tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-338245602024-03-14T02:30:19.920-06:00A Blister to My EyeA week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye. - Anthony TrollopeDavidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.comBlogger522125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-44757485372512925602024-01-30T15:42:00.005-07:002024-01-30T15:42:53.451-07:00A Football Quandary<p> </p><div><div class="" dir="auto"><div class="x1iorvi4 x1pi30zi x1swvt13 xjkvuk6" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id=":r3d:"><div class="x78zum5 xdt5ytf xz62fqu x16ldp7u"><div class="xu06os2 x1ok221b"><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs x1xmvt09 x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto"><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">As you might possibly remember, I root for whoever is playing against the Denver Broncos, because the more the Broncos lose, and the earlier in the season the losing begins, the faster the preseason spurt of Broncomania fizzles, and the city becomes almost normal again. </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Normally, that includes the Kansas City Chiefs. But now I've learned that the Chiefs are agents, or at the very least dupes, of a dark international cabal (who could that possibly be?) that controls everything in the world and rigged NFL games so that the Chiefs would end up in the Superbowl, where Taylor Swifte (evil! evil!) will hypnotize the vast TV audience into voting for Joe Biden! </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">So now I don't know which team to root for when the Broncos next play the Chiefs. I'm utterly torn.</div></div></span></div></div></div></div></div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-5566385399459824442023-03-24T14:44:00.000-06:002023-03-24T14:44:14.331-06:00Drumming for Jesus and Genocide<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: left;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">My mother was born in 1914 in a village in Lithuania. She
emigrated to England as a teenager, in time to avoid the horrors that would be
visited upon Lithuanian Jews not too many years later. Her mother and many
other family members were not so lucky; they were still there in 1939 when
World War Two began.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">When the Nazis’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Endlösung
der Judenfrage</i>, Final Solution to the Jewish Question—i.e., the
Holocaust—reached Lithuania along with the invading German troops, the locals,
told by the Germans that they were free to murder their Jewish neighbors,
responded with such enthusiasm that even some of the German officers were
disturbed. To the locals, this wasn’t something new, and they had never needed
anyone’s permission to slaughter Jews. Jews had lived in terror there for
centuries.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Lithuanians, at least in those days, practiced the tradition
of Easter drumming—loud, round–the–clock drumming from Easter Friday to Easter
Sunday, to commemorate the Crucifixion and (or so my mother was told) to help
awaken Jesus on the third day. By itself, this sounds simply annoying and
silly. However, during those long hours, the local Christians, filled with
grief for their dear Lord and anger against those they blamed for killing him,
worked themselves into an even greater frenzy of antisemitism than usual.
Sometimes, they acted on their fury. The Jews huddled in their houses,
terrified, hoping that this Easter would pass without an outbreak of mass
murder. Any Jew unfortunate enough to be caught outside had a good chance of
meeting a violent death. My mother always remembered the ominous drums and the
long weekend of fear.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I think about this every year when, even in this supposedly
civilized and enlightened country, people post “He is risen!” on social media.
I imagine the drums and the seething atmosphere of hatred and violence. To me,
it’s all one and the same: Christianity equals murder.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“Oh, no!” some Christians will protest, resorting
immediately to their own version of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. “Those
weren’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">real</i> Christians! Jesus
preached love. Also, Hitler was an atheist, so there.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">No, Hitler was a Christian, and his life, far more than that
of the mythical Jesus, shows us what Christianity has really been throughout
its long and evil history. Of course there are good Christians, many of them
extraordinarily good, but that is only to say that there are good people, many
of them extraordinarily good, who are also Christians. They are good despite
being Christians, not because of it. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Almost from its beginning, the church preached—indeed,
commanded—murder: murder of pagans, murder of Christians of the wrong flavor,
but most especially murder of Jews. Christians have always been happy to do as
the church commanded, at least when it comes to murder. To be fair, calumnies
against Jews and mass murder of Jews predate Christianity, but the church
raised both to a new level and spread them throughout the world. The church
also added a vicious twist to Jew hatred. It told the faithful that by hating
and killing Jews, they were avenging the death of their Savior; they were being
good Christians.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But what about all those sweet, goopy things the fictional
character named Jesus is supposed to have said? Isn’t that the true nature of
Christianity? No, the true nature of Christianity is what the great mass of
Christians have been doing for thousands of years, which very much includes
hating and murdering Jews. Words, however pretty, don’t matter at all when they
are ignored. Words are nothing. Deeds are what count.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Those deeds, the centuries of ostracizing and killing,
culminated in the Holocaust, the greatest pogrom of all, one carried out with
twentieth–century technology and organized with German efficiency but also participated
in by vast numbers of non–Germans using whatever tools, modern or primitive,
they could find. We think of the Holocaust as something uniquely evil and apart
from history, but that’s a mistake. It’s very much a part of history—European
Christian history. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">So it is that when billboards and social media posts proclaim “He is
risen!” I see past the smug Christian moral posturing and self–congratulatory back–patting,
the arrogance and sense of superiority posing as humility. I think of those
bloody centuries and hear the primitive drumming and sense the bloodlust that is
the foundation of it all.</p><p></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-1504229475229096732022-12-08T19:14:00.005-07:002022-12-08T19:14:37.702-07:00The Nauseation of the Adoration<div align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;"><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
wonder if Christians realize how strange and creepy their manger
adoration fixation looks to an outsider: adults on their knees,
smiling half-wittedly while worshipping a baby who glows with an
eerie light; wise men or kings or whatever they’re supposed to be
traveling a great distance to bestow gifts on the same baby, guided
by a striking celestial phenomenon not recorded by the many ancient
civilizations that studied the sky and scrupulously recorded anything
novel therein.</span></span></p></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">Meanwhile,
Mary looks on with even more saccharine goopiness than one normally
expects from a new mother. How quickly she has recovered from giving
birth! Did she not writhe in pain during the process, shrieking at
Heaven “I hate you!”? Perhaps giving birth to a godling is
different from normal mortal birthing. Perhaps it’s an exquisite
experience rather than an excruciating one. Perhaps the Blessed
Virgin writhed, not in pain, but in ecstasy, shouting, “Oh, God!
Oh, God!” I believe the Gospels don’t say, but possibly medieval
Christian theologians discussed this matter, although without
recording their conclusions.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now
I’m wondering what other aspect of newborn care might be different
when the newborn is God himself. Never mind painless birth. What
about His poop? Did Little God’s diapers smell like roses? Even
that seems wacky for a godling. Perhaps he didn’t poop at all. Or
pee. Or eat. How can a god eat—or need to eat—human food or nurse
at a mortal breast? And if he does, you don’t want to make him eat
what he doesn’t want to eat or deny him that breast when he wants
it. The consequences could be awful. Don’t cross that baby! If he
wants to stay up late, let him! If he wants to put something in his
mouth, don’t tell him it’s dirty or dangerous. Let him!</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">If
luminescent Baby Jesus did poop and pee, not only must the output of
his godly bottom have smelled, well, heavenly, but it would also have
been extraordinarily valuable and deserving of reverence. Never mind
bringing gifts to the divine infant; people would have been fighting
viciously for the infant’s gifts. Perhaps there’s a hidden
storeroom at the Vatican containing all of those soiled diapers, a
secret room where only the Pope and the most cardinal of the
cardinals may enter to worship the ethereal nappies. </span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">Oh,
but wait! The sanctity of His shit wouldn’t have ceased with
infancy, would it? That room must contain all 33 years of his
infallible feces. And pee. And presumably any vomit and perspiration.
That’s a big room.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">That
room must also be very well smellproofed. The odor of the divine
dung, etc. is surely not only indescribably lovely but also of godly
power, intensity, and reach. Thus the room must be smellproofed
appropriately, for otherwise, treasure hunters would have only to
follow their noses in order to find the hidden brown gold. Or, having
done so and found—and smelled!—the paradisiacal poop, would they
have a religious experience, fall to their knees, and promise to be
exceedingly good thenceforward? Probably not. Better to smellproof
the room really well.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">Putting
that aside, let’s get back to the nauseating weirdness of that
adoration of a baby. I’ll admit that I start with a strong
prejudice against any sort of adoration—of a celebrity, a
politician, an athlete, an entertainer, etc. Such adoration puzzles
me, and from puzzlement I usually move quickly to contempt. So when I
see manger scenes or hear a Christmas Carol such as “Adeste
Fidelis” (quite a beautiful song if you hear it in Latin, but in
English the lyrics are nauseating) or hear references to the sweet
little Baby Jesus, contempt comes quickly—contempt for the cringing
servility of it all, the belly-crawling, boot-licking doggishness,
the subjugation of the human spirit to an imaginary superhuman
monarch, and moreover one in the form of a mere infant. </span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">Religion
is inherently nauseating, but Baby Jesus adoration is one of the
weirdest, creepiest, and most nauseating forms it takes.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p align="justify" class="western" lang="en-AU" style="line-height: 17pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0pt; page-break-inside: auto; text-indent: 25.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">That’s
even without the super poop.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;">
</span>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-19231733375840865422022-11-30T18:16:00.007-07:002022-11-30T18:17:42.227-07:00Ex-Jew Interview<p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I was interviewed this morning on the Chicago Jewish Cafe program about my book ONCE A JEW, ALWAYS A JEW? Here's the video link:</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bU-nMPmhIo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bU-nMPmhIo</a> <br /></span></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-80177952677746590412022-11-25T16:03:00.004-07:002022-11-25T17:00:13.598-07:00Cucumber God<p>Behold the Cucumber God.<br /><br />He is surrounded by His adoring worshippers. The crowd is so dense that some of those in it must stand upon others so that they can be bathed in the effulgence of His divine stupendiferousness as he spews his seeds (of wisdom). Sadly, there seem to be some doubters among the tomatoes.<br /><br />You might notice that the god is made up of two conjoined aspects. How can this be? How can He be both one and two? <br /><br />This is a deep mystery that can be understood, to the extent mortal mind can understand it, only by those who have studied deeply the ancient writings, the Cuke Canon, and the centuries of exegisis performed thereon and extrapolation derived therefrom by generations of cucologians, cranky fellows crammed together in stinky little rooms, performing their sacred labor while their wives and children labored to provide food and shelter for their families.<br /><br />For us ordinary mortals, it is sufficient to know that He is the bigod. When a person thinks he is saying "By God!" he is in truth offering a prayer to the only true god, the bigod. Or should that be the bigods? It is a bit confusing.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitLLc62ccpRjk6AZ4J0baagvmxGNBs0kLrjrmNx8yA5rQMWGEbFHrmaTu8DeEp4oL-vbYIX1q9OTBYtyH_fgYBFkXYeVNVlFYVqQr4EHQ4eJ81rU8gfNi1BfJMYmbcd8nGcX0ZE0Q9jy5IC_9nrGATMuB8Hqr23xggmN4eU12FO70rk4swzw/s2973/cucumber-god.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2659" data-original-width="2973" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitLLc62ccpRjk6AZ4J0baagvmxGNBs0kLrjrmNx8yA5rQMWGEbFHrmaTu8DeEp4oL-vbYIX1q9OTBYtyH_fgYBFkXYeVNVlFYVqQr4EHQ4eJ81rU8gfNi1BfJMYmbcd8nGcX0ZE0Q9jy5IC_9nrGATMuB8Hqr23xggmN4eU12FO70rk4swzw/s320/cucumber-god.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-9648599262332759062022-10-16T23:14:00.004-06:002022-10-16T23:14:41.356-06:00 Mysterious Midsomer Murders Mystery Solved!<p>I've long been puzzled by certain aspects of Midsomer County, the supposedly fictional English county with a shockingly high murder rate. <br /><br />First, there's that murder rate itself. So many bodies in such a sparsely settled, idyllic setting! Why is the UK national press on the case? Why aren't the notorious British tabloids permanently ensconced there? Why aren't questions being asked in Parliament?<br /><br />Second, there's the strange unimportance of time within Midsomer County. Murders there are often the result of events decades, generations, even centuries in the past. Past and present almost seem to coexist within the county.<br /><br />Third is the question of the exact size and location of Midsomer County. It's a bucolic place, for the most part, with small villages and lots of farm country and open meadoes. Despite that, the total population, based on the number of different characters we've met during the life of the series, must be enormous. Our detective heroes drive over to Reading to get information and then return for the day, and there are residents who work in the City, so we know it's in the south of England, probably one of the Home Counties (but not included in any lists of them!). However, there are people who have lived there their whole lives who nonetheless speak with pronounced Northern accents. There is at a Welshman, DS Ben Jones, who nonetheless grew up there and whose grandmother lives there and knows local gossip from long ago.<br /><br />Then there's that shapeshifter DCI Barnaby, who is really the same Barnaby throughout the series, despite changing his first name and family members. (Perhaps you see where I'm going with this.) (Perhaps not.) He's always accompanied by a companion, a detective sergeant, who also changes outwardly but not in essential nature.<br /><br />And finally, and perhaps the most important clue of all, there is this astonishing list of people who have appeared, using different names, in both Midsomer Murders and another popular, supposedly fictional British television series:<br />https://www.imdb.com/search/name/?roles=tt0118401,tt0056751<br /><br />In a blinding flash of insight, I realized that Barnaby is a Time Lord and Midsomer County is inside a TARDIS! <br /><br />Somewhere along an obscure country road outside London stands what appears to be a blue police box. Inside it -- vastly bigger on the inside than the outside -- is Midsomer County, drifting randomly in time and all over the island of Great Britain in space. <br /><br />How the tabloids would love to get inside that box! But of course, they never will.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-47754145115564635402021-12-23T20:44:00.001-07:002021-12-23T20:44:27.235-07:00Chrismanukkah<h3 style="text-align: left;">A Heartwarming Story for the Holiday Season</h3>
