Lucas' 2 month checkup..
.. was yesterday. He got 5 vaccination shots, but I think they hurt Teresa more than they hurt him.

He is one healthy baby! He's at 95th percentile in length (25 1/4"), and at 80th in weight (12 lb 14 oz) for his age. The doc also said he had the head control of a 4-month-old.

<proud papa smile>
- posted by Doug @ 4:04 PM    Comment

 
Believe it or not, Kristof, faith is not incompatible with reason
Nicholas Kristof has a column in today's New York Times (registration required) in which he argues that America is 1) undergoing a fundamentalist religious revival, and 2) that this is a bad thing. Let's take a look:

Today marks the Roman Catholics' Feast of the Assumption, honoring the moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

The 28% number seems frankly incredible to me. Kristof quotes (on his site) a Gallup poll as his source. I don't have a Gallup subscription, so I can't check this, but I did find a Gallup data set from 1991 that shows a 47% figure for strict creationist vs. 49% for evolution (guided plus unguided). I find it hard to believe that belief in evolution has dwindled 20 points in a decade. Another site that quotes the same Gallup poll does show a 28% support level among two different subgroups, those without a high school diploma and evangelical Protestants. It appears those two subgroups are the ones with the lowest support for the evolutionary theory.

So this day is an opportunity to look at perhaps the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world: faith. Religion remains central to American life, and is getting more so, in a way that is true of no other industrialized country, with the possible exception of South Korea.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view. (For details on the polls cited in this column, go to www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds.)

Really. And exactly how moral have the French been acting lately? Were the actions of their government moral toward putative allies in the buildup to the Iraq conflict? How about when they ignore the terms of EU agreements (e.g. the Growth & Stability Pact) when they don't feel like following them? Not to mention the actions of private citizens in desecrating American cemeteries in Normandy and anti-Semitic violence against France's synagogues and Jewish population. The French are a bunch of immoral crapweasels (to use a term borrowed from the great Jonah Goldberg).

The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time. The percentage of Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth actually rose five points in the latest poll.

My grandfather was fairly typical of his generation: A devout and active Presbyterian elder, he nonetheless believed firmly in evolution and regarded the Virgin Birth as a pious legend. Those kinds of mainline Christians are vanishing, replaced by evangelicals. Since 1960, the number of Pentecostalists has increased fourfold, while the number of Episcopalians has dropped almost in half.

So now it's "mainline" to view what has been a central tenet of Christianity through the ages as "a pious legend"? Perhaps the reason the Pentecostal church is growing and the Episcopal church isn't is that folks are seeking a church that remains true to its Christian faith rather than riding the liberal wave.

The result is a gulf not only between America and the rest of the industrialized world, but a growing split at home as well. One of the most poisonous divides is the one between intellectual and religious America.

Oh, that's nice. People with religious faith can't be intellectual? (Yes, I know what he means, that the "intellectual elite" tend to be less religious, but that's not the way it sounds when you read the sentence.

[...]
The Virgin Mary is an interesting prism through which to examine America's emphasis on faith because most Biblical scholars regard the evidence for the Virgin Birth, and for Mary's assumption into Heaven (which was proclaimed as Catholic dogma only in 1950), as so shaky that it pretty much has to be a leap of faith. As the Catholic theologian Hans Kung puts it in "On Being a Christian," the Virgin Birth is a "collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary" narratives, an echo of virgin birth myths that were widespread in many parts of the ancient world.

Sigh. Where to begin? First, Mary's bodily assumption into heaven was proclaimed as infallible dogma by Pope Pius XII in 1950 -- but that was hardly the first (or "only") time that this element of faith appeared in the Church. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the Feast of the Assumption has been celebrated in various parts of the Church at least since the 5th century. The Pope saw the need to proclaim this as dogma since people were starting to drift away from this consistently held belief. Second, "Catholic theologian Hans Kung" is so far afield from Catholic teaching that the Vatican has asked that he not be referred to as "a Catholic theologian". And as to the assertion that a belief in "Mary's assumption ... has to be a leap of faith," well -- ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! It's a funny thing about religion, that most of its tenets have to be taken on faith.

