” But now that they have tipped their hand and shown a desire to post anything that’ll get them web hits, regardless of weither it "works" or not, I can’t say I’d endorse it with the same enthusiasm as I used to. And they definitely will not be the final authority on any of my research from now on.

Manly Sweaty Doll Blogger Award.

2010-03-18T14:00:00.005-04:00

I typically don't pass along these silly memes on my blog but what the heck.

I have been challenged to answer at least four of the following questions: Tell a couple of things about yourself, the name of your favorite guy book, your favorite sports moment, favorite MANLY MAN movie, favorite manly music, and your Favorite Food with No Nutritional Value.

1. I once swapped drivers in a moving car by going across the windshield Dukes Hazard style. Of course it was in a VW Rabbit and we weren't going all that fast.
2. I had a the coolest job a High School kid could have in 1983. I built and tested arcade games.
3. Favorite Guy Book: Touching the Void by Joe Simpson, the most griping armchair mountaineering book every written. This book will either inspire you to climb big mountains or scare you to a life of sitting behind a remote control with little grey in between.
4. Favorite Sports Moment: Sid Bream outrunning Barry Bond's throw and just sliding in under the catch of Mike LaValliere to win the 1992 NLCS for the Braves.
5. Favorite Manly Movie: The Hunt For Red October, no explanation needed.
6. Favorite Manly Music: Lately I've been really digging Apocolyptica
7. Favorite Food with No Nutritional Value: That chocolate raspberry stuff at Brusters.

I'm not gonna tag anybody specifically but If you feel like participating knock yourself out.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

2010-03-17T13:04:00.002-04:00

More on Logical Fallacies: Begging the Question

2010-03-16T07:05:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago I witnessed a wonderful demonstration of this logical fallacy at our weekly Boy Scout troop meeting. Our Senior Patrol Leader wanted to remind the older scouts about the importance of wearing our uniforms. It was also a good opportunity to inform the newer scouts how we do things. So at the end of the meeting he asked the entire group of boys and the adults as well, “When do we wear our class-A scout uniform?” I was very proud of him for taking the time to do a little educating and reinforming. But I share his frustration over what came next.
One after the other the boys and even a few adults started giving the vaguest answers possible.
“We are to wear our class-A uniform whenever you tell it is appropriate.”
“Wear it unless our leadership tells us it is inappropriate.”
“ The uniform is to be worn according to local troop policy.”
All of these answers are technically correct but can you see the frustration our Senior Patrol Leader must have faced? It’s as if each person was so worried about getting the answer wrong that they didn’t provide any information at all. They just restated the question in fancier language. None of the responses actually provided an answer. The question started with the word “when” and none of the responses gave a specific time or event. This is the logical fallacy know as begging the question. If the question itself is the only source you have for your response you are likely just begging the question.
Another quick example:
“How do we know if psychics can talk to dead people?”
“Because they are psychic.”
Finally the patrol leader restated the question in such a way that didn’t allow for any non-answer responses, “Give several specific examples of times when, according to troop policy and what our leaders have told us, we should be wearing our full class-A uniform”. At last he got some responses that actually educated the newer boys and reminded the older boys. “At all Troop meetings and Courts of Honor.” “While travelling to and from any campout.” “At evening assemblies during summer camp.” etc.

On a side note: Most people misuse the phrase begging the question. Rather than use it in the context I’ve just described they use it as if it is synonymous with “brings up the question” . If my daughter says “Noah won’t let me play with the snake.” That brings up a bunch of questions but it doesn’t beg any.

Where Men Win Glory

2010-03-08T18:00:00.008-05:00

My Review of Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer

(Warning: There are a few spoilers)

First of all, I must confess that the only reason I chose to read this book was because I love Jon Krakauer’s work. As I pointed out last week I think he is an excellent investigative reporter. Even when the events he’s reporting on are partially concealed by the Alaskan back-country, the deadly slopes of the highest mountain in the world, secretive polygamist societies or in this case by the chaos and fog of war. I had made up my mind about Pat Tillman and was not really interested in devoting my reading time to this poster-boy of the war effort in Iraq. It was only my history with Krakauer’s work that made me reconsider my prejudices. And my preconceptions about Tillman couldn’t have been more wrong.
Since I don’t understand football I didn’t have any clue who Pat Tillman was before the Bush administration chose to make him the poster boy for the war effort when he turned his back on a $3,000,000 contract to join the Rangers and do his part to help out in the war in Afghanistan. I don’t think that football players are a special class of people so I saw his sacrifice as just the same as any other person who chose to put their life in danger to protect my rights. And I got a particular bee in my bonnet after his death when the right wing media tried to spin his death as meaning more than any other soldier’s death. Tillman put himself in harm’s way to protect my liberties. He literally gave his all. Yet so did thousands of other soldiers. Their future earning potential is irrelevant. They gave their lives for this country.
So I had pigeon-holed Pat Tillman, without any research on my part, as a mindless jock who just jumped behind the war effort because he’d heard Toby Keith’s song and wanted to go act it out. Indeed that is the way much of the talk show noise spun his enlistment. If you still believe this distortion of who Pat really was you will be very disappointed when you read the book.
Pat was probably one of the more literate people to ever wear an NFL jersey. When the other players on his team were buying the fanciest cars they could and just partying, Pat was being teased about driving his used Volvo to practice and spending most of his spare time completing his Master’s degree. Pat was a voracious reader. Among his favorite authors was Emerson, Thoreau, Homer and Noam Chomsky. The title of the book is a quote from the Odyssey, which Tillman particularly like and had a copy of it with him in Afghanistan.
Pat kept meticulous journals. Much of the book is quotes taken straight from these journals. At a couple points Krakauer used phrases that I thought were unnecessarily partisan. I thought that he was just putting his own opinions into the book which wouldn’t have been appropriate for an investigative report like this. Then I stepped back and realized that these weren’t Krakauer’s opinions, they were Tillman’s taken straight from his journals. With my preconception of Pat I just hadn’t expected him to make statements like, “the neo-conservative brain-trust in The White House” and “that cowboy at the helm”. Those were some of the nicer things that Pat said about his Commander-in-Chief. You see Pat really didn’t fit the mold. He didn’t think we had any business in Iraq at all. He and his brother, Kevin, had enlisted to assist in the war in Afghanistan. They were both very vocal and upset and felt tricked into fighting in a war they didn’t agree with.
Krakauer departed strictly from Tillman’s story for a little bit to give a history of U. S. friendly fire accidents. Although the press didn’t dwell on it too much the first confirmed deaths of the Iraq war were friendly-fire accidents. This short history of accidental fratricide in the military was necessary to show the predisposition of the military to covering up the facts. In a friendly fire death the investigative agency is the military itself. There is no other agency involved like there is with other accidents. In a plane crash the airline doesn’t investigate themselves. That task falls to the NTSB in order to avoid a conflict of interest. So with the military there is a serious conflict of interest and tendency to push the blame as far down the chain of command as possible. This section seemed hauntingly familiar and I kept thinking about Zimbardo’s work on situational evil.
The descriptions of war in this book are quite graphic and not for the squeamish. The day I finished the book I was so emotionally jarred by it that when I came home and saw my son taking joy in a war video game I just couldn’t stay quiet. He deserved to be criticized for his behavior, but I was definitely responding more to my feeling about this book than I was to his behavior.
“When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time honored responses of first resort.”
After Tillman’s death the extent to which the military and the government took to spin and cover up the specifics was particularly unnerving. The members of Pat’s unit were sworn to secrecy about the incident even from Pat’s brother, Kevin who was in the same unit. The doctor who performed Pat’s autopsy was denied the details of his death and ultimately refused to sign the official report because his investigation had been so hindered that he knew his autopsy was incomplete. Pat’s brain was never actually recovered. Pat’s uniform, body armor and personal effects were removed and burned in open defiance of military protocol. Along with the uniform was a notebook that Pat had been keeping his journal on while they were deployed. Of the two letters written for Pat’s posthumous Silver Star one was edited so much in the final edition that the author didn’t even recognize it and the other was unsigned and the alleged author did not remember even writing it.
I’m glad I read this book. It put a face on the men and women who are dying in our country's wars. I’m glad I got to know Tillman better. I still think it’s a shame that there isn’t a similar book written about every single soldier killed in action. The Bush administration unashamedly tried to spin Tillman’s story into a ideal of post 9-11 patriotism. Instead Tillman’s story became a story of unnecessary sacrifice, inept leadership and cover-up. But Pat’s legacy is stronger than that. Thanks his mother, brother, wife and this book Pat still refuses to be reduced to a stereotype and lives on in the lives of those he inspired.

