The Chrysalis

Recindivism

2011-08-12T00:51:00.001-04:00

Well, that was fun. If I didn't make it clear enough before, my original idea was to reuse this blog for personal posts, with posts pertaining to Fredericton kept to Stranger in Fredericton. With a lot of things that have been going on lately however, I've decided to once again keep things down to one specific blog. Thanks to everyone, past and present, who read and commented on my posts.

Disconnections

2010-03-24T00:43:00.001-04:00

I’ve often observed that whenever a significant event occurs in someone’s life, what they expect doesn’t quite live up to what they actually experience. This works both ways of course: I remember that when my friend Shauna got married, the look on her face throughout the whole experience left her feeling like the entire enterprise of marriage was something far beyond what even she - the woman for whom it seemed like marriage was what she was preparing her whole life for - was expecting.

In my case, moving to Fredericton was met by my expectations being succeeded, quite handily, in ways both positive and negative. For the positive side of things, I was expecting, to some extent, the people I’d encounter to be quite friendly, and indeed, some of the most friendliest and open people I’ve ever met in my life have been the friends and acquaintances that I’ve made here. On the other hand, I’ve come across a lot of interpersonal issues that have left me, for lack of a better word, vexed.

When I lived in Toronto, I thought nothing of the relationships I had with people of the opposite sex. I naturally gravitated toward them, towards the fact that I could have actual conversations with the girls in my life, as opposed to many of the guys I’d befriended who seemed to talk about things I’d thought of as puerile and banal. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t come across as the most “masculine” person around, and I make no pretensions as to what I think of manliness and my own sexuality. Suffice to say, with girls I developed a sense that I didn’t have to go around waving my penis (intellectually or otherwise) around to show that I was someone worth hanging around, and I didn’t have to brag or lie about my said member’s size or length to show that I was someone of value and merit in someone’s life.

I think one of the first things that I came across was an attitude towards relationships between men and women that were a complete 180 to what I was used to. Now, I had to brag. I had to drop the pretensions and act and feel like I was someone which I wasn’t.

A case in point: I learned some time ago that someone I knew was uncertain as to my sexuality. I’ve never had an issue with where my preferences lay (and in fact, one of my great stumbling blocks with respect to sin is that my preferences are too strong for my own good), but between how I displayed that and how some people saw it was a disconnection. Sadly, as what happens all too often, disconnections were followed up not with a desire for dialogue, but a set of assumptions which left me feeling emasculated and divorced from the people around me. I’ve thankfully had the experience to not dwell too deeply on that (er, much), and to at least focus on that separation in a positive way - a way to know what I shouldn’t do as opposed to what I should do when faced with people who defy common expectations. If I may be allowed, I think I should be permitted to feel just a tad incensed that, on top of the emotional work I’ve had to do to try to “fit in” with the lay of local culture and practice, I’ve had to also work to break out of the assumptions and expectations suddenly laid upon me. The shortest path between two places may be a straight line, but sometimes, that line can feel like it’s as long as infinity.

Full Circle

2009-09-09T11:11:00.002-04:00

The past is a dangerous thing to think about, especially in times of crisis. While looking to the past is always important for the potential wealth of lessons to be mined, it also tempts the mind to retreat back into an inner shell of deluded visions hazily thought of as "the way things were". But history is only as good as the person reconstructing it.

For example, I can think back to a definite time in my life where I knew there were people in whom I was confident I could trust my life, and my most important thoughts and feelings. In this time, I remember that I was confident in who I was, and what I had accomplished. I could look at the sum total of what I was doing and say, yes, I did this, and I can be proud of that.

And right now, I feel like I haven't any of that at all.

Of course, if you went back in a time machine, you'd notice that things wouldn't be quite so rosy as I'd thought, and if you'd followed me around you would have seen me at some of the worst points in my life - my little disaster with Catherine at VCF for instance, the failed 2nd year Calculus mid-term with my classmate rubbing said failure in my face, my angry blow-ups against Sidrah and Katherine. And yet, all of that gets washed away in the wave of even more times of sadness: the loss of a father, of a lover, and all of the things that come with such loss.

It strikes me that maybe, all of this sadness will get washed away with something even worse in my future, and I'll sit somewhere, thinking, "Wow, I wish I were back in Fredericton again..." when the little joke in all of that is that in the end, my net level of lonliness and isolation won't be any higher than it would have been when I was in Fredericton, which wouldn't have been any higher than it would have been when I was in Toronto. It is all ultimately, up to our perception. So I find myself struggling to find some piece of tangible evidence that yes, things were better in the past, compared to how shitty things seem now. When all you have is the shifting vagrancy of memory though, sorting out the fact from the romanticized myth becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, and any exercise to converge towards the truth becomes an asymptotic curve where you get closer and closer towards fact, but in the end, you never, ever truly attain it. Like the limit of a function.

Limits of functions however, are important components of the equations in which they serve. They contribute to a greater solution. Our exercises in futility, be they material or mnemonic, may immediately lead us nowhere, but for the sake of our sanity we must remember that they are another step towards something better.

Coda

2006-12-09T21:55:00.000-05:00

As inquiring individuals may or may not have discovered, I've decided to move on with my blogging - in a metaphorical sense, after a prolonged period of time as a pupa, the larvae has transformed into the moth; and knowing the luck that most Lepidoptera seem to have in my experience, this moth will most likely end up gassed to death in an overly eager Entomology student's Kill Jar. Yes, friends, I have moved on, from my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto to a Masters program at the University of New Brunswick.

Certain people will no doubt be thrilled to see me flailing about in a wholly new cultural context, far removed from the epicenter of Canada that I usually call "Toronto". Others (and I can actually name names here) will be quite disappointed to know that my posts will be, and have been, just as much focused on relationships, religion, and my nose-diving (yet valiant) attempts to do a good job at both, as they were before...to which I have to respond, in sterotypical, selfish, yet defiant emo-laden fashion, with middle-fingers eagerly flipped and invectives eagerly spewed.

As I've posted to my earlier haunt on LiveJournal, interested parties will know how to find me.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

2006-08-10T09:31:00.000-04:00

One of the unexpected benefits of being a youth of the Internet Age is the ability to look at how time and again the corporate suits seem to think that the Internet is something which can be co-opted, controlled, coralled, and otherwise bent to suit their whims. The popular media seems to be replete with examples of how there's this apparent perception that all a company needs to do is to sprout a website with pastel colours and fancy designs to be "cool", or failing that, some cryptic ad campaign with a URL composed of nothing but oddly oblique symbols or sentences or phrases which may or may not have anything to do with the product or service that they're selling. We're jaded to things like that now. We lived through the hype and promise of the Dot-Com Bubble, and we're living right now in the hype and promise of "Web 2.0".

But of course once in a while a company throws us jaded netizens a curveball by doing that is so completely and ludicrously over the top that it's simply hard to believe it's true.

Right now, that company is Wal-Mart.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

Wal-Mart just recently launched a new website known as The HUB, and ostensibly, it's a "social networking" site (which is incidentally light on the "social" and completely non-existant on the "networking"). It's supposed to ape MySpace, apparently.

Take a look at one such user's account and then gauge the reaction by one young girl who was polled about this: "Some of the kids looked like they were trying to be supercool, but they weren't at all, and they were just being kind of weird," she said. "Are these real kids?"

And check out the video of the perky Asian "tween" linked on the front page:

Shopping will be my number ONE hobby this fall. I am going to be the most fashionable teen at school! I'll be on the lookout for the latest fashions. From leggings to layers, to boots and flats, big belts, and headbands! I'll be looking for it all! Layering is SO IN right now. Hobo bags are also in style. OH! And big sunglasses! WHOO!! I don't know where to stop! With all of the new clothes I'll be getting, the kids at school will be begging me for fashion tips!

And I feel fine

At the same time I can't help but wonder if today's marketing wizards and boardroom executives just haven't learned the number one rule of marketing: understand your target market. Understanding your target market isn't about setting up some false veneer of a social blogging website with a me-too façade. It means actually getting involved with them and understanding why they make the choices they make. And all of the hip and trendy websites with blog posts of questionable veracity and obviously scripted "reality videos" isn't going to change that.

But at the same time, I think about what I see in today's youth when I'm out there, and I can't help but wonder if in fact that's what they've done. Are today's kids really that shallow and materialistic? I've seen middle schoolers toting around iPods, PSPs and cell phones. Parents are now buying these kids thousand-dollar laptops for school when I'm sure it should be plain as day that an old fashioned notebook and pencil would do. For every youth I've seen who chooses to fight the establishment there seem to be a veritable legion of them who flee to the comfort of the things they buy. And yet, there they are. And I suspect, there are more of them than there were when I was their age. I can find some comfort in that, that despite all of the noise there are people out there who get the message. I think that as long as at least someone out there recognizes the monumental shame at the heart of marketing campaigns like Wal-Mart's, there is still something left for me to believe in amongst our youth.

Can't Get There From Here

2006-07-31T00:48:00.000-04:00

In Evolutionary Biology, distinctions can be made between traits that are plastic (i.e. have the capacity for short-term, reversible change) and traits that are fixed (i.e. do not change, or if they do change, do so in an irreversible fashion). Plants for instance, may be able to change their growth habit in very different ways depending on where and/or when they germinate and grow. And yet, biologically speaking, they may be the same species, or genetically even the same individual. A plant grown in shade may change its growth form to maximize available light absorption (by increasing leaf surface area), and when transplanted into open sun may change in the opposite way, reducing surface area to avoid damage from overexcitation of its photosynthetic machinery.

Some traits however, are not so easily mutable. Take pentadactyly, for example. As long as 360 million years ago, the earliest tetrapods (animals with four limbs) had as many as eight "fingers" (or toes). We now known that the five-finger/toe arrangement we see throughout the animal kingdom first appeared 340 million years ago. For 340 million years we've seen tetrapods with, more or less, five fingers and toes. Some traits are so deeply ingrained into the developmental plan that any evolutionary change which doesn't have an immediate penalty or may have a positive effect is fixed.

I've been there I know the way

When I was young, my dad yelled at my mother and I a great deal. There's a great deal of psychology and history behind it all but to make a long story short, he was frustrated with the turns his life had taken, and that left him with an exceedingly short fuse. He had little time, patience, or tolerance for people or things that didn't agree with him or go his way.

I didn't have any means to fight back - any uprising was seen as an immediate excuse to increase the severity with which my father would try to enforce his will. He demanded that I show only happiness around him - anything less was forbidden. The fact that he used it to feed his Martyrdom Complex was the icing on the cake. So I trained myself to completely internalize all of the hatred, and anger and frustration and animosity I built up for myself over the years. I pushed it down, compacted it, distilled it, poured into a little botttle and left it in a dusty corner of my subconscious where I'd hopefully forget about it. Of course, the bottles would pile up, cracks in the glass from the contents inside would occur and an explosion would result, necessitating a release. But better to do it in all in one shot, I thought, than to continually subject myself and those around me to a continual, prolonged misery.

I don't remember when I started doing this - I must have been maybe 8 or 9 or so, sometime between the point where I vomited all over the dining table when I force fed myself in terror over what my parents would do to me if I didn't finish my supper and when I first started cutting myself (only very occasionally mind you, but it was still nevertheless deliberate). But somewhere long long ago in the past, I adopted this strategy to deal with the times I was sad and angry with my friends. In a way, it wasn't very different. Like my dad, some of my friends had ended up developing an idea that I could only be happy around them and never be anything less. Or, they had an image of who I was and looked down on me for not living up to that ideal. And so I further refused to talk about whatever it was that bothered me about someone or something someone had said or done.

Around 15 years later I still find myself stuck in old habits. The silent building up of an acute sense of rage and anger to the point where I would explode in momentary bursts of omnidirectional vitriol. It isn't a sustainable strategy - some day I'll have to make that evolutionary leap to something that works better. But like many evolutionary changes, that leap is really only a series of very small baby steps aggregated together over a very long period of time. As in biological evolution, in the course of human experience, that kind of change doesn't happen in the blink of an eye. The change is ongoing, unceasing. Like that open source project you may have read about on slashdot, our version numbers seem to be increasing in ever smaller steps - from version 0.98 to 0.98.1, to 0.98.2. Looking at how human personalities grown and change with time, human beings are always perpetually works in progress. And I realize now, I'm no different.

Got to find a reason/A reason things went wrong...

2006-07-24T13:56:00.000-04:00

Never start no static/I just get it off my chest

Things are starting to get to a point where the pool of people I know with whom I can spend more than five minutes without getting grossly pissed off by them is growing smaller and smaller by the day; in the meantime, the block function in Adium is getting a serious workout. Unfortunately, Adium doesn't neatly organize all of my contacts who are blocked into a separate list the way Fire does. I've heard that Adium's upcoming 1.0 release is supposed to fix that though.

I've always been a stickler for classification and organization - chalk it up to being ~~indoctrinated~~ trained in the biological sciences. From my training and through my astute observations, I've been able to group the people in my life into various categories. Taxonomically speaking, I've used personality traits as my characters; maybe when I get around to it, I'll draw up a suitable tree.

It all comes back to you you're gonna get what you deserve/Try and test that you're bound to get served

Hence, this little running tally that I've made up in my head, in the hopes that maybe I'll learn from this little Rogue's Gallery I've assembled in my life - maybe I'll learn to avoid more people like these in the future, and keep them from getting their hooks into my life before it's too late. And so, here I present the first edition of the Ctenuchid's Personal Catalogue of Obnoxious People:

1) Arrogantus maximus - yes, dear, you have an opinion, and yes dear, you're entitled to it. But no, you're not entitled to berate and beat down people who disagree with you. And no, you're not entitled to yell and scream at me as if you seem to be right and I seem to be wrong without any regard whatsoever for what I have to say. Believe it or not, you don't know everything about everything, and while I'm sure you enjoy seeing me entertain your endless screeds with the nodding of my head...deep down inside, I'm not laughing with you, I'm laughing at you.

2) Expectus toomuchus - God knows I try to be a good person. I really do. But for some reason which I can't for the life of me ascertain and/or fathom, you seem to hold me to some insanely high standard of perfection to which I can't possibly live up to. And I think you know it. Newsflash: I make mistakes just like everyone else. Just like you. I tried to be patient with you when you did things I didn't like - I think it's only fair I be treated the same way.

3) Hypocritica doublestandardia - "This uniquely pernicious class of individual is usually characterized by a highly defensive reaction which appears to be evolutionarily optimized to deal maximum damage to individuals of the genus Ctenucha. The reason for this is unknown. The defensive reaction is known to be grossly disproportionately large compared to a stimulus which may be relatively benign in nature..."

- of course, you know I saved the best for last. What else can I say about someone who routinely twists my own words against me to mean the exact opposite of what I intended to say in the first place? And this of course, conveniently feeds your Martyrdom Complex which consistently puts you in the position of innocent victim and me in the position of vile evildoer. Go ahead, ask me another question, when you know that whatever I say, it'll be the wrong answer in your book, and I'll be in the wrong for answering it no matter what my answer is. If I give you the answer x you'll chastise me for it not being y. And when I give the answer y you'll say how I'm wrong for it because it's too much like x. Since when is friendship all about being part of an ego-stroking circle-jerk? That's more than just unfair. It's greedy and selfish.

3.1) subspecies Preferentia againstmeitia - this unique beast (the result of a potential hybridization event between the above and E. toomuchus) thinks it's perfectly fine for their friends to behave as badly as they want to, as poorly as they want to, and, yet, when presented with a hint of human imperfection from me, immediately leap down my throat telling me what an awful of horrible person I am, shoving my own mistakes down my throat like so much vomit at the dinner table. Never mind how badly their other friends have treated them. Do I get the benefit of the doubt like they do? How about a "Get Out of Jail Free" pass? Oh no. Naturally no. Of course, no.

And so gentle reader, thus endeth the lesson. Tune in next time when I update the Personal Catalogue to include university administration and faculty...

Requiem for an Entomologist

2006-07-16T09:29:00.000-04:00

Lake Opeongo, Summer 2005

I spent a lot of time ruminating on this. I was going to type out this long philosophical post on the glories and wonder of field work, and how Mike was someone who showed me that, and gave me so much because of it. But it's all just...well. Right now it just feels so fake and plastic, and it wouldn't be fair to him.

So all I'll say is this: God bless you Mike. And thank you, for everything.

Fishgut Bay, searching for water scorpions, Summer 2005

EDIT: I apologize if I lost anyone with this post - Mike Spironello was my TA for the third year entomology course which I took late last summer in 2005. Not only did I get to go back to Harkness (see the link in the sidebar) - but I got to experience more of Algonquin Park. Really one of the high points of the year.

What always just blew me away about Mike was how he fit my ideal image of a grad student to a "T" - someone who just breezed through life in a wholly nonchalant way, and yet in the snap of a finger could look at an insect and recite on command an almost encyclopedic amount of knowledge about it. A razor sharp mind whose sense of fun and enjoyment of life was something I'd never seen before.

More information on what happened can be gleaned by going to the link in the title, and I suggest you at least take a small glance to get to know him better.

The pictures are from the Flickr page of my friend and fellow entomological colleague, Yasser Habib (Later resized on Photobucket to fit the window).

Christian Video Games!

2006-05-31T12:12:00.000-04:00

(Crossposted to SNOG!, but I just couldn't pass up an opportunity to post it here too.)

Original story here...

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice...

...This game immerses children in present-day New York City -- 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).

Is this paramilitary mission simulator for children anything other than prejudice and bigotry using religion as an organizing tool to get people in a violent frame of mind? The dialogue includes people saying, "Praise the Lord," as they blow infidels away.

Boo-yah, time to give those goddam Catholics their just deserts! Yeah, I can't wait to load up this game and...

...oh wait...

The Blogger's Dilemma

2006-05-22T13:54:00.000-04:00

Come out of things unsaid, shoot an apple off my head

There once was a time when the term "blog" hadn't yet entered into the lexicon of the Internet. There were sites like Diary-X, Digital Expressions, xanga, and of course, LiveJournal. You couldn't really define what these places were in as much as they weren't places you could think of in terms of broad, sweeping generalizations. Some of them were just places where people would just keep a diary of the ordinary events of their everyday lives; some mundane ("...went to the mall with such-and-such today, and saw a really nice [insert item here]"), some...not so mundane ("I found out today that I'm pregnant. How will I tell my parents?"). But regardless of the gravity of what they were saying, there was a total lacking of any general formality with these things. People just posted up whatever they felt like posting, whether it was a random rambling about a boy they met, brooding reflections about dismal romantic prospects (or the total lack thereof), or, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, was an act of "opening up your window and making love to the world".

Confusion that never stops, the closing walls and the ticking clocks

Now of course, things are much different. People now talk about the "Blogosphere" in much the same way that people talked about the World Wide Web itself more than ten years ago: a vast network of people, directly or directly connected, all expressing disparate opinions, thoughts, feelings, words, ideas, and yet united by this common thread such that a resonating event would cascade throughout its members. The "what" of the reaction would be different, but the "how" and the "why" would be the same, regardless of who you were, were you were, or why you were there. It's commonality on an unprecedented scale.

And among it all, we now have bloggers who are professional bloggers...bloggers who are corporate shills...bloggers who need nothing but a soapbox to stand on. Amongst all of the new functions that a blog has come to fulfill, there seems to be a general black hole in the middle of it all, a black hole which I think has been growing ever since the explosion of the blogging phenomenon: what is the meaning of a blog?

Gonna come back and take you home/I could not stop, that you now know

A late night discussion with Renee reinforced a point she made in passing with a comment she left a while ago. Among all of the things I write about: science, religion, society...why don't I write about myself? As if somehow, I'd lost all of the meaning of what the spirit of a blog should be, that amongst my musings, I'd lost sight of the proper gestalt of blogging.

If you go back to my original place on LiveJournal, which I'll unabashedly say I still leave up only for the sake of accessing the blogs of Jennie, Renee, Karen, Naomi and LFyda, you'll see a lot of posts where I did focus on myself. And just what did I focus on?

1) Problems with girls
2) Problems with girls
3) Problems with girls

Now of course, the nature and context of those problems don't really matter; what does matter is that I'd almost invariably whine about what X said or did to Y. And it would get to a point where it was somewhat formulaic. I'd have an issue with someone, it would really sadden me, depress me, or otherwise, piss the hell out of me, I'd blog about it, there'd be some fallout from it, and I'd end up apologizing profusely. This routine wasn't so clear in some posts, but it was definitely explicit in others. And I couldn't stop. It was what I knew, and I didn't know it could be any other way. I needed an outlet, and my creative writing was stagnating, and it wasn't like I could call up Katherine and bitch and moan about my life to her for the umpteenth time.

Which leads me to my fundamental question, which I asked Renee herself the other night. At what point does a blog turn from a means of self-expression to a means of self-indulgence?

Singing come out upon my seas/Cursed missed opportunities

I've come to know and learn a lot about blogging in my time on the Internet. I've learned that no matter how anonymous or cryptic you think you are, there's always someone watching you who will almost invariably take offence at whatever you have to say, be it something political or something personal. And it should be self-evident, I know, but like my earlier little rant on labelling people, sometimes things are so painfully obvious that we don't know it's there until reality decides to ultimately clue us in.

I tried my hand at self-expression, and plainly speaking, I realized that self-expression all too easily leads to self-indulgence. Perhaps ranting on and on about the failings of my personal life doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it presents a bad face, of myself not only to the people I know but to the people I don't know. Better to offend someone based on an insightful and semi-intelligent view on politics, religion and society than to offend someone by making them think I'm Yet Another Emo Kid.

Am I part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

And that's what I mean by "self-indulgence". The realization that you could all too easily turn a post asking for advice on a personal problem into an emotional and verbal Vomitorium. I don't like people who emotionally barf all over others at the slightest chance as much as the next guy (and admittedly, I realize I've been guilty of that particular sin more times than I can count), so it's only fair to expect myself to not do that. In fact, it's only fair to hold myself to a higher standard - a standard that states that there's more to me than the sum total of my depression, bitterness and loneliness, and the disappointment I have in myself. That there actually is something of value swimming around in the thick soup of grey matter in my head. Because ultimately, who really cares about that? in the greater scheme of things, I've seen that my own problems are really quite petty compared to those of others. And compared to the problems out in the world in general, they're infinitesimally insignificant.

And that ultimately may be the point. Perhaps the meaning of the blog has changed to the point where it no longer means what it was thought to mean. It has for me at least. Perhaps it signals more of a regression on my part through a renewed focus on the internalization of my problems; a harmful strategy, to be sure. But this much I know for sure: it's nothing that I know that anyone else around me can complain about. I think that having one less thing in my life to have my friends complain about counts for something, at least.

Backpedalling (Or: The Trouble with Labels)

2006-05-22T02:07:00.000-04:00

I've come to realize lately how problematic (and yet how easy it is) to label people. And that sort of thing is something you'd think would be terribly self-evident, and yet it's something so patently obvious that you never really see or understand it even though it frequently stares you right in the face. It's embarassing that way, but doubly so because to face it means that you have to face a very unpleasant reality evident not only in other people, but in yourself as well.

When Stereotypes Attack

What better example to draw from but the Evolution/Creationism issue? Here you see labels tossed at people from both sides. "Darwinians" and "Materialists" and "Atheists" versus the "Fundies", et al. All in all, it's a lot of polemics being flung about. An awful lot of rhetoric and ego. So much so that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, there actually is someone over there on the other side, an actual human being, not some sort of amorphous persona manifested on a website, or a caricaturized incarnation of evil.

In my travels in life, I've made some good friends who've held a lot of differing ideas from me whenever it came to social issues, religion, philosophy, politics, or science, and in talking to all of them I've all come to invariably realize that there's a great deal more to their attitudes and beliefs beyond what a simple label could ever convey. Like, take for example, the term "Creationist". Are all people who don't accept modern biology "Creationists"? Hardly: a lot of times, they reflect a lack of understanding or comprehension of biology, which isn't surprising - as I've said before, this stuff really is rocket science. It's not something you can easily compress into 15 minute sound bites.

