What caught my eye was the surname of the guests. The episode is an interview with brother and sister Claire and Mischa Berlinski, who are promoting two novels they’ve just published contemporaneously. I’ve read a few essays and one book by their father, and judging from the interview, the apples clearly have not fallen far from the tree. These people may very well be Platonically ideal dinner company: well-rounded, well-spoken, spirited, even-handed, and just the most fundamentally interesting people you could hope to know. It doesn’t hurt the interview that these two are clearly a very loving brother and sister who enjoy each other quite a bit and are accustomed to thinking and working together on worthy things.

Mischa’s book is called Fieldwork. It’s about the epic struggle between two powerful enemies of the natural world: missionaries and anthropologists. It is discussed between 8:14 and 15:30 in the podcast. Go listen now, then we’ll talk about it.

I’ll wait.

…

No, for real, listen to it.

…

Okay, welcome back.

Being somewhat familiar with the elder Berlinski, I can’t say I was surprised to find Mischa being sympathetic toward Christian missionaries and turning a bit of a jaundiced eye toward anthropologists as they are normally found in the wild. The Berlinksi father, though a self-described agnostic Jew, has some philosophical commitments which are otherwise strongly correlated with Christianity, most notably metaphysical realism and a comfort with the broad idea of Intelligent Design. Claire and Mischa are quick to point out that they are no evangelicals, and they and their hosts do indulge a near-chuckle at the expense of the evangelical worldview that comports with that of the indigenous animists who provide the setting for the novel. (Although the missionaries may assign a slightly different ontological pedigree to the spirits that torment the tribal people, they believe just as fervently that evil spirits are quite real, and quite able to be defeated by the Gospel. This seemed slightly bemusing to everybody on the podcast, but their bemusement was subtle, brief and really not all that disrespectful.)

Anthropologists, Mischa said, are almost more religious than missionaries. They see a kind of spiritual deliverance in their field work, claiming that you can never truly know yourself until you’ve left your culture of origin and immersed yourself in the life of the Other. Only then can you learn your true identity, learning what belongs uniquely to you and what is what is cultural accident. What struck me about that statement is that I’ve heard very similar things from missionaries whose work has been deeply and incarnationally cross-cultural. Immersion in another culture for years does make indelible changes in a person, and it does reveal some deeply held beliefs to be contingent and culturally conditioned. Of course, an evangelical missionary would stop short of making this a religious experience: the soul is not redeemed by learning to eat weird foods, speak hard languages, and criticize the Bush Doctrine. The soul just gets to know itself a little better.

Still, the podcast is a good listen. Never have I been disappointed by the show, but the most recent installment is particularly delightful. Enjoy.

Upon re-reading the posts I find some of the prose to be a bit overwrought at times, but then I have a tendency to do that when I’m excited. Apologies in advance.

People Seem To Like It: a facetious suggestion to use an online auction system to decide what kind of music to play in church. But hey, if we’re just trying to find out what people want, why not do it right?

Music Doesn’t Matter Much: except it does. This is a brief response to people who would defuse the music discussion debate by calling it unimportant.

Defining Some Terms: the terms “contemporary” and “traditional” are problematic, but we might as well stick with them for now.

Form, Not Content: a foundational argument in the music debate. If the kind of music matters as much as the words being sung, then contemporary worship music starts to look like a pretty bad idea.

The Defense of Contemporary Music: a critical look at a few arguments typically advanced in defense of contemporary worship music.

P.S. If the title of this post seems inflammatory, it’s not mean to be. It’s a play on a tradition in computer science literature.

Researchers at Stanford are onto this:

Now Kwabena Boahen, a neuroengineer at Stanford University, is planning the most ambitious neuromorphic project to date: creating a silicon model of the cortex. The first-generation design will be composed of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons. Groups of neurons can be set to have different electrical properties, mimicking different types of cells in the cortex. Engineers can also program specific connections between the cells to model the architecture in different parts of the cortex.

