Kate, Hannah and I spent the morning on a guided tour around the Wing Luke Asian Museum, just a couple of blocks from the apartment. It’s a really great place to visit, but don’t just go to the museum. Take a tour. It costs a dollar more, but you see many additional exhibits, including the painstakingly restored rooms of the old hotel that once occupied the top two floors of the building.
Rather than trying to give my impressions of the museum, let me refer you to this excellent review from the New York Times which describes it much better than I could.
Moving to the Mini
About a year ago I started having problems with my Powerbook. The most common pattern was that I would try to restart it (after, say, a software upgrade), and I’d be faced with a black screen, requiring me to reset the Power Management Unit. This was a hit-or-miss affair, and required at least one trip to the Genius Bar. My diagnosis:
The PMU is dying, slowly, and inducing a variety of failure modes. The trick is going to be inducing a hard failure, or at least a failure that the Genius will take seriously.
In March this year I bought myself a MacBook Air, intending to use the Powerbook as a remote CD, print server, iPhone backup, and media hub. Realizing that the PB might fail at any time, I shifted my iTunes and photo libraries to an external HD.
Last week, things took a turn for the worse. I installed some new software on the PB, the restart failed, I reset the PMU (with difficulty), and when it rebooted I decided to check the disk. There were lots of errors. I rebooted from the OS X DVD, repaired the disk, and restarted. A day later, the system failed again, and Disk Utility reported more errors. And this time, when I tried to repair them, I saw:
And just to make sure that I didn’t try anything rash, Disk Utility marked the HD as unbootable.
What to do? I had a complete backup on my Time Capsule, so I had the option of scrubbing the disk, reinstalling Leopard, and then restoring my backup. But how much could I trust the hardware? I decided that the time had come to replace the PB – but with what? I couldn’t really use the MacBook Air for all of those functions, but I didn’t want to spend much money.
At this point I remembered that I still had my Samsung monitor. When I first arrived in Seattle, I bought myself a nice SyncMaster 940MW that could work as a TV or a computer monitor. A few months later, I acquired a Sharp HDTV, and the SyncMaster was relegated to occasional use as a second screen for the PB. I had a mouse (plenty of them, actually), so the obvious solution was to get a Mac Mini and an Apple keyboard. I decided that I didn’t really need a DVD burner or extra RAM, which meant that I could get the basic Mac Mini (1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, Combo Drive) and be up and running for around $700.
So I ordered the Mac Mini and an Apple Keyboard on Monday, and they arrived yesterday. Basic setup was a breeze, and it all just works – though I’m holding off for a couple of days before restoring stuff from the Time Capsule. I love the minimalist design of the keyboard – like the keyboard on the MacBook Air, it’s way ahead of what I was used to on the PB, and significantly better than the white MacBook I’m using for work. And the Samsung monitor works perfectly, via DVI. (No VGA nonsense here.) It’s looking good…..
The Bond market declines
Kate, Hannah and I went to see The Quantum of Solace at the Cinerama this evening. After the success of Casino Royale, I had great hopes for it. Sadly, no. Muddled plot, unmemorable characters (except for Bond and M), and a ridiculous reliance on special effects. The film does set some kind of record for the variety of chases: a car chase, a running-across-the-rooftops chase, a boat chase, and a plane chase. Each raises the improbability level a notch: picking a random beat-up old boat in a harbour and finding that it had a supercharged engine that could outperform the bad guys, then renting a decrepit old DC-3 in the Bolivian desert and performing low-level aerobatics in narrow canyons that would be the envy of Top Gun – and without the wings coming off. That was just silly. On the plus side, the computer user interface in use at MI6 takes the design from Minority Report and raises the bar a couple of notches.
Religion and niceness
Over at Slate, Paul Bloom takes a look at a seeming paradox. On the one hand, American atheists seem to be less happy than believers. On the other, mostly atheistic societies like Norway and Sweden are much happier and healthier than the US. He suggests that it’s the result of community and exclusion.
American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, “[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them.”
The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.
Coincidentally vjack has a piece up at Atheist Revolution endorsing the idea that philanthropy may be a good organizing principle for atheist community.