<p class="MsoNormal"><em><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">© 2021, David Dvorkin. All
rights reserved.</span></em></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It was the morning of December 25. The sun shone down from a
cloudless sky, its light sparkling on the pure white snow that covered the
town. Dogs barked, children shouted, giant birds with terrible talons circled
above, looking for small animals to swoop down on and tear limb from limb for
food and fun. It was God’s beautiful, perfect world.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy Goldstein made his way carefully downstairs. His
eyes shone in anticipation, while he held the banister tightly with his left
hand and his crutch with his right. He couldn’t wait to get down the stairs,
but he didn’t want another tumble like last week’s. That would truly ruin the
holiday spirit.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For today was Chrismanukkah, the name his blended family had
invented for their joint celebration of his mother’s Christian and his father’s
Jewish heritage. To simplify matters, and because in America Hanukkah had long
ago been transformed into the Jewish Christmas, Little Timmy’s parents had
agreed to limit their observance of the Jewish festival to one day and to shift
it to Christmas Day. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy didn’t really care about those details. He just
liked the special foods, the lights, the music, the family togetherness, and
the gifts. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And there it all was, waiting for him when he finally
struggled his way to the bottom of the stairs! A Christmas tree! A Hanukkah
bush! A plastic Santa lighted from within! A plastic menorah ditto (with all
its candles lit)! Piles of presents! Lots of lights! Shallow holiday music!
Bleary–eyed parents! Food remnants everywhere! Innumerable siblings breaking
their presents and stuffing their faces! The big morning celebration was over
because poor, crippled Little Timmy was always last on the scene, but he didn’t
mind. At least he was here, in the bosom of his loving
Americo–Judeo–Christian–traditional family.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Hello, family!” he shouted. “I love you!”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He ignored their distracted responses. His gaze had been
caught by the two paintings that loomed over the living room from opposite
walls. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One was a painting of a simpering Jesus with blond hair and
beard, eyes raised heavenward. Across the room from him, a fearsome armored
warrior glared at the family. This man was a bit darker, a bit more Middle Eastern.
It could have been a gift from his mother’s side of the family. They were conservative
Republicans and seemed to think of Jesus as an armed mercenary in the employ of
America’s wealthiest classes, but Little Timmy had always assumed that this
painting was his father’s property and that it depicted Judas Maccabeus, ready
to smite him some Greeks real good, and perhaps the wimpy, flaxen–haired Jesus
across the room, too, while he was at it.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Suddenly a new and disturbing thought struck Little Timmy. He
wondered why he hadn’t thought this thought before.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Say,” he said, thinking this thought aloud, “isn’t it odd
that we spend so much time and money and brain juice and emotion worshiping
Jesus, who probably never even existed, and at the same time making a fuss over
Judas and the rest of the Maccabees, who attacked other Jews who worshipped
foreign gods such as Jesus? Anyway, it all comes down to the idea of God, which
is a silly idea to begin with, right? And what’s with all the lights and stuff?
When you look at them objectively, they’re really very tacky. Also, most of the
music is really bad.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Silence fell on the room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">His parents rose from the couch, and his innumerable
siblings stood up, abandoning their presents and food, and all of them began to
advance upon him, hands held before them, fingers curling like claws, eyes
blank. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Kill,” they said in unison.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Moving as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast but
fortunately was faster than his suddenly mindless family, Little Timmy opened
the hall closet, pulled out his heavy winter coat, his gloves, hat, and boots,
and exited through the front door, slamming it behind him. His family lost
interest in his existence and returned to their mindless holiday doings.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy stood irresolute for a moment. Then the cold
struck him and he donned the winter garb he had fortunately taken from the
house. He felt it wise to put distance between himself and what had been his
home. He went carefully down the icy front steps, once again holding the
railing with his left hand and his crutch with his right, and then on to the
sidewalk.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Again he stood still for a moment, wondering what to do
next. Had he truly just lost the only home he had ever known? Where would he
go? What was he to do next? This was the worst Chrismanukkah ever!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nearby, a rabbit screamed as something ate it alive. Apparently,
God’s eye, being on the sparrow, was too busy to watch the rabbit as well. Or
possibly the Lord and Creator of the Universe was answering a prayer uttered by
whatever it was that was tearing the rabbit to pieces. What a conundrum! If the
fox prays for a rabbit to eat and the rabbit prays that it will not be eaten by
the fox, how does God decide which prayer to grant? This is one of those
mysteries that are beyond the ability of the mind of Man to comprehend.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That rabbit’s having an even worse Chrismanukkah than I am,
Little Timmy thought. I shouldn’t stand here feeling sorry for myself. I know!
I’ll go to Georgie’s house! They’ll take me in. They won’t mind what I said
about Jesus and Judas. Not that Judas. I mean the other Judas.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Georgie and his family were atheists. Georgie had often
invited Little Timmy to come to his house to escape what he called all that
religious stuff. “If you ever get tired of it,” he would say, “come to my
place. No one at my house cares about God or any of that silly nonsense.” </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy had visited Georgie’s house more than once, but
not to escape from religion. In the past, the very idea of escaping religion had
seemed sinful. Now it didn’t. Now it seemed to be just what he wanted. Also, it
was very cold outside.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He walked the two blocks to Georgie’s house, shivering
increasingly, walking carefully because of his crutch and spots of ice, eager
for a welcoming place, warmth, and the absence of all things Chrismanukkahish.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When he got to Georgie’s house, Little Timmy was surprised
to see a wreath tied with a red ribbon on the door. It gave him an uneasy
feeling. Nonetheless, he rang the bell. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Georgie opened the door, greeting him with cries of delight
and pulling him inside. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy said, “I had to get away from—”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That was as far as he got.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Of course you did!” Georgie’s father said, laughing his
wonderful big, booming laugh.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“You’re always welcome here, away from all of that,”
Georgie’s mother said in her lovely, musical voice.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Georgie’s brother and sister chimed in with similar charming
sentiments.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy felt warm and comfortable and safe. He did have
some questions, though. “I was surprised to see a Christmas wreath on your
door. Why—”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“It’s not a Christmas wreath,” Georgie explained with an
indulgent smile. “It’s just a holiday wreath, a decoration for the holiday
season.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy pointed to the decorated Christmas tree in one
corner. “What about that?”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“That’s just a traditional symbol of the time of year,”
Georgie’s father said with a chuckle. “It’s originally a pagan symbol, you
know. The Christians stole it, so we’re taking it back from them.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“And all that music?”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“It’s cheerful,” Georgie’s mother explained with a
condescending smile. “We like it. This is a family time of year, and the music
helps with the mood. It’s not religious,” she said while “Adeste Fideles”
played in the background.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Axial tilt is the reason for the season,” Georgie’s brother
said, looking down his nose at Little Timmy, which was easy to do because
Little Timmy really was quite little. “We’re celebrating the solstice.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“That’s pagan, too,” Georgie’s sister said, a bit
impatiently. “The Christians stole that as well, and we’re reclaiming it.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“But you’re not pagans,” Little Timmy said. “And paganism is
also a system of religious belief, so it’s just as silly as the stupid stuff
I’m trying to escape from. It’s all just a bunch of nonsense. If you just want
to celebrate family togetherness, why are you doing it at the same time as all
the religious people around you are doing it, and with the same symbols and
music? I think you’re just not strong enough to truly break away and chuck all
of this nonsense out the window.” He spotted a half–eaten cake on a nearby
table and felt suddenly hungry. “You’re trying to have your cake and eat it,
too.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Silence fell on the room. Georgie and his parents and
siblings started walking toward Little Timmy, hands reaching for him. Their
faces were blank, and together they droned, “Kill.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He fled, slamming the front door so hard behind him that the
non–religious, purely holiday–season wreath jumped from the door and landed on
the ground.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">High above, inaudible and invisible to Little Timmy, a
warplane streaked by on its way to bombing the bejesus out of some recalcitrant
brown people, who would be having a very bad Chrismanukkah indeed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy hobbled away as quickly as he could. Where
would he go now? He had no idea.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">While he pondered, he was approached by a man dressed in
wretched, torn clothes who limped badly. He looked like someone whose every
Chrismanukkah was a rotten one. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Could you give me a dollar or two, sir?” he asked Little
Timmy. “Or three? Or fifty cents? In the holiday spirit.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy gritted his teeth in annoyance at the last few
words, but he did reach into his pocket to see what was there. He found a few
coins, took them out, and dropped them into the man’s outstretched hand.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“What happened to your leg?” he asked the man.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“I asked some guy coming out of church for money, and he
kicked me.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy felt around in his other pocket, found a few
more coins, and gave those to the man, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“God bless us, sir, each and every one!” the man cried in
delight as he took the coins.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“And this,” Little Timmy said. “I no longer need it.” He
held out his crutch, which was, after all, just a metaphor.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little Timmy watched in satisfaction as the panhandler
hobbled away, leaning heavily on the crutch. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Standing up straight on his two sound legs, no longer quite
so little and no longer quite so cold, Little Timmy looked up at the cloudless
blue sky. He knew that the appearance of a dome holding us in is an illusion
created by the diffusion of sunlight. The sky is gas, thin and tenuous, and
beyond it is the vastness of the universe: stupendous numbers of galaxies,
stars, planets, and surely civilizations. The immensity of it all is
incomprehensible to the human mind, but it’s all just matter and energy. There
are no gods. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Probably, Little Timmy thought, there are a great number of
silly religious ideas out there, just as there are here on Earth, but there
must also be many sensible worlds, many intelligent species that have liberated
their minds from the absurdity of religious belief and religious celebration or