Substance dualists should be happy about this kind of research for two reasons. First, if it works, it is likely to yield new tools of heretofore unheard-of levels of aweXomeness. For instance, right now Google image search offers up pictures of trees based on the close association of a web image with text that talks about generally arboreal things. With massively scalable brain-like image recognition, maybe we’ll be able to do web-scale searches for pictures of, say, tire swings with foreboding skies in the background. But then physicalists get jazzed about this kind of thing too.

The real payoff for substance dualists is in the utterly faithful simulation of the human brain. That this will be done someday is a certainty. And theories of quantum consciousness notwithstanding, the brain is a machine—an elaborate configuration of matter scrupulously obeying the laws of physics. If substance dualism is true, then the silicon brain should be qualitatively different from the human one. It might be able to associate visual images with one another, find subtle patterns in search spaces, and carry on a spoken conversation with a person, but we would predict that its soulless-ness will in some way be obvious. Kind of like when Dr. Kurnow asked SAL in 2010 how she felt about being powered down: the question made no sense to her. Enfleshed souls tend to be a bit touchier about that one.

I have long thought it a key aspect of the Classical school that we always have our apologetic money on the table. Hence if the brain is the organ of the mind, then as technology allows, let’s build a replica brain and have a talk with it. If it’s indistinguishable from a person, I lose a line of evidence. If, the better and better we get at making silicon brains, the more and more obvious it is that these things are not human, then we need to have a nice, long talk about just how silly it is for me to believe that I have an immaterial component that is essential to my identity.

The metaphysics of the human person notwithstanding, it just wouldn’t fun if they didn’t create some nice, new bioethical dilemmas while they were at it:

Engineers ultimately hope to use the information generated by the silicon cortex in a variety of ways–to build better neural prosthesis, for example. “The real-time aspect of this technology allows us in principle to interface the silicon cortex with the real cortex or brain,” says Gert Cauwenberghs, a neuroengineer at the University of California, San Diego. “There is the promise, at least in the future, to build a prosthesis to replace some lost motor function or sensory function.”

And I’m sure it will stop there. William Gibson, call your office.

h/t Slashdot

It may not be surprising that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women filled only 26.7 percent of computer and mathematical positions in 2006. What’s troubling is that this percentage has been declining for some time. And the descent has been nearly universal across all IT job categories. For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000. At the management level, the imbalance persists. Among computer and IS managers, for example, 27.2 percent were women in 2006. By contrast, women held 66 percent of all social and community service management jobs last year.

An optimist might at least observe that women seem to be better-represented in management ranks than among network and system administrators. However, the data are very spotty, and there are many peer categories to sysadmins that might dilute the outlook. Still, what is “troubling” about the numbers? Whence the assumption that the sexes ought to be equally represented in a given occupation? Can anyone adduce evidence of real oppression keeping women out of IT? I don’t deny that glass ceilings used to exist in full force and are surely present residually in the world today, but the burden is on the author to show that they are to blame in this case, or explain why anyone should care what little girls want to do when they grow up. The article’s strengths notwithstanding, these burdens are not borne.

An obvious explanation for any gender imbalance in any profession is that younger women make career sacrifices in order to raise children. Pinnacle Entertainment CIO Carol Pride comments:

In order to get to the top of the food chain, you have to own something big and ugly — an ERP implementation, for example, or a slot machine implementation at a casino….Often, the first big-and-ugly project coincides with the time one is trying to raise young children. Women often realize, rationally, that children are more important than companies, but if you don’t do the big and ugly, then it ends up hindering you later.

