Humanism and religion

Mark Rowlands posted a piece at Secular Philosophy in which he argued that humanism is…

… in essence, a secular form of Christianity. The idea that humans are the most valuable animals in the world makes no sense when it is removed from a theological context in which that animal is created in the image of God.

I think that this is bullshit, frankly. While both humanism and Christianity are socially-constructed systems based on admixtures of faith, idealism, and pragmatism, the “image of God” idea is not something that they have in common. What follows is a slightly edited version of my comment on that thread.

It is reasonable to suppose that every creature has an innate bias in favour of the survival of its kin, simply because such a preference has strong survival value for its genes… [It]makes perfect sense for me to regard my child as the most important creature on the planet.

For simple creatures, this innate bias is expressed in a variety of behaviours: mating patterns, competition with non-kin, protective and even self-sacrificial ways of defending offspring. For thinking, social creatures one would expect a variety of cognitive and social mechanisms to emerge that would reinforce this same bias. Unlike instinctive behaviours, such mechanisms are more plastic, since they interact with and are affected by a wide range of other social forces.

How big is the circle of “kin”? This is a critical factor that we see in many social creatures, from termites to chimpanzees. Over human history the original kin circle of the nomadic group has been broadened under a variety of pressures: tribal, racial, national, and so forth.

So what of humanism and Christianity? They are similar in that both seek to exploit the “kin bias” instinct to advance a particular idea. However their objectives seem to be diametrically opposed. Christianity, and all religions, seek to inject a supernatural authority into a worldview, and declare that only those who accept this authority are “kin”. Humanism proposes that there is no supernatural authority, and that the only reasonable way of defining “kin” is in terms of the species homo sapiens. All other definitions have historically been exploited for sectarian, tribal, or racial purposes, and should be rejected because of this.

While McCain and the WSJ declare victory….

A useful reminder by Leon Hadar in The American Conservative:

The benchmarks to measure success in Iraq should be the ones that Bush, McCain and the other cheer-leaders had provided before Congress authorized Bush to go to war. That should be the context for the debate on Iraq during this election:

1. We would discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

2. We would uncover the ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin.

3. The war in Iraq would be as short and relatively costless in terms of American lives and U.S. dollars as the war in Afghanistan.

4. “Liberated” Iraq would be a unified nation-state and free of ethnic and religious rivalries as well as of foreign occupation.

5. A democratic and secular Iraq would become a political model for the entire Broader Middle East and would create the conditions for a political and economic liberalization in the Arab world.

6. Iraq would not require American economic assistance since it economy would grow and the country would become prosperous thanks to its growing oil revenues.

7. The U.S. military victory in Iraq would strengthen U.S. strategic position in the Middle East

(a) encouraging other global and regional powers to jump on the American bandwagon,

(b) weakening the power of anti-Americans governments (Iran) and terrorist groups,

(c) helping revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process (”The road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad”),

and (d) putting pressure on North Korea and Iran to end their nuclear military programs.

Now…based on these high standards set-up by the Bush Administration, it has failed in achieving all these seven goals (and related others). Seven F’s. Time to switch that kid to another school.

Observations of an hotel

While I was in Chennai, I stayed at the Asiana Hotel. In general, I was quite pleased with it, but there were a few things that seemed out of place:

  • Internet service was provided through an open WiFi. I had been expecting the ridiculously overpriced WiFi that seems de rigeur for up-market hotels, but I was pleasantly surprised – at least for the first few minutes. I soon discovered that they were running a proxy server on port 80 which would periodically substitute a hotel advertisement for the page you had requested. Perhaps it was intended to be an dynamic interstitial, but under Safari it simply loaded and stayed there. The side-effects were bizarre: at one point, I brought up an Apple Help page, chose “More…”, and got the Asiana ad instead of the extended help from apple.com. The solution, apparently, was to run everything through a VPN, but that wasn’t available on my personal MacBook Air, nor on my iPhone.
  • On Tuesday, I was sick, and stayed at the hotel rather than going in to the office. I delayed checkout until 2pm, and then hung around in the lounge and courtyard, drinking weak tea and hoping for recovery. As with most places in the hotel, there was background music playing. Unfortunately, they were playing just one track: “After the Sunrise”, by Yanni. Over and over again. It’s 4:38 long, so it was repeating 13 times an hour. I was in the lounge for two hours. Brain damage is a distinct possibility….
  • The hotel bar was OK, even though they mixed most of the cocktails too sweet, and the tonic (not Schweppes) was so strong that it killed the taste of the gin. But the entertainment was simply disconcerting: two young women in hot pants, backed up by an older guy on guitar and synths. They had a wide repertoire, from Abba to the Cranberries, but their favourite seemed to be “Hotel California”. Did they play it because the girls liked to sing it, or because the guy wanted the chance to come forward and play the epic guitar passage at the end? We’ll never know.