But the point I'm trying to make is that not all "Creationists" are actually Creationists. Not all of them actually subscribe to the general mindset and belief system commonly associated with actual Creationists (and I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself what that mindset and belief system are). Some of them actually have...well, good intentions. Some may even be well meaning people, and it does them a tremendous disservice to slap a label on them for disagreeing with what you have to say. For some people it's well deserved, sure, but surely everyone you meet who won't agree with you can't be the evil inhumane monster that's only well represented by the minority.

"Conservative". There's another one. It's easy to correlate it with people like Fred Phelps, or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, but it personally stretches my sense of credulity that all "Conservatively-minded" people could be like that. I'm sure that Conservatism, much like Liberalism, is in fact a broad spectrum of idealologies leading to a stunning array of diversity. I'm willing to bet in fact that there are more than a few "Conservatives" out there with views not that far removed from people of more left-leaning ideals.

Doing away with labels is the first step, (and by extension the most hardest and crucial step) for any kind of meaningful dialogue and resolution of conflict between both sides of any issue.

The trouble now is, how do we deal with those for whom the labels (as we have now come to define them) are well deserved?

Tonight, I'm a Rock N' Roll Star

2006-05-01T19:32:00.000-04:00

I usually don't buy into or even read into a lot of horoscopes I come across in my daily reads because they're so wishy-washy that they'd make the Oracle at Delphi look like Peter Jennings.

However, I always love reading Rob Brezseny's Freewill Astrology featured in NOW Magazine. This one especially stuck with me:

Capricorn (December 22-January 19)

Things you DON'T particularly need right now: excuses to procrastinate; urges to retreat into hardened positions and fixate on the way things used to be; a willingness to politely tolerate control freaks; fantasies about changing the personalities of people you love. Things you DO need: a windy day, a meadow, and a dragonish kite; more raw curiosity and better questions; a slightly irrational diversion that fires up your imagination; an idiosyncratic altar in your bedroom; more gratitude for and intimacy with your muse; finger paint and five large sheets of paper so you can illustrate your life story.

*

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Write the following on a piece of red paper and keep it under your pillow. "I, [put your name here], do solemnly swear on this day [put date here] that I will devote myself for a period of seven days to learning my most important desire. No other thought will be more uppermost in my mind. No other concern will divert me from tracking down every clue that might assist me in my drive to ascertain the one experience in this world that deserves my brilliant passion above all others."

Somehow, reading that always brings a smile to my face.

The Scientist

2006-04-30T18:40:00.000-04:00

One of my best friends from school pointed out how "negative" I'd been lately. And that's something I can't deny - I only point to the many posts I've made in the past on the Religious Right, Christian Conservatives, and the Intelligent Design/Creationism movements. I don't talk about that much anymore because I think that pretty much everything you can say about all of that has pretty much been already said; all of the recent developments that have been made like the court trial in Dover aren't really anything new so much as they are just reiterations of what we've already known all along: Intelligent Design/Creationism is neither a scientific theory nor a scientific school of thought, but rather a socio-political movement designed to forward a Neoconservative Right-Wing agenda heavily based in Christian Fundamentalism.

This can all be proven by looking at what they say or do, and comparing it with - well, reality in general. However, when all is said and done though, there's one question left to be asked. Why care?

Nobody said it was easy

I suppose it could be easy to just say, "Well, these people are obviously crackpots; no one takes them seriously and the people who do are just a marginal part of society anyway.", and use that as an excuse to be blissfully apathetic to the whole situation. That'd be easier, wouldn't it? No more having to rant and rail about Creationism this or ID that.

It's a valid point; it's a wrong point, but it's nevertheless valid. It's wrong when you look at just how popular and pervasive the mindset is in the US which encourages a hostile attitude towards science (not the least of which being evolutionary biology). There's no mistaking that Christianity is the de facto majority religion in the United States. And the segement of that religion which is the most powerful is the most sympathetic and agressive element in forwarding a distinctly anti-science agenda. Case in point: George Deutsch, A George W. Bush appointee who was involved in the censure of scientists over Global Warming, among other things.

Believe it or not though, that isn't what does it for me.

No one ever said it would be this hard

For all of the polemics that Creationists and ID advocates toss around, terms like "honesty", "truth", and "atheist" are tossed around a lot. Modern science (and by extension, scientists) are dishonest, and biased against the Truth (note the big T) in their blatantly materialist, atheistic position. In short, scientists are people deeply immersed in secularist, materialist, atheistic thought who are at best blissfully ignorant about the Truth of Creationism, and at worst are wicked intellectual criminals who delude people through lies and deceit into thinking that God didn't create them in Six Days.

Coupled with that is the invariable implication that they themselves are far more qualified and knowledgable to study biology and science than the people who have spent their entire lives devoted to their fields of research - regardless of their intellectual background. Philip Johnson, "Father" of the ID movement is a lawyer, for example. William Dembski is a mathematician (though some would argue that calling him that is being overly charitable). Look at the credentials of many Creationists or IDists and you'll notice a pattern: hardly any have a rigorous, reputable, and solid foundation in the natural sciences.

Science is hard. And I don't mean school and classes hard - I mean...it's hard work to actually do it. Two research projects and two summers of field work have thoroughly convinced me of that. There's a lot of blood, sweat and tears that go into a paper that may be only five pages long and may end up forgotten to history in a library. But it's the journey along the way to get to that paper that matters.

If you look at the history of science, you see that also rings true of past scientific accomplishments. Looking at the path modern science has taken, you really can't get past the fact that science is a long, arduous process involving a great deal of effort and sacrifice.

The attitude of the people attacking science simply spits in the face of the extraordinary effort that people have made to further our understanding of the natural world. It is a statement that the knowledge and benefit that science and biology have given to society is not only meaningless, but actually evil in its agnosticism. It never came from the Bible, so therefore it must be wrong.

Oh take me back to the start

I feel passionate about this because I care. Because fundamentally, at my very core, I feel that it is important that we study and protect our natural resources before they are destroyed by our own greed.

I've seen for myself with my own eyes how beautiful and wonderous nature is, and how much it needs to be protected and studied before it is lost forever. It just disgusts me than one person's view of religion could compel them to disregard that as "atheistic" nonsense. After all, we shouldn't focus on conserving the rainforest...we should be focusing on converting the people living in the forest to Christianity! No, we shouldn't care about effective scientific study of our world, because it's not Biblical!

I have a right to be upset. I have a right to be angry and sad, and depressed and bitter because I have to fight people who are so set in their own self-important arrogance to even bother to notice that the world is dying around them. As long as they can put in another notch on the scorecard they give to their vision of God, it's all good for them.

I have a right to be angry. And no one can take that away from me.

The Canadian Universities Lightbulb Joke

2006-04-22T19:47:00.000-04:00

For some reason, back in high school I used to get this email as a forward practically every week from some random person on my MSN, AIM or ICQ list who I probably only talked to once in my entire life. It's still quite funny after all these years, and it shocks me that practically no one I know has heard of it, given how often it was passed around back when I was in OAC. Anyway, without further ado...

How many Ryerson students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Trick question; Ryerson isn't a real university.

How many Lakehead students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* None, Thunder Bay doesn't have electricity.

How many University of Toronto students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Two, one to change the lightbulb and one to crack under the pressure.

How many Algonquin students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Only one, but he gets six credits for it.

How many Laurentian students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* None, Sudbury looks better in the dark.

How many Queen's students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* One, he holds the bulb and the world revolves around him.

How many Waterloo students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Five, one to design a nuclear-powered one that never needs changing, one to figure out how to power the rest of Waterloo using that nuked lightbulb, two to install it and one to write the computer program.

How many Western students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Five, one to change the lightbulb and four to find the perfect Tommy Hilfiger/L.L. Bean/Eddie Bauer outfit to wear for the occasion.

How many McMaster students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Two, one to change the bulb and the other to say loudly how he did as well as any Queen's student.

How many Windsor students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Two, one to change the bulb and one to complain about how, if they were at a better school, the lightbulb wouldn't go out.

How many McGill students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* One, but she can't do it on Thursday, Friday or Saturday night.

How many University of Calgary students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Seven, one to change the bulb and six to throw a party because he didn't screw it in upside down this time.

How many University of Alberta students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Two, one to change it and the other to boast how it was so "Indisputably Recognized" around the world.

How many Guelph students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Seven, one to screw it in and 6 to figure out how to power it on manure.

How many Mt. Allison students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Five, one to do it and 4 to be in the Macleans photo of it.

How many University of Victoria students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* None, lava lamps don't burn out man!

How many UBC students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Four, one to do it and three to translate the instructions.

How many University of Saskatchewan students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* One, there's nobody else around to do it.

How many Laurier students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Five, they make it campus affair.

How many University of Manitoba students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* There's a university in Manitoba?

How many York University students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Three, one to take directions from the science student, the science student, and one to philosophize about life as a lightbulb.

How many University of Ottawa students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* One, (s)he screws everything, why not a lightbulb?

How many Carleton University students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* Two, one to change the bulb and one to brag about how they did it faster than the Ottawa U students did it.

How many Laval students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* One, but she would insist that the way she did it was distinct.

How many United States University/College students does it take to change a lightbulb?
* That depends; how much is the athletic scholarship worth?

In which I bravely decide to weigh in on the timeless Abortion issue (or: Procrastination Unlimited)

2006-04-07T00:43:00.000-04:00

Quebec vs. Canada. Israel vs. Palestine. Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice. Mac vs. PC. All timeless struggles between two diametrically opposed sides, both self-righteously validating, inflexible, both simply irreconcilable. (Well, except for the last one, I guess.)

I walked by Sidney Smith hall, the main Faculty of Arts and Sciences building to see the makings of yet another interesting day in the life of U of T. At the far side of the long open space in front of what is now the new student space, large placards mounted on poles in a horseshoe arrangement. Closer to the main entrance, a table manned by bright-eyed and rather friendly looking kids no older than me, wearing pink buttons. The placards in the back paint a very ominous picture, comparing abortion to animal rights abuses, etc. And that's when it clicked. Ah ha, these are the guys who've been making waves comparing abortion to the Holocaust. And I say "guys" in a very literal sense; as I remarked to some of my fellow classmates in BIO 328, I found it...interesting that all of the people manning the anti-abortion booth were, all, well...male. The Pro-Choice table on the other hand, had around two girls (I know one was at the booth) present...it's one of those "things that make you go hmmmm..."

I know I'm right, because you know I'm right

I had a really nice conversation with a girl in my class about the whole thing who's very opinionated about...well...a lot of things, I think. Anyway, she said a lot of things about her justification for approaching people who don't agree with her, but what really stuck to me was just how assured she was of the correctness of her position. No, I wouldn't call it arrogance, because with the badge of "arrogance" comes the connotation of condescension, and her expression of her correctness came in a very matter-of-fact style of expression, with no malice implied.

I'm not mentioning this because I think ill of the way she views discussions...far from it in fact, but talking to this girl really brought up in my mind the importance of cross-talk between two sides of any bitter conflict.

If debating you is wrong, I don't wanna be right

I'm what you would consider a fence-sitter in the whole abortion thing. I think that abortion is simply inexcusable as a "lifestyle choice", an easy way out of a situation that perhaps, could have been avoided. (I was going to list a hypothetical example, but I decided not to because I really don't want to sound judgemental on the whole "premarital sex/dating thing", and besides I think it's fairly intuitive as to what I'm talking about.) On the other hand, there are a lot of extenuating circumstances in which abortion may be not only understandable or allowable, but even justifiable: rape, incest, and life-threatening medical situations where the mother or the child's life may be at stake.

Another potential situation where I think abortion should be allowable is for children with potentially debilitating and highly destructive birth or genetic conditions. Tay-Sachs Disease comes to mind, as my Classics mentor in high school had a daughter with Tay-Sachs. Mothers with drug or alcohol addictions also count.

Unfortunately, this position doesn't hold much water, I'm afraid, with either side of the debate. To one side, I'm still an atheistic feminist baby-eater...to others, I'd probably be just another man who thinks they know better than a woman about what a woman should do with her body.

Having been blessed with a set of friends in my life that have been grossly biased towards the feminine persuation, and having been raised a devout Roman Catholic, I'd like to think that I understand what both sides are saying. And I think that's important, because, as I said to this girl's friend in class, there is always some truth and meaning to what The Other Side is saying in a debate (yes, this includes you, Creationists/Intelligent Design-ists). Yes, I think that it's just disgusting for a man to think that they know better than a woman about how they should think of, and look at their own body. I mean, hell, I don't have a vagina*, and my penis doesn't bleed every X number of weeks. Oh yeah, and I don't have to carry and pop out a screaming mass of humanoid out of my rear end. I don't know anything about being female...and I don't profess to know.

On the other hand, I've met people who would have no problem having sex and aborting the baby if it posed a "threat" to their future plans in life. And to me that just seems wrong. People seem to forget over and over that actions have consequences, and what makes humans truly human in this context is our understading that we need to take responsibility for what we do in life. A child is a tremendous responsibility, one which should never be trivialized or taken lightly.

This is the part where I start to sound like an 1980s ABC Afterschool Special

I think the solution to all of this is quite simple, and doesn't involve any of the vitriolic bile-filled conflict: increased funding and support for effective, no-nonsense sex education. Make it mandatory even in Catholic and private schools. They too have to abide by Province-wide standards, don't they? Why not make it part of that? Teaching students about sex empowers them to make informed choices about sex. This isn't like giving clean needles to crack addicts...this is like telling people to do research on candidates during an election before they vote. Knowledge is power. And empowerment is critical in making an informed choice. If two people decide to sleep together, they'll know what they're getting themselves into. I don't think it'll make the issue of abortions go away, but it'll help towards some resolution at least.

But it isn't going to work until both sides are willing to do some talking. And of course, there's the rub. How do you get them to talk?

I don't have an answer to that, but I will say that there is a time to stand your ground, dig your heels in, and revel in the incontrovertible righteousness of your position, and there's a time to say that something has to change; that obviously open warfare between two immovable sides is totally futile. Both sides can be both right and wrong. For one side to win, the other side doesn't have to lose.

*PS: Damn you Renay for getting me so used to saying the word "vagina" with a straight face. If only you know how much trouble that's gotten me into with people...

PPS: Ang and Kavitha - the addendum with your posts to the first Carnival of the Snoggers is coming...seriously.

Carnival of the Snoggers: #1

2006-03-15T01:03:00.000-05:00

Okay, this marks the inagural edition of Carnval of the Snoggers, a Blog Carnival held among members of the illustrious SNOG! message board. If you're not familiar with the way a Blog Carnival works, it's essentially a group of bloggers who come together to post on their blog about a common topic, or write posts to their blog along a common theme. One blogger, appointed the host, acts as a hub hosting links to all of the sites in a magazine-like format, with some optional wry commentary on the various posts tossed in for good measure. A great example is Carnival of the Godless.

Okay, so the call for submissions was er...found somewhat wanting. I've got three submissions online, and I decided to go ahead and publish with what I've got, mainly because I said I'd be publishing tonight. The "grace period" will be until tomorrow noon, EST. After that, that's all folks!

This week's topic is "Thinking Positively". How did our first round of submissions go? Let's see...

Live and On The Air...

As Katherine can attest, I have no love lost for Xanga users, but our first two submissions gave it their best. And besides, Xanga users can't be all bad, right?

• x_Perfectly_x3_Flawed_x says that we really need to stop giving a damn about acting and thinking positively...and just...er...think positively...

So you may ask yourself "Gawsh, how in the world can I get back to the positive self that I used to be?" My solution is this: Don't focus on trying to thinking postively, in fact, don't even focus on not thinking negatively...don't focus at all. Take the time to be by yourself and simply *inhale* relaaaax *exhale*. Sounds simple, right? Eh, it usually is.

Sometimes the most complex of problems can be solved with the most simplest of solutions. I mean, we usually drown ourselves in a well of constant self-analysis. Well, I do at least. How often does it occur to us to simply just, well, relax and take a deep breath? Not often enough, I imagine.

• Citarra has a somewhat different outlook on things...

People can just try to think positively about some of the things that they used to be so negative about. You never know what you can find out about a person if you change the way that you are thinking.

Even if you think that someone has something bad about them such as being childish, try to think that maybe thats a good thing, that you can only be a kid for so long and they are trying to grasp it and hold onto it for as long as they can. Yes, it can get annoying, but, they will most likley get over it if you give them the chance.
For some people it may be hard, but, just try. :)

I like Citarra's general message, but I really think she should have elaborated more on that. I like her "Can-Do" attitude, but I wonder if she understands how difficult it can really be for people to "Just Do It". Sometimes you meet people who drive you absolutely nuts and telling people to try to see the good in that person would probably get you reactions ranging from indignation to outright incredulity. How do you fight human nature? I'm curious to know what she has to say to that.

• Stephanie, meanwhile shows that something good can come out of being in a depressed state:

So I was frustrated, most especially with me and most especially with the hard time I was going through and the fact that no one was really paying attention. I wrote that entry to release some anger. It really helped.

But one side-effect to writing that was surprising. It seemed that writing that entry, that way with all of the emphasis that I think looks so pretty, helped cement everything in my head. Everything. Before I would tell myself, “Oh, you should think positively every day!” every one or two weeks, whenever a weblog or person or something reminded me of it. Now, I get out of my car in the mornings and the first thing I do once I’ve gotten all of my junk out of the trunk is remember to smile. I smile at my friends when I first see them. I smile at random people at school. I try not to look quite as harried in between classes, and I remind myself to really look at people.

That reminds me a lot of the general sentiment I felt when I wrote my own submission. You feel a certain sense of anger, and you turn that into a way in which you can in some small way make your life better. Even if it was just through writing. Glad to know I'm not alone.

In a way it does seem plastic, but I do sense a genuine sincerity behind it. If you're not sincere about something like that, the veneer quickly fades away, but if you in some way believe in it, it sticks. She doesn't mention how long she's tried her new habit, but it's working. That's proof enough, right?

• And of course, last but not least is my own submission, easily accessed below.

Hopefully the others will be finished soon, so I won't have to do an excessive amount of edits.

Until next time...

Fits of Madness, and On Thinking Positively

2006-03-14T23:13:00.000-05:00

I was rereading an fairly recent interview with famed Mac developer Wil Shipley on DrunkenBlog. To sum up, he's a fairly well-respected figure in Macintosh programming circles, and for good reason. He was one of the principal minds behind software powerhouse The Omni Group, and is now head of Delicious Monster, maker of the critically acclaimed Delicious Library.

One of the things that really lept out at me was this particular bit:

My discovery is that everyone I meet is broken in some way. As I've gotten to know my friends and business associates and girlfriends, I've discovered they all have some kind of problem with their emotions. And they all compensate for it in different ways, so it's hidden from other people most of the time.

Fits of Madness

There's certainly no shame in realizing that you're flawed. But we often lose sight of that. We build up massively overblown expectations of who we are and what we can do, and when we fail to meet those expectations -- as we invariably do -- we often tend to magnify our flaws, and dwell on them. And that leads to a whole variety of ways that we can deal with that. Which led me to this post on Shipley's own blog, linked to that article:

Depression is not glamorous. It's not like a movie. You don't get to get cured of it. You don't wake up one day and realize that life's tough, but there it is, so slap a smile on your face and keep on trucking. Some people have never dealt with depression, and they can't figure out how it's different from "being sad." "I've been sad! I don't whine about it! I just get over it." Yes, that's nice. Also, not the same.

Depression completely robs you of hope. You don't believe things can get better, and you don't believe anything is OK. You look around you and realize that everyone and everything you love is going to go away, sooner or later, and you don't believe anything good will replace them. Sometimes you just want to self-destruct: you get so tired of waiting for the things you love to abandon you, waiting for that shoe to drop, that you push them away pre-emptorily . Take that, you thing I love, now you can't hurt me, now I don't have to live in fear.

If I just stay in bed, and pull the covers around me; if I just unplug the phone, if I don't answer the mail, then whatever bad news is waiting for me can't get to me. If I can just sleep, and then just sleep some more, then I won't have to deal with it. Not now. I can't deal with it now. Maybe it'll go away on its own. Maybe I'll die and I won't ever have to deal with it.

I realize I'm probably overstepping my bounds since I've never been formally diagnosed with clinical depression, but I want to say that I feel that a lot of the underlying emotions that are felt by people who have to battle through this are emotions that a lot of "normal" people can relate to. Which is why I think that there's a special kinship that can be felt between the mental "haves" and "havenots" when it comes to depression. What Shipley said in his blog really resonates with me, because it reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a while ago. She told me that she just feels this overwhelming urge to just lay in bed and sleep all the time. And it seems silly to most people, perhaps, but to me, I said to myself, wow, in some perverse way it makes so much sense. When you sleep, you don't think about all of the things that are bothering you. And you don't have to do a thing about them.

On Positive Thinking

Which is the real challenge when you're trying to rationalize in your head all of things you should do keep afloat; to not just give up and let yourself be swept away by the current, caught in the undertow. For me, it's not a sense of dread over an impending and inevitable loss; it's just this constant fatigue from having to fight life or God or whomever and whatever is out there, every single step of the way. Why do things always have to be so hard? Why can't things run a little more smoothly? These are questions we ask all too often, but we never really see the meaning of them until the shit really hits the fan and we realize that what we worried about five minutes ago really didn't matter in the Grand Scheme of Things.

There's a quote I picked up a few months ago, one I ended up saving in my email .sig file:

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."
- St. Augustine of Hippo, (354-430).

I think that's one of the keys to thinking positively. A sense of anger and frustration at the the way things are. Sure, it's possible that you may not be able to change a thing, but you did something, and that something will at least go to making your life better in some way. If you're going to be executed, you'd might as well go feeling comfortable.

We often associate anger with destructive, negative tendencies, but here I think it serves a valuable, constructive purpose: a driving force that pushes us to do things we otherwise thought we couldn't do. Maybe that's one of the things we could do to help us fight depression: be more angry -- at ourselves, at the world, at others...and then use that anger to make things better. I find it almost fitting that someone could in some way find help in improving themselves with something that we think makes us worse than what we are.

I'm writing my abstract Dr. Sage, honest...

2006-03-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

I was going to continue on chronicling my single-minded quest to trick out my Mac as much as I could without going overboard with the Dremel. However, I realize that 99.999% of the people who take the time to read what I'm writing don't know half of what I'm talking about, let alone understand why I'd go to so much trouble instead of leaving well-enough alone. I'll give it a break for a while and deal with some other things I've wanted to write about.

Also, I've got a million and one things rattling around in my head. An urgent reply to a message I got from a treasured friend who I've been sadly neglecting. A possible misunderstanding with another. The Hawaiian Paper for Dr. Brooks. The Blackfly Paper for Dr. Currie. And an abstract I need to write for a course that I want to email to my TA tomorrow morning. I wake up in the morning with expectations of what I'm going to do and what I'm going to accomplish. And a lot of times I fall woefully short. So is the error I'm making one of insufficient effort? Or just overly-ambitious goals?

There's a point to all of this rambling, really

I saw something in today's Metro which ended up making headlines at Slashdot. Apparently, Wal-Mart's recruited bloggers to help whitewash its corporate image. Which is of course, what's happened often in the print and online media for ages now, with companies, nations, and many other institutions, both public and private. So why the outrage?

I think it's because we've come to expect the blogosphere as the Great Equalizer, in a way. Before, it was The Internet as a whole that was considered to be the Great Equalizer, but that was really before it became less of a democratic forum and more of the great untamed virtual wilderness that the military-industrial complex could exploit. I mean, we've all seen with our very own eyes how commercialized the online experience has become. And we've all heard alarmist reports of "cyber-terrorism", alongside reports of how the US military wants to do to the internet what it's been trying to do to space since Reagan's "Star Wars" of the 1980's: "weaponize" it. (Is that even a word?)

Blogging may be the last great expression of free speech which is true to the phrase's very nature. You all heard the pundits talking about what effect the Blogosphere could have on the election, both in Canada and in the US. Your virtual soapbox has a virtually unlimited audience. This is communication at its very finest.

