2009-04-30 0815: The New York Times has an unusual obituary: Hans Holzer, Ghost Hunter, Dies at 89. Holzer was the paranormal investigator of the Amityville Horror house. He believed in reincarnation and he was a vegan. He also expected an an afterlife that is "strangely like this side, and bureaucratic to boot, [where the] dead who become restless and wish to return to Earth for another go-round must fall in line and register with a clerk."
2009-04-25 2300: This evening, I watched the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. I had seen it many years ago on public television, but I wanted to see it again having seen the movie Milk. I was a bit surprised that it seemed rather bland and dull, particularly since it was an Oscar-winning documentary. Then I realized it was because the movie Milk was so vivid with such strong acting. Also, Milk was a fast-paced movie that showed a lot more detail about Milk's life and times than did the documentary. In particular, the documentary shows little of Milk's personal life (Milk is shown with his partner Jack Lira in stills several times in the documentary without Lira being identified). Another thing about the documentary that surprised me is how old it is; it came out in 1984, in an era when public acceptance of gay people was substantially lower than it is today. I think that must have increased the impact of the documentary on many people; that and how recent the events were that it portrayed. (As noted at the conclusion of the documentary, Dan White had been released after serving 5 and 1/2 years for the murder of Milk and Moscone; an evident injustice when the movie was made, but a year before White committed suicide.)
2009-04-25 2030: I was glad to see the baby rabbits in my backyard this evening, or at least two of them, accompanied by their mother. I watched as the mother rabbit nibbled on dandelion stalks and the two babies scampered about.
2009-04-25 1300: I was intrigued yesterday to find an article online (The painful truth about trainers: Are running shoes a waste of money?) about barefoot running. It seems that there are a lot of people who enjoy running barefoot. They believe that it is more natural and healthier to run without shoes, because our feet were meant to run without shoes and because shoes weaken the feet. They cite research that people who run in running shoes have more injuries, and that people who run in more expensive running shoes are more prone to injuries than people who run in inexpensive shoes that lack the elaborate cushioning and motion-control technology featured in expensive shoes. They also cite the success of certain barefoot runners in international competition, including marathons. They also say that running injuries were less common in the days before modern running shoes appeared, when runners ran in thin shoes that provided little cushioning. The modern running shoe was introduced by Nike in 1972, and the key idea behind the shoe was to put a lot of cushioning under the heel. The article has a wonderfully tart comment about the first running shoe: "[Nike co-founder Bill] Bowerman called Nike's first shoe the Cortez — after the conquistador who plundered the New World for gold and unleashed a horrific smallpox epidemic." It's disconcerting to read about Nike in those terms, since I grew up a short jog from the Nike corporate headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. (It's common to see Nike people testing running shoes in the park in my Mom's neighborhood.) But then again, I haven't worn Nike running shoes in many years—lately, I find that New Balance shoes are most comfortable (and I appreciate the fact that they're made in the USA).
One curious fact I learned this morning reading about barefoot running: It turns out there's no law in almost every jurisdiction against driving a car while barefoot. Also, there are no health regulations in most states against being barefoot in retail establishments or restaurants. Stores and restaurants are free to set their own dress standards, but if they have a sign referring to health regulations, they're in error. Advocates of barefoot lifestyles regard these rules as discrimination. It's perhaps not surprising that there are several web sites for barefoot enthusiasts; see Google for links.
2009-04-25 0750: Yesterday morning, I was surprised when mowing my lawn to find several baby rabbits hiding in the grass. I was afraid I would kill one with my mower (they were hard to see hidden in my tall grass), but they scampered away from my mower. Yesterday evening, I saw a large adult rabbit in my backyard. I suppose that it was the mother of the baby rabbits. But yesterday evening, my neighbors behind my house finally mowed the very tall grass behind my property line. I hope the baby rabbits made it to safety.
