Deism

In a recent debate with an atheist I found myself explaining the difference between religion as an abstraction that we use to understand our world in ways which simple experimentation cannot and should not, and religion as a literal truth and map of history and the universe. I think I summed it up better than I have in the past, and I also don't think I've come out in this blog as specifically deist (though I've dropped some large hints), so let me share both with you, now:

What is a religion? What isn't?

Today, I tried to participate in a conversation where someone mistakenly asserted that atheism is a religion. Sadly, I didn't have enough time to truly engage the conversation, so let me address it here for posterity:

There are quite a few different definitions of religion, but unless you get into the really abstract sociological definitions, here are three common elements that almost everyone agrees on:

• A religion is a cultural context that...
• relates to a set of supernatural or spiritual beliefs and...
• asserts a means for connecting the two (e.g. through ritual, prayer, customs or other means)

The hard lesson of Google Reader

Google Reader logo

Google is learning some new lessons of late. Specifically, that the user base of a product doesn't map 1:1 to the impact that removing that product will have. In the case of Google Reader, the company's recent announcement that they'll be discontinuing the service in July first met with the usual round of "noooo! I use that!" from what few users the service still had after it was gutted to remove its social features and replace them with Google+.

That was probably no more or less than Google expected. But since then, there have been some interesting secondary effects:

• "Reader" has been one of the top-trending topics on Google+ since the announcement.
• New product announcements from Google are now being met with suspicion.
• Digg, a social news site, has announced that they'll build their own replacement.
• An existing competing service, Feedly, has seen over 500,000 new users in two days.

On Consciousness and Creation

James Hopwood Jeans
from Wikimedia Commons

Tonight I was browsing Google Plus and came across a post by Kevin Clift of a lecture by Richard Feynman as a video clip. The lecture itself is well worth watching. However, at about 7 minutes, 30 seconds he says, "I would use the words of Jeans ... 'The Great Architect seems to be a mathematician.'" That phrase struck me as kind of interesting, but I didn't recognize the name, so I googled for Jeans... not terribly useful. Then I googled that phrase, which lead me to the specific Jeans: James Hopwood Jeans.

Among the many fascinating things that this man said and did, I found this quote:

"I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe... In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind."

Why aren't Republicans mad as hell?

There's much to love hating about the Democratic party in the U.S., and usually I'd say just about as much to hate about the Republican party (I'm not talking about Republicans and Democrats, but the actual party bureaucracies .. if you have trouble with the idea that those are separate things, then you might want to stop reading, now). However, in recent years, the Republican party has really made a case for their entire voting base just walking away from them in disgust. No, I'm not talking about the usual complaints of the left. There's a comfortable dance that the two parties do, slinging mud at each other while maneuvering toward a known conclusion. It's not the best way to run a country, but it's what we had for many decades.

New York's man-made climate

Hurricane Sandy, 2012

credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Nothing like it had been seen in a very long time. The hurricane ripped through the eastern seaboard and washed away entire communities in New York and surrounding states. The financial mess that the nation had been through wasn't yet over and the blow came hard in the communities that it hit. It was brutal. It was 1788.

Nothing like it had been seen in a very long time. The hurricane ripped through the eastern seaboard and washed away entire communities in New York and surrounding states. The financial mess that the nation had been through wasn't yet over and the blow came hard in the communities that it hit. It was brutal. It was 1821.

Nothing like it had been seen in a very long time. The hurricane ripped through the eastern seaboard and washed away entire communities in New York and surrounding states. The financial mess that the nation had been through wasn't yet over and the blow came hard in the communities that it hit. It was brutal. It was 1938.

There are two things we know about New York weather:

1. About once a century, a really nasty hurricane will hit.
2. It's clearly precipitated by a financial crisis...

Music on Amazon

Amazon now has a kind of cool feature where you can turn your purchasing history into a sharable bookshelf. The above collection is a random selection from the music that I've purchased over the years. Pretty slick, really.