I've Boldly Broken From the Traveled Road

I’ve boldly broken from the traveled road.  
The toll, I found, was much to dear to pay.
I’ve left the path, ignored the ancient code.
With one last glance I’ve thrown my maps away.
For where I head no map can be designed.
There are no guarantees of how I’ll fare
Though you may call me “lost”, I hope to find
A life and love more beautiful and rare.
But I would travel pathless, not alone.
Will you come with me, Angel, lover, friend?
And you, my Lover-Saint, can we as one
In life, in love, seek out a better end?
  Let others walk the wider path and scorn
  While we find out how better loves are born.

[Karl Jennings - 12/24/2010]

I've found the most joy in my life in unconventional places. I don't know what it is about the "beaten path" but it always seems to become an end in itself, even when the more fertile fields of life and love have migrated elsewhere. I've come to the realization that life is too short to waste time following paths that only have the virtue of being well traveled. I don't intend to be a trail blazer, necessarily, though if I find what I'm looking for, I'll try to leave the trail well marked. I hope some of you will come with me, and others will forge new paths of their own.

Halloween Treat

I love Halloween.  I especially like the old-style spookiness that often seems to be forgotten in favor of blood and gore these days.  I also really enjoy spooky stories, poems and other writing and like to try my hand at it around this time of year.  This year, I came across a challenge to write a short story, (300 words), and it had to involve a pumpkin.  Here's my attempt:


Jack

Summoned from another year’s rest, I will protect you from darkness and from evil.  I’ve done this since ancient times, watching from porch or fence, daring the Evil Ones from making mischief here.  Oh, they will make mischief.  The lucky or persistent ones may even find a home where they can latch-on to strife or anger, hatred, envy, greed or any other misery.  Then they will do mischief, and more, but not here.  Not on my watch.  The oldest ones know better, but the younger, foolish ones I gobble up and swallow back to the dark place where they can think about their foolishness for another year.  Better luck next time, heh, heh.  

This is the charge I was born for: to protect you during this brief time when evil pours anew into your realm.  But each year I see fewer and fewer of my comrades.  Your neighbors have turned the ritual into a game, making mockery of the sacred gourds.  They forget the ancient ritual, the sacred symbols for eye and nose and mouth.  They carve bats and greetings and even (ugh) kittens into the sacred fruit, or worse.  The fools will weep.

But tonight I guard you, who remembers the sacred ways.  My face is fierce and my flame is strong.  I will keep the dark things from your home even as your neighbors are invaded.  (Kittens?  Really?)

Now the witching hour approaches.  Now the evil presses in from every shadow.  Now I burn with righteous fire!  But wait!  No!  My fire is weak.  My candle burns low.  It gutters and will go out!  That Old One!  It sees me falter.  You will be naked to him and he knows it.  Foolish mortal!  To leave me so weak at this evil hour!  This is not a game!  THIS IS NOT A GA--

Gay Marriage Opposition Shows No Substance

The initial trial over Prop 8 is over and I'm sure no one reading this is unaware that Judge Walker ruled the proposition unconstitutional.  Of course, proponents of the proposition are appealing the decision, and the question probably won't be settled until it goes to the Supreme Court.  However, Judge Walker's opinion (which can be read in its entirety here) makes it clear that proponents of Prop 8 had no other basis than religious bigotry for barring same-sex couples from the right to marry.

This is monumental.  As is well documented, the campaign for Prop 8, while a California state initiative that would have no standing outside the state of California, was heavily influenced by organizations (mostly religious) who drew enormous resources from out of state.  When Prop 8 was challenged in federal court, the state officials named as defendants (including Gov. Schwarzenegger) chose not to defend the proposition, the state Attorney General even conceding the unconstitutionality of the proposition.  This left the organization and individuals initially responsible for the proposition to come to its defense.  Because this issue has been touted almost as a last stand for "traditional marriage", and has enjoyed the support of such deep pockets and well organized indoctrinators as the Mormon and Catholic Churches, one should expect that this defense represented the best arguments available for preventing gay marriage.  Of course, in a court of law in a country where laws are not supposed to be enacted on purely religious bases, the proponents of Prop 8 took pains to avoid explicitly religious arguments supporting their proposition.  Unsurprisingly to many, without "god says so", they had nothing to left to offer, and Judge Walker agreed.

As one would expect in a pluralistic society such as ours, Judge Walker maintains:


"A state’s interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose."

Left to show a secular purpose behind their proposition to bar gays from marriage, the proponents of Prop 8 claimed that "the state's interest in marriage is procreative", but when asked to explain how allowing gays to marry would adversely affect this interest, the only response they had was "I don't know".  Despite this, they claimed they would show some 23 specific harmful consequences that would result from allowing gays to marry.  In the words of Judge Walker:

"At trial, however, proponents presented only one witness, David Blankenhorn, to address the government interest in marriage. Blankenhorn’s testimony is addressed at length hereafter; suffice it to say that he provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate."

