Five quotations

There’s a new blog-meme floating around: I’ve seen it at Good Math, Bad Math and Pharyngula among others. The idea is to create an account on The Quotations Page and go through adding quotations to your page until you have five quotations which capture the essence of YOU. Here are mine:

  1. The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)
  2. Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. John Archibald Wheeler, American J. of Physics, 1978, 46, 323
  3. Ignorance is not innocence but sin. Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
  4. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)
  5. A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5×11 inch paper cannot be understood. Mark Ardis

In progress

My first blog post from inside Amazon, on my corporate laptop (HP/WinXP/Firefox). Curiously the WordPress UI looks quite different on FireFox; I imagine there are some features which don’t work correctly on Safari. Oh, well.

The most important things that I learned yesterday:

  • 90.3 KEXP
  • FX for beer
  • Lots of faces from the Distributed Systems Engineering all-hands, to which I now have to attach names
  • Remedy (internal tool) is the answer to 90% of questions. The other 10% are the really important ones.

    Must-read links:

Day 1

So, finally, my first day at Amazon. Four hours of orientation this morning, then being shown my office (no bookshelves! must fix that), then lunch with my manager, then wrestling my computers (WinTel laptop and Linux desktop) into submission, then diving out for an hour to sign the lease on my apartment and open a new bank account, then back to the office to see if the Exchange server has decided to behave itself, then provisioning my VPN device… all of this interspersed with greetings and introductions from dozens of people, most of whom I will come to know really well in the next few weeks, but right now my caches are spilling data as fast as it comes in, so I’m damned if I can remember any names, and suddenly it’s 6 o’clock, and I have to head across the street to get a shuttle bus back to the PacMed building where I parked my car.
Whew!
I knew I was in terminal overload when I returned to my desk after I’d signed the lease and opened a bank account, and suddenly realized that I didn’t have the apartment paperwork. It was still at the bank. Panic. Rush back to retrieve it. Resume breathing.
Speaking of banks, my account back in Massachusetts is with Bank of America. (Used to be BayBank, than BankBoston, then Fleet….) And my new account in Seattle is also with BofA. But in MA your ATM card can have a 5 digit pin, while here in WA the pin can only be 4 digits long. Go figure….
And to all my friends and family who asked about the employee discount at Amazon.com…. There is one. But it’s modest, and I can’t share it. Sorry. (Mind you, as a new WA resident I’ll have to pay sales tax on my Amazon.com purchases. So the discount will come in handy.)
But, you ask (well, some of you), what’s it like? What’s the gestalt of the place? Obviously it’s too soon to say, but one thing is very familiar after years at Sun. The people here are smart. Very smart. And they seem to be predisposed to action, which feels different from some parts of Sun recently.
This is going to be fun. More anon.

Weekend photography

As requested by Alec, here are a few photographs taken this weekend. Most show the comings and goings of Seattle’s busy port. My (temporary) apartment here in Belltown gives me excellent views southwest, towards the container terminal, and northwest, towards Bainbridge Island.
cruise ship entering port - Seattle

An elegant rebuttal of the "God as ultimate explanation" argument

Keith Parsons has come up with a beautifully-written paper entitled No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but this paragraph will give you a sense of the strategy that Parsons adopts:

[Varghese] does tell us that “It is as absurd to ask for an explanation for the existence of a self-explanatory being as it is to ask ‘Why is a circle round?'” (pp. 14-15). Well, yes, it would be absurd to ask “What is the explanation (meaning an explanation external to that being itself) of the self-explanatory being?” But we are still left completely in the dark about just how we are to construe God’s alleged self-explanatoriness, and, in particular, how it would differ from the condition of a putative original, uncaused state of the physical universe. Worse, until and unless we have such clarification of what it means to be self-explanatory, it is hard to see how God’s alleged self-explanatoriness really amounts to anything other than just being inexplicable. If God, by definition, can have no cause or dependence on anything else (since all else is caused or depends on him), then God’s existence is placed beyond the bounds of any possible explanation, account, or understanding. Ironically, therefore, Varghese and Meynell may have only succeeded in defining God into utter inexplicability, and so making him into precisely the sort of ultimate brute fact that they decry.

