Tastons

We just came back from a local coffeeshop, The Rosemary Cafe, where we shared a yummy omelette -- sort of a preliminary birthday celebration for me.

The omelette was full of carbs and cholesterol and probably salt. Also taste. Lots and lots of taste. In other words, it was full of taste particles, or tastons.

Tastons are mostly found in fat and carbs and salt, etc. That's why food that's good for you is so low in tastons.

The production of healthy food involves the removal of tastons. Outside the factories where tasty food is converted to healthy food, giant piles of tastons are to be found. The factories make extra money by selling those tastons to the producers of junk food.

And that's why it's so hard to be healthy.

The Problem with Biometric Login

I'm intrigued by the new ideas for biometric Web site logins that avoid using usernames and passwords. The idea I was reading about most recently would use the pattern of the user's heartbeat.

Biometric login is almost certainly coming, but it presents a problem.

Our editing/self-publishing business includes my formatting the client's edited files for print, converting them to e-book (ePub and MOBI), and uploading those files, plus the cover, to certain online sites. Which means that I have to log in to those sites as the client -- i.e., by using the client's username and password. That works now, but what happens if all those sites convert to biometric login?

The problem is much larger than our business. Many of our clients are blind, and they rely on sighted helpers to conduct a lot of their online business for them. They're okay with giving their login information to trusted sighted people. Biometrics will be a problem there.

In time, many more Web sites will be much more accessible to the blind or vision-impaired, but I doubt if they all will ever be. Even now, because I've become much more sensitive to this problem, I'm shocked at how inaccessible most major Web sites are.

But even if they all become accessible, or there's a cure for blindness -- bionic eyes, maybe -- there will always be people who want or need to have others access online sites for them by logging in as them. How will biometric login deal with this?

I live in the American heartland, and you probably do, too

Unless you live in another country, but in that case, the odds are that you live in that country’s heartland. If that statement strikes you as odd, it’s probably because of the way the word heartland is deliberately misused.

On the surface, the word might seem to refer simply to a country’s geographical interior, but in America it has layers of meaning far beyond that. In America, the use of heartland escalates during election season. I say “escalates” rather than “increases” because the word is used as a weapon. It’s also a dog whistle and a push on a button, and it’s effective in both regards. The heartland is understood to mean America with the evil, degenerate coasts removed. The East and West Coasts, at any rate; the Gulf Coast is increasingly iffy. The heartland also excludes inland cities that are dominated by the same evil degenerates. Those are political liberals of all kinds, racial and ethnic minorities, and academics. Because of the latter, university towns are also not part of the heartland. Gulf Coast cities such as Houston and New Orleans are also excluded from the heartland.

What’s left is taken to represent the real America. The so−called heartland’s racial and ethnic makeup, its religiosity, social attitudes, presumed disdain for learning, even its preferences in music, sports, and movies—all of these are what the Founding Fathers intended America to be. Everything not part of the heartland is an aberration.

Of course, this is absurd in terms of both numbers and history.

By 2010, the United States had reached an urbanization level of 81%, and that number is still increasing. Even the South, the least urbanized section of the country, is 76% urbanized. Worldwide, the percentage of the population living in urban areas is almost 55%. That number is growing steadily. It will be two−thirds by 2030. By mid−century, almost two−thirds (64%) of the population of the developing world will be urbanized; in the developed world, the number will be 86%. The worldwide average will be 70%. Nearly all future population growth worldwide will occur in urbanized areas.

The word civilization derives ultimately from the Latin word civitas, meaning city. That’s not coincidence. Cities are the source of civilization and its driving engine. How do we discover an ancient civilization whose existence was previously unknown? We find signs of its cities. Cities have always been the home of culture, learning, science, technology, innovation, art, and liberation from social and religious shackles. From the ancient coastal cities of the Philistines to Rome to London to New York to Los Angeles, their lure is irresistible. “Come to us,” they say to the countryside, “and give your mind and soul free rein.”

Fewer than a fifth of Americans live in that countryside, and that percentage is shrinking. Their world is dying. Jobs are disappearing, their young are leaving for the jobs and lifestyle opportunities of the cities, and even their life expectancy is dropping. (They do produce much of our food, but even that is under the control of giant corporations with headquarters in major cities.) They resent the cities and believe comforting myths about their moral superiority to decadent urbanites—attitudes that politicians are quick to appeal to—but the world ignores them and leaves them ever further behind.

Occasionally, years later, one of those young people returns to the home town to retire. Nostalgia, cheap housing, aged family members who need help—there are numerous reasons for the move. For a time, they may well feel that they’ve finally come home again. That probably doesn’t last for long. It’s more likely that they’ll feel a powerful need to keep in touch with the city life they left. The Internet, cable television, and the Interstate Highway system give them access to that previous life. They haven’t really immured themselves again in the old home town—which is no longer the town they remember and perhaps never was. The town has changed; they’ve changed even more.

Politicians will keep using the image of the heartland as a rhetorical device to appeal to voters in non−urban, non−university−town America. They will pretend to be just like those voters. They will continue to address crowds while wearing painfully new blue jeans. They’ll arrive at rallies in rented pickup trucks. In time, those politicians will decrease in number and importance along with their constituency.

Cities create and control our culture, our wealth, our lifestyles—in America, everything but our politics. Even that will change. The disproportionate political influence of non−urban voters is due to voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the absurd Electoral College. The process might be slow and painful, but in time, urban population growth and demographic changes will finally eliminate even those injustices and aberrations. Meanwhile, the rest of the country, the supposed heartland, contributes little to American civilization and less every year.

