Is this the answer to the question on everyone’s lips:who is The Stig
"I was not raised in a religious household…."
From the American Humanist Association:
As PZ said, let’s all hope he lives up to these values.
Finally!
George H. W. Bush, August 27, 1987:
I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
Barack Obama, January 20, 2009:
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.
Thank you.
A sparkling winter day
Last Friday, I checked the Seattle weather forecast to see what the prospects for the weekend were. Morning fog, cloudy skies, damp, low 40s. Sigh. It was going to be typical Seattle winter, just as I’d been promised when I moved here.
Except that it wasn’t. On Saturday the fog and most of the clouds disappeared by lunchtime and it turned into a beautiful day. So when Sunday dawned with thick fog, we crossed our fingers, and by mid-morning things were looking brighter.
Even though the Seattle area was cloud-free, we could still see bands of fog draped over the shores of Bainbridge Island and the slopes of the Olympics. But then even these began to burn off, and to my amazement Mount Rainier loomed out of the haze, 50 miles to the south.
In addition to the numerous freighters anchored in Puget Sound (waiting to load at the grain elevator) there were a couple of bonuses for the transport geek in me: an Amtrak train from Vancouver approaching the city from the north, and the prototype Boeing 777F turning finals towards Boeing Field.
So no, not all Seattle winter days are grey and wet. ((We’ve got about a week of nice weather ahead of us.)) But don’t bet against it….
"They're not simply war criminals; they're fools."
British MP Gerald Kaufman, speaking in Parliament:
(Via Juan Cole.)
Cultural Christianity
The British writer Douglas Murray contributed an eloquent essay to The Spectator on how he became an atheist. The title – deliberately provocative, I suspect, in these times of confusion over the role of Muslim culture and law in Britain – was “Studying Islam has made me an atheist”.
Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe — though rarely arguing — ‘Well, your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist.
What I found particularly interesting was his discussion of the concept of “cultural Christianity”.
My final fear was one which I think a lot of Christians in this country feel, particularly as they see Islam re-emerging and gaining adherents in spite (or perhaps because) of its intransigence and intractability. It is, I suppose, a sense of cultural abandonment. We know how much of what we enjoy and relish comes through Christianity. Can we really go on without it? Doesn’t it leave our building without foundations? Slowly I discover that it doesn’t. I still can’t pass a country church or cathedral without going in. The texts are still essential to me. They are just (and ‘just’ hardly does the job here) no more divine than Shakespeare.
The question of how, without believing it, we transmit the good of our historical faith to another generation is certainly problematic. Perhaps like many Jewish people who rejoice in their identity but don’t believe in God we could be better — and franker — at being cultural Christians.
This all seems very reasonable. And many atheists are happy to be “cultural Christians” – Richard Dawkins has often written of how he cheerfully celebrates Christmas. And I know many Jewish atheists, who don’t seem to get involved in public debates about whether their atheism is compatible with their Judaism. So what’s the problem?
It’s the Christians. Or, rather, the enthusiastic Christian believers who see the arcane but beautiful texts, rituals, and music as barriers to creating the kind of religious communities that they want. When I, like Douglas Murray, go into a wonderful old English country church, I delight in the experience right up to the moment that the service starts. And then the beautiful, timeless space is filled with banal language and trite (and ephemeral) music.
I have no problem with believers indulging in their rituals, ancient or modern. Chacun à son goût, and all that. But most of them seem actively opposed to the concept of “cultural Christianity”: they insist that if we are to enjoy the Christian heritage of England, we should do so on their terms. The rest of us are merely day-trippers, to be hit up for cash and then pushed out of the way when they want to exercise their “authentic” Christianity.
For the most part, I can ignore the enthusiasts and enjoy the culture. But it’s annoying to be treated as a tourist in your own country.
Getting out of the book
Via PZ, a nice parable. Free-thinking beats any one book (especially contradictory mashups of bronze age myths).
One of the commenters on the PZ thread recommended this TED piece by Jonathan Haidt.
Visualizing "lots and lots"
Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it’s still hard to grasp just how much a “billion” really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: “What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?”
The MegaPenny Project, tip of the hat to the Bad Astronomer.
7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me
Steve tagged me with the “7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me” meme. The rules:
- Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
- Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
- Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
- Let them know they’ve been tagged.
