Phil Plait’s video on not being a dick, part 2

I like Phil Plait a lot, but he’s recently been on a thing about “Not Being A Dick” and his recent video is supposed to be a clarification of that position. 

This reminds me of the scene in nearly every cop show where they take a fuzzy picture and apply enhancement software to it, and see a reflection of the killer’s face on a chrome-plated lugnut.  There’s only so much you can clarify a position that is fuzzy to begin with.

Mind you, I try to be fair-minded and respectful but those are adjectives, which means they are difficult to quantify, like “fast” or “cold”.  In other words, they take on their meaning by contrast to the context in which they are found. 

Phil has said that it’s all right to argue with passion, and that satire and name-calling are OK.  Which is a good thing, because if I couldn’t call Ken Ham an idiot, or Ted Haggard a hypocrite, then we might as well just talk about the weather. 

Perhaps I should have been more clear on what I mean by being a dick. I thought I had been clear, but a lot of people seem to think that I meant anyone who gets upset, or angry, or argues with emotion. I wouldn’t include satire in that category, or comedic work, or even necessarily using insults; tone and attitude count here. Think of it this way: when someone argues that way do you think to yourself, “What a dick”? I don’t; at least not necessarily. I think that way when the person belittles their opponent, uses obviously inflammatory language, or overly aggressively gets in their face.

Y’know. Being a dick.

Gee, Phil, thanks for clearing that up.  What, specifically, are you trying to say?  Is it wrong to use profanity?  Why and in what context?  I hardly ever use profanity online but that’s me, not a prescription for you.

Is it wrong to perform symbolic actions?  This seems to be the one that most angers traditionalists.  Draw a picture of Mohammad, or stick a nail through a cracker, and you are making a point about the value of those symbols outside the context of their community of adherents.  Yes it might be painful for someone within a belief system (not the same as a value system) to see such actions, but they’re symbolic.  Usually, they are performed in the context of a response to non-symbolic actions, like violence or oppression.

The meaning is almost always argued outside of its context, but it is context that gives meaning.

One thing I have learned is that what is normal to one person may be horribly offensive to another.  And I’ve also picked up on the fact that not everyone has the same goal.  Plait again:

Others took issue with my initial question, asking how many people were “converted” to skepticism by having a skeptic yelling at them and insulting them. In fact, at least one person said that method does work and worked on them. That’s good for them, but given what we know about the way people argue and change their views on issues, the vast majority of people will become further entrenched when confronted in that way.

Phil could be asking the wrong question here, or addressing the wrong audience.  Maybe the yelling, insulting person isn’t trying to convert the Kirk Camerons of the world; maybe they recognize that is impossible.  It could be that their goal is to show them as the laughable idiots they really are - to make space for others to escape the cultural trap of “respecting” that which deserves no respect. 

Posted by George on 08/28/10 at 03:35 AM
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Can this be right?  Am I missing something?

A professor asked to borrow a couple punch cards to pass around in class.  I recently saw an ad for a 1tb drive for eighty bucks, and got to thinking; how high of a stack of punch cards is that?

1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or 1tb
divided by 80 bytes per card =
13,743,895,347 punch cards, times .007 inches, the thickness of a punch card =
96,207,267 inches, divided by 12 inches per foot =
8,017,272 feet, divided by 5,280 feet in a mile =
1,518 mile-high stack of punch cards to equal 1tb.

Really?  It just sounds impossible, like I missed a bunch of decimal points somewhere, or made some massive error in logic.

Posted by George on 08/23/10 at 03:25 PM
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At the grocery store

I bet there won’t be any mosquito larvae in that water…

From my photo album, Notes
Posted by George on 08/23/10 at 07:10 AM
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Waiting on the world to change…

(h/t Ed Brayton)

Posted by George on 08/23/10 at 06:08 AM
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Paper or plastic? The book versus eBook conundrum

***Dave has another one of his great think-pieces out, this time about the reader’s experience of a book printed on paper vs. one downloaded to a Kindle or some other reader.

