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2011-03-25T00:24:00.001-07:00

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Updates to follow...

Thoughts Do Not End, and Neither Does Extra Code

2011-03-16T22:49:00.001-07:00

I don't think it's proper to say I wish I didn't have as much energy as I do right now, but maybe I wish I could flip and switch, sleep, then flip it back on. That would be very useful. I feel like working all night on business and into tomorrow, then taking three days off for "life". But, I'd probably feel worse than simply sleeping a while and getting up normally and working.

I think it's that 15 months of bureaucracy has left me with a huge collection of stalled motivation to execute on ideas for solving customer / user problems in the SIMPLEST and most user-valuable (and those most economically valuable) path first, rather than for technological fancifulness.

When you see, very clearly, that simple, uncomplicated solutions to problems can prevent months and months of backtracking, it's very frustrating to have to watch those decisions being made. But, you also have to realize when it isn't worth your own personal expenditure, when what you are working on is not under your authority or ultimate influence.

Writing code should not be like a "drug hit". When it gets like that, then no amount of code is ever enough. There has to be more, more, more.

Yet, the words of this random google search ring so, so, so true:

Improve Code By Removing It

http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Improve_Code_by_Removing_It

Less is more.
It's a quite trite little maxim, but sometimes it really is true.

One of the improvements I've made to our codebase over the last few weeks is to remove chunks of it.

We'd written the software following XP tenets, including YAGNI (that is, You Aren't Gonna Need It). Human nature being what it is, we inevitably fell short in a few places.

I observed that the product was taking too long to execute certain tasks — simple tasks that should have been near instantaneous. This was because they were overimplemented; festooned with extra bells and whistles that were not required, but at the time had seemed like a good idea.

So I've simplified the code, improved the product performance, and reduced the level of global code entropy simply by removing the offending features from the codebase. Helpfully, my unit tests tell me that I haven't broken anything else during the operation.

A simple and thoroughly satisfying experience.
So why did the unnecessary code end up there in the first place? Why did one programmer feel the need to write extra code, and how did it get past review or the pairing process? Almost certainly something like:

It was a fun bit of extra stuff, and the programmer wanted to write it. (Hint: Write code because it adds value, not because it amuses you.)
Someone thought that it might be needed in the future, so felt it was best to code it now. (Hint: That isn't YAGNI. If you don't need it right now, don't write it right now.)
It didn't appear to be that big an "extra," so it was easier to implement it rather than go back to the customer to see whether it was really required. (Hint: It always takes longer to write and to maintain extra code. And the customer is actually quite approachable. A small extra bit of code snowballs over time into a large piece of work that needs maintenance.)
The programmer invented extra requirements that were neither documented nor discussed that justified the extra feature. The requirement was actually bogus. (Hint: Programmers do not set system requirements; the customer does.)

What are you working on right now? Is it all needed?

Time for Sleep Once More

2011-03-14T21:45:00.001-07:00

I bought a wireless keyboard / multi-touch touchpad for my old HP that I hook into the big-screen TV. It' working quite well. I set the HP up on the book shelf and set the display to only show on the TV. I also moved some of the wireless router and DSL modem devices of the edge of the couch and onto some old popcorn tins. Finally getting past these small mental weights that are really annoying me around here. If I cannot be "sustainable" in keeping my mess near 0, how can I hope to be useful elsewhere?

-----

I finished the American Mind audio course while walking at the Chattahoochee river trail after work today. The last couple of lectures were about the dissolution of "The New Left" in the 1960s, and then about Neo-Conservatives. I found it very fascinating that emigres from Europe were heavily involved in both the acculturation of the New Left and the Neo-Conservatives. What was most interesting toward the end was the observation that the left had sort of "missed he boat" when it came to understanding the human condition, at last as it applied to US culture. Its thought leaders, building on their own understanding of Marx, built their own philosophy on "Homo Economicus", or so-to-speak, upon the belief that people were driven, primarily, by economic motivations and that they would want to see a revolution i the social structure that would give them, and society at large, a better deal compared to the power-brokers of industry and capital. However, what the Neo-Conservatives understood, and "capitalized" on when Reagan brought them fresh-faced into his administration was that people are driven more by a larger identification with their "culture". And, part of the American self-identity is a belief in social mobility afforded to them through the existing capitalist system.

At least, that's how I recall what I heard at this moment.

There is much more about the course that fascinated me, but I'm not very skilled at pouring out detailed reviews of facts from things I've just read or listened to. You'd have to listen to it for yourself. But, let's just say that these are some of the highlights popping to mind so far:

The development of "Pragmatism", out of William James' and John Dewey's life and work, and how this "philosophy of practical utility" continues to this day.
A number of scientists, including Albert Einstein, who regretted the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein said if he had known Germany would not have succeeded, then he would never have alerted Franklin Roosevelt in 1939.
Apparently, some American scientists freely gave instructions to Russians after WWII about making atomic bombs, in hopes that the Russians would develop a bomb and thus force the United States to become more balanced. (Cannot remember the names of them)

I guess that "worked", but thankfully the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't leave the world toast.

The development of university science labs in the late 1800's following the models of German universities, in which corporations often provided the initial funding, and ultimately became the "breeding ground" for the labor needed to power corporations.

I need to listen again, but the lecture about Reinhold Niebuhr was very fascinating. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr

Excerpt:

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (pronounced /ˈraɪnhoʊld ˈniːbʊər/; June 21, 1892 – June 1, 1971) was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world. He attacked utopianism as useless for dealing with reality, writing in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944):

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

His realism deepened after 1945 and led him to support American efforts to confront Soviet communism around the world. A powerful speaker and lucid author,^[vague] he was the most influential religious leader of the 1940s and 1950s in American public affairs.^{[citation needed]} Niebuhr battled with the religious liberals over what he called their naïve views of sin and the optimism of the Social Gospel, and battled with the religious conservatives over what he viewed as their naïve view of Scripture and their narrow definition of "true religion."

Some time ago, Speaking of Faith had an episode called "Obama's Theologian", about him. Here it is: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2009/obamas-theologian/

Testing

2011-03-14T21:09:00.001-07:00

testing

The Corporeality of Spirit

2011-03-06T22:05:00.001-08:00

I spent Thursday and Friday working on the new business, and made satisfying progress. It's going to be fun to bring it to life and learn how to make it successful.

Friday I saw the Hawks get beat by the Thunder, with Durant getting 29 points to go just above his average. What do you expect from the leading scorer? It was a close game right until the last minute though. Saturday I went to see a performance of the play Inherit the Wind in Roswell with ATL Science Tavern members. It was a very good performance. Afterward, I watched and read some more historical background on the Scopes Monkey Trial, which is pretty fascinating. The fictionalized trial and characters of the play, while they seek to portray a general attitude, are not precise representations of the real trial, so I recommend reading the historical record. Earlier, my mom sent a link about possible fossilized microbial life in meteors, so that will be gigantic news if it turns out true.

And tonight I saw Stomp at the (Fabulous) Fox Theatre with Erica. It was very good, and loud. I saw it in New York City a few years ago too.

I also watched the film Creation, about Charles Darwin and his eldest daughter Anne. It's very sad, because Anne died when she was 10 years old. This event, ultimately, gave Darwin the conviction to finish his now famous On the Origin of the Species book, which has so dramatically changed the world during the past 152 years since its publication. The film also, naturally, portrays the struggle between Darwin and his wife Emma because of Emma's religious convictions and societal sensibilities. Darwin slowly and painfully lost his own religious faith, and during one scene leaves the pews of a sermon in which it is stated that not even a sparrow will fall to the ground without God willing it. He later remarks, mockingly, about God's beneficence toward butterflies being so high that he designed wasps to lay eggs inside the butterflies' caterpillar larvae.

Besides all that, I did a lot of reading or listening this weekend. I wish that time could be suspended so that I could read, listen, and watch everything I want to learn. On the one hand, I've been listening to lectures in The American Mind about the early to mid 19th century, as theological seminaries began to take root in the U.S.A. The discussions have been around the development the Moral Philosophers, the America Romanticists, and the early influence of Princeton Theological Seminary. Even though the different sects have some very differing ideas as to liturgy and even salvation, it strikes me as very much contrasting with what I started watching tonight, "The Buddha", a documentary on NetFlix.

Without the aid of a specific creation story, at least not one that would cause such consternation as has happened in Christian-dominated society, Buddha's teachings are not about external controllers like God , but about the individual response to the suffering or "general dissatisfaction" that we all experience in the world, ultimately arriving upon the 8-fold-path which I have not yet gotten to in the film, but am familiar with from prior study.

I confess to not knowing much about the varieties of Buddhist thought, and whatever metaphysical or supernatural beliefs may be involved, but the parable of Siddharta does strike me in many ways as similar to that of Jesus. Yes, there are great differences, but as far as stories go, they both have archetypal aspects to them and are great stories that serve to educate in ways that mere facts or data never have. Only feelings, felt in ourselves, lead us to compassion. Words on a page rarely do that, but stories can remind us of our own feelings, and can aid in our ability to imagine the feelings of others.

One part of the story I had never heard was that when Buddha was seated under the bohdi tree and tempted by Mara, he placed his hand on the ground as if to say that the ground, or the Earth, would be Buddha's witness to his ability to withstand the temptations of mara. The commentators remarked that this was Buddha's way of communicating his one-ness with the Earth, with nature.

This discussion recalled a very powerful memory from my childhood which must have been a pivotal moment inside of my growing brain and consciousness, because it's still so vivid, yet feels so buried inside of me, that it feels as if it happened centuries ago. I don't believe it's my earliest memory, but I also don't really know when it took place.

But as I remember it:

I was playing outside the house in Wappingers Falls, and was sitting on the grass, probably sifting through the grass and dirt and pebbles. I observed that far from being completely green, like it appears from the street, when you got up close to the ground, the grass settled into the the soil, but small pebbles and other types of plants lived there too, like onion grass and clovers. Beneath the soil and pebbles I could find "potato bugs", and maybe even worms. Sitting there amidst what other people were doing, like mowing their lawns, or planting flowers, and hearing birds chirp and feeling the breeze blow the leaves in the trees above me, kicking off "helicopter seeds" to flutter toward the ground, I put my fingers against the grass and soil.

I felt then, for a few moments that have remained with me, no separation between myself and the Earth beneath me. I think I had a flash thought of children on the other side of the world digging their own hands into the soil, and wondered what they were thinking. Some people, with the language and technology to prepare them for it, might have said they "felt God's presence" in that moment. But for me, I had not grown up with that. It was simply an awareness of the life around and beneath me, as being not just separate from me, but also contiguous with my own life. It was very reassuring and calming.

This was probably between 25 and 30 years ago, in the early 80's, so I'm not going to revise history and say I was becoming aware of the ecology or environmentalism. If anything, it was a premonition to myself that life is not a fully independent event. It depends entirely upon a chain of being and interconnections.

I will be the first to admit I've felt alienated from that reassurance and comfort so long ago. Perhaps by being so soon after that day immersed into the world scholastic education, into entertainment, and later still high technology as a career, I became disconnected from the primal lessons and bonds of nature. To this day, it is only when I walk through natural spaces and take time to gaze upon the mysterious sinews of a strong tree that I see a glimpse of that ground beneath my feat from seeming centuries ago.

As I reflect upon the mental castles built by the theologians of early US history, even as they inherited much of their architecture from Europe, with their elaborate explanations, I'm struck by how anthropocentric these views actually are. Darwin, so conflicted in his culture by its dogmas and traditions, used most powerfully his own hands and eyes to reach down to the Earth, to pull up its secrets by their roots. And, not only did he realize that he, and all of us, are one with that Earth, but he explained how we came to be so, how he himself came into being.

And with his ideas, far from separating humankind from nature's god, he brought corporeality to spirit, the animating or vital principle in a living being.

Existence is a mystery, and its ultimate nature always will be whether we refer to it as God, Nature, or by no name. But learning and understanding more and more about our own relationship to all that exists strengthens our security while ever expanding our wonder and awe.

This spring I'll be volunteering in the community garden here in my neighborhood. I look forward to getting my fingers into the ground and hope to experience again the corporeality of spirit that I felt so long ago as a child.

Sleep Comes Late

2011-03-02T23:21:00.000-08:00

Tonight I am totally invigorated because tomorrow is the first day I get to spend devoted entirely to working on starting my business. I'm now working three days a week at the bank, and two days on this business. Hopefully I can continue the part-time work for at least a couple of months or so, but even if not I will be able to afford working solely on the business for at least a few months before needing to have a stream of income again. Taking to time to at least get started and "in production", even if just in alpha or beta, is going to be a tremendous step for me and my business partners.

For me I have the feeling that while I'm not sure how long it's going to take to become successful with it, I know we will become successful. I feel this way because we are flexible and adapting to change very rapidly already.

Sleep!

PBS God in America

2011-02-27T21:49:00.001-08:00

I've almost finished re-watching the PBS God in America series, which can be watched in its entirety via Netflix or on PBS at http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/. It's a very good series that I recommend. It begins with Spanish conquistadors and continues through Jerry Fallwell's Moral Majority, and beyond to George W. Bush and the changing face of religious plurality in the United States. It covers how Los Angeles is the most ethnically diverse city in the world, and also the most religiously diverse city in the world. It also discusses how 1 in 6 Americans are not religious, or atheist or agnostic. It shows Rick Warren talking about AIDS in Africa, and poverty. It concludes with President Obama, as candidate, talking about how faith can inform political discourse, but that, ultimately, arguments need to be made to make sense to people of different belief systems.

I have to admit, I find it fascinating to think about what causes people to believe the things they believe. Or, maybe I should say, I'm fascinated by listening to people explain the reasons for what they profess to believe.

I grew up respecting the parables and wisdom embodied in many religious texts, from Christianity, to Hinduism, to Buddhism, but not a follower of a creed or dogma. I am growing more and more interested in seeking to understand why individual people believe different things that emanate from their own religious or philosophical vantage point. It's important, I believe, not to look at religion as a "virus", something vile and despicable with an attitude like the so-called "New atheist" writers espouse. It's better to examine religion for what it is, and it is often changing.

I've started to listen to a course called "The Birth of the Modern Mind", which is a brief history of The Enlightenment, but I have not gotten very far yet. There are so many courses and materials I want to take and read.

Integration

2011-02-27T17:36:00.000-08:00

I have another blog that I've used for technology-only related posts, Agile From the Ground Up. But, I'm kind of tired of maintaining different collections of writings in different places. There's just one me. I have many different interests and aspects, and activities to me. I'd rather not segment myself.

It's been a long past year and start to this year already, with my aunt passing away, my brother Danny getting surgery, and my father stating that he going to be, at long last, telling my two other brothers, David and Jeff, about me. That's no small thing for me, after almost 19 years of being a secret, once again, to half of my family, and never being able to really see through the veil of what was being done, or not wanting to, until the last couple of years.

But during that time, I've come to a far greater and wonderful knowledge and connection to my mother's side of my family and upward through my grandfather and his siblings and even his parents! How fortunate I am for this! It is one of the reasons I am working to create a book about my great-grandmother's life and her beautiful paintings.

Over the last couple of years, I've either started or co-founded several social groups that have been influential to me and others. The most prominent of these is The Atlanta Science Tavern, which I co-founded with Carol Potter in 2008. The group now has over 1,000 members, and it has been, truly, an exercise in self-organization and cooperation amongst many dedicated people. There will be a brief article in Atlanta magazine in June about the group. I am very thankful that Marc Merlin has taken formal leadership of the group and will be leading its transition into a full-blown not-for-profit organization. I can only imagine the expanded good that we'll be able accomplish in the coming years.

I suppose I have a different sensibility about the world than a lot of people, including many in my own extended family who are Christians. I was not raised to believe any specific creed, a fact for which I am very grateful to my mother and family. Because of this, I feel most comfortable considering myself Humanist and Unitarian Universalist, being now a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, which is a congregation which collaborated with Ebenezer Baptist to let white students and black students get to know each other during tumultuous times around the middle of last century.

Over the last few days I've been watching PBS documentaries about presidents, Native Americans, and today I started re-watching the God in America series, which is fascinating. I've also listened to a few more lectures in the American Mind audio course from The Teaching Company that I mentioned in yesterday's post. What struck me today, as it did when I visited his estate, was Thomas Jefferson's willingness to speak up, on record, for the Baptists' right to believe as they did, even though he personally disagreed with their views. Leaving aside other dubious aspects of Jefferson's character, it is important to understand just how critical his support for religious freedom really was. You can read his letter to the Danbury Baptists here: http://www.usconstitution.net/jeffwall.html. You can also learn much more about Jefferson, including the Jeffersonian Bible, here in the PBS series "From Jesus to Christ": http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.html

Why comment on this now? Well, it's on my mind, and that's usually reason enough for me. However, more importantly, is that I believe in an integrated stance toward life and all that is. Perhaps part of that comes from having had to wage many battles against my own segmentation, but I think it also comes from a natural human tendency toward wanting peace and prosperity for one's self and in one's vicinity.

Last night I sat with Virginia at the Science Tavern meetup event. She has come to many, many events from the beginning, and is always informative and enthusiastic. She told me more about the Southeastern Photographic Society that she is heavily involved with, and also about how she knows S. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-Fil-A, and how she knows the Spiveys, who donated funds for Spivey Hall, after they made money developing Lake Jodeco and Lake Spivey, which is in the same neighborhood where my good friend Appollo lives, and where I've had many great boat rides during the summers.

Anyway, getting the chance to talk with her in more depth, I re-realized one of the primary reasons AST is as important as it is to me and many other people these days. While all of us could get our science news from the television, the internet, magazines, or books, it is only through conversation that we get to form connections and build friendships that often surpass boundaries of age, race, culture or sub-culture, political viewpoint, and many other dimensions.

We got a big tent. Come on under.

AOP Reading Links

2011-02-27T12:36:00.001-08:00

It's nice to relax at home and try to catch up on some long-postponed technical reading.

I've glanced over these articles a number of times, and know that many of the tools I use depend on them, but I've always wanted to study them much more deeply.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/library/AOPLibrary.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/UsingAOPInCSharp.aspx

And, the entire LinFu series: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/LinFuPart1.aspx

This kind of approach has been used in jQuery for a long time now, and other JavaScript frameworks, and it's common in Ruby and has been used in lots of C# and Java programs as well. Despite its wide-spread adoption in frameworks and tools, it's still uncommon to see it in application development.

Reading Notes

Part I: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/LinFuPart1.aspx

After reading part I http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/LinFuPart1.aspx, I am not sure how the interceptor knows to discriminate to the Greet method. However, I think that's explained here: "Every proxy generated by LinFu dynamically overrides all of its parent's virtual methods." I think that means even if there were a "Farewell" method, it would still call the identical methods in the IInvokeWraper instance.

Part II: Here Comes Rubber Ducky

This part is about Duck typing and other interesting aspects of the framework. It's pretty easy to understand. Nothing to comment on.

Fighting Terrorism Since 1492

2011-02-27T00:57:00.000-08:00

I often put off writing. I put it off because I'm not sure what I want to write about, or whether I want to write about one thing and not another. All of that is just mental noise. It's more important to simply write. Transcribing some of my great-grandmother's journals tonight shows me that very clearly. Some days, she simply dashed off a few words. Those entries are on http://CarolaLGoughArt.blogspot.com.

I watched several documentary episodes today. I finished the We Shall Remain PBS documentary about Native Americans and their struggle against homeland aggression from settlers. The faces in Carola's paintings have always haunted me, and this documentary tells the story very deeply. It is deplorable what our government did to the native people of this land for so many years. Next I watched another American Experience documentary, FDR. Franklin Roosevelt. I grew up just a few miles from his estate in Hyde Park, New York. I've seen his home in Warm Springs, Georgia also. As a "traitor to his class" of privilege and inherited wealth , he did whatever he could to help turn around the nation during the depression. Bringing electricity to rural areas was something I learned about in Warm Springs.

After watching this, I went running in Freedom Park, and bought my "Gimme Green" rice shake at Sevananda. I also stopped into the Native American store in Little Five Points and spoke with one of the workers there for a little while. He is one-quarter Sioux. He gave me a lot of things to think about the history of Native Americans. There are maps of different tribes and peoples on the walls in the store, and many books, music cds, jewelry, news paper articles, bumper stickers, T-Shirts. One of the most fitting is below which reads "Homeland Security -- Fighting Terrorism Since 1492"

What a thought-provoking perspective on things, isn't it?

While jogging I was also listening to the audio course "The American Mind". I listened to the first 6 lectures so far, which discuss The Enlightenment and the Great Awakenings and Jonathan Edwards' influence. It's fascinating to understand the founding of Harvard and Yale, among others, as competing institutions born out of essentially religiously-derived differences that stretch back into the "old world".

This is the course description:

Americans pride themselves on being doers rather than thinkers. Ideas are naturally suspect to such a people. But ideas are at the root of what it means to be American, and today’s habits of thought practiced by citizens throughout the United States are the lineal descendants of a powerful body of ideas that traces back to the first European settlers and that was enriched by later generations of American thinkers.

Behind this nation’s diverse views on religion, education, social equality, democracy, and other vital issues is a long-running intellectual debate about the right ordering of the human, natural, and divine worlds.
In their own times such great thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William James, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others engaged in lively and often contentious debate that helped mold America’s institutions and attitudes. Their approach was frequently honed by ideas from abroad—from Locke, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Gandhi, among others.

You can see the entire list of lectures at the link above.

I'm just now getting into the section where the discussion of Locke and his theory of property is being covered in lecture 6. As I listened to this, I thought back to the Native American treatment and the contrasting views of nature, God, ownership, and reality that came crashing into each other when settlers (invaders from the perspective of the Native Americans) attempted to forcibly convert natives to Christianity, take their land away and push them further and further away into reservations, and ultimately to destroy their culture. In my readings of the Christian Gospels, I can say this is not something Christ would have done. Unless you're one of those people who likes to drag out verses about "bringing a sword", then you'll find it hard to justify such brutality within the words of Christ. It is for reasons like these that I cannot take seriously claims of people to be "on God's side" when a blind eye is turned to injustice like what was done to Native Americans.

The subject of the painting below, one painted by my great-grandmother Carola, is a human being, one with unalienable rights, as in:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Thank you very much, Mr. Hobbes, Mr. Locke, Mr. Paine, and also Mr. Jefferson. Yet, when human beings are viewed from a distance, through the lens of nothing more than problem, profit or plunder, then certainly we will see exterminations and cleansing such as what took place over a span of hundreds of years in the Americas to its native people, via the slave trade, or what happened in Nazi Germany to Jewish people and other non-Aryan peoples.

Aristotle wrote:

“The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”.

This is the art of dignity, an inner quality of a human being viewed as such.

Maybe Infinity Is Time Enough

2011-02-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

I know I need to sleep within the next few minutes. My gripe against sleep is only that there are thousands of things I want to do. I want to experience them all simultaneously. I wish I could be learning more on my piano, learning more about business, reading numerous technical books, novels, philosophies, all at once. Likewise I want to be hiking, traveling and exercising and going to dance parties and watching movies and listening to music and visiting friends and family. I want to learn how to draw again, and eventually how to paint. I want to become "more serious" of playing tennis, learning more strategy and technique. I want to write the books and essays and create the animation artwork I've thought about. I want to have a family, and to continue volunteering my time with community efforts. I want everything.

I want to do all of these things. I wish I could do them all simultaneously and be an observer of all of them, like an omniscient observer of my own infinities. Though it seems it would require an infinite time-scale or infinite presence to do everything.

I know I have to settle for sequential progress. I know, I know.

