culture

Bring Your Priest and Your Prayerbook. That’s It.

Just the other day, Good Pope Bennie opened a door for conservative Anglicans to become Roman Catholics without completely abandoning their Anglican traditions. (Links to more discussion here.) The Roman Catholic Church will be willing to create Personal Ordinariates for converting Anglicans, which is jargon for establishing non-territorial dioceses in which members retain a distinctive liturgical style different from that of the RCC as a whole. This has been done before on a very small scale, though it’s a complex business and not everybody within the RCC agrees that it’s a good thing.

Basically, conservative Anglicans will be received into custom-built dioceses with their own priests and prayerbooks (what Anglicans call missals) and report directly to the Pope, rather than to an RC archbishop in a particular city. They’ll be able to continue using their liturgies and occasional ceremonies pretty much as they have before. The big win for them is that they will no longer have to cope with women priests or demands for gay marriage. However, there’s a downside, and I wonder if it’s dawned on potential crossover Anglicans what they’ll have to leave behind:

Birth control. Even conservative Anglicans in my experience have no particular issue with contraception. (Abortion is another matter entirely.) In the Roman Catholic Church, procreation is the primary reason for marriage and the only permissible reason for sexual activity or even sexual thoughts. Contraception remains a mortal sin. There’s no indication that Personal Ordinariates trump Papal teachings at this level.
Divorce. This was, after all, the whole reason for Anglicanism to begin with. While divorce is treated less casually among conservative Anglicans than among liberal Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is nonetheless embraced reluctantly when necessary. Crossover Anglicans will have to agree with Rome that divorce is impossible.
Their bishops. Male Anglican/Episcopalian priests have been accepted into the RCC in the past, but married bishops are considered off the table. The problem here is that every prominent Anglican bishop I’ve ever heard of has been married, primarily because nearly all Anglican/Episcopalian priests are married. So crossover Anglicans will have to accept episcopal oversight from Roman Catholic appointee bishops, or bishops newly consecrated out of the ranks of (the very uncommon) unmarried priests.

I don’t think this will work, and here’s why: In my view, a religious culture is more than a set of prayers and ceremonies. It’s a way of seeing Earth as well as a way of seeing Heaven, and in my own research the Roman Catholic and Anglican Catholic undertstandings of the physical world, the human person, sex, and marriage stand out as radically different. There’s some serious question in my mind as to how many Anglicans will embrace Rome once they completely understand what Rome will demand of them–and whether those who accede will continue to be Anglicans in any honest sense of the word.

Odd Lots

Oct 8th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

If like me you stand amazed at the precision of the English language (which is distinct from the precision of the people who use it, which is all over the map) do visit Obsolete Word of the Day. Many of the citations are old slang and many words do double duty: A slype is slang for a man who talks much about seducing women but lacks the courage to do so. Its formal use is architectural: the connection (often a covered but not enclosed passage) between the chapterhouse and the rest of a church complex. Much more there; you can sink hours on this one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Here’s a gatherum of peculiar or downright gross sodas from around the world. Yogurt-flavored Pepsi, anyone? Or (urrrp) Placenta? Alas, Inca Kola is not mentioned, though it should be. (Thanks to Bob Calverley, via George Ewing.)
The title on this article is wrong (or perhaps some people understand the term “hyperdrive” differently than I do) but it describes a new twist on an interesting and mostly forgotten 1924 speculation of mathematician David Hilbert: that a stream of particles moving at greater than half the speed of light could accelerate a nearby stationary object without subjecting that object to inertial forces. That wouldn’t be a true hyperdrive, but a genuine inertialess drive would almost seem like one if we limit the frame of reference to the starship. (I.e., we could go from here to sunlike star Zeta Tucanae in a week or so from our perspective, though 28 years from the universe’s perspective.) This is mighty exotic physics, and if there’s anything to it, we may learn more once Felber’s hypothesis is tested using the LHC, or perhaps the Tevatron.
I saw a trailer on what may be an interesting new film comedy: The Boat That Rocked , which had been originally (and I think more appropriately) titled Pirate Radio. It’s about the 1960’s offshore radio pirates operating just outside the UK’s territorial waters, something that’s always fascinated me. I’ve been taking notes on a novel I call (or called, sigh) Pirate Radio, exploring the notion of untraceable Internet broadcasting through large-scale powerline networking, and that research brought the old UK high seas radio pirates to mind. Probably won’t write the novel, but it’s been a good excuse to read up on things I haven’t looked at since I read them in Popular Electronics in the 1960s.
Don’t miss the Steampunk Genre Fiction Generator. Stumbling through it with no malice (or anything else) aforethought, I came up with: “In a leather-clad Aztec empire, a young farm boy with dreams stumbles across a talking fish, which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots with the help of a cherubic girl with pigtails and spunk and her discomfort in formal wear, culminating in convoluted nonsense that squanders the reader’s goodwill.” Somebody else write it and I’ll pay a quarter for that!
The ice melt across Antarctica during this past Antarctic summer (2008-2009) was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite era. I’d worry a little less about rising oceans swallowing New York City, as much as I sometimes find myself wishing for them to do so.
I used to wonder how corn mazes are made (and still do, for older mazes) but if you’re doing one today, you’re basically going to need a lawnmower and a GPS receiver, and a way to overlay a drawing onto a GPS-enabled map display. Oh, and a large field of corn that you’re willing to seriously mess with.

