Springtime In Colorado

We met family today at Dillon Lake off I-70. The clouds were spectacular, but the rain held off for most of the day. Here are three photos:






Now if we could just get a political scene as pretty as the mountains...

You Send It

I'm very pleased with YouSendIt.com. For no charge you can send files up to 100 megabytes in size to as many as 100 other people. You can pay a fee for larger files, more people, or added security. It's easy to use -- you just need to set up an account and establish a password -- and the service will send an e-mail straight to recipients telling them the file is available. (They have seven days to download it, again unless you pay extra for more time.) Today I sent a zipped folder of photos as well as a short video. Very cool.

Tales of Beedle the Bard

I've written a review of J. K. Rowling's book of fairy tales, Tales of Beedle the Bard Expands Rowling's Moral Themes.

My least favorite story is "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot," because it mixes themes and develops them poorly. My favorite is "The Fountain of Fair Fortune." I find the other three tales to have interesting things to say about psychology, politics, and dealing with death.

Read the entire review.

Goode Family

We just watched the first episode of The Goode Family at ABC.com. It is about an environmentally-conscious, sensitive vegan family (think Boulder). The parents adopted a child from Africa to fight racism and accidentally got a white kid from South Africa. The dog is vegan, too -- and, coincidentally, many of the neighborhood animals have gone missing.



This is biting social criticism from Mike Judge (of King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-head fame). And, like all of Judge's work, it has something of a soft heart, despite its sometimes-painful satire.

This is not "ha, ha funny" television. It's so satirically critical of environmentalism that I'm surprised a major network picked it up. Good for ABC. I'm not sure it can last with its hard edge (especially among an American audience, which loves the dumbed down, Americanized version of The Office). Still, very interesting television.

Unemployment Whiners

UPI reports:

Some people recently laid-off from religious institutions in Virginia said they were shocked [just shocked!] to find the state does not offer them unemployment benefits.

Carol Bronson, who was laid off from her secretarial job at Temple Emanuel synagogue in Virginia Beach, said she was told her unemployment claim was denied because the tax exemptions for religious organizations under Virginia law include an exemption from paying unemployment taxes, The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot reported Monday.

Steven G. Vegh of the Virginian-Pilot adds that "under Virginia law, tax exemptions for religious organizations include freedom from paying unemployment taxes. The groups still must pay Social Security and withholding taxes."

You don't have to pay the tax, so you don't get the benefits. Sounds pretty fair to me. In fact, it sounds like such a good idea that I think it should be expanded. All businesses should be able to decide whether to pay the unemployment tax. If I could decide not to pay the Social Security tax in exchange for not getting any Social Security benefits, I'd sign up in a second.

Sennheiser Microphones

In the case of remote microphones, it is true that you get what you pay for. I purchased a lower-end Audio Technica mic that worked, but it offered steady background static, frequent bursts of interference, and practically no controls. I returned it.

Then I purchased a much more expensive G2 series mic system from Sennheiser (from B&H, by the way), and my preliminary tests came back with crystal clear sound. The only problem I've had is that, out of the box, it's a little hot for my camcorder. But I can adjust the volume, the frequency, and various other settings fairly easily. I haven't quite decided on the optimal settings for my equipment, but I've come close.

I'm a bargain shopper. Sometimes, though, the best bargains cost the most money.

Origins Of Life?

While no doubt the matter will continue to be debated, British scientists seem to have made some progress regarding the origins of life. Via Fox, the Agence France-Presse reports on "a paper published in the British journal Nature by University of Manchester chemists:"

The team, led by Professor John Sutherland, venture that an RNA-like synthesis took place through a series of chemical reactions and an important intermediate substance.

Their lab model uses starting materials and environmental conditions that are believed to have been around in early Earth and are also used in the standard "RNA first" scenario.

Their theory starts with a simple sugar called glycolaldehyde, which reacts with cyanmide (a compound of cyanide and ammonia) and phosphate to produce an intermediate compound called 2-aminooxazole.

Gentle warming from the Sun and cooling at night help purify the 2-aminooxazole, turning it into a plentiful precursor which contributes the sugar and base portions of the new ribonucleotide molecule.

The presence of phosphate and ultraviolet light from the Sun complete the synthesis.