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Yale historian and theologian, says in his book "Mary Through the Centuries" that the earliest references to Mary (like Mark's gospel, the first to be written, or Paul's letter to the Galatians) don't mention anything unusual about the conception of Jesus. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke do say Mary was a virgin, but internal evidence suggests that that part of Luke, in particular, may have been added later by someone else (it is written, for example, in a different kind of Greek than the rest of that gospel).

[...]

Much scholarship has been done over the centuries on the question of the authorship of the first chapters of the Gospel of Luke. (How's that for way too many prepositional phrases in a sentence?) The Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes some of the work on this page, especially in sections 2 and 3. Read for yourself, but the consensus seems to be that St. Luke did not hear of the Virgin Birth orally from Mary herself, but instead cribbed from another source, written by someone who had heard such a firsthand account.

I'm not denigrating anyone's beliefs. And I don't pretend to know why America is so much more infused with religious faith than the rest of the world. But I do think that we're in the middle of another religious Great Awakening, and that while this may bring spiritual comfort to many, it will also mean a growing polarization within our society.

Our society has been polarized on two sides of the culture war for decades now. Maybe Kristof just means that his side is losing converts to the other team.

But mostly, I'm troubled by the way the great intellectual traditions of Catholic and Protestant churches alike are withering, leaving the scholarly and religious worlds increasingly antagonistic. I worry partly because of the time I've spent with self-satisfied and unquestioning mullahs and imams, for the Islamic world is in crisis today in large part because of a similar drift away from a rich intellectual tradition and toward the mystical. The heart is a wonderful organ, but so is the brain.

Oh, good Lord. With all the religiously based schools, colleges and universities in this country, does Kristof really believe that the "scholarly" and "religious worlds" are incompatible?! As the Catechism (#159) states:

Faith and science: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."[Dei Filius 4: DS 3017.]
"Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."[Gaudium et Spes 36 # 1.]

- posted by Doug @ 11:30 AM    Comment

 
Woohoo!
We're #1! We're #1!

Interesting: "Dell has quietly sold plasma TVs through its Web site for more than a year. Few consumers knew that until last month, when the company featured a plasma TV on the cover of one of its catalogs.

Dell currently sells a 42-inch TV for $2,850. By comparison, the Gateway-branded 42-inch plasma TV retails for $2,999."

Hell, I work there and I didn't know we sold plasma TVs... :)

- posted by Doug @ 10:03 AM    Comment

 
One more reason to thank my lucky stars I live in Texas..

So today a little mishap in a Manhattan power plant [EDIT 3:30PM 08/15/03: ... or Michigan, or Ohio, or Ontario -- no one's quite sure yet] caused outages as far north as Ottawa and as far west as Detroit. The reason this can happen is that all the Eastern states and Canadian provinces are joined together in one massive electric grid -- ditto with the western states, provinces, and some Mexican states. (See picture.) Note that most of Texas is on a grid by its lonesome -- and that the Texas grid does not cross a state line. So someone screwing up in New Orleans won't plunge Austin or Dallas into darkness.

The reasoning for this is detailed in this article originally published in the Wall St. Journal. It's a neat story about Texas pride. Yee-haw! :)
- posted by Doug @ 5:52 PM    1 comment

 
The limits of Moore's Law
Everyone by now should know about Moore's Law. It can be stated in many ways, but one of the most common ways is that computing power doubles every 18 months or so. The law was originally formulated as saying the number of transistors in a fixed area of a silicon die doubles every 18 months. Obviously, this expansion can't go on forever. How many transistors, or more generally, how many individual data storage elements is it possible to fit in a certain area?

Current technology allows us to fit on the order of 10¹⁰ bits on a 1 cm² piece of silicon. Advancements in VLSI silicon technology could conceivably allow us to fit 10¹² bits or so in the same area (about 10 years out by Moore's Law).

What if we go to quantum technology, where we use the states of molecules or atoms to store data? Conceivably, this could increase storage density to somewhere on the order of 10²⁰ - 10²³ bits/cm² (50-60 years out). Is this the limit?

Scientific American has a fascinating article on hard theoretical limits to information storage capacity. (Warning: hard science there) It turns out that even if we can use additional states of atoms at the same time (spin in addition to position, for example) or states of subatomic particles, we can't get any more dense than about 10⁶⁶ bits/cm² (nearly 300 years away if Moore's Law were to continue to hold). Anything with that much entropy (one measure of information storage) must collapse into a black hole. Oops -- there goes your term paper!