Rant: Chicago’s Escape from Hell

Oct 5th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

I didn’t have time to say much the other day about my hometown’s narrow escape from Olympian Hell, and a few days’ wait has allowed me to spot some reasonable analysis by other people, especially Andrew Zimbalist, who I’m sure is often called a Sports Benefits Denier. I was a little surprised that our president would fly over there to lobby for his hometown–it seems a bad use of his time when health insurance reform is sinking out of sight–but that’s the sort of thing that presidents do, and I for one won’t hold it against him.

The nature of the ongoing spend-tax-money-on-sports argument is very nicely summarized over on Slate, in this piece by Brad Flora. It’s the same thing we hear again and again when billionaire sports team owners extort publicly financed stadiums from cities by threatening to move the team to a more gullible venue. The strategy virtually always works, though one wonders how or why.

Such deals never make financial sense for the cities and their taxpayers. It’s a strange ballet of spreadsheets vs. hypnotism: The policy wonks (I’m not sure they’re nerds as I define the term) come up with studies and hard numbers to debunk the Civic Pride and Benefits myths, while the jocks simply repeat statements of tribal emotion over and over until the electorate’s eyes glaze over and caves. It’s the same deal with the Olympics, and perhaps worse. Cities are expected to cough up billions of dollars to host an event lasting a few scant weeks, including the construction of substantial stadiums and athlete housing and lord knows what else, and then figure out how to make the facilities useful after the Games are over and everybody disperses to the four winds.

How can this ever make sense? It took Montreal thirty years to pay off the billions it cost to have the Games there in 1976. Few Olympic facilities get much use after the Games. Past Olympic facilities in some cities are crumbling wrecks behind barbed wire fences or already torn down in whole or in part and dumped in landfills. (That was actually Chicago’s plan from the outset.) The vast sums of money required are virtually always steered into politically friendly hands, and sheesh, guys, this is Chicago we’re talking about! (The sport they play best over there is racketball.) The crush of outsiders makes residents flee to the countryside, and in places where an ongoing tourist economy already exists, tourism falls to nothing before the Games and often remains depressed for years afterwards.

All for a mutated megatourney that has gone 180 from its original purpose: to transcend nationalism and glorify the efforts of individual athletes. Instead, we now have a global festival of flag-flavored tribalistic poo-flinging that takes huge advantage of the dazzling young athletes, who work basically for free while insiders and organizers pocket whatever money comes in.

I know, I know, I always come out against sports, heh. Guilty, and unrepentant. Still, not a single person I know in Chicago (and I know lots) came out for the Games, and if anybody was defending them before, I suspect they’re being very quiet now.

My view is pretty simple: The Olympics have long been too big an event to bounce around the world as though they were a spelling bee. They need to go back to Greece and stay there forever. What we used to spend on building whole cities every four years to host the Games, we should now parcel out as prize money to the athletes, so that they can at least get a college education against the (strong) possibility that there isn’t much money in professional biathalon once the last echoes of Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream” fade to silence.

Odd Lots

Aug 25th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

I just missed seeing a nice article on the current sunspot dearth before posting my entry for August 20, 2009. The longest stretch this solar minimum is 52 days back in 2008, and we could well exceed that come early September with no additional spots. (We’re now at 45 consecutive spotless days.)
I’m practicing rolling my eyes for the latest showing of the Mars hoax. On August 27, multitudes of people who are rumored to posess something close to human intelligence are claiming that Mars will appear the size of the full Moon. (This does the email rounds every couple of years.) Note well that if Mars were the size of the full Moon in the sky, we’d be living a disaster movie, so be very glad it’s a hoax.
Stanford University reports that media multitaskers do not in fact multitask very well. I liked this refreshingly straightforward quote in the article: “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn ‘t find it.” More details here from the Beeb.
ZDNet reports on a virus, named Win32.Induc, that pulls a trick I’ve never heard of before: It looks for the Delphi programming environment, and infects Delphi such that any apps built by that copy of Delphi will carry the virus. I can’t quite see how this manages to propagate in a herd as thin as the Delphi programming world has become, unless Delphi programmers tend to use a lot of Delphi utilities obtained from places like Torry’s. (I know I did, so that’s my theory.)
Maybe you had one: A die-stamped thin steel rectangular lunchbox, usually (but not always) with completely inane artwork, often branded to TV shows, toys, and other pop-culture phenomena. The Denver Westword has a “10 worst” feature on tin lunchboxes that’s worth a look. I never carried a tin lunchbox to school (we used paper bags from Certified) but I have one now very much like #1, purchased at a hamfest years ago, filled with FT-243 ham-band crystals. I’ve always wondered why the boxes always had little vents punched in the short end sides.
Here’s an interesting 2-tube minimal broadcast-band superhet, using 12V space-charge tubes. It’s interesting enough that I might even build one, though my own holy grail is a 2-tube FM receiver. I’ve got the schematic (courtesy John Bauman KB7NRN) and lack only the time to hack it together.
I’d never heard of morning glory clouds, probably because they mostly happen in a certain part of Queensland, Australia. The bigger question is why they get all the truly great Weird Stuff down there, and we have to settle for minor-league weirdness like Michael Jackson.