The opposition purported to provide evidence that children raised in straight households fare better than those raised in same-sex households.  They failed to show any credible evidence of this.  Not a single legitimate study has shown this to be true, and in fact, the studies cited by the plaintiff's lawyers showed the opposite, that there was no appreciable difference in the adjustment or care of children raised by gays or lesbians, and those raised in more "traditional" families.  


In the end, the key witness for the proponents of Prop 8 agreed with the plaintiffs:

“Blankenhorn noted that marriage would benefit same-sex couples and their children, would reduce discrimination against gays and lesbians and would be 'a victory for the worthy ideas of tolerance and inclusion.'”

In spite of that admission, Blankenhorn maintained that gays should be denied the right to marry on the basis of his unsubstantiated opinion that to allow them to marry would "weaken the institution of marriage".  Anyone following the debates about gay marriage should be all too familiar with this vapid, yet often repeated platitude, clung to so desperately by the anti-gay-marriage crowd.  For years proponents of gay rights have asked "How, exactly?"  Now, officially and before a federal judge they reveal their only legitimate answer "I don't know."


Religions enjoy a lot of freedom in the United States.  They are free to disseminate all manner of doctrines, theories, creeds, and even diatribes, venom, racism and bigotry, as are the rest of us.  What they don't have the freedom to do in the United States is to legislate their private religiously based morality.  To enact laws abridging the activity of others in the United States, they have to show that there is a compelling state interest in that abridgment.  The proponents of Prop 8, despite the support of highly organized and well financed organizations on a national level, have failed utterly to show any state interest in denying marriage rights to gays.  I submit that this is because there is none.  If there were, the Prop 8 trial would surely have been the place to show it.  

Thanksgiving Thoughts

I love Thanksgiving.  I always have, and I think it's one of the few holidays I enjoy as much or even more than when I was a kid.  As I kid, I always loved watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, and of course, I loved all the food and the time off from school.  As I'm older now, I haven't watched the parade in years, lately because I don't have live TV anymore.  Also, as an adult, I've probably worked on Thanksgiving as often as I've had the day off.  As for the food, well, I do like it, but these days it seems like I have to make a conscious effort to just enjoy food and not worry about whether it's keeping me fat or clogging my heart or speeding me towards diabetes. 

So why do I say I love Thanksgiving?  I love it because it seems almost immune to all the things that detract from the other holidays. 

First of all, Thanksgiving seems almost immune to commercialism.  I say almost because people do spend a lot on food for Thanksgiving, and of course, every grocery store takes advantage of that fact for specials and sales, but for the most part those are low key and more like a bonus for shopping with a given merchant, rather than an enticement to buy things you weren't already shopping for.  There are displays of decorations for sale, too, but they are usually relegated to a small shelf in the back of the store, vaguely near the Christmas decorations.  I have noticed in the last couple of years that the companies who sell Christmas lights have been marketing lights for other holidays.  I just saw a yard with several turkeys built out of strings of autumn-colored lights on plastic frames.  I doubt those will catch on, though.  Only the most die-hard yard exhibitionist is likely to go for those.  The rest of us probably welcome a brief respite between taking down the Halloween decorations and putting up the Christmas ones.  Additionally, aside from perhaps a host or hostess gift, there's none of the gift-giving pressure some feel at Christmas time.

Also, Thanksgiving is non-denominational.  In fact, although it's a time many people thank their respective gods for their "blessings", you don't have to be religious at all to express thankfulness, or at least reflect on your good fortune.  Also, unlike "Merry Christmas" these days, you can wish a "Happy Thanksgiving" to just about anyone without fear of offense.  Gratitude is universal. 

Finally, although most people probably do still spend the holiday with some combination of relatives, Thanksgiving is very accomodating of last minute guests and ad-hoc groups.  With the tendency for extended families to become more and more spread out across the country though, it's not always practical to get everyone together for Thanksgiving.  I've spent many Thanksgivings overseas, or far from family with little money or vacation time for travel.  Perhaps because it's a simpler holiday than say, Christmas, it's easier to celebrate in ad-hoc groups.  It's easy for friends who can't (or don't want to) be with relatives to get together and share a meal in celebration.  It's usually pretty easy to add a last minute guest or two as well.  I've never been to a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't accomodate a few unexpected plates and still have plenty of left-overs.  Also, last minute guests usually don't have to worry about intruding on a family gift exchange. 

