There’s an interesting commentary in the Washington Post that’s making the blog rounds today: “Stop Trying to ‘Save’ Africa.” The author’s aversion to a certain type of attitude in regard to Africa reminds me of my dislike of the slogan “Save the Earth.”
I’m pretty sure life on earth will continue on in some form for millions, if not billions, more years, even if we humans manage to make the environment inhospitable for our own species.
So, I think ‘Save the Earth’ really means: help to keep the environment in a state that will continue to support human life similar to the way it currently is.” That in itself is a worthy cause, but the hubris implied in ‘Save the Earth’ really rubs me the wrong way.

I’m a little late on posting this, but security expert Bruce Schneier tells it like it is:

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots — and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse — is wrong.

Remember, folks, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t be scared of something that, statistically speiaking, barely even makes the list of things likely to hurt or kill you.

Today, Fred Clark blogs about a growing movement in the Southern Baptist Convention to urge parents to pull their children out of public schools. One of the motivations for this movement is to remove children from the “‘metastasizing spiritual, moral and intellectual pathologies of the government school system.'”
As usual, Fred does a very good job of covering the political, cultural and religious aspects of the issue. But his post reminded me of something from my own past. I grew up in the Texas Hill Country just north of San Antonio. We lived just beyond the fringes of suburban San Antonio at the time; you could live more or less in the country and still commute into San Antonio, though it was a long commute.
I can think of quite a few families who moved out of San Antonio to remove their kids from the perceived negative influences of the city’s schools. But by and large, these families continued to deal with the same types of problems with their kids even in the idyllic Hill Country. In my opinion, those families chose to blame the city for their kids’ problems, when in fact the problems lay with the kids and families themselves; moving to the country didn’t change things. Sounds to me like some Southern Baptists might be suffering the same delusion.

This comment on MetaFilter sums up my feelings about many of my grad school professors quite well:

Respect for academic achievements is slowly eroding into extinction. Good riddance, I say. I have been working several years at a university known as one of the top in the country for its particular field, and here’s what I found out: it’s meaningless. It is an institutionalized popularity and writing contest. It’s as if these folks who probably suffered from social ineptitude at some point in their lives (or continue to suffer from it) are using their intelligence as a substitution for charisma and basic, decent human behavior. Which is fine for them inside their own circles I suppose. However, I personally have little respect for titles, authority, position and supposed academic credibility. The result of your work may be astounding and important, but that doesn’t make you a good person or a decent human being, and it damn well doesn’t mean that I have to show you any respect until you earn it. If I don’t understand how great your work is, then you get to earn your respect from me by being a good person on a general level.

A while back, I winced when I saw the word ‘congradulations’ on the sign in front of our local middle school. But that ain’t nothin’. Check out this letter from a Staten Island middle school administrator.

Rafe Colburn links to an article in the Washingon Post about the self-help phenomenon The Secret. I was not previously aware of this hit book, but as soon as I read it, I thought: this sounds like it appeals to the same type of people who are attracted to the Gospel of prosperity. Two sides of the same coin. Interesting.
(NOTE: I’m only linking to pages that are critical of the respective movements. I don’t want to give google karma to the proponents.)

This week, writer John Scalzi is blogging his answers to questions submitted by readers of his blog. Yesterday’s question was, in essence: What is the meaning of life?
Mr. Scalzi suggests that he devised his answer to this question via humanist (non-religious) means:

What I’m leaving out here, for the space of relative brevity, is a detailed examination of processes by which I came to this intellectual methodology, generated through years of self-examination and self-realization via intentional and unintentional experiential phenomena, to produce the robust heuristic structure through which I filter data.

Here’s the heart of his reply:

Finally, in the larger sense — the one in which I am a citizen of the world, that I like no man am an island, blah blah blah blah blah, it becomes a matter of asking one’s self first whether one wants to be engaged in the world, and then if so, how best to be of utility. I do enough things that I feel engaged in my world and I feel like I’m trying to do beneficial things (or at least I’m doing as little harm as possible). I think it’s my responsibility to try to make the world a better place than it was before I got here; I don’t feel obliged to be heart-rent at every thing that’s wrong with the planet. One person can make a difference in the world, so long as that one person realizes that one person can not do every thing or be actively concerned with every damn thing. I pick and choose; everyone does. I focus on what I think I do well, and where I think I can do good. (emphasis added)

I find his answer to the BIG QUESTION quite similar to my own, which I formed in the context of being a Christian. I guess it all comes down to the source of the responsibility, and his answer shows what I believe: that there are many ways to realize your obligation to ‘love your neighbor’.

I’ve noted for a while a lot of misunderstanding about hydrogen fuel cells as a possible solution to our dependence on fossil fuels. This article correctly points out that since we have to manufacture hydrogen, it is really an energy storage mechanism, not a fuel.
The manufacturing process uses electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The resulting hydrogen is collected, and distributed. Then fuel cells combine the hydrogen with oxygen again, producing water and electricity. It takes more energy to create, collect, store and distribute the hydrogen than is regained when it is used to create electricity–which makes hydrogen a very inefficient energy storage mechanism.

There’s an interesting article at New Scientist that imagines what would happen to the earth if all humans disappeared today. The most basic conclusion is that pretty much all traces of human existence would be gone in 100,000 years.
Equally interesting is the discussion of this topic on MetaFilter. As usual, the MeFi discussion goes in many different directions, but I sense in some of the posts an unease that traces of the human race could be erased so quickly.

Microsoft’s yet-to-be-released iPod challenger, Zune, is already drawing a lot of attention. So, one of Zune’s innovative features is the ability to share musically via a wireless connection with other nearby Zunes. Cool. For copyrighted music, however, the receiver can only play the received content three times or within three days, whichever comes first. Okay, a big nod to the music labels. That in itself is generating a lot of controversy.
But here’s the part that astounds me, directly from the Zune blog:

I was going to leave a comment in my last post answering questions, but I decided to make a new one…
“I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?” Good question. There currently isn’t a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she’ll come see you three days later. . .

Just like the music industry attacked file sharing applications because it’s possible to use them to share copyrighted material, Microsoft is defaulting to DRM since it can’t know for sure whether a shared file is copyrighted. Better safe than sorry–safe for them, anyway. Well, that sounds pretty sorry to me. It’s a ‘guilty with no chance of proving your innocence’ strategy. Great way to treat your customers. Of course, a lot of people are observing, justifiably to me, that Microsoft’s primary customer is, in fact, the music labels. The consumer runs a distant second. In which case, the Zune will not catch on.
OK, so what about Apple’s DRM? First off, if I import a non-DRMed song into iTunes, iTunes doesn’t mess with it. Second, Apple doesn’t promise to let me legally share files with someone else. I don’t like DRM any more than Cory Doctorow, but Apple’s ‘five computers plus attached devices’ DRM for iTunes seems a reasonable limitation for personal use. Millions of other iPod owners seem willing to accept it, too.