Religion and Science meet for coffee

Religion and Science meet for coffee over at Real Live Preacher, and part of the discussion included this wonderful observation:

Dark matter makes up about 96% of all that is, which is a little sobering, considering we make a lot of broad statements about reality for creatures that can only perceive about 4% of it.

They say perception is reality, and this data puts a metric on it: The reality we perceive, at best, captures about 4% of what's there.

Read the whole piece, which was as delightful as it was insightful - a rumination on science and "trust," in which RLP concludes wisely that "trusting people is its own kind of spiritual exercise."

Never been horse that can't be rode, never been a cowboy can't be throwed

Wow, what a Superbowl game, huh?

When Kathy asked who won, I told her that light prevailed over darkness and the Evil Empire had fallen. I think she was a little non-plussed at the hyperbole. Still, I was glad to see New England go down.

Who gets to write the first draft of history?

How the "first draft of history" gets written has changed a lot in my adult lifetime.

It used to be said when I was a lad that journalism was the "first draft of history," and that conceit helped draw me into writing for The Daily Texan in college. There I learned, in fact, that the press release was the first draft of history, but even that has changed. After a while the "first draft" began to show up on blogs, and today, more often than not, it comes in a blog comment.

I'm not sure whether I think that's good or bad, but I think it's true.

It's also been said that winners write the history, but to a large extent, that has changed, too. If there's one thing you can say for the blogosphere, it's that it's definitely given losers a voice!

Note to Wall Street Journal: It's not "historic" when you predict wrong

Here's an example, to me, of the utter failure of the modern media: They've become so reliant on polling and so confident in their own predictions, they now believe it "historic" when THEY are wrong! What hubris! From Justin Wolfers at the Wall Street Journal:

Judging by the pre-vote polls and prediction markets, the Democratic primary in New Hampshire created one of the most surprising upsets in U.S. political history.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was favored in the final pre-election poll of all 12 pollsters who surveyed voters since his surprise victory in Iowa, and was the unanimous favorite among television pundits. The only real question to be resolved appeared to be the size of Mr. Obama's majority.

His loss to New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was equally embarrassing for prediction markets, such as the WSJ Political Market. Election-eve trading had suggested that Sen. Obama had a 92% chance to win in New Hampshire, while Sen. Clinton rated only a 7% chance.

Against this background, it is no exaggeration to term the result truly historic. Not that there haven't been more dramatic upsets or come-from-behind wins that carried more significance -- this was just an early primary, albeit a pivotal one. But in terms of unpredictability, or at least the failure of everyone to predict it, it may have no modern match.

The fact that he and his egghead buddies were wrong in their predictions doesn't make this primary result any more "historic" than it would otherwise have been. (It is, after all, the presidential campaign, so in some sense calling it "historic" is definitionally redundant.)

Managing expectations has officially become more important than reality. We've reached a stage when many in the media believe their own pre-election assumptions are actually more important, apparently, than the actual voters themselves. Otherwise, when the voters disagree with the media's and the pollsters' predictions, why is it such a big deal?

That's definitely a bias in media coverage, but it's not a bias toward left or right, it's an expression of narcissism and group think. Results, not expectations, are what matter, but you wouldn't know it from reading most political coverage.

A Random Assortment of Movie Reviews

Lately Kathy and I have been on a movie-going spree, seeing five movies since Christmas Day. They were:

Charlie Wilson's War
The acting and script were so good in this movie it was almost possible to forget the frequently glaring historical inaccuracies. Among my beefs, when you say the covert ops received matching funds from the Saudis, how hard would it have been to have added, "from the Bin Laden family"! Another: Texas Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson was a buffoon and a tool, not the compassionate, forward thinking Congressman portrayed in the movie by Tom Hanks.

The movie (as well as, I understand, the eponymous book) downplayed the fairly predictable consequences of climbing into bed with fundamentalist jihadists (a decision which arguably led directly to the creation of Al Qaeda and ultimately 9/11), and it gave Wilson way too much credit. After all, the Reagan administration itself was simultaneously selling arms to fundamentalists in neighboring Iran - do we really think arms sales to Afghanistan weren't part of a broader Reagan administration policy against the Soviets? Was it really this one Democratic Congressman who wanted those weapons? That's certainly not how I remember it.

No Country for Old Men
An iconic drug war tale set in an imaginary Terrell county in southwest Texas, No Country for Old Men also was a tremendously well-acted movie, plus its fictional subject it didn't suffer from comparisons with history that plague Charlie Wilson's War. On the other hand, the movie was also tremendously violent, perhaps unnecessarily so, coupling the already grotesque routine violence associated with the drug war with the actions of a true psychopath whose murders weren't always business related.