were perhaps never subject to any of it in the first place. How wonderful it
would be to live on such a world!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If only I could visit them, he thought. I never will, but
it’s wonderful to think that they’re out there and that there are probably many
other Little Timmys, alien in form but not in mind, looking up and thinking the
same thing, and all of us freed from silliness.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The future would be difficult. He had no idea what lay
ahead. But he did know that he was free.</p>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-66662055205418843072021-09-02T22:35:00.006-06:002021-09-02T22:35:48.652-06:00Adult Animals Drink Milk<div><div style="text-align: justify;">And why shouldn’t they? <br /></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I suppose we’ve all heard the supposed dictum that adult humans shouldn’t drink milk, that doing so is unnatural and bad for us, and we’re the only animals that drink milk past childhood.<br /></div><div><br />Let’s start with the last part. <br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> I read of a hunter who saw an adult male polar bear kill a lactating female polar bear, tear open her teats, and drink the milk. There’s no need to go to the far north and hunters’ tales for examples of adult animals drinking milk. Anyone who has owned dogs or cats knows how eagerly they lap the stuff up if they’re given the chance. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;"> Ah, but adult dogs and cats don’t drink milk in the wild, do they? Putting aside the fact that dogs and cats aren’t wild animals but creatures bred by us for thousands or tens of thousands or years, and that we don’t know for sure that adult feral dogs and cats don’t drink milk, let’s ask why adult wild animals, as a general rule, don’t seem to drink milk. <br /><br /> The answer, of course, is that milk isn’t available in the wild except when it comes from a nursing mother. We humans have an immense production and distribution chain to procure milk, process it to make it safe to drink, transport it, store it, and sell it to us. In our homes, we have refrigeration so that we can store milk safely. When it comes to milk, all of this is what really separates us from adult wild animals, not some divine edict or mystical rule of nature. <br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> As far as we can tell, wild animals also don’t have refrigeration or cook their food. (I think I’ve read of a few remarkable exceptions to that statement, but it’s still true for all but those few exceptions.) If we should not drink milk as adults because adult wild animals don’t drink milk, then we should also not refrigerate or cook our food. We should not live in houses or wear clothing. Goodbye to eyeglasses, hearing aids, telephones, and so on. But of course we don’t want to return to the life lived by our very ancient ancestors. The story of civilization is one of constantly inventing new ways to further distance ourselves from the natural state, that state in which life, as Thomas Hobbes said, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” <br /><br /> Think of that polar bear. Isn’t it better to get your milk from the fridge? <br /><br /> Let’s return to the first part of the original assertion, that drinking milk is harmful to adults. As far as I can tell from a bit of Googling, this is either completely true or utterly false. The “false” position highlights all the healthful nutrients milk contains. The “true” position counters that the same nutrients can be obtained elsewhere and milk also contains lots of saturated fat, which is known to be bad for us. <br /></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> One doesn’t have to drink whole milk, though. My wife and I switched to 2% milk years ago, and when we were used to that, we took the next step and switched to 1% milk. It tastes fine in tea, coffee, and cereal. (Perhaps we’ll manage to go all the way and switch to skimmed milk, but I doubt it.) <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> If you think that saturated fat is sufficient reason to avoid milk entirely, then I assume you also don’t eat butter or eat cheese. You should also reject meat, especially red meat. Avoid alcohol and tobacco, limit ingestion of fried foods and snack foods, get sufficient sleep, don’t sit for too long, exercise regularly, avoid stress and pollution, drink plenty of water and never soft drinks, and never eat processed meats. And all of the other rules that most of us know quite well and try to observe, sort of, for the most part, but with occasional lapses. (We have good intentions.) <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> If you’re one of the rare few who actually do follow all of those rules strictly and always, congratulations. I admire you. I’ll never be you. You’re doing everything you should do at the 100% level, whereas I’m at the… I don’t know. Better than 50%, I’m sure. Perhaps I can even say 75-80%, at least on a good day. I don’t think that eliminating the moderate amount of 1% milk I drink in tea and coffee would raise my good-health-habits percentage significantly. I’m quite sure it would eliminate the pleasure I derive from those beverages. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Few of us will ever attain perfection in anything, and that’s especially true of the healthiness of our lifestyles. Perhaps it’s wiser to establish moderate habits and to aim for a high but reasonable level of healthiness. Make small improvements as you’re able to. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> Don’t beat yourself up about it. Sip a bit of milk. I hear it’s calming and helps fight stress.</div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-56299315381286439142021-08-10T18:07:00.000-06:002021-08-10T18:07:13.412-06:00Knowing the Mind of God<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The world is rife with people eager to tell
us what God thinks about this or that—marriage, work, family, food,
entertainment, the purpose of life, and just about everything else.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">I always wonder how they know.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Sometimes, they refer to the Bible. That’s
silly enough to begin with. The Bible was created by people to whom the
universe was little more than the Middle East—or in the case of the New
Testament, the Roman world—and the sky above it, which they thought of as not
very high up. Their god was an unpleasant and emotionally insecure father
figure who insisted that things be done his way, or else. Like any such father,
the only reason he gave was “Because I say so!” To follow rules supposedly laid
down by this tiny, limited god of a tiny, limited world is absurd. But let’s
accept that, for the sake of argument.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The Bible contains many dos and don’ts
supposedly written by this god, or by humans inspired by him. Some of those
rules are fundamental to the conduct of a sane society and are found all over
the world; the most obvious one is “Thou shalt not kill.” Those rules are old,
basic, and owe nothing to the Bible; they are recorded there but didn’t
originate there. They are irrelevant to this discussion. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">As for the others, they are largely
nonsensical but in some cases clear enough: keep the Sabbath (why?); pigs are
unclean (huh?). Many of the rules, though, are tricky because they were written
in a far simpler time. People who take the Bible seriously must jump through
strange logical hoops to figure out how to apply those rules to modern life.
For example, the Old Testament forbids lighting a fire on the Sabbath. Modern
observant Jews therefore don’t turn on electric lights on Saturday, even though
no fire is involved. At some point, when electricity became common enough for
this to become an issue, rabbis pondered mightily and declared that turning on
lights violates this biblical proposition. God knew all of the past and the
future, but he neglected to write down a rule for electric lights, the mention
of which would have been bewildering to the ancient Hebrews but which God knew
would become a problem for them in a few thousand years. Thus human religious
authorities were required to tell us what God meant but neglected to write down.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">If he didn’t write it down or cause it to
be written down, how do they know what he meant?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">This is very common in Judaism, the
religion I was immured in until I was able to leave home. Almost all of what we
now consider Judaism, such as the wacky dietary laws, was invented by rabbis
centuries ago. Crammed into little rooms, they argued with each for hours other
about the meaning of a word or phrase in the Torah (the first five books of the
Old Testament). The records of their discussions fill immense volumes, called
the Talmud, which rabbis and religious students have studied and memorised ever
since. The discussions of those ancient rabbis, along with later such
theological squandering of brain cells, have been codified into detailed sets
of rules that dominate food preparation, dining, and much of the rest of daily
life among observant Jews.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">(Those rabbinical discussions weren’t
limited to the written version of the Torah. They also included discussions of
a number of unwritten rules and regulations supposedly transmitted to Moses by
God on Mount Sinai and then passed on, without a word being changed, from one
generation of priests/rabbis/theologians to the next. The number of
improbabilities and assumptions one has to swallow to believe in all of this is
remarkable.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">I gather that something similar applies in
Catholicism, where the rules by which the devout live were deduced from holy
writ by theologians arguing with each other about what God–Jesus (remember that
the two are mysteriously and inexplicably the same) meant by this or that
phrase or sentence. For that matter, I think this is generally the situation in
religions generally, monotheistic and otherwise.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The old men spending their days debating
meaningless theological minutiae while being supported by hardworking peasants or
family members are imbued with the aura of divine authority. Their supposed
wisdom (they pronounce nonsense with great conviction), learning (they know
their religion’s fairy tales in great detail), and holiness (they have big beards
and soft hands) are taken to mean that their decisions about right and wrong
bear God’s stamp of approval. He is speaking through them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">(“But, God, why didn’t you just cause
everything to be written down in great detail in the first place. That way,
there’d be no risk of a misinterpretation?” “I was busy, okay? I had a universe
to run.”)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The religions these old men represent are
granted elevated status by time. The dogmas are covered by the accumulated
grime of centuries, which looks like a holy patina.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Actually, that patina isn’t even required.
As we know, dogmas are revered even without that layer of grime. New sects
arise in a moment—especially in Protestantism—whenever a self–appointed leader
appears with a new dogma, a new claim to know the mind of God. The sheep line
up to hand him their money and follow his new set of rules.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">This is common in religion, and it’s even
more common in the world of woo–woo. In that case, it’s not the mind of God
that the new leader claims to know but rather the secret workings of nature,
hidden to all save that new leader. But it amounts to the same thing: “Only I
can see what’s beyond the veil, what God/the universe requires of you, how to
propitiate/harmonize with the divine/secret force and live happily ever after.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Of course, much of this simply a confidence
game. But there are, I think, a fair number of religious/woo–woo figures who
are sincere. They delude themselves before they delude their followers. They
really do think that they—and only they—know the mind of God/true nature of the
universe, and they burn with the need to impart hat knowledge to the masses.
And there are masses, sadly, who are eager to believe them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">That raises a very different question: Why?
Why are the masses so ready to believe these people? Rabbis, priests, imams,
politicians, self–appointed health experts, music experts, fashion experts, wine
experts, conspiracy theorists, talk radio babblers, and on and on. Why is their
self–proclaimed authority so readily accepted? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">There has been research on this subject,
and it seems to confirm what I’ve long thought: that the believers and
followers fear uncertainty, want definite rules, want to think the universe isn’t
random, want to think someone knows the answer, and want to be part of an elect
group of insiders who know the truth. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">However, that’s not the question I started
with: Why do the people who claim to know the mind of God believe themselves?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Again, I’m not talking about the con men,
the preachers with immense incomes happily fleecing the sheep. They’re
despicable but no more so than con men of any other type. I’m talking about the
ones who are actually sincere. They are legion. They are everywhere. Most of them
aren’t even preachers; they’re simply convinced that they know the mind of God,
although they may express that knowledge by saying that “the purpose of life
is...” or “I believe we were put on Earth to...” Others, though, are eager to
share their special knowledge with the world, to preach.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">No doubt a fair number of such preachers are
bonkers. Perhaps the most famous example is Joan of Arc, who saw visions. I
have the impression, though, that most of them are sane. They’re not hearing
voices, let alone the voice of God telling them what he wants. They don’ t
claim to have a literal direct line to Heaven. In a way, that would make a kind
of crazy sense. What’s even stranger is that they seem to think that they have
an extraordinary ability to simply know what God wants and what verses in the
Bible really mean.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Perhaps in some cases, they never grow out
of being nineteen–year–olds. That’s the stage at which people tend to think
they know everything about everything. (In my case, that happened around
seventeen, and by nineteen, I had begun to realize how incomplete my knowledge
of everything was.) Maybe the people I’m talking about simply don’t progress
past that point. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">But surely that only explains a minority of
them. Few people retain the ignorant certitude of nineteen well into adulthood.
