Pregnant woman shot at checkpoint

For the love of God, is it not about time to just get out? Any goodwill the coalition had is very nearly completely spent between this and the Haditha massacre. It is time to just leave these people in peace - nobody can live in a nuthouse environment like the one that has been created for them. If the terrorists don't shoot them, the soldiers will!

Time to face the facts - Saddam was a monster and a tyrant - but a reasonably competent one. These people were safer under his tyranny than they are under incompetent anarchy. At some point some things trump freedom: things like the right to just live without being shot at!

Hobbit people brainer than first thought - Breaking News - National - Breaking News

I find this a funny human conceit. We are very unprepared to believe in the skills of earlier people.

Scientists were unwilling to consider that Homo Erectus might have been basically human even by our standards until the Flores discovery forced scientists to acknowledge that Homo Erectus made rafts or boats nearly a million years ago; that discovery forced us to acknowledge that Erectus could probably talk and think in a way quite familiar to us (after all, their brains were nearly the same size as ours.) Prior to that, one scientist argued that if we encountered Erectus today, we'd probably put them in a zoo.

Some scientists thought the Ebu Gogo/Hobbit people could not possibly have made the tools they were found with - only modern humans could have made them, we were told. That was until stone tools from seven hundred thousand years earlier, flaked in the same style, were found.

Hobbit people brainer than first thought - Breaking News - National - Breaking News

It is the same kind of conceit we have about the pyramids and stonehenge. Surely bronze age and neolithic people could not have made such things - had to be aliens or Elvis. But the simple fact is, they did!

Lost in the clouds again

Last year I flew home on the longest day of the year, and watched the most amazing clouds I'd ever seen. I didn't think I'd ever see anything so beautiful again. I was wrong. Flying home from Toronto tonight, we soared through a heaven of cumulus clouds bathed in the glow of the setting sun.

Thank you God.

Yahoo Answers is a virus

Really, I think it is.

I told my daughter about YA, and now she is quite hooked on it. I always see those white and greens on the computer screen whenever I glance over. :-)

First swim of the year for the lobsterman

I went swimming for the first time this year. Since my last swim is usually in October, that'll make six months this year in which I swam. That makes me feel like I'm not just an igloo-bound Canadian. Unfortunately, I worked on a boat crib today, too, so I also have a huge bright red sunburn all the length of my back. It is quite painful.

Summer is here! Hurrah!

Cloaking device

A BBC report speculates on the feasiblity of a cloaking device.

Most people, upon hearing of such a thing, will think of the military potential of such a device, a la Star Trek. But has anyone considered the more mundane possibilities? What if you could cloak all the boxes and old furniture in your garage?

Out of the hospital

My wife is out of the hospital today. She's near the cottage, so will probably spend a day there before coming home. This whole episode was a tremendous shock to us all, but all's well that ends well. I am happy we are all still here.

"Pray for me to stay calm"

"Pray for me to stay calm," She said.

She had just waved me back into my chair. For nearly twenty four hours, she'd been struggling for every breath.

I did. I prayed every prayer I could summon in my head - the Rosary, the Divine Mercy, the 23rd Psalm. I knew I needed to stay calm, too - for her. I went out to the nurses station.

"She's getting frightened," I said, frightened myself, "As you know, for an asthmatic, that is the worst thing that can happen. Please... is there anything... a calming agent, that can be considered here?"

"The doctor will be out of the delivery room soon," is all I got for the third time.

The moment passed, though it seemed to take forever - the doctor came, saw that she needed to be in the ICU and transfered her up there. She's better. But in those few moments I prayed hard, because I could see finally all that was at stake. Everything that we were - every happiness and moment we had - was fleeting and fragile. This woman represented all my hopes and dreams. More than I ever, ever realized I knew in that moment that she is the reason I wake up in the morning with a smile, the reason I bike as fast as I can on my way home, the reason I want to go camping, make music, or even look at the stars. The two desperate runs for the Perth hospital, so much like the one of two years ago, were scary. But these frightening moments made me realize how much I love her, and how fragile love makes me. But I don't care. She's everything to me.