The movie opens portraying the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad out in the middle of the desert, both buyers and suppliers gunned down, when a hunter stumbles upon the scene and leaves with the money, launching a blood-drenched chase by a hit man hired by the drug purveyors to get the money back.

Two overarching message from the movie: First, the border region has always been a violent, semi-lawless place, where rational minds struggle to impose reason on the occasionally inhuman actions of its worst inhabitants. In a brilliant scene near the end, a beleaguered and overwhelmed Tommy Lee Jones learns from a relative how his great uncle, a Sheriff, like Jones' character, died in the line of service in 1909, gunned down in a hail of bullets at his home by seven armed riders. The message: Never think what you're seeing is new, it's how humans have always behaved. And it overwhelmed your predecessors, too.

The other theme that arose was how far away law enforcement was from comprehending the scope of the problem from any given incident. Jones' character spent most of his time in a diner reading the newspaper, as though he might find a clue to the murder there! He never really got close to understanding the characters and organized crime infrastructure that confronted him, perhaps typified in his conversation with the El Paso County Sheriff, who blamed the rise in murders as stemming from a degenerate culture that tolerated disrespectful teenagers with purple hair. Jones' character nodded sagely, but of course, none of the killing in the movie - neither the capitalist driven drug cartels nor the psychopathic hit man with a strict if twisted moral code - had a darn thing to do with the high Terrell County body count. As if to drive home the point, Jones at one point found himself knocking at a door where the killer was hiding on the other side, but by the time he entered his foe had vanished. Their paths never crossed, everyone went on about their business, and life goes on, for some of the characters, anyway.

Though it was quite a different movie, the ending reminded me of the denouement of Traffic, with its nonconclusory and anticlamictic result. Nothing will change, the film seems to tell us, this is just how things are, how they always have been.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
This movie had me laughing out loud throughout, which is about the best thing I can say about a comedy. From the opening scene when it's made clear the director would stoop to any level for a laugh ("Where's Cox?," a young man with a clipboard yells while muscling through a crowd, "I need Cox!"), the movie was a joyous musical and historical romp. John C. Reilly created a bigger than life character whose goofy ego and legitimate musical skills (he's got a great tenor voice) rose above the anything goes humor to create a flawed but memorable and lovable persona.

The movie is 100% satire, so to my mind that lets them off the hook for most pedantic complaints, but Kathy perhaps rightly thought that, at times, the movie was too directly satirical of Walk the Line, the recent Johnny Cash biopic, paralleling Cash's story, if indirectly at most of the major plot points. To me, Johnny Cash is bigger than any movie, either this one or his biopic, and not satirization can harm his legacy. But it's certainly true that just drawing story lines from one or two other iconic rock and roll figures into the mix might have made a couple of the jabs seem less mean-spiritedly directed at the Man in Black. That said, the movie overall was smart and funny, well worth the cost of admission and probably better viewed on the big screen.

The Golden Compass
I've not read the books this movie was based on, which I've been told contain an anti-Christian bent. But I couldn't detect such theological undertones from this movie any more than I could see any pro-Christian overtones in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Hollywood apparently must pound those theological elements out of our cultural products before they're deemed safe for viewing by the public.

In any event, the movie itself was visually stunning, the script smartly written, and the plot compelling. The story takes place in a universe parallel to ours, but astonishingly different, where people's souls (their "daemons") take animal form, follow them around, and communicate. A variety of other differences take a great deal of the movie to flesh out so that the plot becomes understandable, but by about 1/3 of the way through they'd sufficiently established their fantasy lexicon to die into a fairly complex plot line.

The acting in this movie wasn't as good as in the others reviewed so far, but let me tell you: Nicole Kidman can play the hell out of the part of an ice princess! And the talking armored "Ice Bears" were terrific animated characters, perhaps the most impressive part of a truly visually stunning movie.

One complaint: The movie's close left many plot threads hanging, nearly insisting that moviegoers return for an inevitable sequel. I understand the financial reasons for doing that, but artistically it just left the movie with a quite abrupt ending, leaving feeling of incompletion in its wake. OTOH, it left you entwined enough with the plot to anticipate the sequel, which I guess was the goal.