I have to assume that the people I’m talking about realize how little they know
about other areas of life. So why do they continue to think that they know the
mind of God? What is the nature of that part of their self–image? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">I’m mystified.</span></p>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-26709926163795483782021-08-03T17:44:00.000-06:002021-08-03T17:44:04.836-06:00The Material Atheist<p class="MsoNormal">Years ago, when I was commuting by bus to work in downtown
Denver, I used the time to read. There were people who preferred to spend the
ride making small talk with the stranger sitting next to them. My reading time
has always been precious to me, and I resented people interrupting it with
pointless babble. Usually, answering them grunts while keeping my eyes glued in
the book made the point, and they’d turn their attention elsewhere or even
change seats.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Except for a smiling young man who sat down next to me and
asked me what I was reading.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“A book.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“What’s it about?”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Mumble.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Oh.” Pause. “Do you know what I like to read?”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I looked at his smiling face and realized what was coming.
“The Bible?” I asked.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He seemed <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>disappointed that I had seen through him, but
he persisted, jabbering about Jesus—witnessing, I suppose, that annoying word Christians
use to mean interrupting the precious reading time of someone who hasn’t
intruded on them, is trying to ignore them, and is hoping to be ignored by
them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Finally I told him to stop talking to me and that nothing he
said would affect me. I was an atheist and thus fully immunized. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He looked nonplussed for a moment and then asked me to
define “atheism” for him.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I told him that in my opinion it was essentially materialism.
I thought that would put an end to it.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He pondered and then said something like, “Have you ever
thought that maybe there’s more to life than the accumulation of worldly
possessions?”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I realized that he only knew that use of “materialism,” so I
told him that I was using it in the other sense, the philosophical one, that
the universe consists of matter and nothing else.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He digested that for a while and then finally left to find
another victim, mouthing platitudes about blessings and praying for me as he
went.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Recently, I’ve been trying to remember the process by which
I became an atheist. At the time it was happening, I wasn’t looking at myself
from the outside. I was concerned with what to believe or not believe, but I
wasn’t analyzing myself. Now that all of that’s in the distant past and I’m an
old fart who’s toying with writing his autobiography (because why not?), I’m
trying to look at that period in my life objectively and analytically. When I
remembered the incident of the twit on the bus, I realized that I was always a
materialist by nature. It just took me a few years of intellectual and
emotional struggle to cast off parental conditioning and become my true self—a
materialist, which is to say, an atheist.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When I was a child, I believed what my parents believed. The
mythology in the Old Testament, the existence of God, the inherent rightness of
the wackadoodle Jewish dietary laws, and so on—that was how the Universe was.
At the same time, I really wanted to understand how the Universe worked. I read
science books written for children and absorbed their contents, which I placed
on the same level of truthfulness as the religious nonsense fed to me by my
parents. It was all equally true and equally important to understanding
everything. My parents were pleased by the religious part of the preceding and
assumed that I’d follow path of religious self–brainwashing everyone in their
families had followed, which they thought was the right and proper path for a
Jew, especially a male Jew. I was very good at parroting religious rubbish. One
of my sisters once called me the little rabbi.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">An important difference, though, was that science was
exciting and satisfying. It appealed to me emotionally as well as
intellectually. Judaism was just there. It was true (as I still thought) but
increasingly uninteresting. The rituals and seemingly endless time spent in the
synagogue were annoying and oppressive. That was time I could have used to read
science books (and science fiction and comics).</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As far as I can remember, it was that emotional disconnect
that moved me steadily away from religion and toward science as a way to
understand the Universe. Well before increasing understanding of science showed
me the absurdity of the creation story in the book of Genesis, this lack of a
need for a religion, and therefore a lack of interest in it, made me a Jew in
name only. God and religious belief disappeared from my life. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Not so with outward religious display and observance. As the
rabbi’s son, I had to keep going through the motions. That would last until I
left home for college. At the same time, I was struggling with what to call
myself. I think I had arrived at “atheist” by the time I left home. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On an emotional level, the Universe was a material thing to
me. But what a wonderful thing! As a teenager, I devoured books on astronomy.
The astonishing size and age of the Universe and the variety and strangeness of
the objects and energies that filled it delighted me. I wanted to know
everything I could about it. I wanted to understand it. Clearly, religion was
not a path to that understanding; it was only a path to fantasy—boring fantasy.
I could see that science was the path to understanding. It wasn’t that science led
me to atheism. Rather, it was materialism that led me to science. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Space and astronomy fascinated me, but so did books about
the opposite end of nature, what we see through the microscope and what we
learn from particle accelerators. There is another stunningly wonderful Universe
below us in size.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">LaPlace told Napoleon that God wasn’t mentioned in his book
explaining the workings of the Solar System because “I had no need of that
hypothesis.” For me, in our vast and wonderful Universe, there is no room for
that hypothesis. How trivial, shallow, and silly the idea of God is compared to
immense reality. To an ancient people who thought of a small part of the Middle
East as the entirety of existence, the concept of a god who had made all of it
might not have been so absurd. Expand that view to the entire world, with all
of its natural diversity and wildly different human cultures, and already you
have to strain to believe in such a supreme being. With what we now know of the
Universe—and knowing that we can only observe a tiny part of it—you have to willfully
restrict your conception of reality to something cramped and simplistic in
order to still believe in a god of any kind.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One of the reasons I want to be immortal is so that I will
live to learn about further scientific discoveries on both the microscopic and
telescopic levels. What wonders we’ll uncover! Who needs childish fairy tales?</p>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-40845164735659316332021-07-19T21:30:00.003-06:002021-07-19T21:36:59.565-06:00Dusty Docs out the Airlocks<p class="FirstChapterParagraph"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I got an
e–mail from someone who was searching for information about the onboard
computers on the Viking Mars landers, those brave little robots of beloved
memory. He had found my resume online (<a href="http://dvorkin.com/dresume.php"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">http://dvorkin.com/dresume.php</span></i></a>) and saw that I was part
of the team that developed the deorbit burn targeting software for the landers.
He assumed that that software was loaded into the onboard computers and
therefore I would be able to answer his questions about those computers’
architecture.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Alas, I had to tell
him that I knew nothing about the onboard computers. The Viking software I
worked on was developed on a ground–based computer, a CDC 6600, a stupendously
powerful scientific/engineering computer for its time. During the missions, the
software ran on another ground–based computer, a less stupendously powerful but
still pretty nifty Univac 1108. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">He told me he had been
searching online for documentation about the onboard computers but had found
little. I commiserated, saying that I have sometimes tried to find documents
about my work on Apollo at NASA, including documents I myself wrote, but with no
luck. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">When I was working there,
I saw thick notebooks filled with details about computer architecture, hardware
specifications, and mission minutiae. NASA was fanatical about having
everything written down to the finest level of detail. That applied both to
work done inside NASA and to work performed at contractor sites, such as the
Viking software development I was later involved with at Martin Marietta (now
Lockheed Martin). I’m sure all of that paperwork still exists, but
unfortunately, it hasn’t been digitized.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">By the way, the
process to produce it was tedious and painstaking.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We engineers wrote our
documents by hand. Yes, children, by hand! Any needed charts or illustrations
were also done by hand, sometimes by the engineers, sometimes by graphic
artists. In my case, I cut and pasted tables from computer printout onto sheets
of paper and inserted them into the handwritten document. All of this was then
typed by clerical workers in the approved format. The engineer proofread the
typed document, made any needed changes, had pages retyped if necessary, and
sent the document to the editing department, which did its damage (e.g.,
insisting on approved NASA spelling, such as “alinement” instead of
“alignment). The edited document was then retyped as necessary. Finally, copies
were made and sent to those who needed to see the document, and a copy was sent
to an archive, a library of some sort.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I think the people who
did all the typing had some sort of very primitive word processor—in effect, an
electric typewriter with memory. Still, it was all very primitive, and quite a
contrast to the cutting–edge technology that was taking men to the moon.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Some years later, I
wrote a simple document formatting program in FORTRAN. I hoped to use it to
print out short stories and novels in the proper format for submission to
magazines and publishers. Still later, when I had a desktop computer, I tried
writing a word processor in C. It was fun, but it soon became pointless as
commercial word processors made their appearance. How we would have loved those
back in my Apollo days!</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Some random bits and
pieces of NASA documents have been put online, often by people outside the
government. It’s peripheral material, not the important stuff.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">For example, someone
on a social network challenged me to prove that I had worked on Apollo.
Foolishly, I didn’t put the twat on permanent Ignore and instead went looking
online for old Apollo documents of mine, feeling sure that I would find them. I
didn’t. I did find a site with digitized versions of attendance lists of some
meetings held at NASA/Houston during Apollo. There were a lot of those
meetings, and I was in quite a few of them. There I was, listed as an attendee
at some. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It was enough to
stifle the twat. It also made me realize how little of the immense storehouse
of data, vital to historians of technology, is still only available in
original, hardcopy form.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is potentially
tragic. How many hard copies of those documents exist? How widely separated are
they? How well protected from fire and flood? How close are we to losing a huge
part of the history of Man’s greatest technological achievement?</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It’s possible that the
important stuff is still classified, as it was at the time. The wasn’t because
we were working on secret military projects, but because we were using data
with military relevance. Specifically, mission dates were classified because
the Evil Adversary (i.e., the Soviet Union) could use those to extrapolate the
geographical positions of a big part of America’s military resources,
especially naval resources, for the duration of the mission and for many days
before launch.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Of course none of that
should matter now, decades later. However, as I vaguely remember, such
classification lasts for a very long time, perhaps forever. I believe the
classification can be removed at any time by presidential order. Surely this is
the time to do that and to allocate funds to digitize everything, to make
copies and backups of the digitized documents, and to make all of them
available free online.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><div style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Yes, it would be cool
on a personal level. I’d love to be able to download copies of everything I
wrote back then, although it would probably depress me to see how little of it
I could now understand. (I’m pretty sure I understood it when I wrote it.) But
such documents are of greater importance than the personal. Our understanding
of history is built on such little details—on the innumerable minor deeds of
innumerable minor people—and not just on the grand actions of great men.</span></span></span></p></div><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I don’t think we can
afford to lose those immense stacks of paper, and I suspect we’re in danger of
doing so. <br /></span></span></span></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-21644920622564602542021-07-19T21:18:00.000-06:002021-07-19T21:18:14.439-06:00Space, the Final Etc.<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The familiar phrase “space, the final
frontier” is from the opening narration of the original Star Trek television
show (i.e., the real Star Trek). It’s a catchy image, designed to appeal to
America’s romantic if historically questionable idea of the Western frontier. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">I prefer John F. Kennedy’s metaphor of
space as a new ocean, one we must sail upon. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">This is part of a speech he gave at Rice
University in 1962: “</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We set sail
on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to
be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space
science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own.
Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the
United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether
this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do
not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of
space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea,
but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires
of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ
around this globe of ours.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">You can read the
speech, and see and hear it, here:</span></p>
<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm</span></i></a></span>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-42450613536389900912021-02-16T16:19:00.000-07:002021-02-16T16:19:11.226-07:00Spicy Is a Type of Bland<p>I grew up with bland food—limited ingredients, limited variety,
limited seasonings, and everything overcooked. Little taste and
texture remained, and what did remain was unpleasant to me. That I
was a fat child was a result of inactivity and mealtime parental
intimidation and not due to the appeal of my mother’s cooking. When
I got to college, I liked dorm food. The variety was refreshing. Pork
was a delight, partly because of the taste, but mostly because it was
non-kosher, but that’s another story. I also shed a lot of fat,
about thirty pounds during my first year on campus, but that’s yet
another story.</p>
<p>Later, when I was in graduate school, earning money as a Teaching
Assistant and dating Leonore (who is now my wife of almost 53 years,
but that’s still yet another story), we used to occasionally
splurge on dinner at a Chinese restaurant. That was my first
experience with Chinese food (the very idea of which horrified my
parents, but that’s another etc.). In those days, that meant
Cantonese food, which nowadays is looked down upon by many as bland
and boring. To me, the new tastes and textures were wonderful.</p>
<p>Perhaps I would now find the food at that restaurant a bit plain,
and probably I’d find the dorm food bland, boring, and possibly as
unpleasant as my friends in the dorm professed to find it. Back then,
American food had the reputation of being bland and boring. I never
agreed with that, at least not as a general statement to all American
food.</p>
<p>Times have changed. Capsaicin is—ho, ho—hot. The spicy bite is
in, and the spicier the better. Perhaps this is due to changing
demographics and the growing popularity of various ethnic cuisines
that favor the use of hot peppers. In addition, there’s a segment
of blindingly white Anglos (I’m allowed to say that because I’m
one of them) who see the spiciness level of one’s food as a moral
and cultural issue instead of a matter of food preference. Those who
don’t like spicy food, we are told, are narrow minded,
unadventurous, unappreciative of flavorful foods, provincial, and
probably racist stooges of running-dog capitalism. (Yes, I
exaggerate.) (Slightly.)</p>
<p>For me, the opposite is true.
</p>
<p>There’s probably a lot of variation between individuals. Perhaps
there are people for whom the addition of hot chili peppers to a dish
makes the flavors of the other ingredients all the more detectable.
For me, however, spiciness masks those other flavors. Everything else
is overwhelmed by the heat. If the spiciness level is high (by my
standards; others might consider it low), I become unaware of
anything but the spiciness. Even different textures disappear.
Nothing is left but the unpleasant bite. I disliked my mother’s
cooking because of the lack of taste and texture; it was like chewing
tasteless dough. Spicy food is even worse—just as tasteless and
textureless as that childhood nastiness, but in addition eating away
at me all the way from my lips down to my stomach and beyond.</p>
<p>That’s why I say that spicy is a type of bland. Blandness
implies a lack of anything strong, noteworthy, outstanding. Spicy
food does have one strong element, but that one element wipes out
everything else. In both cases, there might as well be no individual
ingredients, and there’s no interesting mouth feel or aftertaste,
nothing left to appeal to a variety of senses. It’s all the same.</p>
<p>You might want to stop reading now. (That’s assuming you’ve
read this far. If you haven’t, then you aren’t reading these
words, and therefore...Well, never mind.) The rest of this essay
deals with a subject that’s quite distasteful. Unpleasant, even. In
fact, it stinks.</p>
<p>There’s a good reason that many people should avoid spicy food,
and that is the dreadful effect it can have on one’s breath.
</p>
<p>Years ago, I developed an awful case of halitosis. The was
unbearable—for others. I couldn’t smell it, but I could see how
others shrank away from me. It depressed me terribly. I had no
control over the problem. I couldn’t make it go away. I had no idea
why this had happened to me. My health was good. My teeth, a common
cause of bad breath, were also fine. Finally, my dentist told me that
the source of the problem was my sinuses; he had encountered this
before. My doctor later said the same and told me to take an
over-the-counter medication. It worked to a degree, but not entirely,
and it had side effects, such as disrupted sleep.</p>
<p>I consulted Dr. WorldWideWeb and learned that my problem was
common in dry climates, such as Denver, where I live, and was
commonly triggered by an allergy, often a food allergy. The advice
was to drink lots of water, take a garlic oil supplement, and
identify the allergen and eliminate it. The first two were easy. I
tried cutting out the various foods mentioned as possible allergens,
but none of them did the trick. The trigger wasn’t a food. I
continued taking the garlic oil supplement and drinking lots of
water, but I felt hopeless. It was time to grit my teeth, avoid human
contact whenever possible (on the bright side, I’m an introvert),
and carry on with life.</p>
<p>I had been in the habit of a weekly lunch with a friend at Casa de
Manuel, a great Mexican restaurant in downtown Denver, where I always
had a pork burrito smothered with green chili (along with a side
order of menudo and a cheese enchilada, all of which were also really
great there, but that’s still yet again another story). The green
chili was spicy but not extremely so; perhaps the heat was somehow
toned down for the mostly Anglo lunchtime crowd.
</p>
<p>Because of various circumstances, I skipped that lunch for a
period of a few months, and suddenly my breath became normal.
Children and small dogs no longer scattered at my approach. Bingo! I
experimented by eating something with green chili again. The dreadful
dragon breath returned. That was the last time I knowingly ate green
chili. I also generally avoid the red kind, just to be safe. It was
hard not ordering the smothered burrito when I returned to Casa de
Manuel, but not as hard as dealing with the alternative. (Later, I
left that job and stopped working downtown, and Casa de Manuel lost
their lease and moved to a distant location, but of course that’s
another story, because there are almost a million stories in the Mile
High City.)</p>
<p>I say “knowingly” because a few years later, at a lunch with
coworkers, I ordered something that wasn’t labeled spicy, and it
wasn’t spicy, but it had the distinctive taste of green chili.
After lunch, I noticed people keeping their distance from me. It was
confirmation of my great scientific discovery, at any rate.</p>
<p>Of course, I could be the only person in the world with this
particular allergy to spicy food and this particular reaction to it.
I don’t think I am, however. It seems highly unlikely. Beyond that,
I sometimes notice that distinctive and awful smell of sinus problems
when I’m in a Mexican restaurant. That’s surely not a
coincidence.</p>
<p>If you have the same breath problem and can’t get rid of it, try
avoiding spicy foods for a while, along with taking a garlic oil
supplement and drinking lots of water. You might also consider using
a neti pot; if you do, read up on safety precautions first. Don’t
worry that food will be tasteless and bland. On the contrary, you
might well discover a whole universe of subtle tastes and textures
that the spiciness was masking. You might even come to feel that
spiciness is a type of bland.</p>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-1031904537152619082020-12-25T16:03:00.000-07:002020-12-25T16:03:01.900-07:00Fulsome Fendik!What’s an atheist to do? <br /><br /> When people say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” to me, I know they mean well, and I don’t want to be rude. Many atheists simply reply with the same greeting. It’s no big deal, they say. Well, it is to me. It violates my principles to use any religious phrase other than “God damn,” “Jesus Christ!” and that sort of thing. <br /><br /> So I decided to make up a holiday and an associated greeting that I can use to reply to the Merry Christmases, etc. <br /><br /> Of course, all holidays are made up, whether they celebrate mythical events—e.g., Passover, Christmas, Easter—or historical events that have been utterly distorted in the retelling and have had a religious gloss laid upon a bloody event—e.g., Hanukkah. Either way, the religious elements in all of them make them objectionable to me. <br /><br /> Then there’s Festivus, a tongue-in-cheek holiday invented for a TV comedy series. The problem with that one is that it’s taken on real attributes. It has a symbol associated with it, the Festivus Pole, that people are actually erecting. It has rituals and even miracles. (The miracles are also tongue–in–cheek, but nonetheless they’re there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in time, some people start to take them, and the rest of the holiday, seriously.) <br /><br /> Those problems don’t apply to Fendik. <br /><br /> Fendik doesn’t celebrate anything real, but it can if you want it to: your birthday, your marriage, your divorce, the death of your greatest enemy, or nothing at all. It has no religious element. It can fall on any date and last for as many days as you like. It can occur numerous times in one year. It can even occur numerous times in one day, lasting, say, for 15 minutes at a time. It might never occur at all, as will be the case for most people, probably all people. <br /><br /> There are no prescribed rituals or modes of observance. Any decorations are acceptable, as is the absence of all decorations. No one can accuse you of celebrating Fendik incorrectly, or of using the wrong decorations, or of putting them up or taking them down too early or too late. <br /><br /> Send cards or don’t send cards. Put anything on the cards that takes your fancy. Just be sure to include “Fulsome Fendik” somewhere. <br /><br /> The only rules are the name, which cannot be changed; the greeting, “Fulsome Fendik,” which likewise cannot be changed; and the lack of any religious element, which must never be added. <br /><br /> Other than that, you’re free to make Fendik your own. <br /><br /> And a Fulsome Fendik to you! Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-16798538670841292612020-12-21T18:45:00.003-07:002020-12-22T11:49:23.188-07:00Gimme That Old-Time Religious Privilege<p style="text-align: left;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</p><h1 style="margin-left: 0in; text-align: left; text-indent: 0in;"></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Atheists and other non-believers are reminded on a regular
basis how privileged religion and religiosity are in this country and how
oblivious the religious are to the existence of that privilege. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">On a national level, this refers to Christians. On a local
level, it can be some other religion or religious group, such as the Haredim in
some parts of New York State and city. Overwhelmingly, though, in America,
religious privilege equals Christian privilege, so letʼs stick to that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Recently on the Nextdoor social media site for my area, a
woman asked for auto mechanic recommendations. She said she had been cheated
and otherwise mistreated by unreliable and/or dishonest mechanics before, and
therefore she now wanted a recommendation for a God-fearing one.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">I took exception, of course.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Iʼm trying hard to be non-confrontational these days. Well,
less confrontational. Well, sorta kinda. Politely, I asked her how
“God-fearing” was relevant.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">A few people chimed in to suggest possible answers to my
question. They gave her the benefit of the doubt, although one poster asserted
that believers are more honest than other people. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Eventually she responded to me—not with an explanation, but
with hostility. She accused me of attacking her god. She told me to get a hobby
and not bother her. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I kept answering politely, pointing out that her words were
a slur against non-believers. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
insisted they weren’t. I asked if she would be as dismissive of slurs against
other groups. She became more hostile. Eventually, she blocked me. Rather, she
said she was blocking me, but then she showed up again to tell me that I needed
help—presumably because pointing out that someone has denigrated a group of
people is a sure sign of mental illness. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The original poster and others accused me of only wanting to
disrupt the group. That’s a technique commonly used to dismiss complaints and
those making them. Jumping into an online group discussing football just to say
that I hate football would be disruptive, not to mention rude. It would also be
pointless. I do hate football, but that silly game and its fans, even at their
most boorish, are not a threat to my freedoms. I donʼt need a wall of
separation to protect me from them. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The discussion on Nextdoor wasn’t about football. It had
morphed into a debate about the perceived right of believers to insult
non-believers. In pointing out that they were insulting non-believers, I had
exposed their unconscious religious privilege. They wanted to be free to sling
such insults in a public forum, and they were outraged when someone called them
to account.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">I had touched a nerve. I wasn’t surprised. I’ve touched that
nerve before. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One such time was in December 1962, at Indiana University in
Bloomington, Indiana. I was a college sophomore, but it was my first year
living away from home on a college campus. Christmas lumbered into view and
holiday lighting went up on numerous campus buildings. This upset me. IU is a
public university, so it was clear to me that putting religious decorations on
the buildings was a violation of the separation of church and state. I said so
in a dormitory bull session. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The first response from my fellow bullsessioners was
bewilderment. Such lighting was ubiquitous. They had seen it all their lives.
