a printing house in hell

moksha

2008-07-21T13:30:00.007-05:00

After two weeks of total reclusion, I've finally finished the project I was working on. It's probably the worst paper I've ever written, but it's done, and I'm (sort of) happy. The flip side is that I've inverted my sleep schedule, broken my body down to the point of near-sickness (and it takes a lot to get me sick), and had almost no interaction with the outside world.

After reading hundreds of pages and typing thousands upon thousands of words, I'm understandably not so keen on writing anything substantial here right now. Since I seem to love numbered lists lately, I'll do one of those instead:

1. Getting out to see The Dark Knight on Saturday was the first substantial exposure to other human beings that I'd had in a long time. This might have contributed to my perception of the movie itself -- or maybe it was the absurdly loud sound? (And obviously I'm not against big explosions and all, but when it's been amplified so much that there's audible clipping and distortion, I think it's probably a bit too much.) At any rate, it was a great movie, and Heath Ledger won an Oscar seven months before the ceremony. I'm waiting for the director's cut, which pretty obviously exists, judging by all the absurd editing (which still only managed to shrink the whole thing down to two and a half hours).

2. My parents have left town. As is usually the case when they leave town, my diet is reduced to a strict daily regimen of steak, salad, and bread, with shepherd's pie and pasta on nights when I have time to cook. Cooking utensils are used in a way that absolutely maximises efficiency, taking the cleaning process into account. Copious amounts of cream, salt, and butter are used where applicable, and sometimes where they aren't. I no longer have to sit properly when I eat.

3. Since I won't be playing the guitar outside of my room anymore, I have no need for an amp with a big cab and 12" speaker. In light of this, I'm thinking of selling the Epi, getting one of these, and pocketing the difference. If I do get it, I will resist the urge to tear it apart (although I'll swap tubes).

4. I actually really do appreciate pop music, just not today's pop music. And that's not because I'm trying to be unique or counter-cultural or postmodern or postpostmodern or postpostpostmodern or postpostpostpostmodern; it's because today's pop music sucks. Anyway, I'm really into the Stones right now.

5. For what it's worth, all the bands I listen to are all the top-selling musical acts of all time. So really, I'm not going against pop or the mainstream at all. In fact, I'm as pop/mainstream as it gets.

6. There is no 6.

7. I'm excited about next year. My courses all seem really fun, and I'll be doing a ton of things outside of class at the university too. I know most people find the academy boring, but I love it here.

8. Now that this paper is done, I have more books to read and another, longer paper to write. Guess I should get started.

an apology

2008-07-07T12:21:00.006-05:00

I tend to be headstrong about things. When I form an opinion that I really believe in, I commit myself fully to it. Most of you know this -- there was a fiasco some months back that was largely caused by a particularly contentious opinion of mine.

I apologise for this tendency that I have, because I know it can cause tensions and conflict. I don't think I can help feeling strongly about things (I'm not sure that I should), but I do think I should be doing a better job of filtering those convictions or emotions out of the way I behave. I guess there's a balance that needs to be maintained between indulging my own convictions or emotions and hurting or conflicting with others, even when that balance compromises some truth that I hold to. I'll admit that I don't have an easy time saying this, because Unadulterated Truth is an ideal that I base my understanding of the world on, but I'm starting to think that there are times when even the truth isn't worth it. I think Confucius had something to say about this once.

At any rate, I'm sorry for the hurt I've caused by being so overbearingly assertive. It's something I'm trying to work on.

fear me, --

2008-07-05T20:40:00.022-05:00

-- for I am a Liberal Protestant™; for my faith is based on the Lies of Humanity and not on the Truth of God; for I indulge in vile and idolatrous rites of culture-worship; for I spend money that I should be tithing on indie trends and starving children in Africa; for I have never heard of Regent College or Charles Spurgeon; for I am POSTMODERN; for I associate with Non-Believers; for I listen to Radiohead and snort disdainfully at any mention of "Contemporary Christian Music"; for I hate Conservative Protestantism™; for I am emerging, or am possibly emergent, or perhaps, alternatively, I am emerged; for I invoke the name of Rob Bell (occasionally in vain); and for I speak and write (though not here) with contractions, slang, and profanity.
What a pile of skubala!
I am your worst nightmare, and I am coming for your intellectually underdeveloped and impressionable youth. Be very afraid.

more on love

2008-07-03T10:50:00.000-05:00

Love has a reality beyond the personal or subjective, and by this I mean to say that love isn't just to do with one person's particular experience. Love isn't just a name for an emotion or an action or a type of relationship that we have with someone else. Of course, love encompasses all of these things, but it's also something more, since all of these things are limited to a single frame of reference: if love is an emotion, then it's felt by the lover, and if it's an action then it's enacted by the lover, and if it's a category of experience then it's created and reinforced by the lover. This sort of a definition of love is necessarily one-sided and non-reciprocal, delineating strict roles of "lover" and "loved", so that if we were to describe love between two people we would, in fact, have to posit the existence of two distinct loves. While an understanding like this might seem to make sense when love really is one-sided, I don't think it's the whole picture.

Love is a union, in that it takes two distinct parts and creates from them a single, unified whole. This kind of a union doesn't favour one perspective over the other, but rather elevates both perspectives to the point of recognition of the wholeness of love. In this and other senses, love is literally more than the sum of its parts, and the lovers become capable of so much more when this experience of love becomes a reality for them. There can, for example, be a mutual awareness both of self-needs and of other-needs, as the object of love becomes neither "me" nor "you" but instead "us". This love, by virtue of its all-encompassing nature, creates a context for reciprocity and an according appreciation of the deep complexity of human relationship.

A love like this can't be boiled down to emotional responses or physiological processes or isolated experiences and memories in the way that the personal-subjective model of love can. It's necessarily holistic, since it encompasses the whole of both lovers and their love-experience. That means that love can't be something that only part of the self engages with; in the moment of love, it has to immerse a person's entire being.

scatterbrained

2008-07-01T14:50:00.004-05:00

1. I can't focus when I work, which isn't a good thing, since my work requires focus. I need to establish some kind of regimen, and I need to stop distracting myself. I definitely need to stop listening to AC/DC. For now, I think choral music is most conducive to my productivity, but even then I sometimes derail myself.

2. This post is an exercise in not focusing when I work.

3. I apparently don't have any trouble focusing on other things, or at least on things I'm interested in. I recently spent a night attacking my computer with screwdrivers and shears and twist ties and hockey tape. Here's what I wound up with:

I won't lie; I'm quite proud of my handiwork. After a bit of cable-mangling and re-wiring, I've managed to lower the speeds on all of my fans (by reducing the voltage that's fed to them). They still push enough air to keep everything nice and cool, but they now do it without creating any excess noise. And with the implementation of some makeshift soundproofing (not pictured because it's too awesome), my computer has now become essentially inaudible, even at night.