Great Expectations

Which brings me to my original point. We've built up our expectations of "the blog" and "the blogger" as this last frontier for freedom of speech and freedom of oppression. When in fact, the "blog" is just some amorphous entity that doesn't really have any meaning or purpose aside from the intent that the writer has when he or she writes in it. I mean, people recently have been raving about blogs like its some new phenomenon. But sites like Digital Expressions, Diary-X and LiveJournal have been around for years and years now, before anyone ever even thought of the trendy word "blog". And what were a lot of these people blogging about? Not politics, or computers, that's for sure. Just a lot of mundane, semi-interesting things about themselves, their friends, and their daily lives. And that's not really a bad thing or a good thing, it's just the way it is. Nothing profound in it at all. If the "origin" (if you could call it that) of the "blog" were teens and twenty-somethings just writing about the stuff in their lives, then I don't think you could expect some massive socio-political revolution to come out of it. A lot of fighting and verbal internet-drama, sure, but not some profound intent to expose the evils done in the shadows of the corridors of power.

Oh well. I think I've said enough for tonight. Speaking of expectations, I have a few to live up to, a few I should have made good on a long time ago. It's about time I changed that, starting now.

The MDD Chronicles: Part II

2006-03-02T02:30:00.000-05:00

Some people go to absolutely extraordinary lengths to cool their MDD Power Macs. I wasn't about to go crazy with the power tools on my Mac, especially since it's long out of warranty and I'm sure parts as mundane as the plastic front panel would cost me an arm and a leg (plus iI feel it'd be somewhat wrong to put two gaping holes in the top of my sleek, beautiful Mac).

Nevertheless, I love taking risks, which probably might come as a surprise to the people who usually know me to be the shy, reserved, introverted type -- which I usually am. So, with some trepidation, I decided to wade into further the world of computer modding.

After trying to scour the web for days trying to find hints on how to (non-destructively!) cool and/or quiet down my MDD, I came across Steve Smedley's homepage, where he documented a pretty cool trick which didn't look very hard.

Pop off a part of the back plastic panel of the MDD with a flat head screwdriver, and you can access the perforated metal grille below. Then, after sliding two 60 x 60 x 25 mm fans behind the processor heatsink, screw them into the grille, and pop back the panel. You now have an easy way of increasing the cooling on the typically hot heatsink.

It seemed a lot easier than two other mods I'd looked into. The first involved the use of a hard drive cooler similar to mine, retrofitted with two 60 mm fans. Problem was, I couldn't find any store, in Toronto or on the Internet, which sold the kind of hard drive cooler that he used. All of the coolers I've seen bolt directly on to the back of a hard drive; this one apparently screws into a 3.5" hard drive bay much like a hard drive itself. The second involved the mounting of 60 mm fans directly onto the processor heatsink itself. This mod involved the use of something called "Tiger Elastic Fixation", a sort of plastic rubber anti-vibration fixture. Trouble is, I couldn't find anything quite like this that was locally available; at least, nothing that would be able to fit in between the fins of my heatsink. Furthermore, it seems that there are two types of aluminum heatsink used on the MDD; the first is a type that's more traditional, with the fins broad at the base and tapering off at the tip; the one on mine is a series of thin aluminum plates stacked horizontally, so I wasn't sure if I could do this with my heatsink (the aluminum plated one). And then of course, the fact that the heatsink currently runs in excess of 40-60 degrees C; I couldn't help but shudder at the thought of melted rubber fusing itself to my heatsink.

So, Smedley's hack was the one to use. I'm a creature of habit, so having had experience with a Vantec hard drive enclosure, I decided to use a Vantec fan, from their much lauded "Steath" product line.

A lot of the shops on College Street don't seem to sell cooling parts -- at least, that's the impression you'd get if looked at the websites for all of the various computer stores on College Street. The only place I saw which seemed to have a good variety was Bigfoot Computers, a store near the corner of Jane and Dundas. After visiting several stores trying to find the vaunted Vantec Stealth fan, it seemed like this was the last place on earth that had them -- and they only had one left. I remember the experience of my first time visiting there was rather amusing; the guy eyed me nervously and with some mix of bewilderment, confusion, and suspicion. I think he thought I was going to stick him up, or dash out the door with my merchandise before I paid for it. Maybe that or he just didn't expect a brown-skinned guy to be into the whole PC-modding thing. Or maybe they just don't get a lot of foot traffic into their retail store. I mean, hey, the corner of Jane and Dundas is a far cry from the strip of College Street between Spadina and Bathurst.

Oh Snap

Anyway, I get home, a little cocksure. I mean, hey, if Smedley could put two 60 mm fans behind his heatsink to cool off his MDD with just a flat-head and Philips-head screwdriver, I could do it, right? Only, there's one problem...

The bloody fan won't fit behind the heatsink. Damn. There's just no getting around it. At least, not without damaging the heatsink. And this fan certainly wasn't cheap. I didn't go to all of the trouble I had to go to, to get the fan only to end up not using it. I had to use it somehow. Okay, what about removing the heatsink and then attaching the fan? No can do: you need to reapply thermal paste to the CPU's after you remove and before you reattach the heatsink. Which I didn't have. Plus, in a catch-22, you couldn't screw the heatsink back in without removing the 60 mm fan to gain access to the three rear heatsink screw holes. Damn. Then, remembering Jason Schraeder's MDD cooling project highlighted on MacMod, I realized that the only thing I could do to not let the fan go to waste was to just strap it to the back of my Mac with plastic wire ties.

Yeah, it looked ghetto. At least his installation was more professional, since he used machine screws. In fact, my attempt was so ghetto that I was glad that I didn't have access to a camera to document this project. The copper heatsink (the third type of heatsink commonly seen on MDDs) seems to the only common denominator among people with MDDs who easily did this hack without disassembling their motherboard. The copper heatsink, while much taller, seems to be more narrower at its base than the aluminum heatsinks, affording more clearance for the fans. Damn.

To add to the hilarity, I noticed something funny about something else I bought at Bigfoot: a set of plastic slot covers also from Vantec, ostensibly meant to cover free RAM and PCI slots to prevent dust build-up. The PCI slot covers, however, only covered up 2/3 of the actual PCI slot. Huh? I then remembered: Apple used full-length 64-bit, 33 MHz PCI slots in pretty much all of its G4 and later G3 Power Macs. Guess what the majority of PC motherboards use? Smaller, 66 Mhz PCI slots (which, according to what I've seen, can be either at 32-bits or a full 64-bits). Ah, right. This is Apple we're talking about. A company that builds its computers with as many non-standard or uncommon parts as possible, quite possibly for the sole purpose of pissing off to the fullest extent people who dare to add anything standard to their hardware. Thanks, Apple. Thank you, so very, very much...

. . .

2006-02-27T21:25:00.000-05:00

I loathe the idea of going back to school. I just think of the idea of being back in class and a wave of disgust just washes over me. I feel angry, bitter, sad, scared, all at the same time. My classes feel very cold; there's no sense of familiarity that I get. No sensation that people are there who are going to be happy to see me, no one who'd miss me when I'd be gone, no one to ask me, "Hey, where were you last class?". I took that for granted back when I had that. God how I miss it. I miss how Jeenat, Isadora and Sayma would smile when they'd see me. I wouldn't worry about being late for class; they'd have a seat saved up for me. And vice versa, of course.

It's a simple fact that there's something along the lines of a 3:1 ratio of women to men in Arts and Science at U of T. So, the majority of the people in my classes are, well, female. And I can't talk to a single one of them. And it's certainly not for lack of trying. I mean, what else are you supposed to do when you're trying to make conversation of some sort and they simply aren't interested in talking to you? What do you do? Or if you're talking to someone and all of a sudden she just completely blows you off for someone else who just came in?

I mean, God, it's not too much to ask, is it? Look, I'm not expecting to ask anyone out on a date. I'm not expecting life-long friendship. I'm not even expecting anything beyond the school year. Just some sort of chance to show that I'm not a bad person to socialize with.

I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. Numb myself with lots of cups of hot chocolate, or tea or coffee or something. Anything to dull the pain of this loneliness I'm carrying.

The MDD Chronicles: Part I

2006-02-22T15:33:00.000-05:00

The last revision of the Power Macintosh G4 was called the "Mirrored Drive Doors" G4 (or "MDD", for short), so-called because it's dual optical drive bay doors were given a sleek metallic-like mirror polish. Inside, it had the best of Apple's technology: DDR SDRAM system memory fed to dual PowerPC G4 processors through a "System Controller" chip, a system inherited from Apple's G4-based xServe.

It was in some way a sign of ingenuity and desperation on the part of Apple's hardware engineers; with the Power Mac G5 still coming, Apple had to something, anything to keep its G4-based desktop computers in line with their Intel and AMD-based equivalents. The G4's antiquated bus couldn't handle the bandwidth of the new memory, so they had to find a way to work around it. It's in many ways a symbol Apple with it's back against the wall, trying to find a way to do the best with what they had.

Anyway. Renee told me that I need to blog more about myself, so, I decided to do so, by putting up a series of posts as a chronicle of my quest for a quieter, cooler computer.

This is my computer; a June 2003 MDD Power Mac G4, the last Mac Apple ever made capable of natively booting Mac OS 9. The main distinction that this computer has from the earlier 2002 models is that, like the later 2002/2003 MDDs which couldn't boot OS 9, they sported several modifications to make you actually believe that yes, that was a Mac under your desk and not an F-16 taking off on full afterburner.

Also, they sported huge heatsinks, and an internal arrangement reflecting how Apple tried to pack as many things as they could within the confines of the G4 case. As you might imagine, With two optical drives, four hard drives, and 2 GB of RAM plus four PCI cards and a graphics card all crammed together with dual 1.25 Ghz G4 processors, things have the potential to get very hot, very quickly.

If it don't fit, don't force it...

My odyssey began with a trip to Canada Computers on College Street. Ah, College Street. A little slice of heaven for a computer geek, where you can wade into rows of computer stores owned and operated by shifty-eyed Asian families who always seemed to know a lot more about you and the stuff you were buying than they were letting on, selling a panoply of obscure and common computer stuff for suspiciously low prices.

Naively, I picked up a $15 Vantec Hard Drive cooler to use with my boot drive, expecting that somehow, some way, it would work with my system...

Errr. Yeah. I bring it home and I realize that the rear drive cage can't accomodate the height of the drive with the hard drive cooler screwed on its bottom. It's best described in pictures, but I don't have a digital camera, so a short description will have to do; the rear drive cage in the MDD has special slots to allow a standard 3.5" IDE drive to slide inside. Since the cooler adds a few more millimeters of height to the drive, the drive won't fit in the cage; the slots aren't big enough. I tried unscrewing it, and attaching it to the cage itself above the drive with plastic wire ties; it worked, but oddly enough my system kept on freezing after waking from sleep.

I then tried attaching it to the top of the drive by attaching it to cage, via more wire ties; this time, it prevented a signal from appearing on my monitor, causing the screen to cease functioning (!?!?). After about a week of fruitless agonizing over finding some way to mount this fan, I gave up and tossed it out of sheer frustration.

Oh well. Better luck next time?

Dear AlterNet...

2006-02-04T11:27:00.000-05:00

You piss the living hell out of me.

When you published a piece gushing on Rupert Sheldrake I was just only mildly offended. Here was essentially the Left's version of Creationists/ID advocates like William Dembski and Michael Behe. People with fringe ideas that have been justly marginalized by the scientific community, heralded as being champions of a new revolution (for Goodness, ostensibly) by people who have absolute zero knowledge of what they're talking about.

...Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance" -- a complicated framework of ideas proposing that nature relies upon its own set of memories, which are transmitted through time and space via "morphic fields". The theory holds that these fields, which operate much like electrical or magnetic fields, shape our entire world. A panda bear is a panda bear because it naturally tunes into morphic fields containing storehouses of information that define and govern panda bears. The same with pigeons, platinum atoms, and the oak trees on Hampstead Heath, not to mention human beings.

Do I even need to reflect on the complete incredulity of this claim? What next - is he going to try to prove this "theory" by constructing a light saber?

"Science is the last unreformed institution in the modern world today," he adds in a matter-of-fact rather than harsh tone. "It's like the church before the Reformation. All decisions are made by a small powerful group of people. They're authoritarian, entrenched, well-funded and see themselves as a priesthood."

Reflecting a blatant ignorance of the scientific process and the way science is carried out. Yes, the scientific community is socially and fundamentally flawed in many, many, many ways, but to "democratize" it is just a fantasy dreamed up by people with a vision of how the world should work that is just as ludicrous and dangerous than people with a similar vision who want to turn science into a branch of the Pat Robertson Church of Christianity.

Hey guys. Ever remember the Sokal Affair? You guys are more than happy to dredge up all of recorded history to prove your points (as noble as they may be) and are yet completely forgetful of the lesson Dr. Alan Sokal taught you a scant ten years ago when he exposed your superficial, and insufferably arrogant high-horse 'PoMo' bullshit for all the world to see.

Anyway.

Now you guys decide that it's perfectly okay to shit all over other people religions in the name of Free Speech.

So then what gives you the right to moan about all of the things that The Right say in the press? You talk about how Free Speech should be a right for everyone but you're only lying to yourself and to others by posturing yourself in such a way that the only Free Speech that counts is YOUR Free Speech. Sounds a little familiar, eh?

I know you guys hate us. I know you guys would be more than happy to group the Religious Left along with Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson, shove us all into a rocket, and blast us off into the sun. But sorry guys. We're here and we're here to stay. We're not going away. When you offend other religions, you alienate a potential source of powerful support; academics, intellectuals and activists who use their religion and their faith to support the causes which "The Left" so eagerly falls over itself to support.

When you offend them, you alienate them along with the other fundamentalists. And do you really think you're too good for our support? By supporting those cartoons You're automatically saying to ALL Muslims that it doesn't matter if you're with The Left. You're part of some stupid silly cult which likes to crash aeroplanes into buildings and follows some bearded guy who died thousands of years ago.

So you think you don't need the "Religious Left"? you can do just fine and dandy without us? Look at you guys. Bush won a second term in office, in spite of everything that was done to stop that. So who do you guys blame? The religious guys. Naturally.

I only wish we had more people like Sokal to expose your arrogant self-righteousness.

You guys are the very definition of the term "asshat". While I still consider myself part of the "Religious Left", you make me more proud of being "Religious" than "Left".

Until you guys finally grow up, I don't think you deserve a government any better than the one you've got just now.

Detestably Yours,
justin

It's all relative

2006-02-04T11:10:00.000-05:00

Here I was feeling a little depressed and bummed out. I thought I'd have a good chance this time at an NSERC USRA (Undergraduate Summer Research Award). Turns out I didn't. Despite my awards, despite the drastic improvement of my marks, and despite my research experience, it didn't mean jack-all.

I emailed Katherine asking if she'd be up for some quality time (since I'd missed her the last time we tried to meet up and I'm somewhat overdrawn on my sympathy account with some of my other friends, given this funk I've descended into), and then I got this several minutes later.

Hey Justin,

My friend Irene Arevalo passed away last Sunday evening and her
memorial is going to be this Saturday in London, ON. She was
struggling with cancer for many years... she suffered a lot of pain
the last few months before passing away but she's with the Lord now,
so I think most of us who know her are at peace about it, but her
family may be going through a hard time.

I don't know if I'll be free this weekend...

Kath

On 2/2/06, Justin Ancheta wrote:
You up for a work session together on Sat./Sun.?

--justin

I met Irene only once, a long time before, back when I was still trying to fit myself in with the people at Katherine's church. She was a bubbly young woman, full of life and constantly smiling, a nucleus within an electron cloud of friends. I hung back and didn't bother to try to get to know her better, only content to just see her so happy. I'm best with socializing with people one-on-one and besides, she wouldn't have wanted a grumpy curmedgeon like me hanging around her. Well, okay, maybe not - but I know her friends at church maybe wouldn't have been so charitable...(And I mean that in a very comically dry sense - I wish that with all of the technology we have we could devise a way to communicate dry humour over the internet.)

It's funny, isn't it, how small our own problems become in the grand scheme of things, isn't it? Something which kinda sucks doesn't really suck once we measure it up against someone else's something, which really does suck a lot more than our own.

It's all in the game

2006-02-02T17:13:00.000-05:00

Hi Justin,

I am sorry to have to inform you that we were not able to put your name
forward for an NSERC Undergraduate Research Award. This year, the
competition was keen, with 32 applications for 13 awards. I do encourage
you to apply again in the future if you are eligible.

Thank you for taking the time to apply.

All the best.

WWJD: Where Would Jesus Download?

2006-01-30T15:35:00.000-05:00

If you're a Mac user, newbie or veteran, you probably know of MacUpdate, one of the internet's preeminent websites for Mac software updates.

And if you happened to go to MacUpdate on Christmas Day, instead of seeing a listing of the day's software updates, you would seen something distinctly different.

Now, I understand that the vast majority of the people who read my blog aren't In-The-Know Mac users, so here's a fitting comparison: imagine if you went to your local supermarket, picked up a flyer to see what was on sale, and instead of seeing the latest prices on Tide, prepared salad, or macrobiotic yogurt instead saw something akin to a Jack Chick pamphlet.

I'd imagine that the range of reactions I'd be seeing would be from utter indifference to complete outrage. And that was what you'd be seeing if you'd looked around the Mac Web.

On Suitability

I remember the first reaction to the long black webpage I saw when I loaded up MacUpdate. "Huh?" Suffice to say, when you go online looking to search for software updates in preparation for your Great Leap Forward to a new version of the operating system you're running, the last thing you'd expect to see is someone pushing Jesus in your face in the same way your little brother or sister might slam a pillow in your face in the morning.

You can defend what the webmaster at MacUpdate did by saying that it's his website to do with as he pleases; and it's not like he made you go to MacUpdate. It's a free country and if he wanted to do that, more power to him. From a strictly (evangelical/conservative) Christian perspective, you could perfectly defend what was done at MacUpdate as being suitable in that they were simply doing what they saw as being mandated in the Bible.

But then again, think of Mormons/Jehovah's Witnesses who often love to practice the time-honoured ritual of door-to-door preaching and conversion. They easily justify it as allowable in that it is their right to show others the path to the way of life that they see is superior to all others, the one that should be practiced by all others. But in all honesty, just how effective is this? I wonder, how many people have they brought over from the Dark Side as opposed to those who they've simply pissed off? And were those people worth all of the ill-will they gained from the enterprise?

There are plenty of options that could have been done with MacUpdate if they wanted to promote a Christian message at Christmas time (and don't get me started on how the idea of "putting the Christ in Christmas" is a total sham). How about a revised front page promoting various charities? How about an interfaith "Peace on Earth" message å la Apple's multilingual Mac OS X introductory movies? Those are all Christian messages, aren't they?

Now How Come Things Aren't What They Oughta Be?

A common theme that I've tried to communicate in a lot of my posts here is how people often see the world in a way in which it isn't, and act accordingly. This isn't just a problem with "the Right"; it's just as endemic among people on the "the Left" as well. Amongst the Creationists/IDists, it's people who see science as simply an affirmation of their own religious beliefs: science is no longer a method of inquiry into the natural world but merely a rubber stamp on their view of how things should be. Ditto for the people constantly trying to inject conservative Christian values into an increasingly diverse society.

The message is always the same. Conformity and homogenity over diversity. In biology, all of the discussion and debate over evolution and ecology should be replaced with the single undying mantra: God did it, I believe it, that settles it. In politics and society, it's the conservative/evangelical Christian worldview trumping the views of everyone else by default.

And that I think is the reason why MacUpdate did what they did. There's always more than one way to skin a cat (so to speak), and you are only limited in what you can and can't do by the limitations you impose on yourself. The limitations MacUpdate imposed on themselves were clear: that to believe in their version of Christ and in their version of Christianity was the only way to go.

I guess the lesson to be learned in this is that when you want others to share in your beliefs (whether it be Christianity, animal rights, social justice, or computing on the Mac), the one thing that's easy to forget is that your audience has feelings too. They have emotions and opinions that aren't going to always run parallel to your own. They're not just an abstract wall at which you can thoughtlessly hurl your opinions.

Contrary to what some people may think, I like to believe that there's more to Christianity than seeing your friends and people around you as targets of opportunity to mark up on your celestial score card.

A gap in my knowledge

2006-01-19T21:51:00.000-05:00

A girl I know said some pretty nice things to me not too long ago:

What can I say about you? You make my brain laugh, hurt, feel insuperior (a task in itself), explode, swim, and crave ramen noodle soup. You are truly a catch and anyone who's brain can withstand your awesome power needs to be studied. I'm so glad that I know you, even if it makes my brain melt.

Pretty heartwarming stuff, isn't it? Well, I thought so at least. However, after a few minutes of pondering over her words, a few thoughts started to pop into my mind...

You Think Too Much

Truth be told, I felt a little sad, but that's mainly because, (a) I'm a massive Drama Queen, and, (b) I have the disturbing tendency to blow things massively out of proportion.

Now, I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but I fancy myself to be a reasonably well-rounded person; I'm somewhat intelligent, reasonably educated, fairly rational, and on the Female Jerk-O-Meter of Guyhood, I think that while I rate considerably lower than Prince Charming, I do rank somewhat above Prince Charles. Hopefully.

So this wonderful and kind person (God bless her) decides to expound on the virtues of my wonderful cranium. Then all of a sudden, I started to think: is that really all there is to me? My supposed massive intelligence? I mean, she's known me for two years. Okay, so we weren't bosom buddies, but she's seen enough of my interactions with other people we know that I'd like to think she can recognize some of my other virtues. There has to be more to me than just my head, right? I can't have fabricated all of this feeling out of nowhere inside my head...this has to have a legitimate basis in reality - shouldn't it?

I Seem To Have Lost Control

A few other people I've come to know have told me about something that no one's ever really told me before: that perhaps the reason why I have trouble socializing with people is that I unconsciously put myself so far above them that they feel intimidated by me, and because of that people are distanced from me. Which got me to realizing that perhaps it was a genuine problem on my part: I was acting arrogant about who I was, about what, and how much I knew, and it was something I needed to stop. But...what if that wasn't really the main cause? I mean, I can't help using words and phrases that people don't understand and know. No, really. Looking at everything I've written so far, the only "technical" or uncommon word I've used is "cranium". But how obscure is that word? Starbucks sold a board game called Cranium, and there was a fairly widespread ad for some kind of car accessory that was jokingly billed as being suited to fit "on the average cranium". And even if you didn't know what that word meant, in our modern day, education is only a google:define function away.

Whatever the reason, there seems to be this recurring trend among people I know that I apparently possess this massive well of intelligence inside of me, and because of that there seems to be this "ooh, ahh" factor which people seem to have about me. And people feel intimidated, turned off by it, perhaps. It puts up a wall between me and others: a wall which makes emotionally meaningful dialogue just too hard. All of a sudden, conversations shrivel up and die because the other party tries to say something but can't because of the all-encompassing fear of looking "too stupid". And I try to control it by stressing that no that won't happen because (a) I happen to care very deeply about my friends, and (b) I get that every day I'm at school, so why the hell would I do that to others? Being put on an ivory tower may seem fine and dandy for a few minutes, but after a while it gets really lonely up there.

Are You Special?

...which brings me to my point. We as a society attach a mystique to what we percieve as "intelligence". That person is so, so smart...how could he know so much? How could he get good grades? I'm sure we all know The Guy who our friends of our friends know who parties all day, drinks all night, doesn't crack a book, and yet effortlessly sails through all of his courses (this could easily be a girl of course, I'm just using the masculine terms for convenience's sake). Now I admit there are some truly naturally brilliant people out there. People who fall to the most extreme right tail of the bell-curve distribution of "intelligence", measured by whatever metric you plase. But how often do we know people like that? How common are they? Surely not every music student we know is Mozart or Mendelssohn. Every art student isn't a Picasso or a Rembrandt. And every science student isn't Einstein or Hawking.