It was normal. It was traditional. It was entirely appropriate. That’s one of
the major characteristics of religious privilege: The practitioners of the
majority religion always think it’s normal and appropriate for their symbols to
appear everywhere. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Then their bewilderment turned to anger. I argued for a
while with an increasingly hostile crowd. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Some of them knew that my father was a rabbi. The anger
followed the inevitable course. Someone said bitterly that all those Jewish
merchants had no objection to making money selling goods intended as Christmas
presents. I laughed and said sure, why not? If Christians are so foolish as to
spend huge amounts of money every Christmas, why should Jewish merchants not
sell to them? </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Someone, trying to cool things down, asked if I’d be okay
with the decorations if they included a Star of David. Would that satisfy me?
No, I said. It would still be a violation of church-state separation. Any
religious symbols on the buildings would be a violation, no matter what
religion was represented. This resulted in more bewilderment, mixed with
frustration. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Eventually, the discussion fizzled. No blood was spilled. I
had learned, though, how quick Christians are to anger when their right to fill
the public square with their religious symbols is questioned.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Christian symbols and rituals saturate public life in
America. They are so much a part of the background that Americans donʼt even
notice them. This is Christian religious privilege, and it’s everywhere.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It extends from Bibles in hotel rooms to the president being
sworn in with his hand on a Bible and adding “so help me God” to the oath of
office. It’s politicians ending speeches with “and may God bless the United
States of America.” It’s ubiquitous public prayer. It’s celebrity preachers
being treated with deference in the news media. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">And, yes, it’s those tacky Christmas decorations on public
buildings.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It’s manger scenes on public property and the fury of
Christians when an organization dedicated to church-state separation, such as
the <a href="https://ffrf.org/">Freedom from Religion Foundation</a>
or <a href="https://www.au.org/">Americans United for Separation of Church and State</a>, calls for the removal of
such manger scenes. (Fury and threats of violence—how the love does pour out of
Christians when they’re celebrating the birth of their mythological Savior!)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">There has been a change since that dormitory bull session,
but in the wrong direction. Instead of the annual display of public Christmas
decorations fading away, they now include the occasional menorah as a nod to
Hanukkah. American Jews, I think, see this as acceptance and tolerance instead
of realizing that they have been recruited into helping destroy the barrier
between church and state.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">One the one hand, Hanukkah isn’t the threat to church-state
separation that Christmas is, because Judaism doesn’t have the power and
influence of Christianity. Christian churches have been the real threat to
separation, and hence to religious (and non-religious) freedom, from the
beginnings of the country. So a menorah on public property should elicit less
outrage than a manger scene. On the other hand, as I told my fellow students in
1962, any religious symbol on public property is a violation of separation. In
addition, religion itself is a potent threat—that is, deference toward
religion, reverence for the idea of it, and the elevation of religion and
religious leaders and spokesmen to a special place. You certainly see this in
popular entertainment, where the believer is the default and religion intrudes
everywhere and is treated with deference.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The culture is so pervaded by the symbols and customs of
Christianity that their religious nature has become invisible. Thus courts have
ruled that the use of Christian symbols and prayers by public officials is
merely “ceremonial deism” and can continue. That’s an absurd and pernicious doctrine,
but it flew under the radar even of those who should have reacted with outrage.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">That’s no surprise. Many who proclaim themselves atheists or
agnostics put up Christmas decorations and celebrate the holidays. “It’s no
longer a religious festival,” they say. “It’s just a custom and a family time.
And I like the pretty lights.” At least one separationist organization makes
much of celebrating the solstice every winter; they have created for their own
comfort a thinly disguised Christmas celebration without the saccharine manger
mythology.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Ah, well. Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, so
selling religious liberty for a display of pretty lights has an Old Testament
resonance.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It may be that people require ceremonies, and that’s why
public ceremonies and symbols, including religious ones, are ubiquitous. I
donʼt feel that need, so it’s hard for me to judge. Does everyone but me
require ceremonies? Almost everyone? A substantial number? A minority that has
cowed the majority into silence? Whatever the percentage, those who have that
strange hunger for ceremonies and symbols have to realize that the importance
of keeping church and state separate far transcends their need for shiny lights
and manger scenes. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Complaining about all of this is probably pointless. It’s
tilting at windmills. But sometimes, the windmills must be tilted at. Some
battles must be fought even when the likelihood of a grim outcome is known in
advance.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Oh, perhaps there really is no need for windmill tilting. Religion’s
grip on America seems to be loosening. Perhaps someday, America will become
like other developed countries, where believers are a tolerated minority. If
so, the silly lights and music will probably persist, but they really won’t be
a danger. They won’t be, as they are now, innumerable chisels working away at
the mortar that holds the bricks in the wall of separation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But we’re not in that future, are we? We can’t even be sure
that we ever will be. Here and now, the wall is in danger. Theologically tilted
courts and opportunistic politicians have been working hard to remove its
bricks. Americans who should be alarmed fall into the trap of dismissing each
removal as trivial, as a battle not worth fighting, as meaningless. Meanwhile,
the wall becomes weaker and shakier. That’s the way it is with walls, both the
physical and the metaphorical ones: Every brick must be safeguarded, every
crack must be repaired, and the vandals who would dismantle it must be kept at
bay. The vandals are doing their best to prevent religion’s decline. They’re
working as tirelessly to force theocracy upon us as they ever have. They’re
tireless, and so we must be tirelessly vigilant.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">That includes being vigilant about what may seem to be small things.
The wall is weakened brick by brick, but it’s also made higher and stronger the
same way. Moreover, the bricks that make up the wall are not the same size, but
each one is nevertheless important. (Yes, that is indeed the sound of a
metaphor being stretched extremely.) Religious indoctrination in schools is a
very big brick. Mangers on public property are smaller but nonetheless
important bricks. “Holiday”—i.e., Christmas—lights on public buildings are a
bigger brick than you may think. And the religious privilege that lets people
feel free to say that non-believers are dishonest and will cheat you—oh, that’s
a very big brick indeed, for it reduces non-believers to an inferior status, a
lower class of being. Surely the vileness of that is obvious.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">And therefore I disrupted a Nextdoor discussion—not in order
to disrupt, but in hopes of making at least some believers more aware. Possibly
I made a tiny dent in their armor of privilege. Possibly.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Also, football is a really stupid game.</p>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-24237057320792248472020-10-16T12:00:00.000-06:002020-10-16T12:00:10.924-06:00Randolph Runner<p> Just in time for the election, my new novel -- sf, satire, and anti-trump:</p><p> </p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal">Butler, warrior, moral philosopher, robot. Randolph is all
that and more.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Randolph is the prized product of Superior Domestics, a
Silicon Valley firm dedicated to producing robot servants for people who grew
up watching British period costume dramas on PBS. The company’s motto is, “All
the gracious living of Upstairs with none of the unseemly drama of Downstairs.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When the novel opens with the assassination of King Donald
II and a coup d’état, Randolph epitomizes that motto. He is calm, quiet,
supremely competent, always in the background, and never interfering. He is a mere
witness to great events. He is focused on supervising his staff and properly
running the household of General Henry Redgrave, architect of the coup and
would–be power behind the throne.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">War! Romance! Sex! Skulduggery! Artificial Intelligence! And
lots of other stuff, too. </p>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Read more here: <a href="http://www.dvorkin.com/ranrun/">http://www.dvorkin.com/ranrun/</a></span><p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-19086042884964818992020-08-26T21:17:00.003-06:002020-08-26T21:17:45.328-06:00Pondering the Vanishing of Backyard Wildlife<p class="MsoNormal">Where in the world did the animals go?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And who would have thought that we’d miss them all so?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The squirrels and rabbits, the bugs and the birds,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The gnawed–upon apples and the … animal turds.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At the base of the chain, the insects seem few.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I wouldn’t eat them, but the spiders sure do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The spiders have left, their webs all blown away.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(I’ll admit that I’m torn about having them stay.)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We’d happily watch, on a bright summer morn,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Squirrelly squirrels and bunnies new–born,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Birds screaming insults way up in the trees,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The anger of wasps and the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>buzzing of bees.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There’s a bush that bears berries way out in the back</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That squirrels and birds by the score did attack.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">They were hooked on that lovely sweet berry taste,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But this summer the berries have all gone to waste.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Our backyard’s a haven, of chemicals bare.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So why are the birds and the squirrels not there?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Is it smoke from the fires destroying the West?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(It burns in your eyes and your throat and your chest.)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Is it heat that’s relentless and air that’s so dry?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Have they all given up and just crawled off to die?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Or migrated north to a friendlier clime?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Will they come back again in some happier time?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Will we be here to greet them if that time does arrive?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Or will only our distant descendants survive</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With many mutations to keep them alive</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On an Earth that’s like Hell but where they will thrive?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But what if the animals never come back?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What if they die from this climate attack?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What if the animals die every one,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And history says that our folly has won?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Then pity the dying on a planet of death</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Dying of thirst, gasping for breath</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Joining the animals doomed by our addiction</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To fossil fuels and pesticides and ignoring the prediction</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of the scientists who warned of what likely would be</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If we didn’t stop the heating of the air and the sea.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But I’m guessing at causes; they might be benign.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The vanishing of animals might not be a sign.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Maybe all’s well, no cause for alarm</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And our many indulgences are doing no <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>harm.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If the temperature keeps rising, crank up the AC.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Douse gardens with water from the water company.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Eat your meat and your fish and your chicken by the pound.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There’s more where that came from, they’ll keep coming
