From the Book of Pots

A moment of spirituality and humor, courtesy of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

"Listen again. One Evening at the Close
Of Ramazan, ere the better Moon arose,
In that old Potter's Shop I stood alone
With the clay Population round in Rows.

And, strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot
Some could articulate, while others not:
And suddenly one more impatient cried---
"Who *is* the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?"

Then said another---"Surely not in vain
"My Substance from the common Earth was ta'en,
"That He who subtly wrought me into Shape
"Should stamp me back to common Earth again."

Another said---"Why, ne'er a peevish Boy,
"Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;
"Shall He that *made* the Vessel in pure Love
"And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy?"

None answer'd this; but after Silence spake
A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
"They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
"What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"

Said one---"Folk of a surly Tapster tell
"And daub his Visage with the Smoke of Hell;
"They talk of some strict Testing of us---Pish!
"He's a Good Fellow, and 't will all be well."

Then said another with a long-drawn Sigh,
"My Clay with long oblivion is gone dry:
"But, fill me with the old familiar Juice,
"Methinks I might recover by-and-bye!"

You're read some of the more familiar verses from this poem, e.g.

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
...
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter---and the Bird is on the Wing.
...
"Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse---and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness---
And Wilderness is Paradise enow."

...and to those, I hope you enjoy adding the Book of Pots!

Avataring Sites

I needed to make some quick avatars for a presentation: a mom, dad, son and daughter.

A quick google gave me 12 Sites To Create Cartoon Characters of Yourself which was pretty useful, since it not only listed a dozen resources but gave me a quick idea of what each produced. I tried two:

Joystiq Mii

First I tried Joystiq Mii characters and in a short time made Wii-style avatars. I couldn't figure out how to save them but no worries: Windows 7's "Snipping" tool worked just fine. The results were quick and fun; not terribly detailed but o.k. if you want cartoony. I did run into a problem with gender and age differentiation; since there was only one body type I needed to use facial features. Putting eyelashes and long hair on the females, and a mustache on the daddy was an adequate tho not satisfying solution. In retrospect I might've used different lip styles too, since cartooning usually gives females fuller lips.

For age differentiation I tinkered with giving the children bigger eyes and smaller noses. Because you can move the features, growing or shrinking them, you can have a very large number of faces. I tried to give each child at least one feature directly from either parent. I would've liked more features, e.g. ears, body types, but for a quick cartoony avatar, I was happy.

http://www.joystiq.com/media/2006/10/mii.swf

Yahoo Avatars

I wanted a more realistics, "sexier" look, so next I when to

Yahoo Avatars. This definitely gave a more realistic (although still cartooned) look. One nice feature is that it saved your 10 favorite avatars; I still used the snip to save the avatar to my harddrive but it looked like I could keep up to 10 works-in-progress for tinkering. But a complication arose when I started playing with gender.

Gender differentiation was straightforward: you pick your gender and it gives you a female body type, and face/hair/clothing/accessory choices. However, switching gender was a problem: when you changed gender you lost all your favorites. It appears that yahoo's avatars are intended to be used for your login and not for other purposes. You might consider having a separate login for each gender (...or hey Yahoo! think about gender switching sometime!)

Age differentiation was also an issue. Yahoo avatars had a lot fewer face choices, since you can't move the features around as with the Wii above. To differentiate the dad from the son, I gave the former the face with a five-o-clock shadow, but I couldn't find something similar for facially differentiating mom and daughter. Instead, I had to do that with choice of costume, giving mom some definitely hotter outfits and the daughter garb that deemphasized body shape.

It would have been nice to be able to play with body proportions, for example giving the children relatively larger heads, as a way of suggesting age.

Others

Since I'd met my goal, I stopped checking out avatar-building sites (but I'd like to get back to Simpsonize Me!, South Park Studio, and the interesting-looking Meez). None of these utilities are perfect, but for the price, what-the-heck!

I-1068: Kitchen Table Reasons to Decriminalize Marijuana

I don't smoke, but jailing those who do is the stupidest policy I have ever heard of. That's why I not only support I-1068, Washington State's Marijuana Deciminalization Initiative, but am collecting signatures to put it on the ballot.