My humble opinion, which is of course backed up by absolutely no empirical evidence whatsoever, is that most people are, well, normal. And in fact, I'm willing to grant that the majority of the people who enjoy success in the intellectual sense merely live their lives in such a way that they do what they need to do, to do well; things which are perfectly mundane and easily practiced by any ordinary human being. Their apparent intellectual superiority is not the result of the cosmic stars aligning on the night of their birth to grant them superhuman ability; it's simply an interest in what they do, and the desire to do it. To use myself as an example, I like to search for things I don't know about on Google or Wikipedia, or I look them up in books, if I can. I'm curious about the world around me and I want to know more. I don't think that makes me smarter or any more special than anyone else I know. It sure as hell doesn't grant me a special level of intelligence which elevates me above others around me. It sure as hell doesn't make smarter. A tad more informed than I was before, perhaps, but knowledge and intelligence are two different things.

If you've gotten this far maybe you're thinking that I should just shut up and take my compliment with grace and style.

So I will. Erin...thank you.

The Vision Thing: Addenda

2005-12-11T02:49:00.000-05:00

A bit of a correction is in order; the branched tentacles I showed in the second sea cucumber picture are indeed feeding structures: the respiratory tree is actually a completely internal structure. It's still connected to its anus though.

The structure(s) outlined in pink are the respiratory trees in this holothuroidean.

In reponse to Naomi's earlier comment I some agree and disagree; to me, vision is more than simple imagination; it's passion, focus, drive, and even a bit of madness. It's a belief in an idea of how things should that is so strong that someone is willing to push himself and even the ones he or she loves to their absolute breaking point in order to see them through.

And admittedly, a lot of people don't have that. I think the primary reason for that is that we are centered in a society so completely divorced from our environment that we are from the beginning of our lives rendered incapable of developing any awareness of what exists around us, for those who do feel that awareness, it needs to be grown, fostered, and cultivated within the context and confines of a culture that is openly hostile to such thinking.

But I think she's right in that there is a price to trying to realize a vision before its due in society. The sad reality however, is that the biodiversity crisis cannot wait for society to reach the point where it acheives its much sought-after environmental epiphany: it demands immediate, decisive action, regardless of what human society deems appropriate.

The Vision Thing

2005-12-05T22:27:00.000-05:00

This is a holothurian:

The simple, and humble sea cucumber. Not much to look at, is it? A very odd relative to those sea urchins you might have has the misfortunte of stepping on at the beach at a tide pool, or those things you see those cute little sea otters hammering open on TV, they're really not all that spectacular. Well, except for the fact that they come in such cool colours. That and the fact that they breath through their ass.

No, seriously. In this picture you can see the tentacles used for respiration very well; it's a highly branched structure used by members of the holothuroidea for breathing. It's on the anterior end of the organism, yet, it's directly connected to the anus - on the posterior side of the organism. I think the respiratory tree is made up of highly modified tentacles, which makes it clear that the anal connection may have been a vestige of the tree's original role in feeding.

One of the rather...odd abilities of at least some holothurians is that when threatened, they can actually expel out all of their internal organs into the environment, not unlike a lizard leaving its tail behind when it escapes. Yes, that's right: all of its internal organs. And sure enough, they can be completely regenerated.

-

This is Aristotle's Lantern:

It's the feeding structure used by sea urchins when they graze on algae. It's heavily made up of bone and collagen - oh, but this isn't ordinary collagen. Not our kind of "set-it-and-forget-it" collagen, like the kind present in our joints. No, this is flexible collagen.

So imagine, if you will, a future where people get involved in horrific accidents, macerating their internal organs, destroying their joints...and people like that, who would have had no chance for survival, let alone any sort of recovery, being able to completely regenerate their organs and have fully functional joints that can still work as well as the day they were made.

-

Or, imagine a miracle device you can carry around with you on your next hike in the forest or up in the mountains. You bought it for $99.99 at RadioShack earlier, as a toy for your kid's day camps to the forest; you see an interesting beetle scurrying about, and you catch it, prick it's softer underside with a needle, and instantly a micro gene sequencer goes to work. It uploads its results instantly via wireless connection to conservation authorities, the location logged via a built-in GPS sensor. A message has flashed on the device's screen: congratulations. You've just indentified a new Asian Longhorn Beetle infestation, and may very well have helped save the forest from a terrible fate.

This is what biology is to me. I've heard it said on message boards and forums that there's little more to biology than useless memorization, but here, here is where such people are horribly, horribly wrong. How can holothuroidians regenerate their entire bodily organs? How and why is sea urchin collagen different from our own? We don't know, and that's what makes biology so damn cool. The ratio of what we know versus what we don't know is staggeringly small.

A lot of people don't understand that, and I think I'm starting to realize why. Vision. It's all a matter of vision. I think that you really need some sense of vision to truely understand the embarassment of riches that we have out there, a wealth which we hardly notice, let alone appreciate. I look at things like that which I've seen and my mind just boggles at the possibilities. We don't all have to be rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth taxonomists to really get a sense for what's out there. All we really need is the vision to really, truly see it.

The question then is, how much of that vision do we have left? And how much of it are we using?

Piling up on an easy target

2005-09-19T19:43:00.000-04:00

From The Questionable Authority comes another article on the exchange going on between Timothy Birdnow and P.Z. Myers.

In his article, Birdnow posted this:

...Consider the Permian Triassic Extinction, the so called "Great Dying", 250 million years ago,in which 9 out of 10 marine creatures and 7 out of 10 land creatures died. Before the Great Dying five phylla walked the Earth; insects, mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. After the Great Dying we had the same 5.

...to which Professor Myers answered:

You should be aware that in those 3 sentences, you made 4 immense errors.

1. There are many more than 5 phyla; about 30.
2. Mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and insects are not separate phyla. The first four all belong to one phylum (Chordata) and the last belongs to another (Arthropoda).
3. There were no mammals or birds in the Permian.
4. There were no mammals or birds in the Triassic.

...to which Birdnow answered:

You are correct in that there are 30 total animal phyla; I was writing a piece to explain this concept to a general audience, and I included the chordates plus insects. You, as a revered Professor of Biology, may find my pique with my carelessness. Fine(after all, I`m not a biologist). Nonetheless, it does not matter to the argument wether there are 2, 8, 15, 30, or 2000 phila (ouch! my knuckles!); the point is that we there was no real crossovers between creatures. I suspect you understood my point, but quibble over it because you think you`ve got me. If it salves your ego to gloat, go right ahead! The fact is, the great point you think you scored was wide of the argument.

Reread Birdnow's response. Can you believe this? After being blatantly shown the errors of his writing he refuses to address them in any rational way. His answer pretty much amounts to "So what if I'm wrong? I'm still right, so nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!"

Sad.

Even now, after years of perversely following the Intelligent Design/Creationism movement, I'm still completely baffled by the extent to which people cling to their willful ignorance and refuse to expand their knowledge in any way shape or form. God forbid they be ever proven wrong. Why let something insignificant as "the facts" get in the way of their right to spew nonsense?

And yet, even more baffling is the fact that these people are so resistant to any attempt to try to get them to expand their minds to be aware of the problems with their arguments. They'll still repeat the same arguments over and over, regardless of the fact that they're been debunked.

One of the lessons I learned from Christianity was that humility was a virtue truly worth its weight in Gold -- reading the chronicles of Christ's life and deeds underscored that for me. An important and crucial aspect of humility is admitting when you're wrong. Evolutionary Biologists are wrong about a lot of things many times -- it comes with the territory of being a scientist.

Supporters of Intelligent Design refused to acknowledge any problem with their statements. In their mind, they are never wrong -- only their opponents are. How is that scientific? Moreover, how can that ever be Christian?

"Crusade" is the new "Jihad"

2005-09-13T15:16:00.000-04:00

At the spearhead to get Intelligent Design (ID) Creationism into high school classrooms and university lecture halls was the Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture -- the CRSC. A subset of the Discovery Institute (DI), it was a right-winged conservative Christian think tank closely linked to Philip Johnson, the prominent lawyer who for debatable reasons thought that his degree in law automatically made him an authority on evolutionary biology.

I say "was" because the CRSC is now known as the CSC: the Centre for Science and Culture. Notice something missing? In short, the reason why they dropped the "R" was because of the rather negative reaction that the ID movement was getting due to things like the Wedge Strategy, an uncompromising statement of what the aims of the CRSC and the DI were: to remove the secular influence of "materialism" in culture and science and replace with a theocracy, where both science and culture would begin and end with a conservative/evangelical version of Christianity, coupled with a unflinchingly literal view of scripture. Hence the "R" for "Renewal" in CRSC.

Not something you'd be quick to accept if you were an average American with only a cursory knowledge of biology, but with enough religious sense to say "NO" to self-righteous preaching and conversions.

So of course, they tone down their rhetoric, remove the "R" from the name, and go on pretending that ID is just as secular and as scientific as that evil materialist/atheistic un-scientific evolution. Of course, the ultimate goals and aims haven't changed -- is it any wonder then that cynics often refer to the CSC as the Centre for the ~~Renewal of~~ Science and Culture?

So then we come to one of the "big three" Christian organizations at U of T: Campus Crusade for Christ, or as I used to playfully call them, the 'Crusaders. No? Oh wait, I'm sorry. That's Campus for Christ. Notice anything missing? Katherine told me about how she found out about the name change, which prompted me to do a little Googling...which led me to this:

Published Tuesday, October 13, 1998
Campus Crusade for Christ seeks new name

BEN TRACHTENBERG
YDN Staff Reporter

Christian students may soon stop "crusading" at Yale.

Concerned that the word "crusade" inaccurately represents the goals and activities of the Campus Crusade for Christ, members are now considering new names for the religious group. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.

Although the CCC has not yet chosen a specific new name, President Brian Kang '99 said the new name will omit the word "crusade."

This should sound familiar to you, right?

"There are negative connotations associated with the word 'crusade,'" Kang said.

Kang said that despite the name change, the group's religious activities will remain unchanged.

"We're not trying to compromise our purpose," he said. "It's just that some people find [the name] offensive."

David Myung '00, who leads a CCC Bible study group, said some of CCC's 50 to 60 members worry that the word "crusade" scares off students otherwise interested in CCC's events.

"negative connotations"? Are you kidding me? We're talking about the bloody Crusades here...an unfathomably inhumane period of Christian history where Christians were slaughtered alongside Jews, Muslims, and anyone else unfortunate enough to get into the army's path. Rape, murder, robbery, pillage, cannibalism...these were all elements of accounts of what the Crusaders did on their journeys.

As Raymond d'Aguiliers, chaplain to Raymond de Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse observed:

"Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious ceremonies were ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle-reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood."

- Edward Peters, The First Crusade: The chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and other source materials, p. 214

"The name itself is a little antiquated," Myung said. He added, "I don't think the word 'crusade' exactly reflects what the fellowship is there for."

Heh.

Historically, the term "crusade" refers to attempts by Christian armies during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to conquer Jerusalem and reclaim the city from its Islamic inhabitants. The attacking armies often slaughtered Jerusalem's non-Christian residents, and medieval crusaders' religious rhetoric can jar modern sensibilities.

As I pointed out, it wasn't just Muslims who were the only victims, though they were ostensibly the main targets: pretty much anyone who was non-Christian suffered and died. And in many cases, Christians suffered too.

Recalling a meeting for CCC that I went to a year or so ago, there was much talk of "raising the banner of Christ higher over U of T", even talk of "claiming" the university for Christ...as if somehow, there was some sort of hidden, implicit goal, concealed in their rhetoric, of turning U of T into the Canadian version of Bryan College. It made the use of the term "crusade" in their name all too apt.

Is it fair to really equate "C4C" to the CRSC? Well, the motives are similar: a desire to present a more superficially pleasing and acceptable face to non-believers with the intent on raising their status in a larger secular society. But does C4C's name change come with the same intention of malice and dishonesty that the CSC has? We'll have to see about that. I have my suspicions though.

I think though, that perhaps the direction of the name change should have gone in the other direction, instilling a greater sense of honesty to their name...

Wow.

2005-09-11T01:03:00.000-04:00

Check out some of the latest posts up on I Am A Christian Too about the religious right's response to Hurrican Katrina, with some good old fashioned racist hypocrisy thrown in for good measure.

from Tim Wise
...She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have done so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest that theft would not be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus for your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot. Praise the Lord.

Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.

Just shows you what kind of a Christian I am. I generally don’t say grace before a meal in a restaurant, and I’m against shooting people without a trial for petty theft.

God, Suffering, and P.Z. Myers

2005-09-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

For the past little while, I've been gelling (to borrow a God-awful meme from a Dr. Scholls ad) pretty well with Professor P. Z. Myers' consistent verbal poundings of Intelligent Design and Creationism. God knows he does a better job of that that I (but then again, he's got the Ph.D and I'm just a lowly worm of an undergrad). And I think I mentioned this in the past, but I even got around to sending him some gushing fan mail while trying to sound smart and pensive at the same time (which probably ended up being dropped into his Spam folder. Heh).

However, on occasion he does say things to which I take serious offense, and which I have to say, are really illustrative of the problem with religious people with Progressives and Liberals in general that I've been talking about earlier.

God offers you nothing, and accomplishes nothing, and his 'grace' is the squalor of a shattered city. This is the religion of the ineffectual. It's the language we've seen a lot of lately: Pray for New Orleans. Thank you, God, for only destroying my home and not killing me. The dead are in a better place now. God protect the members of my sect. Smite the unbelievers.

Is such a witheringly negative tone truly necessary? I understand his negative feelings towards Christianity, but I don't think there's any need at all for needless stereotyping of Christians as some sort of spiritual mafia.

No, Katrina was a natural disaster that killed thousands and has caused suffering to hundreds of thousands more. It was not the sword of your fictitious lord, and this kind of justification of people's pain as the righteous action of an angry god just leads to the sanctimonious hatred we see below.

I am in full agreement with Professor Myers that this idiotic spinning of recent events to support some foolish right-winged arrogant school of self-righteous thought is completely reprehensible. But that makes me think of Renee's similar sentiments that I've talked about earlier. Does the hate and scorn shown by those people justify your own hatred? And how much of a better person are you if you meet their hatred with your own?

I wish those were only rare and hateful kooks, but religion is the breeding ground of this nonsense, and far too many people wallow in lesser delusions that they will use to justify absurdities.

It's sentiments like this which both really sadden me and anger me. I wonder how many Christians (or other people of faith) he has talked to to give him a sensation of religion as a "breeding ground of nonsense". And who in those faiths has he talked to? People in the mainstream, or the marginalized, yet vocal few?

I'll readily admit that religion can very well breed a lot of evilness, but it can also be a source of wonderful things as well. Nothing is ever black and white, and to simply denigrate religion -- and I mean any religion, not just Christianity -- as just a source of utter nonsense is to really denigrate a potential source of much of humanity's most wonderful qualities. If you just ignored all of that, then all people of faith at the very least just misguided, blind fools, and at the very worst dishonest crooks -- that a Mother Teresa is on par with a Jerry Falwell, and that anything good done in the name of religion is to be regarded with the same scorn and mistrust as any similarly comitted sin. Personally, I don't think that even Myers is that jaded in his view of humanity.

And lest we forget, nationalism, racism, sexism...there are many other human "-isms" that can all too easily bring out some of the worst in humanity. Human beings don't need religion to be delusional or evil -- we can manage that just fine on our own, thankyouverymuch.

Secularism won't protect us from natural disasters, but it also won't encourage us to savor other people's suffering as a vindication of our own beliefs, and it will provoke more rational responses than begging for help from nonexistent deities.

Stop praying. Get out of the churches. Go do something constructive.

In a time like this, moral and spiritual support is just as important as material support. I saw Oprah Winfrey's special episode of her daytime talk show where she toured the New Orleans Superdome and later met up with the crowd of survivors that had been relocated to Texas. She may not have given away iPods, cars, or houses to each and everyone of those people, but she was there. She could have been in other places, doing other things with other people, but she was there.

For reasons known only to ourselves, we may not be able to donate tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars to help the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and we may not be able to go out and collect canned food or assemble aid packages, but at the very least, what we can do is to take at least some time out of our own lives and think about the horrible tragedy which occured, and to integrate those thoughts into our daily living; to be appreciative of what we have, instead of longing for things we don't. To try to be a little more kinder to those around you, because someday, you may be needing their help.

Katherine told me in a phone conversation we had about the people at her church...they weren't doing anything to help the survivors in a material sense, but they were praying for them. It's true that a prayer won't feed or house a hungry family, and I totally think that spiritual aid always has to be followed up by material aid. But in someway, they are making a difference. They have at least motivated me to get off of my lazy ass and do something. That, I think, is something they've done.

*And just to cover my ass, I want to make it expressively clear to anyone who may be have come to this by way of a direct or indirect link to Pharyngula that I'm in no way attacking Myers for his views. He's got a right to his attitudes and I have a right to disagree with them.

That's Ancheta...

2005-08-22T10:57:00.000-04:00

...Ancheta with an "n". An N. A goddamn N!

From: xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: QUBS photos
Date: August 22, 2005 7:32:24 AM EDT
To: jancheta@sprint.ca
Return-Path: xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx.xxx

...Sorry for not getting these to you sooner, the 'n' in your e-mail address looked like a 'u' to me...

I've given out my email address many times to many people and they've had no problem reading my writing. It's like whenever I'm at a big gathering of people and the one person I talk to never, ever seems to ever hear a fucking word I say. It's enough that people seem to have selective hearing; now, do people have selective reading or what?

Oh well. She didn't call me "Jason", or "Jeff" or some other obtuse permutation of a male name starting with "J". And she didn't say my last name as "An-CHEE-ta". I guess I should be thankful for small mercies.

And for the sake of keeping this post civil, I won't start on how Kodak Gallery was used instead of Flickr. Not that I'd have to worry about getting flack from anyone on the QUBS field course who'd be reading this, since they've all most likely misread the "N" in "Cte-N-uchid" as a "u". I just never win, do I?

Paradox Redux

2005-08-01T19:05:00.000-04:00

Reading over my earlier post on the article from Harpers made me want to discuss my feelings in a little more detail and with a little less bile and vitriol. Particularly with respect to this statement I made:

Anyway. The fact of the matter is that a lot of Christians just don't know their faith as well as they think they do. Oh, they go to church, boycott laviscious and demonic books like Harry Potter, and try to keep their kids from dating until they're 40, but at the end of the day, just how much do they really know about the teachings and philosophy of Christ? Would they actually want to know, or would they feel more comfortable believing that the Bible tells them that it's okay to be rich and greedy with no compassion or sympathy for those in need?

Most of my exposure to "real" Christianity really happened when I first got connected to the internet. I guess that when it comes to being online I'm what you would call a "late bloomer", but nevertheless, from talking to people via ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, or on the many list-servs that I belonged too once, I quickly discovered a sort of recurring pattern in the pattern and behaviour of the Christians I met. Chiefly, it was, for lack of a better word, a very simplistic view of scripture and of God and Christ. My Grade 13 English teacher (a Jew, no less) really pounded home in my mind how beautiful the Bible is, not just as another religious treatise, but as a work of literature. She taught me to see the Bible as an array of allusions, metaphors and similies, more than a puzzle, but a journey that would challenge your way of thinking. The "gaps" in the Bible, weren't gaps per se, but rather ways to engage your mind, to really understand what God was trying to tell you through all of the ambiguity and confusion. I came to the realization that nothing in the Bible is ever obvious, and no matter how well you think you've understood this passage or that phrase, there's always more layers of history and sociology to understand, more complexity to comprehend, and while it always intimidated me, I always ended up feeling just a little more enriched, spiritually.

So with regards to what I said earlier, I think a lot of people don't understand their faith at all because there's just so much to go through in scripture. There's so much to discuss, debate, meditate over, and write about -- and it's never, ever easy. In fact, it's bloody hard. I think that the most challenging aspect of my own faith, even more than my own struggle grappling with sin, or the constant tirades of the Christian Right, has been the Bible itself. You think you've got it all figured out, when the reality is that you've only just scratched the surface.

And understandably, a lot of people aren't ready or willing to cope with that. Far more easier to rely on someone else to tell you what the Bible says rather than to figure it all out for yourself. We're much too busy, much too harried, much too time-constrained to do that. And on top of that, it forces you to think about your faith, your beliefs, and your actions in a way that's 180 degress from what you're comfortable with. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a good example of this. I for one, would place myself with the people who'd pass him by. And why not? He might have been bait for a trap by other highwaymen, or he might have been feigning his injuries and be carrying a knife underneath his garments. There are countless rationalizations that we can think up to pass him by, and I know all about them. I think of them whenever I pass a homeless man begging for change in my neighbourhood. "What if he was going to buy a pack of smokes with the money I give him? Or booze? How do I know that money's really going to his family?"

What I'm trying to say is that no matter how much we think we know our faith, there is so much that we don't know that we have left to discover. My education as a biologist has already made me realize that the ratio of what do know to what we don't is astonishingly, jaw-droppingly low. Scientists aren't content to just sit back and let other people tell us what's out there...generally, what scientists do is to try to figure out what it all is for themselves. Why shouldn't Christians do the same?

The common fear is that by challenging our faith, by opening ourselves up to asking questions about our beliefs, is that we'll have our faith undermined by The Evil One. However, that then carries the implicit assumption that your faith really wasn't anything of substance to begin with; that it's better to have your faith remain in a state of stasis, being locked in a protective bubble, than to challenge it and give it an opportunity to grow. In my time at university, I've met a lot of wonderful people from all manner of racial, religious and sexual backgrounds, and all of those people have led me in one way or another to rethink what I thought I knew about my faith and my beliefs. Did they ever make me think about dropping Christianity for atheism? God No! As I've said before, if there's any one group of people who have time and time again made me seriously consider dropping my faith, it's other Christians.

So I think Christians shouldn't avoid the chance to question their faith, but instead should welcome them. And as I've always believed, the best way to know your faith is to question it. The risks are great, to be sure, but the benefits make the discomfort and the potential dangers well worth it. As one Buddhist parable so eloquently puts it, "The Journey Is the Reward."

The Christian Paradox

2005-07-30T18:36:00.000-04:00

Pharyngula posted yet a link to another brilliant piece on Christianity and politics published in the August issue of Harper's, but this time it's a revealing look at the general state of Christianity in general in the United States, and how it relates to the reality of Christianity as we know it in the United States (and, I'd argue, to a lesser degree in the good ol' Great White North as well).

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

Asking Christians what Christ taught isn’t a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.

Professor Myers' comments were spot on in this regard. Knowing the Bible like the back of your hand is definitely NOT a requirement for being a Christian. Memorizing the Ten Commandments is one thing; actually living them (whether you are conscious if that or not) is something else entirely. If you'll pardon the aside, on one list-serv I belonged to years and years ago, the moderator chastized my friends there for not citing scripture in their discussions. A few months later they were all too happy to gang up on me and subject me to constant verbal abuse due to my Catholic upbringing (and were trying to convince another one to stay, either to serve as their personal anti-Catholic punching bag, or to try to "convert" her to "real Christianity").

Anyway. The fact of the matter is that a lot of Christians just don't know their faith as well as they think they do. Oh, they go to church, boycott laviscious and demonic books like Harry Potter, and try to keep their kids from dating until they're 40, but at the end of the day, just how much do they really know about the teachings and philosophy of Christ? Would they actually want to know, or would they feel more comfortable believing that the Bible tells them that it's okay to be rich and greedy with no compassion or sympathy for those in need?

...Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of (Americans) call ourselves Christian. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That’s what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.

This is an interesting distinction. Is the United States a Christian country, or is it just a country that says that it is? If anything, the idea of America as a country defined by it's Christian identity is far more apt than America as a "Christian Nation". Again, you can say, think, or believe yourself to be Christian, but is that really the same as being one?

But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?

Now, before I go on, this is Republican America we're talking about -- you know, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheny, etc. etc. etc. I don't need to tell you what the answer to that question is, now do I?

This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we’re the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus’ strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with the European Union’s average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We’re at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?

(emphasis mine)

Huh? Gays and Lesbians destroying marriage in America, eh? Looks like you "Christians" are ruining it just fine on your own, guys.

AlterNet: The Religious Left Fights Back

2005-07-30T01:49:00.000-04:00

This story from AlterNet was so good that I have to repost this in its entirety, since it captures so well what I've been trying to articulate in the past two posts I've made (excluding my post on Konfabulator). I really recommend that you read this, if you've got the time; it's a story which also sums up my own feelings very well.

