Matt wrote up a really good article on the hostility in public discourse between theists and atheists, calling special attention to the “new atheists” such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. His premise is that one can and should engage the other side respectfully and without the use of straw men and ad hominem attacks, recognizing that brilliant people exist on both sides of the philosophical divide and that we should have the humility to be ready to learn from them.

Thanks for the good food for thought, Matt. I appreciate your clarity of thought, your respectfulness and humility.

Sorry for the dearth of recent posts. Life has been awfully demanding of late, leaving little room for writing. To make up for it in some small way, here are two items for your consideration:

• Matt’s new weblog, Not A Pipe. He’s thinking lots about faith and science and how they do or do not relate, and as a physicist, has some excellent insights. Good stuff. (Long time readers may remember Matt from the Baylor Sing 2007 post.)
• Here’s a photo of me modeling the most excellent gift that Jason Young gave me for Christmas this year. It may become our uniform for future mad science experiments:

  

Minor Tweaks, one of my favorite people-I’ve-never-met weblogs, runs a regular feature called “Weekend To Do List: Post-Portem”. Believing fervently that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m adopting the practice here. Enjoy!

• Take wife to Fredericksburg for anniversary getaway. Marvel at, contribute to, economy fueled entirely by souvenirs.
• Try Mad Dog hot sauce on a cracker. Realize belatedly that 600,000 scoville units is 90x hotter than Tabasco. Sweat and moan.
• Watch “The Holiday”. Wonder why we didn’t get famous neighbors when we did a home exchange in England.
• Find dog by side of road. Adopt against better judgement.
• Accidentally set Dance Dance Revolution machine to “ultra-hard”. Flail gamely to the amusement and consternation of Chuck E. Cheese visitors. (“Hide your eyes, children!”) Thank the heavens wife doesn’t know how to use YouTube.
• Install ceiling fan acquired 9 months ago.

Back when I was a young geek, I spent endless hours at a TRS-80, and later an Apple ][e, entering BASIC games from books, tweaking them to better understand how they worked, and eventually creating my own. This was a great way to learn computers and to bring the joy of creation to the process of learning how they worked.

I’ve been looking for a while for a way to replicate this for my own kids. They certainly won’t have the patience to sit and type in endless lines of BASIC code, nor should they have to. Our computers are far to capable and powerful for anybody to have to suffer through that sort of thing any more. But how can one learn the sort of logical thinking necessary for writing software without necessarily having to deal with all that fussy syntax and unrewarding rote copying?

MIT has an excellent answer to these questions in the form of Scratch, a visual programming environment cum social web site. The free download makes it easy for people to create multimedia projects, games, interactive art pieces, and the like, and then to post and share them for other people to see. The development environment looks like this:

The key innovation here is the visual language; it allows programmers to create pretty complicated logic in a very intuitive, visually obvious way. Liam and Abigail both picked it up very rapidly, and with a bit of coaching for the trickier bits, Liam had knocked together a very passable maze game within an hour or so. Better yet, because Scratch includes a website as in integral part of the system, he was able to upload his new game and get comments from other people using the system immediately. And here it is:

You can try his game out right here. If you have a young one you’d like to get some programming experience, or you’re just looking for a fun and easy prototyping tool, I heartily recommend Scratch. Thanks, MIT!

The Oregon Convention Center is a super-cool place. Its most obvious feature from the outside, and indeed anywhere around downtown, is two jutting glass spires that claw at the Portland sky. The interior is spacious, nicely appointed, and features a giant Foucault Pendulum, apparently there to remind you that the world is still out there and turning. Additionally, the facility has taken strides to be one of the premiere sustainable conference centers in the country, with an emphasis on recycling all the waste the conference visitors generate, capturing and filtering rainwater through gardens before returning it to the Columbia river, and use of natural light and energy efficient materials.

Wednesday morning I met up with Seth in person for the first time outside of the hotel, where we tromped on over to the conference center with Mary, my coworker from the University who also came out for the conference. It was great fun to finally get to spend time with someone who I have known for seven years now, but never met face-to-face. We were joined shortly thereafter by Jim, another veteran of the glory days of Macrobyte Resources. In spite of the fact that none of us had spent time in person before, it was a meeting of old friends; the shared meals, conversations, and photo/mischief excursions were among the highlights of the trip for me.

Since my circadians do not turn on a dime, I found myself popping unwillingly out of bed each morning shortly after 5:00am — my normal time to wake up minus the two timezones I was away from my accustomed place. I was initially a bit at a loss what to do with that time, but since it was getting light very early and the metro rail was free to ride in the downtown area, I took to exploring the city a bit. I especially enjoyed a stroll through Portland State University’s campus, which has a nice central park area, some cool trompe l’oeil murals on the buildings, and an abundance of the rhododendrons that were so enthusiastically blooming around the city.

The conference itself was one of the most odd and entertaining I’ve been to. In addition the previously posted ukulele/accordion cover of Radiohead, we also were treated to a performance of the Extra Action Marching Band, which is exactly the sort of band you’d expect to be leading a parade through the Castro district in San Francisco, and an over-hour-long exploration of next-generation participatory media from the always-entertaining Ze Frank. His presentation revealed depths of thinking about this stuff that his 3-minute The Show appearances wouldn’t have belied; he’s an incisive and insightful guy. Even the corporate representatives got in on the fun with photoshopped Dick Cheneys inserted into Battlefield Earth shots. Fun and funny all around.