4. While I don't necessarily agree with him on all his points, I do think Swami Vivekananda has a lot of interesting and important things to say.

5. People say they hear Hendrix's influence on Stadium Arcadium. I don't get it, I really don't. I think John Frusciante's older stuff had a lot more Hendrix in it than this album does. I also have this nagging suspicion that people are just picking up on a distorted-Strat-lead-on-a-Marshall type of sound and equating it with Hendrix on those grounds. At any rate, I definitely think that what stands out about this album is the rhythm playing, and not the soloing.

6. I'm still learning, and I have a long way to go.

problems

2008-07-01T00:22:00.002-05:00

I know they seem like opposites, but could insecurity and pride be two faces of the same problem? To be more specific: can insecurity emerge out of pride? or can pride emerge out of insecurity? Alternatively, could both emerge out of some deeper issue?

It's strange, really -- I know I can be quite insecure, and at the same time I know I can be quite proud, and I know there are often situations when I'm being both. It's almost like a simultaneous lack and excess of love for myself. How does that work?

Circumstances unfolded today in a way that made most people less happy, but I was secretly glad. I guess that's not something to be proud of -- but I don't feel sorry for feeling that way at all. I know the situation wasn't ideal, even after it'd developed the way it did, but anything is better than nothing, and right now I feel like I need everything I can get.

Is that wrong?

love?

2008-06-18T17:50:00.001-05:00

I'm horrified by the prospect of losing friends, whether to distance or to estrangement or to any other circumstances of life. I guess it's because I'm really needy when it comes to being loved. It's easy enough for me to stop loving a person, but I can't handle having love withdrawn from me.

I wonder if all people are wired this way. I, at least, feel like love, both for and from other people, is something I absolutely can't do without.

But that brings me to a question I've had on my mind for a while: if I can't live without love for and from other people, then is God's love enough for me? or is it enough for me to love God? Should it be enough for me? I'm starting to think that it's not.

And this, of course, is hardly the theological lynchpin that undoes Christianity. Actually, I think it adds something beautiful to Christianity. As dangerous as people will say it is to put anything in the place of God, I think it's equally dangerous to equate putting God first with putting God everywhere.

brand-whoring

2008-06-17T09:42:00.004-05:00

So I've had my moments of brand-whoring in the past. There was a period of time when the origin of the clothes I wore meant something to me (I suppose it still does now, but for very different reasons). I bought a computer that I probably could've gotten from another company for a lot less -- granted, I hadn't known about the merits of VAIO when I got the Alienware, but I should've at least done more research. And I made a thousand other purchasing decisions that were motivated primarily by my own vanity (which I masked with a facade of functionality). It all had to do with that disturbing concept of "brand identity," I think. I was, in essence, buying my identity.

I think, with the exception of the laptop, I was always the subtle and more dangerous breed of brand-whore; I hated visible branding, like the little prancing horse or polo player or eagle or penguin or whatever, and preferred to harbour my knowledge of the brand in secret. That way, I could convince myself that I didn't care about the brand, when in actuality it was only that I didn't care about the brand as perceived by others, and it still mattered enormously to me. Of course, I still got occasional kicks out of having dorky Asians come up to me at Sid Smith and be like, "UHHUHUHH, NICE COMPUTER, WUT'RE THE SPECS."

I believe they call this "pride."

I think I care a lot less now. My purchases, when I ever do make purchases (I was recently linked on someone else's blog as a "poor friend" -- what does that tell you?) are now informed by function rather than form. Of course, brand names still matter in terms of a particular reputation (this was especially true when buying computer parts, for example, because I don't plan on having enough money to replace anything that might get fried anytime soon, and so factors like reliability are of enormous importance to me), but I don't any longer feel like my identity benefits positively in relation to the amount of money I spend in order to acquire a specific brand. Obviously that means I'm also saving money, which is never a bad thing.

But I've recently realised that there's another, possibly even more dangerous threat lurking under the surface of this new perspective I've adopted. I don't quite know what to call it yet (although I'm tempted to link it to the concept of "indie," if only because I love taking jabs at "indie"), but I can definitely describe it to you: it's the sort of "counter-cultural" snobbery that defiantly tries to cultivate its own identity in opposition to the mainstream. I'm pretty sure it started out as an intellectual and ideological snobbery that, in the 1990's, turned its attention to the products of culture and commerce. The sheer irony is that it's now commercialised and is more or less the "mainstream"; but even as we struggle to find new ways to be indie, the root problem is still there. Identity is still something that's purchased (and nowadays, it can either cost a whole lot less or a whole lot more than the norm, depending on what kind of indie you are), and in the end, for those of us who, like me, tend to take it to the extreme, there's only an endless cycle of trying to feed the bottomless pit of our own vanity.

I know I refrained from naming any specific trends or tendencies in that paragraph. I'm trying not to because I don't want to offend anyone more than I may have already. But what strikes me about this counter-culture business is that it's just as prone to asserting itself over and against other views as the mainstream mentality is. I tend to see this a lot in discussions about musical instruments, particularly guitars: you have the guys buying high-end gear who won't shut up about "tone," who think nitrocellulose lacquer is the difference between life and death, and who think the term "guitar" only applies to instruments made in the USA with retail prices over $2,000, and you have the guys buying low-end guitars who also won't shut up about "tone," but who think there's a secret corporate conspiracy (fuelled by the idiocy of brainless consumers) behind anything that costs more than $200, and that the cheaper stuff actually sounds way better anyways. There are, of course, people who might lean in one or the other direction but who understand the choice as a point of preference, and consequently don't take it quite so personally. But for others, and importantly, for people on either end of the spectrum of belief, this has become an issue of identity. The same thing happens with respect to clothes, gadgetry, and whatever else we might buy and have and then compare.

I believe this is also called "pride."

Just so you don't get any false ideas, I'm not going anywhere constructive with this. I don't honestly know if there's really a solution to vanity or this kind of self-buying. If you think about it, your identity will always be directly linked to your financial decisions, if only because what you have shapes your identity (particularly what you have on you or with you at all times, like clothes, since we tend not to make a fundamental distinction between a person and the clothes they wear -- unless, of course, we're perverts with vivid imaginations), and most of what you have is bought. Even if you choose not to buy anything, you're still forming your identity (as a homeless, nudist ascetic) by way of negation.