Awesome

2010-03-06T09:08:00.001-05:00

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

Under the Banner of Heaven

2010-03-04T16:40:00.007-05:00

I initially read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith when it first came out six or seven years ago. That was before several recent high profile polygamy cases and the HBO series “Big Love”. These recent events prompted me to read it again. I also had a friend tell me that he was interested in hearing what I thought of the book. I couldn’t find my original review so I’ll do my best to cover all those details as well as post some of my impressions from reading it the second time.
Krakauer has a very easy to read style. His books feel like the in depth investigative reports that they are. All of them have a similar approach that works very well. He starts with quick overview of what hit the news. Then he goes backwards as far as he has to on each line to explain why the events unfolded as they did. I’m currently reading Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. He’s using this same format to tell Pat’s story and it’s working very well.
In Under the Banner of Heaven the news story was the savage 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her daughter, Erica by her two brothers-in-law Dan and Ron Lafferty. The Lafferty brothers were members of a polygamist sect of the LDS church. The details of the murders were very tough to read. But had Krakauer stopped with the events of that year it would have been very incomplete. It was important to explain what lead up to the murders and what caused these murders to believe that they had the right and even the duty to murder innocent family members.
To get those answers Krakauer had to go back to the early 1800s and pull a lot of skeletons out of a lot of closets. This is the primary section that most Mormon readers will be uncomfortable with. The history of Joseph Smith is presented based on the contemporary evidence. Most LDS readers would not be familiar with this since they are likely used to the whitewashed “official” versions of the history of the early church. That being said I did not think that one sentence of the history was mean spirited or could honestly be classified as persecution. But if you’re the type that refuses to accept any imperfections in the people you have chosen to follow you might want to stay clear.
The simple truth is that polygamy would not exist to anywhere near the extent that it does in the United States if it were not for the actions of one man, Joseph Smith. Giving an accurate account of the Lafferty murders without mentioning Joseph Smith would be like writing a book about September 11th, 2001 that did not mention Islam. Like it or not, the LDS Church will be forever linked to these polygamist sects who, incidentally, all believe that it is the Salt Lake church that has gone astray and they are preserving the true teachings of Joseph Smith.
I’ve detailed some of my own opinions on polygamy previously on this blog and explained how it’s a mathematical recipe for child abuse. And here is a link to some of my Great-Grandfather's journals. He grew up in a home that still practiced polygamy long after the 1890 declaration by the church stating that it was a forbidden practice. One of the next books I have on my reading list is Lost Boy. Victoria just finished reading it and from her report it seems to validate my mathematical theory.
In my humble opinion Under the Banner of Heaven should be read by every Latter Day-Saint. The practice of polygamy never should have been officially sanctioned by the church and I believe that Salt Lake should take much more drastic measures to apologize, make amends and distance themselves from this evil practice. Simply saying “Yeah but that’s in the past. We don’t do that anymore.” is seriously inadequate.

Toyota

2010-02-26T18:43:00.004-05:00

I've owned Toyotas for over 300,000 miles and never had any major problems, but this is just funny.

The Wordy Shipmates

2010-02-26T17:26:00.003-05:00

So if you’re looking for a straightforward history that conforms neatly to the Thanksgiving story as depicted by your local elementary school kindergarten program then you might want to stay away from The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell . It’s a great book, but I’m just gonna warn you up front that it’ll upset your apple cart if you want to think of the Indians as the savages who didn’t deserve this country and you see Columbus and the pilgrims as the ones who brought civility to this land.

More than just a history Vowell frequently compares and contrasts the actions and beliefs of these early settlers to modern politics. She rarely misses an opportunity to tell how modern perceptions are wrong and even throws in quite a few digs at politicians who attempt to distort the pilgrim’s real goals and agendas. This was actually my favorite part of the book.

I found this book very eye opening. Too much of our early history has been romanticized and pretty much turned into a sacred American mythology. This book took away the nonsense and showed a much more believable account of history. Much like as in Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me it was refreshing to see our history displayed warts and all.

I listened to this book on CD. It’s narrated by the author. Sarah Vowell has a very funny voice. She played the voice of Violet Parr in The Incredibles. Many times while listening to this she made me giggle, not just because of the words, but by the funny way that she delivered them. There is also a small cast of male voices that are used to narrate quotes from male sources. Fans of The Daily Show will recognize several of them. They definitely added to the atmosphere of the CD.

This Post is So EPIC!!

2010-02-25T07:48:00.003-05:00

I'm really getting tired of the word "epic". But only because I rarely hear it used correctly. My kids seem to think it's a synonym for “very” or “really” or just “neato”. Twenty years ago everything was “awesome”. And before that I guess it was ‘cool”. I guess I’m from the “cool” generation, which seems to have come after the “hip” generation.