I still have her. K is not out of the hospital, because the doctor says, "You're in much better shape than when you came in, but its still crappy." But she remains in my life. This alone makes my heart burst with a hundred songs.

"I know dear"

Shortly before my grandmother died, I had a conversation with her. She had had a bit of a stroke, and had started to recover. We got to the deep philosophical topics. I do not remember exactly how it went, but I vaguely remember it like this.

"People don't need to live forever," She said, "And I have had a good and long life."

"I know, but I love you." I might have replied.

"I know, dear." And that's all she said on it.

Two weeks later, at the start of December, she had another stroke, and she lost the ability to speak or respond. My grandmother had been more than a grandmother to me, but a dear friend.

And I prayed. "Lord, I know my grandmother has had a long life, and she has earned her rest. I know I saw her this summer, but... please, if there's any way... can I see her one last time? If there's any way at all... just one last time?"

Two days later, on Thursday morning, on my desk was an envelope, from across the country. I opened it. Inside was a card from my grandmother - a Christmas card, even though we were just beginning December. Inside it read, "I wish I were with you this year, love... Nanny."

Something fell out, and I picked it up. It was a small one by one photograph, taken at her ninetieth birthday that summer, when we went out the west coast for her party. It was probably the last picture taken of her.

My prayer had been answered - not with a great thundering miracle, not with the red sea parted, not with a miracle cure for my grandmother. It was answered with the gentle love each and every one of us has access to - the love of those who love us, and the love of a God that permeates all that love.

People who doubt in him demand that God show His love on the large scale - prove it to us by stopping the wars we wage, or preventing the effluent we pour out from reaching our rivers. Ultimately, that is too impersonal, and God would prove nothing by interfering in our actions. God works in the grand issues far more intimately. Did God stop slavery? No, good and right thinking people eventually did. But while there was slavery, for every heart-harded plantation owner that beat his slaves, there is today, even still, an African American spiritual speaking the language of Moses. Who outlasted who?

There are atheists who know God better and more intimately than the religious, and there are believers who shine like the sun. I have met them, known them, and loved them.

I can only speak for me. In a moment of quiet longing for something that seemed out of reach, I asked for something that I did not think was there to be asked for. My grandmother and my God reached out, took me by the heart, and simply said, "I know, dear."

Two Splits Between Human and Chimp Lines Suggested - New York Times

This explains a lot concerning my recent focus on anthropology... and my rather strange craving for bananas.

Two Splits Between Human and Chimp Lines Suggested - New York Times

Symmetry and Symbols

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth... (Genesis 1:1)

Platonic reasoning is not the only kind of knowledge and learning we cling to. Literature and art has always resorted to a different kind of message transmission - the carefully echoed symbol. Look at the use of "rosebud" in Citizen Kane, the way Brutus is betrayed just as Caesar is betrayed in Julius Caesar, and, turning back to film, the way the monolith keeps reappearing to tie up all the narrative threads in 2001: A Space Oddysey.

This is what our great religious texts do as well. They echo something we have inside by echoing their own internal themes. Wandering about the wilderness resulted in Abraham becoming the patriarch of Canaan. Wandering about the wilderness turned twelve tribes into the great nation that settled in Canaan. Moses would not live to enter Israel, only Joshua would. David would not live to build the temple, Solomon would. Hannah proclaims, "My heart exults in the Lord," and the virgin Mary exclaims, "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord."

By seeming to speak with one voice, the scriptures gain the authority of having personality - of seeming like a cohesive and singular expression of a great mystery. We have only to read to learn more of this mystery, but like the pages of a person, the pages of this book reveal more each time we read...