I do think, though, that the idea of buying your identity is in some way morally objectionable. I think it spits in the face of human dignity and cheapens the notional worth of the individual. I mean, it's called "brand-whoring" for a reason, right?

But I say this only with respect to the desire to buy things for the sake of identity. It's that kind of buying that leads to prideful contention and vanity, and which ultimately reduces a person to a sum of meaningless parts. Buying in general is unavoidable, and so inheriting some facets of identity from the things we buy is also unavoidable. I don't think it's wrong for us to buy things that appeal to us or that we think will make us look pretty or feel good or whatever, either. In the end, I guess, it's all about a healthy balance. We can't avoid being shaped by what we have, in our own eyes and in the eyes of others, and so it's inevitable that at least part of our identity gets outsourced to something "external" to ourselves. The trick is to not get carried away and wind up outsourcing too much.

more lessons learned

2008-06-14T12:57:00.011-05:00

1. The only thing more difficult than driving safely while listening to AC/DC is studying while listening to AC/DC.

2. However, AC/DC happens to be the perfect accompaniment for cooking or playing video games.

3. There is nothing better than an open, honest conversation with a friend.

4. It's probably a good idea to get directions before leaving the house.

5. Meat should only be measured in half-pound increments.

6. Tat tvam asi.
6.5. The sacred and profane are not distinct.
7. I need new contacts.

8. Even though it seems like I can never love and cherish them enough, friends mean the world to me.

9. Pews are uncomfortable.

10. I love C-plus (even more than ginger ale!).

the beggar

2008-06-11T09:09:00.003-05:00

The beggar rages against grey plaster skies
And the water beneath his feet.
He holds the key to a door that he has never seen before
Wondering why the lines are drawn between his eyes
Or why his watch never knows when the sun will rise.
The thick air wrests the breath from his tired lungs
But as night falls, and washes his shadow from the wall,
He starts to believe that his luck has turned.
A roll of the dice: six and two;
This might work out after all.

He ascends the golden ladder with heavy steps;
He knocks --
But in quiet heaven, no one answers the deaf and blind.
At his feet is a billboard knocked off its post
It screams in words he cannot read, but which nonetheless
Appear beautiful.
Distracted by memories and prophecies,
He wanders into the clouds, only to find
That the thin air is suffocating;
That the ground felt firmer beneath his feet;
That the movement itself is now replete
With vanity.

The beggar mourns the passage of time;
In his mind is a seed, but his mind is in asphalt
And heaven denies him rain.

sometimes

2008-06-05T03:22:00.001-05:00

Sometimes, words aren't enough to tell someone how much you care. Sometimes change comes, but not quite when you'd hoped it would. Sometimes the surest right turns out to be the most flagrant wrong. Sometimes a single thought unravels the most complex rational constructions. Sometimes, it's okay to have regrets. Sometimes, you have to say goodbye.

I love you and wish you all the best.

folding, part ii

2008-05-14T20:51:00.004-05:00

This is a continuation of the previous post, in which I talked mostly about the mechanics of the Folding@Home project. But my excitement about folding has to do with a lot more than just the technical aspects of the project, or even the feel-good factor of having contributed to some tangible good. There are a lot of important and challenging implications to Folding@Home and the principles behind it that I've been forced to consider seriously in the short while that I've been involved with it.

It's first of all true that the whole notion of doing good through technology is, in fact, counterintuitive for a lot of us. I'm not at this point arguing that Folding@Home accomplishes "good" (although I think it does); but it certainly has the potential or the capacity for good, and this in itself is for some of us a stretch. Think about it: when do we ever really talk positively about technology? At most we describe it in morally neutral language, like when we acknowledge the convenience of a particular thing. Most of the time, though, we're talking about how we really shouldn't be watching TV, or using so much gas, or wasting so much time online.

Granted, these examples are all tied to other issues (e.g. laziness, vs. the desire to be active), but they nonetheless breed a sort of instinctive moral aversion toward technology. Consequently, when our thoughts about technology move beyond indifference, we almost always adopt a language and conscience of guilt. Sometimes this antipathy is warranted, like when technology is used to harm or oppress or kill others. I think, though, that a lot of the time it arises moreso out of the sort of ingrained cultural paranoia that I've (briefly) described, and that it in fact isn't the necessary or even the appropriate response.

Of course, in order to make the claim that this sort of moral aversion is in fact an inappropriate response, we'd have to first establish that technology actually does achieve moral goods. It's not exactly an easy point to make, though: even in the case of a technology like Folding@Home, there are moral "pros" (the advancement of medical knowledge, or even the advancement of knowledge in general) and "cons" (the hardware and equipment used to fold and the energy required to power them, both of which might have adverse ecological effects).

In fact, it's a point I'm not even really going to try to make, since I haven't exactly thought up a rational proof for the moral merit of technology in general, or of Folding@Home in particular (although, on a slight tangent, I've recently become convinced that morality can't be determined by reason alone). I will say, in the particular context of this discussion, that I believe there are some ends that energy or natural resources should be consumed for, in the same way that animals consume resources for their own benefit (and yes, I understand that animals give back in order to integrate seamlessly with their ecosystems -- ideally, we would, too). I'll leave the question of morality open-ended, though, since I'm primarily interested not in its solution, but in how people perceive the question in the first place.

I've also been considering how the issue of technology and morality relates to our appraisals of culture. For a lot of us, the words "human culture" set off any number of alarms and red lights; this is particularly true of Evangelical Christians, who tend to see human culture in direct opposition to God's authority.

Here's a bit of a history lesson: for a while now, and against the centuries-old Christian paradigm of the sinfulness of humanity, people have been talking about the inherent goodness or merit of the human race. This school of thought, aptly called humanism, might be said to generally affirm that "Man is the measure of all things" (Protagoras). In the latter stages of the European Enlightenment, Protestant Christianity started picking up on threads of humanistic thought; the result was the abomination that we usually call liberal Protestantism. Suffice it to say that in the aftermath of the Second World War, a lot of Christians realised that liberal Protestantism, and its tendency to view human culture in a positive light, had contributed a great deal to the rise and subsequent horrors of Nazism. Modern "Evangelical" Protestantism reacted strongly against humanism as a result, and it's in the midst of this reaction that we've come to develop such a pessimistic language about culture and its creations (such as technology).

Of course, the polemic against culture existed in other forms before the rise of liberal Protestantism, but I think this is where the modern push, driven by the likes of Barth, originates (although this origin has since been forgotten). The polemic against technology has also found a lot of different expressions throughout Christian and even pre-Christian history, but generally speaking, when Christians look for a doctrinal basis for these sorts of beliefs, they adopt a view that's parallel with the objections made against liberal Protestantism (human insufficiency vs. God's power or authority), and thus I've decided to find a correlation between the two.