In the middle of all the shenanigans, there was a lot of good technical information as well. Some of my favorite bits included details on integrating Rails apps with Interactive Voice Response systems, discussions of refactoring code for readibility and elegance, a framework for data warehouse reports, javascript AJAX frameworks, and running rails in a Java VM. Overall, it was an excellent conference, and I’m glad, both personally and professionally, that I was able to go.

The University was gracious enough to send me out this year to Portland for RailsConf, the big gathering of Ruby on Rails developers and users. The best part about it for me has been the opportunity to finally meet in person several people I’ve only known via the Internet until now: Seth, for whom I used to work, Jim, who worked for Seth at the same time, and Mark, long-time Internet friend.

I came up Tuesday afternoon, a day early, so as to provide a bit of time to run around Portland and its environs before the conference began. Mark and his fiancé Cindi picked me up at the airport, from which we took the light rail and bus back to their place. We enjoyed a meal at the local pub, a fun and busy hole in the wall that featured really excellent burgers, before settling in for the evening. (My plans for becoming a vegetarian keep getting derailed by delicious, delicious meat. Why must you be so tasty, animals?) It was great to finally get to meet Mark and Cindi face to face after years of disembodied communication.

Wednesday morning we went and grabbed a rental car and headed out to Powell’s Books, one of the most expansive bookstores I’ve ever had the pleasure to prowl. It’s an amazing place, so overwhelming that employees hand out maps to the place as visitors enter. We spent a happy couple of hours roaming around, enjoying the rare tomes, odd finds, and general wonderfulness of the place.

From there we headed up I-85 to Multinomah Falls, one of the numerous cascades that perforate the Columbia River Gorge, the immense river valley the waterway has carved into the landscape over the millenia. The falls were lovely, and well worth the 30 minutes or so we spent wandering around. I took advantage of the gift shop to replace my wedding ring, which had leapt off my finger as an involuntary sacrifice to the San Marcos River a week or two before, with a $2.00 mood ring (which has the added advantage that I can keep an eye on it to know when Kathy and I are having marital challenges).

We drove back along the Historic Columbia River Highway, a winding sylvan road that parallels the interstate but is a much prettier drive, as it takes one through forests and farmland with some spectacular views. The most impressive of these is found at Vista House, a striking structure built in 1918 on a rocky promontory overlooking the gorge that now houses a museum and gift shop. It’s a magnificent place; one can see around a dozen miles of the gorge from that overlook. (The gift shop has a $3.85 pennywhistle which turned out to be surprisingly good as well.)

We had dinner at The Edgefield Manor. The Manor bears a bit of explaining: the site was originally constructed as a poor farm, a place where impoverished people could come and live while working to grow produce, thereby feeding themselves and earning their keep — an arrangement that seems a good deal more humane than many modern programs designed to address the same need. Later, the premises became a nursing home for a number of years, but was eventually abandoned. The McMenamin brothers, who had by that point been in the business of acquiring old properties and turning them into great UK-inspired pubs for several years, bought the property for $300,000, cleaned and renovated the place, turned loose a handful of artists on the place, and created an absolutely delightful resort.

The Manor now features a variety of services and entertainment: two restaurants, a hotel, a glass blower, a brewery, a 10-seat bar built into an old gardening shed, a golf course, a distillery, a movie theater, a winery, and herb garden, and a grill. The clever, inventive work of many talented artists is evident throughout, even extending as far as the exposed overhead piping. I had a beer sampler as part of dinner, which featured 6 of their brews. All were excellent, though the porter and the ruby brew (a raspberry ale) were my particular favorites. I even liked their IPA, a variety I’m not normally crazy about.

Mark and Cindi then dropped me by the Red Lion Inn, to which it had never apparently occurred that conferences of technical people would actually be interested in using their “free high-speed wireless internet”, which is neither free, since you have to rent a room to use it, nor high-speed, as I’ve not gotten better than dialup speeds, and is only marginally wireless since I have to put my laptop in the window of the room to even get a connection.

More to come in a later post…

My nerdy obsession of the hour: iStalkr, an RSS compiler that grabs feeds from various services you specify and plots the data therefrom on a timeline. I’ve got mine set up currently to combine the books I’ve finished reading, posts I make to my weblog, twitter messages I post, bookmarks I plop onto del.icio.us, photos I post to Flickr, and movies I rent from Netflix. It makes for an interesting combined view which I’m sure will come in handy for a reference while writing our Christmas letter this year. You can see my timeline here.

We were treated to a Ukelele/Accordion duet this evening:

I like the water fountains here in Portland. They’re handsomely crafted and run continuously — a surprising sight for someone who comes from a place as water-bound as Central Texas:

UPDATE: You can also zoom out on this photo here.

This just in:

Please join us in congratulating Kathy McMains and Julie Henry, recipients of the 2007 IT Scholarships. Kathy and Julie will receive $500 scholarships through the Office of Student Financial Aid this Fall.

Kathy McMains, a sophomore working toward a Bachelor of Recreational Administration degree, is the wife of Sean McMains, Senior Programmer Analyst in Instructional Technologies Support.

Julie Henry is the Senior Administrative Assistant in the Vice President’s Office. Julie is a senior working toward a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in English with Creative Writing Emphasis.