Symbols of an Early Age - III

Believing in God (in the way human beings would come to as civlization approached its classical apex) is not a product of the primitive mind. It is a product solely of the conceptual mind, the mind that uniquely developed in the most modern form of humankind. To be fair, atheism - or atavistic conceptions like reincarnation - are also products of the conceptual mind.

The reasoning that - perhaps not too consciously - lead human beings to believe in God are Thomas Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God in Summa Theologicae. He didn't so much discover them as become the first person to put them succinctly. Using St. Paul's words from the Book of Acts, "The invisible things of God are understood by the things that are made", Aquinas goes on to tell us that the things that we can see do have the ability to help us formulate an idea about the things we can't.

He writes:

We find that some things can either exist or not exist, for we find them springing up and then disappearing, thus sometimes existing and sometimes not. It is impossible, however, that everything should be such, for what can possibly not exist does not do so at some time. If it is possible for every particular thing not to exist, there must have been a time when nothing at all existed. If this were true, however, then nothing would exist now, for something that does not exist can begin to do so only through something that already exists. If, therefore, there had been a time when nothing existed, then nothing could ever have begun to exist, and thus there would be nothing now, which is clearly false. Therefore all beings cannot be merely possible. There must be one being which is necessary. Any necessary being, however, either has or does not have something else as the cause of its necessity. If the former, then there cannot be an infinite series of such causes, any more than there can be an infinite series of efficient causes, as we have seen. Thus we must to posit the existence of something which is necessary and owes its necessity to no cause outside itself. That is what everyone calls "God."

This is the basic reason people began to believe in God (or in gods, or other divine concepts) although he is the first person to put it as eloquently. People reasoned at some point that, because things exist, utter non-existence can never have been the case. Since the world shows signs of aging - rocks that crumble, mountains that round instead of peak - the world is not eternal. How could it have been made, then, in the scope of that which is eternal? Just like the anthropic principles, God is an attempt to solve this problem. Theology is not strictly reason of course; but nor is it strictly the product of irrationality either.

Symmetry - another characteristic of the symbolic mind - is perhaps the distinguishing facet of the theological sciences.... but I guess I'll get into that next post....

globeandmail.com : Moose, not men, blamed for mammoth extinction

"I can't believe you totaled a mammoth."

"Well that mountain shouldn't have gotten in the way, eh?"

globeandmail.com : Moose, not men, blamed for mammoth extinction

Symbols in an early age - II

The Neanderthals lived in the world, quite directly. It is unlikely that they were less intelligent than we are. On the contrary, there are some signs of elaborate culture. For instance, they buried their dead. Thay made flutes out of bone. Some seem to have had some sort of coming of age ritual where they had to wrestle a bear.

But as I said, they lived in the world directly. As Sheeve notes, when a Neanderthal saw the power of the river in the spring, they likely did not feel compelled to name the river god and go carve a talisman of it - they looked at the river and saw and felt the river god.

Human religious inclinations evolved slowly from such things. There are traces of it even when Genesis is set down. A careful read of Genesis lets you see that even those who set it down had difficulty conceiving of God as making something from nothing, which is the way we might think of it today.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.

It is as if the instruments that set down Genesis felt compelled to grant God the raw materials with which to make the world as we know it - not quite nothing, but the "formless wasteland."

It isn't hard to understand why they would conceive it that way: things that a human being causes to exist come into being by being shaped into that form from something else. People had asked the question, how did the world come to be? And their ability to think symbolically allowed them to wonder if a being or beings on a scale as different from us as we are from ants could somehow be responsible.

Over time, the Jewish people would comprehend God to be less and less an anthropomorphism as an all powerful being, and more and more another kind of being altogether. This becomes most apparent in the Book of Job, one of the most intelligent attempts to make God's inscrutability in the face of disaster seem almost reasonable.

But all of this is to say that our coming to believe in God (or gods) is not a product of our primitive mind. Spirituality in the form of awe and wonder may have germinated earlier in human history. But a refined understanding of what leads us to spirituality is the very recent development of our ability to be symbolic.