But is human culture actually so evil? I think that in order to answer the question, we'd first have to consider Protagoras' aforementioned maxim. If Man isn't the measure of all things -- if there exist layers of experience that aren't contained within human experience -- then there's the possibility of a higher (e.g. divine) existential mandate. If, on the other hand, Man is the measure of all things, then human existence can only be dictated by human experience.

This brings us back to a discussion (or was it more of a pitched battle?) that took place on this blog a while back, in which questions of subjectivity and objectivity came up. In short: we all think and feel and know and remember through the lens of our perceptive faculties (and these, of course, aren't limited to sensory faculties). Everything we experience and claim to know passes through this lens. In other words, we're subjective beings, and have no actual understanding (beyond a purely conceptual one) of what objectivity even is or means. For this reason it's completely nonsensical for us to claim access to "other" layers of experience, regardless of whether or not they even exist, because even if they do, they couldn't be known directly -- again, they would be coloured by the lens of our own experience.

So if human beings are subjective beings, and if our perceptive faculties are the lens through which all experience is filtered, then Man really is the measure of all things, as far as we can be concerned or ever know. Again, I'm not saying that God doesn't exist, in the same way that I'm not disavowing the existence of trees or birds or water or even other people. I'm simply saying that our knowledge of this and all other existence is contained within experience, whether we admit to it or not.

(Am I going to conclude that human culture should be glorified above God? No, and if this is where you thought I was going, you honestly need to give me a little more credit than that. Then again, what I am going to suggest might be an even more abhorrent train of thought.)

I think the very fact that all experience is subjective (and by extension that all knowledge of existence is contained within experience) precludes any real distinction between human culture and God's authority. If "human culture" loosely describes the expression of human experience, and if our understanding of God's law is contained (as all other knowledge is) in experience, so that the implementation of God's law could be said to ultimately be a form of such expression, then to deny the merit of culture is to deny the merit of the divine law. To deny the merit of human culture, in fact, is then to deny the merit of experience as such. I don't know about you, but I can't really conceive of a merit-less experience of life.

I hope that all made sense, and I hope it isn't perceived as an attack on some fundamental values. I actually think it's entirely in tune with our experience (at least when we're honest with ourselves), and that it doesn't undermine the importance of faith at all; I just happen to be using a lot of words that are taboo or already laden with negative connotations in the Christian context.

I'll just skip ahead to the most foreseeable and obvious objection to what I've said here before I end this post: no, I'm not saying that we should just be wishy-washy liberals who cave to the social/cultural fads of the day (and again, if you were thinking along these lines, you need to give me a little more credit). I've only argued that experience in general has merit, and not that "therefore everything that proceeds from experience has merit." The aim here was to object to the dismissal of all culture (still used here in my definition as the expression of human experience) as fundamentally corrupted, which I don't think it is -- although there are certainly such things as particular cultural forms that are wrong or evil.

I don't think Christianity loses its subversive, counter-cultural element in such an understanding of experience, either. There are quite obviously a lot of things wrong about culture, and Christianity and other creeds are right to oppose them. What I'm saying is that the polemic against culture as such, as if culture by its very nature is evil or in opposition to God, needs to be reconsidered. For the most part, I'm convinced that few Christians actually feel this way anyway, and that this sort of extreme, all-encompassing polemic emerges only when people start to look for a theoretical or doctrinal ground to tie their many counter-cultural convictions together.

In closing, I'll note that the Folding@Home project is again a perfect example of a cultural form -- of an expression of experience -- that doesn't fit into a fundamentally negative view of culture. Its specific merits aside (we left the question of its "net morality" open-ended), it does do some good, which already challenges a view that human culture and all its forms are essentially evil. At least, that's what I think -- I might be wrong, and in light of the possibility (as well as the fact that I just like to talk about these things) I'm more than open to discussion.

folding, part i

2008-05-13T22:05:00.005-05:00

In a post I wrote a while ago I mentioned something called "distributed computing" and its application in fields like medical research. The specific initiative that I was referring to was the Folding@Home project run by Stanford University. Now that I've started folding regularly, I figured that I should explain a little more of the concept and what's involved. I'm actually really hoping this post isn't ignored out of boredom or perceived technical complexity, because I think the project is a really amazing and important one, and that awareness about it should be spread.

Distributed computing is actually fairly straightforward. We're all familiar with the concept of the supercomputer, a uniquely powerful and specialised machine that handles complex or involved computational tasks. There are a number of fields (e.g. in scientific research) where enormously powerful computers like these are required. Of course, this kind of equipment can cost a lot to operate and maintain, and even then there are general limitations on how much processing power can be crammed into a single working machine. Basically, distributed computing works around these problems by creating a "virtual" supercomputer, which in actuality is a whole bunch of less powerful computers working together, and by "distributing" the workload across this network in small-enough chunks that even these less-powerful computers can process them.

It seems, then, like distributed computing trades off one expense for another: an institution like Stanford waives the cost of having to maintain supercomputers, and instead that cost -- the initial cost of equipment, and the upkeep cost of electricity -- gets pushed on to the people who participate. But it really isn't that sinister, because the reality is that there's an enormous amount of energy waste on most home computers. That's to say that most computers these days are fairly powerful, and are a lot more powerful than they need to be to do the things we want them to do (word processing, browsing around on the internet, chatting).

To underscore the point: if you're running Windows, you can open up your "Task Manager" (if you don't know what I'm talking about, just ignore this part) and see, under the "Performance" tab, a graph of how hard your CPU (the brain of your computer) is being worked.[1] Chances are that 95% of the time, you aren't using more than 5-10% of your CPU power (I actually rarely ever exceed 1%), and that a huge portion of your computer's computing potential isn't being utilised. Distributed computing taps those spare resources and puts them to good use.[2]

So that's distributed computing, in a nutshell. Folding@Home is a specific project run by Stanford's chemistry department. Its purpose is to run simulations of protein folding, in order to gather data about the folding process and to analyse related phenomena. I can't go into a full explanation (partly because I want to keep this concise, but moreso because I don't fully understand myself -- all I know is what little I've read online and extracted from my dad over the dinner table), but the research is directly linked to studies of diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and even some cancers.

There's so much more to say about it, but I'm probably not the best person to say it. A wealth of information is available on the Folding@Home website, including instructions on downloading and using the Folding client. The instructions might be a bit technically involved, though -- so if any of you are interested but can't quite figure out how to make it work, you can ask me any questions and I'll be happy to try to help.