4. A book is a single-tasking device.

I.e., it doesn’t tempt you with email or Twittering, it doesn’t browse the Internet.  It doesn’t act as an alarm clock or RSS reader.  Whether we’re talking an eReader that has some online abilities, or an iPad that’s a tablet computer that you can read on, electronic devices for reading are not, purely, about reading.

A book is a book.  It lets you read. That’s all it does, and that’s a feature, not a bug.

He explores the concept of book ownership, including the intellectual sense of having physical evidence (in the form of wear and tear) of having read the book and how many times.  He notes that you can loan a physical book, you can keep the book, and it’s a tactile experience. 

All valid, all true.  As actual bookstores begin to die (Barnes & Noble is up for sale, for example), we may find ourselves without anyplace to handle a book before buying it.  And it’s a pretty short couple of steps from there to rusty printing presses in abandoned buildings.

I am trying to get my library down from its one-time peak of several thousand books, to maybe just 500.  The nature of the books I plan to keep until they become somebody else’s problem when I die, can be used to discuss what should be plastic, and what belongs on permanent paper.

Books I’m getting rid of:

Books about software and computer hardware have very short lives anyway; they belong on some kind of reader.  The tactile experience isn’t all that important but searchability is, and I’d be gladly rid of the tonnage.  This is a depressingly large number of books in my house and I’ve been throwing as many of them out as I can without exceeding the weight limit on our garbage can.  Let’s face it: nobody wants my old copy of Windows 2000 System Administration or my 1109-page Using HTML 4 from QUE press, let alone Microsoft Guide to Managing Memory in DOS 5. 

Also goodbye to books that were sort-of-interesting but turned out to be utter bollicks: The Oxygen Revolution or that book about how the fillings in your teeth are killing you.  That’s also a depressingly large number of books.  Nobody can accuse me of not giving the woo a fair shot, but they’re goin’ in the can.

I’m also discarding deep, scholarly volumes from my college career, about church history, biblical commentaries, and ancient culture.  I’m unlikely to need them again and if I do, I’ll download something.

Goodbye to books on darkroom technology and chemistry - that’s a lot of volumes - with a specific exception to be noted below.

I threw out my Encyclopaedia Brittanica, a few volumes a week.  It was a 1976 edition, and it had been three years since the last time I looked up anything in it.  Not that I’ve stopped being an information junkie, but the computer is faster, lighter, and more portable.  The tactile experience of heavy Brittanica volumes on arthritic fingers just isn’t worth getting nostalgic over.

So what am I keeping?

Most of my science nonfiction, like Asimov and Dawkins and Sagan and Clarke and Dennett and Eisley and Cousteau and Carson and countless other authors on space, Earth, materials science, environmental science, epidemiology, human-caused disasters and related technology history, etc.  The tactile reading experience isn’t that great but I am likely to read the books again and there’s no hope of being able to download most of them.  So paper it is.

Science fiction too, at least by the holy trinity of Clarke, Asimov & Heinlein; and some anthologies. 

3 signed volumes by Edward Tufte.  My books by Ansel Adams - even the ones about technologies I no longer use.  Books on skepticism and the scientific method.  Sagan’s Varieties of Scientific Experience, and a lot of other philosophical/scientific books by him.  Graphic novels.  It will be a long time before that reading experience can be matched on a screen.

Some landmark books on education, like John Holt’s How Children Fail, Banesh Hoffman’s The Tyranny of Testing, Raymond Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency.  Dennet’s Mismeasure Of Man. 

Books I specifically plan to download:

Certainly any very heavy books, and this could modify the “keep” list.  Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or Asimov’s Physics.  And books that I plan to read once, like Francis Wellman’s The Art of Cross-Examination.