You should too.

The arguments are well-known and well-worn. You've probably sat at your kitchen table and gone over them with family and friends:

• Marijuana is less harmful than either tobacco or alcohol.
• If we want to jail somebody, let's put Big Tobacco's CEOs in jail for the hundreds of thousands they kill every year in the normal course of business.
• The only people who profit from criminalizing weed are the drug cartels who, like their rum-running predecessors during Alcohol Prohibition, are making a killing, both literally and figuratively.
• Weed makes some people stupid, but they were probably stupid to begin with; lots of other people it doesn't affect at all and there's a whole lotta people for whom it does as much good as my daily cuppa coffee.
• While we may salute the sincerity and sacrifice of the Drug Enforcement Community in being Crusaders Against Evil, we must never forget that smiting the harmless and the innocent in the name of the Law only promotes more evil. It's sad and tragic that when you remove one ton or a hundred tons of the stuff from circulation, all you are accomplishing is to jack up the price of the stuff that remains ... making it even more valuable to the criminals. Retired police chief Norm Stamper is right.

And so on and so on. At this point, I don't think anyone who can be pursuaded by rational argument can oppose I-1068 so it's time now for We The People to make the law as our State Constitution provides.

I have my copy of the petition on a clipboard on the kitchen table. Anyone who comes into the kitchen gets asked to sign. Signing doesn't mean you support the inititiave; it just means you want there to be a vote on it, which may win or lose. When I leave the house, the clipboard goes with me in case I meet someone (heck if the LaRouchies can besiege the Post Office, I guess I have the duty to provide a sane alternative. Maybe I'll ask them to sign!) As soon as I fill it up, or in any event by the end of the month, I'm sending it in, having done that "civic action" thing we all heard about in school. It turns out that collecting signatures is also a fun way to make a little conversation. People will tell you the darndest stories!

Why don't you try collecting signatures too? Learn more at http://sensiblewashington.org/

How To Compile Your List of How To's!

You probably have many postings of useful hints right on your blog. Think about it; after a couple of years of blogging, if you have written only one how-to a month, haven't you accumulated a lot of useful stuff? But it can be even more useful if you compile them into an easily accessible "How-To" list. 

Fortunately, this is easy to do: simply tag each post you want to put on your list with the tag "how to", and then post a link to your how-to list!

Here's mine: http://rewinn.blogspot.com/search/label/how%20to

If you're not sure how to generate the query, look at the bottom of one of your blog posts that you've put a tag on. When you click on the tag, you get a page of all your posts with that tag (... maybe multiple pages, but that doesn't matter.) Now go get the URL from the top of your browser, then copy and paste. You're done!

Different sites may call tags by different things; for example, in blogspot, they call tags "labels". It doesn't matter; the technique is the same whatever there terminology: you add a little metadata to the relevant posts, then link to a query for that metadata. Does that make more sense ;-)

I was inspired to post this by Inspiration Alley's invitation to a "Learn Your Lesson" Blog Party:

" You are invited to a blog party with a difference. Why yes, of course there will be tea and cake (what's a party without either of those after all?). There may even be lashings of ginger beer and perhaps something with a touch of sparkle too... Who knows what the party will bring?

One thing we do know however is that you'll be taking away quite a goodie bag. Yes my little chickadees every visitor, every player and every participant will be given some wonderful gifts - for this is a special sharing party. No posh frocks required, for you will be getting most messy, seriously sticky and terribly tangled. Just bring yourself and your gift... your lesson.... your tip.... your tutorial.....

We thought it would be terribly good fun to roll our sleeves up and learn something new. We'd love you all to share a lesson with us - perhaps you might have a photoshop trick you can explain? Maybe you know how to transfer images successfully? How do you glue paper without leaving bubbles? Do you have a receipe that no longer needs to remain a secret? Can you tell us how to make clay beads without cracks? To bleach a photograph or make something furry and felty? You may even just like to list your favourite tutorial sites. Anything goes, just bring your special gift to the party by way of a link to your own blog post and take away a goodie bag of lessons to try out for yourself.