This post is a preliminary one, in which (I hope) I've clearly outlined the concept and mechanics of distributed computing in general, and Folding@Home in particular. I'll follow up in a few days with another post on some of the broader ideas and issues I've been reflecting on in relation to this project.

Notes:
[1] Ctrl+Alt+Delete -> Task Manager (unless Ctrl+Alt+Delete already gets you to Task Manager), and then click on the tab labelled "Performance".

[2] Now, granted, when your computer isn't working as hard it doesn't use as much electricity; and so when a distributed computing program is running on your computer, the end result is a higher power draw out of the wall socket. Still, and even if power usage and associated costs (financial and otherwise) are higher, there's a huge difference in efficiency -- a distributed computing program will make use of way more of the energy that your computer is eating up than your average, mostly-idle usage will.

im spiegel

2008-05-12T12:22:00.005-05:00

If this were my body, and if this calloused flesh
Could twist and tear across these brittle bones,
Would it be broken?
Or would it only be reformed, but not re-Formed,
Being in essence still a cell of the living Body?

And if this were my blood, poured out of every gaping wound
To fill the cup of Thanks-giving for a short and bitter life,
Would it be drunk and spent?
Or would it solve into the stream and disperse,
And dissipate across the channels of experience?

Humanity has one Soul, and one Body;
The Soul and Body are one,
And entirety is contained within.

In cold heaven, the condemned man sits alone;
His sentence: to be cleft from the world of men
And thrust into the chasm of Deity.

questions of no importance

2008-05-09T22:00:00.007-05:00

Meet Malachi, the magic 8-ball:

Pictured here engaging a daruma in a staring contest (which he's clearly losing), Malachi is nonetheless all business when it comes to his prophetic office. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for me (although I occasionally had to coax the answers out of him):

Q: Does God exist?
A: ASK AGAIN LATER.

Q: Does God love me?
A: SIGNS POINT TO YES.

Q: Do I love God?
A: WITHOUT A DOUBT.

Q: Is that enough?
A: YES DEFINITELY.

Q: Is there a difference between "enough" and "everything"?
A: IT IS CERTAIN.

Q: Is God love?
A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Then is God greater than love?
A: REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN.

Q: Then is God greater than love?
A: ASK AGAIN LATER.

Q: Does God permeate all existence, rather than standing outside of it?
A: IT IS CERTAIN.

Q: Then is there a real difference between loving what exists and loving God?
A: CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN.

Q: (with furrowed brow) Then IS there a real difference between loving what exists and loving God?!
A: CANNOT PREDICT NOW.

Q: Can you predict the weather?
A: ASK AGAIN LATER.

Q: Is my body absolutely distinct from my soul?
A: MY ANSWER IS NO.

Q: Is the rest of the physical world absolutely distinct from my body?
A: VERY DOUBTFUL.

S: Sounds like Shankara was right.
A: IT IS CERTAIN.

Q: Is there a wrong way to live?
A: YES.

Q: Is there a right way to live?
A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Is there an a priori religious "premise" to humanity?
A: BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW.

Q: Is it possible for Christianity to be radically without religion?
A: YES DEFINITELY.

Q: Is love the highest law?
A: IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.

Q: Is love the only law?
A: DON'T COUNT ON IT.

Q: Is it actually necessary to have a developed or systematised central belief?
A: VERY DOUBTFUL.

Q: Do belief and knowledge essentially have the same requisite conditions?
A: IT IS CERTAIN.

Q: But is there still a difference between the two in terms of actual qualification?
A: YES.

Q: Then is it right for Christians, whose confessed faith is a belief, to attempt to qualify their faith as knowledge?
A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Relatively speaking, am I hard to love?
A: IT IS CERTAIN.

Q: Is it unreasonable of me to demand reciprocity in (most) relationships?
A: MOST LIKELY.

Q: Can love be destructive?
A: YOU MAY RELY ON IT.

Q: When I "trust in God" am I ultimately discerning/deciding, according to my own faculties, what God wants me to do?
A: IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.

Q: So am I not ultimately trusting in myself, and in my own understanding of God?
A: YOU MAY RELY ON IT.

Q: Am I really a liberal Protestant?
A: MOST LIKELY.

Q: Are you John Connor?
A: WITHOUT A DOUBT.

Q: Is the world really divisible into rock stars and groupies?
A: IT IS CERTAIN.

Q: Is it possible to live without passion?
A: YES DEFINITELY.

Q: Is it possible to live a worthwhile life without passion?
A: DON'T COUNT ON IT.

Q: Are people inherently evil?
A: AS I SEE IT YES.

Q: Are people inherently good?
A: YES.

Q: Are good and evil really inherent attributes, or are they just descriptors of human actions (and therefore not inherent)?
A: ASK AGAIN LATER.

Q: Is human culture evil?
A: ASK AGAIN LATER.

Q: Is religion an example of human culture?
A: YES DEFINITELY.

Q: Is it better to love people and ignore God than to love God and ignore people?
A: WITHOUT A DOUBT.

Q: Do you think most people would misunderstand the meaning or intent of these questions?
A: AS I SEE IT YES.

Q: Will the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup?
A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

S: Your sources are wrong.
A: DON'T COUNT ON IT.

Q: Does God exist?
A: DON'T COUNT ON IT.

the remains of the day

2008-04-25T16:09:00.002-05:00

There are times when I'm acutely aware of the immensity of existence. There are also times when a single thought engulfs the whole world, and consumes the entirety of my being in one fleeting moment.

Love isn't bound by the conventions of courtesy or obligation or even attraction. Love abides by its own law, which supersedes all others. Its motivation to act isn't necessity but a creative, positive energy, and its object isn't the loved "other" but is the union of lovers in a greater whole.[1]

I'm excited by the prospect of forming new friendships and reviving old ones. Still, I know I'm far from having figured friendship out.[2] In order to make the most of these opportunities that are now presenting themselves, I need to fundamentally change the way that I relate to people. I need to make myself vulnerable if I want to break down barriers and love more openly.

An insight that a very wise person -- or rather, a very wise friend -- shared with me recently: people are always either growing together or growing apart (and never seem to grow parallel to one another).

To believe in something is to know the truth of that thing.[3] If truth has an intrinsic moral value, then belief, too, has direct moral implications. Thus if two contradictory beliefs come into contact (being, as they are, in service of two contradictory truths), they have a moral obligation to conflict with and oppose each other, cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum.[4] To avoid conflict is to betray the truth in which one believes. At the same time, if the outcome of such conflict can be decided in favour of one or the other perspective, to deny this verdict is to betray Truth itself.