round.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Because the sad truth is, when all’s said and done,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I haven’t a clue where the animals have gone.</p>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-75509584910948499792019-12-04T12:07:00.001-07:002019-12-04T12:07:08.468-07:00Servants of Spiders<p>No, not people who are servants of spiders but robotic servants made up of spiders. That’s what we need.</p><p>I was thinking about the kind of robot servants that might be coming our way in the not-too-distant future. For many uses around the house, the best shape and size would be pretty much humanoid. After all, our houses are designed for humans of average size. However, for some purposes, such as cleaning nooks and crannies and finding small objects that manage to roll under the refrigerator, as they are wont to do, small spiders would be far more efficient. Swarms of spiders would be efficient for so many other tasks, too: finding and eliminating pests, checking for damage in hidden places and repairing it, etc.</p><p>So we could have two main types of servants: humanoid and spideroid. (Is that a word? It should be.) But with technology only somewhat advanced beyond what we now have, we could combine the two for convenience. We could have swarms of robot spiders that would assemble themselves into human shapes, to the human eye indistinguishable from actual humans. For example, you could have a perfect butler serving you dinner, and if you dropped a pea and it escaped and rolled under the fridge, the butler would calmly dissolve one hand into a swarm of spiders that would retrieve the pea. Meanwhile, one of his ears would become a swarm of spiders, scurry into the kitchen, and assemble into some convenient shape to check on something on the stove.</p><p>Unfortunately, all of this is too much like scenes from various horror movies to have much appeal to consumers. </p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-54127707038378653742019-10-21T13:28:00.001-06:002019-10-21T13:28:18.777-06:00Publishing and Buttons<p align="justify">Switching to self-publishing has had an unexpected and beneficial effect on my attitude about writing.<p align="justify">When I started out, long before self-publishing was an option, I was writing for the sheer pleasure of it, for the happiness it gave me, for the delight in the act itself. I wrote what I liked, and I liked what I wrote.<p align="justify">That changed as soon as I became traditionally published. I started focusing on writing what a commercial publishing house would accept. I became almost obsessed with pushing all the right buttons. It hampered my creativity and it certainly limited the fun. Much of the time, writing wasn't fun at all. <p align="justify">After I switched to self-publishing in 2009, that near-obsession stayed with me for a while, but it started to fade, and then it evaporated entirely. In time, I stopped worrying about those buttons and reverted to writing to please myself again. It's been wonderful, liberating. This attitude isn't likely to result in bestsellers, but it does result in a happy writer.<p align="justify">And so, after all these decades and 29 books out there, I have come full circle. Once again, writing means to me being a man alone in a room happily pushing his own button.<p align="justify">So to speak.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-66453499622250980852019-09-22T22:13:00.001-06:002019-09-22T22:13:47.762-06:00The Day I Was a Whacked-Out Hippie on a Bus in California<p align="justify">Being a random memory from the Space Age.</p><p align="justify">From 1971 to 1974, I worked on the Viking Mars lander program at Martin Marietta in Denver. I was part of a small team (three men most of the time, with two to three other people added for brief periods) developing the software that would be used to determine the timing and duration of the Viking lander’s deorbit burn when it was in orbit around Mars. </p><p align="justify">The orbit would be known(ish), Mars gravity would be known(ish), the atmosphere would be somewhat known(not-very-ish), and the desired landing site would have been specified. Make some assumptions, turn on the deorbit rockets, and head down to Mars! With the assistance of a few gazillion lines of code.</p><p align="justify">Which we developed in FORTRAN on a CDC 6600. The original plan was for the software to be run on that machine during the actual mission. However, Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL, in Pasadena, California, exerted its considerable political weight and it was decided that during the mission, the software would instead be run on a Univac 1108 at JPL.</p><p align="justify">We shipped our software to Pasadena and told them to load it onto the 1108 and have at it. However, what had worked just fine on the 6600 failed miserably when transferred to the 1108.</p><p align="justify">We tracked down the problem and made the changes.</p><p align="justify">Or so we thought. JPL said it still didn’t work. (As was always their way, they made it clear that all would have been just hunky dory [or copacetic, as people in the Apollo program used to say] if the software had been written at JPL in the first place.) (Yeah, right.)</p><p align="justify">Time was getting short. Time is always getting short in the aerospace biz. A few of us were sent out to JPL to track down the bugs and run simulations and verify that all was well. Quickly.</p><p align="justify">I was out there, on the very edge of civilization, for three weeks, getting too little sleep, spending my days and much of my nights at JPL, reading printouts, writing my changes on the printout, changing punch cards, submitting card decks, waiting for new stacks of printouts, repeat. By the end of the three weeks, desperate to get it done and go home, I spent a few days without sleep, working around the clock. </p><p align="justify">Finally done with my part, I went back to the hotel like a zombie, packed, checked out, and took a bus to the airport. </p><p align="justify">This was in 1974 (or just possibly late 1973). I had long, red hair, worn in a ponytail, and a full, rather bushy red beard. I was wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. My eyes were gruesomely bloodshot and had huge bags under them. I sat in the bus swaying from side to side, falling forward, drifting into sleep, then snapping awake again. </p><p align="justify">I don’t even remember what the bus was. Some short of shuttle between hotels and the airport, I suppose. I don’t even remember getting on it. I do remember that it kept stopping to pick up tourists at hotels and once, oddly, at the Hearst Castle. </p><p align="justify">Most of the tourists seemed to be older English couples dressed formally informally. They kept turning to stare at me and then turning away again quickly when I met their eyes. Very British. I imagined them whispering to each other that they had heard that the drug problem was bad in California, and here was living proof. Just look at that poor young man, his mind destroyed by drugs. Shocking.</p><p align="justify">The rest of the story is anticlimactic. I got to the airport, got home, went back to work, got laid off once all the work was done and the company had been paid by NASA—a typical aerospace story. </p><p align="justify">But I’ve sometimes imagined myself trying to reassure those tourists that I wasn’t on drugs. My words slurred, mumbling incoherently, swaying, my red eyes open wide in earnestness, waving my hands about, I would have tried to tell them that I was working on sending stuff to Mars. And before that, you know, moon, men, men on the moon. Mars, people. Moon. </p><p align="justify">For years afterwards, they would have bored their grandchildren with tales of their trip to California and the wild-eyed, hairy hippie they saw there, his mind destroyed by drugs, ranting about Mars and the Man in the Moon. “Tragic. Probably long dead in the gutter, the poor young man. Let that be a lesson to you, children.”</p><p align="justify">Writing this reminds me of the time, years earlier, when I was in graduate school and drove down from Indiana to Mobile to visit Leonore and her family, my first time in the South, through the heat in my un-airconditioned Volkswagen. Then, too, I had a beard and wore my hair in a ponytail (ya know, grad student). I was dressed in shorts and sandals. I was so naïve. I had no idea why the locals were glaring at me. I smiled at everyone. It must have been a year or two after Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were murdered. In the parking lot of a grocery store in Mobile, a well-dressed white woman glared at me through the windshield of her expensive car and tried very hard to run me down. But that’s another story.</p><p align="justify">------------------------------------</p><p align="justify">See below for some of the nasty details. They’re not indispensable to the story, but they might be of interest to some. Keep in mind that all of this work was done using punch cards.</p><p align="justify">Yes, FORTRAN is always all caps. At least, in this household. It was THE language for scientific computing! With GOTOs, as God intended! (Not that there was a real alternative, although I did later run into mercifully short scientific programs written in COBOL, gasp.)</p><p align="justify">The CDC 6600 was a great machine for scientific computing by the standards of the time. One of its best features was its 60-bit-word architecture, meaning that we could do the job without bothering to double-precision any variables. </p><p align="justify">At a later job, I programmed on a Univac 1108 extensively and liked it, but it used a 36-bit word. The difference was important for this story. The calculations done by our software were long enough and iterative enough that too much precision was lost on the 1108 compared to the 6600. That was why the code gave erroneous results after it was transferred from Denver to JPL. After a few iterations, the values of a lot of the variables in the program were, in effect, random numbers. To fix that, we had to go through the code and convert everything to double precision. Gazillions of lines of code meant zillions of variables that had to be changed in many, many places. Inevitably, we kept missing some of them and having to go searching through the code again.. </p><p align="justify">In addition, we had used a nifty but dangerous FORTRAN thing called Block Common, also called Unlabeled Common, which was a way of transferring variable values between subroutines and functions without putting them in argument lists. It meant that many more places where variables had to be declared double precision and more opportunities for overlooking them. We finally decided that we had to break our enormous block common into numerous (jillions) of separate labeled common blocks. It was ghastly.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-25772260158486637802019-07-16T16:08:00.003-06:002019-07-16T16:08:55.200-06:00Just published: My memoir of working on the Apollo project<div class="_5pbx userContent _3576" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-testid="post_message" id="js_ha">
Just
in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, I've
published my short memoir of my time at NASA working on the Apollo
project:<span class="_3c21"> http://www.dvorkin.com/moonland/</span></div>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-49954832389849816242018-10-18T12:08:00.001-06:002018-10-18T12:08:16.133-06:00KDP Print Cover Templates–Beware of This Glitch<p align="justify">We recently finished a client’s book that’s 91 pages long. I downloaded the KDP cover template. Because those come in ten-page increments, I was given the template for a 100-page book. The template includes space for text on the spine, so as usual I put the book’s title and author’s name there.</p><p align="justify">When I submitted the book for publication, it was rejected because a book has to have at least 100 pages in order for the cover to have text on the spine. Fair enough, but KDP apparently doesn’t have an appropriate template for a book of 91-99 pages in length. Instead, you get the 100-page template with space for text on the spine, which causes an error.</p><p align="justify">So be aware of this problem. If your book is under 100 pages but the template shows a space for text on the spine, don’t put anything there.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-15792211126248510832018-09-29T14:36:00.001-06:002018-09-29T14:36:39.576-06:00Leonore’s Tribute to Her Stepmother, Willene<p>A wonderful woman whom we all miss greatly. Read Leonore’s blog post here:</p><p><a title="http://denverspanishtutor.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-tribute-to-my-dear-stepmother.html" href="http://denverspanishtutor.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-tribute-to-my-dear-stepmother.html">http://denverspanishtutor.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-tribute-to-my-dear-stepmother.html</a></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-17109836764817079112018-09-26T13:46:00.001-06:002018-09-26T13:46:43.051-06:00Did your CreateSpace book(s) get moved to someone else’s KDP account?<p align="justify">Of course that shouldn’t happen, but I just encountered a case where it did. If there’s one such case, there surely are others.</p><p align="justify">A while ago, I went through the process of transferring the print editions of all of <a href="http://dvorkin.com/dwriting.php">my books</a> and <a href="https://www.leonoredvorkin.com/">my wife’s books</a> from our CreateSpace accounts to our KDP accounts. This was before Amazon started doing anything automatically. The process went smoothly. For a few hours, the books were no longer listed on CreateSpace but hadn’t yet shown up on KDP. That was disturbing, but eventually, the books did show up where they belonged.</p><p align="justify">As part of our <a href="https://www.dldbooks.com/">self-publishing services</a>, we upload our clients’ books to both CreateSpace and KDP. I have moved some of our clients’ books from CS to KDP, also without any problems. I’ve been checking other client accounts to see if Amazon has done the move itself. </p><p align="justify">Yesterday, I checked the CS account of Client A, who had one self-published book listed there. The book was no longer listed on CS. Because of a password problem, I couldn’t check Client A’s KDP account to look for the book there, but I assumed all was well. Later, I checked the CS and KDP accounts for Client B, who also had one self-published book on both. The print edition of that book was no longer on CS, but it is now on KDP, as it should be. Amazon moved it correctly. However, Client A’s print edition, which had disappeared from CS, is also on Client B’s KDP account! Amazon moved the print edition of Client A’s book to Client B’s KDP account.</p><p align="justify">Client A will contact KDP in hopes of sorting this out. </p><p align="justify">Not only is this awful, it’s also a remarkable coincidence. Given how many self-published authors use both CS and KDP, the chances of some kind of software/database error accidentally moving one of our client’s books to another client’s account must be minuscule. Is it possible that Amazon’s software has stored cookie information from two different logons from my computer? It seems extremely unlikely, but if so, this is alarming for people who use any Amazon sites on shared computers.</p><p align="justify">I’ve been wondering how Amazon knows which KDP account to move a CS book to. It can’t be using login information. You could be using the same e-mail address to log into both CS and KDP, but not necessarily. Both sites should have your Social Security Number or other tax ID, so those could be compared. Either comparison should have avoided the error I described above. So how did this happen? And how can anyone be sure it’s not happening to many different writers? </p><p align="justify">Check all of your books on KDP carefully once the dust has settled from this move. That’s not very useful advice, but it’s all I can think of.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33824560.post-13696015864896673352018-03-03T20:54:00.001-07:002018-03-03T21:00:58.990-07:00The Aliens beneath Our Feet<div align="justify">
SETI looks outward. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence looks for signals from alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe. The odds are long and the cost is high, but the rewards for success will be great. That search must continue. However, I think we would profit from redirecting a small portion of SETI’s money and resources to a much closer and more accessible target: earthly dust. We should be looking down as well as up.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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In my short non−fiction book <a href="http://dvorkin.com/dn/">Dust Net</a>, I predicted the advent of nanoscale communication and information−gathering devices the size of dust motes, extremely powerful, and scattered across the earth. These will be developed in the fairly near future for a number of purposes, benign and not so benign. I also speculated that extremely advanced versions of such devices might already be present, deposited on Earth by alien races. </div>