Silence is a Good Teacher

2011-02-19T23:08:00.000-08:00

I love silence. It is during silence that the most fundamental of our life concerns and thoughts can arise in our minds unobstructed. For me, this means thoughts of my family as well as thoughts of my career and outside interests. Although, of late, I've increasingly sought to merge my "outside interests" with my envisioned career. These goals take time.

I've started the work of creating a book about my great-grandmother, with a project sketch and outline at http://CarolaLGoughArt.blogspot.com.

I am very tired now, and will have to complete thoughts later.

Where Were You?

2011-02-14T20:35:00.000-08:00

As a child I thought I would always be an "only-child". Sometimes I wondered what would it be like if I had older siblings. Would they be as good to me as my mother's siblings, who were between 16 and 19 years older than me? Or, would they be in "sibling-rivalry" with me?

When I learned that I would, in roughly 9 months, have a half-sibling, I was very happy. No longer would I be an "only-child", and I would not always wonder. It's more than 20 years later now, and my half-brother Danny lives with me now in Atlanta. We've had a lot of good times over the past couple of years, after I had lived away and gone to college in Atlanta while he grew up with our mom and his dad, my stepfather. It's very hard to imagine him not being a part of my life.

I actually have two other half-brothers who live in New York state. Unfortunately, I've been kept a secret from them my father and stepmother. This causes much pain to me.

But, lately, its causing more than pain. It's causing guilt. I feel a natural responsibility and love toward my two other brothers, one of whom I lived with briefly when he was an infant.

I feel guilty because some years ago I got a letter from my father with his resume in it along with a computer disk of a web page he had built while taking a course at work.

On his resume he mentioned that he was married with two children, David and Jeffrey

Somewhere in the white space I expected one simple sentence to read, "His older son Josh lives in Atlanta." But, it was nowhere to be found.

This caused me considerable frustration and for quite sometime when I visited New York and my family asked me about seeing my dad I refused to even discuss it.

I feel now like I should have tried sooner to reestablish contact, as if I had done that then perhaps my other brothers would not have gone so long without knowing me yet.

Logically, I don't believe it's my fault, but that doesn't mean I don't wish I had done more.
I have painful thoughts of them asking me, "Where were you?"

I am still a patient person, perhaps to the point of fault. I believe it will be best for my father and stepmother to tell my brothers this directly, rather than forcing myself to be known, even though I do have contact info that would allow me to do so.

But, the feeling in my soul is welling up that my brothers are being denied their own birthright and the chance to have a friend, me, who could be to them what people like my aunt Kara was to me before she passed away and like my uncle Kevin and aunt Kelly still are.

The feeling is starting to wear on me that all three of us are being too selfish and self-protecting here and not being kind to my brothers. However, this is just my feeling, and I have not yet had a chance to speak directly with my stepmom about these feelings. I very much want to achieve understanding as to why she does not want the truth to be known and for the three of us brothers to have relationships with each other.

To place this in context, I have to mention the passing of my aunt. After seeing her die, right there in front of me, I've not been able to shake the image of her last breath from my mind. Sometimes I will be walking into a store and the image is just there in my mind constantly. In fact, it's rarely left my mind for more than a month. I do not consider this a bad thing or something I want to go away, necessarily. She died mostly peacefully, with morphine in her system calming her pain. It is not the fact of her death that seeing her last breath symbolizes, but the reality of her life transferring from active, sustained breath to immortalization in the collective memories and future actions of remembrance that we who love her take from this point forward.

Some human emotions or experiences simply cannot be described in words. They can only be lived, but it is still important to describe them as best we can. Those final moments of being with Kara while she was still alive, and the moments shortly after her passing have permanently changed me, in good ways. I am a happier, more complete person both for having known her as a child, and for being with her to at her last breath.

One outcome of that experience that I could never have predicted is that I feel physically and mentally stronger and more connected to this existence than ever before. Fears that may have lingered in my own mind about my own self-worth or dignity have begun to vanish.

In the most visceral sense, I feel solidified in my soul, as if in the embrace and tears that my grandmother, my aunt, and my uncle and I shared immediately after Kara died there was an invisible tree that instantly took deep root and we became its trunk and branches, as did Kara, immortalized within us.

Everything seems to be less important to me now than watering that tree and its branches.

Seeing a person you love dying taps into the best parts of your nature."—Lise Funderberg

This quote comes from an article on MSN Health: http://health.msn.com/health-topics/caregiving/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100246804

The article expounds further:

Before experiencing the death of a loved one, many people view the prospect with dread. Afterward, they often look back on their death-witnessing experience as having been a horrible, grief-stricken time that nevertheless brought certain gifts. Among these: new insights into their own capacity for selfless love and caring, renewed or intensified bonds with other family members, a new respect for siblings or medical staffers, a healing of old wounds.

"The situation asked for grace, patience, and charity, so something I actually benefited from was to see I had a fairly deep capacity for those things that hadn't been called on in the same way before," says Funderberg, who wrote about her father's long final illness in Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home. "Someone dying is a great prioritizer. What does something like the resentment you were holding onto matter now?"

And it all brings me back to what is happening, or not happening, in the closest relationships I have on this earth. What am I doing to care for and feed and water those relationships?

And sometimes I think, wow, overnight I could triple my number of half-siblings! Whatever would I do? I'd probably take them all to a baseball or basketball game and eat some french fries or pretzels with them. I'd then probably try to convince them to also eat other healthier vegetables and foods and think about their futures!

That's what much older brothers do.

Understanding - The Great Jewel of Wisdom

2011-02-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

Respect is something that can easily be lost, but sometimes it can be regained.

Disappointment is a natural human feeling when one feels wronged or disgraced.

But losing hope is something that harms oneself more than it harms anyone else.

Life and love are grand mysteries, and so are individual motives, actions, and fears.

Hope may seem irrational, but it is often this sheer irrationality that strengthens our human resolve to do what is right.

Having the power to retaliate against others who we feel have wronged us is a temptation.

But to do so speaks more out of fear than it does out of love. It doesn't matter whether everyone around you would say you are "justified" in doing so if you feel in your soul that you are acting defensively rather than from love.

Remember, in your heart, that almost all people are doing things that they believe are right or of the most benefit to themselves and others based on all they know about themselves, others, and their circumstances.

Thus, what will elevate the character of yourself, and others, more so is to strive earnestly for genuine understanding of the other's actions and motives.

This is not to say that power should not be used when reasonable and earnest attempts at understanding fail and you feel strongly that what is harming you and others is unjustified.

But, peaceful relationships seldom result from retaliation.

Retaliation is a bow that fires arrows at both the target and the archer, but understanding is a salve that heals the wounds of both souls.

Pleasant Surprise After Sad Month : My Long Lost Performance for My Aunt

2011-02-13T22:28:00.000-08:00

It's been more than two years since I've posted anything on this blog. I've been working at two different jobs during that time. I did post some things on my Agile From The Ground Up blog about software development though. I'm tired of having different sites though.

The importance of writing strikes me now more so than ever. I can ill afford to not write.

This time, it comes a month after my Aunt Kara has passed away after a long battle against Lou Gehrig's Disease, A.L.S. I was in the hospital with her along with her brother Kevin and her sister Kelly and her mother, my grandmother, Barbara. It was the first time I've been present when someone left our world. While I don't wish anyone to prematurely face a situation like that, I am extremely grateful that I was there with her, and my family.

It is not really possible, in words, to express the human emotions that I felt when I saw her take her last breath. But, it is something I will never, ever, forget.

Witnessing Kara's life end, it's correct to say I left that room with my own life changed, and in ways that I am still trying to decipher. I will write more about that later.

Tonight ended on a very uplifting note for me, however. After Kara passed away, we had a small memorial for her at her and Lew's house. While with Kara, I told her that I had wished I could perform a song on piano for her. She could not speak any longer. I bought a new digital piano and I performed at the memorial and dedicated it to her.

Still, I felt bad that I had never gotten the chance to share it with her. The song was U2's "October". When I was 10 she introduced me to their music, some 23 years ago.

Tonight I played piano for the first time in more than a week as I've been recovering from a skin eczema. Playing that song again reminded me of Kara, of Lew and Aiden, and of my entire family for that matter. When she was in the hospital bed, I promised her that I would help Aiden appreciate new music and that I'd play piano for him, as well as teach him to play someday. After I performed, he ran to the piano with his daddy and began to play the keys. It was only later that I found a wonderful video Kara had taken and posted on her blog of him playing on a toy piano at age 2. He loved it so much even then! I can't wait to play for him again and visit again and to someday help him learn to play the instrument in remembrance of his mommy and for his own spiritual enjoyment.

Playing again tonight with my hand healing, that promise began to take on physical reality, not just a mental conviction. Playing music with a purpose feels like the true meaning of life. What else can groups of people do or enjoy together so thoroughly and so magically?

The joys and sorrows of this life are many, that we all know. It takes a lot of effort just to live each day.

But, to play music from your soul, to revel in even just a few moments, is to take a glimpse at eternity -- it is as though music exists independent of time, and time slows down. If motion is movement through space and time, music is movement through soul despite time.

Tonight I found on a seldom used computer a file called "October-Dedication.mp3", and another named "October-Performance.mp3". I opened my email and searched for the first one's name. Sure enough, I found an email that I sent in July of 2009, just before Kara had surgery to have a feeding tube put into her body.

I had performed for her after all. The weight of everything happening in December and January had made this memory evaporate from me.

Here is my short letter to her and her response to me:

Kara,
Please listen to the attached piano performance. This is, so far, my best recorded rendition of the 1981 U2 song "October". It is my goal to perform this piece sometime at a future UUCA open-mic night. My friend Tony Knuppel organized one last month and plans to do it again. Many people performed piano, guitar, and vocals. I read aloud an essay I wrote that is currently the #1 peer-rated answer to the question "How many stars are in the universe?" You can read it here:
http://www.helium.com/items/128325-how-many-stars-are-in-the-universe

Since I was a child I saw the big piano in the house downstairs and I wanted to learn, but all I did was press on the keys. I saw you buy an electronic one some years back and I wanted to learn then too.

And now, this is something I am learning, week by week, very very slowly, and just a tiny bit at a time -- enough to play one song at a time that matters to me.

You were the first person to buy me a U2 album, The Joshua Tree, when I was probably 10 years old. For more than 20 years, their widely varied styles have been the "soundtrack" of my mind, and their spiritually yearning lyrics and music have at many times been a comfort for me.

I hope this brief performance is in some small way also comforting to you.

Rest assured, when I do perform this live, I will dedicate it to you, and we will record it. -- I have lots of practicing to do because I don't want to mess it up!

love always,
Josh

----------

Josh, your audio recordings were beautiful. You play very well! And your memories of things we did together mean so much to me. I always wished to enrich your life. If I have succeeded even a little, my reward is the treasured memories you keep. I'll never forget the spellbound little boy who met Johnny Cash. I watched you glow in the experience, and I told myself "well done Auntie, well done."

Love you,
Auntie

Sent from my iPhone

Tonight I feel fine to sleep, saying "well done Rabbit, well done."

David Finkelstein on Physics

2009-01-26T23:00:00.000-08:00

Saturday we had another Atlanta Science Tavern meetup (http://www.meetup.com/AtlantaScienceTavern), this time with Dr. David Finkelstein, Professor Emeritus of Physics at GA Tech.

His approach was to take questions from the audience of 45 people at Manuel's Tavern. His answers were very precise and well-described. I asked him if the wave-particle duality is an effect of our senses "taking a measurement" at a given moment in time. That is, are the measuring devices, in this case our eyes, or in other cases the photon sensing or exposure producing materials, simply "capturing" a slice of the waveform of light, and thus causing the illusion of a discrete photon.

It's been years since I've taken physics, so I don't recall all of these details, and probably never really understood them in the first place. Logically though, it just seems as if our senses are what "quantize" the wave and thus lead to our observation of a discrete entity called a photon.

I know I should be sleeping now, but it was a very interesting discussion. I wish I could study physics, and everything else in the world too.

The Accidental Mind: Fascinating Book

2008-08-23T23:38:00.001-07:00

Judging by the podcasts I am listening to, this is a very interesting book and topic about brain evolution:

http://accidentalmind.org/events.html

Passing the Impasse: Inviting the Religious and Non-Religious to Participate Together

2008-08-23T23:20:00.000-07:00

Note: the following is the beginning to something I want to create to help get religious and non-religious people working together, not against each other, to solve problems in the world. What I envision is a group similar to the Interfaith Youth Corps of Chicago that engages people in community service projects primarily, with an optional component that allows people to discuss their differences through civil discussion without any pressure or expectations.

--

Throughout my life I have been fascinated by two subjects more than any other: science and religion.

I did not grow up religious. At a very young age I learned about science and critical thinking by watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on television. Sagan never, to my knowledge, discounted or belittled religion. He seemed to consider himself an agnostic to the ultimate question as to whether a supernatural being exists or not. However, he never did shy away from putting claims about phenomena in the physical world to the test of reason.

Looking around our world we see several major religious traditions, and countless other smaller ones. Within each major tradition are sects with their own beliefs and practices. It seems that each of these traditions consider themselves correct and others wrong. Could it really be that there is one correct path and all the others are wrong? My own position is simple. My belief is that no one has all the right answers. That certainly includes me. But, when people practice a religion, they often form strong communities based on the ideals of love and shared values. They draw strength from the religion's rich stories, teachings, parables, and guidance for both the old and young. Yet, religions change too. In the Christian gospel accounts, Jesus continually questioned the Jewish religious leaders of the day, leading ultimately to a new religion founded upon his teachings.

Therefore, shouldn't religious people of today continue to question popular religious traditions and practices the same way Jesus did?

Now, what about science? Do the scientists have it all correct? Hardly. In fact, true science is based upon the idea that hypotheses must be tested by multiple independent people and in multiple ways before they become accepted as well established theories. Einstein's theories have been corroborated time and again by experimental evidence. Does that mean that Einstein's theories are complete? No, it does not. It means that they can predict observable behavior accurately under a given set of circumstances. But, there is more research that has to be done before his theories and quantum mechanics can be reconciled. Even then, we may never have a complete and final understanding of how nature operates.

Therefore, shouldn't scientists continually questions ideas and theories the same way Einstein did?

We all know that there are many scientists who are religious, some who even hold to fairly traditional and literal interpretations of many religious texts. Francis Collins is a prime example of someone likely to be known to many. We also all know that there have been many books published recently from prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris that aim to show that science is superior to religion. So, who is correct?

Once again, neither "camp" is correct about everything. There are some things religious people are correct about, and some things that non-religious people are correct about. Life is almost always like this. One side is very seldom entirely correct and just as seldom entirely incorrect.

Personally, I am an agnostic atheist in the following sense: I do not believe that any human being has ever, or could ever, claim to know the absolute truth about the ultimate nature of reality. In this sense, I reject all claims that any particular religion is "correct" about God and therefore I reject all human conceptualizations of God. Mystics of all faiths have come to much the same conclusion. I am not just making this up. To speak about it without jargon, they essentially state that any idea or conceptualization we could hold in our finite, human brain, by definition, cannot be God. A thought is a thing. Mystics say God is not a thing.

However, I am agnostic to the proposition as to whether there is an existence higher than what we experience. I am not calling such an existence "supernatural" as is popularly portrayed. Instead, I offer a simple analogy to illustrate my point. Imagine you are a character in a 3D video game. You've been programmed with such sophistication that you can make decisions within the context of your own environment. The environment is governed by rules and laws. We might call them "game physics". How would you, as a game character, ever come to comprehend the fact that you were actually constructed by human beings in a totally different plane of existence?

Therefore, who is to say that our universe is not a construction of a force that we simply cannot, by definition, ever comprehend?

Likewise, who is to say that it is? I am not postulating our own universe is like that. There are theologians, philosophers, and scientists who have argued both sides of that question with far greater sophistication and erudition than I have to offer. However, what I am saying is that I think religious people and non-religious both need to take a second look at what they believe before they step all over each other. Each side can learn from the other through civil discussion and participation.

The goal of this site is two-fold:

1. Allow religious people and non-religious people for form community groups aimed at helping people in their community, regardless of any creed, belief, or lack there-of.
2. Allow religious people and non-religious people to engage in civil discussion about ideas.

Passing the Impasse: Religion and Science Misunderstanding

2008-08-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

All throughout my whole life I have been fascinated with two things: science and religion.

Most of my writings are about my own perceptions and thoughts regarding the interplay of science and religion. My ideas are likely resonate with both atheists and religionists in some areas as well as strike discord with both in other areas. The reason for this is that I agree with most atheists about the importance of critical thinking and I agree with most religionists about the importance of community. I also disagree with most atheists about the meaning of religion and I disagree with most religionists about the literalism of their beliefs.

I believe that religion and mythological traditions have been, for thousands of years, humankind's way of trying to explain existence and to provide a shared system of beliefs upon which to base communities. As modern science has explained more and more of the physical nature of the universe, many have come to believe that religion is outdated, useless, or unimportant.

However, I disagree with this. Instead, I believe that we can look past the literal interpretation of religious texts and seek instead to discern wisdom from their stories and parables. This does not mean we take what they say wholesale with no modification or criticism. It means that we must interpret them in the light of modern science and think about how they have and will continue to affect our culture.

I am a strong proponent of rational, critical thinking. Because of that, I think it is irrational and uncritical to suppose that the entire world can just stop paying attention to its religious traditions. Instead, we must leverage those traditions to increase the importance of critical thinking from the inside out. This does mean that traditional and literal interpretations must change. I know that many people do not want to change their views. However, I hope that my writings will help demonstrate the reasonableness of my view, and, at minimum, help my friends and family understand my position.

I do not practice any specific religious tradition, and working as a software engineer I probably spend more time than most people thinking about logical systems and the interconnectedness of parts. Due to this, I tend to view systems from multiple perspectives. I look at them from the inside, at the level of individual methods or properties. I look at them from the surface, at the level of classes, modules, or assemblies. I also look at them from a higher perspective, at the level of complete application. I could expand on this and discuss interconnecting systems across the internet, but I'll just leave it at that.

Similarly, I look at belief systems in the same light. I look at the individual practices and understandings of verses and how people interpret and apply these to their daily lives. I look at the way families and communities incorporate their shared traditions into their lives. And, I look at the way societies assemble themselves around these sub-units to form a larger whole.

Where I have the most to say, however, is about individual thought processes and interpretations. It is my hope, again, that my writings and recordings will help others to understand my perspective and see the reasonableness of my views.

Attention and Focus: Distracted, Loss of Critical Thinking

2008-08-06T20:59:00.001-07:00

There is an interesting interview on Point of Inquiry by the author of a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Here is the link:

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/maggie_jackson_distracted_the_erosion_of_attention_and_the_coming_dark_age/

The book has only 3.5 stars on Amazon, and ironically one of the comments says the book is a prime example of what it condemns!

Anyway, the observations the author and host D.J. Grothe make are about the increasing number of "connections" that people have via the online, networked world, but the decreasing depth and fluency of those connections. They discuss how these days people are expected to know more about a larger number of things.

This reminds me of the concept of the long tail, described here: http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html.
The crux of the long tail is that people now buy fewer items of a larger number of items, such
that the total volume of sales across the larger number equals the total volume of sales for the most popular market leaders.

So, it seems as if people are stretching themselves to pay attention to more and more things across a long tail because they feel that knowing that little bit across the horizontal scope complements the larger amount they know about a few things in the vertical rise.

Scott Ambler has written about the "Generalizing specialist" in terms of Agile teams on his blog here: http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists.htm

Here is a brief excerpt:

A generalizing specialist is someone with a good grasp of how everything fits together. As a result they will typically have a greater understanding and appreciation of what their teammates are working on. They are willing to listen to and work with their teammates because they know that they’ll likely learn something new. Specialists, on the other hand, often don’t have the background to appreciate what other specialists are doing, often look down on that other work, and often aren’t as willing to cooperate. Specialists, by their very nature, can become a barrier to communication within your team.

So, are long tails and generalizing specialists intrinsically linked to the distraction topic or am I proving the author's point by just introducing tangents?

Well, I think they are related, and not necessarily bad. The decrease of attention and erosion of critical thinking is bad, no doubt, because it represents an inability for people to perform the top-to-bottom in-depth analysis needed to make wise decisions.

However, the increased side-to-side attentiveness is good in that it shows that people are becoming more aware of the relationships and connections of parts into a whole.

Understanding that whole, however, requires a thorough understanding of the top-to-bottom view of, at minimum, a complete vertical slice of a process.

In software engineering, this means that a developer can grasp the overall architecture of a system by having a thorough and deep knowledge of one particular module, top-to-bottom, if and only if that module is representative of the larger system as a whole.

That is to say that the module under examination follows the same basic design structure and coding standards, design principles, and design patterns that are adhered to by the rest of the system. This helps achieve something akin to the concept of economies of scale.

On the other hand, if an engineer must contend with dozens of differing formats, approaches, spaghetti code bases, incompatible languages and toolsets, then a lot of understanding is lost or can never be gained simply due to something like the effects of diseconomies of scale.

For a team to achieve a level of productivity and efficiency in software engineering, they have to apply design principles that are in accordance with shared purpose, communication, maintainability, and flexibility. Creativity is an important aspect, but creativity should be expressed in terms of solving the problem domain in terms of the most understandable and simple design, rather than in terms of the most terse, most elegant or innovative, or unique design.

This may at first sound rigid and unflexible, but the introduction of basic, rudimentary constraints, such as the generic interface seen in REST, provides a context within which creativity can be expressed, yet also affords communication and connectivity to external components without cumbersome setup time or negotiation.

So, to bring this back to the idea of distraction, I want to point out that it is important for people to use the tools they have to help them find the right path, and then focus intently on understanding that path and exploring that path to the fullest, to understand it from the top-to-bottom, and to build in the side-to-side extension mechanisms to enable future modification and expansion without impact to the core features and functionality.

These are core principles expressed in the literature of design patterns and agile design guidelines, but they must be carefully studied and learned. They cannot be gleaned by glancing over a few web sites or thumbing through a few books. They have to be explored, experimented with, and ultimately employed in real systems in order for engineers to comprehend them fully.

Certified Scrum Master Training from Innovel

2008-08-03T19:20:00.000-07:00

I completed my Certified Scrum Master training Friday from Innovel. You can learn more about the training at http://www.scrumtraining.com.

My instructor was Chris Doss. He was a great instructor. It was a very good class and I met a lot of great people in the class as well. I think I was one of the younger folks in the class, so I was able to learn a lot from everyone there just through "osmosis".

Of course, the CSM course is not something that makes one really a well-practiced Scrum implementer. I think it's more of a way to get your feet wet. The progression for training in Scrum is diagrammed here: http://www.scrumalliance.org/training/

The course covers a lot of ground at a high level about Agile, Lean, and Scrum, with a touch of XP. I've been conducting independent study on these subjects and documenting the links and videos I've read and watched on the ATL ALT.NET wiki at http://atlalt.net/screwturn/High-Performance%20Teams.ashx.

Aside from watching those videos from Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, I read two Scrum books to prepare for the training:

Agile Software Development With Scrum:
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Software-Development-SCRUM/dp/0130676349

Agile Project Management with Scrum:
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Software-Development-SCRUM/dp/0130676349

I'm currently reading Scrum and XP From the Trenches from InfoQ Press by Henrik Kniberg:
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Future Reading
I am now planning to read Head First Software Development from O'Reilly:
http://www.amazon.com/First-Software-Development-Brain-Friendly-Guides/dp/0596527357

This book is not overtly about Scrum, but the authors thank Henrik Kniberg's InfoQ book and it is heavily geared toward scrum from that I can tell so far.