The Religious Left Fights Back
By Van Jones, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2005, Printed on July 29, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/23725/

Rabbi Michael Lerner is stirring up trouble again -- thank God.

Earlier this week, Lerner was the main organizer of a national gathering in Berkeley, California, for the religious Left. His "Spiritual Activism" conference was intended to help launch a much-needed new initiative: the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP).

Lerner has been the spark-plug for many progressive, faith-based undertakings over the years, including Tikkun magazine. But this latest effort is an order of magnitude more challenging than anything he has attempted thus far. And given the stakes for our ailing would-be democracy, the birthing of NSP may prove to be his most important calling.

Lerner wants to help forge a new alliance of "religious, secular and spiritual, but not religious, progressives." This alliance will someday expose and challenge the cancer of American consumerism. And it will oppose the religious Right's abuse of scripture to promote war, intolerance and ugly corporate agendas.

By itself, those two goals would warrant full-throated support from all progressives. But don't be surprised if the good rabbi's efforts also draw some serious "boos" from many parts of the Left, as well. That's because Lerner's bravest and hardest work is aimed much closer to home.

He wants to do more than just minister to the mall-lobotomized masses or give the fundamentalists a well-deserved spanking. He also wants to challenge the Left's chronic and toxic bias against religious feeling, expression and people.

Lerner hopes to end "religio-phobia among progressives." And such efforts will not be welcome among a great many rabidly secular progressives.

As for me, I will be praying for the Rabbi's success. I am an African-American Christian who was raised in the American heartland. When I moved to the cosmopolitan coasts of Connecticut, and later California, I ran headlong into shocking levels of anti-religious bigotry among progressives.

I literally have had liberals laugh in my face when I told them I was a Christian. For awhile, I felt self-conscious about telling other activists that I preferred not to meet on Sunday mornings, because I wanted to go to church.

It is still commonplace to hear so-called radicals stereotyping all religious people as stupid dupes -- and spitting out the word "Christian" as if it were an insult or the name of a disease. I thought progressives were supposed to be the standard-bearers of tolerance and inclusion.

I certainly know the monstrous crimes that have been committed through the ages in the name of religion, or with the blessings of religious people. But I know a few other things about religion, too.

I grew up in the Black churches of the rural south, listening to the stories of my elders. As children, we heard about the good, brave people who had poured their blood out upon the ground so that we could be free. We learned how police officers had clubbed and jailed them. We learned how Klansmen had shot and lynched them. And how the G-men from Washington had just stood by and doodled in their notepads.

We learned of marches and mayhem, freedom songs and funerals. We saw images of billy-clubbed Black women on their hands and knees, searching for their teeth on Mississippi sidewalks -- crawling while still clutching their little American flags. We felt pity for the children who spent long nights in frigid jail cells, wearing clothing soaked by fire-hoses, while their bones -- broken and untended -- began to mend at odd angles.

We saw pictures of Black men, like our fathers, hanging by their necks -- their faces twisted, their bodies rigid, their clothes burned off -- along with their skin. And we saw photos of carefree killers, sauntering home out of Alabama courtrooms -- their faces white and sneering and proud.

We learned how the very best of humanity had faced off with the very worst of humanity -- each circling the other under the same summer sun. That epic struggle had elevated southern back roads and backwaters onto the Great World Stage. And the fate of a people -- along with the destiny of a nation -- hung in the balance, for all to see.

In the end, we children cheered, for the righteous did prevail. More than that, they performed one of the great miracles in human history: They transformed American apartheid into a fledgling democracy, tender and delicate and new.

All progressives today proudly celebrate that achievement -- and rightly so. But one key fact seems to escape the notice of today's activist crowd. The champions of the civil rights struggle didn't come marching out of shopping centers in South. Or libraries. Or high school gymnasiums.

To face the attack dogs, to face the fire-hoses, to face the billy-clubs, these heroes and she-roes came marching boldly out of church-houses. And they were singing church songs. They set an example of courage and sacrifice that will endure for the ages. And as they did it, they prayed on wooden pews in the name of a Nazarene carpenter named Jesus.

The implications are clear for those who seek today to rescue and redeem U.S. society. The facts are simple and profound: The last time U.S progressives captured the national debate and transformed politics, people of faith were at the center of the movement, not stuck in its closet.

As a descendent of enslaved Africans who were told that God (and not capitalist greed) required their degradation, I know the crimes of the Christian church as well as anyone. But as a child of the civil rights movement, I also know the power of Christian faith, the power of moral appeal and the power of spiritual strength -- to break asunder the bonds of servitude.

And in our do-or-die effort to set things right in America, it is time for U.S. progressives to return to the bottomless well of soul power that sustained the slaves and defeated Jim Crow.

That is why I applaud Rabbi Lerner's efforts. He is standing in a long tradition of faith-honoring Americans, who have helped lead the charge from barbarism toward democracy. In the 1800s, escaping Africans fled enslavement through the bedrooms and basements of Quakers, along the famous Underground Railroad. In the 1980s, religious congregations led the Sanctuary Movement. Their efforts opened up U.S. cities to Latinos who were fleeing U.S. President Ronald Reagan's violent and covert interventions in Latin America.

The Rabbi's new efforts also resonate today. Reeling from the steady string of recent defeats, even the most hard-core U.S. activists are seeking deeper meaning and spiritual sustenance in their lives. At the same time, previously apolitical "spiritual types" are getting involved as activists for the first time -- to defend the Earth and her people from the predations of the Bush agenda.

Rev. Jim Wallis' most recent book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, struck a chord this year and became an instant bestseller. Rev. Frances Hall Kieschnick (spouse of Working Assets wunderkind Michael Kieschnick) is taking steps to start a Beatitudes Society, to give more voice to progressive people of faith. Similar efforts are springing up on smaller scales all across the country.

Somewhere, in all of these stirrings, I see the seeds of a wisdom-based, Earth-honoring, pro-democracy movement -- one that affirms and applauds religious and spiritual impulses, while opposing fundamentalism, chauvinism and theocracy. Over time, this kind of progressive movement has the potential to win -- and win big -- in the United States. To be honest: it is probably the only type of progressive movement that stands a chance in a country as religious as ours.

Such a movement is within reach. But progressives must abandon the old pattern of reducing the Great Faiths to their worst elements, constituents and crimes -- and then dismissing all other facts and features. It is not just stupid political strategy. At a moral level, it is a form of blindness and bigotry that is beneath all of us.

My prayer is that a critical mass of progressives can agree on two basic premises.

Number one: Any progressive approach to "faith in politics" that ignores the awful crimes of religiously-inspired people is dishonest, inauthentic and can never achieve emancipatory ends.

Number two: At the same time, any approach that fails to honor and embrace the positive contributions of religiously inspired people is also wrong-headed, and it foolishly and needlessly shuts progressives off from our own history, achievements and present sources of vital support.

I believe that Rabbi Lerner has come up with a thoughtful, sensitive and wise approach, worthy of broad-based affirmation. He aims to: "build an alliance between secular, religious and 'spiritual but not religious' progressives -- in part by challenging the anti-religious biases in parts of the liberal culture (while acknowledging the legitimacy of anger against those parts of the religious world that have embodied authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic practices and attitudes").

That is a formulation that the vast majority of progressives should be able to adopt, affirm and cheer about. And I proudly say to it, Amen, brother Lerner ... Amen!

Attorney Van Jones is the national executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/23725/

Arrogance Redux

2005-07-27T10:33:00.000-04:00

While I disagree somewhat with Karen's charge of discombobulation, I wanted to make my argument more clear:

A) Many on the "Left" are just as guilty of arrogant, out-of-touch, self-righteousness as many the "Right".
They have plans and grandiose visions of a better world, surely, just like the neo-Cons and the Christian Fundamentalists. But are any one of these visions truly practical? The Fundamentalists want to establish an Atwood-esque Theocracy akin to Taliban-era Afghanistan, while people on the Left have equally lofty goals of environmental sustainability which seem to have no reasonable basis in reality; The Nature Conservancy's stance of "OMG we have to kick out all of the native people off their land so we can save it!" and the Canadian Green Party's seemingly one-track focus are good examples of this. Yes, your goals are truly admirable. But how do you plan on actually acting on these goals?

B) The amount of appreciation, level of integration with, or even respect for moderates and/or religious liberals is dismally minimal.
This is where my own personal experience comes into play: people I've met who use their position as being on the Left to justify their bigoted, irrational and prejudiced hatred of religious traditions. I'm sorry to say this, but not even some professors and grad students I know here are wholly above such emotions. Granted, I understand why they and Renee feel the way they do given their life experiences, but it's indicative of the fact that people on the left are more than willing to divorce themselves from a potentially significant source of support through their apparent universal disdain for the value and role of religion. I think that a whole lot more could be done if more people on the left were more willing to talk to and include religious liberals. Sadly, it seems that they view us as nothing more than a peripheral footnote in their collective history.

And here's really what I wanted to say, in so many words:
C) Because of A and B, many initiatives carried out by the left will suffer greatly and may even fail.
As an aside, I think that the number of religious liberals out there is greater than many people think. For example, I think that the number of Christians who support gay marriage is more than the conservative Christians would lead you to believe. I think that the images of religious liberals as the minority is because a lot of people of faith do have a vague sense of liberal (or at the very least, non-Conservative) beliefs -- social justice, economic equality, LGTBQ/Women's rights, etc. -- but they just haven't really closely identified with them. Because of this, there is no apparently strong and cohesive identity for liberal Muslims or liberal Christians the way there is for the conservatives, and as result, it's clear that the "Christian Left" or the "Muslim Left" is itself very weak as a social movement.

Now, what does this have to do with points A and B? By being more vocal and more organized, we can go a long way towards solving both those problems. Without the support of religious liberals, in the general public eye liberals will be more and more marginalized and with them, much of their message. Additionally, it will give more and more "mainstream" people of faith a more visible and viable alternative to the arguably insidious movements carried out by religious conservatives. And finally, it will help to convince more and more "common folk" that being a liberal is more than just being a tree-hugger or some radical protester; that it's a legitimate and respectable way of approach social and political issues.

Without this support, the amount of people who stand to be convinced of the virtues of these movements (for environmental conservation or social/economic/political justice) would, I argue, be considerably less than it could be. That means a weaker, and more marginalized left with less support among people who are of more "mainstream" socio-political ideals. Which means that there are less voices being heard than there could be, supporting things like conservation and human rights.

In short, everyone wins. Everyone has something to gain from a tighter integration of liberal religious faith groups with the main body of the "Left". The only thing left standing in the way of a more stronger, united Left are egos and self-righteous arrogance, really.

I'm not suggesting that this is a panacea that will drive the Republicans or the Conservatives into oblivion, but it'll at least make alternatives to them more practial, stronger, and more accessible to The Rest Of Us.

Reaping the Whirlwind

2005-07-27T01:33:00.000-04:00

The big news in "the industry" is that Yahoo, in a pretty unexpected move, bought out a company called Pixoria, responsible for a highly controversial Mac/Windows program called Konfabulator. To make a long story short, Konfabulator was a program that wasn't just any program: it was actually a program that allowed you to run litttle mini-programs called "widgets". These were little applications that you could easily have on your desktop to use at your beck-and-call, from monitors measuring wi-fi signal strength to news readers that could stream today's headlines right to your desktop. When Apple released Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the big announcement was an interesting feature called Dashboard, which allowed you to...well, run litttle mini-programs called "widgets" that you could easily have on your desktop to use at your beck-and-call, from monitors measuring wi-fi signal strength to news readers that could stream today's headlines right to your desktop.

Pundits cried bloody murder, that Apple trampled all over a poor developer by stealing his ideas - a concept that in my opinion, has been to a good extent addressed and even refuted by John Gruber, for reasons which are too arcane for me to get into.

Which brings us here to the Yahoo buyout. It seems that everyone wins: the developers, who get full backing from Yahoo, Mac and Windows end-users, who now get all of Konfabulator for FREE (the previous price was USD $25), and widget developers, who hopefully now will benefit from Yahoo's apparent willingness to open up widget development to more users, making it more accessible.

Having used it for two days under varying conditions (i.e. my desktop jammed full of widgets to only a bare minimum of those I need actually being active), I have to say that I sadly still have the same problems with Konfabulator that I did way back in 2003 when I first tried the early beta and 1.x releases of Konfabulator (the current version is 2.1):

1. Resource Usage. Konfabulator is a notorious CPU and memory hog, taking up system memory and processor cycles with considerable enthusiasm. Even when running by itself, with no widgets loaded, it can take up a very significant amount of memory. It's disappointing that nothing seems to have been done to deal with this problem, though it seems that it has improved from the early 1.x releases.

2. Third-Party Widgets. One of the problems with the new freeware release under Yahoo is that it's been now given a new version: 2.1. They must have done something to the program besides take out the registration stuff asking for a paid serial number because it seems to have broken a lot of widgets; ones that worked just fine in earlier versions, now don't. That isn't a fault of the developers, but it is a major problem.

Second is the fact, that well, I hate to say it, but there aren't really any "killer widgets" that make this tool indispensable. RSS reader? I've got NetNewsWire Light. Internet search from the desktop? I've got not only Huevos, but the internet search function in Another Launcher. And so on and so on. This isn't an insult to the people who've gone to the effort of making their own widgets...I actually have a lot of respect for them for what they've done, since making Konfabulator widgets is much more difficult compared to making widgets for Dashboard (another significant problem with Konfabulator). Just that I've yet to find the one widget with that certain something, that certain je ne sais quoi that makes both it and Konfabulator a must-have app.

But hey, that doesn't detract from the fact that Konfabulator is still an incredible app from people with an incredible history of user-interface development on the Mac. And you certainly can't argue with the price. And what's more, Windows users get to join in on the fun too.

If you've got a few minutes to spare, I think it's worth heading on over to the Konfabulator website to download it and try it out; it'll run on just about anything able to run XP and 10.2+. What have you got to lose? It's totally free, and chances are you might end up gaining some use out of it.

Bipartisan Arrogance

2005-07-24T11:39:00.000-04:00

They say that you're a radical leftist liberal when you're young, and end up turning into a wisened conservative as you grow older. Maybe this is just a sign that I'm on the cusp of such a transition, and in another ten years I may end up voting Conservative, driving an SUV from my brokerage firm on Bay Street to my generic house in Richmond Hill built on razed mixed-deciduous forest.

Lately I've grown more and more annoyed and disenchanted by the general attitude I've gotten from people on the "left". Reading the stories on places like NOW Magazine and AlterNet, it's become more and more clearer to me that many (note: that's many, not all) people who call themselves "liberal" or ally themselves with the "left" have this incredibly inflated self-righteous view of themselves and the causes that they champion, as if their cause is the One True Cause to believe in.

Sound a little familiar to you? Replace words and concepts like "gay rights" with "Christian morality" and you get the same thing on the "right", virtually a mirror image. Doesn't this strike anyone as being more than a little disturbing?

In general, you've got people on the left who, apparently, are shouting and screaming that for their cause (the just and good cause, naturally) to succeed, ALL aspects -- both good and bad -- of the other side have to DIE. And ditto of course, for the right. I've seen more and more in many places this general fundamentalist fervour. Which of course, leads to my personal beef: an apparent, well "persecution" (for lack of a better word, I suppose) of people belonging to religious traditions who do believe in liberal values, amongst people in the "leftist" movement itself. It's not really direct or explicit, but it's evident in the writing and thoughts of people who have this incredible, repugnant hatred of religion (and those who practice it) and justify it under the rubric of "being a liberal", as if that somehow justifies what you say and feel.

And this is what I have to say to those people: you're all a bunch of fucking idiots.

Believe it or not, you need people like the religious liberals. You need people like them to ground you in reality and ensure that people not belonging to either side see you as legitimate people for positive social change instead of tinfoil hat-wearing psychos shouting out slogans to "Smash the State". More importantly, you need people like them to open channels of dialogue to other people and to show them the meaning of what you fight for, and why they should support you.

But it seems like people like you just don't care, and would rather be caught up in your self-involved, self-righteous ivory tower. Pity you don't see the cracks in the foundation.

No, No, No.

2005-07-23T03:29:00.000-04:00

I’m predicting that Bush and Benedict XVI will play much the same role in the distintegration of evolution (i.e., the ateleological materialistic form of it that currently dominates the West) as Reagan and John Paul II did in the disintegration of communism.

- William Dembski, The New Pope and ID, April 19, 2005

You have got to be kidding me.

And you know what? I don't know. I thought Catholics were supposed to be the evil turncoat-Christians who made a compromise with that evil philosophical naturalistic atheatelitical agnosticarian, or whatever-you-call-it movement. And now you guys are claiming that we're now on your side?

What a joke.

A removal of doubt

2005-07-05T18:43:00.000-04:00

So I'm back. Not that it should come as a surprise to all five people who regularly read this blog, since I was out with Karen, Naomi, and Alex to the Renaissance Festival, and I've given Katherine a call, and tried to be online with Jennie as much as I could be, wonky DSL line notwithstanding. It's good to be back, and the culture shock wasn't quite as jarring as it was when I came back from my last summer at Jokers' Hill. I have to admit though, being in North America just isn't quite the same now, now that I've spent a month surrounded by tropical forest. I also learned to be less of an arrogant pompous smart-ass as I was before; I suppose Dan Brooks can take some comfort in the fact that I learned at least that much from him.

Right now I'm back at Jokers' Hill: this time I'm working for the director herself, Prof. Anne Zimmerman, on the Garlic Mustard problem that's been a major concern to her and others working on the reserve, along with my friend Anna. The fact that her boyfriend, and my friend Russell, who's doing a Summer NSERC for James Thomson is also there, is, of course, purely coincidental. :) It's really nice seeing them together, but it does make me think alot about Jennie, and the possibility of me visiting her this summer.

-

Just for kicks, I decided to drop in on VCF's website to see what they were up to, and that plus a recent conversation I had with Karen brought me back to a comment left by Mark Nutter on an earlier post I made on the Dover court case in Kansas. Here it is, in its entirety:

I've been following this for a while and feel like playing devil's advocate here. I agree in principle and I've posted quite a bit on the Kansas Kourt on my own blog, but I'm thinking, "What makes people think and act this way?" It's ironic, but it may be the same psychological principle that causes people to perceive intelligent design--we perceive a certain pattern and we feel certain that it represents an intelligent and intentional attempt to achieve a particular goal. The ID'ers see scientists speaking a certain way, and perceive it as a pattern of deliberately trying to sabotage faith in God. The pro-science folks (like me) see the ID-er's speaking a certain way and perceive it as a pattern of deliberately trying to lie and deceive. Maybe the perceived "evil intent" is really there, and maybe it's just a trick of perception.

Perhaps being skeptical of ID means we shouldn't be so quick to assume evil motives on the part of ID'ers, or else we risk falling into the same psychological pitfalls as they do. Granted, there are real issues at stake, and we need to take substantive and decisive action to oppose them. But on the level of human understanding, and character assessments and such, maybe we should cut them some slack--maybe they're just messed up and confused. God knows I've been there...

Karen mentioned that, and generally agreed with Mark on his points. And indeed, Mark does make a very valid, if not charitable, assessment of much of the ID movement. Thankfully I feel a lot more calm about it now so I hopefully won't sound like the thundering loud mouth than I usually am.

My general outlook on the ID people pretty much echoes what I told Karen myself: in looking at what people from the Discovery Institute, and their supporters have done and said (mainly in print), it's clear to me that these people aren't stupid. It's easy to think that they are, because of their position (at least, you'd think so if you weren't an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian), but I would argue that they aren't.

Evolutionary biology has one simple thing going for it: the weight of the scientific evidence that supports it. You may have heard endless rhetoric about the "evidence against evolution" or "evidence for creation/design" but that really amounts to little more than reinterpretation and distortion of data via an a priori framework that by default already favours a supernatural explanation. By its very nature, evolutionary biology relies upon explanations rooted in a materialistic and naturalistic perspective. That's what science is: science is not religious; it never has been and it never will be. For all of the whining and moaning and hand-wringing by Creationists, an appeal to supernatural causes is not scientifically justifiable, and there is simply no satisfactory philosophical or scientific arguement that it should be.

That being said, it becomes self-evident that Creationism is simply just an extension of a narrow view of Christianity, and that's where the issue of moral position comes into play. The ID proponents have consistently painted themselves as being supporters of a secular theory that purports to be as scientific (if not more so) than evolutionary biology. But how can that be if they have at their core a supernatural entity who is Himself beyond the investigation of conventional science?

This is the first reason why I believe in the inherent dishonesty and immorality of the supporters of Intelligent Design: they have lied, and continue to lie in press to the general public. They lie in their portrayal of Intelligent Design and its goals. For all of their talk of "fairness", it is really a smokescreen for a wider agenda. One needs only to read The Wedge Document to see what I mean. The second reason comes from my earlier paragraph on "evidence". They lie in their portrayal of scientific research in evolutionary biology; it's enough that they turn the long, hard work of many people in ecology and evolution into a distorted caricature of itself to suit their goals; it's even more incredibly infuriating and incredibly insulting to be accused of being "dishonest".

Which leads me to my third point. In spite of the countless corrections and debunkings of their arguements and their evidence, they still continue to use the same tired arguements in their crusade. They still look to the bacterial flagellum as their example of an intelligently designed "irreducibly complex" system, they still point to things like "CSI", "IC", and "NFL" as examples of their work, and they still use incredibly outdated arguements stretching back to Richard Paley -- arguements that have been long debunked -- as their shining examples of how ID works and evolution fails.

In short, despite the repeated, continual debunking of their arguements, despite the constant stream of work being done which demonstrates the presence and operation of evolutionary forces, they still continue to deny everything they see and hold fast to their beliefs, constantly trumpeting and parroting them to a public all too eager to listen.

Which brings me to my ultimate point. The people behind all of this are not stupid, and they have succeeded where science has failed: by communicating to the public. This is the ultimate example of how making the packaging of your product all shiny and sleek and sexy will always triumph over making a good quality product. It is the ultimate demonstration of vacuous marketing over scientific progress.

This is why I think that at at the very least, the leaders of the ID movement are inherently evil. They know what they are doing, and yet continue to do it; the fact that intellectual ID leader William Dembski charged the taxpayers of Kansas $200/hr. for his testimony while pro-evolution witness Pedro Irigonegaray went to the Dover trial FOR FREE speaks volumes to me about the motivation and mindset underlying the Intelligent Design and Creationist movement.

I'm sorry, but I can't buy into the arguement that this is all due to innocent ignorance on the part of the ID proponents. Perhaps that is true for many people who only casually agree with ID, but for the leaders themselves, it is inconceivable that they could simply be innocently ignorant of what they are doing, and it is inconceivable that they think that they are doing this all in the name of "Christianity". Even the most hard-core zealot will agree with me that lying is a sin. The only way they could be doing this is if they are the "ends-justifies-the-means" type of Christians who think that all churches should be like Landover Baptist Church. Maybe they are, but the rhetoric of even the most extreme of the ID proponents doesn't strike me as being that far gone. My point here is that religion, cannot be purely behind all of this.

So if the ultimate driving force behind this is not scientific honesty, and if it is not religious fundamentalism, then what else is there, really?

My Tropical Odyssey

2005-05-22T16:36:00.000-04:00

Well, this is it, ladies and gentlemen.

For the next four weeks (from May 23-June 20) I'll be in Costa Rica doing field work with the professor I had as a supervisor for my ZOO 498 research project, Dan Brooks. We'll be doing parasite work involving genetic barcoding, a new (and very controversial) approach to systematics and taxonomy. There are species of parasites (nematode worms, I assume) there who live in their larval stage within snails, and from there spread to other host organisms (mainly birds, but also lizards, frogs, etc.) in their adult phase. The larvae are almost impossible to classify through traditional methods (i.e. morphology), so the idea is that they could be classified using genetic barcoding techniques. Of course someone has to get the larvae, and that's where I come in.

We'll be going to a biological reserve (not unlike Jokers' Hill) near Liberia, one of the major cities (the capital?). Dan says it's pretty tame; we'll have running water, electricity, a phone line, and laundry will be done in Liberia, where there are laundromats. Sadly, there will be no Internet, with the exception of momentary stops at Internet Cafe's in Liberia while we'll be in town for laundry. Suffice to say, I won't be around (heh, not that anyone would notice, of course!), and I fully expect my email inbox crammed full of spam ^H^H^H^H friend's telling me how much they miss me when I get back.