Hollywood used to call movies that told the life of a historical figure an epic. Lord of the Rings is an epic.
But the kids were really excited that Victoria had bought Reese's Puffs cereal. I'm sorry but there's nothing epic about that.
In 1995 I went on a climbing trip to Yosemite. My partner had exaggerated his abilities and lied to me about having climbed the route we were planning on climbing before. We had to back off of a dangerous climb because he couldn't do a relatively simple technique. I ended up getting a massive sunburn after standing the whole day on the same little ledge 2000' up the rock. Then the next day we had to get rescued off another route because we made a mistake while trying to get back down off a climb. Somebody was at the base of the rock stealing our packs and we got in too much of a hurry. Then on the way home I blew the engine on my car in the middle of the Nevada desert and had to hitch-hike to the nearest city and then get a ride home to Salt Lake in a tow truck. Now that was epic.
As good as Reese’s Puffs cereal is, "epic" just isn’t the right choice of words.

Questions for my Intelligent Designer

2010-02-23T21:42:00.000-05:00

1. Why did you invent so many ways for things to fly? Birds, insects and bats all have very different means of flying. Wouldn't it have been more intelligent to figure out which was the most efficient method and make everything fly the same way?

2. Why do dolphin fins, bat wings, and my hands all have very similar skeletal structure? What is so intelligent about making basically the same design perform three drastically different jobs?

3. As a man what purpose do my nipples serve? Don't get me wrong. I've kind of grown used to them. I'm just curious what you had planned for me to do with them since male mammals don't lactate.

4. Why is human reproduction so ridiculously inefficient? In her life time an average human female will produce several hundred eggs and only a very small percentage will ever be fertilized. Don't get me started with human males. Millions of sperm die for every one that wins the race.

5. Would it have hurt for humans to have those cool closable nostrils like seals and otters? I've never been a very good swimmer but if I had nostrils like that I could do a lot better.

6. And speaking of seals, if they're gonna spend so much time in the water, wouldn't it have made more sense for them to have blow-holes like whales and dolphins?

7. Why did I have to have my wisdom teeth pulled? They never came in all the way and even if they had, it's not like I have to chew on sticks to get to the soft stuff in the middle.

8. Why did you design my eyeball with the rods and cones behind all the blood vessels? Wouldn't it be more intelligent to put the blood vessels behind the photo-receptive cells?

9. What's the design advantage of making me breath and eat using the same tube? Was this just your way of giving Heimlich something to invent?

10. Why did you design so many thousands of fossils that look as if life was evolving? As an engineer when I design something I sign my work. You seem to have signed your work “Evolution”.

Emotional Distance

2010-02-22T19:49:00.005-05:00

(Warning: personal content)

In the spring of 1998 a friend of mine and I went down to Zion National Park and climbed a very pretty sandstoen route that was about 1000’ tall. I was recovering from leg surgery and didn’t do much if any of the leading, but I was rather proud of what we’d accomplished. This wasn’t a first ascent but it was a very nice line that took us over a day to finish. We took a fair amount of pictures because our employer, REI, wanted us to do a slide show for the customers. Several times when we could have just moved on and made better time we took extra effort to get the climb on film. The climb was particularly important to me because I would soon be moving away from Utah and back to Georgia. It was unlikely that I would get another chance like this to climb at this grade. Indeed, I haven’t climbed anything nearly that hard ever since.
When we got back to Georgia we put the slides together for the presentation. I wanted some friends and family members to see what we had done. So one day when they stopped by the store I pulled them aside and gave a small private screening. After only a few shots one friend, who has a serious issue with heights, asked to be excused. I showed the rest of the slides, but it was a little bittersweet. It was clear that in order to have a relationship with this friend they had to maintain a certain level of cognitive dissonance about my hobby. Which meant that I would not be able to share this aspect of myself with them.
I understand this friend’s apprehensions and I fully accept them. But at some level it saddened me. Here was something that was important to me, something that I enjoy and I had to hide it away in order to not upset them. Since this event I’ve learn about several other things that I do that upset certain people that I am close to. Don’t get too hung up on the first example. This is about much more that just the fact that I like to go climbing and caving. I have a long mental list of topics that I need to avoid cross-referenced to friends and family members. It seems that as I get older the lists just keep on growing too.
So what are my choices? I can have a relationship where I personally hide nothing and stay completely open about my opinions and activities even though that makes loved ones uncomfortable. Or I can hide a few details about things that are important to me in order to not upset people, but in turn I come across as emotionally distant. Or I can not have any relationship at all with people who don’t accept me as I am. Granted there are shades of grey between each of these. Ideally I’d like to be completely honest with everybody and still not upset people. But so far I haven’t had much luck with that one. Perhaps it’s something about my personality. I don’t know.
This post would not be complete without stating how grateful I am to the one person who I feel really understands and accepts me. Victoria and I disagree on many issues. And that’s great. She doesn’t need to be just an echo of my views, likes and dislikes in order for me love her and have a relationship with her. If I could only figure out how to be just as honest with the rest of the world as I am with her and not drive them away.

Miller hits the mark, yet again

2010-02-18T08:16:00.003-05:00

If you've never met my wife, Victoria, consider this fair warning.

Puzzles

2010-02-10T16:53:00.004-05:00

It’s been a few years since I’ve done a jigsaw puzzle. But last month my youngest asked me to sit down with her and work on a small one that she got for Christmas.

This puzzle was of a horse wearing a Native American blanket. We went through all of the standard techniques for building a puzzle. First I propped up the box lid so we could see the picture that it was supposed to look like when it was finished. Then we proceeded to flip all of the pieces so that the picture side is up and the raw cardboard side was down. Next I started sorting out all of the pieces that had a flat side, assuming that these would be the border pieces. Ideally, in the process we’d find the four corner pieces. Then the two of us started sorting the pieces by color, trying to group the pieces into smaller groups to work on separately; horse, sky, grass, blanket, etc.

Next came the process of assembly. Each of us would pick up a piece and try to see how it fit into other sections that we’d already assembled. I started by looking at the picture and trying to establish the border. I don’t always start with the border but it seemed to work for this puzzle. Sometimes it’s easier to start with a predominant color and try to get it together first and then work in the border later. I don’t really have a preference as to which method I choose. It just depends on the puzzle.

Eventually you’ll end up with a few sections assembled but not linked together. At this point you start looking for pieces that have a little bit of two different things on it, pieces that could conceivably go into more than one pile. The pieces with a little grass and a little bit of horse help tie those together and the pieces with the grass and sky help defiant he horizon. The “ah ha” moments of most puzzles come when you can link two large parts together with just a few small pieces or sometimes with just one. The best pieces are the ones that help tie three different chunks together. Once you’ve linked them you start looking for support pieces that also connect those chucks. Those help reinforce that your linking pieces are correct. Sometimes they disconfirm and force you to look for new ways to link the puzzle together.

At some point it seems you are always stuck with a bunch of pieces of relatively the same color and your only clue as to how they need to be assembled is to look at the shape of the pieces themselves and try to make them work.