I love the Head First concept and am currently reading Head First Design Patterns to freshen up on my understanding of design patterns, which is not as good as it should be.

Scrum Link List

2008-06-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

As I've been talking about the Scrum software development process framework and its associated terms and phrases like agile, velocity, productivity, reduced defect rate, I have collected some great links.

Getting up to Speed on Scrum

After reading the definition on Wikipedia, I recommend watching Jeff Sutherland's presentation at: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/AgileEnterpriseRealWorldExperience

It presents real industry data and case studies that demonstrate how teams have transformed themselves by introducing agile practices using Scrum. It will definitely make you want to learn more.

Scrum Definition:
Concise definition and links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)

Hirotaka Takeuchi, coined the term Scrum in 1986 after studying how Japanese companies increased their productivity and competitiveness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirotaka_Takeuchi

Hirotake Takeuchi's book on Knowledge Management:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470820748/

Presentations about Scrum:
"The Agile Enterprise: Real World Experience in Creating Agile Companies", by Jeff Sutherland:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/AgileEnterpriseRealWorldExperience

"Scrum, et al", by Ken Scwaeber, co-inventor of the scrum method for software development, presented at Google:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011&hl=en

"Scrum Tuning: Lessons Learned from Scrum implementation at Google", by Jeff Sutherland, co-inventor of the scrum method for software development:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8795214308797356840

"The Roots of Scrum", by Jeff Sutherland. A presentation with lots of empirical data and examples. He discusses the roots of Scrum within Japanese businesses like Toyota, and about his own experience with medical companies using Scrum:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-Roots-of-Scrum

Audio Lessons:

These three introductions to Scrum by Ken Schwaber are excellent. They give you very clean and clear definitions of what the major aspects of Scrum are. Listen while you jog, listen while you drive, but just listen:

Part 1: http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2005/10/25/2296.aspx
Part 2: http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2005/10/31/2323.aspx
Part 3: http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2005/11/05/2362.aspx

Books:
Agile Software Development with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle:
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Software-Development-SCRUM/dp/0130676349

Scrum and XP from the Trenches, a 90 Page Experience Report, by Henrik Kniberg:
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Previous Posts by Me:
I have written a few posts recently about scrum and agile. You can find all those by clicking here.

Enjoy the links!

Scrum at Google: Ken Schwaber Talk

2008-05-26T16:20:00.000-07:00

Ken Schwaber addresses Google about Google's Scrum implementation:

In this video he discusses the history of scrum coming out of Japan when Japanese firms were stressed to compete at higher levels. He also talks about how Google's competitor Yahoo uses scrum.

Related Resources

Agile podcast and interviews about Scrum with Ken Schwaber

These three introductions to Scrum by Ken are excellent. They give you very clean and clear definitions of what the major aspects of Scrum are. Highly reocmmended.

Ken Schwaber's book:

Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Microsoft Press: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X

Scrum Masters 2: funny video

Review: Scrum and XP from the Trenches

2008-05-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

I am reading the book Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. It is about his personal experience successfully implementing a Scrum-based methodology in his development team of 40 people in Stockholm, Sweeden.

You can read the book as a PDF on InfoQ's web site here: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Or, you can purchase the book at LuLu here:
http://www.lulu.com/content/899349

Review
Here are my comments on each section of the book:

Foreward by Jeff Sutherland

Jeff co-created Scrum. In his foreward he makes these points:

JSG paraphase:

Scrum is becoming very important to venture capitalists (especially his own partners)
Teams must know their project velocity -- This is how much of a backlog a team can accomplish in a given sprint. (See http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/39-glossary-of-scrum-terms#1110 for details)
Only teams that match all of the criteria below in the excerpts will be funded by his venture capitalist partners.

Direct excerpts:

Iterations must have fixed time boxes and be less than six weeks
long.
Code at the end of the iteration must be tested by QA and be
working properly.
A Scrum team must have a Product Owner and know who that
person is.
The Product Owner must have a Product Backlog with estimates
created by the team.
The team must have a Burndown Chart and know their velocity.
There must be no one outside a team interfering with the team
during a Sprint.

Foreward by Mike Cohn

Mike is a founding member of the Scrum Alliance. He has written books, articles, and speaks regularly. Learn more at http://www.scrumalliance.org/profiles/8-mike-cohn.

Mike makes these points:

Scrum and XP are both practical, results-oriented approaches. They are about Getting Things Done
Prototype early and often rather than documenting requirements at an exhaustive level
Avoid excess modeling, prefer prototyping instead
Work on things that have potential to become part of the actual working solution
Refer to other resources for the theory behind Scrum. It is out there, but this book focuses on implementing Scrum successfully

Preface

He was skeptical going in, but was convinced shortly thereafter starting
Scrum worked for the author's 40 person team
Team's quality was way below acceptable, but implementing Scrum solved their problems
He will use Scrum by default for new projects in the future unless there is a specific reason not to use it

1. Introduction

Scrum is not a magic bullet
You tailor it to your context
His team was fighting fires all the time
Quality was low
Overtime was up
Deadlines were missed
"Scrum" was just a buzzword to most people
Implemented across teams of 3 to 12 people
Learned about different ways of managing backlog (Excel, Jira, index cards, etc)
Experimented w/different sprint sizes (2 to 6 weeks)
Used other XP practices like pair programming
Used continuous integration
Used TDD
Took Ken's certification course
Most useful info came from real "War Stories" and case studies of people actually solving problems with Scrum

2. How we do product backlogs

Backlog is hear and soul of Scrum
Backlog contains customer's desired features, prioritized by most critical
Call the backlog items User Stories or just Stories
ID, Name, Importance, Initial Estimate, How-To-Demo, Notes
6 fields were most often used
Kept in Excel spreadsheet on shared drive with Multiple Editing allowed
Additional: Track, Components, Requestor, Bug Tracking ID if needed
Keep the product backlog at the Business Level not a technical level
Let the team figure out the How-To Technical Level
Ask Why as many teams as needed to get to the underlying intent if the Product Owner does state it in technical terms, and move technical language to Notes field.

3. How we prepare for Sprint planning

Product Backlog MUST exist first in ship-shape form
One Product Backlog and One Product Owner per Product
All items should have a unique Importance level
Leave large gaps. 100 does not mean 5 times more important than 20. Easier than making 20.5 if you did 20 and 21 instead when item C comes up in the middle
Product Owner should understand the intent of each story
Others can add stories, but only Product Owner can assign importance
Only the team can add an estimate
Tried using Jira for keeping the backlog, but too many clicks for Product Owner
Have not yet tried VersionOne or other Scrum tools

4. How we do Sprint planning

TODO page 25

5. How we communicate Sprints

6. How we do Sprint backlogs

7. How we arrange the team room

8. How we do daily Scrum

9. How we do Spring demos

10.How we do Spring retrospectives

11.Slack time between Sprints

12.How we do release planning and fixed priced contracts

13.How we combine Scrum with XP

14.How we do testing

15.How we handle multiple Scrum teams

16.How we handle geographically distributed teams

17.Scrum master checklist

18.Parting words

Recommended reading

Getting Real, Release It!, and The Perpetual Beta: Modern Web Apps

2008-05-24T19:38:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking an awful lot lately about web application architecture and release strategies. This has a lot to do with a project I am working on professionally, but it ties into everything I've been thinking about regarding architecture in general.

Here are some links for reading more about these topics and insights from some of today's top developers, including 37signals.com, the creators of the Ruby-on-Rails framework and developers of http://www.Meetup.com

Getting Real, by 37Signals

Learn about 37Signals by googling them. They are the creators of the Ruby-on-Rails framework that has pushed a lot of other people to higher levels of quality. Only a true Microsoft fanboy would not know that tons of what is inside of Microsoft's forthcoming ASP.NET MVC framework comes straight out of the Ruby-on-Rails framework.

Getting Real is a book by the 37Signals crew about how they do Agile development.

Read it here: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/index.php

Here is a key excerpt from chapter 2 in the essay entitled Fix Time and Budget Flex Scope

"Launching something great that's a little smaller in scope than planned is better than launching something mediocre and full of holes because you had to hit some magical time, budget, and scope window. Leave the magic to Houdini. You've got a real business to run and a real product to deliver.

Here are the benefits of fixing time and budget, and keeping scope flexible:

Prioritization
You have to figure out what's really important. What's going to make it into this initial release? This forces a constraint on you which will push you to make tough decisions instead of hemming and hawing.
Reality
Setting expectations is key. If you try to fix time, budget, and scope, you won't be able to deliver at a high level of quality. Sure, you can probably deliver something, but is "something" what you really want to deliver?
Flexibility
The ability to change is key. Having everything fixed makes it tough to change. Injecting scope flexibility will introduce options based on your real experience building the product. Flexibility is your friend."

Comments
I really like these ideas with regard to web applications. These principles become extremely important when you are migrating a system from an older technology to a new technology, especially when the benefit you seek is primarily for the application infrastructure as opposed to for the end-user benefit. You have to ask yourself questions like:

How does this migration actually benefit the user?
Is is tested well enough to replace the existing system such that users do not notice the change?
Is there a way to minimize any possible damage the new infrastructure could cause to profitability should it not work as hoped?

As a consultant, you have to make clients aware of these questions. Your job is to inform them about possible problems and strategies for risk mitigation. Ultimately, they may select to do something you either agree with or don't, but you have to due your diligence when you recommend a migration strategy.

The situation is more complex when you are implementing not just a back-end migration, but also adding brand new features that you want to introduce to actually improve the user experience.

Suppose you have this scenario:

You have a client that operates a popular shopping web site
The existing application is running ASP with COM objects written in Visual Basic 6.0
The existing application works well and has been tested through real-world use for more than five years
The existing application continues in increase in value, leading to higher and higher ROI each year
Your client wants to migrate to Visual Basic.NET and ASP.NET 3.5
Your client wants to add new features to the system that will increase the usability and utility for the system's users such as Ajax-enhanced search pages and RESTful URLs that offer strong Search-Engine-Optimization benefits

You have to carefully weigh all of these demands and criteria. Ask questions like:

How important is time-to-market?
How important is it that users do not have any interruptions in service?
What are the performance and scalability requirements?

Yes, Yes, and Yes
In my experience, most clients will want it as soon as possible and with as few interruptions as possible and with as good or better performance as the existing system. This is just a given.

But, you really cannot deliver all three of those concurrently. You have to make some trade-offs.

In this case, I believe the best migration strategy is what is called a vertical migration strategy. Read more about this in the Dr. Dobbs link below.

Create the new foundational architecture in Visual Basic.NET to support the system
Create Interop assemblies on top of the COM objects
Create the new, value-added functionality first
Bring up the system in beta side-by-side to the existing system so that the value-added features can be delivered to the users and so that the client realizes early return-on-investment (ROI) and gets early user feedback.
Monitor the system's performance and refactor any of the bottleneck areas caused by interop by implementing them in pure .NET code.
Add more features to the beta to slowly replace the existing application, getting user feedback and important performance and scalability information all the while to help direct your refactorings.

This is different from a horizontal migration strategy. In a horizontal strategy, you would select an entire layer of system, such as the UI, the Business Logic, or the Persistence Layer. A horizontal strategy is typically more complex and time-consuming and requires more testing.

However, you can use a very similar risk mitigation strategy to what you do in a vertical migration. You can bring up the new system side-by-side with the existing one and allow users to alpha and beta test it while you measure the usability, performance, and scalability and refactor as needed before it replaces the existing system.

You can read much more about the various approaches to ASP.NET application migration in this Dr. Dobbs online article: http://www.ddj.com/windows/184406077

Figure 1: Vertical Migration Strategy

Figure 2: Horizontal Migration Strategy

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

Another book that I have eyed on shelves of late is called Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard. Here is an interview with the author on InfoQ about the book and his lessons learned:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/nygard-release-it

Michael Nygard: First off, there's quite a bit of variation in what people mean by "feature complete". Even at best, it just means that all the specified functionality for a release has passed functional testing. For an agile team, it should also mean that all the acceptance tests pass. In some cases, though, all it means is that the developers finished their first draft of the code and threw it over the wall to the testers.

"Production ready" is orthogonal to "feature complete". Whether the acceptance tests pass or the testers give it a green check mark tells me nothing about how well the system as a whole is going to hold up under the stresses of real-world, every day use. Could be horrible, could be great.

For example, does it have a memory leak? Nobody actually runs a test server in the QA environment for a week or a month at a time, under realistic loads. We're lucky to get a week of testing, total, let alone a week just for longevity testing. So, passing QA doesn't tell me anything about memory leaks. It's very easy for memory leaks to get into production. Well, now that creates an operational problem, because the applications will have to be restarted regularly. Every memory leak I've seen is based on traffic, so the more traffic you get, the faster you leak memory. That means that you can't even predict when you'll have to restart the applications. It might be the middle of the busiest hour on your busiest day. Actually, it's pretty likely to happen during the busiest (i.e., the worst) times.

This is crucially important. Memory leaks come from third-party vendors just as often as they come from your own internal code. There is nothing like having to log in remotely to a web server when you're trying to have fun and the third-party component is causing your web server to hang. These are things that people rarely think about up front because they typically are problems revealed only by real system usage. I'll give a real world example:

Suppose you have a Visual Basic 6.0 COM object that use ADO internally. It may keep a RecordSet open to allow for consuming code to rewind the cursor and start over from the beginning. Well, .NET uses non-deterministic finalization, so you have to take care to call System.Interop.Marshal.ReleaseCOMObject to inform the runtime that it should destroy the COM object when you are finished with it. If you do not do this, you could end up with long-standing blocks against your database until the garbage collector frees the COM object.

I have run into this problem, and luckily was able to refactor my wrapper class in one single place to alleviate the problem. In the web application, we never rewind the collection, so it was safe for us to free the object after the while loop in the IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() completed.

As for this book, you can read the full table of contents and excerpts from the book in this PDF extracted from the book:

http://media.pragprog.com/titles/mnee/mnee-patterns.pdf

After looking at the TOC, I know this is a book I want to read.

Web 2.0 Applications and Agile Methodologies
This brings us into the territory of web 2.0 applications and the topic of the agile methodology.

The wikipedia entry for Web 2.0 defines the following key characteristics for a web 2.0 application:

"The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client-applications. The differing, yet complementary approaches of such elements provide Web 2.0 sites with information-storage, creation, and dissemination challenges and capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected in the environment of the so-called "Web 1.0".

Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques:

Cascading Style Sheets to aid in the separation of presentation and content
Folksonomies (collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging)
Microformats extending pages with additional semantics
REST and/or XML- and/or JSON-based APIs
Rich Internet application techniques, often Ajax-based
Semantically valid XHTML and HTML markup
Syndication, aggregation and notification of data in RSS or Atom feeds
mashups, merging content from different sources, client- and server-side
Weblog-publishing tools
wiki or forum software, etc., to support user-generated content
Internet privacy, the extended power of users to manage their own privacy in cloaking or deleting their own user content or profiles."

Suppose your task is to migrate a web 1.0 application to a web 2.0 application such that it increasingly resembles these features. How do you do that with maximal risk mitigation and protection of the existing system's ROI?

Taking Cue's from Yahoo and Google's Lead
First, from a process methodology standpoint, both Yahoo and Google have adopted an agile process. In particular, they have adopted a Scrum-based development methodology. You can watch the following videos to learn more about that:

Scrum Tuning: Lessons Learned from Scrum Implementation: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8795214308797356840
Scrum et al: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011

Just to summarize, however, here is what Scrum looks like visually:

Verbally, the wikipedia article describes it as:

Scrum is a process skeleton that includes a set of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in scrum are the ScrumMaster who maintains the processes and works similar to a project manager, the Product Owner who represents the stakeholders, and the Team which includes the developers.
During each sprint, a 15-30 day period (length decided by the team), the team creates an increment of potential shippable (usable) software. The set of features that go into each sprint come from the product backlog, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. What backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint.^[4] During the sprint, no one is able to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for sprint.

There are several good implementations of systems for managing the Scrum process and the "sprints" while others prefer to use yellow stickers and white-boards. One of Scrum's biggest advantages is that it is very easy to learn and requires little effort to start using.

Why have both Google and Yahoo adopted scrum? Well, just listen to what someone inside of Yahoo had to say about this in the Scrum Mailing List.

http://shmula.com/159/scrum-at-yahoo

"What the Times doesn’t say is that Yahoo! is now 18 month into its adoption of Scrum, and has upwards of 500 people (and steadily growing) using Scrum in the US, Europe, and India. Scrum is being used successfully for projects ranging from new product development Yahoo! Podcasts, which won a webby 6 months after launch, was built start-to-finish in distributed Scrum between the US and India) to heavy-duty infrastructure work on Yahoo! Mail (which serves north of a hundred million users each month). Most (but not all) of the teams using Scrum at Yahoo! are doing it by the book, with active support from inside and outside coaches (both of which in my opinion are necessary for best results).

Pete Deemer Chief Product Officer, Yahoo! Bangalore / CSM"

Microsoft also uses Scrum-based methodologies for building systems. See this eWeek article here for details:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Microsoft-Lauds-Scrum-Method-for-Software-Projects/

David Treadwell, corporate vice president of the .Net Developer Platform group at Microsoft, said that while Microsoft welcomes the use of methodologies like Scrum, "were not mandating them, but were encouraging them. So Scrum is one process—the idea that teams meet once a day for half an hour, figure out what theyre going to do then go off and do their work very quickly.
"Its most important to mandate levels of quality. You have to give teams some flexibility to achieve those results as is most effective for those teams."
Indeed, "There are a lot of things going on," at Microsoft on this task, Treadwell said. "We have realized inside Microsoft over the years that software practices we used in the mid-90s dont scale to the size of problems that were tackling today.
"And we made some assumptions around the turn of the century that those processes would scale up and result in certain time frames that we would be able to ship software.
"And what happened is as the projects got larger and larger, we introduced too many complex interdependencies on early software, more so than we could really digest throughout the system," said Treadwell.
"And that was super-challenging for us, given the scale of these projects. But now were being much more precise about where we take those interdependencies."

Microsoft ASP.NET and MVC: A new direction
We see further changes in Microsoft's approach to development in the way they are releasing upgrades to ASP.NET and the MVC framework. Take a look at http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet. This is the new home for the ASP.NET framework, where Microsoft makes "often and early" releases to the developer community. They are still a few steps short of going fully open-source, but I think they will get there sooner rather than later. At least, I hope they do if they hope to survive in the competitive market.

The Perpetual Beta: A way forward that ensures quality

Finally, arrive at the idea of a perpetual beta. This is something that Tim O'Reilly discussed a few years back about the nature of a web 2.0 system. Read more about his comments here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta

and here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=4

His key point about the concept of a perpetual beta is this:

"Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time."^[1]

The Perpetual Beta Deployment Model in Practice

In practice, you could implement the Perpetual Beta model as follows:

Web Farm: production.samplesite.com
[ Production Server #1 - App v1.0 ] [ Production Server #2 - App v1.0]

Beta Server: beta.samplesite.com
[ Beta Server #1 - App v1.x ]

To follow Google and Yahoo's lead here, you would deploy release candidate builds to the Beta Server and allow users to select to use that version of the system, but they could always navigate to the production URL instead of the beta.

This provides you the following benefits:

Users become part of your testing process and help you develop and guide the evolution of the system
Your team becomes far less stressed and annoyed because they have a true metric of user satisfaction and system stability to gauge before changes actually go into the true production environment
You decrease your time-to-market by having a system that is continually improving

Cautions and Caveats to this process:

You have to take care in testing the beta build well in advance of pushing it to the beta server. Make sure there are no database concurrency issues or blocking processes that could cause the beta and the production system to conflict.
You should be exercising automated tests and using regression test tools well in advance of the beta deployment.
You will still not catch all problems before it goes into the real production environment. This is just the way development is.

Conclusion
These are just some of my notes and thoughts on the way forward for web application development. I know I'm already behind on most of this stuff, but some of my readers are further behind :-)

Is there a silver lining to all of this change and fast pace?

I believe there is. The silver lining is HTTP and URI.

If you build your URIs to last, last they will. That is the fundamental change in mindset that is taking place for most of the successful players right now. They are realizing that they can construct their services using RESTful designs that allow both applications and users to repurpose content and data in ways that nobody thought possible before.

If you don't believe me, just head on over to http://pipes.yahoo.com or read up on Google Base http://www.google.com/base.

URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier. It's about time we started treating it like one. We've got to stop reinventing the wheel and start driving the car we have with the wheel we got already.

Check out my previous posts on REST or just read Roy Fielding's dissertation to learn more.

Related Resources

Orbitz.com Lead Architect Brian Zimmer on Challenges on a Large Scale Project: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Architecture-Brian-Zimmer
James Shore, author of "The Art of Agile Development" discusses his book: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/The-Art-of-Agile-Development-James-Shore

Querying Google Base using GLinq in C#

2008-05-22T18:36:00.000-07:00

Google Base is google's open data repository. Watch a video and learn more about the open API to use Google Base here: http://code.google.com/apis/base/

The GLinq project is a beta project that provides strongly-typed access to Google Base. Check it out at: http://www.codeplex.com/glinq.

Once you download the beta, you can run the sample application, which consists of this code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ConsoleTest
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//You need a google key. It's easy - http://code.google.com/apis/base/signup.html
Console.WriteLine("Enter your Google Base Key (http://code.google.com/apis/base/signup.html):");
string GoogleKey = Console.ReadLine();
GoogleItems.GoogleContext gc = new GoogleItems.GoogleContext(GoogleKey);
var r = from ipods in gc.products
where ipods.BaseQuery == "mp3 players" && ipods.Brand == "apple"
where ipods.Price > 200 && ipods.Price < 400
orderby ipods.Price descending
select ipods;

foreach (GoogleItems.Product product in r.Take(100))
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} for ${1}",product.Title, product.Price.ToString("#.##"));
}
Console.ReadKey(true);
}
}
}

This returns a big list of the first 100 items returned from Google Base:

16GB Apple iPod Touch for $399.99
IPOD for $399.99
Black 80GB Video Apple Ipod for $399.99
Apple 160GB iPod classic â?" Black for $399.99
Apple iPod Photo 60GB - 15000 songs & 25000 photos in Your Pocket for $399.99
Apple 160GB iPod classic â?" Black for $399.99
16GB Apple iPod Touch for $399.99
Apple 60 GB iPod with Video Playback Black for $399.99
Apple iPod Touch 16GB WiFi Digital Music/Photo/Video Player for $399.99
BOSE SoundDock Portable Black Digital Music System for the iPod for $399.99
Apple iPod touch 16GB* MP3 Player (with software upgrades) - Black for $399.99
Apple 8GB iPod touch for $399.99
APPLE IPOD 8GB TOUCH for $399.99
BOSE SoundDock Portable Black Digital Music System for the iPod for $399.99
Apple 16GB iPod touch for $399.99

Web Application Architecture in 2008 and Beyond

2008-05-11T13:37:00.001-07:00

Application Architecture 2008: The More Things Change the More they Stay the Same
This post is about the future of Web Application Architecture in 2008 and beyond. It details some trends in "returning to the basics" regarding the adoption of REST-based services that are happening right now that I believe will lead to companies being able to build solid long-term platforms for service integration and collaboration with external partners and end-users alike.

Back to the Basics, Son
A good architecture should minimize the degree of difficulty for end-users, software components, and external vendors and third-party software to use a system. It should maximize the opportunity for the same people and software to derive value from and contribute value to the system.

The way the existing World Wide Web works, with the simple HTTP protocol and URI standards, provides a good model that companies like Yahoo, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft (as of late) are capitalizing on to build long-term scalability and integration with disparate systems. The architecture of the web is called Representational State Transfer (REST), a term coined by the principal author of the HTTP and URI specifications, Roy Thomas Fielding .