Clearly, this could go on all night, and it’s time for bed.  It looks like reference materials and books on current technology can go “plastic”; I won’t be reading today’s software books in ten years.  Conversely, books that I’d read for intellectual pleasure or just entertainment, or which I might not be able to download, I’m keeping in paper form.  But some books will cross those lines.  In any case I’m discarding about twenty books a month these days.  It might taper off as the decisions get harder.

Most of the people I know are bibliophiles.  What will your future library look like?

Posted by George on 08/21/10 at 10:16 PM
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One aspect of it, anyway…

Continued...

Posted by George on 08/21/10 at 11:31 AM
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Movie Review: Micmacs

MrsDoF and I went to the Historic Normal Theatre this evening to watch the French fantasy-comedy Micmacs this evening.  This is from the same twisted mind that created Amelie, and if laughter is any indication, everyone in the theater enjoyed it. 

Here’s the setup: Bazil’s father is killed by a land mine.  Years later in a drive-by shooting, Bazil takes a bullet to the brain - though he survives (after a fashion), becoming homeless and unemployed.  He learns that the two companies that made the land mine that killed his father, and the bullet he carries in his brain, are right in Paris and across the street from each other.  He takes up residence with some of the most creative people in Paris - who live in a junkyard and scavenge all their gear from the cast-offs of the city.  Together they cook up a whimsical con…

Hilarious pranks and scams and some rather large explosions artfully rendered too.  On the walk home, we each thought of movies that Micmacs reminded us of.  It might be a mix of The Sting and Iron Man, as envisaged by outcast junk scavengers…

UPDATE: Here’s the International trailer, with longer scenes from the movie.  You’ll see the Characters - and that’s with a capital “C” - a little better:

It’s interesting that neither trailer gets the plot right.  Bazil runs his con by playing two arms manufacturers against each other, and neither trailer mentions his father or the one that made the land mine that killed him.

 

Posted by George on 08/14/10 at 09:49 PM
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Ending the silver

This post will probably make one of my good friends weep, but here we go.

Before there were digital cameras, photography was done by exposing silver halide emulsions to light, developing them in chemicals, then projecting light through the resulting negative onto similarly treated paper, then developing the paper in chemicals and drying the resulting print.  It was back then - up until about 15 years ago - that I was professionally involved in traditional photography.  I did camera repair, and did industrial and archival photography on the side.

What a lot of people who had a photo course in high school or college don’t realize is just how technical this craft could become.  Behind the Ansel Adams print they admire, for example, is a lot of science, and many of his books are masterpieces of technical writing as well as of art and even English prose.  To control the process you have to do controlled experiments and I did - calibrating the combinations of film, light, developing, enlarger, paper, and chemicals to get the result that I wanted.  By the time I sold any prints from a given brand of film or paper, I’d already explored how it behaved with shadows and highlights, at what contrast, and with what chemicals, and recorded the findings in my notebooks for future reference.

Well the camera repair business tanked when cameras became too sophisticated to repair in a small shop, and I wasn’t making enough in photography to pay the bills.  So I dove into computers and started studying at a furious rate.  It’s resulted in a string of jobs that have worked out well for me.

From my photo album; On Digital Photography

But my darkroom sat, for fifteen years.  Gradually I got rid of most of the heavy equipment - cameras and enlargers and print washers and dryers.  I still have some enlarging easels and beautiful Honeywell/Nikor film developing reels, and no idea what to do with them.  But I am cleaning out that room.  I don’t want to leave it for my kids to deal with.

And my “paper safe” - a specially constructed cabinet designed to keep out light and to be self-closing, was full of fine photographic paper: Mitsubishi Gekko, Agfa, Ilford, Arista, Kodak, even some East German Orwo.

This is expensive stuff and as you can see from the picture, there was a lot of it.  Last night I opened the paper safe - with the lights on - , and methodically emptied the boxes into a single large box for the next county toxic-waste pickup.  The empty boxes, I threw away. 