National Treasure II
I actually saw this movie way back on Christmas Day with my brother's family, including my niece and nephew, and for a pure comic romp it has a little something for everyone. Like a bizarre, Americanized Da Vinci Code, National Treasure has envisioned a spectacular alternative vision of US history dominated by secret societies and cabals that still secretly haunt the modern political landscape. Nicholas Cage plays a cartoon-character version of Indiana Jones with admirable enthusiasm, and the ensemble cast around him came together with more cohesion, I thought, than in the first rendition. The movie was a fun diversion, and left a pretty wide age range in our party (9-60+) more or less equally satisfied.

That's the most frequent batch of big-screen movie going in which Kathy and I have indulged in quite some time. With the writers strike spurring TV's nightly, hellish descent into reality and game show pablum, there are probably a few more big-screen titles out there I could still go see.

What movies have you seen lately that you'd recommend?

The Way of the Fallen is Hard

These lyrics, for whatever reason, have been rattling in my head all day:

Down in Corpus Christi
Always around midnight
You'll find the devil limping along 'cause his shoes are too tight.

His hair's up in pig tails
His whiskers are in braids
He's talking 'bout the promises he said God forgot He made.

The way of the fallen is hard.

-Ray Wylie Hubbard, Brewed in Texas, Vol 2

Truer words were never spoken. Like God, in whose image we're created (or vice versa), we despise no one more than those with whom we're disillusioned, those whom we once put on a pedestal who for whatever reason fall off and no longer seem worthy of the imaginary shrine built to them in our mind's eye. Whether it's a friend who betrayed us or prideful Lucifer, God's Shining Star ... when we're profoundly disappointed, it's easy, isn't it, to succumb to our pain, to demonize our betrayer (and who's more demonized than Lucifer?). But the object of our scorn has a story to tell too, even if he's doomed to tell it sitting by the railroad tracks in Corpus Christi wearing tight shoes.

The way of the fallen is hard.

Fort Worth museum exhibit boasts earliest Christian art

Before Christmas Kathy and I visited this exhibit on early Christian art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth - described here by the San Antonio Express News - "Picturing the Bible." It was a neat experience I'd highly recommend if you get the chance; the exhibit continues through March 30, 2008.

Nearly all truly ancient Christian art - even after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the Fourth Century - has been destroyed as a result of later "Iconoclastic" movements bent on destroying images that portrayed the Divine or even humans since they were created in God's image. Countless ancient works were lost to these awful movements, whose motivations mirror those of radical Islamists today who object to portrayals of Muhammad.

We'd gotten to see some of the early Christian art that escaped the Iconoclasts when we were in Turkey, buried in underground temples and chapels carved from caves out of canyons in Cappadocia that to this day one must hike in to see. Many of these drawings in what today is central Turkey (and what in ancient times was "Galatia," as in Paul's epistle to the Galations) were done by monks loyal to St. Gregory, the earliest Christian monastic, who led his followers into the wilderness in central Asia Minor to contemplate God in true, remote isolation. (Some of these images were preserved because they'd become covered with smoke over time, and are only now being restored, often revealing brilliant color preserved by the ash, virtually untouched in more than a millenium.

In Fort Worth, though I got to see even older specimens, the most ancient from the catacombs around Rome excavated around the turn of the 19th Century. The paintings on these catacombs dated, at the earliest, from around 200 A.D., and constitute the oldest extant Christian art, nearly one hundred years older (and much more classically Grecian in style) than anything I'd seen before.

Discovered in the 19th Century outside of Rome, the Vatican commissioned what are known as the Wilpert Watercolors, named after Josef Wilpert (1857-1944), a photographer who took more than 600 photos of the ancient tombs and Christian paintings and sculpture inside, in many cases documenting art that was untouched since the graves were closed. The photos were in black and white, but we're incredibly lucky (since much of the art didn't survive excavation) that Vatican scholars had the foresight to commission artist Carlo Tabanelli to take the same photos into the catacombs and paint over them in watercolor to document the exact colors in the original tombs. The result is a 600 page book that must be out of print (I can't find it available online, but we copied the title from the exhibit), called Roma Sotteranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane.

By far the most common themes from the catacomb art were the Good Shepherd and his flock, Adam and Eve (see the finely detailed ring in the first image above), Noah's Ark and Family, and the story of Jonah and the "great fish," which the ancients saw as directly foreshadowing Christ's resurrection (Jonah three days in the fish; Christ three days in the tomb). Interestingly, unlike today when we think of Jonah in the belly of the whale, ancient Christians believed Jonah had been swallowed by a Keto (at left), or a Grecian sea monster straight out of the Homer and the Odyssey. This early mixing of pagan Greek and Christian symbology was especially striking in light of how our conception of the story of Jonah has changed thanks to modern science and sea exploration.

