The Hanover Collaboration

A while back Christopher Hitchens issues an open invitation to debate atheism with anybody. One of these debates turned into a movie that comes out (straight to DVD!) tomorrow. Honestly, I’m pretty confident that the movie is going to be consummately boring not least because Wilson concedes a lot and seems primarily interested in the “Without religion, i.e., if life is meaningless, how do you establish morality?” question. That should be a pretty easy one.

Anyway, I’m just posting to tell people to listen to the last little bit of this Laura Ingraham appearance where, on the buzzer, Hitch nails a three-pointer from half-court.

President Obama wants to give a speech to the nations school students next Tuesday at noon. The country is so polarized that, apearantly, this is a big controversy. Georgetown, (MA), for instance will not be showing it.

Suppose that the President were Republican and the angry parents were Democrats, how do you think this would play out?

1) It wouldn’t. Democrats would suck it up as “civic duty.”
2) It wouldn’t. Democrats don’t have a good enough network (mainly radio shows) to rally enough angry phone calls to schools.
3) They’d do the same, but then get hung out to dry for a “lack of respect.”
4) It would play out just the same.

I’m thinking (1), because I really, truly, hated Bush, but if he were going to give the kids a pep-talk on the first day of school, I’d think that was fine, good in fact. The president is important; they might listen.

Everybody who is hand-wringing about how “political” the speech might be is not thinking about it very hard. When Obama speaks, he is nothing if not cautious. If he said anything even remotely political, even remotely assailable, he would (deservedly?) suffer for it. Those kids are guaranteed some of the A-grade flowery bullshit. But maybe it will inspire a kid or two to work harder, stay in school or become better citizens. Whether or not it’s worth the time is another argument, but I think it probably is.

Regarding the other complaint regarding “indoctrination”, let’s be honest, it’s there and it’s pervasive, but it’s not coming from Obama.

It’s pretty clear Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite. His father was a Holocaust denier, and Gibson has stated that “the man never lied to me”. Though I never saw the film myself, I’m told that even the blind come away from The Passion of the Christ with a diminshed opinion of Jews, and on many occasions, the devoutly-Catholic Gibson has taken issue with the findings of the Second Vatican Council, which officially renounced the doctrine that the Jews killed Jesus. So why has the media reacted with such shock and vitriol at Gibson’s drunken rantings during a recent DUI arrest?

I don’t think we’ve had this argument here yet.

My setup here is dual boot RedHat 9/Windows XP. I haven’t booted to RedHat in like 3 months. In fact, I’m not even sure the IDE cable is plugged in make that happen. That’s because of Cygwin.

I’ve got a little Cygwin command prompt window here and it may as well be a linux prompt. If I want to install some open source wing-ding or something, I can. It fails to compile pretty much the same fraction of the time as open source stuff on Redhat. Cygwin has pretty much everything that I ever use. A great analogy to Cygwin would be the OSX command line. It’s almost the real thing.

Another advantage of Cygwin over the dual boot is that it shares the same filesystem with Windows.

“But why not go straight up Linux?” you may ask. The answer is simple but it sort of betrays my attitude for the computer. Because Windows just works.

If I get some program or some hardware, I can just pop it in and it just works. Let’s say I want to play some flash game for which I don’t have an adequate player. I can just click on a link, click download, press enter (which I have as a mouse buton), click “Accept the terms” press enter two more times and I’m playing the game. Good luck doing that in linux.

I know some guys get off on making buggy ports work or on hacking drivers and the like. I like that too but only for easy ones that end up working and don’t take long. I get frustrated easily I guess. Switching back into the Windows partition is such a relief sometimes—like getting into the hot-tub after swimming in cold water.

Then there are the little things that sort of add up for me. For instance take my USB keydrive. In Linux, I have to mount it and unmount it and to do that I need to su. I know for some of you, “getting” to do that is some sort of affirming experience and I’ll admit that it was for me the first couple times, but not anymore¹.

Then there are is the money software, like Half-Life, that regardless of your willingness to pay, you can’t have on Linux.

