As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality. It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences – all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, the knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It’s my way of making the world a better place.
Albert Maysles, documentarian, http://www.mayslesfilms.com/companypages/albertmaysles/albertmaysles.htm
05.28.08
Can’t … Stop … Watching
Yay! Richard Dawkins rappin’. Friggin’ hilarious. Hello to Barefoot Bum. (Yes, it takes me a while to catch up with my video-watching, sometimes.)
05.23.08
Pac-Man Movie
Ars Technica has the announcement. I’ll definitely see it.
Still anticipating The Power of the Dark Crystal, and still peeved at the failed appearance of the live action The Last Unicorn. 
In the meantime, the trailer for Hellboy II looks absolutely awesome. I’ll definitely see that when it releases.
Travel and Laptops
Renowned computer security expert Bruce Schneier has an article up at the Guardian (thanks Slashdot) about the problems of taking your laptop with you through customs.
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.
But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it’s a fact. So how do you protect yourself?
I hadn’t heard about the pornography bit before, so I did a little Googling and it looks like this mainly means pedophilic materials. Though, since it’s much easier to automatically determine whether there’s pornography of any sort on a hard drive, than it is to distinguish between “regular” and “child-flavored” porn, I think it probably means that if they find substantial porn of any sort on your hard drive, you’ll be delayed and your laptop’s disk contents will be copied, or the laptop itself retained.
Anyway, the crux of the matter isn’t that I should be relieved that I will never have to worry about custom officials finding child pornography on a laptop as I travel abroad (since I don’t ever plan to possess any), but rather the fact that they do the scan at all, and even retain the “right” to keep my laptop or copy its contents.
The vast majority of my laptop contents are publicly available material. What’s not basic software packages downloadable from packages.ubuntu.com, is probably work-in-progress on things that I code on, like Wget. But I also have things like private encryption keys on there, some of which aren’t passphrase-protected. Someone with one of those would be able to get root access to my private servers on the Net. It’s not as if I host child porn there, either, but one common thread in government snooping is that they often use one pretext as an excuse for other purposes. If the government deemed me worth investigating (for whatever reasons), they wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of the private keys on some old copy of my hard drive to do a lot more snooping, than they have a right to.
Schneier recommends destroying the browser cache and cookies, using secure deletion software to delete anything sensitive that you can, and using encrypted partitions or USB drives for the things you can’t do without (curiously, steganography wasn’t mentioned: I’d have thought this an ideal application).
It seems to me, though, far simpler to swap your normal laptop hard-drive with a “travel suitable” one, one that just has your necessities installed over a fresh new disk. Of course, this still doesn’t solve the problem of having sensitive-but-indespensible materials, for which you’d still want encrypted (and probably stealthed) partitions or USB drives.
While we’re on the subject of laptops and travel, note too that there are restrictions on packing lithium batteries and devices that contain them (in checked luggage: “there is generally no restriction on the number of spare batteries allowed in carry-on baggage“). (I saw this too on Slashdot first.)
05.08.08
More to Teach My Kids
There are a couple additional things I want my kids to know, and despite the fact that they’ve been going around in my mind for some time, they apparently were nowhere to be found when I actually set out to write a list.
Compassion. Should be top of the list, of course. Obviously, this is one of those things that they hopefully pick up from conversations with mum an’ dad, and day-to-day knowledge-passing at the home. Bolstering it with good stories and maxims, such as those from the Book of Virtues or the Bible (hey, just coz it’s been way over-hyped don’t mean it doesn’t have some good stuff in it).
But it needs to be more than that. The reason there’s a problem today with so many people with so little compassion, is that the most exposure a lot of people get to real, genuine need, is bedtime stories and news coverage. People get into the practice of hearing about and watching compassion, and then stand around looking stupid when the time comes compassion is required of them.
Compassion is an action, so if I expect my kids to learn compassion, I should ensure that they have regular opportunities to put it into practice. Local soup kitchens, and programs to address homelessness (rather than just shelter its victims in their status quo), such as EHC LifeBuilders, are a good place to start.
Healthy Decision-Making. Not talking about avoiding fast food restaurants (clearly, I’m not the one to teach them that, except by negative example). Talking mainly about sexual health, and substance abuse. Mistakes in these areas can have extreme consequences; I’m not willing to leave this up to “parent-and-child” chats. The best way to make healthy choices is to be exposed to the consequences of unhealthy choices. In a short while, information (as opposed to rhetoric) and powerful movie-stories are probably a good start; but when they’re older, there’s no substitute for seeing for themselves. What it’s like to see a life utterly destroyed by narcotics. How having a child in your teenage years brings an abrupt limit to a formerly wide array of choices and opportunities, and what it’s really like to come to terms with an acquired venereal disease.
Kids’ Book on Critical Thinking
OMG, this is so awesome! Atheist and skeptic blogger The Barefoot Bum points out a nice list of logical fallacies on ChristianLogic.com. No sooner do I visit the page than I see a notice mentioning that this list is actually taken from a book they’ve published, entitled The Fallacy Detective (amazon), which is a textbook on logic for children.
Lessons on logic and critical thinking aimed at educating children is exactly what I’ve been wanting to find for use with my own kids, for a while now. I didn’t actually have much hope of finding such a thing, so was planning on drumming up some lessons of my own (like I’d find time for that). This looks like just the sort of thing that I need.
The book uses straightforward explanations and comic strips (including Dilbert and Peanuts) to illustrate various logical fallacies in common use, and follows up with exercises in which the child must decide whether statements are fallacious, and if so, which fallacies are being used. Judging from the sample chapter, the book’s text is also set attractively, using Adobe’s Caslon Pro font, and using software that knows how to make good use of fonts (using appropriate “fi” ligatures and the like, so the hook of the f isn’t mashed together with the dot of the i). It’s not an example of great typography (for instance, paragraph indentation following a block quote or other figure isn’t really desirable), but at least it’s not a glaring example of bad typography, as the vast majority of modern printed books tend to be.
Of course, some concerns are raised by the fact that the book’s page explicitly states, We wrote this book to meet the needs of Christian parents who want a do-able text for introducing logic and critical thinking to their children. Especially considering that one of my primary motivations for wanting to teach critical thinking to my children is to avoid the various fallacies and pseudo-logic that tend to be used in defense of Evangelical Christian faith. According to one of the reviews on Amazon, the book does apparently put a fairly Christ-oriented spin on things, saying such things as, Logic is the science of thinking the way God thinks - the way Jesus taught us to think. Another review states, This book is loaded with Christian overtones, Bible verses, and other religious dogma. This being the basic foundation upon which the book is built, I suppose it’s also likely that it will misapply a few examples to support the authors’ preexisting biases.
Still, beggars can’t be choosers, and anyway the fact that we expose our children to such video material as Superbook, The Flying House, Veggie Tales and even Davey and Golliath proves that we don’t exactly go out of our way to prevent exposing our kids to religious dogma. And, while it presents something of a nuisance for me to have to possibly go in and “adjust” the way some of the material is presented, yet at the same time I welcome a book on spotting logical fallacies that’s aimed at the Christian homeschool community, a thing that is clearly in dire need, especially in the realms of Scientific Creationism and various Christian-culture political propoganda, such as is used to dismiss global warming concerns (seen “Jesus Camp”?).
Provided the core material itself is basically accurate and informative—and I see little reason to believe that it isn’t—it should be perfect for adapting for our own needs. Even if it turns out to be of little use, I’m dying of curiosity to see what’s in it, so either way, I’m running to drop it into my Amazon cart, for my next batch of purchases.
05.05.08
Not Especially Common
Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade pretty much summed up my feeling of the current state of Wii games:
If your Wii is not used exclusively for bowling when your parents are over, you probably get excited when even the most rudimentary sort of game is released. This is because Wii games that even reach the level of “adequate” are not especially common. Speaking from our own experience, we’re hungry for almost any opportunity to make use of the machine, and each time it happens we’re reminded how much we enjoy using it.
(This is the introductory paragraph to his review of a new game that they deemed enjoyable, namely Steven Spielberg’s Boom Blox.)
05.04.08
Things I Plan To Teach My Kids
As my daughter Joy, currently 8, is growing in understanding as well as curiosity, and as I myself am becoming increasingly aware of the deficiencies in the education that any child in America will receive, whether in a private or a public school, it’s becoming quite clear to me that I should begin to look to supplementing her education, with things that she is unlikely to hear elsewhere, but must know.
The Bible. An atheist teaching the Bible to his children? What on earth!
As much as I’d be happy for our society to be rid of all superstition and myth, the fact is that the Bible and Christianity are an intrinsic part of American culture (though it is waning); she should at least be able to get references to Noah’s Ark, Adam & Eve, etc. Besides that, I think the person most at-risk of falling prey to Evangelical persuasion, is the one who has no preexisting knowledge of the Bible; and given that it’s a virtual certainty that she will encounter attempts at persuasion by Evangelicals, it’s wise to arm her with knowledge.
This past Christmas, some readers may be surprised to discover that I purchased DVDs of Superbook and The Flying House at Amazon for my kids for Christmas. These are Christian Japanese animations from the early 1980s, promoting an interest in the Bible and biblical stories among children. Both series (by the same creators) feature a girl, a boy, a robot, and a professor, and traveling through time to experience (grossly simplified) biblical events. I bought them as much for my wife and I, who’d grown up on them and were feeling the twinge of nostalgia when we purchased them. But I had little fear that brief exposure to a Christian children’s TV series would undo our efforts to promote critical thinking in our children.
