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, ...

I just sent a long fax that cost me over $30. There were 22 pages. For some reason, I can't ever seem to count the number of pages in a fax correctly. You wouldn't think it would be that hard -- I'm pretty sure I can count to 22 under normal circumstances. But every time I fax documents and write the page count on the cover page, I seem to be off by at least one. I heard a song on the radio yesterday that had the following chorus: I don't want to do your dirty work I ain't gonna do your dirty work no more I don't want to do your dirty work, oh yeah Is that it? Unless there is some very fancy vocal work going on, you would think they could at least make it rhyme. I don't want to put them to too much trouble, but, sheesh. Yes, I am like the rabble watching Shakespeare's plays, for whom he put in rhymes at the end of each scene to hold their interest. I like rhymes. I don't think rhyming is everything, hence I don't care for rap (or hip-hop...

Do you ever wonder how you have lived so long and not heard certain popular phrases? I had never heard "ho" used in its derogatory sense until I was in grad school, and I swear the people in my middle school and high school called each other every other insulting name ever invented. I thought it was a recent invention, but I learned from my mother that it was used back in her youth. "Junk" and "pacakge" are two other terms that I never picked up in school, in spite of the best efforts of my classmates to give me an education in sexual slang. Did I just never hear them, or are they relatively new? Or are they, perhaps, somewhat regional? I don't care about the words themselves, but it baffles me how I didn't learn them before adulthood. On a more palatable note, I never heard the expression "over the top" used in the sense of "over the line" until I was 30. The first person I heard use it was Canadian, so I thought perhaps...

Barack Obama became president under an unusual set of circumstances. Most presidents can expect to be praised or blamed based on what happens during their administrations: if the economy is good, they will get the credit (or at least will benefit from the good feeling in the electorate), and if it is bad, they will be blamed. One exception to this was FDR, who inherited a disastrous economy. Everyone blamed Hoover, and it didn't matter that FDR didn't do much to bring about recovery; he got a pass because the economy was a disaster when he took over. Obama is in a similar situation on the economy. Thankfully, things are not nearly as bad as the Depression (despite what some people say), but they are worse than they have been in a long time. Because this started six months ago, while Bush was still president, he gets the blame. No one expect Obama to turn the economy around instantly. I expect that he will not start attrating much blame until the end of 2010, if the econ...

I normally shop at Wal-Mart for groceries, but they don't have one near where I am, so I went into Harris Teeter. It was like entering the first world. The signs were all painted in a functional yet pleasant colour scheme. The person at the deli counter volunteered to help me as soon as I came near, and actually seemed anxious to do so, unlike the reluctant Wal-Mart employees. Instead of the cheap and overprocessed meats found at Wal-Mart, Harris Teeter offered a delightful collection of succulent meats, complete with many prepared meals. There was a nice salad bar, a refrigerator with an array of international cheeses, and even an olive bar. (That one really struck me -- how many different kinds of olives does one really need?) The shopping aisles seem enormously long -- I'm not sure to what purpose, but it certainly looks like they have an intimidating stock of items. The cashiers not only ring up and bag your groceries, they take your cart on their side of the regist...

I noticed a long time ago that there isn't much difference between the sound of country music and rock music nowadays. If I'm surfing my radio and I come to a station playing jazz, classical, or rap, I recognize it right away; but if I come to a country or rock station, I often can't tell which it is until the song is half over. Country songs often have screaming guitars that would fit equally well in a hard rock song, and only a minority have a recognizably country instrument such as a fiddle or a banjo. All the same, no one could listen to a country music station for more than a few minutes without realizing that it is definitely not a rock station. What are the differences? There are some stylistic differences. Country songs are more likely to have a boogey beat or certain western-sounding bass lines. They also tend to be more formulaic: if you can't predict how a country song ends, you probably don't listen to much country music. But those things aren...

