Souls shrivel under the spotlight

Here’s another straightforward, common-sense piece by Greta Christina on why she doesn’t believe in the soul.

I mean, even when we didn’t know what gravity was (which, if I understand the science correctly, we still don’t fully grasp), once we got the idea of it we understood that it was a physical phenomenon. Once we got the idea and began studying and observing it, we didn’t try to explain it by invisible spirit- demons living inside objects and pulling towards each other. We could see that it was physical objects having an effect on other physical objects, and we understood that it was a physical force.
In other words, we don’t need to completely understand a phenomenon to recognize it as a physical event, governed by laws of physical cause and effect.
And when you start looking at the “soul,” you realize that that’s exactly what it looks like, too.
Everything that we call the “soul” is affected by physical events in our bodies, and those events alter it, shape it, and eventually destroy it.

My emphasis. Or, to put it more crudely, we don’t need no stinkin’ “god of the gaps”, thank you very much!
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Testing the iPhone app for WordPress

Just a quick posting to test the WordPress client for the iPhone. The main advantage over a web-based client is that it supports the caching of local drafts, so I can blog from the plane…. I can also add photos from the iPhone camera.

photo

The state of American health care

From Marty Kaplan’s HuffPo piece, Beyond Sicko:

“I had a colonoscopy the other week,” the CDC’s Dr. Gerberding told the 400 public health officials, business leaders and nonprofits she was hoping would sign on to a “healthiest nation alliance.” “Actually,” she added, “I was billed for two colonoscopies, though I’m sure I only had one.”

So much for "there's never any passing in Formula 1"!

It’s a good thing when a team has complete confidence in their driver. On the other hand, it’s possible to get carried away with this. Today’s German Grand Prix was a good example. Lewis Hamilton took the pole, and at the start of the race he simply ran away from the field. Only one thing could spoil his domination: a Safety Car period. And sure enough, Timo Glock’s suspension broke, his Toyota snapped into the pit wall, and out came the Safety Car. Everybody lined up, and waited for the pit lane to be opened. The obvious strategy was going to be to pit under yellow, take on the final set of tyres and enough fuel, and then wait for green. Inexplicably, McLaren told Hamilton to stay out, not to pit. They seemed to think that he’d been going so quickly that he would be able to pull out over 20 seconds in just eight laps, so that he could refuel under green without losing the lead. Lewis did his best, but he could “only” pull out about 14 seconds. He rejoined in fifth, and provided a thrilling finale by passing his team-mate, muscling his way past Massa, and then blasting by Piquet to take the win.
Coming so soon after his British Grand Prix win, this was another crushing victory. The Ferrari team must be feeling really demoralized. Even though they still lead the Constructors Championship, Raikkonen could only finish sixth, while Massa was unable to put up any resistance and couldn’t even run down young Piquet for second. ((According to Massa, he had brake problems during the closing laps, and this sounds quite reasonable – it seemed that every time we got a cockpit shot of Raikkonen’s car, he was fiddling with the brake balance.)) So Hamilton has opened up a four point gap over Massa at the top of the Drivers Championship, 58 to 54.
There’s two weeks until the next race, in Hungary. I’ll be on the road then – I’m heading back to India, visiting Chennai on business – so I’ll be relying on my trusty electric monk DVR to urge on Lewis to victory.
UPDATE: From the official FIA post-race press conference:

Q: Lewis, on behalf of all race fans we have to thank you for making that such an exciting race by not coming in with the safety car. You gave yourself so much work to do in the latter stages of the race.
Lewis Hamilton: Well, thank you. I didn’t plan on doing that.

Common sense and nonsense about taking offense

The Barefoot Bum takes a look at the notion of taking offense. First, it’s OK to feel offended; in a society of diverse views, beliefs and cultures it’s inevitable.

If you’re offended, you’re free to say so. It might be important that you’re offended. Sometimes I offend people unintentionally, and a civilized person should never give offense unintentionally. A civilized person also never gives offense gratuitously, for no other reason than to make someone else feel bad. If you’re going to give offense, you should do so intentionally and with reason and purpose.

(And that, I think, should be PZ Myers’ retort to Andrew Sullivan.) The point is not whether we feel offended, but what we do about it. Civilization is about talking, not rioting.
So far, so good. But then The Bum makes an interesting leap:

Fundamentally, all ethical beliefs are about being offended; without the concept of taking offense, each person would object only to physical harm he or she personally suffered. It is taking offense when we care about harm caused to others and condemn acts that harm others.

I don’t think that this quite works. First, there’s a large class of ethical beliefs which have deeply non-rational roots. (Yes, I’m thinking of Fischer and Ravizza’s famous “trolley” problem.) In such cases, expressions of being “offended” are almost certainly no more than social convention (One is expected to express ethical conflicts in this kind of language.) There are other ethical dilemmas which don’t seem to fit The Bum’s broad brush. Consider what we might call the “ACLU problem”, Evelyn Hall‘s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The “disapprove” bit fits The Bum’s model, but “defend” is also viewed as an ethical stance.
To get a full picture of this, I think that we need to go beyond “offended”, and introduce another one of today’s “fighting words”, “disrespect”. “Offense” is generally a reaction to an action by another person, while “disrespect” speaks to the other’s attitude. With “offense”, the situation is clear: X did Y, Z was offended by Y, and we can debate about the ethics of Y. The problem with “disrespect” is that it is… well, “inchoate” feels close, though it’s not quite right. X did Y, Z felt that this showed that X disrespected him, and even if we resolve the question of Y we can’t clear the air about Z’s perception of X. Typically Z demands a compensating action from X to demonstrate X’s respect.
So I think that The Bum’s attempt to define ethics in terms of taking offense is backwards. We take offense over questions of an ethical nature which also arouse feelings of disrespect. (Not all ethical questions do.) And the way in which we act when we’ve taken offense is strongly (completely?) determined by the feelings of disrespect that are triggered, and may have little to do with the “Y” of the matter.