I'm currently collecting addresses for postcards from people (you know who you are), so expect to get some in the future! I'll be sure to try to get some souvenirs for people too, if time permits.

Well...see you in four weeks!

It starts with "i" and ends in "Pod"

2005-05-19T11:37:00.000-04:00

So I did it. I went out and got yet another 512 MB iPod shuffle to replace the one I had that became my oh-so-wonderful mother's Mother's Day/(Belated) Birthday Gift. I'm aiming to go to the Yorkdale Apple Store grand opening at 9:30 am on the 21st too...I'll see if I can drag mom along from work, if she's not going to be in a fit of sleep induced rancor.

I had this great big, pompous review of the shuffle posted to SNOG!, which was summarily turned into a flame war thanks to Jordie, who decided to tell us (effectively, in so many words) that we were all brand-whores/trend-sheep for liking the iPod. I won't force you to endure the rabid fanboyism of my first review, so here's some general thoughts about the iPod shuffle, for anyone interested...

A) Yes, it doesn't have a screen. But you see, that's sort of part of the point. With a conventional MP3-flash based player, you'd load it up with all of your albums and use the screen to select between tracks. With the shuffle, you add only the songs you like...or at least, only the songs that you really enjoy listening to the most. Of course it's hard to navigate between songs, and that's where the randomness of the shuffle comes into play. Think of it as a radio station that you get to control, one where they play only the songs you like, with none of the advertisements. Want something fresh? Plug it into your Mac or PC, delete and toss more tracks onto it (a simple drag-and-drop deal), or...if you're feeling daring just hit "Autofill" in iTunes. If you've clicked on "Choose higher rated songs more often", you'll get a wider mix of songs you enjoy using.

B) Yes, it doesn't have an FM-radio/stopwatch/voice recorder, etc. But really, how often do you use or need those features? And do they really add to the value of the shuffle as a digital music player? If you really want an FM-radio, then why are you buying an MP3-player in the first place?

C) Naturally, like most (all?) Apple products, the shuffle is not for everyone. If you'd like a digital music player that's a little different from the ordinary, or like me, just need a cheap economical way to carrying your favourite songs or albums along, then the shuffle is a great choice. At $129 CDN for the 512 MB model, it's a very good value compared to similar offerings from other companies like iRiver, Creative, or Samsung. But -- and it's a big but -- if you want or need a music player which works and feels just like your old Sony Discman/CD Walkman clunker (i.e a "conventional" MP3-player with a screen, etc.), then the shuffle wouldn't be a good idea.

And this brings me to the point about trend-sheep-ism; really, I like the iPod because it effectively fits what I want out of a digital music player, no more, no less. I'll admit that the fact that it's made by Apple was a big part of the decision, but that's because I've had a lot of experience with Apple's products, the majority of them positive. "Being Trendy" had nothing to do with it whatsoever. I can think of other, very well designed products who have gathered very devoted followings; cars, basic appliances, personal and home electronics...basically every category of consumer product has something -- a brand or a product because it does the seemingly novel duty of doing what it's customers want it to do, more or less. Since when is that a crime?

Somebody pinch me...

2005-05-14T11:12:00.000-04:00

2004 Fall - Bachelor's Degree Program - Victoria College

Sessional GPA 3.30 Cumulative GPA 2.95
Crs Code Title Wgt Mrk Grd CrsAvg
BIO469H1 Limnology 0.50 77 B+ *
BIO494Y1 Seminar in Evol Bio 1.00 IPR
BOT251Y1 Bio Plants Micro-Organms 1.00 IPR
ZOO354Y1 History of Biology 1.00 IPR
ZOO498Y1 Research Project 1.00 IPR
Credits Earned: 0.50

2005 Winter - Bachelor's Degree Program - Victoria College

Sessional GPA 3.71 Annual GPA 3.67 Cumulative GPA 3.11
Crs Code Title Wgt Mrk Grd CrsAvg
BIO494Y1 Seminar in Evol Bio 1.00 92 A+ *
BOT251Y1 Bio Plants Micro-Organms 1.00 74 B C+
ZOO354Y1 History of Biology 1.00 84 A- B-
ZOO462H1 Adv Phylogenetics 0.50 87 A *
ZOO498Y1 Research Project 1.00 90 A+ A-
Credits Earned: 4.50

You know how I am when it comes to bragging, but I'm sure that given the neurotic state I've been in with regards to marks for the past three months (to say nothing of the last nine years of my life), I think you can give me some allowance on that...

Like I said yesterday...you see? There is a God.

See? There is a God...

2005-05-13T18:21:00.000-04:00

Mission Accomplished

They didn’t have much to go on, only some disturbing photos and a resort location. But Toronto Police have confirmed authorities have found a girl who was being abused for years, and the man they believe was behind the terrible crime.

The case began several months ago, when local cops came across the disgusting images on the Internet. It quickly became clear the abuse had been going on for years and investigators watched as the tortured child grew up before their eyes in photo after photo.

After efforts to track her down failed, the Sex Crimes Unit took the unprecedented step of air brushing her out of the photos and releasing them to the public, hoping someone could pinpoint where the crimes took place.

And someone did, with several tipsters confirming they were from a hotel in Walt Disney World. That led Florida police and local authorities to another photograph, this time of what they called a key witness.

And that’s when cops finally received the tip they’d been waiting for.

Details are still scarce, but police here reveal the girl has been rescued and that the man they believe was behind the terrible crime is in custody.

The F.B.I. and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were both involved in bringing the case to a close.

Police are being tight-lipped about who she was and where she was, but they do admit she was living in a residence somewhere in New York State.

They’d theorized her attacker was someone close to her, but there’s no word on whether they were right.

The case sparked controversy over whether photos of the victim and the witness should be released, possibly compromising their privacy. But authorities believed the benefits outweighed the risks and on Friday, despite all the odds, they revealed the case had finally come to a close.

May 13, 2005

And the process involved what some people on Slashdot have considered to be the World's Worst Job: editing out the girl from the original pornographic pictures. I won't go into what I feel about this...I don't even want to think about it, and it's pretty obvious how I feel about the outcome of this case and the circumstances in which this girl lived most of her life.

I don't mean to at all subtract from the significance of the incredible effort that went into this...but seeing as how the outcome of this case could have been much, much worse (an earlier story looked at how the mother of Holly Jones was dealing with Mother's Day), I think that it's no less than a miracle that she was found safe, and the man (supposedly her foster father) caught.

She's now in her teens now, according to the TV report I just saw. I can't help but feel that while her terrible ordeal may be over, her true suffering...won't.

Back-Spin

2005-05-13T14:12:00.000-04:00

The big news in the popular scientific press is the end of the Kansas "Kangaroo Kourt", centered around the big debate about whether "Intelligent Design" Creationism should be inserted into the Dover high school curricula. The Panda's Thumb has been covering the Evolution side of the debate pretty well, and of course The Discovery Institute and other ID figures like Dembski have weighed in as well.

Really, Steve Case's letter to the Wichita Eagle pretty much sums it up for me. But I'll distill it and give it my own "spin": Creationists and Intelligent Design Advocates in the popular press are deceitful, cowardly liars who have hijacked Christianity to serve their own wicked agenda. Abrams' original letter, to which Case's letter was a reply, would have you think that he is the victim, and only serving the cause of good science...but Case has blatantly caught him in his own web of lies and rhetoric. The only "proof" that the Intelligent Design advocates have given in evidence of their claim that biology is rife with tension and division over the validity of evolutionary biology have been dishonestly used quotes, distorted research from evolutionary biologists, and worst of all, outright lies that are perpetuated over and over and over again despite their repeated, explicit refutation. These people have been told over, and over and over again that the discussion and debate over evolutionary biology is not over the existence of evolution, or even Darwinian natural selection, but on the mechanism - the how of evolution. That these people have ignored this is a clear sign to me that they are either unbelievably ignorant and stupid, or simply without any sense of academic or moral integrity.

What makes me even more angry is not just that these people are outright liars -- but that they either have themselves, or a hardened core of followers who are more than willing to justify this through outright obfuscation, blissful ignorance, or just an even more tangled web of lies.

It simply astounds me that these people can give any justification to their acts...that they deny the overtly religious motivation for their actions yet shield them under a dense fog of confusing jargon. Christianity is not about lying to get ahead. It is about honesty and freedom, yet these people are more than willing to put a yoke of intellectual slavery over the necks of all of the school children of Kansas. This is simply pathetic and shameful, and I have to say to their supporters, Shame on You. Shame on you for demeaning and insulting a proud religious tradition. Shame on you for demeaning and insulting the hard work of scientists and researchers around the world, for decades...and lastly, shame on you for your "justified" hypocrisy.

For Apple Apologetics (And Sour Grapes), Apply Within

2005-05-13T13:27:00.000-04:00

The latest storm in the Apple world is the somewhat overplayed conflict that Apple has had with the KHTML developers over Safari, the high-profile web browser project developed by Apple that was, ostensibly, supposed to be the showcase of how Apple liked to play nice with the OSS (open source software) community. Trouble is, the KHTML people are annoyed at the fact that changes posted by David Hyatt (the lead developer of Safari) are so hard to integrate back into Konqueror, the open-source KDE-based counterpart of Safari that they just don't bother trying. Now, Firefox lead developer Ben Goodger's weighed in with...well, a justification of what Apple's doing - something which has raised the ire of people who, well, don't seem to really understand what either side is saying.

Hyatt himself pretty much lays it all out: the changes that he submitted to the KDE/KHTML developers were changes made to WebCore, not KHTML; KHTML is the rendering engine behind Konqueror, and WebCore, the rendering engine behind Safari, is based off of it: Webcore != KHTML. The Safari team, and Apple, have effectively forked the KHTML code, in the same way that Firefox, has, effectively, been a fork of the browser code of Mozilla. Just like how Mozilla and Firefox are two totally different web browser projects that have originated from a common ancestor (heh), Safari and Konqueror have the same relationship. And like Mozilla and Firefox, they're two totally different projects.

The trouble here is that people seem to think that Safari is just an Apple-branded version of Konqueror, when the reality really couldn't be farther from the truth. That's essentially what Hyatt is saying, but the media has of course blown this totally out of proportion, and has failed to see what the fact of the matter truly is.

Goodger's comments do raise a good point; Apple's "vision", for better or for worse, is one that is user-centric, in stark comparison to OSS projects like Konqueror, which arguably are more developer-centric. I don't buy into the interpretation of one comment from a KHTML developer which was construed to say "We don't care about users, only developers", but its just that like most OSS projects, the fact of the matter is that developers are front and centre, not users.

So what ultimately is my take on this, as a user? People point to the relationship between Apple and the GCC OSS community as an example of How Things Ought to be, and I'd generally agree. I don't know as much as I should, but I suspect that Hyatt's working method differs enough from the KDE developers that for either one to shift their method of working on the code to the other's methods would just be too much to ask. Maybe there's more, but beyond that I really can't say.

I think that the real fault lies with the media and the pundits who've really lost sight of what's really going on here. As always they've turned a molehill into a mountain, and as a result, Apple's relationships with its developers has the potential to suffer some degree of appreciable damage. And that's really too bad.

Hey Karen...

2005-05-12T22:20:00.000-04:00

As requested, I've unlocked comments so anyone can post...which of course leaves me vulnerable to some extent (but that shouldn't be an issue unless the people who I don't want here actually come here -- mum's the word, yes?)...anyway I'm really curious to see what sort of comments you have on some of my posts...

Spring is in the air...

2005-05-04T16:28:00.000-04:00

I spent most of the day out with mom, showing her art stores that I thought she might have liked to see for pictures for her room, the dining room, and the kitchen. While I was out with Jennie once I saw a nice picture of a bowl of strawberries for only $10 (down from $35), and she liked it.

It was...hard, having to revisit some of the sites where Jennie and I went and hung out in. Like the last time and the first time she visited, there was a sense of emptiness there, a vibrant colour which was once there but now faded away. I have to now train myself to get out of the eager routine I fell in, calling up Jennie's room at the Delta Chelsea, and hearing Bonnie's bright and cheery voice, hurrying through the College Park shopping concourse, seeing my smiling Jennie coming up to hug me in the lobby.

I'm going to see her again -- I know I will, and once again we've gone back to our old routine on AIM. It'll take me a while to adjust, and it's gotten better with time, too. Still, I just can't help but feel this overwhelming sense of realizing that something wonderful and magical was once with me, and now just isn't there anymore.

The whole week was just a whirlwind for me. Between the emotional stress of having to try to keep mom happy, having to help Jordan take care of his maternal grandfather, and dealing with Bonnie's reaction to all of that plus being dropped back into Toronto, it was a miracle that I could still keep myself together to actually spend time with Jennie -- and even then I realized that a lot of important things fell through the cracks...like helping Katherine with Neena's move back to her apartment in Etobicoke.

(If you're reading this, Katherine...my God, I'm sorry. I tried to get back to you, but I just was either too exhausted or just simply had no time...but I did try to call you up last night and you weren't there...could we get together sometime soon?)

It's never easy, isn't it? But as Jennie told me, life would be pretty dull if it were, wouldn't it?

T-9 Hours...

2005-04-13T23:11:00.000-04:00

Well. This is it. Tomorrow morning I'm going over to the College and St. George Alicos to pick up my poster for the ZOO 498 poster session. Damage? $189 and change, tax included. I've heard rumours that you can actually print posters over at Physics for free (which is apparently what Marc did for Alice's BIO 299 poster) but I know Marc's busy with his own papers, and, well, it felt really nice to have done all of that all by myself without having to rely on anyone to help me out. Not that I had a choice, anyway: Dan was in Mexico for a GBIF meeting. I cringed when I heard the price quote over the phone, but I still maintain that it was a good price; they're giving me a high-res printout on photo-quality paper, and given my experience with Alicos and special print/copy jobs compared to other places, I'm fairly sure that they had the lowest price overall. I didn't have the time or energy to go to every single print shop I know of to check prices, anyway.

God, actually laying out the poster was an exercise in absolute frustration. I've never had a more frustrating and infuriatingly irritating project: it should have taken a morning to do, but what it ended up doing was suck up the whole day. I had to rely on GraphicConverter to do all of the grunt work for me; now GC is a great file format converter for graphics files, but it's clear that it's absolutely terrible for anything else. The text tools are substandard and not directly editable; if you make a typo, you need to completely delete your whole block of text and start all over again. Sure, GC isn't supposed to be Photoshop, but not having editable text is silly (I am using an older version though, so maybe this has been improved).

And then there was the file itself. I'd never layed out anything close to 1 x 1.1 m before but I knew it was going to be massive, and indeed it was: even just scrolling through the file was excruciating. That was what took so much time: the process of actually moving from place to place on the file. And for some reason, even typing text was glacially slow.

As luck or irony would have it, I actually got Gimp.app running on my G4 via X11, which didn't happen before...and I realize just what a breeze this would have made of the layout. Well, not that it does me any good now. Sigh.

Anyway...if you're going to be around campus tomorrow, the poster session will be from approx. 1:30-3:30 pm on Thursday (tomorrow) in the Ramsay Wright Student Lounge, in the basement, and I guess this goes out to Alex and Katherine, since you're the only ones in my day-to-day life who actually go to the trouble of coming here and reading my posts...oh well. Wish me luck, guys!

"What is it with you, anyway?"

2005-04-12T02:11:00.000-04:00

That's probably one of the one-liners from Star Trek that will remain with me for the rest of my life -- a wry remark by McCoy to Kirk on Rura Penthe in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when he sees that once again, Kirk is up to his skirt-chasing ways, as always.

I wish I could say that same thing to all of the people I've met or seen who put their journals on "Friends-Only". I'm not talking about most of the people I've seen here on Blogger...I'm talking about the people I've seen and met on the infamous Journal-Site-That-Is-Not-To-Be-Named.

On their front page, LiveJournal bills itself as "...a simple-to-use (but extremely powerful and customizable) personal publishing ("blogging") tool". And in many respects, the purpose of a blog is to arguably provide a public insight on your thoughts, be they on science or current affairs, life in general, or just what happens to you in your-day-to-day life. The very concept of a blog is, arguably, to provide a public outlet for your own feelings and thoughts. Think about it. "blog" is a slang contraction for "Weblog". Web + Log. "Log" of course, being obvious, but "Web" clearly refers to the fact that you're publishing this "Log" of yours to the Internet. And by its very definition, the Internet is a communal place where privacy is deemphasized in favour of openness and group discussion. So, extending that logic, a "blog" is by its definition a record of your thoughts which is purely open -- or at least, as open as you wish it to be, within reason.

So I then make the case that people who put their blogs, be it here or on LiveJournal, on "Friends-Only" are doing something which is antithetical to the very idea of a blog. If they're all "Friends-Only" then what are they doing publishing to an Internet site in the first place? Better to keep a pen-and-paper journal that you show to your friends, or tell them all about your thoughts and feelings via email. At the risk of sounding snobby, it in a way smacks of pretentiousness.

~

Now, I understand that it's their right to do whatever they want with their journal and it's their business how they want to express themselves...not yours. But it seems so cold, and even arrogant in a way. I've met people through LiveJournal and Renee's message board who I'd love to get to know better, but seeing that "I am putting my journal on Friends-Only from now on" post is like a big red Stop sign to me. It says to me that no, I don't want nor need your friendship, thankyouverymuch. I don't care about you, I only care about me and my own little inner circle of friends -- and no, you can't be a part of OUR group.

Which brings me back to the communal nature of the Internet today. If the Internet were a neighbourhood, we'd all be freely exchanging all of our ideas, thoughts and feelings...our doors would be unlocked, and your next door neighbour could drop by anytime, whether it was to borrow a few cubes of sugar or just sit down for a chat and some tea. But the Climate of LiveJournal is different. It's colder, more impersonal, more inhumane. It's a neighbourhood where all of the doors on the houses aren't just locked, but bricked up and sealed off with razor wire and chain-linked fences, and houses are linked only by deep and dark subterranean tunnels. Newcomers are treated with suspicion and even malice.

It's the difference between Toronto (well, Michael Moore's Toronto anyway) and a suburb in L.A.

But anyway. I'm keeping my LiveJournal and keeping it asystolic, yet still open and left at the entry about dad...if only as a sign of protest against LiveJournal's collective xenophobia. In the meantime, why don't you drop by my place here at Blogger? My door's always unlocked, and if you need to borrow a cube or a cup of sugar, I'll always be happy to oblige.

I am no longer Justin Ancheta...

2005-03-30T21:57:00.000-05:00

But Justin Ancheta, FCD. Well, hey, at least I have a cool TLA to tack on to my name if I flunk out of my undergrad degree. I'd change my information on SNOG!, the message board I love to hate (or hate to love?), but that would mean that Renee and the others on there would know about this place. And I simply can't allow that to happen. I've always valued my privacy and my personal space, and sadly, she's had a history of not fully appreciating that when she's been with me. Naomi put it best during our walk: I'm the kind of person who likes to quietly walk away from situations I don't like. It's somewhat bizarre how I've ranted on about that place in the past. Leaving that place for good has always been one of the things on my to-do list, yet it's something I still can't bring myself to do. I guess it's like an abusive relationship, although that term would probably better describe me and Renee (and guess who'd be the abusive one?) rather than me and that message board.

On a more happier note, Jennie posted some pics on her LiveJournal site, pics which I dare not post out of fear that some random guy will see them and start drooling over her they way I've been since I've seen them...and she knows how jealous I can be (since she's usually that jealous herself). Really. They're that good. I saw them on the weekend (or last weekend?), so...well, that means that that's a lot of drool that I've been putting out.

Last night, I almost beat my latest record for sleep-deprivation: 3am-6am, this morning. Not quite the two hours I was shooting for...maybe next time when I have to scramble to finish one of my last papers...

6(^6) Degrees of Separation

2005-03-23T07:52:00.000-05:00

I made a mad dash to get my Advanced Phylogenetics paper and PowerPoint presentation in. No, mad dash really isn't the word to use, more like...frantic last-minute panic. I have to say that it's not wholly my fault...PAUP* took hours, if not days to carry out most of the analyses I did. Agnes in her presentation today said that one run through her data set with a heuristic search went on for more than a month and it still hadn't been finished yet. Argh.

So I ran my ass off to class and Professor Murphy was there right behind me making a smarmy remark. Which I guess is just as well. I do take school too seriously, so much so that it's almost impossible for me to tell the difference between when they're joking and when they're being serious. Anyway, so I forgot all about the Gap Coding assignment that was due on the same day. Double-argh. But it wasn't so bad. Next door at ZOOCU they were having free quasi-Chinese food, so at least I made up for the fact that I skipped dinner the night before and breakfast and lunch. I pigged out, especially in front of Nancy, but I didn't care. I saw Anna there and talked to her for a bit. It doesn't bother me as much as it did before (not that I really was objecting to it), but it was still nice that she took the time to come to me and say hi.

I spent a good day with Naomi a few weeks ago and I really enjoyed it. It still really boggles me, just how they were able to remember me so well when I met them outside Seekers last year. God, they even still remembered my writing. Anyway, I really needed that. It was a nice time to talk to someone who wasn't from school and take some things I'd been carrying around with me off my chest, plus it gave me a chance to act all sappy and tell her about me and Jennie.

Dropping by Karen's site on LiveJournal reminded me of a most bizarre thing I'd heard when I was with Naomi. Apparently, she knows Alex, and her friends, and they met through mutual friends. Weird. It's something I never would have imagined.

Yesterday I bumped into, of all people, Wenjun, the girl who got me connected to Karen and Naomi in the first place. She looked really good, though I have to admit that I think her hair looked better when it was shorter. And she looked really happy too; well, for Wenjun anyway, but not happy enough to remove the Wenjun we've come to know and love so well...it's a good thing she's still retained her trademark jaded cynicism; I was starting to get worried there for a minute...

Christian Crusaders: Coming to a town near you!

2005-03-06T11:38:00.000-05:00

I couldn't leave without linking to an article I read in this week's issue of NOW...Absolutely hilarious (but somewhat saddening, nonetheless -- I've been to anti-war demonstrations where only a few people showed up when we expected hundreds).

...A ripple of fear goes through the crowd. "I've been told there will be a counter-protest at the next stop. And it could turn violent," he bellows across the barren parking lot. "The police have asked us to kindly cancel our rally. Not a chance!" says Thomas defiantly. "This is war. And we need every soldier showing up for duty."

Then Thomas jumps into his black Lincoln Continental and takes off for the big demo. We follow. Twenty minutes later, we're at Immigration Minister Joe Volpe's office, across from the fab Lawrence Plaza shopping mall.

Thomas isn't kidding. The mounted horse unit is here, squadrons of yellow-jacket bike cops and dozens of uniformed police. Then I see the bus. Obviously, the brakes have been fixed, or maybe not. It floats down the street with its oddly windblown maple leaf insignia and the slogan "Defend Marriage" emblazoned on its side like a righteous brand on a sodomite's forehead. It magically comes to a stop. A stage and a red pulpit are pulled out of its guts and quickly erected.

Suddenly, in the distance, I hear the other demo. The words of Dr. Rondo Thomas ring in my ears. "This is war. We are engaging the enemy today." And there they are, about 150 activists bearing down on us. But who are they? Well, actually – OCAP, coincidentally onsite protesting for immigrant rights. The group marches past the Defend Marriage bus, looking bewildered. With OCAP gone, it's time to kick some sodomite butt.

Charles McVety, traditional marriage's grand fromage, steps up to the podium. The only thing standing between the world and the impending end of life as we know it: 19 people, if you include the guy setting up equipment. They've cancelled the demo, McVety says, because they didn't want trouble, but came anyway in case their people showed up. Some of the reporters look confused. And it's strange that the the protest could have been "cancelled" when it was still advertised on Defend Marriage's website days later. Hmmm...