I’d hate to think I’m giving Carol an uncharitable reading, but I hear her saying that women need to be ready to sacrifice their children in favor of their careers. To dispel some of the gender-political confusion that might cloud our judgment, let’s reverse the roles and see how well the statement plays. Now, nobody knocks dads for being away from the children for 40 or 50 hours a week; it’s not just culturally normative, but necessary to keep food on the table. But suppose we were talking about men who have young families and still want to pursue very competitive careers in which 70 or 80 hours a week are needed to get anywhere. Suppose some executive was mentoring these young men, and he told them that sure, their kids might miss them and their wives might wilt under the stress of running the family substantially alone, and they might know what they’re doing is somehow wrong, but if they wuss out now, it will “hinder them later.”

I mean, with hypothetical mentors like this, who needs no-fault divorce laws?

Clearly I am locked into patriarchal, male-as-breadwinner thinking. This article, written for respectable company, can’t be expected to deal with troglodytes like me, can it? Apparently not:

According to a recent joint study by Catalyst, the Families and Work Institute, and the Center for Work and Family at Boston College, 74 percent of women executives have a spouse/partner who is employed full-time. By contrast, 75 percent of male executives have a spouse/partner who stays home full-time — strong evidence that, despite progress in attitudes toward domestic workloads, women still predominantly bear the brunt of striking a balance between career and home.

The paternalism of that paragraph is jarring. The point is well-taken that most women executives are the “second income” in the household, and most male executives are the only income. But to turn this into “strong evidence” that women are bearing the “brunt” of anything requires us to assume that all women want and ought to pursue a career path that leads to executive management. Could the data not as easily tell us that women from wealthy households frequently make the decision to be homemakers? It’s not like these wealthy families couldn’t break loose a few bucks for a maid and an au pair. If these numbers suggest anything, it is that the women most able to decide how to structure their lives, decide in large numbers to stay home and raise families. They need not be scolded for making what is in the final analysis a much freer choice than most are able to make.

And as for a bad attitude toward housework, my wife would need to comment here to acquit me finally of that charge. However, I am confident that in the end I will be found innocent.

Eventually the article drops complaints about strict gender inequities and instead attempts to give an account of why it matters. Here we find a mixed bag of silliness and sobriety:

“Because most companies are based on a male model and have been for many decades, the men don’t get the kinds of business contribution women can give,” [Women in Technology International Carolyn] Leighton says. “They often [institute diversity metrics] just to meet requirement codes.”

But, Leighton adds, the current nature of IT actually calls for what are considered stereotypical female characteristics. No longer an island within the company, IT is integral to other departments and requires employees who communicate well. “Now IT goes across all departments globally,” she says. “And women by nature are collaborative consensus builders.”

It’s too bad Leighton didn’t elaborate on what a “male model” might be. I mean, I saw a picture of my company’s president from when he was in high school, and he honestly looked a lot like Fabio—no, for real, he did—but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she meant.

Given that, imagine my honest relief that strict gender equivalence is not being assumed here. One might construct a species of feminism around the proposition that the classes “male” and “female” are functionally identical as they relate to the institutions of commerce and family, but the author avoids that path. If we’re talking about corporations based on a “male model” which might be improved by the presence of naturally collaborative and consensus-building women, then we are obviously all comfortable with the fact that men and women differ in important ways which might actually matter in the real world. Continuing along these lines is IBM V.P. of SOA and WebSphere strategy Sandy Carter, who says that “Women are good at accepting change and creating change, which is important in the marketplace,” and “The skills that [women] have — being able to juggle things, multitasking — reflect the [business] environment we’re in now.”

And these are valid points. It seems fairly uncontroversial that collaboration, consensus-building, and “multitasking” are typically more natural for women than men. (Take me, for example. The “consensus” I like best is when everybody agrees that my way is the right one.) But let us not overstate our case: saying that women are more natural consensus-builders is a little bit like saying men are more natural sysadmins because they have the upper-body strength needed to lift the occasional server into the rack. No one will deny that men do, in fact, have this physical advantage, but it’s not like women are all so weak that asking them to heft a 1U box 40″ off the ground is going to make them wilt like delicate garden flowers in the sun. The difference is real and important, but somehow each sex learns to develop some aptitudes that come naturally for the other—even outside of a diverse environment like a 50/50 workplace or a family.