Prerequisite Reading
To fully appreciate this post, I recommend you read a little more about the history of REST and WWW architecture as well as how they compare and contrast to SOAP / RPC models for Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture.

To summarize what you will find in the background reading, here is what REST boils down. Note that I am applying the example HTTP here because HTTP is an example of a REST-based architectural style.

HTTP focuses on finding named resources through the global addressing scheme afforded by the URI standard
HTTP allows applications to GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE to those URIs.
GET retrieves a representation of an resource located at a specific URI
PUT attempts to replace the resource at the given URI with a new copy
REST is not a "buzzword" or a "fad". It is a description of how the WWW actually operates and how it has scaled to the size and success that it has thus far.

Addressability and Uniform Interface are the Keys to Success

As explained in the Wikipedia entry, and alluded to above, addressability and the uniform interface are two of the most crucial features for a REST-based architecture.

I want to compare HTTP's implementation of a REST based architecture with a similar example of SQL.

In HTTP, we have the standard verbs, or methods, GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.

Similarly, in SQL, we have SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE.

Imagine a web site with the following URL:

http://www.mysite.com/Items/ViewItem.aspx?id=123

Here, we have several parts:

http://www.mysite.com = Host address

/Items = Subdirectory off the root

/ViewItem.aspx?id=123 = This breaks down into several parts:

View = verb (action)
Item = noun (resource)
id = parameter name
123 = parameter value

The actual HTTP request for this would look something like:

GET /ViewItem.aspx?id=123

Now, consider an alternative URL:

http://www.mysite.com/Items/123

Here we still have the first two parts the same, but we roll up all the others into the /123. This makes sense because we already have a verb, it's GET. We already know we are looking at the "Items" subdirectory, so that identifies the type of noun that we want already.

Detailed Example of Exposing and Consuming Data

Let's take the example a little further with microformats.

http://www.mysite.com/Items/123

Background Reading

These are some links for understanding Web (REST) architecture.

Real World Business Point of View

Mark Nottingham (principal architect at Yahoo) discussing how Yahoo uses REST-based principles for integrating all of their properties: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/services-without-soap-yahoo

Quick technical review

Overview of REST: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
Paul Prescod on the REST vs. SOAP debate: http://www.prescod.net/rest/rest_vs_soap_overview/

Technical In-Depth analysis

Pete Lacey on InfoQ about REST and WS-*: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/pete-lacey-rest
My recent book review of RESTful Web Services: http://joshuagough.blogspot.com/2008/02/book-review-restful-web-services.html
Other recent interviews with architects on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/rest/
Steve Jones' post "Want to be cool? Learn REST. Want a career? Learn WS": http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2006/11/want-to-be-cool-learn-rest-want-career.html

Detailed understanding

Roy Fielding's Ph.D. dissertation that introduced the term, "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-Based Software Architectures": http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
RESTful Web Services book from O'Reilly: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/

Miscellaneous
These are just some miscellaneous notes.

The more things change the more they stay the same
During the early years of the web we had a few building blocks:

HTTP (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)
URI (http://www.hostname.com/resource)
HTML (and friends like the blink and marquee tags)
User agents (Netscape, Mosaic, Lynx, MSIE)
CGI and PERL

Later, we had things like:

Cascading Style Sheets
XML
Java
Javascript

A little later than that we got:

PHP
.NET
SOAP based Web Services
XmlHttpRequest

Most recently, we've seen:

Python popularity growth
Ruby
Ruby on Rails with ActiveRecord
Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX)

Things that will never happen

My grandfather Gene Gough worked at IBM for 35 years as a programmer and manager. He sent out a funny email the other day. I don't know if this list is accurate or not, but here is the list posted on line: http://www.rense.com/general81/dw.htm.

Here are three good ones from the list

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." -- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman, founder of Digital Equipment Corp. 1977.

I worked with the people at CDC's Epi-X (http://www.cdc.gov/epix) program in the past, and I think they'd strongly disagree not just the first one, but with all three.

We are all familiar with the now famous "Technology Adoption Curve", which looks like a standard bell curve. You can read more about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

REST Notes

2008-05-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

These are links and notes from various sites about REST architectural styles.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/pete-lacey-rest#

Q: Can you elaborate a little on why you think these would be tightly coupled? I mean everybody is talking about loose coupling and SOAP

A: I miss that one. When I was selling Systinet's products I talked about loosely coupled, when I present information for Burton Group on SOA I certainly stress "Trying to do your best to loosely couple client to server", because obviously loose coupling is a very good idea. The issue and I have said this before in print, is that you can strive for the largest amount of loose coupling possible in the SOAP WS-* world, and when you do the best job possible and when you obey all the best practices, you still end up with a tightly coupled system.

And you know the answer, but for the audience out there the fact of the matter is when you are creating a SOAP web service, a client, you have to know a great deal about that service, whether you learnt it via WSDL or some other mechanism, you have to know a great deal about it, and generally if the service changes in any not even terribly significant way, your client has to change with it or it will simply stop working. And you can go through heroic efforts to keep the existing clients alive and you can try and do your best at the design and development phase to loosely couple them, but the fact that the client has to know all the operation names and all the message formats before it can get any value out of a web service, is tight coupling to me.

Where of course in contrast all I need to know about a RESTful web service is its URI. Now I might not be able to derive all of the business values that the service can offer, but I can "GET" it and maybe something interesting will come from that, and it may be all the information I need. So properly designed RESTful system is dramatically loosely coupled, whereas a properly designed SOAP WS-* based system is unfortunately tightly coupled and all you can do is your best effort to avoid more tightly coupling than necessary.

RESTful Web Services: Notes

2008-05-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

This is continued from a prior post. These are my notes from the book RESTful Web Services that Mike (http://www.slipjig.org) and I have been reading. He is finished. He's already implementing a commercial application using RESTful design and the ASP.NET MVC framework at http://www.aps.net/mvc.

=Chapter 8: REST and ROA Best Practices=
*Expose all interesting nouns as Resources
*Perform all access to Resources through HTTP's uniform interface: GET, PUT, POST, DELETE
*Serve Representations of the Resource, not direct access to it
*Put complexity into Representations not into access methods!

=The Generic ROA Procedure=
*Figure out data set
*Split data set into resources
*Name the resources with URIs
*Expose a subset of the uniform interface
*Design the representation(s) accepted from the client
*Design the representation(s) served to the client
*Integrate the resource into existing resources, using hypermedia links and forms
*Consider the typical course of events: what's supposed to happen? Standard control flows like the Atom Publishing Protocol can help
*Consider error conditions: what might go wrong? Again, standard control flows can help

=Addressability=
*RESTful web services should be highly addressable through thousand or infinitely variable addresses
*By contrast: RPC / SOAP based web services typically expose just one or a few addresses
*URIs = Universal Resource Identifier
*Never make a URI represent more than one resource
*Ideally, each variation of representation should have its own URI (think of a URI with en-us for English, ko-kr for Korean, etc)
*Set Content-Location header to specify the canonical location of a resource
*URIs travel better if they specify both a resource and a representation

=State and Statelessness=
*Resource state: stays on server, sent to client as a representation
*Application state: stays on client, until passed to server to use for Create, Modify, or Delete operations
* Service is "stateless" if server never maintains in memory or disk any application state
** Each request is considered in isolation in terms of resource state
** Client sends all application state to the server with each request, including credentials

=Connectedness, aka Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State=
=Server guides client to paths for state transitions of resources using links and forms
=Links and forms are the "levers of state" transition
=XHTML and XML are good representational formats

=Uniform Interface=
*Resources expose one or more of HTTP's interface
*GET: requests info about a resource: returns headers and a representation
*HEAD : same as GET, but only headers are returned
*PUT: assertion about resource state. Usually a representation is sent to the server and the server tries to adjust the resource state to match the representation
*DELETE: assertion that the resource should be removed.
*POST: attempt to create a new resource from an existing one. Root resource may be a parent resource or a "factory" resource. POST can also be used to append state of an existing resource.
*OPTIONS: attempt to discover which other methods are supported (rarely used)
*You can overload POST if you need another method, but consider first whether you can implement your need by simply designing another resource
*For transactions, consider making them resources as well

=Safety and Idempotence=
*GET or HEAD should be safe: resource state on server should not change as a result
**Server can log, increase view count, but client is not at fault
*PUT or DELETE should be idempotent: making more than one of the same request should have the same effect as one single request.
**Avoid PUT requests that are actually instructions, like "Increment x by 5"
**Instead, PUT specific final values
*POST requests for resource creation are neither safe nor idempotent
** Consider: Post Once Exactly

=New Resources: Put Versus Post=
*PUT can only create new resources when it can calculate the actual URI
*POST can create new resources even when the server decides the new URI
**Ex: /{dbtable}/{itemid}, POST to /{dbtable} and the server returns the new URI

=Overloading POST=
*Can use POST to transform the resource into an RPC-style message processor (think: SOAP web services)
*Use of overloaded POST (for XML-RPC or SOAP) is strongly discouraged by the author.
**Using this breaks the Uniform Interface.
**No longer is the web a collection of well-defined URIs with a uniform interface, instead:
**It becomes a collection of known entry points into a universe of DIFFERING INTERFACES, few compatible with each other
*Legit overloaded POST:
**Work around lack of PUT and DELETE support
**Work around limitations on URI length
***POST http://name/resource?_method=GET and payload contains huge data set.
**Avoid methods in GET URIs: /blog/rebuild-index. This is not idempotent

=This Stuff Matters=
*Principles are not arbitrary
*Advantages: simpler, more interoperable, easier to combine than RPC
*JSG: They have, in fact, revolutionized the world by being so simple and constrained to allow loosely coupled "links" from all over the planet to anywhere else.

=Why Addressability Matters=
*Every interesting noun, or concept, is immediately accessible through one operation on its URI: GET
*URIs provide:
** Unique structured name for each item (you own your own domain name so name.com/item/12345 is always unique)
** Allows bookmarking
** Allows URIs to pass to other apps as input
** Allows for mashups you never imagined (pipes.yahoo.com)
* URIs are like:
** Cell addresses in Excel
** File paths on disk
** JSG: Longitude and Lattitude coordinates
** JSG: XPath queries against XML
** JSG: SQL SELECT statements against relational tables

=Why Statelessness Matters=
*The king of simplifying assumptions!
*Each request contains all application state needed for server to complete request
**No application state on server
**No application state implied by previous request
**Each request evaluated in isolation
*Makes it trivial to scale application up
**Add a load balancer and there is no need for server affinity
*Can scale up until resource (database) access becomes the bottleneck
*JSG This is where COM Interop introduces database latency by forcing connections open longer than they need to be because over marshalling data across process boundaries
*Increases reliability (requests that timeout can simply be requested again)
*Keeping session state can harm scalability and reliability, so use it wisely
** JSG if using a cookie, the cookie can be used to reinstantiate the srver side state for the user no matter what server handles the request

=Why the Uniform Interface Matters=
*Provides a standard way of interaction
*Given http://www.example.com/myresource, you know:
**GET retrieves it
**POST can attempt to append it or place a subordinate resource beneath it
**DELETE can assert that it should be removed

=Why Connectedness Matters=
* Provides a standard way to navigate from link to link and state to state

=Resource Design=
*Need a resource for each "thing" in your service
**Apply to any data object or algorithm
*Three types of resources:
**Predefined one-off resources: static list, object, db table
**Large (maybe infinite) number of resources of individual items: db row
**Large (usually infinite) number of resources representing ouputs of an algorithm: db query, search results
*For difficult situations, the solution is almost always to expose another resource.
**May be more abstract, but that is OK

=Relationships between Resourcs=
*Alice and Bob get married, do you:
**PUT update to Alice and to Bob, or:
**POST new resource to the "marriage" factory resource?
**Answer: you should create a third resource that links to both Alice and Bob
*JSG this leaves you wondering how you navigate the other direction, but this is not any different at all from a relational database table that has a linking table.

=Asynchronous Operations=
*A single HTTP request itself is synchronous
*Not all requests finish and many take a long time
*Use the 202 status code "Accepted"
*Example: ask server to calculate huge result, sever returns:

202 Accepted
Location: http://jobs.example.com/queue/job11a4f9

*This URI identifies the job uniquely for the client to come back to later
*Client can GET the URI for status updates and DELETE it to cancel it or DELETE the results later
*This overcomes the asynchronous "limitation" by using a new resource URI
*Caveat: use POST when you will spawn a new resource asynchronously to avoid breaking idempotency if you were to use GET or PUT

=Batch Operations=
*Factory resources can accept a collection of representations and creates many in response
*Create a "job" in response with a URI for the client to check status, or:
*Use WebDAV extension for 207: multi-status; client needs to look in entity body for a list of codes

=Transactions=
*You can implement them as resources, just like batch operations can be
*Example: financial transaction

1. POST to a transaction factory to get a URI for your transcation (201 Created response)

Request:
POST /transactions/account-transfer

Response:
201 Created

Location: /transactions/account-transfer/11a5

2. PUT new balance for checking account to this URI

PUT /transactions/account-transfer/11a5/accounts/checking

balance=150

3. Then PUT the new value for the savings account:

PUT /transactions/account-transfer/11a5/accounts/savings

balance=250

3. Commit the transaction

PUT /transactions/account-transfer/11a5

committed=true

*The server should make sure the representations make sense (no deleted money, no newly minted money, etc)
*RESTful transactions are more complex to implement, but they have advantages of being addressable, transparent, archived and linked

=When in Doubt, Make it a Resource=
*Anything can be a resource
*Strive to maintain the Uniform Interface

=URI Design=
*URIs should be well-designed and meaningful
*URIs should be "hackable" to increase the "surface area"
*Make it so clients can bookmark just about anything to get right to it
**Don't make clients have to repeat dozens of manual steps to get back to a view of a resource
*Go for general to specific
** Example: /weblogs/myweblog/entries/100
*Use punctuation to separate multiple data inputs at the same level
*Use commas when order matters (eg long and lat)
*Use semi-colons when order doesn't matter: /color-blends/red;blue
*Use query variables only for algorithm inputs
*URIs denote resource, not operations: almost never appropriate to put method names in them
**/object/do-operation is a bad style

=Outgoing Representations=
Bookmark: Page 254

Note to Self: Music and Salsa

2008-05-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

So I'm back to technical/work mode in general. Not a lot of time to listen to interesting podcasts or audiobooks right now. But, I am not letting that stop me from doing things I want and need to do for fun.

I am taking piano/keyboard lessons at http://www.l5pmusiccenter.com

And, I'm continuing to take salsa lessons, usually at http://www.takeholdballroom.com and http://www.pasofinopro.com. Check out http://www.atlantagasalsa.com for a full list of salsa events in the area. I'll be taking a cruise to Alaska in August and it is a salsa cruise!

Article Review: Managing an Agile Project by Jeff Pallermo

2008-04-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

Jeff Pallermo has an excellent article about "Managing an Agile Project" at CoDe magazine:

http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=0805041

First, About Jeff

Jeff is the founder of the MVC Contrib project at http://MVCContrib.org and he blogs here: http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeffrey.palermo/. He is also working on a book about ASP.NET MVC with a co-author who is a Ruby on Rails consultant.

He's interviewed on Polymorphic Podcast here about MVC and MVC Contrib: http://polymorphicpodcast.com/shows/mvccontrib/. (Scott Guthrie (The Gu) is interviewed in the beginning of this episode)

My favorite quote from this interview is "If you are writing new code without automated tests, you are writing instant legacy code".

My second favorite part is where he says that they use CruiseControl, NAnt and NCover for MVC Contrib and they do not accept any contributions that have less than 95% code coverage in their automated tests. NO EXCEPTIONS

Jeff leads a .NET Boot Camp for .NET Teams every six weeks: http://www.headspringsystems.com/training/. The training is in Texas and covers the following topics:

This advanced agile curriculum will cover everything involved in developing software in .NET, from setting up a new project and defining the architecture to implementing functionality in a loosely-coupled and testable manner. We will immerse ourselves in domain-driven design, test-driven development, design patterns, object-relational mapping, inversion of control (IoC), pair programming, automated builds, and continuous integration (CI). Students will discover which practices cause projects to fail and which practices help projects succeed. The course will include a strong focus on solid principles and values that can be applied to any .NET project. With a solid understanding of Agile values and object-oriented programming, students will emerge from the training with a refocused view on software development and the tools to immediately bring value back to their companies. All developers will take back working code developed during the course using the techniques and practices taught.

Comments on Article
Pallermo makes some very good points about Communication and Expectations. In my experience with iterative development, these were absolutely critical.

One project I worked on for four years in which Scrum techniques were applied was CDCs Epi-X system (http://www.cdc.gov/epix), a peer-review and emergency notification system for alerting about emergency health threats. We held weekly planning and strategy meetings in which the business side, the scientists and epidemiologists, related plans and goals for upcoming activities. On the development side, we had "stand up" meetings that were crucial for the team to understand the goals and problems for each day. After each milestone and release, we held reviews in which we cleaned up our environments, tightened our procedures, and made other improvements.

During a four year period we made about 15 releases, each bounded, each small and highly testable. That is roughly one release every three months.By breaking down the dilverables into smaller milestones, we were able to deliver new value continuously while also maintaining the mission-critical operations of the system on a day to day basis. Communication and documentation between the users, the business staff, and the technical staff was what enabled our success as a team.

On With the Highlights from the Article

Aiming for Agile

Combine XP, Lean, and Scrum practices

The Fallacy of Fixed Scope

Agile project management understands that scope is a moving target.
The larger the scope, the more it will change.
The software manager should foster an environment where questioning assumptions is welcome.
The software team will apply a critical eye to every story on the table and evaluate whether that story will contribute to the end goal.
Every story must stand up to criticism in order to prove worthy of the team's time.
Working on the right thing is as important as making the thing worked on right.

Teams

In an agile project, you tend to employ more generalists than specialists. With a team of generalists, you want folks who are skilled in a variety of areas.

Key Performance Indicators

Defect-free stories delivered. Each story represents a unique behavior in the software from which the customer benefits. Stories delivered with defects aren't as valuable, so don't count those.
Customer satisfaction. Ultimately, you are creating software for a customer. Without the customer, you wouldn't be creating the software. Keeping them happy is a great metric. It's simple. Just ask their satisfaction level on a scale from one to ten.
Consistent velocity. Iteration over iteration, velocity should remain constant. If it continues to change, something is wrong. After about the sixth iteration, treat any significant change in velocity as a cause for alarm. If the team make-up is consistent, the velocity should remain constant. A slowing of velocity could be a sign of a codebase that is less than maintainable.

Managing the Customer

Manage the customer's expectations. Use daily "stand up" meetings to communicate the following quickly:

What I accomplished yesterday.
What I hope to accomplish today.
What barriers are impeding progress.

Armed with this daily knowledge, the customer will start to feel like part of the team instead of an outsider.
If the customer isn't engaged properly, there will be an us vs. them environment, and that is dysfunctional.
When your team is in competition with the customer, neither will win.

Bugs versus Defects

Defects are gaps between what your team committed to and what they delivered.
A bug is anything that bugs the user. I'm not sure we'll ever get away from bugs, but constant communication sure helps.
A defect is a gap in the story contract and acceptance criteria.
A bug is not a defect since it's an annoyance that has yet to be discussed.
When someone finds a defect, the team should drop everything and fix the defect right away.
A defect signifies that a story which the team has already labeled "done" is, in fact, not finished. Finish the story and move on.
Institute a zero-defect policy.

Retrospectives
After an iteration, have the team take about 30 minutes to document the following:

Good (what you would like to continue).
Bad (what you would like to stop).
Ugly (a fun category if an issue was particularly messy).

All-in-all, you are in charge, so if your team starts a long discussion on how to move forward, you may have to make the call.

Book Review: RESTful Web Services

2008-02-27T23:22:00.001-08:00

del.icio.us Tags: UVC-TECH,Tech,REST,RESTFul Web Services,SOAP,API

I'm currently reading the book RESTFul Web Services, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Find it at http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Leonard-Richardson/dp/0596529260.

This post summarizes what I'm learning from the book. Here is the book's basic premise:

Give me Some of that Flux Capacitor: Back to the Future

Many of today's most modern and successful web applications are beginning to adopt architectures that look more and more like yesterday's World Wide Web architecture, circa 1994. This is a good thing. In the beginning, there was HTTP, URI, and HTML. This was good. This post will explain why based on the arguments of the authors of this book. The basic architecture of the World Wide Web has been term REpresentational State Transfer (REST) by one of its principal architects, Roy Fielding.

From the REST article in Wikipedia, here is a basic definition of REST:

REST strictly refers to a collection of network architecture principles that outline how resources are defined and addressed. The term is often used in a looser sense to describe any simple interface that transmits domain-specific data over HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP or session tracking via HTTP cookies.

REST is About Resources and Their Addresses

To understand more, just visit the REST article in Wikipedia and read it before reading the rest of this post. In summary, the takeaway from that definition are these two key concepts:

Resources
Addresses

Remember that when we discuss REST and the WWW, we're talking about creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting Resources and about specifying Addresses at which locate those resources.

How the WWWW Architecture Works via RESTful Principles

As explained above, I won't rehash details better explained already on the REST article in Wikipedia and in Roy Fielding's dissertation, but I will briefly summarize what REST is with a simple example.

All of us who use the web are already familiar with Resources and Addresses. The content of the article that describes REST on Wikipedia is in fact a Resource. it is a document resource full of HTML text and links to other documents. And, of course, this Resource has an Address, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer.

When you browse to the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer your browser issues a request with a command and an argument. If you have Live HTTP Headers installed for Firefox or a similar plugin for IE, you can spy on the details of this request. It looks like this:

GET /wiki/Representational_State_Transfer HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:18:00 GMT

As another example, when you are on the www.asp.net web site and you do an Advanced Search for forum posts on the keyword "Scottgu", your browser issues a POST command:

POST /search/default.aspx HTTP/1.1
Host: forums.asp.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://forums.asp.net/search
Cookie: __utma=57644090.77168603.1204177720.1204177720.1204177720.1; __utmb=57644090; __utmc=57644090; __utmz=57644090.1204177720.1.1.utmccn=(direct)|utmcsr=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); CommunityServer-UserCookie605740=lv=Fri, 01 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT&mra=Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:48:36 GMT; CommunityServer-LastVisitUpdated-605740=; CSAnonymous=1cf2e1d1-51fe-4609-be1d-b4618c323b27; __utma=185208894.1130547723.1204177819.1204177819.1204177819.1; __utmb=185208894; __utmc=185208894; __utmz=185208894.1204177819.1.1.utmccn=(referral)|utmcsr=wiki.asp.net|utmcct=/|utmcmd=referral
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 9138
__EVENTTARGET=ctl00%24bcr%24ctl02%24ctl00%24SearchButton&__EVENTARGUMENT=&__VIEWSTATE=<deleted>&ctl00%24bhcr%24SearchForm1%24ctl00%24TitleBarSearchText=&ctl00%24bcr%24ctl02%24ctl00%24Keywords=Scottgu

An Embarrassment of Riches: This is Your Grandfather's HTTP, But He Kept His Treasures From You!

Both GET and POST are called HTTP Methods, or HTTP Verbs. These are the two most commonly used and known HTTP methods. However, there are others that almost nobody talks about, except for people who are writing applications using a REST-based approach. You can read more about these at http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HttpMethods

The four most important HTTP methods are GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. Summarizing what other tutorials will explain in more detail, it's safe to say you can see the correspondence between these methods and the SQL DML statements SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE.