What does it really mean to anchor yourself somewhere, in something other than yourself? Can you meaningfully be grounded in something external to your own existence, to your own experience of life? And is that kind of a foundation really true to your experience? to your humanity?

Over the past ten days I've been afforded a lot of time to think, to wonder, to laugh, to create, to learn, to listen, to grow, and to love. I think that I've once again substantially revised my definition of Me, and that in spite of my failures and imperfections I've grown a great deal. Love has really changed things for me this past week, and opened my eyes to new and beautiful realities. In short: the last ten days have been the happiest that I've had in a long time.

Notes:
[1] Thus the greatest love isn't the love that gives or sacrifices, but rather the love that creates something greater than the mere sum of its parts -- a process which involves giving, but doesn't culminate in it.

[2] What does it mean, after all, to be a friend? to have a friend? Is a friend someone who's cared for, or someone who cares, or both? Is love necessary for friendship? Is friendship necessary for love?

[3] I don't think it's really possible to believe in a falsehood; those who try to do so succeed only when they manage to convince themselves that the lie is actually a truth. In a sense this goes without saying: to believe in something is to believe that something is right. Thus the only possible object of belief is truth, even if the truth itself is only subjective.

[4] "With love of mankind and hatred of sins." -- St. Augustine

4-3

2008-04-24T21:22:00.005-05:00

The great thing about being a Red Wings fan is that your team spends the vast majority of its time kicking some serious ass. The only thing that's missing from this series (or rather, from Colorado's roster, now that we've once again added the many-talented Darren McCarty to our ranks) is the largely insubstantial but still sorely-missed presence of the largest specimen of terrestrial turtle known to mankind:

Come on, Claude, let's have another one for old time's sake. The second championship of the decade just wouldn't be the same without you.

proverbs of hell

2008-04-19T21:13:00.002-05:00

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows brings forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
The selfish smiling fool & the sullen frowning fool, shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbet; watch the roots, the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits.
The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.
One thought fills immensity.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

- W. B.

intermission

2008-04-13T19:44:00.005-05:00

Some realisations I've come to and thoughts I've been thinking this past week:

- I've suffered a substantial amount of damage to my ears over the last five or six years.

- I have minimal appreciation for most of the plastic arts. Painting usually bores me, although I think that's because I'm only exposed to "pop painting," which I find to be bland in the same way that pop music can be bland. Photography is nice, but I don't know enough about the mechanics of it to actually appreciate it beyond a sort of superficial affectivity or a purely philosophical aestheticism. I do love architecture, though.

- I was clever enough to avoid detection in grade seven, but I definitely have ADD.

- You can't push friends away, no matter how hard you try. At the same time, you can never keep them close enough.

- There are so many people saying so many things about God, and everyone seems to be right or justified in their own way, according to their own rules. I wonder sometimes if any of us have even come close to hitting the mark. I wonder what happens to the ones who get it wrong in the end.

- Low-level, low-profile blogging (the kind that we all do) is rarely about content. An insightful or informative or humourous blog won't draw much attention by the merit of its insight or information or humour unless it's really well-done (at which point it draws a hell of a lot of attention, and ceases to be low-level, low-profile). Blogging at this level is much more about relationships that exist outside of the blogging world. In other words, people don't read blogs to think or learn or be entertained; they read blogs primarily in order to relate.

- Lotte gum flavours, in descending order of awesomeness: Xylitol, Black Black, Cool Mint, Green Gum, Mint Blue.

obligatory computer post

2008-04-11T20:36:00.006-05:00

So, I definitely need to add a footnote to my hockey post: if it wasn't already clear, I am a huge fan of Alexander Ovechkin. The videos will be up on Youtube within the hour, but for now it'll suffice to say that he's a credit to the sport and is one of its great players. Honestly, there's not a single person in the game right now who has as much drive and competitiveness and love for hockey as he does.

And in keeping with said post, the second half of this one will be dedicated to a recent favourite topic of mine (warning -- the following might bore you):

I've still got one more case fan to go, which should mean another substantial drop in temperatures, but for the time being I'm quite satisfied. After some stress-testing in Orthos I'm running stable at 3.15 GHz (1:1 with memory at 450x7), which is 35% faster than stock (2.33 GHz). The best part about it is that I'm still running on the stock Intel heatsink, albeit with Arctic Silver instead of whatever it shipped with, and temperatures are pretty good (~30°C at idle, well under 60°C at load). After exams are done I'll try to lower my core voltages to lose some more heat.

The one thing I'm worried about is my memory getting too hot. With two enormous fans sucking air out the back, the front side of the motherboard doesn't get much cooling. I might have to add a second intake fan in the front to get air moving in that area.

Oh, and I kicked the 8800GT up to 700 MHz on the core clock and 2.0 GHz on memory, up from 600 MHz/1.8 GHz on factory settings. I idle anywhere between 43°C and 49°C, but for some insane reason my temperatures at load are never over 55°C. This situation can only improve with more cooling.

Now, in spite of all of this overclocking (or "wasting time," as I'm sure some of you have already quietly accused me of doing), this computer also happens to be the quietest in the house, with the possible but unlikely exception of my dad's laptop. In sum: high performance, low temperatures, and no noise make me very happy.

Yeah, I know, my wallpaper is awesome. Credits to Mr. Lee for the title of this post.

the myth of knowledge

2008-04-07T16:07:00.003-05:00

So, here's the thing: most of us think we know a lot, and we're confident in the knowledge that we have. This is evidenced in the way our worldviews, values, and opinions are so often rigidly defined. It's as if we've already got all the answers to our own questions, even if we have the humility to admit that we haven't really thought them all the way through yet. If we don't know everything, we're at least quite sure that we know what matters.

Technology has really made knowledge accessible, and our collective knowledge has been broadened and propagated as a result. But at the same time, it's also created new expectations. There was a time, for example, when knowledge was acquired through years of study and observation and experimentation and conversation. There was a time when concepts could only be read in context, in the texts that contained them, and work was required to attain knowledge of them. Now, we have ever-more concise summaries of even the most complex ideas, and what used to take years can be accomplished in hours, or minutes. What's more, we now expect information to be accessible and available for immediate absorption, and ignore or lose interest in anything that takes too much time or effort to process.

I posit that this sort of knowledge is intrinsically dangerous and, for all intents and purposes, wrong. Why? Because the quick and easy path completely ignores the moral responsibility that comes with learning and knowing. It rewards a person -- or a society -- with the products of a progress that was made by others. The consequence is that these products are open to misunderstanding and, more importantly, abuse by people who aren't directly responsible for them, and thus can't or won't be held accountable.