He also addresses a common theistic sleight-of-hand: the leap from logical contingency to ontological contingency.

But why should any nontheist suppose that the doctrine of creatio continuans has any rational credentials? Why, for instance, would a quark require any metaphysical props to uphold its existence and underwrite its powers and liabilities? Of course, all physical things are contingent in the sense that they might not have existed, but logical contingency does not imply ontological contingency. Just because something might not exist at a given time is no reason to think that in fact its existence is maintained by something else. From the nontheist’s perspective, the insistence upon an explanation of the universe in terms of creatio continuans is just another instance of the propensity of theistic apologists to create a mystery where there is none, and then offer God as the tailor-made answer to the pseudoenigma. As for why existing things remain in existence, nontheists just do not see any mystery here and no need for an explanation.

Indeed. Nicely done.
[Via Mark Vuletic, whose Subucula tua apparet is also well worth a read.]

Progress

The good news is that my boxes arrived on schedule yesterday. The bad news is that they were pretty bashed about, and a couple of seams were starting to split. However nothing seems to be lost or damaged. The contents were mostly clothes, books, DVDs, and electronic miscellania The only items I’m really worried about are three external hard disk enclosures; everything else is replaceable.
I now have high-speed internet access in the apartment. A Comcast self-installation kit appeared yesterday – coax cables, splitter, cable modem, and software. The latter was the only real problem. First, it insisted on installing Internet Explorer on my Mac. (How retro.) Most of the installation process ran fine, but right at the end it started reporting a “communication error”. Since it had been chattering away to Comcast’s backend systems quite happily, I called customer support, and a technician completed the provisioning in a couple of minutes. I haven’t tested the bandwidth yet, but Skype works beautifully.
I’ve now got to the point where this place feels like an apartment rather than a hotel: I cooked my favourite dish last night. Nothing too fancy: chicken thighs and mushrooms in white wine, lemon juice, garlic, and tarragon. It’s a checkpoint that my larder is stocked with the bare necessities.
And finally, in response to Jon’s plea, he and I will be getting together for drinks at McNenamins on Roy Street, at 5 o’clock this afternoon. If you’re in the area…..

Apartment

As I hinted a couple of days ago, I’ve found myself an apartment. It’s in Uwajimaya Village, an apartment complex built over the locally famous Uwajimaya Asian food market. The location is perfect:

  • It’s just across the street from the Amazon.com facility where I’ll be working.
  • It’s 10 minutes walk to Pioneer Square or Qwest field, and 15-20 minutes walk to the heart of downtown Seattle.
  • King Street Amtrak station and a big bus interchange are also right there.
  • And the pièce de résistance: when they finish the light rail project through the city and out to the airport in 2010, I’ll be a block from the station.

My idea of going car-less is looking more and more promising.
I’ll be signing the lease on Monday (the same day I start at Amazon.com), and I expect to take a couple of weeks to furnish it before I move in.

Football fever

I went to the Real Madrid-DC United match at Qwest field yesterday. The attendance was 66K+, which made it the largest soccer crowd ever in the Pacific northwest. I enjoyed myself, even though it wasn’t a particularly good game. One thing about exhibition matches is that all of the tackles are about 80%: nobody wants to risk injury. Some of the Real Madrid players looked a little jet-lagged – Van Nistelrooy was walking (well offside) most of the time, and received some “generous” treatment by the linesmen. Beckham played OK, not great: like a couple of his team-mates, he seemed to have trouble with the relatively narrow pitch. He was subbed at half-time; another aspect of the “exhibition match” is that unlimited substitutions are allowed, which meant that we got to see more of the Real Madrid players but that the team had difficulty settling in to a pattern. DC United played well, but their finishing was very weak. The final score was 1-1, which seemed fair.
Oh, and I may have found an apartment. More anon.

Well-travelled boxes

I love the weird world of logistics. On Saturday I shipped 7 boxes from Chestnut Hill to be delivered here in Seattle tomorrow, Thursday August 10. I just checked on how they were doing:
package tracking info
Those boxes are visiting cities that I’ve never seen….