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In this post, I want to expand upon the idea of those alien devices.</div>
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Let’s assume the existence of a great number of technologically advanced races within a few hundred light years of Earth. That’s a very reasonable assumption. Let’s further assume that faster−than−light travel isn’t possible; that’s very probably the case. I think that developing a technologically advanced civilization requires curiosity about the universe and how it works. That implies curiosity about the possibility of intelligent life existing elsewhere, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that those advanced races are as curious about life on other worlds as we are.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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Those advanced races want to visit other worlds, but distance makes that unfeasible. However, they have the technological ability to send out unmanned interstellar vessels at a reasonable cost—or at least a cost they’re willing to pay. What form would those vessels take?</div><div align="justify"><br>
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They could be large spacecraft filled with data−gathering sensors, recording devices, artificial intelligence computers, and communications equipment. Since no UFO sightings have been validated, we can assume that if there are such ships, they must not be both large and close, or we would have seen them.</div><div align="justify"><br></div>
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Perhaps the ships have some sort of cloaking technology, or surfaces made of advanced metamaterials, so that we can’t see them. However, we watch the skies in numerous and increasing ways, and we watch the earth from above in numerous ways. Before long, we’ll be watching the earth constantly from the moon, with increasingly powerful instruments. Before much longer, we’ll be looking in all directions from the surface of Mars. No matter how advanced the camouflage of alien ships, the chance of them being detected is already high and will keep getting higher. If they exist, they have successfully avoided detection so far, so they can’t be spending more than very brief periods of time anywhere close to the earth. Even at our current stage of detection, they would have to be operating no closer to us than Mars—or at a distance of about 50 million miles (the closest that Mars approaches Earth).</div><div align="justify"><br>
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That wouldn’t be a problem for them, in some respects. Being able to send complex unmanned probes over interstellar distances requires very highly advanced technology, perhaps advanced enough that it can collect all the data the aliens want even from 50 million miles away. Of course, this would prevent them from collecting physical samples, such as air, water, and bacteria. Even if that were acceptable to them, the data they collected would be fairly coarse. They would not be able to examine our world at a fine and detailed level. The restricted nature of their observations would be frustrating to human scientists and would surely be just as frustrating to alien ones. It would probably be unacceptable, given that they have a much better alternative.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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That alternative is what I called Dust Net.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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Human beings will create Dust Net in the near future. It will first take the form of simple, microscopic servers scattered around the world to create a communications network accessible to everyone and secure from interference by governments or malicious private interests. With time, these servers will increase in power and will be reduced to nanoscopic size. No bigger than specks of dust, these particles, these motes, will drift with the wind and float on the surface of oceans and lakes, becoming ubiquitous. Their social and political impact will be enormous even before they evolve, as they inevitably will, into instruments of surveillance and data gathering. There will be multiple separate nets, products of governments, corporations, and private groups both good and evil. Mingled among them will be the alien nets.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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As I explained in the book, networks of such motes will be able to record immense quantities of data. The advantages for alien observers are obvious. Their motes will be safe from observation or interference. Even without propulsion systems, they will eventually spread everywhere on the surface of Earth. They will gather all the information a curious alien civilization could want. </div><div align="justify"><br></div>
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We are already developing ways for swarms of autonomous drones to cooperate. The much more advanced alien motes are surely capable of cooperating in large enough numbers to, say, dissect an animal corpse for detailed analysis. With sufficient data storage capacity and sufficiently advanced recording devices, they can store a complete digital record of plants and animals, obviating the need for physical samples.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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In order for such swarm cooperation to exist, the individual motes have to communicate with each other. Perhaps they use some method of communication that we haven’t discovered, meaning that we won’t be able to detect them by eavesdropping on their communications. It’s also possible that they coordinate their actions only by watching each other, avoiding the need to pass signals. However, if they do communicate, and if they use radio or light signals, that’s something we can try to detect. In addition, the swarming behavior itself would make the motes stand out from natural dust.<br>
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The advantages of exploration of alien planets by means of such dust motes applies to all advanced alien societies, so if there are such motes on Earth from one alien civilization, there are surely similar networks of motes from other alien societies also present on Earth.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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In <i>Dust Net</i>, I speculated that some of the motes created by humans will be designed to destroy other motes. Corporations will do this as a form of industrial espionage. Governments trying to control what information their citizens have access to will try to destroy the motes that provide the access of which the governments disapprove. Eavesdropping motes will expose government secrets, so government motes will try to destroy those. Governments will try to limit observation of their territory by enemy motes, so they’ll produce motes capable of identifying and destroying motes from other countries.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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All of this exposes the aliens’ motes to danger. The aliens must assume that hostile mote networks already exist on the planets they send their motes to investigate. Perhaps the alien motes have the ability to protect themselves, but it would be better if they evaded detection entirely. Therefore, they probably look like inanimate, naturally occurring local dust motes. We could microscopically examine untold numbers of specks of dust and never pick out the alien motes hiding among them.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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How do motes from different alien cultures interact? Do they interact at all? I think it’s fair to assume that in general, alien civilizations don’t need or want to interfere with motes from other alien civilizations. If they can identify each other, they probably leave each other alone. Perhaps some of those civilizations are sufficiently pacific and socially advanced that their motes exchange information with each other. That increases the amount of observational data gathered without extra cost.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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On the other hand, there’s a good chance that some alien civilizations are located close enough to each other to interact directly, with trade or war. If it’s trade, then their mote networks on other worlds, such as ours, are probably designed in advance to cooperate with each other. But if two civilizations are at war, then their mote networks probably are, too. Their motes are here and on other worlds, not for the purpose of gathering interesting data, but in hopes of finding something—science, engineering, weapons—that will give them the edge in the war back home. Their mission therefore includes keeping the other civilization’s motes from finding that dangerous information first, so they are designed to identify and destroy each other. As a precautionary tactic, their motes might well be designed to destroy other alien motes, even ones from peaceful civilizations too distant to be a threat. I think that would be our approach if we were those aliens, and it seems reasonable to assume that warring aliens are just as unpleasant as we are when we’re at war.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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This suggests a way we could detect the alien motes: by looking for the aftermath of battles in the nanoscopic realm.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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It’s not practical for aggressive alien motes to blast the enemy with destructive rays or cannon shells, so we wouldn’t be looking for explosions or tiny bursts of radiation. Such a war is more likely to be conducted at close quarters. Attacking motes act much like predatory insects—injecting the enemy mote with destructive acids or simply tearing it to pieces.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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The dead motes should be the object of our search. Those injected with destructive fluids probably still look outwardly just like ordinary dust motes and so are not detectable. Remnants of motes that have been broken apart are a different matter. The attacking motes could take the time to disguise remnants of the enemy to look like just native dust motes, but that’s surely impractical just because of numbers. Therefore, if we looked at vast numbers of dust motes, we might be lucky enough to find some of those tiny chunks of disabled technology.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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How do the alien motes get to earth? And how do they send their data back home?</div><div align="justify"><br>
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One possible answer to both questions is that an alien civilization could produce vast numbers of such motes—say by cannibalizing entire planets to provide the materials—and sending streams of them out in all directions. Interstellar space could be filled with the devices, providing a chain of relay stations to send data back to the home planet. This is obviously excessive.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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A far better approach is for the aliens to send out large interstellar ships packed to the brim with fabricators: microscopic factories whose function is to churn out nanoscopic motes. The big ships release fabricators as they pass by stars that have planets. The fabricators drift down to the surfaces of the planets and begin creating motes using materials found onsite. Such fabricators are obvious targets for our own search. They are larger than the motes—microscopic, rather than nanoscopic. And it’s hard to disguise them as anything but what they are, because they are emitting streams of newly fabricated motes.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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How is the data returned to the aliens’ home planet? It seems highly unlikely that an individual mote can send a signal powerful enough to reach another star system. But a huge number of them working in concert can do so. We could detect that.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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Perhaps a ship passes by to pick up the signal. That way the signal can be much weaker, possibly below our ability to detect it. However, the passing ship would be detectable. As I argued at the beginning, we can dismiss that idea based on the lack of verified sightings of such ships.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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Perhaps small groups of motes, loaded with data and operating as one, can escape Earth’s gravity and be picked up by a passing ship at a great enough distance that we can’t detect it. We probably wouldn’t detect a small clump of motes leaving Earth, either.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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Detecting motes through the method they use for returning data to the home planet doesn’t seem promising. The other ways I listed above offer a much better chance of detecting the alien motes.<br>
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Should we start the search now? It’s feasible with existing technology. It will be even more feasible when Dust Net exists. That’s probably 20 years away at most, and possibly closer to 10 years. Then we can design motes whose sole job is to examine the dust around them and look for alien motes. Obviously the number of dust specks that could be scanned by using Dust Net, and the number of locations on Earth where the scanning would be done, would far exceed what we can achieve today.<br>
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Nonetheless, I don’t think we should wait even another 10 or 20 years. The odds against finding alien motes are high with current technology, but the cost would be a fraction of the current outer−directed SETI, and the rewards for actually finding alien motes would be immense.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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Unlike SETI, the discoverers won’t have to depend on information given to us by aliens, whether intentionally or as a byproduct of their detected broadcasts. With SETI, the information could be significant, or it could be fairly trivial. By contrast, alien motes will be highly advanced alien technology actually in our hands. Given the way the world now works, that alien technology will be the possession, not of the human race, but of the nation that discovered it. The nation that possesses it will leap ahead of the rest of the world in power and dominance even more than the Industrial Revolution vaulted Britain ahead of the pack centuries ago.</div><div align="justify"><br>
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This could all be fantasy. The alien motes might not exist. But we can’t ignore the possibility that they do. Even now, searching for them would be relatively cheap compared to the cost of SETI and trivial compared to the military budget. The search should begin immediately.</div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08274485227373284224noreply@blogger.com0