Note: The PUT method can actually serve as both INSERT and UPDATE, and POST's purpose is more amorphous. A great explanation of the comparison between these HTTP Methods and SQL CRUD operations is found here on Paul Downey's blog: http://blog.whatfettle.com/2006/08/14/so-which-crud-operation-is-http-post/

REST versus RPC

Below is a compete section from the Wikipedia entry about REST. This illustrates the difference between RESTful web services based on HTTP and RPC-based web services, based upon the SOAP protocol.

The statements below refer to REST in the context of Web Services, specifically as opposed to SOAP. Note that Fielding’s dissertation presents REST in the context of information and media access, not web services. It does not contrast REST to RPC (remote procedure call).

REST
Resources—Commands are defined in simple terms: resources to be retrieved, stored / get, set—difficult to do many joins
RPC
Commands—Commands are defined in methods with varying complexity: depending on “standard”—easier (?) to hide complex things behind a method
REST
Nouns—Exchanging resources and concepts
RPC
Verbs—Exchanging methods

A RESTful web application requires a different design approach from an RPC application. An RPC application is exposed as one or more network objects, each with an often unique set of functions that can be invoked. Before a client communicates with the application it must have knowledge of the object identity in order to locate it and must also have knowledge of the object type in order to communicate with it.
RESTful design constrains the aspects of a resource that define its interface (the verbs and content types). This leads to the definition of fewer types on the network than an RPC-based application but more resource identifiers (nouns). REST design seeks to define a set of resources that clients can interact with uniformly, and to provide hyperlinks between resources that clients can navigate without requiring knowledge of the whole resource set. Server-provided forms can also be used in a RESTful environment to describe how clients should construct a URL in order to navigate to a particular resource.

Example

An RPC application might define operations such as the following:

getUser()
addUser()
removeUser()
updateUser()
getLocation()
addLocation()
removeLocation()
updateLocation()
listUsers()
listLocations()
findLocation()
findUser()

Client code to access this application may look something like this:

exampleAppObject = new ExampleApp('example.com:1234')
exampleAppObject.removeUser('001')

With REST, on the other hand, the emphasis is on the diversity of resources, or nouns; for example, a REST application might define the following resources

http://example.com/users/
http://example.com/users/{user} (one for each user)
http://example.com/findUserForm
http://example.com/locations/
http://example.com/locations/{location} (one for each location)
http://example.com/findLocationForm

Client code to access this application may look something like this:

userResource = new Resource('http://example.com/users/001')
userResource.delete()

Each resource has its own identifier noun. Clients start at a single resource such as the user resource that represents themselves, and navigate to location resources and other user resources. Clients work with each resource through standard operations, such as GET to download a copy of the resource’s representation, PUT to paste a changed copy over the top of the original, or DELETE to remove the data or state associated with the resource. POST is sometimes used interchangeably with PUT, but can also be seen as a “paste after” rather than a “paste over” request. POST is generally used for actions with side-effects, such as requesting the creation of a purchase order, or adding some data to a collection. Note how each object has its own URL and can easily be cached, copied, and bookmarked.

Uniform interfaces in REST and RPC

The uniform interface allows clients to access data from a range of resources without special code to deal with each one, so long as it is actually uniform. The content returned from a user resource could be the globally standard and RESTful HTML, a less RESTful industry standard representation such as UserML, or an unRESTful application-specific data format. Which content is returned can be negotiated at request time. The content could even be a combination of these representations: HTML can be marked up with microformats that have general or industry-specific appeal, and these microformats can be extended with application-specific information.
Uniform interfaces reduce the cost of client software by ensuring it is only written once, rather than once per application it has to deal with. Both REST and RPC designs may try to maximise the uniformity of the interface they expose by conforming to industry or global standards. In the RPC model these standards are primarily in the form of standard type definitions and standard choreography. In REST it is primarily the choice of standard content types and verbs that controls uniformity.

Notice the decoupling of Noun and Verb in the REST sample code section. This is clean, simple, flexible, and feels very much like working with a relational database in which you use those four basic commands, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE to operate on various different types of data. In the RPC sample, the same verb gets repeated and paired with every single type of noun.

Just imagine how insane you would feel writing SQL DML statements if you had to write table-specific operator statements for each table in your database? Don't forget, because they are table specific, you'd actually have to be writing the implementation code for those, perhaps in C, C++, or maybe even C# if you're using SQL Server 2005 which has .NET built in.

SELECT_User(LastName), SELECT_Book(Title)

FROM_User JOIN_User(ID) = JOIN_Book(UserID)

WHERE_Book(PublishDate > '1/1/1990') AND WHERE_User(LastName = 'Box')

If I had to write this terrifying code, in which I have to manually write C# code to create verb + noun commands for each action and table, I would surely welcome the day someone decided to decouple the verbs and nouns, giving me the ability to write this:

SELECT LastName, Title
FROM Users a INNER JOIN Book b ON a.UserID = b.UserID
WHERE PublishDate > '1/1/1990' AND LastName = 'Box'

Washing out Your Mouth with SOAP after Swallowing a Bitter Blue Pill

So when it comes to XLM Web Services, why is it that most of us, at least in the Java and Microsoft .NET universe, have been brought up to believe that SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol is the correct way to implement XML Web Services? As this book argues, this may not be the case, and increasing numbers of web developers and large companies like Yahoo and Amazon have already boarded the REST bus. In some cases they've been riding it comfortably for years by now.

Paul Prescod provides an excellent summary of differences between SOAP and REST in his article Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate. In his article he cites a interesting quote by Don Box, one of SOAP's principal authors, and also the author of the quintessential Windows programming book Essential COM. In the quote, Box states that had XML Schema been completed in 1998, they never would have created SOAP in the first place! Here is the complete context of the quote, which details.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06/06/020606hnbox.html?s=rss&t%3b=news&slot%3b=3

Prior to his calling on developers to build applications, Box detailed the birth of SOAP in 1998, and how it came about as a result of a failed effort to provide DCOM for Unix developers.

"We're entering year five of SOAP. It's kind of interesting that what started as a kind of a sabbatical, fun project ... turned into this kind of monster. But be careful what you wish for is the moral of the story," said Box.
SOAP was Microsoft's "second run up the hill," following the DCOM-for-Unix effort, he said. Box was not a Microsoft employee when he helped develop SOAP.

"The first run up the hill was DCOM on Unix. Had DCOM on Unix succeeded, we would not be sitting in this room," said Box. The effort failed because it resembled Windows programming too closely for Unix purists, Box said.
SOAP, he said, arose out of an HTTP foundation, with HTTP being a protocol accepted by multiple development camps. XML also was critical.

"Really, the novelty of SOAP was simply saying we're going to take XML and make it work for data," Box said.
An upcoming version of SOAP, Version 1.2, needs to be the final version, Box said.

Box also stressed that XML Schema is the dominant technology for Web services. "Had XML Schema been done in 1998, we would not have done SOAP," he said.

"The reality is, XML Schema is the foundation for the rest of XML," said Box. Technologies such as XML Query take XML Schema "for granted, as a given," he said.

SOAP messages need to function with XML Schema, he said. "XML Schema is an inevitability. Resistance is futile. There is no point in not embracing this thing and I strongly encourage those of you who work in Web services technologies [to] make sure your story is straight" with respect to XML Schema, Box said.

Box also addressed some maligning of the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) specification at the conference, saying it has the most opportunity for growth and that the upcoming Version 1.3 of UDDI hopefully will fix problems with identifiers.
"It's hard to talk about UDDI without taking an apologetic tone," Box said.

Top Developers and Corporations Concur: REST is BEST, SOAP is DIRTY.

If you don't believe that SOAP is too complicated, or you believe that REST sounds too simple, don't worry. You don't have to use it. That won't stop Amazon from using it. Or Yahoo. Or Flickr. Or Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft, but more on that next.

Take a look at Amazon's S3 Simple Storage service: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

Or, read about Yahoo's REST-only web services: http://developer.yahoo.com/faq/#rest

Flickr's REST documentation: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/request.rest.html

The list just goes on and on and on. Just Google it for more examples. Better yet, just take a look at the kinds of applications people are building on top of Amazon's Web Services platforms:

http://www.amazon.com/Success-Stories-AWS-home-page/b/ref=sc_fe_c_0_16427261_4?ie=UTF8&node=182241011&no=16427261&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA

Stop that REST Bus, Microsoft's Coming, and They're Bringing a Whole Bunch of Programmers

Now you will not hear much about it yet from their marketing engine since Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 are all the rage and focus at this time, but Microsoft's engineering team is playing catch up right now trying to capitalize these trends. Competent and competitive Microsoft shops should take heed and be prepared well in advance by studying and learning from the competitors and projects that the MS crew are embracing and extending at this time.

Microsoft's ASP.NET team has already released a preview of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extension, available at

Microsoft's ADO.NET Data Services: REST Based Web Services

To get a sneak peek at Microsoft's REST architecture for Web Services, take a look here: http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/

Here is the summary of the technology from the home page:

The new wave of web applications are built on technologies such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight that enable developers to build better, richer user experiences. These technologies bring a shift in how applications are organized, including a stronger separation of presentation from data.

ADO.NET Data Services (also known as Project code name “Astoria”) consists of a combination of patterns and libraries that enables any data store to be exposed as a flexible data service, naturally integrating with the Web, that can be consumed by Web clients within a corporate network or across the Internet. ADO.NET Data Services uses URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data, such as JSON and ATOM/APP. This results in data being exposed to Web clients as a REST-style resource collection, addressable with URIs that agents can interact with using standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, or DELETE.

For the system to understand and leverage semantics over the data that is surfacing, ADO.NET Data Services models the data exposed through the data service using a model called the Entity Data Model (EDM), an Entity-Relationship derivative. This organizes the data in the form of instances of "entity types", or "entities", and the associations between them.

Microsoft's MVC Framework for ASP.NET

Related to the ADO.NET Data Services is the MVC Framework, also part of the ASP.NET 3.5 extensions. Learn more about that here: http://quickstarts.asp.net/3-5-extensions/mvc/MVCOverview.aspx

Here is the summary of the MVC framework from that page:

The Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern separates an application into three main components: the model, the view, and the controller. The ASP.NET MVC framework provides an alternative to the ASP.NET Web-forms pattern for creating MVC-based Web applications. The ASP.NET MVC framework is a lightweight, highly testable presentation framework that (as with Web-forms-based applications) is integrated with existing ASP.NET features, such as master pages and membership-based authentication. The MVC framework is defined in the System.Web.Mvc namespace and is a fundamental, supported part of the System.Web namespace.
MVC is a standard design pattern that many developers are familiar with. Some types of Web applications will benefit from the MVC framework. Others will continue to use the traditional ASP.NET application pattern that is based on Web forms and postbacks. Other types of Web applications will combine the two approaches; neither approach precludes the other.
The MVC framework includes the following components:

Models. Model objects are the parts of the application that implement the domain logic. Often, model objects also retrieve and store model state in a database. For example, a Product object might retrieve information from a database, operate on it, and then write updated information back to a Products table in SQL Server.

Views. Views are the components that display the application's user interface (UI). Typically, this UI is created from the model data. An example would be an edit view of a Products table that displays text boxes, drop-down lists, and check boxes based on the current state of a Product object.

Controllers. Controllers are the components that handle user interaction, manipulate the model, and ultimately select a view to render that displays UI. In an MVC application, the view only displays information; the controller handles and responds to user input and interaction. For example, the controller handles query-string values, and passes these values to the model, which in turn queries the database by using the values.

--To Be Completed--

Year 2007 in Review!

2007-12-25T16:43:00.001-08:00

Hello everyone, I wish you a Merry Bear-free Christmas! And, a happy holiday season and new year!

Since I seem to be the only one without a holiday letter, I thought I'd do something like that, using highlights from my collections of photos on Flickr.com.

Dating back to last summer, here are a few pictures of my new condo that I bought in July. I live across the street from the Carter Center, which has very nice grounds and picnic areas.

Last October, I traveled to Seoul, Korea to attend one of my best friend's weddings. Sang married M.K. in a Christian service, and then a traditional Korean service with just the family members. I was honored when Sang asked me to speak after the ceremony. His family kindly hosted me for dinner and his brother and friend showed me around Seoul, a city of 11.5 million people, and the second most expensive city in the world to live in, behind Moscow. Try Korean BBQ and Soju!

Michael and I went for a GeoCache last November, but we could not find it! My mom is much better at GeoCaching than me.

I started to pick up salsa, LA Style, and a bit of New York Style, in March. They say white men can't dance (or is that jump?) and these ladies would likely agree. I'm still just a beginner. Laugh at me on YouTube with the Salsa for Klutzes series at: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2263E8F6D72EF5F7

I went to White Plans, NY to visit Kelly in March and visited with her and her friend Grace. Kevin met us for dinner at a nice Indian restaurant.

In April, many of Gene and Carola Gough's descendants gathered in Alameda, CA to celebrate Carola's 96th birthday! It was a great trip. Linda brought tons of old family photos and letters to return to the original sender for safe-keeping. We had a good time traveling around San Francisco. Danny and I stayed with Matt and Christine in Point Richmond. And, thanks to Matt's mad google skillz, we made the ferry Just-in-Time to take the tour. I took a tour of the Red Oak Victory ship nearby and took many photos of the "Rosie the Riveter" exhibit honoring the women during WWII that kept the country running while we were at war.

In July, Carola had a stroke and many people traveled back to Alameda to visit her. She passed away on the 25th and left to all of us a tremendous legacy of love, commitment, and inspiring artwork. We've started to form the Carola L. Gough foundation to continue her legacy, starting by helping finish the autobiography she had started that she asked us to finish. See http://www.CarolaGough.com for details.

While in California, I took some time to visit the Lawrence Hall of Science, http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/, which pays tribute to the foundations of nuclear technology and the pervasive impact of science upon all aspects of our modern lives. As the exhibits say, "Math Rules"! Too may interesting books for sale there. I wish I could read them all.

Many gathered in Salida, Colorado for Carola's memorial service in August. You can watch the memorial service on YouTube at which her pastor, her friend Sandy, her daughter Linda, and I spoke in remembrance of her life and influence. The link is http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A37D026CE022E426. We spread her ashes in the same area her husband Gene was spread in 1998.

After coming back from Carola's memorial in Salida, CO, my friend Appollo and I helped organize a "Video Game Create and Play Party" with our friends Michael, Karlin, Anthony, Mario, and Vincent to congratulate them on their academic success and encourage them to continue. Anthony, Mario, and Vincent recently started their own eBay-based business! We wish them tons of success!

One of my best friends from college, Kevin, got married in October in Savannah, GA, his hometown. He and his wife Katie reside in the Atlanta area now. It was a lot of fun being part of the event.

I started running regularly over the last few months of the year and have lost a lot of weight. On Saturday the 22nd, I ran 10 miles (twice around Stone Mountain) with my friends Appollo and Ben. I never thought I'd be able to run 1 mile!

In November, I visited Portland, Oregon to see Kathi, Rick, and Danny in their new place. I lived in the Portland area with them when I was 16, before they moved to Colorado and then back to Portland with Intel. We visited the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), where we learned about the OMSI Science Pub! See http://www.omsi.edu/education/adults/sciencepub/index.cfm for details. This is part of an effort called "Science Cafes", sponsored by PBS and NOVA Science Now, http://www.sciencecafes.org. My friend Carol, a biology teacher here in Atlanta, and I are going to try to start one here. Looking at the map on the Science Cafes web site, the Southeast is without much representation. We're going to try to partner with The Thinking Man Tavern, http://www.thinkingmantavern.com/, and The Fernbank Museum of Natural History, http://www.fernbank.edu, which is right around the corner from where I live.

My mom drove me along the Oregon coast. Wow....talk about beautiful. You can stand on the beach and stare at the ocean, and look over your shoulder at the mountains less than a mile behind you!

Danny and I created this collage from pictures of Carola's paintings and historical photos with the intent of making it a "Traveling Memorial" using GeoCaching to honor the adventurous spirit of Gene and Carola. More pictures below.

I flew from Oregon to New York to see Kevin, Kelly, Barbara, Kara, Lew, and Aiden. Here is a cell-phone pic from a nice new Thai restaurant in Beacon, Sukhothai, http://www.sukhothainy.net/.

"The word Sukhothai in Pali language means 'Dawn of Happiness'. In 1238, King Intradit created a federation of neighboring kingdoms under one banner and founded the brilliant culture named after the city-state."

Here is the completed Gene & Carola Gough Traveling Memorial along with its first destination, a cache named Scotland the Brave, a cache dedicated to the Scotish Bagpipes. I thought this was a great first stop since Scott played Scottish bagpipes at Gene's memorial. You can track the items travels at http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=96a7a571-10a3-4aa0-89ad-432ccf082650.

In October, Appollo and I launched The Atlanta Mentors Leadership Group through Meetup.com. I told Carola we were planning to do this and to dedicate it to her legacy. It's a casual association of professional friends with the following purpose: "To create a network of friends from various professions in the Atlanta area who actively mentor and lead other professionals and students." You can learn more about the group at http://altantamentorsleadership.blogspot.com. We have presentations and MP3 recordings of our group discussions there.

Cheers to margaritas and good friends united again! News of the day was that Appollo accepted a position with my company GB Holdings!

The Atlanta Mentors Leadership Group participated in The Children's Restoration Network's 12 Days of Caring Campaign, http://www.childrn.org/. Michael, Karlin, their mothers, myself, and Felix attended for a couple of hours to help wrap and bag gifts donated from UPS and individual donors. It was a lot of fun and extremely well-organized. Children's Restoration Network serves 2,000 homeless children in the Atlanta area.

Appollo owns a timeshare in the north Georgia mountains, near Helen. We went there to do some hiking and brainstorming about upcoming work and business challenges before Christmas. This part of Georgia is home to Tallulah Gorge State Park, http://ngeorgia.com/ang/Tallulah_Gorge_State_Park. Deeper than 1,000 feet, Tallulah Gorge is the deepest canyon east of the Mississippi! So much for Georgia being flat!

Bye bye CDC! You served us well and we'll miss you, but it's on to larger technical and business challenges with GB Holdings and beyond! I worked at CDC for 4 years. Appollo worked there for 6.

Christmas day, 2007 in Marietta. Peggy and I holing up a proof of the Gene & Carola Memorial Poster. I ordered a custom frame from Michael's to frame the final version for them. A tired Gene and Barron catch up on some snooze-time while everyone else plays board games!

Take care everyone and have a great 2008!

Best regards,

Josh

I'll Have a New Niece Next Year!

2007-12-19T21:28:00.001-08:00

I just found out from my friend Sang that he and his wife M.K. are having a daughter! He said I'll be an uncle in 2K8!

Congratulations guys!

I showed them my cousin Matt and his wife Christine's blog for their son and they watched some of their video clips and were starting to get excited. She is due in April.

I attended their wedding in Seoul, South Korea, last October. Here are some pics from that event. It was quite a trip. I'd love to go back to visit again someday soon.

Sang's Wedding and Seoul at Night

Touring Seoul!

GetFit-Atlanta: Marahton/Half Marathon and Triathalon Training

2007-12-16T18:56:00.000-08:00

I met a woman at a non-fiction book club who told me about http://www.getfit-atlanta.com/index.html. She said she could not run a 5K in May, but she joined this group and in 26 weeks she could run 26 miles. She just completed a marathon in Huntsville!

A Run Down of Atlanta's Non-Religious Community Groups for Humanists, Freethinkers, Objectivists, Agnostics, Atheists, Naturalists, Brights, and the otherwise Non-Religious

2007-09-30T14:39:00.001-07:00

Formal Organizations

These organizations are very well-established and are formal organizations. They have a long history of member involvement have regularly scheduled activities for members and guests alike.

The Fellowship of Reason

Home Page: http://www.fellowshipofreason.com/
Calendar: http://www.fellowshipofreason.com/calendar.htm
Description:

The Fellowship of Reason ("FOR") is a reason-based ethical community; that is, a group of people united by the idea that reason provides the best guide for understanding reality and living the best life possible. FOR differs from faith-based organizations in that we believe each individual's purpose and success in life are derived from, and ultimately determined by, the individual - not a supernatural authority.

Is the Fellowship of Reason for You?

Are you interested in ideas?

Are you interested in continuing to learn?

Do you believe that personal happiness and well-being should be the cornerstones of any ethical system?

Do you believe that reason, rather than faith, is the best guide to living?

Are you interested in friendships based on these ideas?

Do you know what you want out of life, or are you on a quest to find out?

If you answered "Yes!" to these questions, then the Fellowship of Reason is for you!

The Atlanta Freethought Society

Home Page: http://www.atlantafreethought.org
Calendar: http://www.atlantafreethought.org/activities/
Description:

The Atlanta Freethought Society is a non-profit educational organization that exists to provide a community for non-theists in the Metro Atlanta, Georgia area through educational, advocacy, and social activities.

We are Atlanta's non-theist organization for atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secular humanists, skeptics, rationalists, brights, or those otherwise self-identified as non-religious.

The Humanists of Georgia Association

Home Page: http://www.georgiahumanists.org
Calendar: http://www.geocities.com/gahumanists/meetings.htm
Description:

Humanism affirms the inherent dignity and worth of every human being, and asserts that persons are responsible for the realization of their aspirations and that they have within themselves the power of achieving them. Humanism is free from any belief in the supernatural and is dedicated to the search for meaning and values for individuals on this earth through reliance on intelligence and the scientific method, democracy, and social sympathy. Humanism contends that human beings are a part of nature, that they have emerged as a result of continuous evolutionary process and that all their values -- religious, ethical, political and social -- have their source in human experience and are the product of their culture.

The Humanists of Georgia is a membership organization dedicated to building a socially nurturing and intellectually stimulating Humanist community. The Humanists of Georgia strives to achieve its goals through public advocacy projects, social concerns programs, community outreach programs, and watchdog activities.

Please visit their web sites to learn more about them. They try to coordinate their activities such that they do not overlap. That way, people can have a community of friends to enjoy some time with each Sunday, and also during the week or on Saturday sometimes.

Informal Groups

In addition to the formal organizations, there are several new groups popping up on the internet in Meetup.com, Facebook, and on MySpace. Here are links to those groups:

The Atlanta Atheists Meetup

Home Page: http://atheists.meetup.com/590/
Calendar: http://atheists.meetup.com/590/calendar/
Description:

To bring together atheists, agnostics and other freethinkers. What with this nation leaning towards becoming more religious, those of us who reject religion need to organize and combine our strengths. Even in a society that is supposed to be open and accepting, all too often we have to keep our atheism under wraps lest we be made pariahs.

21st Century Humanism Meetup

Home Page: http://humanism.meetup.com/168
Calendar: http://humanism.meetup.com/168/calendar/
Description:

We are devoted to maintaining a continuing dialog between Humanists, Atheists, Freethinkers, Agnostics, and other people who believe in the basic goodness of human nature without supernaturalism.

21st Century Humanism fosters the preservation and growth of Humanism, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, separation of church and state, and the traditional Humanist values of reason, rationality, experience, and the scientific method in a post 9/11 world by examining the real problems experienced by humanists, agnostics, atheists, relativists, freethinkers, rationalists, skeptics, and others.

The Metro-Atlanta Brights and Freethinkers Meetup

Home Page: http://brights.meetup.com/282/
Calendar: http://brights.meetup.com/282/calendar/
Description:

Our group is dedicated to helping free people from their irrational beliefs and providing aid and community for those who have been enlightened and their families. All are welcome to join with us: agnostics, atheists, brights, freethinkers, humanists, naturalists, non-theists, skeptics, and open believers.

