Life is Good

Life is good, and then it's bad,

  and then it's good again.

But if this life were all we had,

  I ask, would it have been

worth all the effort, all the trouble,

  only to have it turn to rubble?

But if this life is not the end,

  but just the shadow of

the tragicomical Event

  upon the stage above,

I ask, would it not be worthwhile

  if that event were Love?

One of my Japan poems, composed shortly before the Great Kobe Earthquake in January of 1995.

"Had an app for that..."

Looks like Apple, in a bid to stop some very marginal illegal (or grey) app-copying, may be considering removing our ability to re-download apps we've purchased over the air. iPhone 3.0 is still in beta, of course, and the reports of those who are running it vary (not surprisingly), but some users are reporting that if you try to re-download an app that you've purchase (as I've had to when my daughter accidentally deletes an app by pressing too long on an icon on the home screen and then taps the "X" that appears) some versions of the 3.0 beta won't let you re-download over the air without paying - instead they require you to re-download it via iTunes and sync your device, an inconvenient process which I avoid as much as possible! My two bits, for whatever they're worth:

1. If you've purchased an app, it's yours - you shouldn't have to re-purchase it for any reason!
2. I really, really hope Apple finds another way to resolve this - or at the very least enables syncing with iTunes over WiFi. That wouldn't eliminate the annoying sync process, but at least it would avoid the unnecessary hassle of having to hunt down a physical cable and leave your phone tethered to your computer for an extended period of time.

All that being said, this could all be cited as a classic example of our society's "instant entitlement" attitude - when one considers how difficult re-installing software on a desktop can be (grr... DRM!), having to physically sync one's phone with iTunes is not really that much of a hassle that it's worth complaining about. Still, when a technological convenience exists and then is taken away from us, it shouldn't be surprising if we see it as an unnecessary and inconsiderate step backwards...

I Want to Wave!

Google Wave, just unveiled today (well, yesterday, actually, now) at Google I/O, Google's developer's conference, has the potential to revolutionize the internet, just as e-mail transformed the nascent internet itself from a tool for remotely controlling and communicating with distant computers into a medium for transferring information between distant computer users. If this is done right (as it appears Google is doing, open-sourcing their software and turning Wave itself into an open protocol), we could be witnessing the rise of Web 3.0!

I want to Wave!

Official Google Blog: Supporting equality???

Official Google Blog: Supporting equality

This is when I am ashamed to be such a big fan of Google. Same-sex marriage is not a "fundamental right" - it is a redefinition of the concept of marriage that is at odds with the understanding of marriage held by every major religious tradition and most historical cultures. It has nothing to do with hiring or search or equality: being denied the right to call their same-sex union a "marriage" will not make Google's employees significantly less efficient; Google's stance on this issue seriously compromises the neutrality that I would expect a company committed to internet search would be concerned to maintain; and, as a secular company, Google has no special expertise to offer on the important moral and cultural question of whether or not allowing same-sex unions to be called "marriages" is a question of "equality" or merely a matter of personal preference.

Please, Google, concentrate on what you do best: providing quick, unbiased search results in an internet-friendly fashion. And if you are really committed to equality and to not being evil (both good things!), please allow for the possibility that there might be some truth in the religious traditions and philosophical beliefs that have lead so many to object to such a radical redefinition of marriage.

This Is Not a Frame - and Is

I have been meaning, for some time now, to publish this essay of mine, based on Foucault's This Is Not a Pipe, and Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe:

Enclosed in the framing essay is an earlier essay about Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics [Google Book link]. The poem that begins the enclosed essay was written while I was working as a missionary/English-teacher in Shukugawa, Japan, and the essay as a whole deals with epistomological and linguistic issues that I had begun wrestling with in my final year of high-school and which ultimately led me to convert to Orthodox Christianity.

Anyhow, without further ado, here is a link to a scanned PDF of the essay in question, "This Is Not a Frame - and Is". Enjoy!

How times have NOT changed!

I've been reading George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie to my boys as a bedtime story whenever we are at St. John's House in Vancouver for the night, and tonight I ran across this passage. MacDonald's 19th Century fairy-tale description of a society in decay sounds eerily familiar...

At last river and road took a sudden turn, and lo! a great rock in the river, which dividing flowed around it, and on the top of the rock the city, with lofty walls and towers and battlements, and above the city the palace of the king, built like a strong castle. But the fortifications had long been neglected, for the whole country was now under one king, and all men said there was no more need for weapons or walls. No man pretended to love his neighbour, but every one said he knew that peace and quiet behaviour was the best thing for himself, and that, he said, was quite as useful, and a great deal more reasonable. The city was prosperous and rich, and if everybody was not comfortable, everybody else said he ought to be.

When Curdie got up opposite the mighty rock, which sparkled all over with crystals, he found a narrow bridge, defended by gates and portcullis and towers with loopholes. But the gates stood wide open, and were dropping from their great hinges; the portcullis was eaten away with rust, and clung to the grooves evidently immovable; while the loopholed towers had neither floor nor roof, and their tops were fast filling up their interiors. Curdie thought it a pity, if only for their old story, that they should be thus neglected. But everybody in the city regarded these signs of decay as the best proof of the prosperity of the place. Commerce and self-interest, they said, had got the better of violence, and the troubles of the past were whelmed in the riches that flowed in at their open gates.

Indeed, there was one sect of philosophers in it which taught that it would be better to forget all the past history of the city, were it not that its former imperfections taught its present inhabitants how superior they and their times were, and enabled them to glory over their ancestors. There were even certain quacks in the city who advertised pills for enabling people to think well of themselves, and some few bought of them, but most laughed, and said, with evident truth, that they did not require them. Indeed, the general theme of discourse when they met was, how much wiser they were than their fathers.

Good Quote

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein