A busy weekend so far

Tom, Kate and Hannah – the three other members of the “Fellowship” – are visiting Seattle this weekend. On Saturday we explored Pioneer Square, prowled around Uwajimaya, grabbed a hasty lunch, then took a bus over to the Pacific Science Center at Seattle Center. The new Harry Potter film was playing there, and it was the duty of the Fellowship to watch it together. A nice bonus was that it was in the new Boeing iMax Theater, and the last 20% of the film was in 3D!
We adjudged the film “thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying”, which led to discussions of the final Harry Potter volume (which all of us except Tom had read). The recurring issue was the sheer implausibility of the Epilogue to that book. I tried to explain it away as “magic”, but that didn’t feel right.
After the film we explored the Seattle Center. Although the weather was perfect, we decided not to join the extremely long line to go up the Space Needle. Instead we returned to my apartment and kicked back for a while. Around 8pm we headed down South Jackson Street to watch the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade. ((Kate pointed out, correctly, that no torches were in evidence, but nobody seemed worried by this.)) It was a very long ((and occasionally disorganized)) parade, and the final marching band didn’t come through until around 10:30. I’ll try to post some pictures (and video) soon.
Tomorrow we want to get out on the water for a while. Maybe a cruise, or perhaps a ferry ride.

This is getting ridiculous

For many years, I was a cheapskate about digital photography. I had a simple scheme: every 2 years, I would buy the best camera that I could get for $300. Typically the cutting-edge models were in the $500-750 range, but that was OK with me. On one occasion my purchase was forced (I left the old one on a plane), but overall the plan worked well.
I didn’t anticipate the new FinePix F50fd from Fuji. This looks stunning:

Combining a 12-MegaPixel, 7th Generation Super CCD with a 3.0x optical zoom and a 2.7″; high-resolution 230,000 pixel wide angle view LCD… With the addition of Dual Image Stabilization, Face Detection 2.0 Technology with Automatic Red Eye Removal function, and ISO settings of up to ISO 6400, the F50fd takes compact digital cameras to the next level…

Damn right it does. And at last Fuji has abandoned its quixotic reliance on the proprietary xD format; the F50fd will accept SD-HC memory. OK, there are some compromises: you’ll only get ISO 6400 at 3MP resolution, and the best you can get at 12MP is ISO 1600. I can live with that. No Bluetooth, unfortunately. (It supports IR, but does anybody really care?) In any case, for $299.95, this looks like a winner. It must be two years since my last upgrade, don’t you think?

Seattle Sounders 2 : Preston North End 1

Just after lunch today I received an email from the Seattle Sounders (US soccer) club, telling me that there was an “international exhibition match” this evening. When I hear “international exhibition football”, I tend to think of the Real Madrid match I saw this time last year, or Sunday’s much-ballyhooed encounter between Los Angeles and Chelsea. But football isn’t just a winner-takes-all sport, and there are lots of teams that play international exhibitions. Like… Preston North End?! OK, I admit that surprised me. Of course the name is legendary:

In the past Preston were famously successful, being the first winners of “The Double” in English football. In 1888–89 Preston became the first, and only, team to go throughout an entire season unbeaten in both the league and FA Cup — only Arsenal F.C., in 2003–04, have managed to have an unbeaten season in the top division since. They were league champions again the following season, but have not won the title since.

These days they play in the Championship, where they finished 7th last year.
During a staff meeting this afternoon, I pondered whether to go to the match. There were pros and cons. Pro: the stadium is across the street, it would be easy and cheap to get a ticket, I could sit anywhere I wanted, there would be lots of English fans, and it would be fun to watch a match. Con: the last time I saw an English team in the US was a disaster (for England), I would probably be surrounded by squads of identically-uniformed ten-year old girls (with their parents and coaches), and the only food on offer was likely to be hot dogs and Bud Lite.
I decided to go. I wound up sitting with a group of Preston fans from England, and so I joined in their singing and chanting. Unfortunately, the match was another debacle. Preston started strong, while the Sounders looked really tentative, and Preston went ahead midway through the half. After the break, Preston slowed down (?jet-lag) and Seattle picked up their pace. Their first goal was something of a fluke, coming off the crossbar twice; by the time they scored their second, the Preston defence was simply too slow. A draw would have reflected the run of play, but 2-1 wasn’t unreasonable.
And now I have to find some real food, to make up for the hot dog and Bud Lite…

Flooding in England

I just got off the phone (Skype, actually) with my mother in Botley, on the west side of Oxford. She’s OK (her house is on a bit of a hill), but she’s cut off from Oxford centre (as you can see in these pictures at the BBC), and there’s major flooding all over Oxford, Abingdon, Kidlington. As Alec reports, Worcestershire is a mess too. And the rain keeps coming.

The moral failure of "moderate" religion

There was an interesting piece in today’s New York Times magazine by Professor Noah Feldman from Harvard Law School, in which he writes about orthodox Judaism in contemporary life. The whole piece is well worth reading. However, one particular section caught my eye, and I really need to quote it at length:

In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)
Because of the proximity of Goldstein’s background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.
This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.
Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.
To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them.