Don't get me wrong.  I enjoy most holidays, and I'm always up for a chance to celebrate with friends and family.  To me, though, the heart the holiday season is spending time with people you love.  As much as I enjoy Christmas, it's the simple spirit of Thanksgiving that I grow to appreciate more and more each year. 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Sci-Fi I Want to See As Sci-Fact (Part 2)

More things often addressed in science fiction that I would like to see as science fact in my lifetime:

True Fully Immersive Virtual Reality

Whether it's a "holodeck" on the Enterprise, or the X-Men's "Danger Room", or even virtual reality piped directly into our brains a la The Matrix, truly immersive virtual reality has long been a sci-fi writers dream.  Who wouldn't love an environment where you could create an entire world from scratch, or modify the one you know into a place where you are only limited by your own imagination?  I certainly would. 

I imagine the technology that will bring this idea to us first will be some sort of direct brain interface.  It seems likely that decoding the way our brains receive information from our senses and learning to simulate those signals will be much easier to acheive than learning how to manipulate actual matter, as would be required to create a "holodeck" or the like, not to mention the enormous amount of power required for matter manipulation.  Of course, I don't think I'd be the first to volunteer for the clinical trails of early brain/computer interfacing.  First I'd have to see the technology refined and be sure I'm not likely to "download" a virus into my brain or short circuit myself or something perhaps even worse.  Given adequate safety assurances, though, I'd love to be able to enter a fantasy world at will, or meet up with internet friends in a virtual space of our own collaborative design. 

Of course, personal amusement is an obvious (and I think, non-trivial) use of such technology.  However, I think there could be many more serious uses.  Imagine being able to design a building (or vehicle, or what have you) simply by summoning the parts you imagine and commanding them into place.  Imagine being able to walk through your design and experience it as if it already existed in the real world before even beginning actual construction?  Of course, if the technology were easily available and sustainable, why build in the real world at all, at least for most things.  I can envision a world where large numbers of people exist primarily in virtual space, especially if it only differs from the "real" world in ways that are actually an improvement.  So many of us spend so much time online now it isn't hard at all to imagine us choosing to spend even more time in a space that could have all the advantages of the world wide web in addition to full sensory experience. 

Granted, we'll want to make sure there's someone or something in real-space keeping the whole system running. 

Human Longivity

Imagine living for 1000 years?  What about 10,000 years?  Scientists are making great strides toward unraveling the mysteries of why our bodies age and fall apart.  It seems reasonable to suspect that once we do understand the things that go wrong, we stand a good chance of fixing them.  I recently watched a TED Talk by a man named Aubrey De Gray, who believes that the first human to live 1000 years is probably alive already.  That may not be all that far-fetched an idea considering how technology seems to be advancing exponentially.  Interestingly, De Gray believes that the first human to live 10,000 years is likely only 10 years younger than the first to live 1000.  His reasoning is that once life expectancy is raised to 1000 years, barring accident, that is roughly 900 years more time for technical advancements to increase lifespan even further, and each increase is even more chance for further increase. 

Personally, I'm trying to live each day to its fullest.  After all, even if expected lifespan is increased to a million years, any one of us could be hit by a bus tomorrow.  Nevertheless, I'd love to know there's a chance I could be around long enough to see how mankind develops over the next millennium or two.

Sci-Fi I Want to See As Sci-Fact (Part 1)

When I was a kid, I used to love sci-fi. Movies, books, short stories, it didn't matter. I loved it all. I especially loved stories set in a human future. I loved to dream about what life would be like in 2010 (or even 1999). The kid I was might be a little disappointed how things have turned out. I mean, where's my flying car? Where are the moon bases? How come we still don't have a colony on Mars? Sure, we have cell phones, and the Internet is probably one of the most quickly pervasive and culture altering developments since the automobile, but they seem a little tame when compared to the futures of Space: 1999, or even 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Now that I'm an adult (for the most part), I'm still fascinated by visions of the future, even if I'm a little more critical of the various futuristic visions I come across. Also, my priorities have changed a bit. I'm not all that interested in a flying car, though I would like one that would drive itself, so I could read, nap, surf the net, what have you, during my commute. Nevertheless, there are speculated future developments I yearn for.

First Contact

Probably hundreds, if not thousands of stories have been written about mankind's first contact with an extra-terrestrial civilization. One of the most plausible (to me, at least) is Contact, by Carl Sagan. In it, he imagines a first contact coming in the form of a signal received from outer space. Indeed, there are a number of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) projects going on right now. I even participate in one of them, SETI@home, a project which uses home computers' downtime to analyze radio waves from space, hoping to find a signal amid all that noise. Of course, I'd love to have the home computer that actually found such a signal, but just having it happen would be exciting enough, regardless of who actually found such a signal.