Read more at: http://brights.meetup.com/282/about/

The Peachtree Freethinkers MySpace Group

Home Page: http://www.myspace.com/103227615
Description:

This is a new group in the Atlanta area to network those who are atheist, freethinkers, humanist, agnostic, or otherwise non-religious who are professional younger adults (18-54). Like with the general demographics of MySpace, most so far are in their 20's, 30's, and some 40's. This is not a singles group so couples are also welcome. We are not trying to replace any current non-theist group in Atlanta but to provide a venue for the void of activities targeted to a younger crowd.

Activities will be up to the members... social mixers, movies, dinners, cookouts, outdoor activities, ball games, cultural events, parties, etc...

The Evolution Meetup Club
Home Page: http://evolution.meetup.com/55/
Calendar: http://evolution.meetup.com/55/calendar/
Description:

Evolution is an amazing concept that provides an accurate and big picture explanation for why things are the way they are. I was an anthropology-biology (essentially evolution) major in undergrad I love talking about it (particularly the philosophical aspects). If enjoy talking evolution as well then join this club and we'll find fun ways to meet up and talk about whatever evolutionary ideas that spark our interests.

The Atlanta Humanists

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18719424192
Description:

Are you tired of religious dogma? But, do you still recognize the need and the joy of getting together for social gatherings with your fellow citizens? Do you base your worldview on science, reason, and evidence? And, do you enjoy being compassionate and friendly to your fellow human beings? Do you prefer to focus on what unites you to others, rather than what makes you different? Do you tend to agree with atheists and agnostics in their view of religion, but feel like those labels don't really speak to what you do believe in, and you'd rather point to what you do indeed believe, rather than simply what you don't believe?

If so, you may be a Humanist!
"Humanism is a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead meaningful, ethical lives capable of adding to the greater good of humanity." -- American Humanist Association

The Atlanta Interfaith and Nonfaith Service Association

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6223179383
Description:

There are many interfaith organizations that promote community service. There are also a few community service organizations for people who do not profess any particular faith.

What we don't have is a group that brings the two sides together for a common goal of serving others in the community. We need this at this time when the world appears divided across not only many different faiths, but also between those who profess faith and those who are secular. Media reports paint a picture of an America that is divided between "God-fearing religionists" and "God-denying secularists".

While we have different philosophical outlooks, there are a great many things we all have in common and behind which we can rally. Thus, the primary mission of this group will be for us to set aside any philosophical or theological differences and come together to engage in community service projects that serve others.

Groups Not Specific to Atlanta

Also of interest to Atlanta area non-theists should be some very popular Facebook groups:

Government + Religion = Disaster Facebook Group

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2208192963
Members: 95,423

Atheist, Agnostic, and Non-Regligious Facebook Group

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2204609276
Members: 11,054

The Freedom From Religion Foundation Facebook Group

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2346399275
Members: 242

Interfaith Youth Core Facebook Group

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2255863314
Members: 131

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science Facebook Group

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2226393021
Members: 1,085

Secular Humanists Facebook Group

Home Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2223483925
Members: 1,167

Fernbank Observatory and Emory's Science and Society Outreach Program

2007-09-27T22:00:00.001-07:00

I went over to Fernbank Observatory tonight for about an hour to see if I could get a view of our moon tonight. I did. It was pretty cool to see the moon through the 36 inch telescope. The astronomer, Dr. Sarrazine, also showed us Jupiter and some stars.

I talked with her for a while while she was closing up the observatory about astronomy and science-related programs in the Atlanta area. She gave me some handouts about the Atlanta Astronomy Club and about volunteer opportunities at the observatory.

When I got home I researched Emory and Fernbank's science outreach efforts in more depth. What I have found are some very good resources.

Fernbank Science Center

Fernbank Science Center's slogan is "From the Forest to the Stars". Read about it at http://fsc.fernbank.edu. I live just 8 minutes away from it, and only 5 minutes from the history center.

Here is an excerpt about the center from its factsheet, http://fsc.fernbank.edu/factsheet.pdf:

General

Fernbank Science Center is a unique educational science resource center, classroom and woodland complex located in a suburban area of northeast Atlanta near Decatur. Fernbank has been operating since 1967. It is an agency of the DeKalb County School System and is open year-round. Fernbank is a founding member of ASTC, the Association of Science-Technology Centers. The Fernbank complex includes our partner-in-education, Fernbank Museum of Natural History.

Programs

Self-guided as well as guided tours of Fernbank Forest
Exhibit hall with a variety of interpretations of the life and physical sciences; frequent traveling exhibits
Home Composting Demonstration Site with a vegetable garden and a butterfly garden
Test rose gardens of the All-America Rose Selections and American Rose Society organizations
Planetarium programs for the public in the evenings
Viewing in the observatory through Fernbank’s 36-inch telescope

Fernbank Observatory

This content is taken directly from the Fernbank web site at http://fsc.fernbank.edu/Facilities/observatory.html:

The Fernbank Observatory houses a 0.9 meter (36-inch) Cassegrain reflector beneath a 10 meter (30 ft.) dome. This is the largest telescope in the southeastern United States and one of the largest instruments ever dedicated to education and public viewing.
In addition to educational classes for school students, free public observing open houses are offered every
Thursday and Friday evening from 8:00 p.m. (or dark) until 10:30 p.m. weather permitting
An astronomer will be available to position the telescope and answer questions.
For more information contact us at 678-874-7102.
Images taken from the Fernbank Observatory:

The Moon

M42, the Orian Nebula

Interview about the Observatory

Interview with Dr. Sudduth and Dr. Sarrazine about the Fernbank Observatory

http://www.scienceandsociety.emory.edu/scienceinyourlife/fsc.htm

Emory's Science and Society Program

From http://www.scienceandsociety.emory.edu/:

The Emory College Program in Science & Society aims to instill the thrill and importance of science in Emory students, especially non-science majors, and in the Emory and Atlanta communities at large.

We promote a better understanding of the impact of science on society, and work with the Science, Social Science, and Humanities disciplines to convey the message that science is vital across disciplines – that science is not merely a collection of facts but is, at its core, a way of thinking and of approaching problems.

We invite you to join us as we continue to explore the interface of science with social issues, including ethics, religion, and morality.

Science in Your Life Radio Show

From http://www.scienceandsociety.emory.edu/scienceinyourlife/aboutus.htm:

The goal of Science in Your Life is to increase awareness and understanding of science in our everyday lives and how that science integrates with the environment, the economy, our health, entertainment, transportation, how we think, and how we express our thoughts.
The Program in Science & Society was developed in 1998 and is a part of the Emory College Faculty Science Council. The Program aims to instill the thrill and importance of science at all levels. Promoting a better understanding of the impact of science on society, the program seeks cross-disciplinary acceptance of science as not just a body of facts but as a way of thinking.
WABE 90.1 FM was Georgia's first public radio station. WABE broadcasts a mixture of mostly classical music and National Public Radio and Public Radio International programming. The station is active in and has a long tradition of excellece in education and science, airing such nationally successful shows as the Infinite Mind and Word for the Wise.
The Coordinator of Science in Your Life is Dr. Arri Eisen, Senior Lecturer in Biology at Emory and Director of the Program in Science & Society. The radio portion of the project is hosted by Ted Vigodsky and produced by Daren Wang at WABE. Ashley Cimino, Undergraduate Project Coordinator, helps bring each portion of the program together. Ajay Pillarisetti is the webmaster.

Science in Your Life Archived Episodes

CDC's EXCITE Program for teaching science and epidemiology to young people:

http://www.scienceandsociety.emory.edu/scienceinyourlife/exciteint.htm

Dr. Frans de Waal's research about primates:

http://www.scienceandsociety.emory.edu/scienceinyourlife/capuchins.htm

Dr. Scott Lilienfield's Demystifying Pseudo-Science:

http://www.scienceandsociety.emory.edu/scienceinyourlife/pseudoscience.htm

Chemistry tames the Supercomputer:

http://www.scienceandsociety.emory.edu/scienceinyourlife/chemcomputer.htm

The Curious Minds Podcast

I'm starting a new podcast called The Curious Minds Podcast. It's at http://curiousmindspodcast.blogspot.com. We are just getting started, but looking to interview people in the sciences, humanities, business, music, arts, etc. Check out our promo MP3 on that link and stay tuned for our first episode to appear sometime soon.

Other Resources

The Atlanta Astronomy Club: http://www.atlantaastronomy.org/

Fernbank Museum of Natural History: http://www.fernbankmuseum.org/

Portland Oregon Astronomy resources: http://www.stargazing.net/David/portland/index.html (this one is for you Mom!)

Freedom

2007-09-27T20:21:00.001-07:00

Originally posted Posted 12/17/2003 at 7:54 PM

Whoever said the best things in life are free spoke the truth
Sit back for a moment and recall bygone days of youth
Nothing meant more than sun in the sky and dirt on the ground
In trees, fields and streams were true treasures found
And when the evening sun vanished below the horizon,
The moon and stars appeared as the long night had begun
While creation rested to gain strength for another day,
Children dreamed all night of the next morning for play
And after dawn when to the birds' songs they would awake,
Off again to the trees, streams, and fields would they take
photo taken on Clifton Road, Druid Hills, Atlanta GA

photo taken on Clifton Road, Druid Hills, Atlanta GA from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's parking deck

Intolerance is the New Old Toleration (Or, the Resurrection of Harry Houdini and Carl Sagan

2007-09-26T22:19:00.001-07:00

I had a long instant-message session with my friend Karl from Texas tonight. I have been chatting with him since long before I had my current job, long before I worked at my last job for four years, before my job before that of 4 years, and my 4+ years of college. I was 17 when I first started chatting with him in an old #U2 chat room. I think he was 16, which is the current age of my own brother. I built a web page for that IRC chat channel. It was the first time I tried to teach myself how to do that kind of stuff, and then I learned PERL and CGI programming to give some interactivity.

A lot can change in twelve years. I now have a career programming interactive information systems after those humble beginning. The entire world now communicates via the internet. We were among the tail end of the early adopters back then, but now we're nearly thirty, and tonight's conversation was not about which U2 album is best or which lyrics are the most meaningful. Instead, both of us now own our own residences, have full-time employment, and are furthering our educations, he with a master's degree, and myself with a technical certification.

Tonight's conversation matched with equal proportion the expansion of our own worlds of personal responsibility our concern over world events and the future of that world. There are a great many things about which he and I can agree that need not be mentioned except for one.

We are both grateful that we live in a country wherein our rights for free expression are explicitly protected in our laws. This enables us to disagree about our definitions of "religion", "god", and what have you. He argues that "atheism" is a form of religion and cites a court ruling that agrees. I argue that the lack of belief in a supernatural deity does not constitute a religion. The distinction is probably not all that important to world events is it?

But, we can discuss it freely, thankfully. The same cannot be said for many Muslims living under the laws of their countries. We are both extremely concerned about militant Islamic fundamentalists that brutalize their own people and westerners, and intimidate the followers of moderate, progressive strands of Islamic teachings. Interestingly, Salman Rushdie will be coming to Atlanta and teaching and speaking at Emory University near where I used to work. His speaking events will be worth attending.

What I finally attempted to argue for was a form of intolerance that Sam Harris has called for in public discourse. In fact, what he is calling for is no different from the current intolerance we already practice in every single strand of public discourse except when it comes to religious beliefs.

Here is a short list of things we are correct to refuse to tolerate.

1) We are right to be intolerant of a surgeon who claim to be qualified to operate on you with only an undergraduate degree in chemistry and no medical degree to justify his belief, and that of his peers, in his abilities.
2) We are right to be intolerant of a car mechanic who refuses to show us diagnostic readings or other instrument print-outs that explain how he justifies his belief that your car needs $2,000 worth of repairs when all you did was bring it in for an oil-change and an alignment.
3) We are right to be intolerant of a man who would claim that it's not his fault when he rear-ends you while talking on his cell-phone and you are waiting patiently at a red-light, simply minding your own business and waiting for the light to turn green so that you can be free to continue on to your destination.

Why then do so many Americans find it so hard to turn the very same intolerance of credulity on their religious beliefs?

The reason is that they have grown up believing their religion to be true, or approximately true, if not completely true. Certainly those who attend denominationalist churches tend to have a more reasoned, seasoned, approximate faith than those who cluster around most "non-denominational" churches.
However, at the core of all Christian religions is the unfathomable, inexplicable miracle of a physical Resurrection. This belief is paramount. Without this belief, as St. Paul attests, their belief is for naught. Of course, you can find Christian theologians or critical analysts who do not accept a literal, physical resurrection, but you cannot find a mainline Christian denomination, to my limited knowledge.

This, I believe, is to the detriment of Christians. They allow themselves the belief in physical miracles for their own religion, at least in principle and in theory, yet they disbelieve in the miracles of Hindu believers, or Islamic believers. On what grounds do they hold this intolerance toward other religions? The grounds, of course, vary from person to person. I was told by Chip Ingram that demons perform demonic manifestations in other religions. I have written elsewhere why I believe this is absurd, so I will not recount it here. Other Christians say they accept miracles in other religions. Others, usually older, will simply not enter the conversation.

But, entering this conversation is a must for Christians to engage with today's world. We live during a time in which lunatic Islamic adherents believe that their idea of the creator of the universe has instructed them to kill non-believers. Many of them also unfortunately believe we are waging a war against Islam as Christian crusade, thanks to George W. Bush's ill-fated speech after September 11th, 2001.

As Sam Harris has stated, many Americans don't really understand what it means to be prepared to die for their faith. They can't even comprehend taking their faith so seriously as to literally want to kill in the name of their God. Yet, the Old Testament states that God instructed the Israelites to stone their obstinate sons and daughters to death in the town square. Obviously, Christians don't believe in this kind of punishment for their teenage children. It is, quite frankly, disgusting and repulsive that anyone would think the creator of the universe would ever inspire a human being to inscribe this kind of law. A Christian apologist could argue that times were so uncivilized back then that this was the most civilized thing that could be done in the context of the society of that time. This claim would be a pure assertion, with absolutely no basis in fact. It would be just as absurd.

Since we do not adhere to the Old Testament laws letter-for-letter, since most Christians believe that Jesus ushered in a different kind of God-consciousness, one based upon love, forgiveness, and kindness, we ten d to take it for granted that our religious heritage of the last couple hundred years is more docile than militant Islam.

But, that doesn't get Christians off the hook for the elephant in their tea cup that is the belief in physical, literal miracles. David Hume's famous statement that no testimony to a miracle is sufficient unless believing that it was not a miracle would be even more miraculous is similar to Carl Sagan's statement that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". However, Sagan's statement actually asks too much. An extraordinary claim, such as the claim that many dead people came back to life when Jesus died and walked around Jerusalem when he came back life (Mattew 27:52) is not a claim that requires extraordinary evidence. It is a claim that requires simply evidence, period.

Yet, there is absolutely no evidence outside of apocryphal Christian texts that attest to this miracle. Christians, ask yourself this:
Is the resurrection of one man, seen by several at first, and then by about 500, more miraculous than the resurrection of many dead saints seen by many people?

Of course, we don't know what "many people" is in this context, but we do know that it is a plurality in both cases. We know that the Romans occupied Jerusalem at the time. We also know that no secular historian wrote anything about many dead people coming back to life and walking around Jerusalem.
Some would say I'm making too fine a point of contention here. But stop and ask is this really the case? Is it really too much to ask for some physical evidence of something that you simply would not believe today?

Imagine someone came into your house and told you he had seen a man get shot, die, get buried, and then come out of his tomb and ascend into heaven. You would think this person was a stark raving lunatic! Why then do you believe that it was even remotely possibly that something of the same physical nature occurred 2,000 years ago in a time when people didn't have cell phones, video phones, camcorders, basic photography, or any other recording devices? I contend that you believe it because you grew up believing it, but certainly not because you have any kind of verifiable knowledge. And, you certainly have no more grounds for believing this to be literally true than a Muslim has for believing that the angel Gabriel revealed the Quran to Mohammed in a cave.

I am open to the evidence. I always have been and always will be. I will never say that I am absolutely certain that the Resurrection didn't happen or even that Gabriel didn't reveal the Quran to Mohammed. But, what I will say is that I see absolutely no reason to believe that either event is literally true.

Finally, I leave this post with a thought experiment that I've written elsewhere.

Remember the story about God parting the Red Sea for Moses and the Hebrew slaves? We all know this story. Many of us believe that it literally happened. Others don't believe that. Well, how would God manifest his powers today?

Imagine that militant Islamic adherents kidnap some children of Christian parents and drop them off into a desert, far away from any communications networks. These children have their cell phones with them. They try to place calls, but it is no use. They begin to pray to Jesus for help. Suddenly, a cell-phone tower springs up out of the ground! The children make their calls and get through to someone who can help. The responders begin to trace the GPS position of the cell-phone tower and send rescue teams!

But, the militants, now in the distance beyond the sight of the children due to the earth's curvature, see the tip of the huge tower over the horizon. They begin to turn back, and quickly approach the tower, this time with murderous rage and indignation. The children begin to run for their lives. Suddenly, the cell phone tower crashes down on top of the militants, killing them and sparing the children.

Yahweh has saved his people through the power of modern technology.

If only you could believe it. The same intolerant, bewildering incredulity you have toward that absurd story is exactly how I see your religious miracles, Christians and Muslims. They are incredibly unlikely to have ever taken place, and the only sane response to that realization is to come to the table with humility, reason, and a mind that asks first for evidence before belief.

Some say there isn't a conflict between religion and science. If that's the case, it's only because somewhere in Plato's world of the forms they gave a war of ideas and nobody shared theirs. Ironically, in a war of ideas, those who choose to lay down their intellectual arms for the sake of conversational tolerance turn a blind eye to the militant around the corner who is picking up a real gun or strapping on a real bomb.

For these reasons, I believe we must be intolerant of credulity. We must look at all belief systems with Occam's razor and we must continually question our assumptions. When a Muslim says that he can die for Allah and reach heaven, we must ask him to give epistemological reasons and factual evidence for this claim. We must also ask the Christian who says that Jesus is God's only way to provide evidence.

It is only wishful thinking to state that I wish both Muslims and Christians would sit down and have a pray-off to demonstrate the power of their gods. This will never happen, but these criticism must be stated, over and over if need be.

God, if you're out there, resurrect Harry Houdini and Carl Sagan. We need Houdini to find a way to get us out of this mess and we need Carl Sagan to argue forcefully once more for intolerance of credulity and tolerance of science as he did in The Demon Haunted World.

Since I don't believe that's going to happen, I'm going to have to physically do the next most sensible thing, which is to try to carry on Sagan's efforts in whatever way I can through my own writings.

Any body want to play the part of Houdini? The last time he tried to come back from the dead, he failed.

Harry Potter Meets Doc Brown

2007-09-26T22:09:00.001-07:00

Originally posted Thursday, June 10, 2004
Click here to listen to me reading the podcast version of this post

Today we were supposed to go to Callaway Gardens, but it rained too much, so I decided to go to work to finish up preparations for the security training that will be tested starting tomorrow when my coworkers return from a conference. My grandparents, uncle, and great grandma went to Virginia Highlands today and then we went to see the new Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban film.

I was very pleased with this film. At first, I found it too super-fantastical and silly, but it quickly delved into symbolism about the battle between good and evil and the mystery of existence that I enjoyed. It was a metaphor for our journeys as human beings from being frightened of the "dementers" that haunt our psyche to becoming fearful only of fear itself. These dementers are the obstacles and barriers we face from our pasts that for years and years on end we are certain we will never overcome. But, the story shows that they can be overcome.

One of the most interesting parts for me was when Harry and his companions traveled back in time to save two innocent lives. I interpreted this on several levels. On the first level, it can be seen as it was portrayed. The characters actually traveled back in time and caused certain events to happen that prevented others from taking place. In the course of the scene, Harry from the future, having already witnessed someone who saves him from the dementers in the past, thinks the one who rescued him was his own father, who had passed away many years before. His companions assure him that no, his father had been killed years ago, but Harry is convinced. It is only when they go back in time and see the evil that is about to be visited upon themselves that Harry is forced to step in and take the place of who he thought had been his father! This is brilliant!

I see a deeper metaphor to this scene as well, and it makes me now think of the film Back to the Future as well. When Harry was so certain that it was his father that rescued him from the dementers, but suddenly had to step in to save himself, he moved from childhood to adulthood in that instant, when he became the steward of his own well being. He gave up illusions that somebody else was going to save him and took responsibility for his own future.

In the final scene of the film, Harry and his companion return to the scene of where they left to go back in time, just in time to catch a glimpse of themselves vanishing. Their bed-ridden friend witnesses the vanishing and the sudden reappearance on the other side of the room with astonishment. He asks them something like, "How can you be in two places at the same time!"

The gentler, even more brilliant subtext to this is that we are all in two places at the same time. Perhaps I should say we are all in each moment as it happens now, as it was before, and as it will be. Harry may have thought that it was his father who saved him even though it turns out that it was really himself. But, the two are really one in the same in the end as Harry achieves adulthood, fulfilling his expectations of what his father was to do.

One of my favorite quotes that I hope always stays with me no matter how lost or angry or confused I get is from George Washington Carver. I think it sums up the wisdom within this film quite well:

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

This recalls the paradoxical scenes in Back to the Future when Marty looks at the photograph of himself and sees himself disappearing, underscoring to him even more how important it is that he perform the right action at the right time. Marty achieves his goal by inspiring his future father to stand up for his future mother when he decks the bully Biff. As a result, Marty returns home to a completely different world than he knew wherein Biff waxes his father's car and everyone in the family treats each other and those outside the family, including Biff, with kindness and respect. This so perplexes him that he can hardly believe his eyes or ears.

How fortunate it was for Marty that he was able to travel into his past and bring to pass just one right action to demand respect for his mother that cascaded a chain of actions bringing him into a future so foreign and so unimaginably beautiful to him and his family and friends. How all the more fortunate it is for those of us who live today, in the here and now, to begin to be able to put into place those principles of kindness and respect and honor.

When we begin to do this on a second by second basis it grows into minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, and year by year. How fortunate for us that by doing these things now, we will need neither a Delorean with a flux capacitor and a Mr. Fusion nor a magic broom.

As both these films illustrate, the destiny of a lifetime rests not in the distant future, but in the actions and attitudes we bring to the people we are with each and every moment of our lives.

Of this I am absolutely certain.

Back to the Future Delorean with Mr. Fusion at Universal Studios in Hollywood, CA

http://community.webshots.com/photo/148527220/148529119ngRbJb

Currently listening :
Mystical Garden
By Omar Faruk Tekbilek
Release date: 06 August, 1996

Satan and The Demons

2007-09-26T22:02:00.001-07:00

Good morning! Today I want to discuss a topic that a lot people are afraid to discuss. But, I think it's a good one, because if you look around our world you see a lot of insanity. You've got people fighting each other, ostensibly because of their religious beliefs. Maybe it's really because of power, money, greed, but a lot of the people doing the fighting believe that their religion is superior to somebody else's and any need to take 'em out!

For example, 9/11: you have Osama bin Laden, we're lead to believe, commanding terrorists and terror cells. And, what do these people believe? They believe that Allah, the Muslim name for God, is directing their war efforts! He has a divine plan and a divine will, and it is his will that these fundamentalist, fanatical, Islamic adherents take out the West. They don't agree with our morals. They don't agree with our culture that we try to export to the rest the world. Maybe they have some genuine concerns with that. I would not disagree with that. But, is taking the lives of many innocent people the right way to go about it? And, in doing so, is believing that you're going to go to heaven and be rewarded rational? I don't think so.