Like Steve, I’ve blogged for years, and I’m not sure how many little-known personal facts I can dig up. And there’s a further problem: two years ago (almost exactly) I was tagged with the “5 things” meme. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I’ll have to think up some new things. Here goes:
- I’m addicted to the British glucose-based drink Lucozade. When I was about six, I was hospitalized with severe whooping cough, and for some time Lucozade was the only thing I could keep down. I prefer it at room temperature, just as it was in hospital.
- You never forget that ghostly blue light. During the summer of 1971, I had a job in the Theoretical Physics group at AERE Harwell. My “office” was a prefabricated shed, erected in the old aircraft hangar that housed the LIDO “swimming pool” reactor. When I worked late (which I did quite often, the only illumination was my desk lamp and the blue glow from the ÄŒerenkov radiation. (And yes, there were life preservers hanging everywhere, just in case someone fell in.)
- If it were not for a British TV docu-drama, I would probably not be living in the US today. Back in 1980 I had decided to boost my income by taking a programming job with a petrochemical company in Saudi Arabia. It was a typical expat deal: I was going to live in a company hostel, with my (tax-free) salary paid into a numbered Swiss bank account, and meeting my family for vacations twice a year in Greece or Cyprus. But a few days before I was due to leave, the film Death of a Princess was shown on ATV. Immediately anyone with a British passport became persona non grata in Saudi Arabia. When it became clear that the ban was likely to last for a while, I started looking for alternative jobs, and was recruited by Raytheon Data Systems in Massachusetts.
- Why am I a Mac user? During 1996 there were rumours that Sun was trying to buy Apple. While any talk of acquisition soon fizzled, contact continued. For most of that year, I was part of a secret team working to integrate the Sun and Apple technology portfolios. Sun was to give up making desktop computers, Apple would abandon its minuscule server business, Solaris would be used as the basis for OS X, and sales and channel strategies would be coordinated. I spent much of my time that year at Apple, working on the networking aspects of the deal. It all unravelled when Steve Jobs returned to Apple at the beginning of 1997; with the NeXT OS technology he had no need for Solaris. Shortly afterwards, Eric Schmidt left Sun to join Novell, before moving to Google a few years later. All I got was a T-shirt, and a PowerBook – but that was enough.
- Out of the mouths of babes and… In 1982 I was working for Raytheon Data Systems (RDS), a company whose main business was supplying IBM-compatible terminal systems to airlines. One day I was invited to join a meeting that included various VPs and corporate lawyers from IBM and RDS, who were haggling over the licensing terms for an IBM specification. After several hours of fruitless discussion, I said, “Oh, come on. Just give us the spec and we’ll implement it.” All the IBM lawyers promptly got in a huddle. “Are you formally requesting that we turn over the document to you?” they asked. “Well, yes,” I replied, rather surprised. “In that case, we are required by the terms of our consent decree to comply,” they said. And they did. Apparently nobody had thought to simply ask for it.
- I have been to Buckingham Palace once – for my mother’s OBE investiture. Unfortunately I didn’t take a camera. (This was before digital photography and camera phones.)
- Me and Ronnie. [Reprinted from an entry in my Sun blog, dated June 11, 2004] While everybody seems to be waxing lyrical (or apoplectic) about Ronald Reagan (and I did like Steve Bell’s cartoon in the Guardian), I was reminded of a personal piece of synchronicity. We had just moved from the UK to the USA (for “just a few years,” we thought – hah!), and it was my first day on the job, at Raytheon Data Systems in Mansfield, Massachusetts. I was joining the team to work on the OS for Raytheon’s next generation minicomputer. It was March 30, 1981, and around 2:30pm, right in the middle of a meeting to get to know the rest of the team, everything stopped: Reagan had just been shot. From my perspective, as an outsider who viewed America as a pathologically gun-obsessed culture, it was an odd moment… what had I let myself in for?
So that’s seven more-or-less new things about me. Now I have to tag seven people. That’s tough. I tagged several people the last time around, and so this time I’m going to pass. Sorry.
Crossroads
Here’s a nice picture from my flight home on Saturday:
The lines are shadows cast by contrails at our level (FL340, or 34,000 ft.) onto the smooth layer of low-level clouds. I took this at 9:46am CST, so I was probably flying over Wisconsin or Iowa, en route to Denver.
Lots more pictures here.