Ultimately we can agree that no man or woman should be hindered from making free vocational choices within the scope of the knowledge professions. Far from this modest goal, though, the InfoWorld piece agitates for strictly proportional representation of women in IT. Even if all the resulting collaboration and consensus and multitasking would make IT departments hum, it seems unlikely that it’s actually good for women to set this goal, or even to care much how many of them choose technology professions at all. Let it be enough to present free choices to women and allow them to structure their lives as they see fit.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have a place in my heart for the career choice of homemaker and homeschooler, and I am not shy about extolling the benefits of that path. Nor, more to the point, is my wife. But I would only want a woman to make a free and informed choice of this lifestyle—never a coerced or a manipulated one. If many women choose otherwise, I will not assume they are either enslaved or unfeminine or unconcerned about their families. The reciprocal charity would be most welcomed.

I know a woman who left IT a couple of years ago. (This is of course anecdotal, but not much more so than the comments of the of ten prominent women in IT interviewed in the InfoWorld piece.) She was a Java developer, and is now a homeschooler and stay-at-home mother of three. She was a single mother of one for most of her career, and while her problem wasn’t precisely one of balancing work and motherhood, she has admitted that her heart was just never really in her work. Her desire was simply more for her son than for Enterprise Java. Maybe she could have championed a massive ERP implementation (if massive ERP implementations were not already passé by the time her career would have allowed her the risk), but she never wanted to. Now she stays at home with an infant and a special-needs preschooler and an eleven-year-old. She tells me she loves it. If we want to carp about women leaving IT, why not tell her story too?

P.S. Certain other women technologists might take the trouble to weigh in on this. Am I completely off base here?

Just let me make one request of you: please don’t make a Christmas CD. I know you believe at the bottom of your heart—you just know it to be true—that what some of those dusty old carols need is a hip new treatment by your favorite musician. The real problem, you catch yourself thinking, is that Hark! The Herald Angels Sing lacks syncopation and an awesome clarinet solo. Or you wonder aloud whether what O Little Town of Bethlehem has been waiting for all these years is your deep, lusty vocals and a disco beat in the bridge.

Oh, and a bridge. It never did have much of a bridge, did it?

I urge you not to do it. I know you, and possibly the market with you, are very impressed with your talents. Maybe you sell a lot of music. Maybe, if you’re a Christian musician (a group for whom the Christmas CD temptation must be particularly difficult to withstand), people tell you how significant your Music Ministry is through all of the conversions, re-dedications, and heartfelt moments of authentic worship it fosters. But think for a moment what you’re up against. I really don’t mean to be all Dickensian about this, but Christmas is a pretty big holiday. Do you really think you, even in your most pensive Piano Solo mood, can possibly capture the significance the day holds to most of us?

Forget the theological import of the season. Your chosen musical form is more or less unable to meet the demands asked of it by serious meditation on the doctrine of the incarnation, which is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that even mere family gatherings, decorations, gifts, cookies-like-mom-used-to-make, parties, memories, and ubiquitous good cheer will probably price you out of the market. You are simply bound to sound cheesy.

And whatever you do, please don’t write anything original. If overdriven guitars are bad for Good Christian Men, Rejoice, then whatever ditty you were contemplating about How Much Christmas Means To You is pretty much guaranteed to be worse. Nothing personal.

Are you discouraged yet? Good. But don’t give up hope! Keep on planning your next project, and be sure to make it something to which you can do some justice. There are lots of topics. Just pick one, as long as it’s not Christmas. Maybe how you felt about your last boyfriend or girlfriend. Anything.

Of course there are a few of you who are actually talented enough to pull it off. Some of you actually can shepherd a classic Christmas carol into the contemporary context with true freshness, sensitivity to tradition, and a hint of transcendence, or maybe even write a new song that hits the mark as well as the existing ones have. But then, if you’re one of those people, it never would have occurred to you to take my advice anyway.

