There is a joke that goes like this:

A traffic cop pulls over Werner Heisenberg. He walks up to Heisenberg and asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?”

“No, but I can tell you exactly where I am.”

Now, this joke is just wrong. Maybe it orginated correctly, and I've just heard it repeated incorrectly. But the correct answer to the question presented in the joke is "No, but I can tell you exactly where I was". The tense used being operative.

The Uncertainty Principle says that you cannot know both the location and speed of a particle, as the act of observing it will change the other variable. Now, you CAN determine how fast the particle is moving, and then locate it at some other point in time. So in this joke, Werner could very well have known both how fast he was going AND where he is. Nothing precludes that from being the case. But if the tense is consistant (how fast WERE you going..where I WAS) then the joke is a joke, and not simply nonsense.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Bill sent a letter along withthe book. Just a little background for some of you: Bill has been a believer for as long as I've known him. And I've not been for as long as he's known me. We've spent untold hours discussing matters of ethics, morality, religion, music, politics, and tOSU atheletics. As many friendships are built upon shared experiences, ours is built upon a deep understanding of one another stemming from our thousands of conversations with one another. We have gone years without talking, and picked up right where we left off. I could not see or talk to him for 50 years, and we would still know one another as well as anyone else did.

So here's the letter that accompanied the book:

Dan,

Bill

Now, Bill is the only person aside from my wife that I wouldn't get defensive with when this topic is broached. So I will read this book, honestly and with an open mind. I think I know quite a bit about the Faith. More than most christians I come across. But maybe I'll learn something. At the very least, I'll get use some of those synaptic pathways that I so rarely travel these days.

My very best friend since we were about 17, Bill Pavuk, Godfather to Trevor, my second favorite Euchre partner (sorry Bill, Ron Round and I had a special connection when it came to Euchre), and Pastor of a small Lutheran church in rural Ohio, got me a book for my birthday. "Why Christian?...For those on the Edge of Faith", by Douglas John Hall. Bill wrote me a nice letter along with it, which I'll transcribe later, since it's flattering to me, and I like to be flattered. :)

I'll probably use the blog here to respond to some of the questions/answers that arise, since a few of you guys are also well versed in these issues, and will certainly provide some fruitful dialog.

The first issue raised by the Author extends from his opinion of one of Humanism's failures, and that is to address the "blinding challenges that life throws up at us..such as "How can I find Eternal Life?"" I stopped reading when he raised that to comment on it.

Now, I can honestly say that life has never thrown this question up at me. I know other people have. But life per se never did. I really have no interest in eternal life. I care about the life I have, and feel very deeply that it is only the inherent reality of life's end that gives it value at all. I see no value in eternal life. Indeed, I find the concept diminishes the importance of the life we know, often in the mere hope that another one awaits. This strikes me as foolish at it's core. Of the Tortoise and the Hare, which do you think would have bought into the idea?

I have a knee jerk response to the sociological importance of that question. They are by no means my primary reasons for my hostility towards the idea, but certainly have informed it. Perhaps it's my upbringing on the wrong side of tracks, or maybe my dalliances with Weber and Marx in my youth, but I can't help but think about who stands to gain from the idea of eternal life. Surely it was advantegeous throughout time for the leaders of any community to have the not-leaders concentrating on the next life, and not worrying too much about how fucked over they were getting in this one. As with most things, if you follow the money, this idea hardly seems one worth spending too much energy on.

This whole idea of having to add the recent spam to a blacklist is nice and all, but it doesn't scale well, and it sucks donkey dick compared to a Bayesian solution that solves our email Spam problem so well. Are there any Bayesian-based comment filtering plugins for MT?

MT-Blacklist works great, mind you, as a reactive tool. But Spam is such a big problem for me that using a reactive tool isn't providing the work : payoff ratio I desire. :)

Well, he's dead. I'm glad they told us, because frankly, nobody would have noticed otherwise. He's been effectively dead to us for a decade.

I'd like to thank him for making Doonesbury pretty damn good when Garry came off his hiatus. I'd like to thank him for setting the standard by which corrupt administrations are judged. And I'd like to thank him for ignoring the advice of Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. and taking a soft line with Gorby, allowing for and helping to normalize relations withthe Soviet Union. Gorby would likely not have had the support of his people if Reagan had not trusted him and cooperated. The importance of that cannot be overstated.

My conservative cube-mate directed me a few days ago to a story on NewsMax concerning an alledged incident between John Kerry and Ted Sampley (Of Vietnam Veterens Against Kerry), wherein Kerry flipped Ted the bird and screamed at him in front of some school children.

Now, i don't know if thisis a bunch of crap or not. I expect it's somethign the media would pick up on if true. But to date, 3 days after I first heard of it, only the Washington Times seems to have picked it up. A lot of blogs have it, but just regurgitating the Newsmax article.

What concerns me is that not only have no pictures come to light, but there isn't anyone else that has corroborated this story. Just Sampley's word. And Sampley isn't a guy renowned for his honesty and integrity. So what's the deal? Anyone heard or read anyhing that wasn't Sampley's account?

Something that I've recently noticed, and bugs me, is that on TV, they always have cell coverage. Now, I spend a good part of my time in basements and data centers, where cell phones rarely work. I can get 5 full bars of signal strength when I walk in the front door of my office buiding, but nary a single bar at my desk, 10 feet from a window ont he other side of the building.

But on NCIS, the phones work in the autopsy room, in the basement (or a few floors below level) of a big building. And on CSI-Miami they even work in a mourgue. CSI has no problems in casinos or their labs, and even out int he middle of the desert.

Nobody has coverage that good. Nowhere.

Really, I think the investigations would wipe Iran-Contra and Watergate out of our collective memories. The Plame thing will be full bore. The VP's involvement in doling out War Profits to War Profiteers is starting to look like it's going to merit some considerable legal wrangling. The Congress could iinvestigate the lies involving the Medicare bill. Not to mention the illegal diversion of funds authorized for the war in Afghanistan to Iraq. Then there is the Chalabi thing (who gave him classified info?), the Torture thing, the Energy Task Force thing...

Even as corrupt as Reagan's team was, this one puts them to shame. But I fear that lacking a second term, the convictions just won't reach the number that Reagan's did.