Don't worry, though, that number represents several orders of magnitude more than the number of atoms in the solar system!
- posted by Doug @ 4:50 PM    Comment

 
Huh?
Does this make sense to anyone? The President would have to specifically approve and report to Congress on every single Spec Ops mission? What's next? Bombing target lists have to be approved by an Act of Congress? Will every sentence in this blog entry be in the form of a question?
- posted by Doug @ 11:58 AM    Comment

 
Go Southwest!
Now if they'd just fly into SRQ so my folks don't have to drive 50 miles to TPA to pick me up when I visit.. :)
- posted by Doug @ 11:39 AM    Comment

 
The ongoing redistricting mess
So the remaining Republican Senators have voted to impose fines on the wayward Democrats. Despite the AG's opinion that this is legal and constitutional, I can't see how it could be. It doesn't seem like a quorumless House of the Legislature should be able to vote on anything. Any penalties for breaking quorum should have been set by the full Senate prior to the quorum break.

While I certainly approve of the end of increasing Republican representation in Congress, the means our Republican Senators are using are getting harder and harder to justify. However, just when I was starting to feel a bit of sympathy for the Democrats holed up in Albuquerque, they go and pull this: "The Democratic senators vowed not to pay the fines and likened them to poll taxes once imposed to discourage blacks and Hispanics from voting." What a crock. The intent is not to prevent them from voting but to get their butts back to Austin and cast their votes! Trying to pull the race card when it has absolutely no application to the matter at hand is despicable.

All that said, I don't really want a Democratic gerrymander replaced with a Republican one. Ideally, I'd like to see some standard guidelines set up for drawing the boundaries. I'm not in favor of an independent commission to draw the lines, as some are. I still think the process should be controlled by the Legislature, as it is inherently political. I don't know if the following set of rules would work, but as a modest proposal, I thought I'd throw them out:

1. Districts will contain between 619,014 and 684,173 people, based on the 2000 census. This represents the standard size of 651,594 +/- 5%. Balancing it down to a gnat's eyelash is silly and doesn't make sense. People move around all the time -- I've lived in 5 different congressional districts since 2000 myself -- and the census counts are necessarily inexact in any case.
2. District boundaries shall be drawn (in order of preference):
   A. Along county lines
   B. Along interstate highways
   C. Along farm-to-market, ranch, or state roads that bisect a county (i.e., the road doesn't terminate inside that county)
   D. (in counties with 2000 populations >1,000,000) Along other FM, ranch, or state roads, or major surface roads (4 lanes or more)
3. Counties with 2000 populations <200,000 shall be kept in the same Congressional district.
4. Counties with 2000 populations <750,000 shall be split into no more than 2 Congressional districts.

As I said, I have no idea how workable this set of rules is, but it would be a basis for avoiding gerrymanders -- I'm tired of districts that wind up one road and down another just to capture a certain neighborhood -- or worse, split a neighborhood in two.

UPDATE 8/13 2:13PM: Chuck was kind enough to point me to a document outlining case law in this area. It appears that the Supreme Court has rejected my reasoning in #1 above for Congressional districts (although it is approved for state legislative districts). So while a variation of 10% would be fine for Texas Senate and House districts, Congressional districts must be more nearly the same population. The Court does allow some variation to meet legitimate state interests, of which preserving county integrity would be one. However, the permissible variation appears to be more on the order of +/- 0.5%. So amend #1 above to read "... between 648,336 and 654,852 people, and as near as possible to 651,594..."
- posted by Doug @ 9:22 AM    Comment

 
Looks like I'm not the only one who was upset at that CBS News story..
(See here for my original post on the topic.)

Catholic talk show host Jeff Cavins asked his listeners to call CBS and "politely register their complaints." CBS received a bunch of calls on the story and invited Cavins to do an interview. Here's the followup story they did. Apparently, they completely twisted his position to make it seem like "Cavins and his listeners were outraged at the Catholic Church's alleged criminal 'secrecy,' rather than at CBS's dishonest reporting." (Emphasis in original)

Media bias? No such thing. :P
- posted by Doug @ 10:47 AM    1 comment