God's Gap may have just shrunk a bit more. Of course, even if scientists succeed in creating new life in a laboratory setting, even that will not prevent (the relatively sophisticated) creationists from imagining the hand of God at work in the origins and evolution of life.

Trimming Songs

Memo to rock bands: don't put annoying filler in your songs. Thankfully, now I can simply cut such nonsense out with my audio editing software (mostly Amadeus, though I have to use other stuff to get around irritating "protection" encoding. I hasten to note that I buy all my music and alter the encoding only of songs I have purchased for my personal use).

I almost didn't buy the new Depeche Mode album because of the bizarre and off-putting (and long) introduction to the first song, which is otherwise great. With a judicious snip, the song is now a minute, twenty-three seconds shorter -- and much better.

I love U2's "Wanderer," sung by Johnny Cash -- except that they recorded these horrible clanging noises at the end. Now I can enjoy the song without rushing to fast-forward through the completely unnecessary noise.

I also got a song from Ghostland Observatory that includes this grating buzzing sequence about three-fourths of the way through. Now the song is about a fourth shorter -- and I can listen to it.

Listen, rock bands: none of you is so great that you can just put annoying noise in your songs and expect us to listen. Knock it off. You're not being avant garde, you're not being edgy, you're not being clever. You're being annoying. And there are too many good bands in the world for listeners to put up with your annoying crap. That goes for you, too, U2. At least now I can fight back and do your editing work for you.

There is a broader point here: with the digitization of music, listeners can now adjust their play lists, not just to include the songs they want, but to include the sections of songs they want. In general, the digital revolution puts consumers in charge of their media in remarkable new ways.

Coconut Milk Smoothie

Wow. Want a calorie booster in your morning smoothie? Try coconut milk.

My nephew is allergic to milk, so I suggested to my sister that she put coconut milk in his smoothies. Today I tried it with great results. We blended a can of Thai Kitchen coconut milk (which Target sells for $1.44), a banana, some pineapple-orange juice, and some yogurt (which I assume my sister would hold). We ended up with four cups of rich, creamy smoothie that tastes fantastic. The coconut flavor is mild and yummy.

The can of coconut milk contains 70 grams of fat, 50 of which are saturated. So this definitely follows the "fat is your friend" line of dietary views. (I know that some people especially like coconut fat in terms of healthy eating, but I don't know the science behind such claims.) You could definitely use less coconut per serving if you wanted to reduce the calorie and fat load.

I do think it's true that eating fat makes you feel full; I've mostly finished my two cups of smoothie and I feel absolutely stuffed, even though earlier I was thinking of making eggs.

Read also about chicken mole using coconut milk.

Castle Renewed! Now Revive Serenity

I'm thrilled for Nathan Fillion (a.k.a. "Cap'n Tight Pants." Not that I noticed, or anything, but I hear tell). Castle, the hip "Murder He Wrote" for ABC, has been picked up for a second season (via Wikipedia).

Jennifer and I just finished watching the final (tenth) episode of the first (replacement) season. The last episode illustrates why I like Fillion. He's funny, yes. But he also has that hard, tense edge when he needs it. I also quite like Stana Katic, who portrays the cop with whom Fillion's Rick Castle partners to solve crimes.

I like the show because Katic's character is driven to find justice, yet the crimes often are shown to be what real crimes are: messy. Sometimes the perpetrators are a little sympathetic, and sometimes the victims weren't so nice.

Okay, so now that Fillion is a big damn movie star (though he already had a fantastic TV show and two outstanding feature films to his credit, plus some other fun work), now that Summer Glau is a freakin' terminator, now that Alan Tudyk is back working with Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, now that Whedon is obviously in his prime, it seems high time to get the crew together and finish making the Serenity movies.

I'll review a few rules here for making the last two movies a success.

1. Film them both at once to save costs.

2. Don't title them "Serenity," which sounds like retired people fishing in a pond or something. Call it "Mal's War" or something bad-ass. ("Serenity" can be in the subtitle.)

3. Run real ads, not those strange "cult following" ads that accompanied the first movie.

4. This is optional, but I like it. Whedon killed off two characters in the first film. Okay, I get it. But you can bring back these characters, say by having Tudyk appear in Zoe's dreams (say, to tell her she's pregnant), and having Book appear in a video recording addressed to Mal. Or something like that.