It was a strange feeling, and commemorates the end, I suppose, of my involvement with traditional photography a decade and a half ago.  I’ve been through quite a few digital cameras, and they’re just now beginning to catch up to film quality at a price point that I (no longer making a living with my camera) can afford.  I’ll soon purchase a Sony NEX-5 to compliment my Canon G11, and be approximately back where I was when I had Yashica medium format and Olympus OM-1’s and OM-2’s.

And I do mean; “approximately” because damn, those Olympus SLR’s were awesome cameras.  The Olympus slogan was; “Match your skills to ours” and they were an absolute joy to use.

NOTES:

  • It is true that some of the photo paper, still sealed, might still have been usable.  But professional-quality printing requires careful standardization, and 15-year-old paper would require a whole new set of tests to establish performance.
  • I wondered if the Barry Lategan image on one of the Ilford boxes would constitute child porn today.  We live in different times…
  • If you have never read a book by Ansel Adams, start with his autobiography; it is non-technical and a quite wonderful view into an amazing artistic and scientific life, and into the development of photography as a recognized art form.  (Also his description of Ronald Reagan was quite a hoot.)  Then read The Making of 40 Photographs and if you’re still going, read his classic trilogy;The Camera, The Negative,and The Print.
  • Check out this image of The first digital camera
Posted by George on 08/14/10 at 12:41 PM
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Dismayed to incoherence

For days now I’ve been trying to say something meaningful about the Republican campaign against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”.  But even though I go on for endless, impassioned paragraphs, I just can’t seem to get beyond; “how can people be taken in by something so stupid and un-American?”

Fortunately, I can just post a picture of a feather that I took this morning, and direct you to two articles that said what I wasn’t able to.  I suppose it’s the equivalent of buying a Hallmark card, only I’m sending you to the very best.

***Dave confronts The Party of Hate.

“Rather than E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One,” their motto seems to be, “Out of Many, There’s Us vs. Them, So We Better Get Them Before They Get Us.  Oh, and Send Us Money, Too.”

The Economist says Build That Mosque.

“WHAT makes a Muslim in Britain or America wake up and decide that he is no longer a Briton or American but an Islamic “soldier” fighting a holy war against the infidel? Part of it must be pull: the lure of jihadism. Part is presumably push: a feeling that he no longer belongs to the place where he lives…

Thank you, that is all.  (And no, the feather isn’t symbolic of anything.  It’s just something I saw this morning that I thought was nifty.)

UPDATES:
Here’s an essay by another thoughtful Christian on the controversy: Michael Kinnamon on Cordoba House and mosque at Ground Zero

... His family lived with the onus of suspicion for six months until Salman’s body was identified. He was found near the North Tower with his EMT bag beside him, situated where he could help people in need.  The point of this now famous story is simple. Not every Muslim at Ground Zero was a terrorist, and not every Muslim was a hero. The vast majority were like thousands of others on September 11: victims of one of the most heinous events of our times. But for the family of Salman Hamdani and millions of innocent Muslims, the tragedy has been exacerbated by the fact that so many of the rest of us have formed our opinions about them out of prejudice and ignorance of the Muslim faith…

And here’s The Daily Show on the Manhattan Island Islamic Center

Posted by George on 08/10/10 at 10:21 PM
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I think I might be married to Julia Roberts

Well, metaphorically speaking…

Diane found herself in the role of organizing a huge funeral dinner at church last week.  The deceased, a beloved personality, had requested that everyone have a full-press sit-down dinner with ham, turkey, potatoes, veggies, pie, the works.  So organize she did, by Facebook and email, and people signed up to bring food, and she applied her extensive professional knowledge of food service, and it was a big success, but not only for those reasons.  One friend was heard to remark; “Everyone wants to make Diane happy!”

It’s true, and there’s a reason.  They want to see this:

(Jeez, she looks about 30 in that picture.  Joy is a time machine…)

I read somewhere that the plot of every Julia Roberts movie is the same: she smiles and the audience is happy.  Then something bad happens and she stops smiling, and the audience is unhappy, and therein lies the dramatic tension until something good happens and she looks at the camera and smiles again, and all is right with the world.  Roll credits!