I think in a way, this scene sums up the right-wing/Christian Conservative movement so well...a myopic point of view forwarded by a select elite few individuals who see themselves as leading whole armies of only a handful of people to charge at windmills, only to pronounce them as "rousing victories". Don Quixote would be proud.

In high school, be sure to check your intellect at the door (along with your guns and knives).

2005-03-06T11:23:00.000-05:00

I got a hold of this link by way of Pharyngula, who I've been trying to read less and less of lately because of the fact that reading his accounts of right-wing zealotry, Creationist dishonesty and general fundamentalist Christian insanity is liable to get my blood pressure to critical levels. His anti-religion comments sometimes bother me too, but hey, the poor man's got a right to an opinion, and given his own experiences, he's got a right to be hopping mad. Sometimes, I need to remember that not everyone's been privlidged enough to live in a cosmopolitan city and a cosmopolitan country where diversity and tolerance are (well, for the most part) widely embraced.

Anyway, check out One Good Thing's account of how she got the short end of the Fundamentalist stick back in high school. It's a good counterpoint to David Horowitz's insane ramblings on how conservatives are opppressed in academia that Pharyngula had to suffer through.

Eureka!

2005-03-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

Well, I finally figured it out; Katherine and Alex sent me some pointers in the right direction (thanks guys!) but by that time I'd already figured it out, thanks to a trip to Blogger's help section. It's kinda cool that you can go right into the code of your template and essentially muck around with it to your heart's content, but it would have been useful if they made it a little more explicit...like "To put in links or buttons to other websites or blogs, simply..." Instead you have to sort of stumble on it by mistake. Or maybe it really is that simple and obvious, and I'm just plain stupid. Still, it's kind of odd how LiveJournal makes it easy and intuitive, but Blogger's a little more obscure.

I also put in buttons in the sidebar; one for Team Mac OS X, and two for Mozilla Foundation projects: Firefox and Camino. I don't use Camino or Firefox that much (I mainly use them for times when Safari chokes on a website), but I do have a tremendous respect for their work and for the blood, sweat and tears that went into what are arguably some of the finest examples of open source software available. I've got the G4 and G3 optimized builds of Firefox, and, really, if only they put in Quartz rendering, native OS X interface widgets, and iApp interconnectivity, I'd be totally sold...doubly so if Camino finally gets to the 1.0 stage and overcomes some of the bugs it has. (Then again, I'm just like the other 99.9% of Mac users who've used Firefox and made much vocal brouhaha over that.)

If you're an IE user on Windows, I really can't emphasize it more; drop IE and use Firefox. It simply is the best web browser availble on the PC. Period. It's faster, more secure, and has better features. MS has been talking about IE 7 recently, but really, why stay on a buggy, insecure browser that will give you viruses and spyware and wait for MS's next version of IE (which is coming in...well, God knows when), when you can have that browser right now, as Firefox? It's a no brainer, in my opinion.

And yes, that means you, Jennie!

There is a light...

2005-03-01T19:52:00.000-05:00

Sorry, Katherine; I just couldn't resist. But I promise that I'll have your money for your Cuts for Cancer pledge. Anyway, welcome to Katherine, who's finally seen the light (okay, I'll stop now, I promise) and left that wretched hive of scum and villany to join the more enlighted bloggers on Blogger.

And speaking of enlightenment, just how the @#$%^&*!? do you get a link section to display on your journal?

Pairing Up and Crossing Over

2005-03-01T19:30:00.000-05:00

So I found out today from Jen (in Advanced Phylogenetics) that Russell and Anna are now an "item" -- whatever that means. Well, okay. They're now a couple. Which I found at once extremely disconcerting since Anna and Russell are the last people on earth who I would have thought would wind up together. I never pictured Anna really pairing up with anyone -- she always struck me as being someone who wouldn't really be attracted to the idea of being attached to anyone on any sort of level, I guess what I'm trying to say is that she'd be far too independent, though it's obviously not something I'd say in a bad way. As for Russell, I could easily picture him being with someone, just not someone like Anna. Or maybe on second thought, it's really not so much a stretch after all. Anna's a pretty quiet, reserved person -- at least, she's not terribly loud or boisterous. And God knows Russell isn't anything remotely like that. So, well, who better for him then, than her?

It's not like I disapprove of all this, it's just that it makes me feel kinda awkward. I'm happy for the fact that two of my friends ended up together, but now I feel like I've lost them both as people I could feel really comfortable talking to -- especially Anna. I know that it'll feel a little more lonely on the train without Anna to talk to and hang out with, since she and Russell will undoubtably be spending more and more time together, at least. And speaking of which, it's kinda funny that I didn't catch on sooner. The times Anna spent having dinner or lunch with Russell, or the time Russell slept at her place...it did kind of seem strange that they were spending so much time together -- but I digress, I suppose. It'll be interesting tomorrow when we all meet up for class, to say the least.

OH, and one more thing...

2005-02-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

The Critic had the utter audacity to send me a Valentine's Day Card, extolling the virtues and wonders of our friendship -- a relationship which, for all intents and purposes, is completely at the whim of whatever position she's at in her emotional cycle. Just the other month or so she blasted me for being melodramatic, over an offhand remark, never mind the fact that her excessive melodrama was the exact reason why I stopped talking to her in the first place.

Physician, heal thyself.

A comedy of errors

2005-02-20T20:52:00.000-05:00

So where do I begin?

1.) Anna was a no-show. Can't fault her for that though, since she forgot where I live, which is only fair, since I keep on forgetting her apartment number. Anna kept on calling, but by that time Bell had disconnected our phone. Isadora couldn't make it.

2.) Ikea and Rogers made it on Saturday morning -- at 9 am. And of course there was no one there, since everyone was busy moving. Mom and her brother got a UHAUL van which was woefully too small, making us rely jointly on Clint's Explorer and Chuck's Windstar. So they left, and aren't going to come back until Monday.

3.) A certain friend of mom's husband (who I shall refer to as "Nancy") came to pick up our bedroom dresser set -- I didn't know what to do when he showed up, so I decided to start bringing that out too. And right then mom showed up completely hysterical and melodramatic, yelling at us (well, me), asking what on earth we were doing. We left Nancy's husband to finish up, and as soon as he was done he left, with nothing so much as a thank-you or an offer to help.

4.) I still have to sleep on the fucking floor. Again.

5.) I have had practically zero time to properly study for my Botany test tomorrow.

6.) And of course, The Relative insists on exerting Her influence, taking over my life, sucking away what little control I've had on my life. I'm little more than a pawn now. For now anyway, until I free myself from this prison.

7.) I fucked up while trying to assemble my desk; I now have drill holes on my tabletop, and drill holes in the floor. I now have to try to figure out some way that I can cover up my mistake; it's going to look a little kludgy, which is far from what I originally had in mind for my table. At least mom isn't going to go "OMFG!!!oneone1" on me, which is what she normally does.

8.) Mom refuses to let me assemble my own furniture. Just like how she thought I was too stupid to disconnect and dismantle my own computer setup, or too stupid to know what's wrong with our stero system, which dad and I had spent years trying to fix.

The only solution I have is to #8; out of spite I plan on dismantling my furniture pieces and reassembling them myself, if I can't *gently* persuade my own mother tomorrow morning than I am neither too stupid or too weak to know how to take care of myself -- which time and time again she seems to delude herself into thinking. I've got some ideas as to how I can fix my table, but like I said it's going to look a little less...shall we say, elegant than I originally thought.

This is depression.

2005-02-11T13:24:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling a lot more drained and unmotivated than I was before, and as a result, more grumpy and more angry. Misty says its the weather, or my lack of vitamin D. I suppose so. It's been overcast a lot lately. The sky is blue today, and the sun is shining. Though it's not making me feel any better.

The office emailed me today and said that I'd been rejected for the summer undergraduate NSERC award. Dan said that he'd pay me out of his own pocket, which is unbelievably kind of him, and yet I still feel deeply guilty and grieved over having to rely on him -- the way you kind of feel sorry for yourself when people decide to pay for your lunch when you go out with them. It makes me realize more just how much Anna's friend was a prick for harping on him when we were at her house celebrating Chinese New Year.

That same night, Anna made a jab at me over having to leave home early to be with mom, the same way that Amy and Jordan used to do. And fuck me, it hurt...and it didn't make sense to me. She knows my dad died, and she knew just how much it broke up mom. I wonder if she would have said the same thing if it were her father that died in his sleep in his bedroom. Not that I'd ever want that, naturally.

And of course, I feel like I'm bashing my head against a brick wall with my 498. I see the islands and the brackets, and the nodes, but my mind can't piece them together in my head. All I see is a jumble of lines and letters. So much for getting anything done today.

I've gathered up a list of names of people I'd like to get in touch with at LiveJournal: I looked at it and just said "Fuck It" and decided to finally do what I'd been putting off for so long.

It's going to be sort of cathartic, seeing my username crossed out on all of those people's pages.

Activist Thoughts

2005-02-06T11:27:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of Five Minutes to Midnight reminded me of the big (?) CFS/"Freeze Tuition Fees" Student Rally that was held on Thursday. The crowd was decently sized, though nothing to write home about. It was at least a lot more substantial than the rather pathetic turn out to the rally held the other year, where a few brave (foolhardy?) souls set about trapsing about campus holding up blue and yellow CFS placards in the middle of a fierce blizzard with temperatures in excess of -20 degrees. At least it looked a lot more credible than the silly "Car Free U of T" band of kids who screamed "The planet is dying/Why are the fuck are you still driving!?" at me and a few hundred others waiting outside SAC to get our metropasses.

Yeah, because naturally of course, TTC riders are the most egregious offenders when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions from driving cars around.

I passed by the parade with an aire of indifference, or rather embarassment, actually. In the space of four years I've run the gamut of activist emotions from "enthusiastic world-changer" to "angry, pissed-off right-wing hater", to "oppressed, secretive freedom fighter". I look back at the voluminous Land Mines/Unexploded Ordinance project I did for Students of Science for Peace or the twenty-page paper I did on Global Warming and Extinctions for IIP and I can't believe that I could have put so much effort and and time into something that had no appreciable and immediate impact on my academic future. It's like some sort of dream, like being in the middle of the anti-war protests and just soaking up the incredible vibe that was in the air...I feel like I'm stuck in the middle of the opening sequence to Fahrenheit 9/11.

I wish that I could have had some kind of motivation to join that parade that day, but for all of the screaming and chanting and slogans being uttered, I had to wonder if there was something more. Yes, I'm sure everyone and their mother would love lower tuition fees, but where will the rest of the money come from? It would be great to have a model like Ireland, where taxation is high but social programs are relatively intact, and free - including university - but such change isn't going to happen overnight, and there are serious issues that need to be considered. Like what about research? Hiring professors and staff? Facilities like Joker's Hill and UTIAS don't come cheap, and the world-class cutting edge research (and yes, it is world-class cutting-edge research, marketing drone BS aside) being done at the unversity certainly carries a heavy price tag.

I don't pretend to know anything about the university's funding model, but what I do know for sure is that screaming out "Reduce Tuition Fees!" is a hollow statement unless you really sit down and understand just what it is you're fighting for. The Federal and Provincial Government surely must step in and increase funding for our universities, but what about social programs? What about addressing issues of the environment? What about global and international aid?

And then of course, there's the question of where we get the money in the first place? Tax the rich, right? Maybe I'm just too jaded and cynical now, especially after what happened with SSfP last year, but unless we have something along the lines of the French Revolution, it's unlikely that we're going to have the rich dump out their coffers to help us poor struggling, university students.

Which brings me to another point. As I said before, the government will most likely if not begrudginly step in to increase university funding if these people get what they want. This will lead to two possible consequences. First, money that could have gone into other projects and programs, like say, environmental protection/remediation and affordable housing will most likely be diverted to make up for the loss in funding. I don't know about those guys, but I'd feel pretty awful if I knew that funding that could have helped keep the homeless people off the streets was instead used to fund my education.

The second is that the government won't step up to the plate, and private industry will. I can imagine that the elements at SAC trying to remove or minimize corporate influence on campus is going to have a blast when Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Eli Lilly, MacMillan-Blodel, Union Carbide, and just about every other evil multinational corporation you can imagine under the sun is going to start knocking on the doors of the Office of the President with truckloads of cash in tow. Maybe I've read too many issues of Adbusters, but I don't want to even think of what's going to happen if that happened.

Oh, and I forgot the third possibility, actually. That Dalton McGuinty isn't going to give a damn about any of this. Neither will the university Governing Council, and the status quo will remain just that.

:(

2005-02-05T01:19:00.000-05:00

"Dr. Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, died on Thursday in Bedford, Mass. He was 100.

Dr. Mayr's death, in a retirement community where he had lived since 1997, was announced by his family and Harvard, where he was a faculty member for many years.

He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The synthesis, which has been described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard as "one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century," revived Darwin's theories of evolution and reconciled them with new findings in laboratory genetics and in field work on animal populations and diversity.

One of Dr. Mayr's most significant contributions was his persuasive argument for the role of geography in the origin of new species, an idea that has won virtually universal acceptance among evolutionary theorists. He also established a philosophy of biology and founded the field of the history of biology."

Quoted from the NY Times article published on Feb. 4th.

More details here [ny times] and here [panda's thumb].

The Megabyte Myth

2005-01-31T22:37:00.000-05:00

It's been shouted out again, and again, and again: RAM is better. More RAM buy more RAM. If you run OS X, BUY MORE RAM. If you're buying a Mac, BUY MORE RAM. It's almost as if all of the Mac pundits and Mac users on earth have been employed or bought off by the memory manufacturers for the last three years. Even above upgrading your hard drive or graphics card, memory is always said to be the first thing to be upgraded. It's this mantra which inevitably led to me putting my G4/400 out to pasture, after buying an inadvertently bad 512 MB memory module for it.

Now Macs Only! has decided to boldly challenge this almost zombie-like mantra with a variety of informal benchmarks using the controversial utility Xbench and a variety of other benchmarking stalwarts like Quake III: Arena.

It makes me wonder now if Apple knew this all along, and it was for that reason that they decided to ship many of their consumer-level and even mid-range professional level hardware with an apparently paltry 256 MB of RAM. Their arguement and evidence is convincing, though not fully conclusive; I'd be more interested if they shifted away from reliance on Xbench and used more "real-world" -style benchmarks. Note that they stress that the real reason why you should buy more RAM -- to kick ass at manipulating huge Photoshop files -- is far from what the intended target market of the Mac mini is supposed to be. And that kinda makes sense, doesn't it? You surely don't need a Dual-2.5 Ghz G5 to check your email, pay your bills online, or type up your letter to grandma...so why do you need 1 GB+ of RAM to do it?

11:30 pm Rant

2005-01-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

It seems that people have some kind of elitist idea to what a "blog" is supposed to be. Now granted, I'm all for putting the kibosh on bloggers who tYp3 Lik dis jUsT 2 LeuC Kewl (see MSN Spaces), but I think that the whole point of a blog is as a personal means of self-expression, whether it be poetry written in red text on a black background set to the music of Korn or Slipknot, or a review on the latest Hilary Duff CD. There are a whole lot of bloggers out there whose writings run the gamut from sublime to silly, but surely Hilary Duff fans have just as much a right to have a blog as the Mac pundits and the random URL-gathering bloggers who fancy themselves to be the next Matt Drudge.

The "It's my damn blog and I'll post what I want to" arguement is tired and clichéd, but that by no means makes it any less an arguement.

It's silly to go online and think that every person who sets up a Blogger, Xanga, or LiveJournal account has to be the next John Gruber or P. Z. Myers. For some people, a blog is all they have. Just look at Riverbend. No, wait, it's not just silly, it's just plain stupid. It's absolutely idiotic to expect that every blog you're going to see on the internet is somehow going to be a fountain of witty insights or spellbinding storytelling. You don't go into a bookstore expecting every book you pick up to be like a Shakespearean play, do you?

If you think that bloggers and their writings are somehow inferior for posting aspects about their life, then you have no right to post your filthy Flash-infested, websites packed full of bloody annoying bandwidth-clogging animated gifs and 1290x1680 jpegs. I'm not interested in your crummy fanboi art direct at the inane worshipping of some pointless sci-fi show or computer/console game intended for an audience with a collective IQ of a deck chair. In fact, I think I'll go over and post a link to your site over to /. for the sake of seeing your host be brought to its knees begging for mercy. Ah, Schaudenfreüde. It's a wonderful thing.

Ahh...all of a sudden I feel so much better now. I should do these late night rantings more often.

Cats: For TRUE Christians?

2005-01-29T16:11:00.000-05:00

When I first learned about this article by way of Pharyngula, what I immediately thought of were...well, not necessarily members of the genus Felis, but another species entirely.

There really isn't much I can say about this, that hasn't been said by Professor Myers already. But I did rather enjoy this choice tidbit:

The Bible does not say that cats were not present at Herod's birthday party when John the Baptist was beheaded. History shows that cats were most likely present at this tragic party that Jehovah did not approve of. Clearly then, as loyal Christians, why would we even want to associate with animals that are without a doubt of such bad influence, remembering how true are the Bible's words: 'Bad associations spoil useful habits'! -1 Cor. 15:33. Some have exposed themselves to possible spiritual contamination in this way. To invite cats in our house is to toy with disaster. Can one deny that the chance exists that the same grave consequences could visit your home that fell upon John? Clearly, God disapproved of this 'birthday' party. Should we not then disapprove (without showing any malicious intent, only Godly hatred) of cats the way the scriptures recommend?

Right. So these are the Christians who think that a strictly, no-nonsense 100% purely literal interpretation of Scripture is the end-all and be-all for everything under the sun, from martial relations, to international law, to historiography and the study of science and tech. If the Bible doesn't say it happened, then the Bible says it didn't happen.

So...the Bible doesn't say that cats had anything to do with the death of John the Baptist...and all of a sudden, that's perfectly okay? The Jehovah's Witness who wrote this just keeps on trucking paying no attention to the fact that he has, for all intents and purposes, just told a total lie.

Ah, to be a Christian.

Request Permission to Update, Sir.

2005-01-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball's been involved in an interesting exchange with various other people on proper procedure for software updates. He gives some very good advice all in all, and it's something that all Mac newbies and OS X converts should look at.

What's worth noting is his adressing of the now-classic troubleshooting technique, Repair Permissions:

I still stand behind my original advice, that Repair Permissions is something you should turn to as a troubleshooting tool, but many of you disagree. For those of you who report that Repair Permissions frequently turns up files with incorrect permissions, however, I suspect it’s a sign of some deeper problem with your Mac OS X installation. File permissions and ownership don’t have a half-life — they don’t rot or “go bad” or even change over time. If they’ve changed, some software had to have changed them.

Of course, the reason people tend to run Repair Permissions immediately after installing system and security updates is that installers are the software most likely to modify these file attributes. It’s anecdotal evidence at best, but for what it’s worth, I have two Macs on which I’ve never run Repair Permissions, which have been updated with every system and security update over the last two years, and which exhibit no permission/ownership-related problems whatsoever.

On both of my Macs and on my friend's Macs, Repair Permissions always reports some error with Permissions, even though I religiously try to keep my system as clean and tidy as possible, using Disk Utility and Disk Warrior to scan and check my disk. Often times it's something with the filesystem or Microsoft Word. I've also noticed after iCal, iSync, or QuickTime updates that some permissions do get changed, and are reported as such by Repair Permissions.

Now, what I don't know is if this is simply natural, just a byproduct of the installation process which isn't really indicative of any significant change to the system. Maybe it's just an artifact of the installer shuffling files around during the installation process. What I'd like to see is a UNIX guru step up to the plate and give some explanations to how the Permissions system in OS X works with respect to what we see in the Repair Permissions report window.

I'll totally agree with Gruber's assertion that Repair Permissions is needed only when you have problems that are strongly indicative of permissions-related issues. Beyond that, repairing your permissions is truly another perceived panacea on the level of rebuilding your desktop or zapping your PRAM in the old OS 9 days. Yes, these problems did happen, and they were an issue -- but they didn't happen often enough to cause the problems that people thought could be solved by using those measures. But I still personally think that a permissions repair after a system update would be good idea. And yes, I do agree that the actual empirical evidence for this is flat-out zero. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some sugar pills to take for my headache.

Anyway, next:

However, a vocal minority of users swear by the use of combo updaters. The idea being that there are occasional problems caused by the delta updaters, which problems can be avoided by using combo updaters. After every system update, sites such as MacFixIt and MacInTouch publish reports from readers claiming that update problems were fixed after running the combo updater.

However, I don’t think it’s necessary. I use Software Update for all the machines in the house, and the delta updaters have never caused a problem. Again, I’m not arguing that the three active Macs here at Daring Fireball HQ constitute a statistically significant sample size, but my guess is that most of the people who run into problems with delta updaters have diddled with files they ought not have diddled.

Gruber then cites an example of one L337 Mac user on MacInTouch who fixed a graphical issue on a newly upgraded 10.3.7 system by using the ATi driver from his previous 10.3.6 installation. Now, I agree with Gruber. Unless you *really* know what you're doing, you should never, ever, ever mix and match system components. Back in OS 9, this wasn't so bad, since it usually involved an extension or control panel that you could easily toss out if it caused problems. But this is UNIX now -- files you may transfer from an old system aren't so easy to get rid of. It's easy to confuse files in the deep UNIX underpinnings of the system, and you may end up changing something else in the process, and the system may not let you delete it easily.

Now with respect to delta vs. combo updaters, the arguement to me is similar to the update vs. clean reinstall issue when dealing with major system updates (i.e. 10.x to 10.[x+1]). Since the delta updaters only give you only the extra files your system needs, the files you may not need for the update are still kept from the old installation. These files may have been corrupted or changed in some way, or even missing. Since the combo updater gives you fresh copies of those files too, any "wronged" files will have been replaced with clean ones.

Of course, this is based on my own limited understanding of the distinction between combo and delta updaters and yes, there isn't a lot of factual evidence to back this up. Maybe I'm totally off-base with this. But better safe than sorry, I think.

Another problem is that, from my own observations, the updater seems to base the composition of the delta updaters based on the current state of your system. Hence, the size and composition of a delta updater may change from system to system, depending on what updates you have and haven't installed. So the update itself may be quite variable. Isn't that what delta means?

When I decided to do a clean reinstall of Panther on my system after a botched security update, after painstakingly reapplying all of the updates up to 10.3.5, I applied the 10.3.6 delta updater. It didn't work. It said it couldn't be used on my computer, even though I'd made sure I installed everything system related up to that update. But then I got to thinking that I hadn't updated everything. There was still Safari, the various freeware iApps, and other Apple miscellany (like ADC developer stuff). Maybe those updates changed aspects of the system that Software Update had reported to Apple when I downloaded my delta updater. Since those changes weren't there, the installer had nothing to work with.

I bit the bullet and downloaded the combo updater, and lo and behold, everything worked out fine.

I don't by any stretch of the imagination think that my situation is indicative of any widespread problem with delta updates. But I think that it should give pause as to the reason why people prefer combo updaters over delta ones.

Biogeography Burn-Out

2005-01-28T18:24:00.000-05:00

I've been working two straight weeks non-stop on my research project, working on nothing but biogeography. It's because of that that I've felt really burnt out from working so hard on my project, and have pretty much ignored everything else. Which isn't a good idea, seeing as how I've got a lot of stuff coming up in the next two weeks; my ZOO 354 assignment, and my ZOO 462 test and assignment -- and studying for the upcoming BOT 251 test...

It's a shame though, because I was really looking forward to Dominic Halas' GAS seminar talk on the "Crisis of Biogeography". But sitting there in the Ramsay Wright lounge, I felt that if I'd ever hear the words "taxon-area cladogram" again today I'd scream.

Ah well. I suppose I could email Halas and ask him for papers/references on his talk.

Sliding Away

2005-01-25T18:58:00.000-05:00

After much soul searching I decided to send the essay on Vincent I'd written earlier. I don't think I got a reply from Nicky about it. Then again, she doesn't check her email often and takes a while to reply to her emails, since she's very busy with her work and with school. I wonder what she'll think of me now. Better to have it this way, rather than explode in front of her and the others at VCF.