I sincerely believe that the next two Serenity films would make money. (Hell, I think you could re-release the first film and make more money off that.) I think there were some problems with the first film in terms of packaging and marketing that held back its sales, but that could be fixed for the next two films. Yes, scheduling conflicts and all that. But this is great art. And great art deserves commitment and funding. I believe the money will follow.

Give us Serenity parts II and III.

Essays on Atlas

Amazon finally shipped my copy of Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. (Get the paperback, unless you're willing to pay an exorbitant price for the hardback.) There's a lot of good material in there, and I've just started to read through it. I enjoyed Jeff Britting's chapter on adapting the novel for screen, based largely on Rand's own advice.

The best essay I've read so far is Darryl Wright's chapter on Rand's development of ethics between her two big novels. In brief, she went from seeing independence as the primary virtue to crowning rationality. The shift places reality -- one's relationship with reality -- at the forefront. And I hadn't directly considered the fact that independence is a virtue possible only in relation to other people; without reference to others one can be neither independent (from others) or dependent (on others). That's a big reason why rationality is primary: one must choose to think whether alone or in society.

Wright also reviews Rand's development of the idea that morality arises only within the context of the choice to live. Good stuff.

Taken

In Taken, a film released to DVD this week starring Liam Neeson, two teenage girls go to Paris without any mature supervision or hard-headed sense. Predictably, they fall in with a smooth-talking predator. And they are taken.

Fortunately, the father of one of the girls (Neeson) worked many years for the government to prevent "bad things from happening." So he heads to Paris to find his daughter -- and take care of her abductors.

The father shows single-minded, coolly passionate competence in tracking his daughter. He demonstrates that there is no necessary conflict between reason and emotional commitment: he uses his mind to direct his physical prowess in recovering his daughter, his supreme value.

I really liked this movie.

Assuming Jennifer and I have kids as planned, I plan to buy Taken and other films with good sensible messages of self-protection. It really can be a dangerous world out there if you don't pay attention to what you're doing and take sensible precautions. I navigated a few dangerous situations by sheer luck. I want to help my kids do better.

Face: Best Boulder Band

Congratulations to Face, an all-vocal recently named the best band in Boulder. See Vince Darcangelo's love letter to Face in the Daily Camera.

My wife and I took my mom to see Face at Nissis on Monday. Good show. The group has sold out that venue something like 80 times in a row. (Note: an owner of Nissis also owns my wife's company.)

I wrote about Face twice in 2005. I understand the group likes my following line:

[S]aying that Face is an "a cappella group" is sort of like saying Jimi Hendrix is a "guitar player." It's true, but it doesn't really get the point across. Face rocks.

On Monday, I was especially impressed with Mark Megibow's new "drum" solo: he was singing through his own beats. (I joked that I'd be impressed when he can also sing harmony with himself.) He must have the best-developed mouth and throat muscles in all of Colorado.

You can listen to Face's music on the group's webpage.

If you want to read a heart-wrenching mother's day story, see Pamela White's article for Boulder Weekly, "2 men, 2 women and a baby." Here's the summary. Forest Kelly is another member of Face. His wife suffered from cancer, so, unable to have children herself, she had some eggs of hers frozen. Then Megibow's wife decided to carry her friends' baby to term. Happy Mother's Day.

Return 'Buy Black'

You've got to be kidding me. A "buy black" program -- as in, buy only from African-American owned stores -- is "becoming a nationwide movement."

This should get exact same reception as a "buy white" campaign would get. Paging Dr. King.

Apple Service

I love Apple. I love my iMac computer, yes, but I also love Apple as a company. previously I wrote about our new computer. I have since processed an HD video file two hours in length; the computer worked fine (though it takes time to process files that big). The source file in iMovie is about 100 gigabytes.

Recently I needed some information about iMovie versus Final Cut Express, the mid-grade software. A guy named Eliot at the Flatirons store spent a few minutes answering my questions about the software. (I learned that iMovie is a lot more powerful than I had imagined.) As we also briefly discussed, when you buy an Apple product, you're not just buying the stuff, you're buying the service, which is worth a lot.