Notes:

  • The funeral was for Earl Kaufman, a free-thinking person equally at home in secular or church context.  His elegy, written by his cousin, is well worth the read.  Early in his life he sojourned in the Unitarian church and even (gasp!) became a Democrat.  When I met him, he had returned to the Mennonite church where he remained an anomaly all his life.  Lest you think Mennonites are all stuffy and anti-technological, he was an amateur pilot and gave MrsDoF her first airplane ride.
  • I swiped the elegy from The Normalite newspaper because they don’t seem to have permanent links for individual articles.
Posted by George on 08/08/10 at 12:31 PM
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I always liked sparks

A friend at work had his bicycle seat stolen this week.  It isn’t a trivial loss either: a $25 seat post, a $40 saddle, a $17 taillight, and an $18 fender.  While shopping for replacement parts, he’s riding on a junk seat that the thief left behind.  Anyway I thought about my bike (and added up the respective cost of those components - a few notches up the ladder from his ride) and decided to hire a sniper to watch the bike racks around campus.

Unfortunately that solution turned out to be impractical for various reasons having to do with the interference of a large Government bureaucracy, so I decided to secure the seat a little better instead.  This I did by pinning the seat tube in the frame.  And what does that have to do with this picture?  This is a view of sparks on the grinding wheel as the carbon-steel pin is shortened to the correct length for the seat tube of the frame. 

In common shop practice, if you want to know (approximately) what alloy a piece of ferrous metal is made of, you touch it to a grinding wheel and observe the sparks.  Some of the patterns are very pretty as well as informative.

(Picture Pentax W60 in macro mode.)

Posted by George on 08/07/10 at 10:17 PM
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Hiroshima

Today is an anniversary that should not be forgotten.  If you have not read Hiroshima by John Hersey… please do.  It was originally published in The New Yorker, but it’s still in print today as a paperback. 

In the small book - for which Hersey won a Pulitzer prize - we come to recognize six human beings in an incomprehensible vastness of destruction and suffering.  You can read it in about two hours, but it will stay with you for a lifetime.

NOTES:

Posted by George on 08/06/10 at 09:48 PM
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Book Review: Crazy For God

Frank Schaeffer didn’t have to write Crazy For God.  At least, financially, it wasn’t necessary.  He’s become a successful novelist and essayist in his own right since he made his “escape”.  The book feels like not so much a “tell-all” as a personal confession, and a painful one at that.  But… it explains so much.

“... How I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the Religious Right, and lived to take all (or almost all) of it back”

Frank Schaeffer is the son of the famous evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer.  Together they produced two best-selling documentary film series, spoke all over the country, wrote piles of books and articles, and lent their intellectual respectability to the conservative evangelical movement, the anti-abortion issue within it, and the Republican Party that merged with it.  This, I knew vaguely, and remembered being influenced by their films and books.

Schaeffer had been a dyslexic kid who never did well in school.  He had polio at a young age and spent most of his childhood recovering.  But though formal education didn’t do much for him, the L’Abri community brought some of the world’s brightest lights to his family’s table, and he spent a good part of his childhood knocking around Italy with his father, who would have been happier as an art historian than as an evangelical leader.

I hadn’t a clue from watching his powerfully-made documentaries, or basking in the certitude of the books, how the Schaeffer universe really worked, or what spiritual compromises had to be made to bring Bishop Sheen, Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan and other, now-powerful denizens of the Religious right under a single tent with little-known hucksters and organizers of the Dominionist movement like Billy Zeoli and Ralph Reed.  Or how they were all exploited by, and in turn exploited, rising politicians like Ronald Reagan and the Bushes.  That was all behind the scenes.

(You just have to read Schaeffer’s description of Bush Jr. for yourself; I won’t spoil it for you.)

Even more hidden were Frank Schaeffer’s doubts.  He just sort of dropped off the edge of the world there for a while, and it never occurred to me to wonder why. He found himself driving the movement by whose winds so many of us were sailing, but at the same time feeling that it was devouring his soul.