Using these methods we were able to assemble this 200 piece puzzle in about 15 or 20 minutes. It struck me that in order to assemble it we had to make several assumptions about the puzzle.

1. The picture on the puzzle is the same as the picture on the box. I’ve put puzzles together without the box just to see how much longer it would take. If I had to guess it’d take at least twice as long. I’ve also participated in a team building exercise where the puzzle was put into the wrong box with a similar but just different enough image n the outside.

2. The pieces only have images on one side and raw cardboard on the other. I have actually done a puzzle that had images on both sides, but the stamping process made for edges that were easy to determine which side of the piece was for image one and which was for image two.

3. Flat edges are for the border. It’d be really sneaky to see a puzzle that had a jagged edge to the image and flat pieces that but up together inside the body of the puzzle.

4. The completed puzzle has no missing pieces in the body. We’ve all been in the situation where we’ve lost one piece and we just don’t feel like we’ve finished it.

5. All of the pieces have to be used. Want to really throw your head for a loop? Throw in a few pieces from another puzzle just to spice things up. I remember doing a puzzle and my grandmother’s house and having exactly that problem. She’d found a few pieces on the floor and just threw them into the first box she found.

I can think of several more assumptions that we make when we try to make sense of the scrambled pieces in front of us. But this will do to start out with.

Lately I've been working on a puzzle that seems to violate all of these assumptions.
No picture on the outside of the box. No raw side to the puzzle and no obvious way to tell one side from the other. Flat edges in the middle and bumpy edges on the edges. A few holes in the main body. A few extra pieces from other puzzles.
And the coup de gras of the whole puzzle is that I have a few large chunks of the puzzle that don’t even attach to each other.

Anyway, that’s my little analogy for today. I think I stopped talking about jigsaw puzzles a few paragraphs ago.

X-rays are Just Cool

2010-02-04T08:37:00.000-05:00

Snake Oil Salesman Getting PWN'ed

2010-02-03T08:21:00.004-05:00

I've never seen the "Dragon's Den" before. If this is the straight forward, nonsense intolerant stance they take to every issue I may have figure out what channel it's on and start watching.

Let the Robots Do It

2010-02-02T06:59:00.003-05:00

I am a space nut. As a kid I built models of the Apollo lunar landers. I was too young to remember the Apollo project first hand, but I do remember Skylab and the Apollo/Soyux missions. I even got permission from my folks to skip school and watch the first shuttle launch and landing. I also remember quite vividly the first pictures sent back from the surface of Mars by the Viking lander. I remember thinking how lucky I was to grow up in a time when the Voyager’s grand tour was even possible. I watched the first raw image returns from the Cassini missions live as they came in from Saturn in 2004. Every day I check multiple Astronomy websites and I make a conscious point to look up in the mornings as I walk to the car and see if I can locate the planets that are currently visible.

So with this introduction you might find it odd that I applaud the announcement to all but kill NASA’s manned space flight program. I don’t have a problem with manned space flight in particular. We just need to look at it honestly and objectively and see what kind of return on our investment we’ve gotten on manned space flight when compared to robotic missions.

While Voyager was taking pictures of Jupiter and all its moons Apollo Soyux was just trying to see if we could get Russians and American’s to shake hands. While Cassini Huygens was taking the best shots of Saturn ever manned missions were trying to figure out how to not burn up another shuttle during re-entry. While Mars Pathfinder more than doubles its life expectancy and continues to send back data from Mars manned missions are trying to figure out how to rescue a shuttle if tiles get damaged on the shuttle. While Hubble continues each day to amaze us with images from the extremes of the universe the ISS is trying to figure out how astronauts can process their own urine and re-drink it. I could go on and on with these examples but my only point is that while the robots are doing real research and doing a bang up job in the process the manned missions are quite literally doing little more than trying to figure out how to stay alive.

I’m not denying the political chest thumping advantage of being able to say we are the only country that has ever set foot on the moon. But let’s not deny that that’s all that it really was. The science was at best and afterthought. We only actually put one scientist up there and he was bumped up to an earlier mission when we realized that we were going to be discontinuing the program. If we feel we need to thump our chest again to show how great America is let’s do it after we’ve taken care of some issues much closer to home. But let’s just not disguise it as a scientific pursuit.

A few years ago when Constellation and Orion were announced I was more than a little annoyed. Why were we spending so much money to rebuild 70’s era technology to do something that we’d already done? So I’m actually glad that the current budget is choosing to cut it. Let Richard Branson, Burt Rutan and the rest of the private sector spend their own money to figure out how to make a toilet that functions in zero-G. Let’s invest our tax dollars into something based on science and with a cost effective return on our tax investment. The robots have proven that they can do that exponentially better than any manned mission.

Introspection

2010-02-01T10:34:00.002-05:00

A few years ago a celebrity got a DUI and while he was being arrested he slipped into an anti-Semitic rant. In his apology he acknowledged that he had an alcohol problem and blamed the anti-Semitic comments on the alcohol. I don’t believe that is how it actually works. The alcohol may have turned off some of his filtering software but the ideas were still there, inside him, just waiting to come forth once the filters were weakened. I felt then that this celebrity needed to not only address his alcohol problem but he also needs to confront what caused him to harbor those ideas in the first place. I trust him when he says he’s making good on correcting both problems.
Now here’s where this post gets personal. For some reason I don’t quite understand I haven’t been getting hardly any sleep for the last week or so. I don’t feel overly worn out in the mornings. It’s just weird that I just seemed to lie around and wait for the alarm to go off. I’ve just been writing it off to having too much to worry about.
Anyway a couple of times lately I’ve been a little punchy and let some comments slip that I really wish I hadn’t said. But that’s not what bothers me. Like the celebrity’s anti-Semitic comments my comments had to come from somewhere. That’s what’s bugging me. I need to go back to the drawing board on these areas of my life and re-evaluate what I value and try to figure out why those ideas were even in my head in the first place. It’s simply unacceptable to blame this on my lack of sleep. It was easy for me to criticize the celebrity and I’d be a hypocrite to try to use the same logic he did to avoid facing the real problem.
I know I have quite a bit of work to do to become the person I’d like to be. This just kinda hit me out of left field and from and area that I thought I already had taken care of.

Polls

2010-01-31T16:51:00.003-05:00

I love PhD comics. Here's another one that's right on the mark.

For Good Reason

2010-01-26T13:09:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite podcasts lately has been Point of Inquiry. DJ Grothe has great guests and he does a great job of showing multiple different approaches to rational thinking. So it was with mixed emotions that I heard the news that DJ would now be President of the James Randi Education Foundation. I suspected that this would mean fewer episodes of Point of Inquiry.
Well I was pleasantly surprised to see DJ is hosting a new podcast for the JREF called For Good Reason. Check it out. I just finished listening to it and I enjoyed it. This episode had an interview with James Randi about the future of his organization as well as some information about some scams that have hit the news lately. I don’t know if DJ will be able to continue to be able to host both podcasts but I look forward to future episodes.
One small disappointment: In the intro to the podcast there is a segment by Jamie Ian Swiss. It’s brilliant but has a few not safe for work words. I loved the podcast but would have loved it more if I could have been able to recommend to my kids and family members without having to give this caveat. I think many podcasts in this genre disqualify themselves from a large audience, school children, by not exercising a little restraint when it comes to their language.