Just decades ago, the technology I have sitting on my desktop was not available at any price. Just years ago, it cost several times the value of my house. The technology revolution has allowed the economy to move forward despite all the federal interventionist shenanigans. Just imagine where we might go in a free economy.

Cookware

Jennifer and I bought a teflon pan a year or two ago at Target. It worked well, but recently I noticed that it had started to show chipping and scratching (even though we use only silicone spatulas). That teflon is wearing off somewhere, either in the wash or in the cooking, and I'm not sure I want to be eating it. Plus, everybody we've talked with says teflon wears out eventually with any pan, and we didn't want to keep buying new pans every year or two.



So we bought a stainless steel All-Clad fourteen inch deep-dish pan. It was pricy, but it performed well for an onion-beef-tomato dish I made. Unfortunately, it did not perform well as a griddle.

So we first bought an All-Clad double burner cast-iron griddle. But I didn't like it for two reasons. It didn't fit our stove's burners well, and my egg immediately ran into the "grease" gutter. So we returned it. I bought two Calphalon 10.5 inch cast-iron griddles at Target, and they work spectacularly. I made the best pancakes of my life in them. (Plus, the two round griddles cost less than the single double-burner one.)

So we now have cookware that works well and that should last the rest of our lives and beyond.

Trekking Boldly

The new Star Trek movie overall is fantastic. If you're a Start Trek fan, go see it. If you like sci-fi, action, good acting, good production, or J. J. Abrams, go see it.

I think there's a reason why Wolverine and Star Trek each earned a huge box office: people still want to live with heroes. Sometimes in our world it's easy to forget that there are heroes out there, that we too can act heroically. People are hungry for that. Thankfully, Star Trek delivers.

Here's the basic minimally-spoily story: a Romulan (Nero, portrayed by Eric Bana) nurses an irrational rage against the elder Spock, who pursues Nero into the past. Nero arrives at a time just before James T. Kirk is born and sticks around long enough to tangle with Kirk as a young man.

I don't like everything about Trek. Indeed, while I enjoyed the movie immensely while watching it, afterward I sulked about the plot inconsistencies and contrivances. Then I decided that, despite the film's weaknesses, it is a heroic story finely made.

That said, I remain frustrated with the film for similar reasons that I've become frustrated with other projects from Abrams. I really enjoyed Alias, but less so after the plot became nearly incomprehensibly complex, and not at all when the Giant Magical Energy Ball appeared. I never have finished watching the series. (While Abrams did not write Trek, he worked with writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman on Alias and other projects.) I loved Lost right until the characters had to repeatedly punch a code into some bizarre machine for some unknown reason. The stories are just too convoluted to be enjoyable.

Likewise, while I enjoyed the action of the Transformers film (which didn't involve Abrams but which Orci and Kurzman wrote), I found the basic story exceedingly tedious and stupid.

Trek is a lot better, but, notably, Spock the Elder has to voice-over substantial background to make the story remotely comprehensible.

From here on out this review includes spoilers!

Star Trek, like Alias, features a Giant Magical Sci-Fi Energy Globule. This is a device, a stand-in for real writing. It's almost as bad as the Giant Magical Energy Ribbon from Generations. It's the sort of nonsense takes the "sci" out of sci-fi.

Here's another example of the occasional idiocy of Star Trek. At one point, Spock the Younger kicks Kirk off the ship; Kirk ends up on a nearby planet, in a random place though somewhat near a Federation outpost. After being chased by not one but two Man-Eating Snow Monsters (because, you know, all ice planets are filled with Man-Eating Snow Monsters), Kirk falls down an embankment and runs into a cave. Low and behold! It is precisely the cave where Spock the Elder has taken up residence after he was sent to the planet by Nero! What amazing luck. But wait, there's more! Kirk meets not only Spock the Elder but Scotty, who just so happens to have been assigned to the ice-planet outpost! It's so coincidental you wouldn't believe it if it were fiction.

Once Leonard Nimoy signed on as Spock the Elder, time travel was a plot necessity (given the undesirability of mere flashbacks). As a rule I hate time travel in stories just because it makes everything so messy and disconnected. I suppose it is poetic, then, that the three greatest Trek films -- The Voyage Home, First Contact, and the new one -- feature time travel as a crucial element of plot.