Let's talk about this concept for a second. You've got this idea of Heaven and Hell, right? OK. What did people in the past used to think about the Sun? They thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. They looked out at stars and thought they were heavens, saying "Wow, look at the heavens, look at the stars!" They saw the sun moving. The Sun brought them light, energy and warmth. At the end of the day the Sun disappeared. Where did it go? It went underneath the Earth: The underworld! Wow! What a concept! People used to think the Earth was flat. And, this hot, burning, scorching sun burned up everything under the world. And, where is hell located? It's always down. And, heaven is always up. We still to this day talk about going up to heaven or down to hell. Who am I to say that people who live on the other side of the world are devilish creatures, that they are in hell? And, when they say that their talking about me! If I go down I go to the fiery core of the planet. I don't go to hell. I may come up on the other side of the planet if I can make it through the core, but there's no hell underneath the Earth. Unless, maybe we really do get burned up inside of the core. Who knows! But, when we go up, we go into space, into outer space where there are many other stars. And, now scientists have found there are over 100 other planets in solar systems outside of our own.

Let's talk about this being that rules hell, shall we? His name is "Satan". OK, Satan. We're told that this Satan has demons, and demons can manifest themselves in the world performing Satanic miracles to draw glory away from Jesus Christ the true lord and savior. And, what else about Satan? Satan wants a lot of glory! Yes, yes he wants all the glory for himself. He used to be an angel, one of the beings of light, one of God's great creations. But, he wanted all that glory for himself. This cat was greedy! So, he tried to topple God, and God kicked his ace out! He took demons; he took angels with him and turned them into demons. So, we're told that these demons can come along in jump into our brains and infiltrate our minds and cause us to do crazy things, lunatic things, evil things!

OK, all right, I'm following you. But, let's ask a rational question now. In our modern day and age when we have medicine that, I will admit, does not cure psychiatric illness, but alleviates the symptoms, what kind of conclusion do we draw? Do we say that these chemicals that go into our bloodstream and modify our brain chemistry are also acting on supernatural spirits? Come on! Do supernatural beings have anything more powerful than chemicals at their disposal? I would think so! So, why is it that our modern medicine can alleviate symptoms of so-called "demonic possession"? And, why is it that demonic possession is more prevalent in some denominations (or maybe I should say demoninations) than others? Why in the mainline protestant churches do you not have people recommended for exorcism quite so often as in Pentecostal or Nazarene churches? And, why do some of these other denominations not value higher education quite so much as some of the other more mainline denominations? Just a question.

Another question: I was told by a pastor that the miracles attributed to other religions are attributable to "demonic activity". There is angelic activity over here and demonic activity over there.

OK, I'm tracking you!

But, let me ask you a question then: If demons can physically manifest phenomena in the world, they're not really that interested in glory are they? Because, if they were, I think that Satan and demons would get on television tonight and, say, multiply food in the name of Osama bin Laden. Wouldn't that draw glory away from Jesus? I think it would. But, you don't see that. Why? Well, Christians might say, "Because God doesn't allow it". Well, how come he allows demonic things to take place over here and over there; something that somebody else always saw or heard. And, when you have a pastor talk about it it's something that he witnessed. But, he has no evidence: no video evidence, no graphical evidence, nothing.

You know, Jesus was said to have cast out a "legion of demons" from a man and thrown them into a herd of swine. And, then the swine ran off a cliff. OK, this leads us to believe that demons are not just some kind of personification of illness or ailment. They're a spiritual-physical being. Spiritual-physical, whatever, trans-physical. I don't know, I'm not up on all this theology. But, if Jesus believed that then I believe that we should be able to see evidence, not hearsay, of these things. I think that's a reasonable concern and a reasonable demand. But, we don't. And, again it's only those certain denominations that are certainly so sure that the demons are spiritual-physical real beings, and not some of the more mainline.

So, this leads us to believe that religion changes. Religious thought changes over the years.

Another thing about these religious books: they were written by men. And, when you talk to pastors about the formation of the canon sometimes they don't want to answer your questions. One question I had was about the crucifixion account in Mark and Matthew. Most scholars believe that Mark was written before Matthew. And, if you read Mark's crucifixion account it says that when Jesus died and then the curtain was torn, and then the guard said, "Surely this was the son of God", or something like that. But, if you then read Matthew's account it says that the curtain was torn and then at that moment there was a great earthquake and the earth did shake and many bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were raised in their tombs and after his resurrection they came at their tombs and walked around the holy city and were seen by many.

OK, I got you. But let's ask a question: what independent attestation is there to this miracle? What did the secular historians write about this miracle? Nothing. Not a thing. There are some apocryphal writings, apocryphal Christian writings about this, but nothing in the secular history. This is a fantastic miracle. This is more fantastic than the resurrection of one-man because this was the resurrection of many men seen by many.

You have to question the integrity of these books. It is your duty. You cannot blindly believe. You must question. And, when you question, do not simply ask Christians. Ask skeptics. Do not take what is written in these books as absolute fact. You must question. Thank you.

On Wanting to Be Christian

2007-09-26T21:47:00.001-07:00

It's interesting to me when people speak to me as if I know nothing about Christianity. They assume that because I profess no belief in it, that I do not understand the stories or that I have not been to church or that I have not heard the "good news" proclaimed that Jesus has born the sins of the world and is my redeemer. They think that I do not know that all I have to do is accept Jesus's atoning sacrifice and that by doing so I will be clinching a place in Heaven by his side when the world comes to an end. They assume that if I only knew these things like they do, then I'd want to be Christian.

But, as that paragraph should attest, this is just not the case. I took religion in general, and Christianity in particular, very seriously for about two years in my mid twenties. Some might say that's not a long time. But let's think about it from an objective point of view for a moment by juxtaposing a couple of hypothetical situations side by side.

Assume that you grew up Christian and then moved to Saudi Arabia in your mid twenties. You were very skeptical of Islam during your youth. But, you began attending Mosque and reading the Quran while in Saudi Arabia. You tried with all your might and will to believe in the teachings of the Quran, many of which you found to be common sense, elegant, beautiful, and deeply moving. But, you had a hard time believing some of the stories, and just could not believe it "literally." That is, you just couldn't believe that an angel Gabriel spoke to Muhammad and revealed God's laws to him literally.

Would you be an infidel for not believing in Islam? To the Muslim you might. But, when you returned to America, you could continue to be a Christian and nobody would think the worse of you!

Now, put on my shoes for a second. You grew up reading about mythology and many religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and others that are more obscure. You also grew up with a deep fascination and appreciation of the scientific method and for historical research and evidence based discovery. You grew up around a family of people who not only were artistic, but also very discerning and skeptical and didn't get played for fools by televangelists or fortune tellers or get-rich-quick scams. In short, they worked their butts off to accomplish what they accomplished, with no help from magical beings.

So, even with that appreciation for science and discovery and mythology you put all of that aside when you were 26 and started attending a Christian house of worship out of the deep-felt desire to connect to the some 80 to 90% of the rest of the nation's purported belief system. Like you did when you went to Saudi Arabia (hypothetically) and attended the Mosque, you began to appreciate the stories and parables and, most of all, the ritual and fellowship. But, something inside you did not let you believe in magical beings or miracles.

Would you be an infidel for not believing in Christianity? To the Christian you might. But, when you returned to a community of those who have studied Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, mythology, science, history, and much else, nobody would think the worse of you!
What's more, when you went to work the next day and you sat at your desk to do some hard work you would not be surprised that the work didn't just accomplish itself out of the sheer will of your mind. No, you would gladly work hard to accomplish the end result. And, those around you would do much the same without any surprise that work did not get accomplished without their effort.

Even more still, you and your coworkers would be shocked, surprised and downright skeptical if someone came in from outside the office and told you that they just saw a man get shot by a firing squad and die, and then he rose from the ground and was lifted away by a cloud and was seen by hundreds of others. You'd probably tell him that you weren't born yesterday or that you have some ocean-front property to sell him in Arizona.

This last paragraph is the condensed and modernized version of Christianity. When you ask me to believe it, I will engage you in open minded conversation, but don't be surprised when I ask you to step into my shoes and open your own mind.

What Happened to All the Miracles?

2007-09-26T21:44:00.001-07:00

It is not uncommon to hear people speak about the miraculous work of their god in their life or in the events in the world. However, it is almost completely unheard of for a scientist to use a god or a supernatural explanation as part of an explanatory hypothesis. It is completely without precedent to find an accepted scientific theory that uses a god or a supernatural explanation.

I remember a time when I was trying so hard to believe in literalistic religion, despite my brain fighting against me every step of the way, that I nearly convinced myself that a miracle happened. Thankfully, wiser friends advised me that I was just lacking sleep and trying to believe too hard.

But, what is a miracle? The site dictionary.com offers various entries for the word. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=miracle. Here is the first:

An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God: "Miracles are spontaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves" (Katherine Anne Porter).

WikiPedia offers a lengthy entry about miracles as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle. Given that different religions and even the same religion may not agree upon what a miracle is, where can we even begin? Let's just start by thinking about some common miracle stories that come to mind.

God parts the red sea to allow the Hebrew slaves flee from the Egyptians, but God causes the waters to flood in on the Egyptians when they attempt to cross.
Jesus multiplies small portions of food into many portions for a large crow.
Jesus instantly converts water into wine.
When Jesus dies on the cross, many holy saints come back to life in their tombs.
Three days after Jesus dies, he comes back to life and appears to several people, and eventually to about 500 people.
The holy saints who had risen in their tombs when Jesus died leave their tombs and walk around Jerusalem and appear to many people.

These are common stories we hear, especially in religious institutions like churches or in religious literature. I have chosen only Christian and Jewish stories because most in my culture are familiar with these.

How likely are you to believe that something like this happened yesterday? What if I and three or four other people told you we saw several bodies come out of their graves and walk around the town?

Or, to be more modern, what if we told you that we had been kidnapped. blindfolded, and dropped in a desert with just our cellphones? When we tried to use the phone to call for help, there was no signal. But, suddenly a powerful cell tower grew out of the ground and allowed us to make calls. With the help of GPS tracking, eventually rescue teams found us. But, if it were not for that cell tower growing out of the ground, we would have perished.

How would you react to such a tale? You'd say we were pulling your leg. So, why do people want to believe in miracles from many thousands of years ago? I believe it brings comfort to people. They grew up in church or in a culture that speaks of these things, and they feel safe believing them. They feel like it gives them a history and a tradition.

Oddly, these are the same people who would never in a million years take their vehicle to a car repair shop that promises to fix their car by prayer or magic. They know that some things just don't work that way. Yet, they feel justified in believing in the miracles of Jehovah or Jesus.

Is it impossible for miracles to occur? I cannot say that it is. I can even think of a way to make an analogy that would demonstrate how they could occur. Imagine that you live on a video tape. The person playing the video tape has seen the video before and decides to change things up and have a little bit of fun with you. He presses the pause button, modifies the tape such that you now are wearing a bright pink tank top, sun glasses, shorts, and sandals. He then presses play again. You would never even feel the pause button or feel any lapse of time. Instead, it would feel to you as if one moment simply moved into the next. Unfortunately, you had just walked into the door of an important business meeting full of people you've never met before. Everyone turns around to see you dressed very inappropriately. You had hoped to gain their business, but now your brain is confused, because you could have sworn you dressed appropriately.

Would there be any scientific test for this miracle? I don't think there could be. Because you exist at the mercy of the tape player, the tape player can modify the tape reality any way he pleases and you won't be able to do a thing about it, nor will you even be able to predict when it occurs. This could be an analogy to a god or supernatural forces doing something similar in our world.

But, do things like this really happen? Or, have we explained more and more events with less and less doubt as to their physical explanation? I believe it is the latter. Richard Carrier recently said that there has never in the history of science been a situation in which a phenomenon was originally explained as supernatural or the work of God, subsequently was explained by physics, and then later still reverted to explanation by God.

Never.

As with all things, I advise you to make your own mind up about this. Maybe the truth is that there is simply one "miracle", existence itself. Everything else is natural and the deeper we study nature, the more and more we will understand its principles and the principles of existence.

Until such a time, I'm not believing in walking dead men, risen saviors, parted waters, multiplied food, or statues that can drink milk. I spoke only about Christianity in this post, but take a look here for some Hindu "miracles", even caught on live video: http://www.milkmiracle.com/.

As you can see from that video, no religion has a monopoly on miracle claims, but at least Hinduism now has some video evidence, right? If you're like me, you realize that this phenomena can be created through a simple process called capillary action. You can try it at home. Just put some milk on a spoon and hold it up to a rounded rock or other surface. A good prop to use is one of the small pagoda waterfall fountains you can put in your kitchen to create ambience.

The moral of the story is that we should not let a miracle be an explanation for anything. We should seek the scientific explanation, which is almost always much more intellectually satisfying and stimulating to our curiosity. When something cannot be explained, simply let it be a mystery. Someday, you or someone else may understand it.

Why I Think I May Be a Humanist

2007-09-07T16:00:00.001-07:00

My tongue in cheek title is a spoof on Bertrand Russell's (1) "Why I Am Not a Christian" (2). I have never really given Humanism much thought until recently. But after reading the basic principles of it in several places and listening to some podcasts from the Institute for Humanist Studies, I think I may just well feel fine about classifying myself as Humanist.

In the Humanist Network News podcast (3) episode #18 (4), cognitive scientist and popular author Stephen Pinker (5) makes the following statement, emphasis mine:

Stephen Pinker: ... I'd like to begin with a question. Why am I here? Why are all of us here?

In my case, I study the human mind, and in studying the human mind I inevitably face the assumption which almost everyone in the field shares, that the mind is a product of the brain, a biological organ, and that the brain was shaped by natural selection and the evolutionary process. That doesn't leave any room for some immaterial entity called the soul, a ghost in the machine. It doesn't leave much room for a narrative of the universe in which humans were put on Earth for a purpose, a moral purpose given by some animate entity, which they are charged with carrying out.

On the other hand, even though I am a materialist, as are most people who study the mind, I still feel that there is a place for meaning and purpose and something larger than ourselves. But when you have this set of beliefs you can feel awfully lonely. I did not have many friends on the politically correct left, and I had even fewer friends on the religious right, and I was kind of feeling, I can't be the only person who has this set of beliefs. They just seem so obvious.

And then at some point, a few years ago, it occurred to me: I'm a humanist. That's what I am.

Humanist Principles

From the Institute for Humanist Studies' web site, http://humaniststudies.org/humphil.html, Humanism is defined as:

Are you a humanist?

Do you try to live an ethical and fulfilling life without religious belief?
Do you think science and reason lead to more reliable knowledge than faith?
Do you support secular government and an open society that guarantees human rights for all?

If you answered "yes" to these questions, you might be one of the millions of humanists on Earth -- people who live meaningful, fulfilling lives based on reason and compassion.

Humanism in brief

Humanism is a philosophy of life inspired by humanity and guided by reason. It provides the basis for a fulfilling and ethical life without religion.

Humanists make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values.
Humanists see no convincing evidence for gods, the supernatural, or life after death.
Humanists believe that moral values are properly founded on human empathy and scientific understanding.
Humanists believe we must live this life on the basis that it is the only life we'll have -- that, therefore, we must make the most of it for ourselves, each other, and our world.

Humanist philosophies have arisen separately in many different cultures over many thousands of years. Whether or not they use the term humanism, tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people around the world agree with the humanist philosophy of living a happy and productive life based on reason and compassion.
Definitions of humanism

Humanism is:

"...seeking, without religion, the best in, and for, human beings." Chambers Pocket Dictionary
"...a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason." Merriam Webster Dictionary
"...a non-religious philosophy, based on liberal human values." Little Oxford Dictionary
"...an appeal to reason in contrast to revelation or religious authority as a means of finding out about the natural world and destiny of man, and also giving a grounding for morality... Humanist ethics is also distinguished by placing the end of moral action in the welfare of humanity rather than in fulfilling the will of God." Oxford Companion to Philosophy
"The rejection of religion in favor of the advancement of humanity by its own efforts." Collins Concise Dictionary
"That which is characteristically human, not supernatural, that which belongs to man and not to external nature, that which raises man to his greatest height or gives him, as man, his gr.eatest satisfaction." Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
"A system of thought that centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth." American Heritage Dictionary

I also like the WikiPedia definition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism

Humanism is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities—particularly rationality. It is a component of a variety of more specific philosophical systems and is incorporated into several religious schools of thought. Humanism entails a commitment to the search for truth and morality through human means in support of human interests. In focusing on the capacity for self-determination, Humanism rejects the validity of transcendental justifications, such as a dependence on faith, the supernatural, or allegedly divinely revealed texts. Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition, suggesting that solutions to human social and cultural problems cannot be parochial.

Local Atlanta Resources

For those in the Atlanta area interested to learn more about Humanism, check out this site:

http://www.geocities.com/gahumanists/ for the Humanists of Georgia.

There is also the Atlanta Freethought Society, http://www.atlantafreethought.org/, and the Fellowship of Reason: http://www.fellowshipofreason.com/

This is definitely something I want to check out more about.

References

Bertrand Russell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
Why I Am Not A Christian, by Bertrand Russell: http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html
Humanist Network News podcast: http://humaniststudies.org/podcast/
Humanist Network News episode #18 Transcript: http://humaniststudies.org/enews/?id=299&article=1

Some of Stephen Pinker's Books

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/llld/index.html

The Measure and Meaning of a Life Well-Lived

2007-09-06T21:10:00.000-07:00

The Measure and Meaning of a Life Well-Lived
By Joshua Scott Gough, 30, about his Great-Grandmother Carola Laurel Gough, 96 (1911-2007)
August 25, 2007, First Baptist Church, Salida CO

How does one assess the both the measure and the meaning of a life well-lived?

When it comes to my great-grandma Carola the first is boundless, and the other eternal, it seems to me.

By measurement, we can look at each other and count the number of descendants from her and her husband Gene: 3 children, 13 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren, and even one great-great grandson. Or, we could travel the world and visit homes and cafes to see all of her paintings that hang in places like Alaska, California, Colorado, Denmark, and Africa. Further, we could scour through our cabinets and old shoe boxes and count the number of letters she wrote to each and every one of us, written by hand, and addressed by name.

She sent her own personal journals and travel diaries to my mother Kathryn, her eldest grandchild, to have her help publish her autobiography. She started the project, and now we can all help finish it. Scanning and transcribing is well underway. See http://www.CarolaGough.com for more information. So, when that project is complete, we can count the number of pages she and Gene have shared with us. All of these are treasures that we measure far greater than gold.

Lastly, by way of measurement, we can count the years she lived: 96; the number of months: 1,153; Days: more than 35,000; Hours: more than 843,000.

So, what of these numbers? What of these measurements?

When we measure our annual salary or the amount of money we need to retire in numbers far greater than the number of days and hours in a span of 96 years, what can we say about such numbers to qualify their quantity? What can we say of the quality in such quantities? What do they "mean"?

For the meaning of a life well-lived we look again to each other, to the faces of Gene and Carola's descendants and their spouses and children; we see them in ourselves.

We look at and we feel the serenity and peacefulness depicted in her paintings. And, we read and we realize with never-ending and unrepayable gratitude the dedication and passion expressed in their writings.

When we do this the message of her life reaches out and surrounds us like a big, warm blanket.

That message is love.

It is love for life.
It is love for this world.
And, most importantly, it is love for each other, whether family, friend, or foreign.

I feel like the most fortunate person to have spent so much time in my life with Gene and Carola, from the time I was about 5 until now at 30. Not many people get a chance to learn life lessons from their mother's father's parents.

Most recently, I feel so thankful that I had an opportunity to spend some precious moments with Carola last month in Alameda and to say a few loving words to her.

She gave a message for all us when I was there with Kerry. She said:

"Thank you to all of you for coming to visit me; all my kids, my grand-kids, and great-grandchildren, and friends. I love you all. If this thing works itself out, I'm going to send an announcement to all of you and we'll have a big celebration."

During her time in the hospital, whenever we mentioned going to lunch or dinner, her persistent refrain was that she wanted to make us something to eat and to sit down to eat together.

This is of course reflected in quotes from her. I spent a lot of time hiking mountains in Georgia, New York, and Colorado with her. On these treks she told me things like:

"When life hands you lemons, make lemonade."

"I always felt like God was right there with me, with his hand on my shoulder, not some pie in the sky."

"Whatever God or Mother Nature had to throw at me, I ran to meet it head on. Sometimes I said, 'God, well what do you want me to do that for?'"

"I didn't want to hit the rocking chair just because I'm 90. When you get older, you can either put yourself on the shelf or do something about it."

One last anecdote from last month. Before I said goodbye to drive back to Matt & Christine's, I told her:

"Great-grandma, spending time with you, seeing your artwork, learning how you have embraced change in your life, and seeing the example you set by volunteering with children in your 90's has made me believe that I can accomplish and good and noble purpose."

Then, even though the stroke had affected her ability to speak clearly, she leaned forward off her pillow and said with as much force and clarity as possible a message to each and everyone of us:

"You can!"

I close with one last direct quote from her:

"I don't eat, I dine." She spoke this when encouraging people to relax and take time to enjoy each other's company and conversation during meals.

Should I live 96 years myself these is nothing more wise I could ever imagine to say.

Thank you, Carola Laurel, you are an eternal inspiration who lives now in all of us and will be passed on forever.

Please visit Carola's web site at http://www.CarolaGough.com to see her paintings on the web and in 3D and to learn more about the Carola L. Gough Foundation, under whose name we will publish the book asked us to finish for her. Please help in any way you are fit and able to.

Also visit http://www.GoughFamily.com to learn much more about the entire family and see thousands of photographs.

Thank you

TheocracyWatch: Bow Down and Obey, or Stand up and Fight

2007-09-04T20:17:00.001-07:00

This post is dedicated to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, without whose voice of reason and pen that crafted a call to freedom none of us would likely be here today.

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

Thanks Also to YouTube

I am so thankful also for YouTube. Thank you to the creative people who built it. Read about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube. They have done their part to enable the rest of us to take back this nation through self-education from the powers of unreason that currently threaten freedom of thought and religion, not just in the United States, but all around the world. This post will focus on the United States and the rise of theocratic aspirations among a group of politically well-connected theologians and pastors.

Quotations that Support the Separation of Church and State

Ed Buckner and his son Michael have compiled a large collection of quotes that defend the separation of church and state at:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_buckner/quotations.html

Both Ed and his son are members of the Atlanta Freethought Society, which you can learn about at: http://www.atlantafreethought.org/

You can get in on the conversation with other Atlanta area people interested in these topics by subscribing to the Atlanta Freethought Society Forum's newsletter at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afsforum/

First Freedom First

This is a great video that demonstrates why the United States of America is a democratic republic, not a theocracy. We are not Iran. This video features more than a dozen of all kinds of different beliefs discussing why the First Amendment protects all of us and why we must defend it against those who would take it from us. The web site for the organization that created it is:

http://www.FirstFreedomFirst.org

Selected Quotes from the Founding Fathers on the Dangers of Government-Sponsored Religion

Here are a couple of good collection of quotes about the dangers of religion in the hands of governments by such people as Thomas Jefferson, the author our very own Declaration of Independence, and the third President of the United States. It also contains quotes from James Madison, the fourth President.

Thomas Jefferson on Christianity and Jesus

Thomas Jefferson wrote a book about Christianity, the Bible, and Jesus. Read about his writings here:

The Jefferson Bible: http://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Bible-Thomas/dp/0807077143
The Jefferson Bible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible
From Jesus to Christ, Thomas Jefferson and His Bible: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.html

Here a few other quotes from Thomas Jefferson about Christianity and Jesus:

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. --Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802 (emphasis my own)
The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. --Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

You can read more quotes from Jefferson about religion here:

http://nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

The Bloodshed in Europe Lead to Their Views and To the First Amendment

These guys had seen the blood shed in Europe. They knew first-hand what happens when governments enforce religious belief upon people.