Dawkins on Darwin

The first episode of Richard Dawkins’ three-part documentary on Charles Darwin has been broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. I’m not sure if/when it’ll be shown in the USA, but in the meantime it’s up on Google Video:

48 minutes. Highly recommended.

Jet lag?

I’m taking a “jet lag recovery” day from work, and thinking about why I feel more woozy than I expected after this trip. Obviously the fact that I couldn’t sleep on the FRA-SEA leg didn’t help, but there’s more to it than that. ((UPDATE: Merry points out that my having been really sick on Tuesday could be a factor. Doh!!)) It occurs to me that this was my fourth visit to India, but on each of the previous occasions I stopped off in Europe for at least a day on the way back.

  • In October 2005, I returned via England, and dropped in on the Tarantella team in Leeds.
  • In January 2006, I flew to Frankfurt, backtracked to Prague, and visited Sun’s NetBeans group before flying on to Denver.
  • And earlier this year I broke my journey in England and spent a day with my mother in Oxford. (Of course that last itinerary was westwards round-the-world, and I found it much less stressful.)

Worth thinking about for next time.

Weird anomaly, and a query

Four flights on four Lufthansa aircraft (two A340-600, two A330-300). On each approach, as the landing gear was lowered, the IFE (in-flight entertainment system) would spontaneously reset, and present you with the “Wilkommen/Welcome” screen. If you were trying to follow the approach on the airshow page, you would have to navigate through the language selection and menu pages to get back to it. Why?
And a query: who cares about the “outside temperature” information on the airshow? I mean, at FL320 and up it’s going to be around -56F, innit? Really useful. Why can’t we have a “Pro Airshow” option, with the really interesting stuff like mach number, airspeed, heading, wind, FL, VS, and so forth? No need to make it multilingual, since English is the standard language for this stuff, and it’s mostly symbolic/numeric anyway. Overlay it on a moving map, give the user zoom control, etc.
By the way, our route from Chennai to Frankfurt this morning was interesting. NW across India to the Indian Ocean, up the coast to Pakistan, then straight across Pakistan and Iran towards the southern tip of the Caspian Sea, then west to the Turkish border, pretty much avoiding Iraqi airspace. Cool.

MAA-FRA routing on Airshow
MAA-FRA routing on Airshow

Back in Seattle, bruised but unbowed

I landed at SeaTac just before 1pm, after about 24 hours of travelling from Chennai. The first leg, from Chennai to Frankfurt, was on one of Lufthansa’s two-class A340-600‘s, with a huge business class section (66 seats!), and I had no difficulty in getting upgraded. However business class on the A330-300 that operates the FRA-SEA leg was sold out, so I wound up near the back of economy. I had an aisle seat (44D), and 44E was occupied by a nervous and fidgety woman from Romania with no English, no sense of personal space, and exceedingly sharp elbows. It was a long and uncomfortable flight, and my mood was not improved by the long lines at both Immigration and Customs in Seattle.
One thing worth noting was that even in economy class, LH served two hot meals with unlimited soft and alcoholic drinks during the 9+ hour flight from FRA to SEA. This at the same time that United is reportedly exploring the possibility of charging for food on intercontinental flights. (They already charge for alcoholic beverages in economy.) If they do this, it will simply reinforce my preference to avoid flying on United long-haul. Mind you, I’ll still buy UA tickets, and upgrades, but only if the flights involved are code-shares with other carriers. ((But could the whole concept of code-sharing be threatened by moves like United’s? If you were a Lufthansa executive, would you really want to sell a Lufthansa flight which was actually operated by United? Wouldn’t the inferior United product diminish the value of your brand?))
While in Frankfurt, I poked around the duty free shops, and came across an Islay single malt that I hadn’t encountered before: Caol Ila. I figured that the chances of finding it in a Washington State Liquor Store were close to zero, and so I decided to treat myself to a litre of the 12 year old, reviewed here. I’ll let you know what I think when I finally open it.

