Stan Taylor

The Episcopal Church USA has elected a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as presiding bishop, sending a great big fuck-you to ‘traditionalists’ in the US and around the world.

The NY Times reported yesterday that the former Bell Labs headquarters in Holmdel, NJ, will be demolished (here is the building on Google maps/satellite). It’s too bad that it’ll be destroyed; it’s an amazing–and amazingly large–building.
I worked at that building for a few months in 1996/7. My first official job in Internet technologies was contracting for AT&T. This was just after the AT&T/Lucent split, and the though the Holmdel building had gone to Lucent, the AT&T that group I worked with was still located there. Due to a strange convergence of facts (I was a contractor who was hired from a non-personnel budget, the building belonged to Lucent, space was tight), I did not have an office until the AT&T group that I worked for moved to an AT&T building. I spent my few months in Holmdel in a testing lab. The lab was located in the corner of a HUGE server room: 65 degrees, roaring computers. The lab was only marginally quieter and warmer. It was quite an experience.

I seem to be experiencing another blogging lull. Mostly, it’s caused by being more engaged in other areas of my life, especially my new job. Stay tuned; I’m sure I’ll be posting more again soon.

According to this no-duh article, shoppers have reported the following problems:

• 50 per cent have had a retail problem.
• The main problems are time it takes to find parking or the product the consumer wants, and unknowledgeable or rude staff
• The bigger the store, the higher the chance there will be a problem
• Men are less loyal than women.*

After analyzing the results of the survey, Wharton School marketing professor Stephen Hoch made the following recommendations:

If businesses want to stop the bleeding from negative word-of-mouth, it’s clear that they need to invest in ensuring that each customer experience is first rate – from adequate parking, to trained front-line staff, to the right product mix, both in stock and on the shelves.

Boy, the sponsors of the survey got their money’s worth with that astounding act of analysis.
* That’s a shocker!

Apparently, this list of reasons why America actually sucks is making the rounds on the internet. I’m the first to question unbridled ‘America is Number One!’ jingoism, but I’m highly suspicious of this list for several reasons:

1. It was created to prove a point, so the data is necessarily selective
2. The sort of short bullet points that the list employs is subject to gross oversimplification
3. Many of the points in the list are not given comparative to other countries (e.g., “Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training” So, how does that compare globally?)
4. I frankly question the veracity or quality of some of the data (e.g., “Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.” I recall seeing a chart of average work hours, and South Korea led every other country by several hundred hours. Apparently, the South Koreans have some really bizarre ideas about the average work week)

I would really like to see someone pick apart the list. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or inclination.

This morning, I happened to catch Alex Chadwick’s Radio Expeditions report from the Ecuadorean rain forest with entomologist Rex Cocroft. Dr. Cocroft’s musings at the end of the piece struck me, so I transcribed them:

It can seem very strange to people, I think, and very ludicrous, to see some grown person who’s spending his time chasing around tiny, strange bugs in the woods, but I think of it like somebody who’s a musician. You’re not just a pure musician in the abstract. You play something, and once you pick up an instrument, all the principles of music are there. And if you’re studying biology, then any individual living thing that you can study has all the principles of biology wrapped up in it, and it has a long evolutionary history that has solved a very impressive set of problems and challenges and has a beautiful set of adaptations.
[The tree hoppers] are just very different from us, but they have just as many challenges in their lives, and fabulous, very finely tuned adaptations for dealing with them. So they’re not at all primitive or simple. They’re actually very complex and advanced, if you will.

I don’t know whether Dr. Cocroft bellieves in any dieties, but I am much more impressed with a God who can devise evolution and let it run its course than one who just spits out creation fully formed. The more I learn about the complexities of creation via science, the greater my reverence for it.

So, whenever I get a new computer, one of the first things I do in setting it up is to install the evaluation version of WinZip. I’ve never run across anyone who has ever bought a WinZip license. If you have done so or know someone who has done so, let me know. I’m doubtful that WinZip has ever sold a license.

I’ve considered writing something about The Da Vinci Code (read the book, may eventually see the movie on DVD, but based on my dismal movie watching history, probably won’t), but I really couldn’t think of anything to add to the billions of words already being written about the book and movie. As usual, Gordon Atkinson sums up my feelings perfectly and much more eloquently than I could have done:

I’ve read the Da Vinci Code. I plan on seeing the movie, which I hear is better than the book. I liked the book. It was a fun read.
I have no interest in discussing Dan Brown’s scholarship or lack thereof. Anyone who paid attention in seminary has heard of these extra-biblical sources and knows that Mr. Brown’s book is an adventure story and not a biblical or historical treatise. The Da Vinci Code has roughly the same relationship to biblical and church history that James Bond has to the world of secret agents. And hey, what’s wrong with that? It’s a good read. Like a Clancy novel.

(Note: I only attended seminary vicariously via Katie)

A Monstrous Regiment of Women is the second in Laurie R. King’s series of novels about an elderly Sherlock Holmes and his young lover and apprentice Mary Russell. As with the first novel in the series, I did not enjoy this one as much as Katie, but it was a good read nonetheless.

I just completed The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King. This is the first in the series of novels about an elderly Sherlock Holmes and his young female apprentice.
I browsed across this book in the Pflugerville public library quite some time ago, and when I saw that it was about Sherlock Holmes, I checked it out for Katie who is a big Sherlock Holmes fan. Katie has since read all of Ms. King’s novels and takes part in an email list for fans of the novels.
It’s difficult to re-use an existing character–especially one so well known as Sherlock Holmes–but Katie thinks that Ms. King has captured the essence of Holmes quite well, even though she sets her novel thirty years after the original stories and gives him a female partner. I didn’t enjoy the novel as much as Katie–as the sexual tension and budding romance between Holmes and his companion didn’t do as much for me as it did for Katie, but I enjoyed the novel all the same.