The Kimbell has hosted some great exhibitions of religious art in recent years, including an exhibit Kathy and I saw in 2003 featuring mediaeval "illuminated manuscripts," and another in 2005 featuring Islamic art (which of course we also saw plenty of in Turkey). I was glad to get to see these excellent pieces, from which I learned quite a bit. Topping the visit off with a walk in the Botanical Gardens (a beautiful, Depression era WPA project) and dinner at the always excellent Realta restaurant downtown, I found the two-day sojourn to Fort Worth last week an enjoyable jaunt, well worth the trek.

There is officially no hope for us as a nation

Graffiti of the philanthropic class

Like taggers, rich folks like to see their names plastered on walls. It's just that they can afford to pay for the privilege, reports the New York Times. That's an interesting way to think about it - philanthropic naming rights as a formalized twist on invited graffiti, compensating the wall owner rather than the artist.

Writer Charles Isherwood wonders "what became of those wealthy philanthropists who used to support arts organizations and other not-for-profit and charitable institutions without requiring that their names be slapped somewhere — anywhere, it sometimes seems — on a building"? Answer: They have mostly succumbed to the narcissistic pleasures of uptown tagging.

The first time I've ever wished I lived in South Carolina

So I could vote for Stephen Colbert.

How can employers reduce worker stress?

Stressed out employees are less productive, tend to have higher turnover than happy employees, and make more mistakes on the job. What can employers do about it? Here's an idea from Australia I bet most workers would support, via Science Daily:

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, found that 54 percent of the emergency room staff in summer and 65 percent in winter suffered moderate to extreme anxiety. However, this fell to 8 percent, regardless of the season, once staff received 15-minute aromatherapy massages while listening to music.

The study involved 86 nurses during two 12-week alternative therapy sessions provided over the course of one year. Sixteen massages were carried out over a two-day work period each week, with the names of staff working those days put into an envelope and selected at random.

"Introducing stress reduction strategies in the workplace could be a valuable tool for employers who are keen to tackle anxiety levels in high pressure roles and increase job satisfaction," study leader, Marie Cooke, of Griffith University in Brisbane, said in a statement.

"But what is clear from this study, is that providing aromatherapy massage had an immediate and dramatic effect on staff who traditionally suffer high anxiety levels because of the nature of their work.

At my last job I watched an insane level of stress make life unbearable for everyone there. Something like this would not only have benefited those who got the occasional treat, but would have helped repair an environment where employees felt alienated and unappreciated. That makes me wonder if there were any subsidiary effects for those who weren't chosen to receive a massage in the weekly drawings (only 16 of the 86 nurses would receive a massage in any given week)? I'd imagine that not only getting an occasional massage might help, just the idea of having an employer who gives a crap about your mental health might also bring stressed employees some comfort.

'Taps' may be the easiest difficult song in the world

I played a little trumpet back in the day ... not well, but maybe well enough to do this with some practice:

While a federal law requires a flag detail for every veteran's funeral service, buglers are optional. With too few military buglers available, some veterans' cemeteries, including Houston's, are turning to recorded or a digital version of taps played over a loud speaker.

Kirby's group helps provide buglers at funerals for U.S. veterans and active duty service members. Every fallen vet and service member, he said, deserves the honor of a live bugler, not a recorded song or a digital bugles.

"We feel every veteran should have a 21-gun salute and a live bugler," said Kirby, a disabled Navy veteran.

But of the group's more than 170 members, only about 40 are able to play taps. The rest are either taking lessons from volunteers or are awaiting the resources to buy instruments they can play.

Kirby learned taps in only four months, but he said it's still a difficult song to perform.

"At a funeral there are no redos," Kirby said. "It's the emotional side of it and getting through the actual song, the tradition of what taps means."

I'll bet that last bit is right about getting through the emotional side being the hardest part.

Taps in one sense is an easy song to play, in another sense a difficult one because of its musical purity. When you play Taps on a trumpet instead of a bugle, you simply don't push down any keys. One changes notes entirely by adjusting your embrochure, or how you purse your lips and how much air you blow through the instrument.

Bugles can only play a given set of notes in a single harmonic series by making your embrochure smaller for higher notes and slightly more open for lower ones. A trumpeter can use valves to switch to a different harmonic series.