Nonsense Intolerance cont.

2010-01-25T11:18:00.005-05:00

As I’ve stated before I have a pretty low tolerance for nonsense masquerading as science. Well last Thursday I hit DEFCON 4.
On the way home from work I stopped by the library to pick up a few books that I had on hold. I also noticed that Victoria had a few on the shelf too. So I picked them up. One of them was a DVD titled simply “Brain”. The cover looked like a National Geographic type program. It looked interesting. I even had a pleasant conversation the librarian about how interesting it looked. After dinner Victoria suggested that we sit down as a family and watch it.
It started off just fine. Slick computer graphics showed cutaways of the brain. They then moved over to interview scientists who were doing research on that particular part. The format kind of reminded me of the Universe series that we really love. So the format felt comfortable. The first half hour of the program was just fine. I take issue with a little bit of the ethics of using this type of brain science to improve combat forces but the science was well done. Then it took a turn off the deep end.
The last half hour was about ESP. They extensively interviewed the unremarkable cold-reader, John Edward and explored his so-called psychic ability as if it was a foregone conclusion. That’s when I really blew my top. The first step to investigating any phenomena is to see it the phenomena really exists. You don’t speculate as to how something works until you’ve determined that it works. But that is exactly what Dr. Dean Radin did. And they gave him the last ten minutes of the show to spout his nonsense.
I completely lost it during one scene. Radin had speculated that during one of his readings Edward’s heart rate would synchronize with his subjects. When he tested it and found that their heart rates did not synchronize he interpreted this clear defeat by claiming that he must be syncing with the person who had passed on. Unbelievable! His test failed completely and he interprets the results as a success. But not just any success, a success that is unfalsifiable. How in the world could we test to see if Edward is syncing with a person who has crossed over? Radin has obviously convinced himself that psychic phenomena is real and all of his results, positive or negative are interpreted to support that forgone conclusion. The kids were laughing at me by this point. I was not reserving any comment and they thought it was funny that I was yelling at the TV. “You do know that they can’t really hear you, don’t you, Dad?”
I was patiently waiting for the token skeptical response. They had it. It was about a 15 second shot of the cover of Skeptical Inquirer with overdubbing that said little more than some in the scientific community question Dr. Radin’s research. That's it? Something as controversial as psychics and you can only spare 15 seconds and one still graphic.
After the program was over Victoria noticed that the program was produced by the History channel. If there is a more inappropriately named TV channel I can’t think of it. A close second it ABC Family. What in the world does a program on ESP have to do with History? But this is the same station that has marathons on UFO stories, etc.
So afterword I took advantage of the teaching moment to talk to the kids about what psychics really do. I showed them a few youtube.com videos of psychics being tragically wrong and having no remorse about the consequences of their wild guesses. I then took out a deck of cards and showed them how I could steer the kids into picking the card I had chosen and making them think that they had chosen it. I then showed them a video of Dr. Richard Wiseman doing a psychic prediction and explained to them exactly how it works.
Hey I’d think it was really cool if ESP really existed. But it’ll take more than these con artists and their carefully selected rubes to prove it to me. Shame on the History channel for giving an once of credibility to these con artists and pretending that there is any scientific validity to ESP.

Appeal to Anti-Authority

2010-01-19T14:12:00.005-05:00

If you’ve been following my blog for more than a few posts you’ll know that periodically I like to talk about logical fallacies. I just think it’s helpful to recognize the flaws in our thinking and make sure that we understand why the logic is incorrect and how to recognize it.
A commonly used logical fallacy is the appeal to authority. Just because somebody with authority in one field voices his opinion in a field outside his expertise does not make him an authority in that field. I’ve grown quite weary of the numerous Albert Einstein quotes being used to support things besides physics. His opinions on politics and religion hold no more weight than yours or mine. His opinions on physics however, are within his expertise and hold a little more weight. But even then there should be evidence to back up his claims and not just a pronouncement by a famous scientist.
What has me upset lately is that I see that many people are embracing an odd variation of this fallacy. I’ll call it “appeal to anti-authority”. In its simplest form the more credible somebody’s authority and evidence the more likely they are to be wrong. And the converse is also true. The more humble somebody’s experience the more likely they are to be right. Take this ad as an example. The advertiser is asking us to not trust our dentist, the real authority, and instead trust a single mom’s procedure to whiten teeth.
I just don’t know how to even respond to this twisted anti-logic. Should I now avoid going to my local garage when I have car trouble? Perhaps I should seek out somebody who explicitly has not had any training in Toyota Tundras to fix my check engine light. Yet this is exactly what many people do and it really scares me. Rather than trusting thousands of immunologists and getting vaccinated they are trusting the anecdotes of actors and putting kids at risk of catching serious diseases. Rather than trusting the evidence presented by thousands of climatologists they choose to believe the talking heads, most of whom don’t even have degrees in journalism let alone anything that grants then any authority on scientific matters.
I saw a series of books the other day at the library. The all started with the line “The Politically Incorrect Guide to…” I find it very sad that more and more Americans are accepting something being politically incorrect as proof that it is true. Something being politically accepted or politically incorrect is irrelevant to the truthfulness of the claim. What does the evidence say? I don’t care who believes the claim or who is offended by it.

“...the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. “
Carl Sagan

One of my Favorite MLK Jr. Quotes

2010-01-18T07:50:00.002-05:00

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King Jr.

Picking Cotton

2010-01-17T10:39:00.002-05:00

In 1984 Jennifer Thompson was raped. She spent one hour with her rapist’s face just inches from her own. She made a concerted effort to study her rapist’s face and learn every detail about him. If she lived through the night she wanted to be able to lock this guy up forever. And that is exactly what she did. However after being in jail for eleven years DNA proved that the man she had locked up without any physical evidence, just based on her description, did not commit the rape. Picking Cotton is this story

I’ve always been suspect of human memory, particular when it comes to our justice system. I’ve had personal experiences where my own memory did not line up with other facts. I know that how I remember the incident could not have been the case but somehow my recollection of the events has been altered. My experiences are completely trivial when compared to the eleven years that one man, Ronald Cotton, spent in prison for something that he did not do.

Since his release Cotton and Thompson have become very active in educating police systems at how to avoid the mistakes that happened in their case.