I read recently that someone was proposing to abolish funding for libraries, on the grounds that they are not needed now that we have the internet around. It is true that much reference information is available on the internet, at significantly greater convenience than going to a library. However, the suggestion overlooks the fact that many people rely on the library for their internet access. It also misses the obvious point that libraries still lend out books, and very few new books are available for free online. I think the suggestion is flawed in thinking that the internet is (yet) a replacement for libraries, but it is worth considering on its own merits. Why do we need libraries? The obvious disadvantage to libraries is that they discourage people from buying books. I occasionally read about declining book sales in America, and surely having nice libraries only contributes to the trend. I am certain that I have read some books in the library that I would otherwise have bou...

English is known as a language that has adopted freely from other languages. Not only is our grammar Germanic and our vocabulary chiefly French, but we also have numerous words from Spanish, Italian, and many other languages. Some of our most remote adoptions come from Malay, which is spoken about as nearly on the other side of the world as one can get from America. Apart from various animals and plants (notably bamboo, dugong, and orangutan), Malay has given us two common nouns and one adjective. amok: To run amok is to attack wildly in all directions. Apparently, some Malays occasionally snap and begin an actual frenzied attack on everyone around them. boondocks: It surprised me when I learned that this word was Malay, because it sounds perfectly English, and I hear it most from country folk (who actually live in the boondocks), where older words tend to persist. This word must fulfill a lacuna in English, because the only equivalent words are the derivative "boonies...

Our Ford Windstar has two settings for air conditioning, regular and "max." We had always assumed that "max" meant the compressor would work harder, hence using more gas, so we rarely used it. That is, until one day another Ford owner pointed out to us that "max" simply means that the vehicle re-circulates the interior air, rather than bringing in new air from outside. This is documented in the manual, but it isn't exactly intuitive; why couldn't they simply say what it does? My truck has this feature, but it has a separate button: you can run any of the air conditioner settings with or without the air recirculating. And I was able to infer the meaning of the button without the assistance of a friend. It does make me wonder, though: if the air recirculates, wouldn't you be breathing the same stale air? How long would it be before that became a problem? I found a site demonstrating that adults inhale 8-10 liters of air per minute. (Th...

Everyone has the experience of falling. In the end, it is usually no big deal: you fall, you scrape your hand or your knee, and you forget about it. But there is always one moment when you realize that your immediate reactions have failed, and you are now hurtling uncontrollable downward. You get an empty feeling in your stomach as your realize that your are out of control, and do not know where you will land or how much it will hurt. The feeling only lasts an instant, but it is one of the most helpless and scary feelings in the world. Moving is kind of like that. The feeling is less intense, of course, because you do know where you are going, and there is no sudden pain associated with a sudden fall. It does seem, however, similar to me. After 8 previous moves, I still feel it, and probably more intensely this time than any of the others. At least on the other occasions, I had a clear destination, and I usually knew what I was going to be doing when I got there. In my presen...

I am an avid Southern partisan. The more I have studied the issue, the more it seems clear to me that the South was fully within its rights to secede from the Union. I can't see how a nation that owes its existence to breaking away from Great Britain can deny that right to the supposedly sovereign entities that compose it. The usual justification is that the South was evil because it had slaves. Destroying evil institutions is a good thing, but it is dangerous to suggest that the ends justify the means. Legally, constitutionally, what the North did was wrong, and Lincoln did not for a moment justify his actions on the basis of the good that would come from freeing slaves. It is good that slaves were freed, but this was, for contemporaries, an incidental outcome of the war to save the union. Which makes me all the more frustrated that Southerners today have come to employ a dumb slogan like "Heritage, Not Hate." It's good to have a slogan to get across the point...

The most annoying political slogan (or catchphrase) I have ever heard is "compassionate conservatism." It annoys me because I am a conservative, and, right away when you hear it, you are led to infer that regular conservatism is not compassionate. This is no subtle logic required to reach this conclusion; it is inherent in the phrase. It irritates me to no end that a Republican, and supposedly conservative, president, would use this phrase and thereby confirm everything that liberals have been saying about conservatism -- that it is a cold-hearted ideology. There is a parallel phrase on the left: "socialism with a human face," as though regular socialism was inhuman. (It is, but that's another matter.) If anything, this slogan is even worse, because the change it suggests is, by implication, only on the surface; socialism will remain what it is, but it will put on a smile to attract more followers. And although the slogan was coined by a Czech leader, the...