The same mental powers that permit Stephen hawking to turn over formulas in his mind that explain a time he has never visited are at work in theology. But they approach it from a different angle....

To be concluded...

Symbols in an early age

I have written before about Temple Grandin, an autistic animal behaviour expert who has used her condition to help explain the mental landscape of animals. She has noted how regular people can only with difficulty see the world around them – we do see the world, of course, but primarily through the prism of our expectations, our abstract ideas about the condition of our world – our internal mental world view. Animals see the world directly, without interference from any preconceptions they might develop about their environment. They can be put ill at ease by changes we manage mentally with ease. That is why your cat or dog can be put ill at ease by some big new piece of furniture in your living room until they have sniffed and inspected every corner of it.

It is hard to know when this change in the mental landscape of human beings took place. A veritable explosion of human culture took place in the Upper Paleolithic – people had been making efficient stone tools forever, but suddenly they were making physically beautiful and artistic tools out of bone, and they made needles for sewing and harpoon heads designed to lock into a fish as it struggled – tools that require great mental conceptualization in advance as they are designed. We began to paint vignettes of horses, ibex, mammoth and deer on the walls. The animals being painted on the wall were not simply a reflection of what we hunted, since the mix of creatures on the wall is a different blend than that evidenced by the butchered remains at our campsites.

Anthropologists long speculated that the sudden difference was language. But all the latest evidence cannot support that conclusion. The Broca's brain area that handles language had begun to develop millions of years before. The legends of Flores (where the Homo Floriensis skeletons were found) talk about a people of small stature who murmured to one another and who could mimic the speech of the local villagers. And Neanderthals are now known to have possessed a hyoid bone identical to that of modern humans, which combined with their advanced Broca's brain and sophisticated hunting, makes them a good candidate for advanced language abilities.

In “The Neanderthal Enigma”, James Shreeve notices that some of the unusual things you find about the earliest developments of the Upper Paleolithic is that it appears humans began to gather in larger groups. One particular site where mammoth bones washed up (mammoth bones made excellent construction materials) boasted tools made of rocks from dozens of kilometers away. This is interesting, because it is a way in which we differ from our closest cousins – like them we cling to small family groups, but occasionally expand our circle to a large extended group we identify with.

This, he supposes, is where symbolic thinking may in some measure come from; in a small social group, a person does not have to have many aspects – but in a larger group with social ritual, a person needs to be able to present different fronts, for example “I am an artist,” “I am a healer,” “I am a mother,” or “I am a hunter.” This is not a deception – my readers will know of several masks that each and every one of us wear – and though each is a near complete disguise, neither are they false guises: I am a musician, I am a son, I am a father, I am a grandfather, I am a professional, and I am a worshiper. I truly am each of these things, although I am not alike in every way in each of these roles.

Symbolic meaning in our self-conception lead to symbolic meaning in the world around us. The same sky could be threatening, beautiful, or mean practical things regarding the hunt or the campsite. These interpretations would develop into not just a way of examining reality, they became our reality.

How to tie this into my cosmological musings? Stay tuned...

I seem to have a good campfire discussion going on

This is a most excellent development! I've been reading 'The Neanderthal Enigma' by James Sheeve. It is an ambitious book that brings into the usual examination of the creative explosion of the Upper Paleolithic a surprising discovery of bone harpoons from middle stone age Africa, and tries to offer an explanation of us.

Can anthropology add insight to the questions of cosmology? It is possible, I think, and we'll see. Don't have time to blog directly on it now.. I'm basically posting right now to remind myself to do so later. :-)

Eventful Saturday

My parents never got to see the baby. My Dad took ill and we had to get him to the hospital. By the time he got out, it was too late to go see her.

We'll try again today.

To my "Big bang" commenter

First of all, thanks for asking the tough questions. Discussing philosophy is a passion for me, and I rarely get the chance. (If anyone else wishes to read what my anonymous commenter wrote, which I am responding to by means of post just because of the interesting ideas raised, see THIS.)