Reading this book was not easy. Sections will and should make you very uncomfortable. The serious miscarriage of justice that happened is not to be taken lightly. Cotton and Thompson’s story will have you squirming in your seats the next time you watch a cop show and they lock somebody up just based on witness identification. Or worse, the next time you hear of a death row inmate being denied a stay of execution and his conviction is based on even less than Ronald Cotton’s conviction.

Far from being bitter about the loss of so much of his adult life Cotton recognized that he and Thompson were victims of the same man, the real rapist Bobby Poole. Their story is one of the most heart warming tales of forgiveness that I have ever read. It will have you questioning a lot of your preconceptions about, justice, memory and what it truly means to forgive.

The Peltzman Effect

2010-01-14T16:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I listened to a podcast that talked a little bit about the Peltzman Effect. In simplest terms the Peltzman Effect is a theory that claims that the safer people believe they are the more likely they are to engage in risky behavior. I need to do more reading on this but the topic seemed to confirm my own observations. From what little I’ve read this is primarily an economic theory. If you believe that your investments are insured to a certain amount you’ll take more risks than if they were not. I’ve also seen many manifestations of this in other areas. Do high-wire walkers take more chances if they have a net? Increase the safety of cars by adding anti-lock brakes and massive crumple zones and some people take this as permission to bump draft on the highway like it’s a Nascar race. In my own experience I can think of several examples from the years when I used to do much more rock climbing. I did much more dangerous things on top-rope that I ever would have done on lead. And I took much more risks on lead that I ever would consider without a rope.
It seems that the appearance of removing the risk, even if it’s only marginally safer makes people behave disproportionately to the added benefit of the safety net. The net effect seems to be that people feel even more detached from the consequences of their decisions. The safety nets, the ropes, and the ABS brakes may actually encourage more risk taking and be less safe.
I’ve given this issue a lot of thought lately for many reasons. I’ve been considering getting my VW bus on the road again and it has no ABS brakes and the crumple zone is pretty much the driver’s and passenger’s legs. I’ve been trying to get in shape to do more rock climbing than I have in years past. But the biggest reason I’ve chosen to blog about this today comes from just being a father.
It’s natural to want to pad the sharp edges that you bumped into as a kid so your kids won’t have to learn the hard way. I also try hard to provide a decent financial safety net for my children. But I fear that in a small way I may be experiencing a little bit of the Peltzman Effect. By making things a little nicer for my kids than I had it I seem to be encouraging them to take risks that I would not have taken. I made a lot of stupid mistakes as a child. I wasn’t shielded from the consequences and in most cases felt the full brunt of those mistakes. As a parent it’s much easier said than done.
There’s a British sci-fi comedy that I really love, Red Dwarf. I think sci-fi allows you to explore ideas and themes that you really couldn’t explore in other formats. In one episode one of the main characters met his alter ego from a parallel dimension. In one dimension this character, Rimmer, was a sniveling middle management suck up with no loyalty and was inept and virtually friendless. In another dimension the same person had become, Ace, the dashing space pilot that everybody wanted to be around and was the hero of everything that he attempted. The two tried to figure out at what point in their life their paths took such drastically different paths, one becoming Rimmer and the other becoming Ace. They concluded that many years ago one of them cheated on a test and got caught, the other did not. The ironic thing is that Ace was the one that got caught and Rimmer had gotten away with it. Having that wake up call early in his life had caused Ace to sit up and re-evaluate what his life would become while Rimmer never had such a wake up call.
My fear is that I’m doing too much to interfere with the natural consequences and not letting my kids get the wake up call they need. As a parent who wants only the best for them that’s much easier said than done.

Random v Inappropriate

2010-01-11T16:15:00.000-05:00

My kids, particularly the oldest two, have developed this annoying habit of saying something completely unrelated to the conversation that everybody else is having and then when they get funny looks just saying, “What? I’m just being random.” For instance during the middle of a conversation on where to eat one of them will just start singing a song that has nothing to do with food. “What? I’m just being random.”
Well yesterday I’d had enough. I don’t remember what we were talking about but we were trying to figure something out. It was probably about trying to co-ordinate our schedules. Well one of the kids pulled this act again and started talking about something completely off topic. And, you guessed it, I got the same response about just being random. So I went on a diatribe something like this.
“No, you are not being random. You are being inappropriate. A six-sided die is random. Occasionally, when you are looking for a six you will get a six. And when you are looking for a one occasionally you will get a one. If your outbursts are truly random then every now and then they should be on topic and still be classified as random. Since none of your outbursts that you label as random are ever on topic the conclusion seems to be that you are trying to be off-topic. Since you’re trying to be off-topic you aren’t being random. You are just being inappropriate. And I don’t appreciate it.”
At this point Victoria was laughing hysterically and told me that I had to blog this before I forgot about it. My only regret was that one of the prime offenders was not in the car and I’ll likely have to give this speech again soon.

Baloney Detection Kit

2010-01-11T09:05:00.002-05:00

This is a very well done video that explains the basics of skepticism. Thanks to teacherninja for point this out to me.

Vigilant Realism

2010-01-06T15:26:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago Victoria pulled me aside to watch and interview with Barbara Ehrenreich on The Daily Show. Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. A few years ago Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was overwhelmed with well meaning people telling her to avoid any negative emotions and to stay positive. She began to look deeper into this cult like attitude that so many people have that you can jinx your health, relationships, and your carrier if you don’t always keep a positive attitude.
Not many of us enjoy being around a cynic all the time. Don’t mistake Ehrenreich’s criticism of the giddy optimism promoted by so many as cynicism. It isn’t. She merely points out that being unrealistic about things can be far worse than just the occasion outward sign of frustration of negativity.
Last month while reading Emotional Awareness the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman pointed out that optimism can be just as destructive as pessimism if it prevents us from seeing events as they really are. Ehrenreich builds on this theme and shows case after case where people have been deluded by their own optimism. She goes in dept to point out how destructive this mindset can be. Blinded by optimism we set reason and rational reactions aside.
This book pulled from and added to many of the books and issues that I’ve been studying for the last few years. She tackled many of the peddlers of irrational optimism like, Oprah, Rick Warren, Joel Olsten, Zig Ziglar and many others.
Unfortunately we live in a time when a book that is literally about nothing more than wishful thinking is a best seller and celebrities and actors are seen as authorities on just about any topic just because they can share a personal anecdote. I’m sorry a personal anecdote is where science starts, not where it ends. Just because Suzanne Summers feels better after a colonic doesn’t make it science and foregoing real treatments can kill you with or without a positive attitude.
I really enjoyed seeing a book that was so passionately pro-science and anti-magical thinking get such good press. I couldn’t put it down.