You might recall a memorable scene from Jurassic Park: Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) goes on a tirade over the lunch table about the Park's brilliant scientists, who've taken the science of others and made a commercial product out of it -- without properly understanding all that's involved, and without having to endure the process of learning and accordingly having to consider the moral ramifications of the application of their knowledge. It's the same idea. When we substitute real knowledge, which can only be worked for, with the ready-made, instantaneous knowledge that's given to us, not only do we fail to really understand what we think we know, but we also open dangerous possibilities for that knowledge to be twisted and used outside of its intended context.

So let me put a definitely recognisable face on all the theory I've been talking about so far. I'll do it the way I always do it: by using popular Christianity as an example (boy, I'll bet you didn't see that one coming).

We Christians are really assured about certain things, mostly spiritual or theological truths. We think we're right insofar as we know these things, and we think that by virtue of this knowledge, we know essentially everything that needs to be known. We might not know how to calculate the derivative of a mathematical function or about Heidegger's concept of Dasein, but we know the essential Christian truths -- about sin, God, Jesus, salvation, and heaven -- and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters.

But where does this knowledge come from? (Blah, blah, "The Bible"; let's just ignore that response for a second.) The fact of the matter is that the majority of us form this knowledge based on what's told to us (in sermons, for example, but also in books and prayers and other things), and not on what we've discovered ourselves. You can take the whole idea of salvation, for example; language like "Jesus died in my place for my sins" has its origins in the Bible for sure, but its special emphasis reflects a very particular theological tradition that we've been steeped in since childhood (well, not me, but a lot of us). It's not something we've discovered ourselves; it's something that was handed to us, made highly accessible, and thus consumed without question as truth.

The problem? We come to this knowledge with no awareness of its origin or the process that was required to attain it, with no according appreciation for its strengths and limitations, and with no resultant understanding of how to appropriately apply it. We aren't aware that this idea of salvation had its scriptural basis in the (arguably) non-Pauline letter to the Hebrews, was developed in Augustine and Anselm, and culminated in the theology of John Calvin. We don't therefore appreciate all (or even enough) of the theological, historical, political, social, personal, and other factors that played into this development. Instead we get a very decontextualised and abstracted concept, which we proceed to do violence to when we forcefully import it into our own world and apply it in all the places where it was never meant to be applied. The idea of satisfaction through punishment (a slight perversion of Anselm's two options of satisfaction or punishment) as the exclusive salvific model, without this proper contextualisation, now puts complete emphasis on the death of Christ, while at the same time it mingles with modernist notions of free will, with which it happens to be fundamentally incompatible.

Even this is just a cursory overview that hardly does justice to the whole issue. But the problem, to reiterate it, is that we don't realise this, and aren't willing to investigate further. We think that what we hear is fact, wherever it originates (whether in the Bible or elsewhere), and so long as it's accessible, we're all too willing to consume it.

I see two possible and morally tenable options. The first is to change our awareness of our own cheaply acquired knowledge. There isn't, in fact, anything wrong with having only a cursory or incomplete understanding of something, as long as we're ready to admit that our conclusions, based on those understandings, are just as cursory and inadequate. In other words, the best we should be able to muster about a complex theory of salvation that we know little or nothing about is exactly that: little or nothing. We should freely be able to admit to not having answers to the questions that we haven't really considered (this is the beginning of hermeneutic humility and honesty). On the other hand, we can't continue to maintain these incomplete understandings while still arrogantly presuming that they're enough for us to know the truth decisively.

On the other hand, if we're going to really claim to know anything, then we have to go through the requisite steps required for the acquisition of knowledge. If we want to know Calvin's theory of salvation, we'll have to first work from its origins in the Bible and then follow the process of its development in other thinkers, as well as the context of its development in Calvin. Only then will we have the moral qualification to speak and act decisively on what we know.

3000 words to go

2008-04-04T10:57:00.006-05:00

The playoffs are approaching, and Detroit is completing another dominating season. Still, as always, I'm looking ahead to the post-season as the only Red Wings fan in this damned city, patiently awaiting my chance to laugh in peoples' faces (although I technically could've started doing that a month ago). Seriously, though, you all should start cheering a winning team.

Okay, I was going to post more, particularly to celebrate the fact that I now have only one more paper to write. But I've gotten a little sidetracked:

Some people think I waste my time with video games. I think that's preposterous.

disgust

2008-04-02T16:49:00.008-05:00

You've got to be kidding me.

Apparently, a UN resolution to declare water as a basic human right, and to set measures in place to ensure its availability, failed to be ratified. That there could actually be any doubt in anyone's mind as to the necessity of clean water for all people is appalling, I think. But to top it all off, it seems that Canada was the country that did the most to oppose the proposition.

If what's claimed in this article is true, then it's a frightening indication of the current state of things. I'm absolutely shocked to the point of disgust that a country like Canada -- which not only prides itself on its involvement in human-rights issues, but also has access to the world's largest supply of fresh surface water -- could actively lobby against a resolution like this. I obviously don't know the whole story, and there may well have been some clauses in the resolution worth objecting to; but there must've been a substantial amount of opposition to the fundamental concept of the proposition for it not to pass at all, and I have to say I'm ashamed that Canada was the country opposing it.

In one of the most fallacious and morally untenable arguments I've yet heard uttered in the realm of politics, a Liberal MP in support of the government's position is quoted in the article as suggesting that the UN resolution might be exploited by private corporations that are seeking to capitalise on water shortages. My common sense tells me that the suggestion itself is utterly absurd, but I won't go into it in detail. What needs to be said is this: that entirely regardless of whether or not these fears are warranted, the bottom line is that water is a human necessity, and we absolutely CANNOT deny that fact, ESPECIALLY on the basis of things as utterly trivial as economic and political concerns. I mean, is it really that hard to understand? We're talking about HUMAN LIVES. The fact that we even have to think about it at all is disconcerting, to say the least.

This issue has gotten me rethinking the basis of my political affiliations (which, I'm aware, don't even matter since I can't vote; but I still have them). I've always been rabidly anti-Liberal, based on my close observations of the way that money is spent in and by the Liberal Party (often indistinguishable from what we'd elsewhere refer to as "corruption" -- and no, I'm not talking about the sponsorship scandal). That hasn't changed. What I've called into question is my long-standing belief that the Conservative Party is the only one strong enough to lead this country in a positive direction. It may still be true; but after reading this article in the paper a few minutes ago, not to mention having spent a good month and a half studying the rise of Nazism in Germany, I'm having serious doubts about whether or not that's a justifiable basis on which to support a particular ideology.