Now as to the specific conceptions you expressed, the most interesting and telling is your resort to the word 'magic.' You've certainly got a curious understanding of what religious people consider creation (such as it is) to be. Why would you use such a loaded term as "magic"? Would the clockwinder of the deist conception be a "magician", too? I'm sure even you can see the silliness of that proposition, so why should the more involved God of the specifically religious have to be a "magician"? How does that follow?

The Big Bang IS troubling, and that's always been acknowledged. When I first read about the colliding branes theory that has the universe stretched out on a ten dimensional superstring sheet right next to another universe, it was in a Discover article uncomfortably noting that Pope Pius quickly endorsed the Big Bang in the fifties. Turok and Steinhardt, who conceived the colliding brane theorem, will certainly not be the last scientists to confront the reality that the Big Bang's universal origin troubles them, as this latest theory suggests.

As to the Big Bang lacking evidence for a deity, I am afraid that is somewhat overclaimed. The universe of limited scope that modern cosmology offers us does offer the teleological problem - why are the universal constants peculiarly well designed for life to emerge? This isn't a small problem - the odds on the universe coming into being in such a way as to produce life are really, REALLY long - according to Paul Davies in "Many Worlds", the odds are "one followed by a thousand billion billion billion zeros, at least."

Such impossibly long odds really only leave a handful of possiblities.

1. The Weak Anthropic Principle, that there is an infinite multiverse and we happen to just be in the one universe that statistically would have to fall into that rare range of values. Of course this is just as fantastical and unfalsifiable as God.

2. The Strong Anthropic Principle, which suggests the universe is self-realizing - can only exist because life within it can emerge and then perceive it. I'd call this almost the "Buddhist cosmology."

3. The teleological solution, or what might be called the "ultimate anthropic principle." The universe exists, in spite of its long odds and finite origin, because it was specifically intended to exist. Since time itself is a property of the universe and does not predate it, (which St. Augustine conceived before modern cosmology) this does not bring the problem many suppose it to of an uncreated creator requiring an origin, for a non-temporal being would be outside concepts such as 'origin.'

Since steady state theories do not require confronting this problem, or the fantastical mental gymnastics of the anthropic principles, the emergence of a new steady state theory of any plausiblity always sees some popularity. If I were still an atheist, I'd certainly favour them and seek them out...

My parents are here!

They are staying with us this weekend. They've come to see the baby! I have to remember to charge the camera batteries. I always forget, and then only find I'm able to take two or three pictures. (I'm afraid of shortchanging the photographic record of our lives.)

Last night, my mother kept filling my wine glass, and I ended up having about three glasses. I never drink, really, other than when we have company sometimes, so it had a strong effect on me. Fortunately, the only effect wine has on me is to make me very sleepy. I went to bed hours earlier than usual, and spent two or three hours in bed this morning just lying there - I'd already slept a full night...

Oh yeah... that praise night

I haven't blogged yet about Tuesday's Praise and Worship night that I helped organize. The reason for that is that it went completely without a hitch! That makes me happy, believe me, but without a narrative of the unexpected, it did not leave me with a lot to write about. There were many moved souls in that sanctuary, but out of respect for the privacy of everyone there, that is as much as I would want to say.

In no way, do I complain about having too little to write about, though. It is good for things to go smoothly!

Latest attempt to impeach the Big Bang

[Grammatical and brain-less errors corrected at 3:56EST]

A number of physicists have been decidedly unhappy with the Big Bang theorem that emerged from the relativistic discoveries of the early twentieth century. Atheism, in the nineteenth century, was in something of a heyday. It was not necessary, as a scientist, to believe in God as eternal. It was sufficient for the universe to be eternal.

The one problem with this theory: the universe wasn't eternal, according to the observations made by Hubble and the discoveries made by Einstein. It had originated, in a very specific place and time.