“A vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness. In fact, it makes it possible.” Barbara Ehrenreich

More Indexed

2009-12-31T07:09:00.003-05:00

Another brilliant Venn diagram from thisisindexed.com

Denialism

2009-12-29T17:52:00.006-05:00

Over the past year I've read several books on this theme. All too often people will ignore data and evidence that does not support their preset conclusions and opinions. Whether it's political, ideological, religious or just hard to swallow people resist accepting evidence that will require them to actually change their behaviour or way of thinking.
In Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives author and science journalist Michael Specter covers several specific areas where people do exactly that and become denialists. Whether it's the benefits of vaccines, the safety of genetically modified foods or the nonsense behind the whole vitamin and alternative medicine craze, Specter shows that time and again we ignore the data and the real evidence and in its place accept unverified personal stories from friends and co-workers. Compelling as they may be these personal allegories are just that. And they are poor substitutes for evidence.
Specter points out that denialism is an infection that knows no political restrictions. Conservatives and liberals alike are just as prone to denying overwhelming data when it doesn't support their political ideology.
One of the side effects of reading several books on the same topic is that I have a hard time distinguishing what I learned from what book. Several of the specific cases and evidences cited in this book were also cited in other books I've read. Parts of the book dragged a little for me but only because it was a re-reading of things I've already covered extensively.
One of the topics that I was surprised that Specter didn't cover in this book was global warming. He responded when interviewed on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast and asked why he didn't devote a chapter to it. He wanted to restrict the topics he covered to areas where more people might be sitting on the fence. He wanted to only address the issues where he hopped that he could actually change peoples' minds. He went on to state that the science behind anthropogenic climate change was so conclusive that he didn't expect his book to change the opinion of anyone who still believed that it was not a reality. Even some of the most hardened skeptics have changed there mind on this topic when they just weighed the massive amount of evidence supporting it.
Denialism is a serious problem. I fear that the marginalizing of science and evidence and the demonizing of intellectualism is seriously hindering technological and social progress. If we really want to solve the major issues of the 21st Century we have to start behaving more rationally.

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."
Bertrand Russell

I disagree with Russell on one slight point here. I've seen far too many times when people have clung to their beliefs even when the evidence was overwhelming.

One-Dimension in Three-Dimensions

2009-12-28T12:25:00.003-05:00

Over the weekend our oldest two kids cajoled us into going to see James Cameron’s latest creation “Avatar”. I had planned on just passing this one over because the plot that I could work out from the trailers looked rather lame. I was convinced to go see it when several people that I trust informed me that the imagery in the film was nothing short of stunning and it would be worth my money to see it in the theatre. So here is a quick review of the movie.
Warning! There will be some spoilers.

First the good news:
As predicted the imagery was breathtaking. The CGI and the 3-D effects created a very believable and beautiful world. The variety of Pandoran landscapes and wildlife were so well done that it reminded me of a National Geographic Imax movie. Only on a few rare occasions did the graphics betray its CGI roots. This is clearly the crowning accomplishment of this movie. If for no other reason the movie is well worth the price of admission.

Now the bad news:
There really is no other reason to see this movie besides the graphics and the eye-candy I’ve already described.
The characters are profoundly one-dimensional, particularly the villains. Every preconception you make about every character turns out to be right on the money.
The plot has been recycled so many times that it is easily predictable. The story just seemed to drag along while you were waiting for the inevitable to occur. One friend of mine called it “Dances with Space Wolves”. The story follows a very similar structure. It’s hard to escape the parallel. The overdubbing, the journal entries, etc. It’s as if he just borrowed Costner’s storyboard for the first two hours of the movie.
Although I share their views, the heavy-handed environmental message was laughable in its rigid adherence to stereotype. The good guys were a bunch of self confessed tree-huggers looking for the life force of the forest and the bad guys were the mindless corporate drones driving fleets of bulldozers side by side in formation across the wilderness in order to meet a self imposed production deadline. Another friend of mine called the movie “a half billion dollar CGI remake of ‘Fern Gully’”.
I also had a hard time with the technological anachronisms in the movie. The humans had perfected near light-speed travel yet their military hardware was little more than Blackhawks with modified rotors. They had developed a way to clone human alien hybrids and transfer their thoughts from a “driver” to the hybrid, yet they still fought their battles hand to hand with flesh and blood soldiers in the field. Why? Even the bulldozers in the movie were remote controlled. So why risk the soldiers?
I really wish Cameron would hire a screenwriter for his next film. “The Abyss” was great. But ever since then he has been willing to sacrifice plot, dialogue, character definition and every other element that makes a movie great in exchange for magnificent images. Make no mistake; the images in “Avatar” are amazing. It just saddens me to see this much money spent on creating stunning three-dimensional images to tell a tired one-dimensional story.

2009 Christmas Letter

2009-12-22T12:01:00.000-05:00

2009 was another very busy year for our little wing of the Taylor family.

Eve, AKA Evey-bug, Bugger Chugs, Evil Livia, Evey, Chuggers has had a good year. She’s enjoying school quite a lot and finally getting the hang of reading. She’s stubborn so she keeps pushing until she understands. She opted not to do girl scouts again this year and chose instead to take gymnastics. She’s very limber and very strong so it’s a good activity for her. She’s still working on her handstands but she’s getting there. She is cursed with the sarcasm gene from each side of the family and it results in a very quick and zany sense of humor. We love having her around if nothing more for the comic relief.

Noah, Noey, Noah Monster, Noah-it-all is far too smart for his own good. He now reads much faster and more often than most everybody in the family. Last week he found a book series that he enjoys and I think he’s on the fourth or fifth book already. He has a great teacher at school who really understands his quirky sense of humor. It can be tough to teach a kid who really believes that he already knows more than you do. We’re working with him on that. His fashion sense is still running on the James Dean model. He’s perfectly content to wear jeans and a white t-shirt every day of the week and he pulls it off pretty good, too.

Rachel is growing up far too fast for my comfort. I jokingly tell her that she can start dating when she’s thirty. She’s had a few growing pains getting used to Middle school. But considering she’s taking so many gifted classes I’m inclined to cut her a little slack. As with all of my kids it’s tough to be happy with B’s when I know they’re capable of A’s, but that’s something I need to work on. Recently her best friend of many years moved to Florida. They have been pretty much inseparable for quite a while so I foresee some family trips to Tampa in the next years and some increased long distance charges.

Last year Aaron passed Victoria in height and he’s less than an inch from overtaking me now. We’re gonna have to stop feeding that boy. This was his first year in high school. He’s still not quite grasping the importance of the school work. We’re really working with him on setting his sights higher. He has created a large group of friends both in school and in his seminary class. Aaron is also still active in his Boy Scout troop. Last Saturday he spent all day helping out with an Eagle project and then selling Christmas trees to help pay for our Philmont trip in July 2010. He’s only a few merit badges away from being able to start working on an Eagle project. Yesterday he was bugging me about getting his learners permit. I can’t believe I have a son that’s old enough to drive already. Where did that time go?