Good news, bad news dept.

The good news: I was able to find an Indian cable TV channel that carries Formula 1 races live, so I’m able to watch the Hungarian Grand Prix live today.
The bad news: the channel is ESPN Star Sports, which has two of the most incompetent commentators I’ve ever heard. I think that the chief fool is a guy called Steve Slater, working with a straight man called Steve Dawson. Almost every technical observation that he makes – from the fuel rig problems to Adrian Sutil’s “shattered brake disc” – is simply silly.
Fortunately I’ve programmed my DVR to record the US broadcast, so when I get home I can listen to a competent team of commentators (especially the irrepressible David Hobbs).
And the race? Well, it was quite interesting until Hamilton’s left front tyre failed. (And the way Slater reacted to this event was monumentally clueless.) After that, the only question was whether Glock could hold off Raikkonen for third place.
And now Massa has just blown up! Slater’s asinine comment: “And now that podium will remain empty!” Sheesh! Anyone remember Colemanballs? And so Kovalainen gets his first win, while Glock nails P2 after Raikkonen backed off. Hamilton comes in 5th, and retains the championship lead by 5 points over Raikkonen; Massa drops to third.
UPDATE: The biggest upset from this race was in the Constructors Championship. Ferrari stay in the lead on 111 points, while McLaren jump to second with 100, leaving BMW in the dust.

Just got back from Mamallapuram

A bunch of Seattle Amazonians, including my boss Colin Bodell and yours truly, found ourselves in the Asiana Hotel in Chennai this weekend, and decided to play tourist.

Colin and Geoff under Krishnas Butterball
Colin and Geoff under Krishna's Butterball
We got a driver to take us down the coast to Mamallapuram, a town 60km south of Chennai. It’s famous for its stone carvings and temples, and for a large impossibly-balanced rock known as Krishna’s Butterball. Wikitravel has a good article on the place.
After several hours at “M’puram”, we headed back up the coast, but stopped for a quick visit to Crocodile Bank, a zoo and research centre devoted to all things crocodilian. From their website:

Starting with 30 mugger adults, the Bank has bred over 5000 and now holds over 2400 crocodilians of 14 different species. By 1987 the CrocBank developed a much broader focus, and became the Center for Herpetology, Indias premier institution for herpetofaunal conservation, research and education. Currently besides crocodilians, the Bank maintains 12 endangered species of turtles and tortoises, five species of snakes, including the King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, water monitor lizards, Varanus salvator salvator, two species of pythons and albino cobras. Housed in enclosures very similar to their natural habitat visitors can get a close view of how these reptiles live in the wild.

It’s awesome. Highly recommended.
The photos that I took are presently uploading (slowly – we’re up to number 28 out of 134 but they’re all up on grommit now) to my gallery. Enjoy.

9 hours 15 minutes, with no food

Amazon.com is becoming a large company, and I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that I met a colleague here in Chennai who had travelled out from Seattle on the same flights that I’d taken. What did surprise me was to learn that on the segment from Frankfurt to Chennai, the passengers in economy had no food whatsoever. I’d upgraded to business class, and I thought that it was disappointing that, because of the strike, we’d got a hot lunch but no other food except a bag of assorted snacks. I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was.
Nine hours, fifteen minutes without food. Longer, actually, because our take off was delayed while we received a fresh overflight clearance for Iraq and Iran. That’s ridiculous.
(Now I’m even more anxious about whether I’ll be able to upgrade my return flights on Wednesday. Right now I’m waitlisted…)
UPDATE: It looks as if the strike is over.