What is real Christianity?

This Is What Actual Christianity Is Supposed to Sound Like is frustrating. It aims to clarify who true Christians are without really engaging with the reason they have to even try to make that claim.

There is no amount of Tim Alberta reporting or free coverage of Michael Tomasky’s mom’s pastor Michael Delk that will stop me from breathing a sigh of relief when the world is free from the Abrahamic religions and their offshoots (I’m including Mormons, Christian Scientists, seventh day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witness, etc. in this tradition). Or at least free from their adherents desire to purge the unbelievers.

She was a good dog

We knew early on she had cancer and only about six months to live. We hoped for longer and gave her the best six months we could.

Non-fiction and The Chaos Machine

I’ve been reading more non-fiction for a work book club. It seems to fall roughly into a few categories: polemic, self-help/business, and history. I’ve been wondering how to rank and compare the different kinds.

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher has a compelling narrative about publicly unaccountable algorithms created by Silicon Valley corporations maximizing human interactions for revenue, despite harms created from those interactions. Google/Youtube and Facebook are mostly singled out for their failure to stop harm. It’s very similar to Stolen Focus, which calls this corporate behavior “surveillance capitalism”. Both books fit squarely in what I call polemic non-fiction.

Thoughts on A Memory Called Empire

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Stories like this where some kind of emissary or ambassador is on an alien planet provide a way to explore big ideas. The Left Hand of Darkness, Embassytown and to a lesser degree The Sparrow have a similar structure and explore big ideas about personal identity and broader culture.

Towards the end of the book I was reminded of the divide between the United States and the American South. In the book this would be Teixcalaan and Lsel Station respectively. One is large in terms of geography, population and drives the culture. The other is smaller and lives within the same cultural milieu despite feeling independent of it.

Online decay

It seems to me the online world is the reverse of the material world in terms of entropy. Online we move from the small, disorganized bands over time to an organized hive mind.

Scrum, who is it good for?

In a scrum training class we discussed the most important element of a user story. These are little reminders to “have a conversation” that have a common format of “As a <requestor> I want <something> so that <desired outcome>”. The instructor asked what the most important part of that user story is. I answered the outcome. That is where the value is created. That is the moment the abstract becomes concrete.

Intelligent design doesn't jive with the Torah and Quran

I spend a lot of my free time reading about religion. Most of that time is on the features that make one religion different from another. That’s why G. Willow Wilson’s article on why intelligent design doesn’t work in Islam and Judaism riveted me.

“The God of the Bible is omniscient and all-powerful, but the God of the Torah and the Quran is omnipresent and omniparticipant. This essential difference has led some religious scholars to draw a distinction between monotheism, the belief in one God, and monism, the belief in One.”

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Comic book recognition

Tear down the ivory towers, obliterate the false differences between experts and hobbyists. End proscriptive grammar and let descriptive grammar reign. Accept that knowledge is a journey and usurp the title of “expert” from the dinosaurs who seek comfort from a chaotic world by telling everyone “how it is.”

I’ll save the full manifesto for some other time but in that spirit I’d like to praise a line from Ebert’s review of The Dark Knight

David Byrne meets the High-5

David Byrne’s March visit to Dallas (via Unfair Park) makes a point of mentioning the awe-inspiring High Five interchange.

I turned north on Highway 75 on what might be the mightiest and most awe-inspiring interchange I’ve ever seen. At least five levels of roads are stacked up, all swooping over, under and around each other as if in some mighty concrete mating dance.

Other writers have described it in more medieval terms as a bridge between castle Dallas and the fiefdoms that surround it. Regardless of the metaphor, it’s hard to convey how impressive the High Five interchange to people who haven’t ridden it. Even harder is to make people understand how miraculous the transformation from dysfunctional eyesore to utilitarian wonder.

Absurd Numbers

This is too long to fit on twitter but I like it too much to forget about it. The word absurd was actually first used to describe irrational numbers.

I’m working my way through a book on all the people that helped or solved problems on David Hilbert’s famous list of 23 great math problems.

Many times a solution only presents itself after cultural change. One of the cultural norms that had to be updated to push math forward was the idea that irrational numbers are actually useful.