Odd Lots

Jan 30th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

In one of my rambles around the Web looking for interestering perspectives on education, I ran across this very insightful (if possibly misnamed) blog post. My take: We are teaching an entire generation that their own blathery opinions are unassailable. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
From Frank Glover comes a link to recent research suggesting that too much artificial light at night correlates with higher risk of breast and prostate cancer. More research is needed, but if the answer is to go to bed early and sleep in a dark room, Carol and I have it covered.
Rocky Jones’s Silvercup Rocket is well along on its restoration, and this page has both period and recent photos, as well as the best history of the Rocky Jones TV show that I’ve seen anywhere. (Ok, I’m biased–two of the photos are mine!)
Many people who have read my Hi-Flier Kites article have asked me what sort of paper was used to make the dime-store paper kites of the 1960s. I’ve asked around and tried any number of papers, but now I think I’ve come fairly close with a type of paper made in Germany and called–sunuvugun–“kite paper.” For some reason it’s popular with the Waldorf school crowd, though not for making kites. You can get it in 19 1/2″ X 27 1/2″ sheets, albeit only in 100-sheet lots, from A Toy Garden. That’s a little smaller than the Hi-Flier 30″ kite, but it’ll work. As spring gets a little closer, I’ll make one and report back here.
What the Waldorf schools do with kite paper is in fact impressive; this Flickr album scrolls through a good many photos of Waldorf traditional origami stars made with kite paper.
From Bill Higgins comes a link to Low End Mac, a site devoted to older Mac machines, especially pre-OS/X.
Pete Albrecht sends hope that Maurice Lenell may not be out of business, though their suburban Chicago plant will be razed to make way for yet another damned shopping mall.
I have several reasons for opposing contact team sports in schools (as opposed to careful weight training and aerobics). This is another one.
The three things I was afraid of as a six-year-old were robots, mummies, and volcanoes. I’ve made my peace with robots and mummies, but volcanoes still give me the willies, and our Alaskan citizens are watching another one nervously.
In case I don’t remember to mention it tomorrow or Sunday, Puppy Bowl V on Animal Planet kicks off at 3 PM EST Sunday, 2 PM central, 1 PM Mountain. When you get good and tired of watching spoiled-brat millionaires get the crap beat out of them by other spoiled-brat millionaires, the puppies may be a blessed relief. We never miss it anymore.

The New Economics of Cool

Jan 16th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

There was a very funny article by Daniel Akst in the Wall Street Journal this morning, about a very stylish New Yorker who converted his entire family to Macs years ago because, well, they were cool. This is easy to do when you have a good job and you know your co-op will continue to appreciate at the rate of 30% a year forever. However, now that Big Media is reminding us every day that we are being crushed under the worst Depression in world history, even the cool people are buying Windows machines because the cost of cool may far outweigh its benefits.

(By the way, although Dan looks cool–click to his Web site–he is actually a highly insightful writer who could make his reputation by puncturing cool culture as his writer’s mission. Read his stuff. I think he should start by buying a suit and getting a professional publicity photo taken. At least he hasn’t shaved his head, which the majority of cool guys do, especially once they start to go bald.)

There’s nothing wrong with Macs apart from the fact that they cost too much. I have some technical quibbles about the UI–using a one-button mouse was a hideous mistake, founded in Jobs’ condescending view that All Users Are Idiots–but it’s a very solid, well-engineered box, basically a Unix system that has been beaten about the head until it learned some manners. But that’s not why people buy them, and once The New Austerity goes mainstream, either their prices will come down or they will become the next NeXT.

MAKE Magazine regularly runs articles about making furniture out of old cardboard boxes. Odd, though, that I rarely hear anybody say that used computers work just as well as new computers–better, actually, when the new runs Vista and the old runs XP.

