Faith and contingency

Author Sam Harris and blogger Andrew Sullivan have been conducting an interesting debate of letters on the subject of religious belief. The latest piece by Sam Harris is particularly thought-provoking. Key paragraph:

You also appear to see some strange, epistemological significance in the fact that you cannot remember when or how you acquired your faith. Surely the roots of many of your beliefs are similarly obscure. I don’t happen to remember when or how I came to believe that Pluto is a planet. Should I say that this belief “chose me”? What if, upon hearing that astronomers have changed their opinion about Pluto, I announced that “I have no ability to stop believing…. I know of no ‘proof’ that could dissuade me of [Pluto’s planethood], since no ‘proof’ ever persuaded me of it.” I’m sure you will balk at this analogy, but I’m guessing that your parents told you about God from the moment you appeared in this world. This is generally how people are put in a position to say things like faith “chose me.” The English language chose both of us. That doesn’t mean that we cannot reflect critically on it or recognize that the fact that we both speak it (we might say it is the “air we breathe”) is an utterly non-mysterious consequence of our upbringings. Indeed, you do admit the role that such contingency plays in matters of faith. As you say, if you had been raised Buddhist, you’d almost certainly be a Buddhist. But you refrain from drawing any important conclusions from this. If you had been raised by atheists, might you even be an atheist?

Review: Philips HN060/37 Noise-Canceling Earbuds

[I just posted this review at Amazon.com.]
For the last couple of years I’ve carried around a pair of Bose QC2 noise cancelling headphones. They’ve gone all over the world with me, and have made long-haul air travel a much less stressful experience. The only flaw in the design is that if you turn off the noise cancelling system, the headphones don’t work. No battery, no audio. That’s dumb – and most of the competition figured that out.
Last Sunday, while on a trip to Silicon Valley, I started to get an annoying buzz in the right earpiece. I changed batteries, but it got steadily worse. Out of warranty. Time to replace.
I mostly use my headphones for two purposes: to listen to my iPod while walking or travelling in a bus or plane, and to listen to channel 9 on United flights. No jogging or energetic exercising.
I picked up a pair of these Philips earbuds at Fry’s in Palo Alto (and paid much more than Amazon – sigh!). They worked flawlessly in my hotel room, listening to a movie on my laptop, and on the flight back from SFO to SEA. Ignore the negative reviews above: the noise cancelling circuitry does an excellent job at attenuating aircraft noise, especially the lower frequencies. With noise cancellation turned off, the in-ear design certainly reduces the high frequencies but does nothing for the roar of an aircraft engine just outside the window. It feels like a nicely balanced design.
As for audio quality, I’m no audiophile, but it sounded about the same as my iPod’s factory-supplied earbuds. Not outstanding, but perfectly acceptable.

Trip complete

I’ve just arrived back in Seattle after my trip to the San Francisco area. Although I don’t generally blog about the who, what and where of all my business meetings (different company, different culture), I can mention that today I visited the A9 team in Palo Alto. They asked me to speak at their weekly all-hands, and so I took the opportunity to go over some strategic material from a recent presentation in Seattle. I’m not sure if they’d had an opportunity to see the video of the earlier talk, but as we all know a video is a poor substitute for a live presenter who can be questioned “in real time”. I think it was useful and (hopefully) provocative.
While I was at A9, I ran into my former Sun colleague Claire Giordano. It was the first time we’d talked since just before I joined Amazon, when I was quizzing her about the difference between the Sun and Amazon cultures. But there wasn’t much time to chat; the schedule was full, and it was only fear of the inevitable traffic jam on 101 between Palo Alto and SFO that brought proceedings to a close. We got to the airport, went through the ritual – turn in the car, check in, check through, eat, wait and board – and I fell asleep until I heard ATC on channel 9 directing our flight to “turn right to one three oh and join the localizer for runway one six centre; caution wake turbulence, you’re following a Boeing 757”.
And rather than waiting for the bus, I got a lift from my colleague Colin (thanks!), so that I was home by 11:40pm.