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
Psalm 51:17

...and if there was ever a broken spirit writing today, it’s Frank Schaeffer.  His attempt to find peace after being at the center of a movement that he came to suffer only with nausea is a story that opens a whole room in the range of human contrition. 

The trouble is, he can’t take it all back. The films are made and still popular in evangelical circles, the politicians elevated, the televangelists wealthy, and the country divided.  Christianity is divided, in perhaps a more fundamental way than anytime since the Reformation.

Schaeffer disavows any notion that he has the only way to tell the story.  There’s even a deeply surprising ending - perhaps the only possible approximation of a happy one, given what he experienced and how he perceived his own failures.

The hardest confession isn’t where he hit rock bottom, but how long he stayed in the movement after the very sight of Pat Robertson and James Dobson or Billy Graham began to sicken him.  The moment when he realizes that he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and is trapped, is no occasion for schadenfreude.  Instead, it makes you wonder if your neighborhood pastor could be in a similar trap, pacing to and fro looking for the exit.

Schaeffer made reference to “the small hypocrisies that make life bearable” and that phrase has been in my mind.  If there is a lesson in the book, it may be that complete philosophical consistency, which is to say purity and absolutism, leads inevitably to complete hypocrisy.

I remember that time, and I remember L’Abri and the Schaeffers being a big deal.  He doesn’t paint many villains.  There are so many, touching perspectives on the goodness in his community, and how good they were to him and his wife, and how they would have been divorced fifty times if not for the genuine love that surrounded them.  As I read the book, I kept thinking of my friends who should also read it.  Anyone devoted to the “pro-choice” movement, and the “pro-life” movement should read it.  Any atheist and any conservative Christian, or any Liberal Christian.  Anyone who remembers that time in history… and anyone who does not.

Because it explains so much. 

Posted by George on 08/05/10 at 06:40 AM
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Trying to figure out the story

That it is the remains of a bird, I could figure out; it almost seems to be posed in flight.  How such a delicate arrangement came to be in the middle of a busy sidewalk, with no trees or buildings above it, is less clear.  The only thing I could figure is that someone lifted it by the forked stick and gently placed it where some guy riding by on a bike would see it.  But perhaps they were not so specific about the audience.  Also left out of the story is how that person found it, or what their concept was in moving it.

It’s art, of a sort: rearranging found objects in an interesting way.  At least, I felt it deserved a photograph, since the artist is unknown.

(For more detail, click through and then enlarge).

Posted by George on 08/02/10 at 10:05 PM
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The main reason I blog?

My boss once asked me what I get out of blogging.  I didn’t have a coherent answer, but since I’ve been doing it for eight years there must be something. 

The generation effect, as studied by cognitive psychologists, shows that knowledge is better retained if it is “generated” by the learner than simply read. “Generation” can be as simple as learning a spelling by “filling in the gaps” or as complex as writing a book about your studies
Alex Kessinger: Notetaking as a way to stay smart

I hadn’t thought of it this way but it could seriously be the main reason I blog.  Yes, I have various passions that I like to share, but my brain is chaotic and unreliable.  Blogging helps me get my thoughts straight.  Once I’ve put it into words, (and when I am lucky, people have commented on it), I have a much better chance of holding on to it and integrating it into my understanding of the world.

I remember a Far Side cartoon where a man stood in his yard with a brush and can of paint.  All the objects in the yard had labels: “house”, “fence”, “tree”, “dog”, and so forth.  “There!,” said the man; “that ought to clear up a few things around here!

NOTES:

  • I miss The Far Side
  • h/t Lucas for the link
  • My brain actually IS unreliable.  Not surprising when you tote up spinal meningitis in childhood, and multiple concussion syndrome.  Took me a while and a few visits to a neurologist to add this all up; it’s analogous to fighting senility.
Posted by George on 08/01/10 at 10:38 AM
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