Victoria is still working much harder than she really should. The yearbook that she put together for the elementary school last year won mountains of praise from parents and students. It was really nice to see so many people gush over it. I know how much of her heart and soul went into every page and it felt good to see others recognize that too. She’s recently taken a few cake decorating classes and really had a good time making cakes for family birthday parties and anniversaries. As with all of her hobbies, she never does anything half way. I enjoy being the technical support and moral support behind the scenes for all her projects. Oh yeah, this is all over and above what she does just getting four kids back and forth from their numerous activities and keeping the house in running order.

I’m now a planner at the phone factory, AT&T. It wasn’t technically a promotion, but it moved me into a group that’s a little up the food chain, which makes it comforting when they announce some lower level layoffs like they did a few months ago. I enjoy the work and it keeps the bills paid.
I’ve taken Victoria’s lead and I’m doing my best to stay in shape. We recently moved offices to another building and I’ve used that as an excuse to walk everyday on my lunch hours. Weather permitting I’ve been doing between 12 and 20 miles each week. But with all the rain lately it’s only been about 10 miles a week.
Victoria bought me a really nice Breedlove guitar for my birthday. I’m still lousy, but I enjoy it and it helps me to relax a little bit while trying to get pretty sounds to come out of it.

On a sad note, we had to say good bye to Jasper a few months ago. Five years ago when we found a stray ferret I never dreamed he would have such an impact on our family. His silly personality was good for all of us. He really helped Aaron deal with years of home-school. He’s probably the primary impact on Eve’s future as a vet. We all miss him terribly, but we’re comforted by the idea that he and Gracie are giving each other a hard time where ever they are.

December 8th, 2009 is the twentieth anniversary of the best decision I’ve made in my entire life. I surprised Victoria by kidnapping her and taking her to a cute little bed and breakfast in Hot Springs North Carolina. It was a great weekend away from the stresses of the world. We’ll probably head back there for our 30th, 40th, 50th etc. I seriously question her sanity every day that she still thinks I’m a good catch, but I hope she never wises up. I truly love her and the family that we have created together.

For more complete details as to what we’ve been up to check out my blog, Victoria’s blog, and Rachel’s blog. And we’re all available on Facebook.com too.

I wish you all Peace on Earth. Goodwill t’ward men.

Emotional Awareness

2009-12-17T10:07:00.004-05:00

I have long been a fan of the Dalai Lama. Even though I don’t accept the deeper doctrines of Buddhism, like karma and reincarnation, I really admire the efforts that he has put in to teaching people to live more peaceably with each other. His optimism is infectious. I’ve also been a fan of the work of Dr. Paul Ekman. So it has been really enjoyable to have my commutes filled with their voices as I’ve been listening to Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion: A Conversation Between the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman.
Ekman and the Dalai Lama both have the same goals but they are approaching them from different perspectives. Ekman is the scientist who is studying emotion scientifically with the goal of trying to make people’s lives better. The Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader who is also trying to make people’s lives better. Both have found a very common ground in the study of emotion and how to respond to our emotions.
I have so many things to take away from this book that I don’t really know where to start.
Much of the conversation focuses on just being aware of our own emotions and controlling what we feel and how we respond to that emotion. The Buddhist principles of compassion and mindfulness come into play quite a bit in this area.
Ekman refuses to classify emotions as positive or negative. It is only our response to that emotion that can receive such a value judgment. Fear that prompts us to get out of the way of an oncoming train can be good. But fear used to intimidate is bad. Similarly pride and anger can also have similar positive effects if channeled constructively. The only emotion that both the Dalai Lama and Ekman agree has no positive effects is contempt.
Moods are a different issue and both men agree. Moods poison the well and last longer than emotion. Most emotions only last for a relatively short time. Moods however skew you perception and are never constructive. A cranky mood will cause you to misinterpret the actions of others to fit your preconceptions. Even a good mood can be destructive if it causes you to gloss over and not give due attention to a stimulus. I found it very interesting that The Dalai Lama agreed that being overly optimistic can have similar negative effects to being overly pessimistic.
The biggest take away I have found from this book is simply an awareness. I’ve been trying to identify my feelings as emotions or as moods and then trying to consciously decide how to respond. I have a bad habit of taking tidbits that I’ve learned and educating my family. That I believe is good but I tend to sound like I’m lecturing them. I hope that as I learn better emotional awareness I will also become better at sharing with my family.

Anonymous Comments

2009-12-17T07:57:00.001-05:00

I have had to change my comments settings to restrict anonymous comments. I started getting so many spammed comments that this was the easiest way to handle it. I hope this doesn’t scare anybody away from commenting. I do appreciate any and all comments that are related to the post and not just trying to get me to send money to Nigeria or buying Mona Vea water, etc, etc.

Surprise!

2009-12-11T14:51:00.003-05:00

So the trick to keeping a secret from my wife seems to be to tell everybody else. But they all have to believe that they are the only ones you’ve confided in. Just to make sure nobody freaked out and to get all of our responsibilities taken care of ahead of time I had to tell the kids, the babysitter and our substitute nursery teachers for Sunday. And they all kept the secret so Victoria was completely surprised.

Friday after I dropped Aaron off for Sunday I kidnapped Victoria and took her off to a cute little bed and breakfast in Hot Springs NC. The drive up was relaxing and very pretty. The last hour was a bit curvy and I though we might have to pull over so Victoria could toss her cookies but she made it.

The folks at the inn upgraded us to the best room in the house since they knew it was a special occasion for us. The inn was very nice and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who just needs a little getaway. The food alone would be worth another trip up that way. Seriously, I haven’t eaten that well for quite some time.

We took a nice walking tour of the town. I could move there in a heartbeat. The Appalachian Trail runs right down the main drag. It was cold but we made the best of it and enjoyed each other’s company. See her blog for a bunch of pictures.

Saturday we took a trip in to Asheville and toured the Grove Park Inn and saw the really cool gingerbread houses. Then we headed down to Biltmore House. In hindsight we could have passed on seeing Biltmore House. I don’t think Victoria and I could have been more underwhelmed. That has to be the single ugliest building I’ve every been in in my life. There was a lot of hype about the house being really done up for Christmas. Honestly I didn’t even notice besides the Christmas tree in the dining room. And even then I wasn’t too impressed with the tree. I was just curious how they got the tree into the house. At one point during the tour Victoria told me, “You know it’s really a shame that somebody with this much money didn’t have better taste.” The only rooms we enjoyed were those in the basement. I thought the pool, the kitchen and the servant’s quarters were really cool. The bowling alley was neat, but I just felt sorry for whoever had to set up the pins each time.

We spent the rest of our trip primarily sitting around the inn taking it easy. Victoria whipped me 4 out of 5 games of chess. We each were able to get quite a lot of reading done as well. Then after another amazing breakfast Sunday we headed home to the family.

Thanks to all innkeepers, the sitters, substitutes and everybody else who helped me surprise Victoria for our 20th anniversary.