Stan Taylor

My conversation with Samuel on the way to school this morning:
Samuel: When I grow up, I’m going to be a little taller than you, and Hannah is going to be about the same as you.
Me: Yeah, that’s probably about right, but I’m not sure Hannah will be quite that tall.
Samuel: Well, we’re all going to tower over Takako. Even Mommy towers over Taka.
Me: Well, Mommy is a little taller than Takako, but I wouldn’t say that she ‘towers over’ her.
Samuel: Well, the midget people who used to own the earth aren’t taller than Takako.
Me: I’m afraid I’m not familiar with these midget people.
Samuel: You know, the midget people who used to own the earth.
[Pause while I try to figure this one out]

Me: Do you mean the ones from National Geographic?

Samuel: Yes, that’s what I mean.

Recently, there was an interesting essay in the St. Petersburg Times about serendipity. The author is concerned that it is in danger in today’s world:

Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find – with an irritating hit or miss here and there – exactly what you’re looking for. It’s efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding. Inside, the book might be a loser, a waste of the effort and calories it took to remove it from its place and then return. Or it might be a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life down a path you didn’t know was there.

I’ve become a big public library patron the last couple of years. During one of the interviews for my new job, the interviewer asked me some personal questions, among them, “What are you reading right now?” One of the books was a novel that I’d picked up while browsing through the new books display at the library. It was by an author I’d never heard of and I couldn’t recall the author’s name for the interviewer. I remember feeling slightly embarrassed that I wasn’t reading something intentional or directed, that I didn’t have any sort of goal in reading this novel.. After reading this essay, I realize that there’s absolutely no shame in browsing.

In a nice essay in Time Magazine, Andrew Sullivan argues that we should not let the politicized Christian right co-opt the term ‘Christian,’ as their belief in the intermingling of politics and religion reflects neither the true message of Christ nor the beliefs of most Christians. Instead, he coins a new term for them–‘Christianist’–defined as follows:

Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

The scene: Sitting with several coworkers in the conference room waiting for someone in another location to join a conference call. Everyone is awkwardly quiet.
Coworker 1: So, how about those Mavericks? Wasn’t that an awesome game last night between them and [some other sports team]?
Other coworkers and me: <blink>
Silence.

Yesterday, Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno made the following statement about ‘creationism’:

He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.
Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. “Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That’s why science and religion need to talk to each other,” he said.
“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.”

Man, I envy the Catholics. I wish that we United Methodists had an official astronomer. I’d even be happy with an official entomologist.

I think I’m glad that I don’t run in circles where I’ve ever run into (or even heard of) this problem: waiters pushing expensive bottled water on diners.

In anticipation of some traveling related to my new job, I recently joined American Airlines’ frequent flyer program, and today I received my first statement (problem highlighted in yellow):

For my new job, I’ve been re-reading Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber. In the Introduction, the author says that common sense is a critical element of the processes that he outlines.
I’m usually wary of appeals to common sense, as they are often used in conjunction with various logical fallacies. In this case, however, I really like Schwaber’s definition of common sense. He says that it “is a combination of experience, training, humility, wit and intelligence.” It really surprised me to see humility and wit in his definition, and it was a good sign that I would like the author’s point of view more generally.

Three weeks ago, I started a new job: QA engineer with Borland Software. I couldn’t be happier. The group that I’m working with is implementing a full-blown agile/scrum process. When I was interviewing with Borland, I told my interviewers that I’d used some agile methodologies in previous jobs. But now that I’ve been participating in a real agile methodology, I realize that there’s a fundamental difference between adopting some of the methodologies and adopting the philosophy of agile/scrum: it’s all about respect, truthfulness, collaboration, visibility, continual feedback, putting individual egos aside for the greater good, etc.

In a short report (audio only) this morning about the high cost of gasoline, the KUT reporter interviewed a UT economics professor who estimates that the instability and uncertainty caused by the war in Iraq accounts for about $7-10 of the rise in the cost of a barrel of oil.
So, the American taxpayers aren’t the only ones paying for the war. Oil consumers the world over are paying the price as well.