[My emphasis.] Note the Talmudic reasoning. The injunction is voided not because it is (and was) immoral, but because, practically speaking, there is no way to implement it. But by avoiding the moral question and introducing a merely practical impediment, the rabbis left the divine command to genocide as a live, unquestioned part of Jewish history. When Goldstein encountered this story in his Torah, he did not find it circumscribed with unequivocal condemnation, but footnoted with a weak excuse that did nothing to inhibit the metaphorical identification of his victims with a rival tribe in some (literally!) Stone Age territorial dispute.
Issues like this cannot be resolved by atheists such as myself. Every fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, Jew, or [insert sect] will assume that we are “the enemy”, and close their ears to us. But if every believer who subscribes to the notion that love, peace and truth are the highest ideals were to place their moral ideals ahead of sentiment about old texts, progress might be possible. Stand up, declaim loudly that genocide, hatred, the subjugation of women, the violent death of non-believers do not represent the word of your god. Tear the pages out of your Bible, your Torah, your Koran. Because if you leave them in, you’re just encouraging the next Baruch Goldstein, or Mohammed Atta, or David Koresh. If you believe that your god is love, surely there is no place in your holy texts for hate.
UPDATE: See also this interesting interview with the author of the NYT piece.
UPDATE: Via Chris, this piece rant by Marcus Brigstocke is also relevant.

HP7

759 pages in six hours. HP7 Thoroughly enjoyable, I thought. A touch of the C. S. Lewis’s at the end, but nothing wrong with that.
I wonder how the other 1.3 million ((There were 1.4M pre-orders at Amazon.com, and another 0.8M at our non-US sites. Our fulfillment network delivered 1.3M books today. That’s 1,700 tons of books.)) recipients of copies from Amazon are enjoying it…

Nasty moment

Watching Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren bury itself in the tyre wall during qualifying, after a mechanical failure in the pits caused his right front tyre to fail.
Hopefully he’ll be OK to race in the European GP tomorrow. Of course he’d be starting from 10th on the grid, so realistically he would be unlikely to finish on the podium. Unless it rains, of course.
In the meantime, enjoy this:

Short and sweet

Friendly Atheist poses a set of common questions for atheists, with the injunction to keep the answers short and sweet. ((Hat tip to the Barefoot Bum, who also provides a nice, but not so short, answer to the morality question.))
Why do you not believe in God? Define “god” and I’ll tell you. Every deity I’ve heard of is either logically incoherent, incompatible with the evidence, or unworthy of serious consideration.
Where do your morals come from? Evolution and socialization.
What is the meaning of life? A strange human obsession, to which the universe is totally indifferent.
Is atheism a religion? No. People only call it so in order to set up a false equivocation.
If you don’t pray, what do you do during troubling times? I can’t do better than what the Barefoot Bum said to this: Try to fix the trouble. (Add a Homer Simpsonesque “Doh!”.)
Should atheists be trying to convince others to stop believing in God? In general: yes. In particular: only if it’s likely to be worth the effort.
Weren’t some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century committed by atheists? And some were committed by men with beards. So what? None of them seem to have been motivated by their atheism…
How could billions of people be wrong when it comes to belief in God? Knowledge – justified belief – is not a popularity contest. Millions of people are wrong about evolution, and geology, too.
Why does the universe exist? If you mean “why” causally, we don’t (yet) know. If you mean it purposefully, that’s just that strange human obsession again.
How did life originate? We don’t know for sure yet, but it seems dumb to bet against the observed self-organizing powers of simple chemistry, coupled with lots of time, energy, lots of parallel experiments, and good old natural selection.
Is all religion harmful? Probably not – any more than all bacteria are harmful. But most of it is. As Dan Dennett has pointed out, we need to understand religion as a psychosocial phenomenon much better.
Is there anything redeeming about religion? Ultimately, no, I don’t think so.
Shouldn’t all religious beliefs be respected? Of course not. Respect should be earned.
Would the world be better off without any religion? Yes. The world is better for the fact that we replaced belief in demonic possession with the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Magical thinking is for entertainment, not for understanding.
What’s so bad about religious moderates? Ask an Episcopalian why s/he doesn’t rip the bits out of the Bible that endorse slavery, genocide, the subjugation of women, and stoning to death for trivial acts. Does s/he think that those ideas deserve respect?
What if you’re wrong about God (and He does exist)? Which god? If it’s Huitzilopochtli, we’re all screwed, aren’t we?
Are atheists smarter than theists? No – they’re just more realistic. (UPDATE: But there are good reasons why IQ tests might show a difference.)
How do you deal with the historical Jesus if you don’t believe in his divinity? Skeptically, of course. And since most of the New Testament is demonstrably false, there’s not a lot to go on.
What happens when we die? Recycling. First, organic chemistry; in the long term, stardust