Gene Saunders

Here’s the full announcement. Please forward to anyone that you think might be interested.

Gene Saunders
Gene Saunders - picture from Detlef Schmier

Gene Saunders, one of the longest serving members of the Sun Microsystems family, passed away unexpectedly on September 19th. Gene had many friends and colleagues at Sun, in the United States and around the World. He was also in constant contact with Sun alumni and his many other friends via email and his blogs. (Even his dog had his her own blog, “Beta the Wonder Dog”.)
Gene is probably best known for creating “onestop”, which for many years was the single most used technical website within Sun. Onestop was started in 1993, hosted on an Ultra 1 SPARCstation 1 in Itasca, IL. It won the “Best SWAN Website” contest several years in a row; at that point, Gene stopped entering to allow others a chance to win!
Gene worked in many groups during his 17 years at Sun. (He joined Sun 19 years ago, but like many of us, he went through a RIF-induced “holiday” which lasted 20 months.) He was a General Territory SE for SunSoft, a Telco focused SE, a member of the Data Center Practice team, and involved on several named accounts. Gene supported many of the User Groups in the Dallas Fort Worth Area, was a very popular speaker at Partner training events, and loved to share his knowledge of technology.
Gene had a rich life beyond his work at Sun. He was passionately involved in political and social issues, nationally and in Dallas. He was an ardent freethinker and skeptic, with a wonderful sense of humor. And he had many friends, from all parts of the world and walks of life, who came to love him deeply.
Gene will be greatly missed by his many friends and colleagues at Sun, in the Technical Community, and around the world.
There is an email alias for friends of Gene to exchange information and share memories of Gene. Please visit: http://grommit.com/mailman/listinfo/friendsofgene to sign up.
– Geoff Arnold
– Roger Lippert

YouTube blocks Pat Condell's attack on sharia in Britain

Via PZ, Barry Duke at Freethinker reports that:

The poison of shariah law which has begun infecting Britain is of considerable concern to many, not least British comedian Pat Condell, who posted an attack on this creeping Islamic threat on our legal system on YouTube.
Condell, of course, does not mince his words, and his video predictably got up certain noses. So YouTube, to its shame, blocked it.

However as John Gilmore famously said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” So here is the Condell video. Watch it, and pass the word along.

If you’re a Brit (resident or expat), please sign the petition that Pat mentions. And as for YouTube, it’s ironic (not to mention dumb) that their Abuse and Policy Center page doesn’t provide any way of complaining about any abuse of their policies….

Fame!

Mark Rowlands has a new book out called Fame. I liked this sentence from the sumary he posted to Secular Philosophy:

I try to show that our present day notion of fame and the extremes that accompany it are symptoms of a significant cultural change: the decline of Enlightenment ideas has seen individualism eclipse objectivism about value, so much so that what characterizes Western society today is its constitutional inability to distinguish quality from bullshit.

It’s $18.95 for a 160 page paperback, but I imagine that I should focus on the quality rather than the quantity. (On the other hand, the first chapter is entitled “Girls gone wild: fame and vfame”. NSFW?)

The financial crisis and your kid's education…

For those short-sighted people who think that this financial crisis is all about punishing fat cats on Wall Street, think again. Via the Leiter Reports

Wachovia bank has frozen the accounts of nearly 1,000 colleges, leaving institutions unable to access billions of dollars they depend on for salaries, campus construction, and debt payments.

The freeze, which affects most institutions that invest their endowment income and other assets through Commonfund, has some colleges worried that they won’t be able to make payroll this period…

Take an hour to understand what's going on

A group of Princeton economists look at the causes of the financial crisis, and what should be done about it. (And when!)

(This is also available on iTunes U.)
It looks as if the really urgent steps have already been taken – nationalizing Fannie, Freddie, and AIG – and we can afford to spend a few days getting the next steps right. As Paul Krugman observed, we actually have a fair amount of experience in dealing with financial crises, and we ought to relate the current events to known patterns and solutions, rather than making things up as we go along.

Gene Saunders, RIP

I just learned that my old friend, Sun colleague, and fellow SecularLiberalGeek Gene Saunders died last week. (I just got off the phone from speaking with his friend Judy.)

Gene Saunders
Gene Saunders
I’m going to miss his constant emails on politics, technology, godlessness, and Texas.
More anon.
UPDATE: Links to Gene’s blog and his photos, courtesy Alec.
UPDATE: I’ve created a mailing list for friends of Gene to exchange news and thoughts. You can sign up here.

One subject, two books…

I left my Kindle at the office this weekend, and I just finished a couple of work-related books (one tedious, one great), and so I’m looking for reading material this evening. I have two new books on the same subject, and I’m trying to decide which to crack first:

Both are accounts by former Christian preachers and apologists of how and why they rejected Christianity in favour of atheism. Both include lengthy justifications, including many of the familiar arguments against Christian faith. I’m more interested in the personal narratives than in the anti-apologetics, however.
One of my favourite accounts of the loss of faith is Anthony Kenny’s A Path from Rome, in which he describes his life from childhood, through becoming a Catholic priest, to the seeking and granting of laicization. This took place during the 1950s and early 1960s, at a time when few Catholic priests left the church, and I suspect that he wrote the book in part as an “existence proof” of the possibility of doing so. Of course, religion was far less potent a social or political force there and then, in England, than it is here and now, in the United States.
I hope that Barker and Loftus present their arguments as aids to the uncertain, to those who are inclined to reject religion but need ammunition to deal with family and friends who might seek to dissuade them. Arguments against religion per se are, in my view, a waste of time: apologetics are all post hoc constructions designed to reinforce a purely emotional commitment to faith, and the hard-choice fideist is unlikely to hear any counter-arguments. People have to find their own way out of the mist; it’s only as they begin to do so that they will be receptive to an account of what the mist is.
Anyway, let me flip a coin. Heads… I’ll start with Godless.