2009-04-20 2230: I note with sadness the passing of J. G. Ballard, the British science fiction author. I have read several of his books and certain of his short stories, although not his best-known book Empire of the Sun. (I did see the Steven Spielberg movie based on the novel.) When I was about 11, I had an old hard-bound copy of his novel The Crystal World (1966). This was a strange and mysterious book, about growing regions of crystals that appear in various locations around the world. In these regions, living things do not die but instead become inert and frozen, with no metabolism, neither dead nor alive in the way a virus is neither dead nor alive. The book was all the more mysterious because its original dust jacket was illustrated by the Max Ernst painting Europe After the Rain II. As an adult, I learned that Ballard wrote novels and stories where the environment was the most important character in the story; his second novel was The Drowned World (1962), when solar activity has made the Earth return to Permian temperatures and London is submerged by the sea. His characters scuba-dive into the old planetarium, in a hot-house world where insects grow to huge sizes and iguanas have appeared with large dimetrodon-like sails on their backs.
J. G. Ballard also wrote commentary on culture and politics. One collection of his, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), included a piece with a shocking title: "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." This proved to be a carefully-written mock scientific discussion, as if written by a psychologist consulting for a political campaign, concerning the sexual attractiveness of the candidate. It was a parody of American political campaigns based on psychological manipulation. This book became the target of a British obscenity trial; a bookstore owner became the defendent in the trial for selling this book. The defendent's legal team asked Ballard to testify in the case, but they were distressed when he testified that the book was indeed intended to be obscene. Of course, the book was intended to be a protest about politics and culture, and so the defendents were able to secure their acquittal. My first encounter with this book was in the Starkville, Mississippi public library. It was said (15 or 20 years ago when I lived there) that the library director was a conservative Baptist who made an effort to keep objectionable material out of the library. I was charmed to see the book, with its grotesquely-titled piece on Ronald Reagan, in that library. This was not long after Reagan was president.
2009-04-20 2130: I saw the 60 Minutes piece on cold fusion. As one can expect, it wasn't detailed enough to allow a viewer to conclude that cold fusion (or "low energy nuclear reactions") has any validity. Apparently, there are a number of labs that claim to have recorded anomalous excess heat from their experiments; one team at SRI claims 25 times more energy out from their device than is input into the device. CBS News approached the American Physical Society to find a physicist qualified to judge whether the labs are measuring the energy correctly; the APS sent them to Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri. They visited a lab in Israel, which granted him access to their experiment. He determined that they are in fact being extremely careful and are measuring the energy correctly, and on that basis, Duncan concludes that low energy nuclear reactions are occuring—the excess energy cannot be explained from chemical reactions alone.
What I thought of when I saw this piece was that cold fusion has become akin to parapsychology, in that it appears that the phenomenon under investigation is difficult to control or replicate, but does produce tantalizing evidence of its reality. Both fields have had prominent scientists conduct independent reviews of the research and come away favorably impressed. In the case of parapsychology, the prominent scientist was the Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem, who was approached by Charles Honorton, a UCLA parapsychologist involved in "ganzfeld remote viewing" experiments. Bem became convinced that these experiments demonstrated "anomalous information transfer," and they published an article in a leading psychology journal reporting on the work. (This was in 1994.) The ganzfeld (German for "whole field") experiments consist of persons in a state of sensory isolation trying to guess what images or locations other people are viewing. A typical experimental protocol is to have the sender randomly choose between four possible images or locations, so random (non-paranormal) results would be a hit rate of 25%. But a meta-analysis of a number of studies yielded a hit rate of 35%, with a fantastically small p-value. Subsequent analysis of other sets of experiments have yielded less-convincing results; the debate as to the validity of the phenomenon continues. I suspect something similar will happen in cold fusion; for the indefinite future, the subject will be mired in a debate on technical and statistical nuances in measuring energy inputs and outputs. It wouldn't surprise me if the either phenomenon turns out to be real, in parapsychology and in cold fusion, but we might not know one way or the other for a long time.
2009-04-14 2230: I finally watched the movie Milk. I was deeply impressed by the script and the acting, and the movie did a phenomenal job of recreating the late 1970s. The movie, which I saw on DVD, comes with three fine short documentaries that included interviews with politicians and activists who worked with Milk as well as interviews with people who helped make the movie. One principal character in the movie is Cleve Jones, a young activist in Milk's political team now known as the founder of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt; one of the documentaries had an interview with him, now in his mid 50s. I was charmed to learn he has a cameo in the movie (he's standing on the side of the platform when Milk addresses a large crowd in downtown San Francisco). The documentary also had an interview with another activist in Milk's circle, who made banners for his rallies—it was for one such rally that he created the rainbow flag that is now ubiquitous in the gay community. The movie, and the documentaries, made it very clear how much Milk and the people around him accomplished in the brief time he was in public life. One more thing to mention about the movie: I saw it in blu-ray format, and the picture quality on my television was excellent.