The writers use time travel to make the new Trek not just an "origins" film, but a complete reboot. Because Nero appears just before Kirk's birth, he literally changes the entire timeline from that point on. The Star Trek universe is literally different from the historical universe of the rest of the franchise. (I believe that Next Generations went off into a parallel universe for a while.)

What's interesting about the film -- and I actually like this -- is that the writers don't "fix" the timeline in the end. This has devastating consequences for an entire world. This adds an element of realism to the movie. The heroes win, but they can't blow on it and make everything better in the end. The bad guy extracts a horrible price, the way bad guys so often do in the real world. While the heroes do not always have to lose something precious to drive a compelling story, in this case it's integral to the story, though it took me considerable time to overcome the anxiety about disrupting the history of the rest of the franchise. (I finally had to ask myself, "Would I like this movie if I knew nothing else about Star Trek?")

After it all, then, I can forgive the eyebrow-raising plot holes, because the story's amazing heroism rings true.

John Lewis Reflects on Tea Parties

While John Lewis was in town to discuss the Athenian constitution, he also shared a few thoughts about the Tea Parties. Listen also to Dr. Lewis's outstanding Tea Party speech from April 15.

John Lewis on Constitutions, Athens and Now

John Lewis gave a talk today in Arvada called "Greek Lessons for Today's Crisis of Government." Here he briefly summarizes his talk.

Values of Harry Potter Update

Kirk Barbera's review of my book Values of Harry Potter was republished on his Cedrac blog.

Barbera writes that Values of Harry Potter shows "the morality of the Potter series does not promote sacrificing life on earth, but instead supports the notion of living life fully."

He concludes, "Most importantly the [Harry Potter] books can teach us how to attain the values best suited to each and every one of our lives. Ari Armstrong shows us that, through Harry, we can learn life isn't just what is; but what can and ought to be."

Note that Amazon is behind in its ordering, but the book should become available there again within a few days. Or order Values of Harry Potter directly with free shipping on all U.S. orders (outside Colorado).

ReCaptcha: Stop Spam, Digitize Books

Some readers may have noticed that I've changed my method of listing my e-mail address on my web pages. I now use ReCaptcha.

ReCaptcha hides a portion of the e-mail, and to access the entire e-mail, you must type in two words. This helps stop spammers, obviously.

But -- and this is the really clever part -- it also helps to digitize books. So we're getting some extra value for our time spent blocking spam.

ReCaptcha is a service of Carnegie Mellon University. Here's the relevant description:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.

This is very clever. Two problems, one elegant solution. Nicely done.

Two Doses of Nonsense Do Not Make for Reason

David Limbaugh's comment today illustrates perfectly what's wrong with today's left-right divide:

Lately, MSNBC's Chris Matthews has been on a childish tear, taunting Republicans to admit their belief in the biblical account of the Creation. Someone ought to ask this paragon of smug self-satisfaction why, if he's so brilliant, he unquestioningly echoes the demagogic hyperbole of global warming fanatics hellbent on destroying the economic system responsible for producing unprecedented prosperity in the advanced industrialized world. Oh, yes, it's fashionable to denounce capitalism these days, but the historical record is clear.

So because Matthews is a nutty leftist, that somehow legitimizes the nutty right? What we need is reason and capitalism.

Out-Of-Wedlock Births Approach 40 Percent

Ken Blackwell alerted me to the latest updates on out-of-wedlock births. The upshot is that the figure approaches 40 percent. And that is a serious problem.

Emile Yoffe of Slate points out that, from 1960 to today, the percent of births to unwed mothers has risen from 5 to 40.

Of course, the mere numbers do not tell the whole story. Some responsible older women choose to have children by themselves. I know several Colorado couples who are "common law" married but who may not show up in the marriage statistics. Some couples, while not technically married, are fully committed to their relationship. (While Yoffe notes that many unmarried couples with children split up, the fact remains that many married couples do the same thing, though at a somewhat lower rate.)

Gay couples typically are legally forbidden from getting married, though they may raise a child in a deeply committed romantic relationship. While many women used to suffer in horrible "shotgun" marriages with abusive spouses, today they are more likely to go it alone -- and they're better off for it. More women (as CNN points out) have a child before getting married, rather than rush a marriage due to pregnancy.