Diablo, steam, and tapas

It’s been a long, but delightful day. After breakfast (at which I met my former colleague, Hal Jespersen, who’s just launching a new startup), I headed over to Berkeley to meet up with Chris and Celeste. We drove up to Mount Diablo, from which we hoped to get a great view of the San Francisco bay. It was misty, but we felt sure it would burn off.
I’d only been to Mt. Diablo once before, about 10 years ago. My daughter Kate was at Mills College in Oakland, and I was visiting her during one of my business trips. On that occasion we drove part way up the mountain, but because time was short we turned off and drove out through Walnut Creek. This time Chris took us to a car park about 850 feet below the summit, and we climbed the Jasmine Trail up to the Lower Summit area. It wasn’t all that far, but the path was steep with loose, friable stuff underfoot, so we got a good work-out. Unfortunately when we reached the top of the trail we found that the mist hadn’t really burned off. Although it was brilliant sunshine atop the mountain, all we could see were ghostly hills looming out of the white. After a break to rehydrate we walked back down the road to the car. (My shoes weren’t well suited to hiking, and I was worried about turning an ankle.)
By now it was after 2, so we drove down to Walnut Creek and grabbed some lunch in the first likely restaurant. From here Chris took us back along Route 24, but before we reached the Caldecott Tunnel he swung up to the north, intending to drive through the Tilden Regional Park. After traversing a maze of twisty lanes, all different, we emerged on the main road through the park, right next to the Redwood Valley Railway. Last summer Chris volunteered at the railway, and wrote an entertaining blog about his experiences. We were about to drive by, but I insisted that we check out this narrow-gauge railway. So we did. One of the enginess was in steam, pulling a passenger train for visitors, and eventually we were able to enjoy the 12 minute ride through the redwoods. (There were lots of visitors, especially children, and each train was full.) After that we walked across to the engine shop, where one of the locomotives was undergoing maintenance, and talked to some of the volunteer staff. After a look around the roundhouse, we took our leave. (I’m going to be back, though.)
From Tilden Park we descended through the redwoods and eucalyptus towards the UCB campus. We parked on Euclid, and Chris took the opportunity to get a (startling!) haircut, while I browsed in the bookshop next door. Then it was time to head over to Oakland; we’d arranged to meet Steve and Wendy for tapas in Piedmont. And so we did, and it was good. Eventually we returned to Berkeley, and I said goodnight and took the long drive back down 880 and across the Dumbarton Bridge to Menlo Park.
I took a bunch of pictures which you can find here. By the time you read this, they will hopefully have finished uploading; however I won’t get around to adding captions for a few days. Enjoy, anyway – especially if you like narrow-gauge steam trains.

Help find Jim Gray

Like several of my colleagues, I’m reposting this piece from Werner’s blog in an effort to get it in front of as many people as possible:

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

UPDATE: Check Werner’s blog for the latest updates – there are new images to be examined, taken on a NASA ER-2 flight.

Back in California for the first time in 9 months (is this a record?)

I just flew into SFO for a short visit to California: two days of family get-togethers in Berkeley and Carmel, then three days of business meetings. (Amazon has several software teams here in the Bay Area, including A9 and Alexa.) I flew down on a UA 737: the plane was full, and it left an hour late, but the flight was otherwise uneventful. (And once again I sailed through SeaTac security without waiting in line; I’m not sure how I do it.)
During the flight I listened to channel 9, read the latest Economist, and browsed the Sky Mall catalog. I noticed that they’re already cashing in on the “no liquids or gels in carry-ons” stupidity; they were offering “his and hers” kits of “essential items” – shaving gear, shampoo, toothpaste, and so forth, enough for a week’s travel. They’ll mail it to your hotel, marked “Hold for arrival”. I don’t remember the pricing, but it looked like something of a rip-off – but how much is it worth to avoid the hassle from TSA? Of course they could simply sell them at the airport: I bought some toothpaste after I’d gone through security, saving me the bother of hunting for a pharmacy near my hotel. (Or perhaps disposable razors are still forbidden…..)
As I pointed my rental car south on 101, I realized that it felt like a long time since I was last here. I just checked (blogs are useful for that), and it’s been nine months. Back in April I spent a week here and in Denver doing “intensive networking” as part of my post-Sun transition. I don’t think I’ve been away from Silicon Valley for this long since… wow, probably the mid 80s.

Sullivan owes an apology

An email to Andrew Sullivan:

Subject: You owe an apology
From: “Geoff Arnold”
To: andrew@andrewsullivan.com
Date: Thu, February 1, 2007 11:27 am
To respond to someone who says this:
> I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility
> and will to act in this world. I have the opportunity to interact
> with others and to create things. I have the chance to leave this
> world a bit better than when I came into it… for my children and
> for the rest of humanity. I don’t do this because a particular
> flying spaghetti monster ordained that I do it and will punish me
> with his noodly appendage if I don’t. I do it because I have the
> power and I believe that it is better for me if I help those around
> me. What else would give my life more meaning than that?
with this
> But why is that more meaningful than flying a plane into the World
> Trade Center?
is something I would have expected from Pat Robertson or Bill
O’Reilly, or a Christianist but not from you. If you really can’t see
why, you’re a fool. If it was just a thoughtless rhetorical flourish,
you should be ashamed of yourself.