2009-04-12 1430: Happy Easter! I've enjoyed two wonderful Easter services this weekend, our Easter Vigil last night, and our Easter services this morning. The Vigil last night was led by Bishop Ted Gulick, who baptised nine Burmese immigrant children. The music was beautiful. The music this morning included some of the same pieces or settings as the Vigil, but we had a brass quintet and a percussionist accompany the organist and choir, so the music was absolutely marvelous. I felt grateful and privileged to take part in such wonderful worship.
2009-04-12 1400: I've finished a couple of other books on religion this Lenten season, both by Diana Butler Bass.
One is Christianity For the Rest of Us, which reports on her extensive research (supported by the Lilly Foundation) on the revitalization of mainline churches. She describes the state of mainline churches, which once were the bedrock of American religious life but, because of demographic and other factors, lost membership and vitality. She describes ten congregations who have found meaningful practices that have lead to growth and vitality. Some congregations have developed successful music ministries; or are devoted to prayer, meditation or adult education; or have strong ministries to the poor in their urban settings. None of these are offered as prescriptions for urban congregations seeking ways of growing and achieving financial stability; a church seeking renewal would need to find its own solution that fits its own personality, beliefs and setting. But we read this book at my church, Christ Church Cathedral, to begin a discussion as to what we might be able to do to strengthen our parish. One interesting and important point that Bass makes: These vital congregations are often neither liberal or conservative—often, they are a mixture of liberal and conservative members, and the theology taught at these churches cuts across red/blue political identifications to follow what Christ taught in terms of charity, justice and peace-making.
The other book I read by Diana Butler Bass is her most recent, A People's History of Christianity. The title of course echoes the well-known book by Howard Zinn on American history. Bass describes how modern Christian ideas and practices arose at various key points in Christian history, often from ordinary people who took great risks to share their new and more generous understanding of God and their faith. One might perhaps read this book as a history (or pre-history) of liberal Christianity; e.g., her discussion of St. Francis of Assisi, whose reverence for nature anticipates modern environmentalism. It isn't the kind of detailed history of Christianity offered by other writers. But I found it insightful and very interesting.
2009-04-12 0900: I completed the Papa John's 10 Miler yesterday morning. My time (1:32:38) was about one minute slower than my time last year, and frustratingly a minute or two off the times of my friends in my running group. I was a bit sore even from the beginning of the run (I apparently overdid my last training run the previous Tuesday). But the weather was beautiful (a bit chilly, but ideal for a long run), and I had a good time. At the end of the run, I had a migraine aura, but the famous free slice of Papa John's pizza, a bagel, a banana and some sports drink replenished my energy, and the aura dissipated with no headache following. And I enjoyed the post-run brunch hosted by one of my running group members, who served us a wonderful breakfast casserole.
2009-04-01 0800: I finished the new book by Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted. This is an extremely interesting book. The back cover description is accurate: "[L]eading Bible expert Bart Ehrman skillfully demonstrates that the New Testament is riddled with contradictory views about who Jesus was and the significance of his life. Ehrman reveals that many of the books were written in the names of the apostles by Christians living decades later, and that central Christian doctrines were the inventions of still later theologians. Although this has been the standard and widespread view of critical scholars for two centuries, most people have never heard of it." Ehrman also says that this is what is taught to pastors at mainline seminaries. He describes his own experience as a deeply conservative Evangelical Christian, when he attended a seminary and learned about the historical-critical scholarship on the New Testament; his conservative belief in the Bible as the infallible word of God did not survive what he learned, even though he was well-trained in conservative apologetics on the Bible before entering the seminary. But Ehrman says that this scholarship need not threaten anyone's Christian faith; he himself is now an agnostic, but friends and colleagues of his who are well aware of the modern scholarship remain devout Christians. Only the kind of faith that equates Christian faith with belief in the Bible as the inspired word of God is threatened by this—but most mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics do not have this kind of belief in the Bible. Jesus, Interrupted is detailed, extremely clear in its writing, and for the most part, highly convincing. The only negative to mention is that it lacks an index.