And cheap. You want cheap? On eBay right now as I write this, there’s a used 2.8 GHz Dell SX270 with 1 GB of RAM, a keyboard, and a mouse. Starting bid is $89.95, the auction expires in an hour, and there are no bids. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a very good machine, because I have one almost exactly like it in our condo in Des Plaines, and I very happily lay out books on it and process graphics. Add an SX270 Windows install CD (which may cost you $30) and a monitor (which you may already have) and for under $200 you have a machine that is built like a tank and will do anything you need to do. The install CD is BIOS-locked to the model (not the individual machine) and you don’t have to activate it. The only thing it won’t do is be cool.

Interestingly, there are pockets of coolness in the free software world, as I’ve discovered as I’ve kicked into high gear revising my assembly language book to be all-Linux. The cool index of Karsten “Rasterman” Heitzler’s Enlightenment desktop manager is off the charts, and Raster’s been working on it for 12 years now. He himself is one of the coolest geeks I’ve ever met, and he does it without any condescension or venom. (I’ve spoken with him in person on several occasions, though it’s been awhile.) How well it works I won’t know until I try it, but that’s a separate issue. The cool is there. Few people know about it because cool is a proxy for status, and status is a proxy for money. If it doesn’t cost money, and if just anybody can get it, then in our culture it’s almost by definition not cool.

This may change. It may change in weird ways, too. It’s currently cool to live in Manhattan, but once companies move most New York jobs to Iowa, Iowa may have to become cooler. Pockets of uncool places are sometimes cool, like Boulder and Austin, but such cool places are so expensive that they may eventually share New York’s fate. You can buy a three-bedroom bungalow outside of Ogallala, Nebraska for 10% of what a similar house would cost in Santa Cruz, and you’d be closer to the beach than much of Santa Cruz. (It’s a way better beach, too.)

Jobs will eventually follow affordable housing. Are you too cool to live in Nebraska? Heh. We’ll see.

Is Everybody Happy?

Dec 19th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

I just ordered two books: Gross National Happiness by Arthur Brooks, and The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop. The books are part of my long-term research into why we think and act the way we do. I’ll report further next year when I summarize my thoughts so far, but sniffing around online for reactions to Brooks’ book has raised an interesting question: Can we in fact measure happiness?

I don’t always agree with Arthur Brooks, but I admire his willingness to bring up issues that seem calculated to infuriate liberal opinion-makers—and back his opinions up with reasonable research. One of his controversial positions in Gross National Happiness is that happiness appears to correlate with intensity of religious feelings. Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson challenges that thesis in his blog, and whereas it’s a reasonable counterpoint, one of the comments below Wilkinson’s essay hit the whole problem between the eyes: People belonging to deeply conservative religious organizations are pressured, sometimes intensely, to say that they’re happy. (The commenter claims to be a lapsed Evangelical.) This maps with my own experience dealing with the conservative Catholic fringe, and yet the truth is that a lot of these people seem to me to be not only deeply unhappy, but on the thin edge of panic.

Why this should be is a subject I hate to broach at all and can’t even attempt right now, but set it aside for the moment. The real flaw in Brooks’ research may be that asking a person if he or she is happy is not a useful way to measure happiness. I see research summarized online indicating that the people in Nigeria are the happiest people in the world, though more recent research tags the Danes. The summaries understate the obvious: Happiness does not mean the same thing to all people. Worse, there are cultural pressures in a lot of places to fit in and not make a fuss (Japan comes to mind) and heavy pressure in religious and other tribal organizations to claim that the tribe provides everything they need to be happy—leading their adherents to make the statements that are simply expected of them. It’s like the ritual answer to the seminal rhetorical question, “How ya doin’?” People who answer something other than “Great!” don’t really understand the ritual.

It might be more useful to measure happiness by way of things like public civility, rate and tenure of marriage, incidence of alcohol and drug abuse, and so on. If research must be based on questionnaires, it may be possible to approach the matter from the other side, by asking more oblique questions about feelings like satisfaction, pain, sadness, or enthusiasm, or at least things that are not obviously a part of cultural or religious scripts. The truth may be that the whole question is meaningless; after all, what is the objective experience of the color red, or the taste of dry wine? We all experience the world differently, and we interpret that experience for ourselves through the lens of our culture and the social structures that are the most important to us. If we badly want to be part of a sophisticated social culture, we may choke down a crappy bitter Cabernet and praise it to the ceiling even if (to us) it’s (red) swill, because that’s what the cultural leaders and our “initiated” peers expect. This is a very deep well of inquiry, and I will be writing more about it in months to come.

We’ll see what Brooks has to say when the book arrives, but I’m suspicious of the premise, even though I would be happy (as it were) to be proven wrong.