I know political conservatism tends to be popular in Christian circles, where it somehow gets equated with social conservatism, but I think it'd be wise for all of us to seriously look into some of these issues, and ask ourselves whether the party we vote for has a moral stance that we can agree with.

a history of antagonism

2008-04-01T19:15:00.004-05:00

I think we Protestants live up to our name. The commotion that Zwingli and Jan Hus and Luther and the rest stirred up is over five hundred years old, and yet we still are as hostile as ever towards "Catholics." There's even a standardised list of conservative Protestant objections to Catholic doctrine (you've probably heard them before -- "They believe in salvation by works and not faith," "They worship Mary," "They baptise babies," "They have priests," etc etc), and a resultant general consensus that Catholics "aren't really Christians."

Let's consider a couple of points. First of all, one really has to wonder these days about conflicts that predate the people they involve. History has proven that historical grudges become increasingly bitter with every generation, and that at the same time the origin and nature of the conflict become less clear. This tendency is especially true of the Protestant-Catholic schism. We all cling to these differences and deep-seated antagonisms, but none of us really understand the issues involved. Those of us who think we do understand have only gotten as far back as the Reformers themselves, and even then there was too much misinformation and misunderstanding for both sides to properly communicate.

The fact is that there actually aren't a lot of significant differences between the Catholic and Protestant confessional positions, and that these differences aren't at all where we generally think they are. This brings me to my second point: I find the proposition of opposing one confessional stance, and presenting another one explicitly over and against it, to be completely ludicrous when we haven't even understood the difference between them to begin with. In other words, the very fact that we conservative Protestants are almost uniformly ignorant of the realities of Catholicism means that we don't have to right to make any comparisons, especially critical ones.

It's definitely something we do often. I recently witnessed a celebration of the Lord's Supper that was given a helpful running commentary for newcomers to the church. The problem was that the Supper was presented and described in direct contrast to the Catholic Eucharistic rite. Two key points of distinction were made, regarding the doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that the bread and wine undergo a metaphysical transformation to become, in their essence, the body and blood of Christ) and regarding the purpose of the ritual, which was to "help the spiritual life" (I'm paraphrasing) and not to win salvation, as (allegedly, although this is not true) the Catholics believe. The first is difficult to deal with, only because the doctrine of transubstantiation is impossibly more complex than what I've just described; but the second point was what really caught my attention.

It seemed that the point being made was that, to Catholics, there's some kind of mystical or religious power immanent in the bread and wine themselves, while the Protestant belief is that it's more of a willed symbolic act than anything else. But to what extent is that actually true? I can only speak for myself and the people I know well when I say this, but don't we all put a hell of a lot more meaning into the Lord's Supper than that? Isn't there something that utterly floors us about taking the bread and wine in communion with the people we love? Don't we attach some kind of mystical significance to the wafer and the cup, even if we don't admit to it? In some ways I think the Protestant description of the Lord's Supper is dishonest, because (for the sake of making a particular theological assertion) it denies on paper what it experiences in reality. I think, too, that when these dishonesties are exposed (as with some other dishonesties in the Catholic profession), we find that the Protestant and Catholic experiences of communion are fundamentally the same.

I've thinned out this last paragraph considerably, in the interest of keeping the post readable (length-wise). It doesn't at all do justice to the complexity of the issue, and a lot of my claims or interpretations might seem unwarranted because of their lack of support. I really do think, though, that if the relevant issues are thought out (and not just "thought out" in terms of adhering to a particular theology, but "thought out" in a thorough, honest analysis of personal experience of the Lord's Supper), the conclusions will be the same. If you're itching to criticise me, take a second to honestly think it over for yourself first.

The bottom line: after five centuries, I think it's about time we started to address some of these long-standing issues. It'll do us a lot of good to clear away the miscommunication and misinformation that's gotten in the way of proper, mutual understanding, and when the dust settles we might be surprised at how much underlying similarity there really was all along.

a few more pieces

2008-03-30T18:23:00.006-05:00

Blogging seems to have gone out of style over the past year or so. That's too bad -- I guess it's been supplanted by photo-blogging and Flickr. But who knows? Maybe MySpace or bulletin boards will be popular again. Really, though, these self-expression trends are getting to be pretty erratic, and I wouldn't be surprised if published iTunes playlists suddenly became the next big thing.

If there's one thing I've realised in my extensive studies of significant people and events, it's that nothing in historical analysis is sacred. Wait until a man is dead, and you can call him a moron or an anti-Semite with no fear of retribution. Wait fifty years and you can either infer that he was a homosexual or begin "reinterpreting" his corpus of great works in increasingly outrageous and inaccurate ways. It's no wonder that anyone of any repute who died in or before the first half of the twentieth century is now remembered (by the annals of popular history and the pages of Wikipedia) as a mentally incompetent, sexually deviant, and generally scandalous postmodernist. The one man they haven't gotten to yet is Antonio Vivaldi, whose career as a priest at a school for orphaned girls has yet to be exploited. They'll get to him soon enough, though; they only got a late start because he wasn't popular until fifty or so years ago.

By the way, I'd like to note that I only use Wikipedia on this blog as a (relatively) neutral and widely accessible/agreeable point of reference, and not in any way as a viable academic source. I appreciate the open concept of Wikipedia, but after seeing this happen some time ago (presumably in the days or weeks leading up to Nov 14, 2006), I've decided to take what I read there with a hefty dash of salt. I'd suggest that you do likewise.

Although I didn't know much about it until just this past week, I was really interested by yesterday's Earth Hour. I know, I'm not exactly much of an environmentalist, but after seeing some really beautiful places around my hometown this past summer, and especially after suffering through yet another winter with no frozen ponds (which meant, again, no hockey), I've realised that conserving -- or ideally, improving -- the state of the natural world is something I actually care about. Of course, if I had a vested (e.g. financial) interest in the annihilation of our ecosystem, my position might be quite different; for now, though, I'm content to try to do my miniscule part to preserve it.

Yes, I know, the total energy savings of Earth Hour were probably negligible. But the point of Earth Hour wasn't primarily to conserve an hour's worth of energy, I don't think. It was to increase awareness by making environmental activism a widespread trend. As sad as it sounds, it takes more than a morally tenable position to get people to stand up for something. Mass-advertising and pop culture in general have shown us that social movements are primarily fashions, and that most of the time it's these fashions that motivate people to act in certain ways. Earth Hour turned saving-the-environment into a fashion. And it worked, I think. I certainly bought into it.

I'm thankful for these blogging breaks, because I don't get to do much else between eating, sleeping, and writing essays. The downside has been that I haven't been able to coherently collect my thoughts into posts that have a singular topic and purpose. Well, maybe I was overdoing it with those to begin with.