Emergency preparedness
Following on from my recent posting about securing the bookshelves to the wall, I’ve now obtained a three day disaster readiness pack. It’s a good basic kit, but I had to throw in a few obvious extras: a crank-chargeable flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, and some glucose and caffeine tablets. Add a few litres of bottled water (replenished regularly), and we should be all set. Let’s hope it remains unused.
Redefining "Single-Celled"
You think “single-celled” means “microsopic”? Meet Gromia sphaerica. 1.2 cm across. That’s the size of a grape. And they leave trails – and they may have been doing so all the way back to the Preambrian Precambrian.
Gimme that old time dysfunctionality…
Ruth Gledhill reviews belatedly catches up with Gregory Paul’s study in the latest a 2005 issue of the Journal of Religion and Society. She begins thus:
Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capitalâ€. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The correlations between religious belief and social dysfunction won’t come as a surprise to my (mostly) secular liberal readers. However one should always be cautious about leaping from correlation to causation. Case in point: there is a strong regional correlation in the USA between religiosity and violent crime. However both are also negatively correlated with education and economic status, and these are rather more plausible causal agents.
Gledhill writes:
He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills.
Really? This could be interesting, and certainly worth reading. At the very least, it looks pretty conclusive that religion does nothing to mitigate or reduce social dysfunction.
UPDATE: Thanks to benjdm for the correction.
And the award for the most ridiculous non-sequitur of the year….
The award goes to Dan Henninger, writing in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. (Well, it had to be there, or the NRO, or the Weekly Standard, didn’t it?) So, what caused the financial melt-down? We’re talking about a crisis brought on by Republican-inspired deregulation, and overseen by a government of Republican Christianists, whose power base lies in the southern parts of the USA…
Dan starts off well:
What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.
Well, that makes sense. After all, the absence of “responsibility, restraint and remorse” has defined the Bush years, from foreign policy to deficits, to energy and taxation. And as Dan emphasizes…
Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down.
Very good. And the reason why responsibility and restraint have failed us is…? (Fasten seat belt: prepare for neck-snapping non-sequitur.)
And so we come back to the disappearance of “Merry Christmas.”
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.
Breathtaking. I guess he subscribes to the notion that if you’re going to say something silly, make it outrageously silly. I particularly liked the idea of how dangerous secularizing “flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people”. (What else would they be – apes? Oh, wait….)
(Tip o’ the hat to PZ.)
How to get a bachelor's degree in bullshit
Q. Where would you expect to find textual material such as the following?
The Life Force, then, with its almost holy purity, is in danger of being inhibited, dampened down and threatened by what amounts to some entirely physical dirt that gains access to that temple of the soul the human body. Whilst in Traditional Chinese Medicine impurities in the mind, emotions or spirit are just as important as physical impurity, it is naturopathy that focuses upon the actual physical sewers of the body.
A. In the course notes for a B.Sc. (yes, that’s a Bachelor of Science) degree course in “Nutritional Medicine” at Thames Valley University in England.
WTF?!?!
Full details here.
The death of obedience
Andrew Sullivan considers the iconic role of traditional marriage for many conservatives in a very nice piece entitled Modernity, Faith, And Marriage. He writes of Rod Dreher, who…
… longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women’s role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.
To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently.
And he continues:
If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces.[…] The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state Rod would not want to live under.
Naturally, Sully has the answer: his Oakeshottian attempt to infuse faith with doubt, and thus accept…
… that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature.
But to achieve this, we must confront the institutions of reaction; the ones that demand “obedience”. Andrew and I both grew up in a country in which Queen Elizabeth the Second was “Fidei Defensor” (Defender of the Faith), and Andrew still professes membership in a religious institution of which the head, Pope Benedict XVI, frequently exhorts his followers to “obedience” and bemoans the evil influence of education.
Obedience is dead. Ditto deference, and all forms of argument from authority. The Enlightenment made them absurd; pluralism makes them unworkable.
Here’s an amusing bit of cognitive dissonance: imagine a Pope such as John Paul II and Benedict claiming that they were “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”? Silly, isn’t it?