Nevertheless, the dramatic rise in out-of-wedlock births points to deep cultural problems, even if not all out-of-wedlock births are a cause for alarm.

Out-of-wedlock births are largely a phenomenon of lower-class America, where decades of welfare have encouraged promiscuity and dependence on federal handouts. Yoffe points out, "Only 4 percent of college graduates have children out of wedlock."

The National Vital Statistics Report for Births: Final Data for 2006 (January 7, 2009) offers the updates. Here's the relevant passage:

The birth rate for unmarried women increased 7 percent between 2005 and 2006, reaching 50.6 births per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15–44 years. The rate has jumped 16 percent since 2002, the most recent low. The number of nonmarital births in 2006, 1,641,946, was almost 8 percent higher than in 2005 and 20 percent more than in 2002. The proportion of all births to unmarried women reached 38.5 percent of all U.S. births in 2006, up from 36.9 percent in 2005. All of these measures were at record levels for the United States in 2006.

Turn to Table 18 of the report (page 54) for some truly frightening numbers. The "percent of births to unmarried women" for "all ages" breaks down as follows:

All Races: 38.5
White: 33.3
Black: 70.2
Hispanic: 49.9

The welfare state and the social pathologies it engenders are devastating much of black America. And any political leader who refuses to look squarely at the problem is a traitor to the black community.

Gay Marriage Advances

Rarely do I favor the fence with my seat, but I have wavered between gay marriage and domestic partnership. I think all romantic couples should be treated equally under the law, but I haven't been persuaded that domestic partnership fails this test.

But ultimately gay marriage may trump. As the Associated Press reports, Maine became the fifth state to allow gay marriage, and New Hampshire may become the sixth.

How can Colorado balk if a gay couple, married in another state, moves here? Will our legal system say, "You're not really married here?" Article IV of the Constitution states, "Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state."

Moreover, does Colorado want to tell successful gay couples that they're not welcome here? While Christian conservatives may decline to answer or may forthrightly say they're happy to push gay couples away, for the rest of us, gay couples shop the same as everyone else, rent or buy houses, perform useful jobs, and generally enhance the economy and culture. It'll be interesting to see how all this works out over the coming years.

Frost/Nixon, How About You

Jennifer and I recently watched a couple of movies that we quite liked. Frost/Nixon is about a historic interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon, after Nixon had resigned. The film sets up the dramatic tension nicely. However, there's really nobody to love in the film, so it is more of interest for its history (so check out the clips from the real interview in the special features).

In How About You, a young woman (played by Hayley Attwell) goes to work at her sister's struggling retirement home. The strongest part of the movie is the friendship that Attwell's character forms with a terminally ill resident, played by Joan O'Hara.

Unfortunately, much of the movie involves the young lady and four other residents who, at first, make her life difficult. There are some nice moments as these other friendships develop, but these other four aren't especially sympathetic. But O'Hara's limited time on screen, as well as the other solid performances, make the movie worth viewing.

On TV (via Hulu), it was great to see Alan Tudyk team up again with Joss Whedon on Dollhouse. I don't want to say more about what he's up to on the show. This show is very well written, but, as I've mentioned to several friends, there's no central hero to root for, so it's intriguing but not nearly as compelling as Firefly (Whedon's previous show). The performances, though, are top-notch.

Posts On Religion

For the time being, I'll split posts on religion between this blog and (where relevant) FreeColorado.com. (As noted, I'm switching the focus of this blog to personal interests, including movie and music reviews, food, health, products, and Colorado living.) At some point in the future I may blog about religion elsewhere, either solo or as part of a group.

Anagram Finder

I was very impressed that J. K. Rowling could turn "I am Lord Voldemort" into "Tom Marvolo Riddle." I was also charmed by Neil Peart's lyrics for "Anagram for Mongo."

Now there's an anagram generator for the lazy (though it won't do names like "Marvolo"), the Internet Anagram Server (or "I, Rearrangement Servant").

Diana Hsieh found a fun anagram for her name: "ha ha die sin."

But I prefer mine: "roaring smart."

Wine and Life Span

In case you missed it, I'm changing the direction of this blog to cover personal interests, including health. (Check back for an announcement regarding where I'll write about religious matters.)