Getting the blog sorted

OK, it seems to be coming together now. The header is working: I like the picture of Tommy, and I don’t need any fancy nav features. I had to hand-craft the page links when I changed the default font to a nice serif; for some reason the page nav inherited from the body style rather than the blog title. Mandigo includes some cute features to let you hide or reveal the body text and sidebars; I’m not sure how you’d use them (or know how to use them), so they’re gone. I’ve updated and reactivated some of the standard plugins, including footnotes and Fluency, and I replaced the moribund WP-CC feature with WPLicense, so I’m properly CC-compliant again.
The Shiny New Toy Of The Moment is Nerdaphalia’s Nerdaphernalia’s Pull-Quotes, implemented in Javascript. ((If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out this Wikipedia article.)) I think that they look really cool; the downside is that the Javascript that implements them runs right at the end of the page rendering. On most blogs that will be just fine, but on my widget-loaded page the load time is already pretty bad. The resulting user experience is that you start reading the page while things are still loading, and suddenly a pull-quote appears in the middle of what you’re reading. What’s happening is that when the pull-quote Javascript finally runs (after all of the Amazon and Google content in the sidebar, and maybe even after the analytics stuff in the footer) it builds the pull-quote, injects it into the DOM for the article, and the browser reflows the text body material around it. Ugh. That’s a good argument for reducing the page weight.
Still to do: replace some of the glyphs and tweak the colours.

Convenient, though a bit garish

If you think you’ve seen this theme before, you probably have. Mandigo is one of the more popular WordPress themes out there. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it’s incredibly flexible and reconfigurable: the theme-specific control panel seems to go on for ever. On the other hand, the colours (there are seven to choose from) are all a bit garish, and the various glyphs and icons are much more intrusive than I like. So I’ll play with it a bit: come up with my own title image, and maybe tone down some of the visuals.
One feature of Mandigo that I really like (and which ought to be part of the base WordPress system) is that you can define your custom header and footer code and Mandigo will inject it where appropriate. This keeps the base theme PHP files uncluttered. One of the things that I had to remember to do whenever I installed a new theme was to cut the Google Analytics and Amazon Associates Javascript from the footer of my present theme and paste it into the new one. Usually this is obvious (it goes in footer.php), but some theme designers skip this file, and simply include calls to the WP footer function in various places. Mandigo gets this right.
I still wish that I knew what was broken in the Breaking News theme. Everything seemed to be working except for single post display. Moreover the failure mode was hard to debug: the WP engine just failed to respond. Since it was an out-of-the-box failure, I’m guessing that it was a subtle incompatibility with WP 2.6. Breaking News is one of those themes that I mentioned above, where the designer refactors things in a way that diverges quite a bit from the standard WP patterns. This approach is always liable to expose some unexpected (or unintended) dependency.
UPDATE: That’s better – a clip from my favourite picture of Tommy makes a nice header.

And now for something completely different

OK, I couldn’t resist this theme. It’s called “Breaking News”, and it’s from an Italian company called ShinRa House. It looks like a three column design, and it’s tagged as such in the Theme Viewer, but in fact there’s only one widget-enabled sidebar. The left and middle columns are used for blog postings; I’ve configured it to show three in the first and four in the second.
Now I need to create a nice halftone rotogravure-style picture of me, just like a real newspaper
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t work very well. There was an obscure bug that I couldn’t fix. (Maybe a 2.6 incompatibility.) I’ll revert to a familiar theme for now.

New theme, new experimental content

As you can see (unless you’re viewing this through the RSS/Atom feed), I’ve changed the theme and added a bunch of Amazon Associates widgets to the right-hand sidebar. The theme is OK, not great, but pretty clean. From my point of view, its delightfully simple – perhaps half the size of the previous one, measured in lines of code. The original was in German, though, so I had to go through translating the text into English. Please let me know if I missed anything.
As for the Associates widgets: yes, I know that they add to the page load time. Most people wouldn’t use so many relatively heavyweight widgets. (I’m just using three right now, but you can expect to see the number, and the selection, change.) On the other hand, this does highlight any latency and rendering issues. Is it better to get a simple frame and header in place before starting any of the content, or should we do most of the heavy lifting on the server side?
The most interesting widget should be the first, Page Recommender, because the content is based on the viewer’s history. I have no idea what you are seeing in this widget; what I see is based on my own history. And it’s going to take a while for the widget to build up a history of page views on my site. It may well be the case that my kind of blog is simply the wrong kind of site for this widget. If most people simply read the current entries via the base URL, and don’t check the comments or older postings, there may not be enough intra-site traffic for the widget to work with. In that case you’ll probably see nothing but product links.
These are not the only off-site widgets that I use, by the way. The other obvious example is the Shared Items from Google Reader. I read most of my daily web content (154 feeds!) through Google’s RSS aggregation, and I tag as “Shared” various items that I think my audience might like to read. These show up in the sidebar widget, under the (presumptuous!) heading “Items from other blogs that you should be reading”. This is really convenient for me, but it doesn’t generate blog content in the same way that, say, a “Links of the day” posting does. In fact, I suspect that the crawlers don’t index content from this kind of widget, so I’m not really helping myself or the items I’m recommending.
Perhaps I need to switch to using del.icio.us, which is how I presume Adriana is generating her “Links” postings, but it will mean finding an alternative RSS reader: one that has built-in del.icio.us support. (And it must work on the iPhone. I read a lot of my RSS feeds whenever I have a few moments: on the shuttle bus between Amazon buildings, standing in line at Starbucks, waiting for a soccer game to start at Qwest field….)