You can read a book about the many wars in Europe that were, at least ostensibly, fueled by religious differences here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/European_History/Religious_Wars_in_Europe

These wars are part of the reason that the founding fathers wrote the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in this way:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The first clause in the first sentence is known as the Establishment Clause, and you can read more about it at these links:

The second clause in that sentence is known as the Free Exercise Clause, and you can read more about it at these links:

This Can't Happen to Us, Right? Wrong!

It's comforting to think that politicians can't enforce their own particular religious viewpoint upon us as citizens. We think that this cannot happen. This is just a comforting illusion. It's not based on reality. It can happen to us, and there are people trying to make sure that it does happen to. They are known as Dominionists, those who believe in Dominionism. You can learn about Dominionism on TheocracyWatch's web page here:

http://www.theocracywatch.org/dominionism.htm

Theocrat: Rousas John Rushdoony

Or, you can read some quotes from one its major champions. I think these quotes should be enough to give anyone the picture loud and clear.

Rousas John Rushdoony is considered one of the pioneers of Dominionism. Here are some quotes from Rushdoony:

Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life. [R.J. Rushdoony, _Thy Kingdom Come_,1978]
One faith, one law and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state . . . Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies. (p 100) [R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law]
Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristrocracy. [R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, from _The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America_, published by ADL]
God's covenant with Adam required him to exercise dominion over the earth and to subdue it (Gen. 1:26 ff) under God according to God's law-word.
The restoration of that covenant relationship was the work of Christ, His grace to His elect people.
The fulfillment of that covenant is their great commission: to subdue all things and all nations to Christ and His law-word. [R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, NJ:Craig Press, 1973)]

TheocracyWatch: Informing Citizens About the Rise of Dominionism

If you are interested in what these people are trying to do to your government and your own religious freedom, you can visit http://www.TheocracyWatch.org, a watchdog organization at Cornell University.

Here are five videos on YouTube about Dominion Theology. They paint a very scary picture about the history of this movement.

Here is another brief video by someone on YouTube. No, he's not famous or well-known, but the video clips of people he shows and the writings that he presents are from well-known public figures, like Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell.

What Can We Do?

We can start by paying attention. Turn off the television. Tune into history. Tune into YouTube and find information that is not being fed to you by corporate media that is often controlled by conglomerates that don't care to tell you anything about history. Speak out against theocracy in America. There are several organizations that help with this cause. The largest one that I know of is Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

http://www.au.org/site/PageServer?pagename=aboutau

If you are from Georgia, they have a Georgia chapter at:

http://www.au-ga.org/index.html

Also, here is Jeffrey Selman's web site. He is the man who defended the Separation of Church and State against the Cobb County School Board:

http://www.jeffreyselman.com/index.htm

More Resources

Some more interviews with Ed Buckner about Church & State separation:

America Is Not A Christian Nation
Freethought Radio features southern secular activist Ed Buckner, Ph.D., talking about how to combat the myth that America is a Christian nation. Ed has a chapter in the new book, "Everything You Knew About God Is Wrong." The show also features some timely news updates and commentary. (MP3, 51 min, 23.5 MB)
The Constitution, Politics, and Church & State (Real Audio), an interview with Ed Buckner (2000)
T. J. Walker interviews Ed Buckner of the Atlanta Freethought Society about American politics, U.S. constitutional history, and his new co-authored book Quotations That Support the Separation of State and Church.

Richard Dawkins: The Enemies of Reason, Etc.

2007-09-02T20:51:00.001-07:00

"Science is the poetry of reality" -- Richard Dawkins, The Enemies of Reason Part I, 41:25

"Science replaced private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence" -- Richard Dawkins, The Enemies of Reason Part II, 14:46

Richard Dawkins is awesome. He is really confronting the insanity of unreason and superstition in our world as hard as he can right now. He's taking the battle to the foreground, visiting psychics, visiting astrologers, and submitting claims to empiricism.

Here is Richard Dawkins confronting irrationality and delusion in video form, following on from his book The God Delusion.

You can read more on WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemies_of_Reason

And on his web site: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1556,Enemies-of-Reason,Google-Links

Here is an excerpt from WikiPedia

Is it rational that the dead can communicate with the living and give sound advice on how they should live their lives? What about sticking pins into your body to free the flow of Chi energy and cure your illness? Or the bending of spoons using your mind alone? Is that rational? Richard Dawkins doesn’t think so, and feels it is his duty to expose those areas of belief that exist without scientific proof, yet manage to hold the nation under their spell. He will take on the world’s leading proponents in their field of expertise, meet the victims who have used them and expose the history of the movements – from the charlatans who have milked these practices to the experiments and testing that have failed to produce conclusive results.

Part I

This reminds me very much of Carl Sagan's Cosmos in which he explains how ridiculous astrology is. One of the most interesting parts for me is at minute 36, when he discusses B.F. Skinner's experiments with Pigeons and shows how they developed superstitious beliefs when he rewarded them randomly with food. The pigeons would do things like looking over their shoulder to try to "invoke" the random food dispersal mechanism.

Notes

Post-modernism and relativism have lead to the closing of physics departments.
Post-modernism has lead to valuing private feeling over verifiable evidence.
The internet is both a help and a hindrance to truth.

Part II

This part discusses the history of medical advances thanks to science and reason, but today there is far more retreat into irrational belief and superstitious theories.

Notes

Tried and tested scientific medicine is under attack from superstition
Shows how a formerly traditionally trained general practitioner is now talking about "Chakras" might be "black holes" inside the body. (This is completely insane)
Shows how quantum theory is increasingly used by people like Deepak Chopra are capitalizing on the ignorance of people.

Famous physicist Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory."

In his face-to-face interview with Chopra, he confronts him on the use of scientific language.
Homeopathy:

The irrational claim that diluting a medicine makes it stronger!
They just use water that has a "memory" of active ingredients that are not actually president any more.

This is more than insane.

People can call themselves homeopaths without any credentials

Richard Dawkins at TED Talks

Richard Dawkins is Oxford University's "Professor for the Public Understanding of Science." Author of the landmark 1976 book, The Selfish ... all » Gene, he's a brilliant (and trenchant) evangelist for Darwin's ideas. In this talk, titled, "Queerer Than We Suppose: The strangeness of science," he suggests that the true nature of the universe eludes us, because the human mind evolved only to understand the "middle-sized" world we can observe. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:42) - More TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com

V. S. Ramachandran on the History of Truth and Science

2007-09-02T15:29:00.001-07:00

V. S. Ramachandran is one of my favorite scientists and thinkers. I first learned about him on Ramachandran's Notebook from PBS.

You can visit the web site here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mind/notebook.html

Here is an excerpt from the site about his work and revolutionary discoveries.

Vilayanur Ramachandran has been called a Sherlock Holmes of neuroscience. Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, Ramachandran has brilliantly sleuthed his way through some of the strangest maladies of the human mind. He has done this by marrying simple tools such as mirrors and cotton swabs with an insatiably inquisitive mind and a tonic sense of humor.

One of the areas in which he has made some of his greatest strides is in the arena of phantom limbs, in which amputees and even those born without one or more limbs feel pain and other sensations in their missing body parts. Here, read Ramachandran's vivid descriptions of his experiences with phantom-limb patients and how he has managed to understand their singular dilemmas and thereby help them.

Here is a lecture in which he discusses phantom limb syndrome, synesthesia, and neuron innervation.

For a great interview with him in which he discusses Galieo's contribution to the concept of experiment and investigation, and how Aristotle took too much for granted without evidence, visit the Science Network:

http://tsntv.org/

If it is no longer on the home page, click here for the medium quality version:

http://tsntv.org/media/tss-rama300.mov

Phantom Limb Syndrome

Phantom limbs are a very fascinating subject! The discovery that Ramachandran made was that pepole who had limbs amputated or severed would sometimes "feel" them still present. To make a long story short, he figured out how the brain fools us. He also figured out how to map sensations on particular parts of the body to specific places inside the brain.

You can learn more about phantom limb syndrome here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is another fascinating condition. In this condition, people get their senses confused. They may smell colors, or taste shapes. It's very confusing, but it all has traces into brain activity.

Learn more about synesthesia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

Beyond Belief 2006 Symposium

Dr. Ramachandran participated in the 2006 Beyond Belief symposium, a gathering of prominent intellectuals discussing the state of the public understanding of science and religion. You can watch all the footage of the symposium on this web site:

http://beyondbelief2006.org/

Here are several excerpts from Ramachandran's time at the podium:

Seizure-Induced Religious Experiences

Some other clips of Ramachandran

Hanging on For Dear Life: Why "Near Death Experiences" are, First and Foremost, "During-Life Experiences"

2007-09-01T13:02:00.001-07:00

Category: Religion and Philosophy

Click here to listen to the podcast version of me reading this post.

A Near-Death-Experience is, by Definition, a During-Life-Experience

Last year I had a long conversation with a coworker about Near-Death-Experiences. At the time I wrote up the following notes about this discussion.
He said that based on the anecdotal evidence that shows a large number of people from a large number of cultures have a very similar experience called a life review, he believes there is strong evidence for consciousness surviving physical death. These life-reviews may consist of the following characteristics:

A "reviewer" who takes you through your life and shows you the good and bad things you have done and how you affected people in your life.
Making things known that seem like they could not possibly be known during the state of "near death".

You can read more about this all over the web. A good place for the anectodal evidence and cited research is: http://www.near-death.com/experiences/research24.html

For the skeptical side, see the Skeptic's Dictionary, starting at the following URL which has many links to further reading at the bottom:
http://skepdic.com/nde.html

Anecdotal Evidence About Near-Death-Experiences

My coworker wanted to argue that it is more probable, based on the anecdotes, that there is some external entity interacting with these people during these near-death-experiences. I want to make a couple of observations about this chain of thought, also using probability.

Some General Observations on Living Objects' Tendency Toward Persistence

A first distinction to make is that a near-death-experience is, before anything else, more properly dubbed a during-life-experience. To restate it: everything a person who has undergone a "near-death-experience" is experienced during life. Therefore, we must first exhaust all possibilities that the causal explanation of the experience came from something biological and physical prior to attempting to explain it supernaturally.

Looking now at probabilities, let's look at some other "near death" experiences that still must be classified as "during life". To generalize the experience, first let's lay out a common pattern that we will observe:

1. A living object is nearing perceived death
2. Living objects nearing perceived death struggle to achieve continued persistence of existence through any means possible.

Now, let's look at other cases of what happens when a living object suspects onciming death.
1. Cells attempt to repair themselves if they are harmed.
2. Tissues attempt to repair themselves if they are harmed.
3. Organs attempt to repair themselves if they are harmed.
4. Therefore, bodies attempt to repair themselves if they are harmed.

In each case of living object, the object makes use of its immediate surroundings to try to continue its existence. This principle is well-founded and well-observed in both our everyday experiences and in scientific analysis.

Even when human beings starve themselves of carbohydrates, the body systems struggle to produce ketones from existing immediate resources to struggle toward continued existence. We don't even have to consciously decide to do it. We may decide to do the Atkins diet, but our bodily tissues decide to preserve themselves of their own volition!

The Human Brain During NDEs

Now let's look at the case of the human brain, imagination, perception, consciousness, or whatever you'd like to call it. Given that the brain is, first and foremost, a physical entity composed of other physical entities, I believe we must first look at its resources to apply this general principle that every single other living object demonstrates.

What resources does the brain have? It is composed of neurons. The human brain has over 100,000,000,000 neurons. That is 100 billion. Each of these are linked to as many as 10,000 other neurons.[1] In the context of our perception, these neurons serve to provide us with memory banks and imagination.

Given that, in general, living objects tend toward using all possible resources to persist their existence, which is more logically justifiable to conclude from the following two scenarios about near-death/during-life experiences?

1. That some external being is directing a "life review", or
2. That the brain is attempting to use whatever its immediate resources are to continue its existence, including memory and imagination?

It is well-admitted that such "life reviews", while they may be generally similar, are widely differing as well. This is natural to expect given that each human brain has different memories encoded into its neurons. Even near-death researchers admit that the culture in which a person grows up strongly influences what the person will "see" during a near-death-experience.[2] For example, Christians may see Jesus, but Hindus may see Krishna.

Am I saying that it's impossible that an external being is directing these experiences? No. What I am saying is that we must first look at the general principle of living objects to tend toward persistence, and then apply that to the human brain and imagination before attempting to explain the experiences as something other than natural.

This idea is not original with me. I've read about it in various formulations on different sites. You can find out more about NDE accounts and find links to people both supportive of a supernatural explanation and to people who believe in a physiological explanation at the following WikiPedia topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience

References:

1. The Human Brain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain

2. Gary Habermas, author, speaks about Near Death Experiences in a variety of cultures: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8225341779641252488&q=habermas+near+death

Penn & Teller's Take on NDEs

A Disturbing Film: Jesus Camp

2007-08-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

There is a very disturbing film out called Jesus Camp. You can read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Camp. The WikiPedia entry links to the film's official web site.

One of the points the adults in the film raise several times is that we are "One nation under God", but the founding fathers did not intend to create a religious nation. They intended to create a nation that had religious freedom. If anyone doubts this, just read Thomas Jefferson's words. I've included some of his words at the bottom of this email.

Furthermore, take a look at this excerpt from an article in Slate that covers the history of the pledge of allegiance.

http://www.slate.com/?id=2067499

Given this tradition, it's not surprising that the original Pledge of Allegiance—meant as an expression of patriotism, not religious faith—also made no mention of God. The pledge was written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, a cousin of the famous radical writer Edward Bellamy. He devised it for the popular magazine Youth's Companion on the occasion of the nation's first celebration of Columbus Day. Its wording omitted reference not only to God but also, interestingly, to the United States:

"I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

...

The campaign to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was part of this movement. It's unclear precisely where the idea originated, but one driving force was the Catholic fraternal society the Knights of Columbus. In the early '50s the Knights themselves adopted the God-infused pledge for use in their own meetings, and members bombarded Congress with calls for the United States to do the same. Other fraternal, religious, and veterans clubs backed the idea. In April 1953, Rep. Louis Rabaut, D-Mich., formally proposed the alteration of the pledge in a bill he introduced to Congress.

For the YouTubers, here is a video that shows various founding fathers with quotes about religion and religious freedom superimposed on paintings of them.

Here is a collection of quotes from Thomas Jefferson about religion and the separation of church and state.

http://candst.tripod.com/tnppage/qjeffson.htm

Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State (Letter to the Danbury Baptists, 1802).

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle (letter to Robert Rush, 1813).

I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling in religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must rest with the States, as far as it can be in any human authority (letter to Samuel Miller, Jan. 23, 1808).

I can no longer be silent in defense of the values of this country. I care about our future far too much. I will not be mocked or scorned by people of religious conviction. The separation of church and state protects religion from government and protects government from religion. Any unbiased reading of the founding fathers' words proves this was their intention without any doubt. I will not sit idly by while religious extremists try to revise the history of the founding fathers and distort their intentions.

Instead, I will treat them with kindness and respect, as I do all people, but I will ask them to provide evidence for their beliefs. It has always astounded me that people who consider themselves religious "conservatives" and like to say that "liberals" believe things based on "what they feel" remain dogmatically immune to looking at their own beliefs and realizing that they are founded upon feelings, not upon evidence.

Here are some very troubling video clips from the Jesus Camp film.

Film Trailer:

A Nation Down the Drain (Part I)

A Nation Down the Drain (Part II)

Praying to George W. Bush
In this clip, children pray to George W. Bush.

Ted Haggard Bashing Gays
Ted Haggard, who has now admitted to having an affair with a homosexual man, bashes gays in this video clip from the film.

A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom

"SECTION I. Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness; and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

"SECTION II. We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

"SECTION III. And though we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right."

Daily WTF: Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda, The Second Coming of Jesus?

2007-08-22T20:37:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Dr. G. for this information about a man claiming to be the second coming of Jesus:

He says that Jesus appeared to him and integrated himself inside of him. He also says he wants to be the president of the biggest government the world has ever seen. He also asks for money, money, money.

The Man-Christ-Jesus has reincarnated in a man from Puerto Rico, according this video:

Here is a brief history of the man, with warnings:

The WikiPedia entry on this man is very brief so far:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Luis_de_Jesus_Miranda

Disgusting Fraud Alert: Peter Popoff is Back

2007-08-22T17:02:00.001-07:00

News like this makes my heart sink.

But, it also motivates me to speak out in defense of otherwise defenseless and innocent people who are being taken advantage of by disgusting and evil people with absolutely no regard for honesty.

Peter Popoff is back and is making millions of dollars scamming people! He is the televangelist that was exposed on national television as a complete and utter fraud 20 years ago by James Randi and Johnny Carson. Randi and Carson played video and audio that showed how Popoff's wife would send him information about audience members so that he could call them up and then tell them that he was being spoken to by God and had special power to heal them or grant them their wishes.

He's back selling Miracle Spring Water! Can you believe this? This man is selling miracles through the television! People are losing their money to this creepy crook and he just does not care at all. He laughs all the way to his million dollar home.

Few things get me seriously riled up, but this kind of disgusting charlatanism infuriates me! It is beyond vile and horrifying for a human being to prey on another person's ignorance and willingly lie and cheat them!

Peter Popoff's Charlatan Spring Water

Inside Edition Exposes This Fraud

They call him "The prophet who profits", and show how he was exposed twenty years ago.

John Stossel Exposing Peter Popoff

James Randi Exposes Peter Popoff

Despite his work, people still believe in Popoff today! This is so sad.

Aaron Ranen's Documentary Exposes Peter Popoff

Penn & Teller Interview James Randi About Peter Popoff

What is most amazing is that people just ended up sending their money to other televangelists after he exposed Popoff.

The Need for Critical Thinking

It is so incredibly important for people to learn the skill of critical thinking. There is no skill more important than this to be taught in schools, in my opinion. How in the world is this nation going to survive when we cannot even remember 20 years ago that Popoff was proven a charlatan? How in the world are we going to survive as a nation when people continue to place their hopes in invisible things and don't care about the beauty and glory of the real world that they know is absolutely real?

Here is a magician talking about critical thinking:

USA Losing Grip on Science and Engineering

See this article for evidence that the United States is losing its grip on the dominance in science and engineering:

http://ec.europa.eu/research/headlines/news/article_04_05_11_en.html

For years, the European Union has treated the USA as a yardstick for what it needs to achieve in science and innovation. That stick – measuring performance in terms of research graduates, patents, prize winners, scientific citations, etc. – appears to be getting shorter, US experts reported earlier this month.

Asia’s ascendancy and Europe’s determination, especially in basic science, have begun to erode America’s dominance in science and innovation, according to John Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation (NSF). “The rest of the world is catching up – scientific excellence is no longer the domain of just the US,” he told the New York Times last week.

The leading American daily offers many examples where the USA fears a loss of scientific status. One area, international patents, is still strong but Asia is on the rise. The US share of industrial patents has fallen steadily over recent decades, now standing at almost 52%. In published research – once a US mainstay – it has also experienced serious decline.

In physics journals, American papers went from 61% in 1983 down to just 29% last year, according to a tracking study by Physical Review. A European Commission study showed that Europe overtook the USA in the mid-1990s as the world’s largest producer of scientific literature. Many of the USA’s woes are outlined in the National Science Board’s January report ‘An emerging and critical problem of the science and engineering labor force’.

Of Universes, Demons, and The State of Education With Thanks to Carl Sagan

Here is a partially completed video of an essay I wrote about the topic of science and engineering education in the United States two years ago.

You can read the essay and see other related videos in this post:

http://joshuagough.blogspot.com/2007/06/of-universes-demons-and-state-of.html

The Beauty of Rational Thinking

2007-08-21T23:09:00.001-07:00

This is a great video. See http://www.WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com

This is also a "great" video in the sense that it shows the complete and utter lunacy of fundamentalist religionists. It is time for "moderates" and non-religionists to speak out against this kind of insanity.

Here is another video of her being insane:

Here is a modified version of it.

Not to be forgotten, Peter Popoff is back!

Reason in an Age of Credulity

2007-08-21T22:28:00.001-07:00

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot Narrative

I had a great dinner and conversation with some friends tonight. We walked over to Surin of Thailand in Virginia Highlands, a local favorite, for dinner: http://www.surinofthailand.com/

After that we started discussing the state of credulity and unreason in today's American culture. We covered a lot of ground! All of us are gravely concerned about the lack of critical thinking in today's society. None of us are religionists. We all believe in personal responsibility and action.

Here are links to many of the YouTube video clips we discussed as well as links to other information about the topics.

Mr. Deity

We talked about the hilarious Mr. Deity video series. My favorite happens to be the one about Lucy, otherwise known as Lucifer.

http://mrdeity.com/

"You're the deity! Come on, who's the deity!"

Why Won't God Heal Amputees

We discussed the great web site http://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com, a site that is very critical of supernaturalistic religion. Here are a couple of great videos from that web site:

Proving That Prayer is Superstition

This video demonstrates that praying for silly things like having dice turn up all sixes never results in creating any prolonged ability to roll six die any greater than normal probability.

I'd just like to add my observation that a much better test of prayer could be done by setting up an experiment like this:

In order to avoid loss of life, use 50 Barbie dolls instead of real people.
Set the dolls on the ground.
Raise an anvil high above them.
Pray that God will make the anvil move out of the way of the doll to protect the doll from destruction should the anvil fall.
Drop the anvil.
Observe the result each of the 50 times.

I will bet you that will not ever see the anvil fail to destroy the Barbie doll. This kind of test is far better than most prayer studies because we can actually test for an expected result. In prayer studies that attempt to measure the result of people praying for others to recover from an illness, there are too many complicating factors involved, too many variables that have to be accounted for. But, in this experiment, there is an expected outcome, so unless the expected outcome is observed, one is justified to explain that's it's likely there is no deity listening to and responding to the prayer.

How Do We Know That Christians Are Delusional?

This video discusses the Muslim Bubble of Delusion, the Mormon Bubble of Delusion, and the Christian Bubble of Delusion.

Richard Dawkins

We talked about Richard Dawkins' encounter with Ted Haggard, his book The God Delusion, and his TV series "The Root of All Evil",

Richard Dawkins Versus Ted Haggard

The God Delusion

The Root of All Evil Part I

The Root of All Evil Part II

Richard Dawkins Interviews a Bishop Who Accepts Evolution

See the whole interview here: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=richard+dawkins+anglican

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (also known as the Spaghedeity) is the deity of a parody religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.^[1] The religion was founded in 2005 by Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson to protest against the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. In an open letter sent to the education board, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural Creator called the Flying Spaghetti Monster which resembles spaghetti and meatballs.^[2] He furthermore calls for the "Pastafarian" (a portmanteau of pasta and Rastafarian) theory of creation to be taught in science classrooms.^[3]

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

The Treaty of Tripoli, or More Evidence that the United States is Not a "Christian" Nation

We talked about the Treaty of Tripoli from 1797. The Treaty of Tripoli clearly stated that the founding fathers did not intend to create the United States on top of any religion.

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

Watch this video to learn more about the Treaty of Tripoli.

Gregory Boyd on The Myth of a Christian Nation

Carl Sagan and Cosmos

We talked about how our world would be a better place, full of more critically thinking people if more young students watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos at a young age.

Here are just two incredible clips from Cosmos to illustrate this:

The Origins of the Universe Part I

The Origins of the Universe Part II

You can view my Carl Sagan playlist on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=099F26B6D0103731

We discussed more videos and resources, but I'll have to add them later as I am tired.