Finally, the Unix chauvenists act like there isn’t a command line interface in Windows. Don’t pretend that bash does so many more things than MSDOS². I can write an MSDOS script that does {latex bibtex latex latex dvips ps2pdf acro32} just as easily in Windows as I can in Linux. Sure there are some commands absent but you can almost always download programs for them. And guess what? They’ll just work.

So guys, I went first. What OS are you using and why?

¹ Actually, having to click on the safely remove icon in the tray is even too much for me. There should be a button on the stick that unmounts it. And that button should be in a place that I would have to touch anyway to pull it out.

² Let me suggest aliasing “ls” to “cd”.

On the north, it is protected by Cannon mtn, and the beautiful Franconia Ridge which before it turns west and becomes the majestic Presidential ridge. On the South, the cliffs of Rumney. To the east, the revered, historic Mt. Moosilauke. To the east roll some of the most pristine mountains of the whites, The Hancocks and Carrigan.

But just as important as the hills are the distances. 50 miles from each Hanover, Concord, Gorham and Saint Johnsbury.

At 100MHz, 50mi is about -110 dB due to free space losses. The thermal noise density in that place is roughly -200 dBW/Hz on a brisk morning such as this. The transmitters that I want to aquire are transmitting 150—3000 Watts at a bandwidth of 100 kHz. So the thermal energy on that channel is -150 dBW while I could hope to receive -75 to -90 dBW of signal were it not for the mountains.

But how can you ignore such mountains! Then add to that the 10 or more dB that I lose due to my budget receiever (which I have working again!). Maybe my electronics could still lock to that low of an energy, but my brain requires an aditional 10 dB for filtering. In the end what you get is a region that is hurting for good radio.

You can always get WHOM transmitting from the blighted summit of Mt Washington. These 48kW are notable for Delilah and Jon Tesh and soft rock that have kept many a cold hiker warm through the night.

But then sometimes, you can get WVNH due to it’s lucky allignment with the valleys.

Today’s was just such a morning and so I was taking in a soulfull. The topic was how Christians in America were beset on all sides. The pastor, described the persecution to which American Christians are subjected, and the degree to which their values are ignored, nay, flouted by the culture and the politicians.

Huh… Man, it must be hard to live with the heathens on one side and the towelheads on the other while getting fed to lions by the government. I’m sure glad I’m not a Christian.

Here are the closing remarks from a really inspirational article from the first page of the D today.

“We’re not in adversarial mode. We don’t view it as ‘us against them.’ We’re about how do you find grace, how do you find wholeness, if you’re broken,” [Craig] Parker said. “I don’t care that people get drunk on Friday night. I want to know what it is that causes a person to drink, causes a person to cut themselves, causes a person to have an eating disorder, what’s going on in a person’s head and heart. And I’m more concerned with that than just the stemming immorality.”

I think that the second part of that question belies the first. Does anyone else agree? Let’s have a competition for who can write the best 500-1000 words in “adversarial mode” and try to have them put it in the D.

This Parker chap runs the Navigators at Dartmouth and is fond of reminding us that Dartmouth was founded to convert the Indayans. The way I learned it was that the college was also founded on 500 gallons of old New England rum.

¹ I didn’t really know what Evangelical meant. I found this pretty edifying.

This NYT editorial begins as follows.

President Bush seems determined to thwart any loosening of the restrictions he has imposed on federal financing of embryonic stem cell research, despite rising sentiment in Congress and the nation at large for greater federal support of this fast-emerging field. His actions are based on strong religious beliefs on the part of some conservative Christians, and presumably the president himself. Such convictions deserve respect, but it is wrong to impose them on this pluralistic nation.

It bothers me that he would start off on such a wrong foot. The fact of the matter is that the Christians deserve the full force of our derision here. They think that the blastocysts in tens millions of tampons and maxi-pads are sacred? Or that the hundreds of thousands of blastocysts destroyed during IVF are sacred too? They are so sacred that we shouldn’t use them for the most promising area of medical research in decades?

It is utter lunacy. I think it is best for everyone that lunacy be called by name and not respected as a “religious belief.”

On science friday yesterday, an interesting point was raised. IVF, the potential source of cell lines in the current, is destroying blaystocysts left and right and has been for a long time. Why is there no outcry over that? Because the goal of IVF is to make a baby and the goal of science is to destroy religion? That’s my only idea.