A Curious Little Blog

You can hardly go into a church anymore and not hear the influence of modern music. Even my conservative old First Baptist Church in Charlottesville includes an electric guitar and a horns sections in its services alongside the pipe organ. I can't really complain about this, as their is nothing in the Bible restricting worship to pipe organs and pianos (though I could have sworn I read something in Leviticus...). I do love the sound of organs, but other instruments don't detract from worship in any way. Maybe they make it a little less grave and awe-inspiring, but one does not depend on those emotions alone. Churches have also widely adopted PowerPoint for displaying the lyrics to hymns. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, and a lot of advantages for churches. They can expand their repertoire to newer songs without having to add new songbooks or bulletin inserts; they can even do away with hymnals altogether, which I'm sure is a significant cost savings for many ...

I'm sure I'm going to alienate a lot of people when I say that cubicles are not as bad as they're made out to be. It's true that they don't provide much privacy compared to an office, but would you have an office if you didn't have a cube? Almost certainly not. If you watch old movies that show people in a large workplace – “Double Indemnity” is a good example – you don't see hallways full of offices. What you see is a large room with desks arranged in rows, people working side by side with each other. In other words, if you didn't have a cubicle, you'd probably have nothing at all separating you from your co-workers. It's interesting that the cubicle has become such a target for hatred. While I admit that you get minimal privacy in a cube, especially aural privacy – you can hear the noises around you, and your own conversations are audible to others – at least it gives you your own space. My current employer will not allow us to hang things on t...

I got to install Linux on my wife's laptop through a convoluted set of circumstances. The laptop was having symptoms, such as never shutting down on its own, that irritated Tanya. After tinkering around and googling failed to solve the problem, I figured I could at least fix it by reformatting the hard drive and re-installing Windows. To my surprise, the problem continued -- more on that later. I told Tanya that there was nothing else I could do. Windows still ran, with quirks; but I offered Linux if she was desperate for a fix. Under normal circumstances, she would probably never have agreed to have Linux installed. However, at the time she had a work laptop that she used most of the time, so she happily let me wipe out Windows and install Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Tanya is highly dependent on Microsoft Office, especially Excel, which she uses constantly at work, and she isn't interested in giving OpenOffice a try. Fortunately, Wine has progressed to the point that it...

The idea of a cap and trade emissions bill frightens me. The idea of a hard cap on emissions is bad to begin with, as though politicians could somehow pick the optimal amount of emissions to allow without imposing too great an economic cost. But what really concerns me is how these caps are going to be determined. The principle seems to be to cap companies at what their current emissions levels. Cyclical changes could presumably be smoothed out by applying the cap at an average of the firms' last three years, or perhaps the highest of the last three years (not that I think regulators would be so generous). So it might be possible to assign reasonable caps for an instant in time. Then what? What if a firm opens a new plant? Who is going to decide how much emissions they will be permitted? What happens when a new company starts up? This sounds like an endless political struggle to me, with the biggest corporations using it to push out smaller players, and opportunities for ...

You may have heard of the Doomsday Clock , which purports to inform us all how close the world is to a nuclear holocaust. In fact, it is mostly a convenient propaganda tool for those in favour of disarmament at any cost. No one really knows what conditions are likely to lead to a nuclear war, and nuclear physicists are in a worse position to judge than historians or political scientists. It has recently been extended to include the threat of climate disaster, as though to emphasize its political motivations. The Doomsday Clock presently shows us at 5 minutes to midnight, which is closer to catatrophe than it has been since 1984, and one of the closest points in its history (see the wikipedia entry for a timeline). For the first time in my life, I believe they may be underestimating the threat. I don't expect a complete global nuclear war anytime soon, but I think the chance that nuclear warheads will be used in combat is higher than it has been since 1945. The Cold War, espec...

A couple of additions to earlier posts: I commented in an earlier post that most songs need to have a rhyming refrain. The Led Zeppelin song " Rock and Roll ," which I happened to hear on the radio the other day, is a perfect example of a song whose refrain does not need to rhyme. The virtuosity and excitement of the line "been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time" carries it; to rhyme it would almost be painting the lily. (Since it's only one line, it's not clear how it could rhyme anyway, but that's another matter.) Few refrains can match it, however. I have written previously (not on this blog) about churches with strange, non-identifying names, such as "The Rain Church" and "The Harvest Church" (both in Warner Robins, Georgia). I have since seen two more in Virginia, "The Rock Church" and "The Lighthouse Worship Center." The Rock Church has a cross on it, so I presume it is Christian of som...

When I was growing up, country music was known as "Country and Western." I don't know why it dropped the "Western" part. Perhaps it was deemed cumbersome to have two words, although it hasn't hurt R & B (then again, R&B flows more than C&W). One thing it has never been called is "Southern." That makes sense, because you can pick up country stations just about anywhere; I distinctly recall at least two in the Detroit area, home of Madonna, Eminem, and Motown, about as un-Southern a place as you could imagine. (Although people around there did joke that the suburb of Taylor was really "Taylortucky.") Heck, even Detroit native and eponymous rocker Kid Rock has moved into country music. On the other hand, it is kind of hard to escape the fact that most country musicians come from the South. I just checked some of the biggest names on this page , and over half were from the South. Some were from the Midwest (Illinois, Ohio, ...