Forbes.com published the article, "Drink a Little Wine, Live a Little Longer." Unfortunately, while I plan to continue drinking red wine and other alcoholic beverages in moderation, I am unpersuaded by the study in question that drinking red wine causes longer life spans.

The article summarizes the findings:

Men who regularly drank up to a half a glass of wine each day boosted their life expectancy by five years...

All long-term light alcohol drinking boosted life expectancy by about 2.5 years in comparison to abstainers.

Drinking more than 0.7 ounces a day extended life expectancy by nearly two years compared with nondrinkers.

Wine drinkers who averaged just 0.7 ounces a day had a 2.5 year-longer life expectancy at age 50 compared to those who drank beer or spirits. And their life expectancy was nearly five years longer than nondrinkers.

Drinking moderately was linked with lower death risk, and drinking wine was strongly linked with a lower risk of dying from heart disease, stroke or other causes.

I wonder where the 0.7 ounce cut-off came from. Presumably, people who drank more than that included those who drank a lot more than that; at a certain point the potential health benefits of drinking alcohol are offset by drinking too much alcohol.

The Forbes article includes the following voice of skepticism:

"Once again, it shows that people who drink [moderately] do a lot better than people who don't in terms of survival," [Dr. Arthur Klatsky, a long-time investigator on the health benefits of alcohol] said.

However, as with other research, Klatsky wondered if it's the pattern of drinking or something related to the wine drinking -- such as wine drinkers being more likely to exercise or eat a healthy diet -- that is the real link.

In the new Dutch study, he says, alcohol from spirits contributes the most to the total alcohol intake, more than wine or beer.

"It's a little hard to think that a little bit of wine is what is responsible for extending their life," Klatsky said.

Klatsky's concern is more potent to the degree that some people start drinking red wine expressly for its reputed health benefits; presumably, such people are more generally concerned about their health and so would live longer whether or not they drank red wine.

But I have a different concern. People who drink wine with their meals tend to have more sociable and slower meals. People who enjoy themselves more and socialize more tend to live longer. I wonder to what degree red wine is a symptom, rather than a cause, of a robust lifestyle.

To be fully convincing, a case for the health benefits of wine would have to show a physiological relationship between the phytochemicals or alcohol in red wine to a human body's functioning. I will not be surprised if such a link is definitively discovered. The study in question, though, doesn't seem to sort out the potential causes well enough, and the study's abstract does not alleviate that concern.

Change In Blog Direction

I'm dramatically changing the direction of this blog. No longer will it be devoted to matters of religion (or "reason versus faith," as my banner has put it), but to my personal interests. I will continue to blog about religious matters less frequently elsewhere (to be announced). I'll update the banner this evening.

I started the AriArmstrong.com blog back in October of 2007. At that point, I had in mind to write about pretty much everything, from politics to religion to personal interests. Then, early last year, I declared the blog "will be dedicated to issues of religion and culture." Why the change now?

First, I want to have someplace to write about movies, music, recipes, health, and other personal interests. I've been putting some material like that at FreeColorado.com, but it doesn't really fit there. (That page is devoted to Colorado politics.) I realize that my readership here will be small, but I'm okay with that (though I hope that an occasional blog earns broader interest). It makes the most sense to me to use the domain with my own name to cover my personal interests. This page will be free wheeling and, I hope, fun.

Second, I've grown tired of writing about religious issues as they appear in the daily headlines. The patterns have emerged. I've written about each major theme many times. I plan to spend considerable time delving into the fundamentals of religion -- the results of which will become available some months in the future -- but I want to spend less time with the pop aspects of religion. These are the major themes I've covered over the past months:

a) Islamist external terror and internal barbarism.
b) The Christian push to ban all abortion.
c) The Christian antipathy toward homosexuals.
d) The separation of church and state.
e) Claims that America is a "Christian nation."
f) Christian support for political controls of social and economic matters.
g) Claims of miracles and supernatural intervention.
h) Creationism.
i) Religious oddities.

Of that list, I most want to keep up with the separation of church and state, as I will do elsewhere. (Where such matters relate to Colorado politics, I'll probably write the material for FreeColorado.com.)

If you want to learn where I'll continue to write about religion, please check back here later today or tomorrow, when I hope to have everything sorted out.

With the change in mind, my next post will be about long-term wine consumption.