Why does the idea excite me? Haven't I seen Independence Day? Or V, or War of the Worlds? Aren't I afraid of becoming an item on some intergalactic buffet? Quite frankly, no. First of all, the chances that some alien species, evolved on a completely different world, with completely different evironmental factors, would even be able to use us as a food source are likely very small. Second, I think if they've mastered interstellar travel, they've likely solved any problems related to a sustainable food supply. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think benign curiosity, if not outright benevolence is a more likely motivation for interstellar exploration than conquest.

AI: Artificial Intelligence

Almost as exciting as first contact with an ETI, and perhaps more likely to happen first, is the development of a true artificial intelligence. My excitement for this is two-fold. First, it would be wonderful to be able to interact with computers as naturally as we do with people. I'd love to have a personal artificial secretary who would keep all my appointments straight, scan the web for information I need or simply might like to know, and screen my incoming information such as phone calls, emails, texts, tweets, and whatever other manner we devise to keep ourselves connected. But aside from simple convenience, I think the insights into our own intelligence we will surely gain from the development of an AI will be invaluable. Also, I'm a bit of a singularitarian. I think we should be working to create an AI that will be beneficial to the human race. I believe that we face problems that our own intelligence, unaided, is proving inadequate to solve. Already we have AIs that can devise their own scientific experiments, carry them out, and analyze the results. Can true human-equivalent artificial intelligence be that far behind?

Why I Think What I Think (Part 2)

Continuing my list of people who have greatly influenced my worldview:

Robert T. Carroll

Robert T. Carroll was a teacher in the philosophy department at Sacramento City College until he retired in 2007. I first came across Bob's writings through his website, The Skeptic's Dictionary. This was in the mid 1990's, and his website was much smaller than it is today. The Internet, or at least the WWW part, was still a relatively new phenomenon, and I spent a lot of time surfing the web. It was during a late night surfing session that I stumbled upon The Skeptic's Dictionary, but I don't even remember what the specific topic was that led me there. At any rate, I knew I had stumbled upon a rare gem for that time: a website full of articles on a wide range of subject which were all well written and rational. While I knew what "skeptical" means, this was my first real introduction to skepticism as analytical tool. I enjoyed the first couple of articles I read so much that I started at the beginning and read all of his articles in order. There were probably fewer than a hundred articles when I started, and I've been pretty good at reading new articles as they've been added since.

Many of the articles were about what I expected, and poked holes in ideas that I already was skeptical of myself, like BigFoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Others were more challenging for me because they dealt with things I either hadn't considered from a skeptical perspective (multi-level marketing, false memory), or I had believed (or hoped) were true at some point in my past, (UFOs, god, etc.). It was through these articles, as well as Bob's writings on philosophy and critical thinking, that I learned to apply the same rigorous tools in evaluating things I perhaps even wanted to believe as I did to things I already thought were suspect.

All this came at a time in my life where I had come to reject a lot of things I had been taught growing up and was still searching for the tools to make sense of the world. I sometimes wonder if I would have been receptive to Bob's ideas when I was 15 or even 20. Would I have been able to save myself a lot of stumbling around in the dark had I had access to something like The Skeptic's Dictionary earlier on, or would I have avoided it as something designed to weaken faith. I don't know, but I'm eternally grateful that I came across it when I did.

Carl Sagan

I first really discovered the writings of Carl Sagan in my late twenties as I was rediscovering and reinterpreting the world in non-religious terms. I had known of Sagan from his television series Cosmos, but hadn't really read any of his books. It was largely the respect and admiration that Bob Carroll gave him and his writings that sparked my curiosity. The first Sagan book I read was The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. This book helped me to examine the things I believe and had believed, and taught me how to ask the right questions when it came to claims of the paranormal.

When I find an author I like, I have a tendency to stick with him until I've read as much of his work as I can get my hands on. Sagan was no exception. I read everything I could find, including works he had written with his wife Ann Druyan. They opened my mind to a naturalistic universe, one that did not require an intelligent designer, though it did not exclude one. Suddenly the universe became an enormous place, far larger, and far more fascinating than I had ever imagined. As much as the science and logic of his writings, though, I've been greatly influenced by his optimism. Far from being adrift in a universe where nothing matters, I found in his brand of skepticism and even atheism, a real hope that we, as humans, can work things out for ourselves, and that we still might not be alone in the universe. Through Sagan's writing, in part, I found the naive faith and hopes of my youth replaced with awe and new kinds of hope, and a new kind of comfort about the world around me.

I was greatly saddened when Sagan died in 1996. It was as if I had just met the man and he had been taken away. I wonder what new insights we might have, had he lived through the last decade.