This year’s light lager is very similar to the recipe I’ve used in the past, except this year I used White Labs Copenhagen Lager Yeast (at Adeodatus’ suggestion) and clover honey instead of wildflower (because they were out of wildflower):

I elected to do the amber lager again this year, not being overwhelmed with affection for the dunkel I did last winter. This too is derivative of previous works, but with the same yeast change and a touch more Saaz hops than in the past. I’m thinking of dry-hopping it, too, but that is yet to come:

UPDATE (12/28/06): After two full days of inactivity, I bought an extra couple of vials of White Labs German Lager yeast, since the store was out of Copenhagen. It’s been way too long for me to wait any longer. Beer at Home treated me better than right, charging me for only one of the replacements. Way to go, guys!

Three years ago, the last few days of Denver’s winter were marked by about 30″ of snowfall. Businesses closed, kids played, neighbors dug each other out, chili and cocoa were made. But not by me, because I was on vacation in Florida at the time, sweating in 85 degree heat and humidity. Bummer for a guy who loves the snow.

This one I didn’t miss. The storm is of course national news, and it has meant a lot of inconvenience for a lot of people, but for us it was just plain fun. We hunkered down on Wednesday and enjoyed being inside (remember, I work at home, so commuting was not an issue), and today we got up early and spent a few hours shoveling out as a family. The kids proceeded to sled and dig snow caves almost until it was dark. They’re sleeping well right now. I’m about to be.

Kari took pictures, which I’ve uploaded to my Flickr account. (Why am I taking credit for them by putting them in my account, you wonder? Because she told me to. The site she prefers for online photo archiving is more about print-making than photo-sharing, so there you go.)

I know a lot of people were badly put out by this storm, and I bet if I were a retailer I’d be mad, but this really was a good time for us. Life will be mostly back to normal in the morning, but this Christmas will be white indeed. Enjoy the pictures if you’re so inclined.

UPDATE (12/22/06): link to the pictures is fixed now.

UPDATE (12/26/06): I did some clean-up shoveling today to get the patches of ice that had formed in the driveway and to remove a good six inches of snow that had reappeared on the sidewalk. (It always gets re-covered with snow and slush by cars cutting the corner too closely.) There’s still plenty of white on the ground, but the kids’ tunnel had collapsed, and overall the otherworldly fun of last Thursday had quite left the yard and neighborhood. It was sad. Last week the blizzard was all fun and magic, but what about next time? Storms like this don’t happen every year. The next time it snows like this, will my kids even want to play in it? I mean, the nest starts to empty out in six years.

Try shoveling that into the street.

What the hell happened? Where did we go wrong? How was Christianity co-opted by a political party? Why are Christians supporting laws that force others to live by their standards? The answers to these questions are integral to the survival of Christianity.

I bet you’ve never heard this one before: it seems that Conservative Christianity has been co-opted by the Republican party, which has drained it of the pure, unadorned Message of Jesus. No, for real:

His parables and lessons were focused on love and forgiveness, a message of “come as you are, not as you should be.” The bulk of his time was spent preaching about helping the poor and those who are unable to help themselves. At the very least, Christians should be counted on to lend a helping hand to the poor and others in need.

This brings us to the big issues of American Christianity: Abortion and gay marriage. These two highly debatable topics will not be going away anytime soon. Obviously, the discussion centers around whether they are right or wrong, but is the screaming really necessary? After years of witnessing the dark side of religion, Marc and I think not.

So Christians—by which I mean the dorky, untattooed, Republican kind—can’t be counted on to lend a helping hand to the poor. This would come as a surprise to Syracuse University professor of public administration Arthur Brooks, whose recent book argued at length that religious conservatives are in every measure more generous than secular liberals. Perhaps Jay means they can’t be counted on to disburse public funds for the benefit of the poor, which is much closer to the truth. I suppose if they were cool, tattooed, Democrat Christians, this failing would be remedied.