All you need to do is pop along to our party room here at the Avenue on the weekend of May 1st & 2nd. Leave a comment with a link to your post and visit all our other party guests...."

OK, you gotta love their attitude, don't ya?

And thanks to my bloggy friend Reduce Footprints for telling me about this - she's hosting the party too!

Debugging the House

This week's Change the World Wednesday challenge strikes home:

"This week remove, or begin to phase out, antibacterial products from your home (specifically those products containing Triclosan). Why? Antibacterial products contribute to new strains of antibiotic-resistant "super-bugs". They are toxic chemicals which also pollute waterways and affect the environment. So this week ... get rid of them."

Antibacterial products are a good way to show how evolution works. We introduce into the bacteria's environment a substance that kills them; those few bacteria that in the natural course of variation tend to be resistent flourish in the new environment.

This was strictly an academic exercise to me until last year when I got an entry-level superbug myself. When I got what I thought was a minor eye irritation, I treated it with what would usually work: hot wet compresses, and taking it easy for a bit. This usually clears up any such problem, but not this time: the area around the eye got swollen and even I couldn't deny that it wasn't going to get better.

A trip to the doctor confirmed I had some kinda infection. They suspected MRSA (which subsequent testing confirmed) and gave me some pills that must've tasted as bad to the MRSA as they did to me, because it cleared the thing up within a few days. Since we have pretty good health care coverage, the whole thing cost me only a couple hundred dollars; there's a charge for a doctor's visit and a charge for a followup visit and a charge for lab tests and a charge for the medication. I never got a bill up front so I could make a rational decision about paying for stuff; the "free market" argument on health care is complete hooey ... but that's another story.

Before the medication kicked in, there was an additional therapeutic measure:  "expressing" the contents of the swelling. This was a gooey and unpleasant process which involved a medical professional wearing gloves and eye protection. It was sufficiently unpleasant from the perspective of sensation alone to persuade me that I didn't want to do this again. Query: what if the antibiotic hadn't worked? How long would I have had to "express" the swelling around my eye before my body's natural defenses won out? What if the superbug defeated those defenses? I don't want to know and I hope you never find out, but clearly we should feel very stupid for evolving these superbugs just to make cleaning a little bit easier.

Anyway, we are almost done moving to our new house and we plan on staying here a loooooooooong time, so we want it to be the healthiest house possible. That means systematically getting rid of anything in it that might help get us sick, or in other ways harm our environment. Getting rid of antibacterials makes sense; for most purposes, plain old soap-and-water works fine, and of course there's always alcohol. The bacteria does not exist that can swim in vodka!

A Book Potlach

Seattle-area friends are invited to my Book Potlach this Saturday, from 1pm until we're done. You can help by coming and taking as many as you want. Seriously!

We're moving, and my collection of over 1,000 used books needs serious culling. I'll be doing technical writing full time so selling books online is out.

I have packed my last book for shipment (see photo), which was Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time". Now I need you to haul away the rest.

We briefly considered having a yard sale, but why bother? It's more fun to have a conspicuous display of generosity and community, a.k.a. potlach. Come join the fun!

Shower Power: Why You Should Share!

In honor of Earth Day: I have always laughed at the idea of sharing showers with my partner - c'mon, haven't you snickered too? - but once we started, it made so much sense that, more than half a decade later, I can attest:

• It's Good For The Planet: You save a lot of water because you can soap up while your partner rinses off, and vice versa.
• It's Good For Your Wallet: Saving water saves money. 'Nuf said!
• It's Good For Your Relationship: There are so many ways that showering together every day is good for you together! First and most important, it's easy stupid fun. You don't need to buy anything or go anywhere; you just do it. But it's is also structured down time, a time to chat about nothing in particular; and if you're not in the mood you don't have to talk much because when there's water pounding on your head, just saying, "How'd you sleep last night?" sounds profound. If conversation flags, you can always ask about the new soap, scrub, wash, rinse or conditioner that your wife has picked up. Whatever you talk about, you simply cannot fight when you're soaking wet and depending on the other person to maintain your balance, but you can be reminded as to why you don't really want to fight. You can also check each other for changes in the moles on your back and do other health-related things. Most of all, you are practicing the habit of admiring each other for a couple of minutes each day, and that's gotta be good!