In other words, when you hold down the valves on a trumpet to create a different note, you're not creating a single different note but shifting the instrument's tubing length to access an entirely different harmonic series, which itself can be adjusted higher or lower by changing one's embrochure and the velocity of air pushed through the horn.

So on the one hand, Taps is "easy," because it's simple. It explores the notes in a single harmonic series. You don't need to know how to use the valves on a trumpet, read music, or really understand anything about musical theory at all - the song basically uses the only notes the instrument (a bugle) can play.

On the other hand, its simplicity also makes Taps difficult because it's entirely about the purity of the notes, their tone, the performer's smoothness of transition - all of these are highlighted more because so much else has been stripped away, leaving pure harmonics and the musician's skill as the only featured elements.

I imagine Taps is most difficult, though, because of the pressure - the emotionalism of the moment and the fact that screwing it up in the middle of such a significant ceremony is really NOT an option. You'd really want to practice long and hard before showing up to perform, but I'll bet it's a rewarding thing to do.

How did they know?

In a conversation with a doctor friend over a meal the other day, she marveled at the specificity with which marketers and list brokers were able to target a person's individual interests.

She'd received a catalog she hadn't ordered, junk mail, IOW, but said on her way to throw it away she realized she was actually interested in some of the things they were selling. She was both a little embarrassed that her interests were so transparent, and a little creeped out by it.

I mentioned that I'd experienced the same thing many times. I'll receive an email from someone I've never heard of asking, "Do you want to have sex tonight?" And I always wonder, "How did they know?"

Shouldn't Austin respect Lady Bird Johnson's wishes about renaming Town Lake?

Burnt Orange Report and most Austin Democrats appear to support renaming Town Lake after the late Lady Bird Johnson, who by any measure was an icon who deserves recognition. As I wrote in the comments at BOR, though:

This would be great and the honor well deserved except for one thing: As I understand it the deceased opposed the idea for this eponymous honor for many years, including fairly recently if memory serves; this has been proposed several times.. I think they should honor Lady Bird's wishes and leave it "Town Lake" unless it turns out she specifically changed her mind and somebody can document it (allegedly whispering it into Will Wynn's ear on hear deathbed, e.g., doesn't count). Otherwise to me it feels a little creepy and opportunistic to use her name in a fashion with which she disapproved.

I really don't like that, at sort of a gut level. Maybe it's because I've lost quite a few beloved family members over the years, so I feel pretty strongly you should respect the deceased wishes to the greatest extent possible if you want to truly honor their memory. I wish they'd do what she wanted, not just whatever the two-bit wannabes on the Austin city council feel like doing.

Gâteau au yaourt

Kathy has just harvested a bunch of beautiful, ripe fresh figs from one of the two fig trees in our backyard, and I'm going to use them to make a "gâteau au yaourt," which "is a traditional French home-baker-friendly cake that is really easy to make," according to the wonderful culinary blog we discovered this morning, She Who Eats. I'll let you know how it comes out.

The Missus and Willie and Me

There are two themes common to most all of the homemade CDs Kathy creates downloading music off of I-tunes. One is that almost all of them start with a song from Willie Nelson. (The one I'm listening to on the computer right now begins with "Shotgun Willie.") The other, perhaps more troubling commonality is they all contain songs about women leaving, cheating on or killing their husbands or boyfriends.

I'm not too concerned. In my house we tend to listen to both kinds of music: Country AND Western. So admittedly these are common themes.

However, they ARE the common themes. Hmmmmm. More on this as it develops.

Alone

Alone
Nobody here
The one person who wants to be with me cannot
And I've driven everyone else away

Alone
No job, no career, only words
No shared goals, no workers' camaraderie
The writer's task is solitary

Alone
I've never accomplished anything
But alone is how I accomplish everything
So my achievements feel pyrrhic

Alone
I wish I found more comfort in God
I wish I were closer to my family
I wish I knew better how to have friends

Alone
The world is still a grand place, full of possibilities
People are kind, fear is surmountable, hope is justified
I don't believe that God is dead though he seems lost to the world

Alone
My muscles contract and my back wrenches
My mind seizes on itself, devoured by fear and self-doubt
I cannot comfort myself, I can only be comforted, but I am

Alone

The New Mexican Tortilla Wars

Thanks to Cargill and other grain speculators, the price of tortillas in Mexico increased 738% since the advent of NAFTA, according to this insightful article tranlsated from La Jornada on the political economy of the new Mexican tortilla wars.