Moving on, surely we can agree that “the screaming” about abortion and gay marriage isn’t necessary. Surely Jay and Marc mean we should engage key aspects of Christian ethical orthodoxy in respectful, rational dialog, rather than the strident garbage that too often infects our discourse. Either that or they mean “Christians should be able to look past their differences and agree to disagree.” Which I take to mean keep abortion legal and enact marriage rights for all, just like you had coolness and tattoos of your own.

It is becoming a tired emergent trope that American Christianity (or Christ-following, or whatever you want to call it) has been wedded to conservative politics, and the answer, rather than dissolve that unholy union, is to get it hitched to liberal American politics. If they would merely say that the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the United States are two separate entities never to be conflated, I would cheer them and their dangerous haircuts and their scary tattoos all day long. Many an American evangelical needs to hear this message. But they don’t stop there. When they say God isn’t a Republican, they really seem to mean that he is, in fact, a Democrat.

And it’s not just disaffected emergent youths. I’ll never forget a sermon I heard by a well-known and deservedly very respected leader in American urban ministry. He was talking about where we could expect to find the locus of truth, and ticking off various institutions that could be expected to turn up empty. “You won’t find it in the Republican Party!” he thundered at one point. “You won’t find it in the Dem—in the liberal Democratic party!”

Uh-huh. I guess that tells me where to look. Bakker and Brown seem to be pointing me there too. Thanks for disabusing me of my reactionary and unthoughtful politics, boys!

Check out Bakker’s church if you’re interested. The decade in which my son enters his teens will see television ministry by a man named Bakker, just like his old man.

I’ll leave you with this: RevolutionNYC.com uses table-based layout again, just like the Christ Follower people. Plus the DOCTYPE is jacked, so it renders in quirks mode. Hipness has a price, guys. The piper will invoice you, guaranteed.

The recipe is Beer At Home’s IPA kit. It should ferment down to about 1.010 in another week. As long as there are no delays in bottling, it will be marginally ready to drink in time for New Year’s.

If you were concerned, the pie really turned out alright, even being gluten-free as it was. Presentation left something to be desired—I really need to work on the crust, gluten or no—but it has gone over well.

UPDATE (12/19/06): I bottled it this evening. It’s good an hoppy, so if it doesn’t mellow during conditioning, it will be a winner.

The topic turned to the American system of public education. They expressed some surprise at the lack of stratification in our system: everybody is labeled a winner no matter what, and distinctions between high achievers and low achievers are considered embarrassing and improper to admit in polite company. You need outsiders to point this out to you? you’re wondering. Isn’t that a rather obvious pathology of American society? Well, no and yes, respectively. But point being that it’s painfully obvious to other parts of the world that in this department we’re not quite right in the head.

Then they went on to talk about their school experience in the 1980s. They said something about a “Reformed school” (meaning a parochial school of the Reformed theological tradition, not a Reform school), which led me to believe they meant a private school.

“No,” the man of the house explained. “In The Netherlands, there are all kinds of different schools, all paid for by tax dollars. Some are religious, some are not.”

“Ah,” I said, assuming he meant a school run by the state church. “We could never do that here because of the First Amendment.”

“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “It has nothing to do with freedom of religion.” He went on to explain that all you need to start a Dutch school is a certain number of students willing to attend the new institution, and you’ll get public funding for it. In his brief account, there was no single authority or central bureaucracy for administering education. Sure, the government imposes minimum requirements on what schools must do, but other than that there is substantial diversity. He was talking about this the way one would talk about having free elections or a publicly funded police force: like it was just the sensible way to organize this particular part of a free society.

This in a country where the left and center-left combined just won 62.4% of the popular vote and 96 of 150 seats in Parliament. And mind you, when I advocate vouchers here, I’m a Friedmanite zealot, probably a theocrat, and maybe even a racist.

So you’ll pardon me if I’m feeling just a bit off today.