Indeed, no worry was warranted, as Superbook actually wound up being a small tool for critical thinking about the Bible, rather than a source of indoctrination. I was gratified to discover that among the stories covered in the first Superbook DVD, is the story of God telling Abraham to kill his son Isaac. How wonderful, when my children then turn to me with the “WTF?” look on their faces, that I am not compelled to explain that God was merely testing Abraham’s absolute obedience to Him, and that Abraham did the right thing by choosing to obey God and murder his son; I can simply shrug my shoulders, return a bit of the “WTF?” look right back at ‘em, and tell them why the Bible (as opposed to I) thinks Abraham’s response was just super.
No atheist or anti-Christian indoctrination needed, here. The only difference necessary for installing a healthy skepticism of the Bible in my children, in contrast to the daily Bible readings I was offered as a child, is that I need offer no defense on God’s behalf, to explain away His righteously horrific acts. “Daddy, why did God tell Israel to kill all the children and babies in the city, too (or, in some cases, keep the young virgin women only, and haul ‘em away)?” Shrug and give the “WTF?” look. “Daddy, why is humankind being punished for a sin our ancestors committed?” Shrug-and-wtf. “Daddy, why is it justice, rather than blind vengeance, for an innocent person to be given the death sentence, rather than the actual murderer?” Shrug and… you get the picture.
Glory be, and “thank God” for the freedom to not be compelled to pretend things make some strange sort of sense, when in fact they don’t make any at all.
Intelligent Design vs Evolution. Believe it or not, I’m all for teaching Intelligent Design as an alternative viewpoint to Evolution (provided it’s done objectively). Because, despite the fact that it doesn’t even begin to qualify as science, and spends virtually no time at all attempting (and far less succeeding) at actually building a case for Intelligent Design (choosing instead to attempt to tear down Evolution, after which they’d still have to build a case for Intelligent Design), it’s an annoyingly pervasive belief in society, that my children will have to encounter/deal with, and suppressing false, insistent information isn’t nearly so effective as education about it. Besides, nothing demonstrates how ridiculous the arguments from the anti-evolution crowd are, like putting them up next to the mountain of solid evidence for evolution.
(Of course, the people who are vehemently arguing that ID be taught as an alternative “scientific theory” to evolution, have no intention of objectively presenting the arguments from both camps, if history is any indication: instead, they’ll present the arguments for ID (that is, rhetoric), and the arguments they pretend are what evolutionists present, just as they’ve always done. I’m not in favor of that.)
Critical Thinking. Something that was (naturally) quite lacking in my own upbringing, and is critically important to evaluating the truth of all claims, whether they’re made by the Bible, religious institutions, politicians, news media, or history teachers. This is actually, of course, my first priority, but I felt the other two would be more sensationalist interesting placed first. 
Among the tools I would like my children to have under their belt, is to be able to detect strawman arguments (as I hinted just above), by simply going and verifying that the claims being argued against, are in fact claims that are being made (and not just ones that have been either set up by the opposition for the purpose of being knocked down, or possibly grossly oversimplified versions of real claims, or actual but decades-outdated claims that no one makes any more). That alone certainly would have saved me a lot of anti-science BS when I was a kid.
Another extremely useful skill, is knowing how to properly handle “statistics” and “studies”, given that such a very large number of claims rest on these, and are built upon them in such a way as to demonstrate a severely poor understanding of how to use them. Checking everything from the reliability of the techniques used to collect the data, to how the presentation of the data is manipulated to sound more significant than it actually is, to deriving a particular conclusion when alternative explanations have not been considered. Understanding the difference between correlation and causality is an especially important and frequently-neglected tool.
History. When we take a day off to celebrate Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, but remain mum on his documented and vicious abuse of the natives to America; when we condemn Cuba for its totalitarian Communist regime, but neglect to mention the role our own despotic presence played, suppressing and squelching any and all power that the elected Cuban president, or autonomy that the nation, possessed; when we gloss over the facts of modern history as it’s being made, by pretending that WMDs was actually a viable reason for invading Iraq, or that it had something to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or that (most importantly) we didn’t completely botch nearly every possible aspect of the war military action; that’s when it’s clear that my child is not going to learn everything she ought to know from government-funded (or private, parent-pandering) academic institutions.
I never liked History/Social Sciences as a kid; I always found it excessively boring. Perhaps because most history texts are scrubbed clean of any of the controversial bits (and therefore, of most of anything that’s interesting). But now, as I’m an adult, and I continually discover the wide disparity between common knowledge and the truth (at least, as apparent by the actual available documentation) about our role throughout history, and indeed our role in the present-day world, I can’t help but find out more about the truth, as I can find it. And naturally, I want my kids to know the real truth (such as is available) as well.
(Such disparities have ever been my downfall: as a fundamentalist Christian, I got into the Harry Potter series of books precisely because there was an obvious disparity between the truth, and the misrepresentations that had become so very widespread in Evangelical Christian circles.)