It almost feels as if the time I spent there was all wasted. I know I won't make that same mistake again.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

2005-01-22T01:34:00.000-05:00

I read an article on the Focus on the Family uproar over Spongebob Squarepants in today's Metro, written by Rick McGinnis. Wow. I thought I'd post the article here in its entirety, if only because I found it very witty and insightful:

“Does anybody here know SpongeBob?” asked Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of conservative lobby group Focus on the Family. Dobson was speaking at a Tuesday night black-tie dinner for members of Congress and political allies to celebrate U.S. election results, according to a story in yesterday’s New York Times. One would assume that, if they had kids, many would probably say “yes” though not, perhaps, in the biblical sense. According to the Times, SpongeBob is not only a hit among kids, but with “adult gay men, perhaps because he holds hands with his animated sidekick Patrick and likes to watch the imaginary television show The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.” (You don’t say? Next thing you’ll be telling me rude things about Bert and Ernie, or Batman and Robin.)

And that might be part of the reason why Dobson and other religious conservatives are targeting the animated show and its unmistakably fey star as part of a “pro-homosexual” agenda. The main reason, however, is the appearance of SpongeBob in a children’s video made by former Chic front man Nile Rodgers’ We Are Family Foundation.

Rodgers, who wrote the disco hit that gave the foundation its name, set up the organization after 9/11 to teach children about multiculturalism, and the main project so far has been a video featuring appearances by a galaxy of children’s TV characters, from shows like Arthur, Barney, Bear in the Big Blue House, Blue’s Clues, Bob the Builder, The Book of Pooh, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Dora the Explorer, Jimmy Neutron, Kim Possible, Madeline, The Magic School Bus, The Muppet Show, Rugrats, Sesame Street, SpongeBob SquarePants and Zoom, among others.

Dobson and his group insist that the video is a recruiting tool, based on a “tolerance pledge” that Rodgers’ foundation borrowed from the Southern Poverty Law Center, and which appears only on their website. “We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids,” said Paul Batura, assistant to Mr. Dobson at Focus on the Family.

Now, it’s one thing to make allegations about SpongeBob’s invertebrate sexuality, but isn’t it a bit much to implicate beloved children’s shows like Barney, Rugrats, Sesame Street and The Muppet Show in some kind of gay conspiracy? (Of course, everyone’s been wondering about Barney for years, and doesn’t Bob the Builder go overboard on the whole butch thing? Just kidding.)

The author of this column, for the record, is a card-carrying Tory, and a religious Roman Catholic at that — ergo, a “religious conservative.” But it’s winceworthy to watch prominent religious conservatives like Dobson make such pitiful statements to the media, so apparently ignorant of concepts like “optics.” In the context of SpongeBob, Dobson makes religious conservatives look like the sort of low-ranking classroom bullies who lash out at the clueless, dateless wonders with which they share the low reaches of the social totem pole by calling them “queer.”

And for the record, sea sponges are hermaphrodites who practise asexual reproduction, so SpongeBob can’t help looking a bit light in the loafers. Lay off already, man.

I couldn't help but be amused by both McGinnis' disclaimer and his observation on sponge biology. Something's definitely wrong with groups like FoF if they start putting off other religious conservatives.

But really, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this sort of thing has happened, given the meteoric rise to fame and utter ubiquity enjoyed by Spongebob Squarepants. While I was at the Dufferin Mall No Frills with my mom, I noticed the massive piece of Spongebob paraphernalia held by a child as his parents were checking in their groceries. It's everywhere. It's as if these guys are targeting anything left, right, and centre that's part of pop culture but isn't Christian. I'm sure that the only reason why these guys haven't targeted the iPod is because you actually can put all sorts of Biblically-related goodies on it.

I wish that I could just as easily disregard and scoff at such wanton and callous accusations of "brainwashing" with the nonchalance that I could give to someone like Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church. Sadly, it's just not possible.

Through the dark/What do I see?

2005-01-08T18:57:00.000-05:00

I suppose I owe my readers an apology for going back on my word earlier. But damn it, I have enough science in my life that if I do any more writing or reading about science I think I'm going to go insane. Not that I can go any more insane than I already have. So I suppose I'll have to make do with more emotional vomitting punctuated with momentary flashes of scientific insight and commentary.

Four people messaged me on LiveJournal out of the blue and gave me their condolences. One of them, Rachey, was once a close friend of mine from the old -InTheSky- YahooGroups! list-serv, but we lost touch as time went on. Nothing like a funeral to bring people closer together, hmm?

I'm thankful that they've let me have what I think is rightfully mine. I find the concern and apparent compassion of people around me stifling and condescending at the same time -- I would rather have indifference; hence the extreme reluctance I've had in telling many of the people I know. I think back to all of the things I tried to keep of his but couldn't save; the least they could do is let me suffer in peace.

untitled

2005-01-07T22:58:00.000-05:00

There's a quiet emptiness now. We've cleared the house of so many things now, and the walls have taken on a somewhat eerie blankness. There's now an empty space in the bedroom where the bed -- our bed used to be. My voice now echoes in the hallway leading to the door of the apartment and the bedroom; we removed...or rather, mom removed all of the things we all kept that served to fill the spaces with our voices, voices of joy, sadness, laughter, and of the mundaneness of everyday life that I now so sorely miss. I cannot return to any routine because I have to routine to return to. I've trained myself to not expect him to come out of the bedroom from an afternoon nap to say a friendly hello as I'd come home from school, forced myself not to expect him to be in the kitchen cooking my mother and I a fresh, hot, warm meal, served, as always, with a generous side of hugs and smiles.

All I have left is a box of mementos from his knapsack, and a memory of a dead body lying in a casket, dressed in a blue suit that was probably two sizes too small for his bulbous form. I fight to maintain the memory of warm tanned skin brushing upon my face as he hugged me, pray each and ever day that it doesn't get replaced in my mind by the sight of grey cold flesh with caked on makeup, a callous and contrived likeness of life.

They say I should forget...that I should move on. That it's time to stop grieving.

Fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck each and every one of you for telling me that I should all of a sudden flick a switch on in my mind and forget that for 22 years and 11 months I had a father. I will have my grief. I will have my pain and sadness and I will wrap myself in it like the shroud that wrapped the body of Christ as he lay hanging, humiliated, broken, and beaten on the cross. I will revel in my sorrow and it will be as much a part of me as my jealousy and my rage and my anger.

And damned be anyone who dares to stand in my way.

Regarding Vincent -- a short essay.

2005-01-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

The text below is slated for an email I intend to send to the iVCF youth worker and the only remaining friend I have at VCF.

When I first heard of Vincent, I was told to avoid him. They never told me why -- only that he was someone who the rest of us didn't need and didn't want to talk to. I tried to ask the people I knew at the Group but the answer they gave me was evasive, misty, as if a dense complicated fog of "umm" and "er" had been thrown up to foil my quest for a simple answer.

And then one night I finally realized why.

When he came into the room, the meeting was already a half-hour underway. He came in with a friend of mine, almost gingerly, as if each and every step was a fight against some primal instinct that upwelled within him, compelling him to do something that was almost certainly unpleasant. Like the Red Sea before a desperate Moses, the circle parted way and gave him a wide berth. Some smiles were exchanged, though only half-hearted. He was a thin, wirey young man, his face boney and his eyes neatly contained within circular thin-rimmed glasses. His shirt, and coat were grey, all grey, perhaps an advertisement of what he was going to bring coming into this meeting, and what he was going to take away with him coming out. But what really struck me was his face -- an oriental face, but one without the bulbous joy I had seen in the faces of his countrymen and countrywomen. The skin on his face had been tightly bonded to the bone of his skull, giving him a sleek, streamlined look. But there was no mistaking what it radiated. A profound sense of loss, as if someone had jabbed a fat syringe into his head and pulled back on the plunger, draining away all emotion of happiness, leaving a cavity to be filled with a dark remnant, a growing anger.

Yes, anger, and it was his anger that I now remember them warning me about. A strained, controlled anger that burst out in radiating quanta of negativity, in every contrary statement he made against whatever some wide-eyed, beautifully freckled and athletic girl stated about her faith in God and Christ. Tension filled the air and a dull pallor was eventually cast. Even the wide-eyed girls and boys who were there were silent.

I don't remember her name anymore, but one of the youth leaders tried to enact some form of damage control. She'd interject and correct him, tried desperately to quell and silence any discussion, the frantic fear in her voice made all too clear that soon a fight would break out. But would it? We were after all, a meeting of young Christians, come together to discuss their faith.

"Discuss their faith"... and of course, in any proper, mature discussion, we are bound to expect dissent. Is it proper to destroy such dissent?

And then it was clear to me, right then and there. In a meeting where a world was painted in rosy shades of glorious, happy colors, Vincent's sadness was not welcome. It was an unwanted presence that could not be tolerated, the sudden thunderstorm that rains out the biggest game of the year. Vincent had used his grey and splashed it all over the happy, bright, rosy-colored painting of Christianity that the bright-eyed, athletic young men and women of the group had tried to paint for all of the weeks that I attended those meetings. They tried to contain Vincent, to somehow isolate him, so that his infectious sadness would not weaken the fire for God that had been set. And all the while, he was left, his head looking down, his legs held tightly together as he sat, the expression on his face set in stone.

Almost a year later, I'm left with the memory of the night of that meeting, seeing in Vincent's face all of the anger, sadness, jealous, pity, and depression that I have carried with me in my journey as a "Christian". I've seen Christians capable of unbelievable and unfathomable acts of cruelty and inhumanity -- the shooting of abortion doctors, the sanction and encouragement of sexism, racism, homophobia, war, violence, and conflict; the ignorance of reason and the worshipping of ignorance. God is an entity of hate, I am told. God so hated the world that He sent a flood, a flood after the holiday celebrating the birth of His Son, to annihilate the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, to joyously cast down His suffering upon millions more. Entire cultures, whole nations, whole races of people are to be nothing but fodder for Winepress of the Wrath of God. Yes. Hatred is good. Because God is good. And God is hate.

And so I am left with a question: what is to be done about the Vincents of this world? The people who, like I, are supposed to have the light of Christ within them? We are a disenfranchised people, people who want to believe but yet cannot believe or reconcile that belief to a hatred which is all too real, a hatred and quest for violence and terror which instills in us not fear, or anger, but an overwhelming sorrow. It is a sorrow that we cannot simply whitewash with sterile words of kindness and happiness.

I am told that those who spew hate and war in the name of God are only but a few Christians, simply a marginal few. But where are the ones who rise to fight them? Where are the Christians who choose to take up their crusade not against the perceived satanic nature of Harry Potter, or the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast on national television, but against racism, sexism, greed, war, homophobia, and all of the offspring of closed-minded bigotry?

I'm left with just a realization that Christianity can't pained as a rosy, brightly colored, happy painting. It can't be a simple as a black-versus-white, us-versus-them quest for spiritual warfare, where God can so nonchalantly cast into the fiery Hell those who do not or simply cannot worship at the same altar as the people who would have you think that they and they alone are privvy to the mind of God. I have seen this spiritual warfare, with preachers and pastors scrambling to gather and use the ammunition of rhetoric and scripture, and it is just as terrifying as any demon or devil or Satan that any human mind can conceive.

I know that Vincent and I are only just two people. Two people only united in their common sadness and lament at a religion that to them, appears to be only father and farther away. But we are growing in numbers, with every word of hate than is spewed, every feeling of separation and indifference that is put up to separate You from Me. There is a divide, a growing divide, between we, the spiritually poor, and you, the spiritually rich. Like panhandlers with their hands outstretched for change, all we need or ask is a sign, any sign, that humanity and common decency do indeed exist amongst the chaos of the darkness that we carry with us from day to day. In this world, in this life, our impoverishment lies within our hearts and minds, a poverty I wear around me as I struggle to find another reason to get out of bed and live through yet another day.

That night, when the small group meeting ended, I packed my things to go home, but when I turned around, Vincent was gone. Just gone. I wished I'd given him a hug before he left. No one else in the room was ever going to do it...why not me?

"The End of the Affair", by Graham Greene

2004-12-17T16:46:00.000-05:00

Up until now, there has been only one book that, after reading, I will simply refuse to ever read again: J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye", but not because it was a bad book; on the contrary, it was one of the finest books I think has ever been written. Up until now, that is. I have to say that Graham Greene's 1951 novel "The End of the Affair", is the second book to make that list.

Most stories start with the beginning of love; how a love affair blossoms between two people, ending either in a poignant bitter sweet resolution (i.e. Ethan Hawke's "The Hottest Day"), or something just barely short of a nice, "happily ever after" ending (i.e. Nick Hornsby's "High Fidelity"). Greene does something which I'm sure was quite novel in his day and age -- he comes to the heart of the matter (to quote one of Greene's other famous works) and takes us straight to where it really begins: how a love affair dies.

People often write about the ebb and flow of a relationship, but I think that a lot of people don't really stop to consider the aftermath of a relationship's end, for better or for worse. David Gilmour, in practically all of his novels, talks about that, but he talks about getting caught in the fallout of a relationship's end kicking and screaming all the way to the bitter end. Gilmour's a fighter, and if there's one thing that all of his characters have in common, from Professor Darius Holloway in "Sparrow Nights" to the young Simon in his deeply personal novel "Lost Between Houses", they all choose to valiantly fight a losing battle against the inevitable. There's a heroic quality in them, even though emotionally and romantically, they must meet their end, in a metaphorical sense. A long time ago, I chased after a girl with whom I no possible chance of building anything meaningful. And yet somehow I chased and chased, and fought and fought. Why couldn't I do it the way they could?

In contrast, Greene's novellist Maurice Bendrix is someone who feels hopelessly overwhelmed. His dreary existence is completely changed forever by Sarah Miles, and then, all of a sudden, she has been taken away from him, and he is at once relegated back to a life of relative boredom -- a life that is little different from that of Sarah's true husband, an innocent in this whole story. Like a tired swimmer fighting a raging current, he doesn't have much choice but to tread water, fighting not just to keep up the offensive, but to merely find another reason to live.

Sarah, who is grieved by an obligation she feels she must keep to God, presents herself as a Christ-like figure for the sake of her husband and her lover. She calls upon God to end her life, if only to end the suffering of the people she loves around her -- Smythe, the atheist, telephones Bendrix and tells him that miraculously, his facial disfigurement has been cured, while Parkis writes to Bendrix saying how his child has been cured of his staggering stomach pains. What will she do for Bendrix? It's hard to say, since we get little sense of how he has changed. But the fact that he has not changed is not a fault of Greene's technique, but a fault of Bendrix's steadfast character. He refuses to totally believe in Sarah's love for him throughout the book, and even when he does it is as if he is being strong-armed into it, if only because he simply cannot resist. He starts off his rebellion against God this way, though it isn't fully sure if this too will eventually wear him down into belief and submission.

Bendrix is angry. Angry and selfish -- but we can't hate him because, at least for someone who has endured the pain of going through a lost relationship, we know that we ourselves are very much with him in our own feelings and thoughts. We don't just know what he's feeling; we've actually experienced (and as anyone will tell you, knowledge is far more powerful than experience). It's been said that Greene based this novel on a similar set of events that unfolded in his own life in England, and that really isn't all that surprising, given the vividness with which we see Bendrix's own range and sorrow at his loss.

And in that, we see Bendrix himself as a Christ-like figure. He has a duty to his friend Henry. Even though he would have stolen his wife, he has a loyality to him which he can't truly turn back on, even if he wanted to. Henry doesn't feel very much grief or sadness but that's because Bendrix is doing all of the suffering for him. And isn't that how it should be? Henry is little more than an innocent child, completely oblivious to his wife's numerous indiscretions -- he's just an ordinary civil servant, just living his life and getting by. His marriage to Sarah is little more than one of convenience, yet we see that Henry does have a genuine sense of care for her...though it isn't quite what you would expect from a loving husband to his faithful wife. Bendrix on the other hand has to suffer for them both; not only does he have his own sins to atone for, but the sins of Henry as well -- the fact that Henry was simply incapable to serve as a husband for Sarah. This is painfully apparent in the closing chapters of the book, where Bendrix rails on against the arrogant Catholic pastor, while a relatively calm Henry tries to restrain him.

Greene himself was a Catholic, and this really comes through in the way that the book is structured and built; see Sarah and her example.

As for me, a whole range of emotions just flooded me as I read this book. All of the memories I held inside me just played again in my head as a reminder of people I had held very dear to me, but now are essentially dead and gone to me. I have to say truly that this is one of the greatest novels I've ever read. Any book which so profoundly captures the spirit of the death of love deserves this title and more.

An excuse for laziness

2004-12-03T16:47:00.000-05:00

Two months since I've last posted up here. Yikes. I've been trying to make it a point to post more often but part of it is that I haven't really thought of too much to post about.

What I originally wanted to do was to make this a more science-oriented blog, like Pharyngula, and less of a place for me to generally vomit my feelings and thoughts. But to do so would mean that I'd have to spend a whole lot of time writing about journal articles I've read which I've found interesting, and really, that isn't what I want to do on a regular basis in my off-time, since that's what I pretty much do all the time for my other courses. In other words, I'm just feeling extremely lazy. Which I find somewhat ironic, seeing as how I'm currently annoyed at one of my friends over her excessive laziness.

I also originally wanted to totally erase my site at LiveJournal, but after three consecutive nights of non-stop wrestling with Xjournal, I decided to leave everything there, as a sort of monument to my own stupidity and immaturity. It's just as well, I think. I get the feeling that I'd forget just how stupid and idiotic I've been throughout my life, and if you forget that, that tends to exponentially increase the liklihood that you'll just do it all over again.

In any case, I guess what I'll do is find some middle-ground; somewhere in between my periodic emotional dumps and my sudden bursts of scientific insight. Let's hope I get more of the latter than the former.

[EDIT: Added the link to Pharyngula, one of my favourite blog sites on the web. Fixed some damn typos, too.]

And now for something completely similar

2004-10-29T13:52:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm now about a month into my ZOO 498 project, and things are going as slowly as ever. Well, not really. I got through Funk and Wagner (1998) and I've finished converting the all of the phylogenies into taxon-area cladograms. I still want to include some of the other phylogenies I've dredged up on Web of Science. Am I really that insane for actually, purposefully, making *more* work for myself?

So now I have to get on the ball and start combining these suckers. Ouch. Some of the venn diagram conversions look like the worst nightmate of a ZOO 362 student on acid. Professor Brooks says that Maggie should be finished the all-mighty program...er...soon(tm). I don't mind doing it all by hand really -- just that I still feel somewhat clueless as to how I'm going to fit this mess all together. And then I have to interpret it.

And speaking of Web of Science, I have to say THANK YOU to the people who decided to upgrade WoS. I hate, just hate, just HATE how for three years I had to put up with searching for stuff on WoS only to find that ~90% of the hits I got were to journals that either weren't carried by U of T or were linked to articles that weren't available to U of T and therefore would make me have to pay some exorbitant fee to get to them. $45 for an article?! are you Nuts!? I had to suffer through Cambridge Scientific's Biological Sciences index, which still doesn't work on Safari and still has downright awful JavaScript coding. I tell you, the people who coded that site deserve to be condemned to running Windows ME on Pentium 166 boxes for the rest of their lives. If it weren't for JSTOR, I would have gone totally insane.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Planet Earth!

2004-10-29T01:59:00.000-04:00

First, an explanation to Jennie; yes, I'm up, and no I'm not sleeping. Insomnia once again rears its ugly head.

According to the Archbishop Ussher, the geneaologies given in the Old and New Testament leads one to an approximate date of creation for the earth as being October 23, 4004 BC, at midday. Which means that now the Earth can relax and retire, having achieved the ripe old age of 6000 years (well, 6000 and change, given that I am about a week late).

Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay "Fall in the House of Ussher" (a rather clever pun on the Edgar Allen Poe work), in the book Bully for Brontosaurus, admirably defends our Irish friend Ussher by showing that his date was more than a mere show of piety, a symbol of a myopic religious establishment that was against scientific principles. Quite the opposite, in fact -- his estimate was the product of incredible, dilligent scholarship and focused, intensive scientific research. Scientific in that he worked through a deductive process, at a time when the use of the Bible in dating the earth was fraught with immense debate and controversy.

I can't do Gould's essay justice; I really recommend you pick up a good cheap used copy of Bully for Brontosaurus and read it. But what I can say is that it's almost ironic that such a clear, stark contrast can be made between Creationists such as Ussher and the great Louis Agassiz, and the Creationists of today in their scholarship, methodology, and motivation.

Would that the Creationists of today learn from the Creationists of old.

[EDIT: Added the link to "Bully for Brontosaurus", in which "Fall in the House of Ussher" was published. I added it because I really liked it, and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in evolutionary biology, or in the history of science.]

Funding as the limiting reagent in the reaction of scientific inquiry

2004-10-14T20:01:00.000-04:00

I had an intriguing conversation with Anna yesterday evening, about a problem than always has and arguably always will plague scientific research: funding. What Anna basically proposed was to change public perceptions of science to make scientific research more appealing and more interesting to the unwashed masses. In doing so, pressure would then be placed on the government to allocate more funding to research.

This then leads to the question, "But how do you actually get the public more interested in research?" Her answer amounts to a general campaign of exposing people to the wonders of scientific research. Get the public so interested, so conditioned to be interested in scientific research, that attitudes will appropriately change.

My arguement disagrees with this (naturally). I completely agree with Anna's motives and to see a world where people think of science as something to be accepted and respected, instead of the caricature which is so often ridiculed, feared, and marginalized. The ceaseless rhetoric of Creationists notwithstanding, many people just don't understand science, and who could really blame them? Not everyone has the luxury of devoting four years or more to studying population genetics, the mechanics of natural selection, or the application of phylogenetic systematics to historical biogeography. Biologists have for years (if not decades) tried to deduce a model tantamount to the "Universe on a T-Shirt" (to borrow the title from a fascinating popular physics book I saw at a store once) -- a clean, simple, easy phrase which can be easily ingrained into the public consciousness. Would that all of biology could be easily distilled, condensed, and packaged up the way Einstein's immortal E=MC^2 is now (and with that I really have to wonder just how much of a percentage of those who can actually spout off that formula could with equal nonchalance state its meaning and importance -- let alone how one could use such a creature).

And of course, there's the selfish factor -- the plague of Conservation Biology. Why do you want to save Species X? What's in it for me?

Perhaps it is my personal bias, having been raised as a child steeped in critical thought (and that of the most devastating, yet excellent sort -- parental). I have always thought of science in the way that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor stated their famous slogan, even beneath their roaring lion: "Ars gratia artis". Is it really such a foreign concept that scientific inquiry should be a pleasurable experience, in and of itself?

Summer of Love...

2004-08-05T08:54:00.000-04:00

Pardon the somewhat sappy subject header...but I can be excused for that, given my current emotional state, right? At least I'm not as wildly bipolar as I was for the first two days after Jennie left for Tennessee...but I still call out Jennie's name at random times in small hushed whispers. I'm sure that the other people who see me in the Zoology Building or in the TTC subway cars think I'm nuts just talking to myself -- but isn't that what falling in love really is? But I digress.

Anyway, for any and all who are interested, the pictures from Jennie's visit with her parents and I to the Canadian side of Niagra Falls, while she and her parents were visiting me in Toronto.

Yet another reason why I love Jennie so much.

Jennie clinging to me on the Maid of the Mist -- one of the only really intimate times that we could sneak in with her parents around. Funny thing about that picture. I wonder if Jennie's dad knew by then that there was something more to our "friendship" than meets the eye. She and I were pretty sure that her mom knew, at any rate...

Looks like I'm not the only one who blinked through a picture. :)

Thanks Nadine!

2004-06-30T20:06:00.000-04:00

Well, another integral piece of the puzzle is coming into place. I'm talking about my user picture, of course.

Trying to find a public domain picture of a Ctenuchid moth was an odyssey which took me a surprisingly long amount of time: most of the pictures I found were royalty-free stock photos which cost an inordinate amount of money, or which were completely forbidden for use outside of the photographer's domain.

Blech.

Which is why I have to be thankful for Nadine Thomson, for letting me use the picture she has on her website of a Ctenuchid perched on some Lambs Ears flowers.

Thanks alot, Nadine!