Steady state theory persisted for a while, though. The Big Bang had some frighteningly theistic implications. Steady State finally died out in the sixties when it was discovered that the ambient radiation that makes up snow on your television is in part a broadcast of the big bang's echoes. In recent years, this background radiation has even been mapped, such that scientists can even tell what the universe looked like when it was 300,000 old.

Scientists troubled by the idea that the universe might originate in some way, or that the teleological problem might have as a solution a divine source, have constructed all kinds of compensatory devices: the anthropic principle, for instance.

But also some attempted revivals of the steady state theory, such as the Colliding Brane theory. This theory lost some ground when a South Pole radio telescope showed that the inflationary model proposed by the Big Bang (which the Brane theory disputed somewhat) was accurate.

Troubled by the implications of the anthropic principle, the idea that the universe is curiously just ideal for life, a couple of scientists have taken another swing at the Big Bang.

Guardian Unlimited | Science | One Big Bang, or were there many?

But the big bang has some life left in it. Hawking's done the math, as he outlined in his "A Brief History of Time", to show that time itself plausibly has an origin. So once again another unfalsifiable theory comes along, relying on an unprovable preexisting heat dissipated universe completely destroyed by recreation (conveniently wiping away all the evidence for their theory at the same time.)

No, the Big Bang has survived many challenges and will surely survive this one.

Justice

There is nothing more powerful than a judge with an eloquent sense of the apropos. The headlines have been about what Moussaoui said about "winning" vs. America, but it was actually this judge who had the last word.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12615601/

“Mr. Moussaoui, you came here to be a martyr in a great big bang of glory,” she said, “but to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper.”

At that point, Moussaoui tried again to interrupt her, but she raised her voice and spoke over him.

“You will never get a chance to speak again and that’s an appropriate ending.”

Breakdown

I was on my way to the last practice for the praise night, biking down Prince of Wales. I had biked down from Hunt Club, and I was just coming up on the Experimental Farm. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I was in my shirt sleeves and my dress pants.

Literally with a song in my heart, I peddled away until... my foot locked. What's going on? The chain, stupid chain.

I pulled over on the side of the road. I tugged and tugged with one hand, hoping to spare the other hand from the motor oil I'd poured onto the chain this weekend. I tugged and tugged. I got my other hand in there... in the meantime, my tan pants began to have long dark grease streaks. Cyclist after cyclist passed by me, ignoring me despite my more than obvious distress. A woman walked by me - nervous - because broken down bikes tended to by strange men have a history of being a very dangerous thing in this city. I didn't say anything, knowing how any woman in this city would feel. But I did resent that nobody was helping me.

After twenty minutes of tugging on this chain, with no results and the time for the practice rapidly approaching, I fell on the chassis sobbing, begging God to help me - it sounds stupid I know, really. But it had already been a horrendous day.

So I got smarter. I started working the chain back and forth, around the bolt surface where it was caught, twisting it under and around. I worked it free, but by this time I was a black and greasy mess. But I was free. I grabbed handfuls of grass from beside the Experimental Farm fence and wiped as much of the grease off my hands as I could, then I wiped all the oil off the frame.

I cycled down to Dow's Lake, pulled over beside the water, and reached down into the seaweed, pulling up as much gritty weed and dirt as I could, and doing my best to clean my hands.

I got to the church on time. One of the other singers had had a bad day, and she said she came because this was her chance to make it a good day. I knew how she felt.

We sang our lungs out, giving up to God our thanks for a few minutes away from the weird curves life throws us.

First babysitter

For the very first time since the baby was born, my daughter left her sight. She went out with my wife to go shopping at the Michael's at the South Keys mall on Saturday.

Guess who got to babysit? Yep - moi.

As she was leaving, I was staring at the baby. My daughter said, "You don't have to watch her the whole time, Dad."

Bemused, I turned around with an arched eyebrow and told her, "I have... done this before... my dear. Babies aren't new for me, like with you."

"He's gazing," my wife added. "Not watching."