The non−urban population is increasingly irrelevant and properly ignored. In what sense can this small and dwindling population be called the heartland? Clearly, the true heart of America beats in its cities. Cities are the heartland of America and increasingly of the world.

God Must Exist Because Nature Is So Gosh Darn Wonderful

I came across a blog post in which the writer gushes about the beauty of the world and its profound effect on her. She concludes that it must be hard work to be an atheist because atheists have to actively deny the god whose existence is revealed by all of this gosh-darned wonderfulness. This isn’t a new argument. Psalm 19 says it this way: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” The blog post, however, tried to be very down to earth, focusing on insects and plants and the loveliness of the writer’s immediate surroundings. Above all, the piece lauded the writer’s emotional reaction to all of that as proof of God’s existence.

(The argument that the universe is a such a complex, remarkable machine that it could only have been designed by a gigantic intelligence—i.e., God—is known as the Argument from Design. I think we should call this minimized and highly subjective and emotional version of that argument the Argument from Gosh Darn Wonderfulness.)

It should go without saying that your emotional reaction to the universe is not data about the universe. It’s not a measurement of what’s outside you. It doesn’t tell us anything about the nature of the universe; it only tells us something about you. This should go without saying, but apparently it does need to be said. Unfortunately, emotional reactions are commonly regarded as a meaningful way to measure reality. The deliberate confusion of subjective impressions and objective data is the basis of bestselling books, not to mention successful political campaigns and religions with hundreds of millions of adherents.

So let’s pretend that your emotional reaction to the beauty of nature really does point to the existence of something powerful and supernatural behind the material reality surrounding you. That’s not a new idea, either. Primitive peoples have been imbuing nature with spirits of all sorts for ages. Perhaps that began even before our ancestors were recognizably human. Why do you conclude that the supernatural power you think you sense is the god you learned about as a child and not one of those spirits your primitive ancestors believed in? Perhaps you’re sensing the presence of the ancient Greek gods, or gods more ancient than those, or other supernatural beings none of our ancestors knew about. The possibilities are not limited to the god you were taught to believe in. Rather, the possibilities are literally limitless; the human imagination, as manifested in the creation of a multitude of religions, has only scratched the surface of supernatural silliness. Make up your own gods! They will serve to explain that feeling of something more than the material universe just as well as the single god the Jews, Christians, and Moslems worship.

But let’s pretend that the magical something behind reality can only be the god you’ve been indoctrinated to believe in. The pagan gods and primitive animism are foolish, and only your monotheistic god makes sense (because we’re pretending, after all).

Let’s look at this beautiful world that fills you with an awareness of a wonderful, astonishing, beautiful intelligence behind it. This lovely world is filled with fluffy clouds and chirping birds and hyperactive squirrels and placid, chewing rabbits—I mean, bunnies—and rustling leaves and dappled shade and butterflies and a blue sky above. Oooh! It’s like a Disney cartoon!

Am I being flip? No, I’m being snide. Do you think this represents only a superficial parody of the theist’s view of the gosh-darned wonderfulness of nature? No. It’s the theist’s view that’s superficial and silly. Look beneath the surface of the cartoon, and you see a horror show.

Those playful squirrels eat baby birds alive when they get the chance. The cute bunnies are likely to be torn to pieces by cats, dogs, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and hawks. Cats are killed by dogs, dogs by coyotes, and on an on. And that’s just at the level visible to the human eye. At a small level, the same is happening in the insect world. Beneath that, the same is true in the microscopic world. Nature red in tooth and claw, indeed. Behind the cartoon lies a constant struggle to eat but not get eaten. Horrible, agonizing death surrounds you.

The god that could create this and allow it to continue would be a monster. The cartoon version of reality may fill you with spiritual feelings. The reality behind it makes me glad that I don’t believe in—let alone worship—your evil god.

But let’s look up. Never mind the awfulness below. Instead, consider the beauty of the heavens. Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said, “I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.” I suspect that quote is apocryphal, but let’s assume it’s genuine.

Look up on a dark, clear night, and what do you see? Wonder, unless you’re dead inside. Indeed, the universe is far more beautiful and wonderful and amazing than we can see with our human eyes. Astronomy is constantly revealing new astonishments. Perhaps the wonder of all of this makes you praise God. It makes me praise the science and the scientists that reveal it to us.

If this astounding universe was created by a supernatural being of immense power and intelligence, then he put unbridgeable distances between civilizations. We are almost certain that other civilizations exist across the universe, many of them far more advanced than ours. What beautiful thoughts, enlightenment, art, and science have they produced? We’ll almost certainly never know. If God existed, he would be a cosmic father who produces innumerable beautiful, loving children and then locks each one of them away in a soundproofed room.

And more than that. The beautiful stars have a finite lifetime, and therefore every civilization in the universe is doomed to destruction. Not only will the wonders each civilization produces never be communicated to the rest of the universe; at some point, those wonders themselves will be destroyed and cease to exist entirely.

The blog post I referred to in the beginning said that, faced with such beauty, it must be hard to be an atheist. It requires effort to deny the immense and beautiful mind behind the beauties of nature. In a sense, it’s true that atheism involves effort. The atheist understands that nature is mindless and that we make our own goodness and beauty. There is no invisible daddy in the sky directing everything and rewarding and punishing us. Being a grownup is demanding, and we accept that role.

It takes an effort to be a theist, too. It requires deliberate blindness to revere a being who would be a monster if he existed. It requires remarkable mental gymnastics to cope with the contradictions and logical absurdities inherent in that belief. And it requires looking only at the surface of the world, and only at part of that surface, so that you can continue to believe that nature is just so gosh darn wonderful.