It may be awkward at first practicing how to maneuver at such close quarters in a slippery-wet environment but just take it slow and you'll soon be as agile as teenagers on prom night!

Or as clumsy. Remember, practice safe showering!

---

This post is in response to last week's "Change The World Wednesday" challenge

"This week, cut the number of showers you take in half. If you take a shower daily, try taking one every other day instead. Whatever the number of showers you take in a given week, cut it in half. Warning ... accepting this challenge may negatively affect any social functions or gatherings ... but will save water. :)"

While I can't cut back to a semi-daily shower schedule due to my level of physical activity, sharing showers effectively halves the number we take at home or travelling.

And ... just talking about the idea still makes me laugh!

Let's Give Earth A Hand!

Happy Earth Day!
Remember, we get only one - so don't screw it up!

Taking the Hand of God Over the Book

There is a form of idolatry which consists of worshiping the text of the Bible.

I have seen this idolatry in several internet discussions of Evolution and the Bible. It is really quite remarkable; the Bible Idolators express fear that if their personal and very literal interpretations of the text is not factual in the way they choose to understand it, then something awful will happen: God will cease to exist, morality will dissolve, and life will have no meaning. Or something even worse.
It would be funny if it were not sad.

There is a sin called "Giving Scandal" that we were warned against in the Seminary. Basically, if you persuade people that you have some special knowledge about holiness or goodness, and then lead them into error, those people may decide that everything you have said is wrong and abandon a perfectly reasonable faith because of your bad actions. In my observation, Bible idolators are prone to giving scandal because no reasonable person can accept Genesis as being historically or scientifically accurate, but some people insist that it must be taken so.

Folks, let us be reasonable!

The Hand of God is most Evident in His Creation. Holy Books may be inspired by God but they are written down by Men, copyed by Men, translated by Men and preached to you by Men. Even with the best will in the world, error creeps in. This is patently obvious in the stories of Genesis but there are other obvious problems, as in the contradictions in the Christmas story or as to the fate of Judas. Pointing this out enrages Bible Idolators, who have spent a thousand years coming up with ever more strained interpretations of the text in order to avoid the obvious: these are stories, to be minded for wisdom, not histories or books of science.

In contrast, consider the Laws of the Universe. These are the Direct Works of the Hand of God.

Now, I'm not entirely clear as to what that "Hand" may be (...quite obviously, this is a metaphor ...) and I don't especially need to know what that Hand may be. It suffices to know that we exist, therefore it exists, and there is no real need to go further as to proof. We have more important issues, such as morality, ethics, and finding some dinner.

When it comes to questions of history and of science, we can have no better guide than the Hand of God: nature itself. God has set up an immense Puzzle that we call the Universe, and one of our tasks is to figure it out. God gave us brains to figure it out with, even though it seems very probable that the task will take a very long time.

If given the choice between truths derived from reading the works of the direct hand of God, or reading things derived from reading a book inspired by God but written by man, the former is clearly closer to the Source, and therefore more reliable.

Some religious organizations don't like this thought. Tough nuts! Organizations are built by men, and prone to the corruption of men (...and of women too. Let's give equal time for corruption ... ;-) It's understandable that organizations would prefer we rely upon them for knowledge but let us not mistake them for God.

The crux of the issue is this: You must decide, when there is a conflict between Science and the Bible, which one of these choices is more likely:

• That God has strewn His Creation with massive evidence that it is ancient (14 Billion Years Old or more) and massive evidence that He created Humankind by evolution, and yet this evidence is false ... which means God is a Trickster; or
• That our Human understanding of the truths espoused in sacred texts recorded by Man, copied by Man, translated by Man ... is in error.

The proud answer is to worship the Book and accuse God of being a Trickster; the humble answer is to let all that be, and just take the Hand of God