"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

No matter how long you've been a rock, when you start getting beaten by paper it's time to start thinking like scissors.

Treating People Like People

Saw the movie 50/50 tonight, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a twenty-something man coming to terms with his cancer diagnosis. Seth Rogen's pitch of the movie on The Daily Show didn't do justice to the premise, but it did get me to check out the trailer. The trailer did a great job of portraying our characters as more than the typical 2D cut-outs we get from cookie-cutter rom-coms dealing with pain and loss, i.e. Sex and Other Drugs or P.S. I Love You.

50/50 could easily be praised simply for its ability to tread the line between comedy and tragedy to paint for us a moving and compelling story of a man dealing with a damning diagnosis. However, I feel that its true strength lies in its ability to create human characters rich with complexity, vices, and virtues. 50/50 also manages to do so without the heavy-handedness and sentimentality of movies like Crash, where we're beat over the head with the didactic "treat everybody nice 'cause you don't know what they've been through" treatment.

50/50 successfully portrays a tenet which politics, nationalism, and religion tend to underplay--that we are all people. "My enemy is my brother or my sister first, and my enemy second."

To Boldly Go

Anyone who's seen the new Star Trek movie has undoubtedly noticed the rampant amount of lens flare the film makes use of and, while some may think it cheesy or tacky, I began to appreciate it more after J. J. Abrams explained how he felt that t was cool that "the future was so bright it couldn't be contained in the frame."

Looking to the future and its unbridled possibilities, I am usually overcome with a wave of awe, an electricity of anticipation, and more than just a twinge of fear. At times, though, I find myself so completely overcome with the beauty of human potential and the what-can-be of tomorrow that, if I were a stronger man, I would allow myself to cry at the amazement of it all. I fathom an America where community and human engagement have become tangible, where the news broadcasts highlight good being done, and the new church preaches that "education" is a lifestyle, like being a vegan or a parent or a citizen, not a four-letter word whose domain begins and ends within the walls of a building. And then my next immediate thought is usually a very sobering "it's a shame that we are not on-track to make this a reality" and I'm aware of how a frustrated idealist can be mistaken quite easily for a brooding pessimist.

The New Religion

"But as church becomes a place where people go to look good — instead of being the one, safe place where they could risk looking bad — we're losing that regular storytelling forum. And the salvation, redemption and communion it allows."

In a world where we accept what it means to be human--that talking about our fears and our urges helps us to take ownership of them, to master them--we could hope to dispense with the lies we teach, the lies we preach, the lies we cling to in the darkness that are sometimes all we have to link us to the past...and we could get on with living.

New Frontier

"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." We have expanded civilization, conquered the New World, and then flattened the Earth back out to achieve an unimaginable level of interconnectedness. We have figured out how to outrun the collapse of the tower of Babel, how to work together to accomplish great feats of cooperation (though not necessarily how best to mete out the gains for such feats).

In a time when the New Frontier isn't a physical location, when political boundaries are overscored by corporate agendas, when the constructs of civilizations are advancing not only faster but faster than many of us can keep up, what looms is a Human Revolution, an Internal Revolution. It's like the New Year's resolution or the fad diet that we keep telling ourselves we'll get around to. And maybe it's just human nature, but who's to say that it's not just the old human nature that needs to move aside to make room for the new? Perhaps it's finally time that we stop focusing on how to be better people and start learning how to be better persons.

What is Science? or Understand What You're Saying

The following entry is dedicated to Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

There are lots of arguments and misconceptions about the world of science. Some think that science is is a cult whose initiates seek to rid the world of imagination and replace it with metal and godless machines. Others think that science is experimentation on nature or imposing man's will where it doesn't belong. Still others think that science is the one and only truth and anything that is not branded as such isn't worth knowing. What is science really? Science is the "
systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." That's another way of saying that science is all all the information we know about the world around us that is based purely on witnessing things happen. We can witness something a lot of different ways; we can see it happen in front of us, we can see the evidence of its happening in the past and use that evidence to reconstruct the events, or sometimes we can even apply rules that we know to be true in other cases to a situation to uncover evidence that would otherwise be hidden to us.

The roots of science are tied to a man named Aristotle, who deviated from many of his predecessors who would sit around and think about how the world should be rather than study the behaviors and patterns of nature to learn about how the world is. Science tells us how iron will react when it is exposed to oxygen. Science tells us the temperature and pressure at which liquid waters transforms into steam. Science tells us how hard to hit a brick wall with a car to break through. If the pattern is too complex or its behavior can't be witnessed, then it falls outside the realm of what science is. Science can't tell us who will be elected President 40 years in the future. Science can't tell us the exact number of oxygen molecules in a state park. Science can't determine whether two people should marry (sorry, eHarmony).

To say that something is not science is not an insult, but rather a statement of fact that a method's principles do not align themselves with science's practice of studying the world through the observation physical events. To say that composing a song is not science is no more insulting than saying that it is not sandwich-making or fishing. Plenty of things aren't science and we don't care that they aren't science. Art isn't science and we really don't care one shred. History isn't science and yet we still keep it around. Philosophy isn't science. Poetry isn't science. Hollywood movie-writing isn't science (though maybe it should be given the kinds of movies that are being produced...). Baseball isn't science. One other thing which isn't science? Intelligent Design. The idea of Intelligent Design is, in fact, the ontological argument repackaged for the 21st century. Intelligent Design does not draw upon physical evidence in the world but rather makes an intuitive leap from observing the complexity of natural phenomena and claiming that it must have been created. Since the evidence of an "Intelligent Designer" cannot be observed, the concept necessarily makes itself ineligible to fall under the category of "Science."And that's fine. It may very well be a correct and profitable view of the world. All I ask is that you understand what you're saying...or at the very least, thinking. Just don't misinterpret philosophy (or "religion" if you prefer to think of it as such) as science.

Would you really want the following non-scientific concepts to be taught as science? The Flat Earth T-shirt is rather cute, but I don't need the idea taught as being on equal footing with our modern view of the Earth.

Liberation Transmission

I'm told that we are living in the Communication Age, made possible--of course--by contributions from our nearest ancestors, the Atomic Age and the Space Age. I believe, however, that the label of "Communication Age" is an inexact one. Yes, our channels of communication have improved vastly: the availability of cellular phones and access to the internet give allow us the means to engage one another with such speed and reliability that we stand in awe of how we ever managed to get along before. I suppose that must be the border that separates revolutions and ages, not being able to recall how you ever got along before it. Yet "Communication Age" suggests that we are, in fact, communicating, rather than merely chattering.

I argue that we are not living in a Communication Age but rather a Transmission Age; it is our ability to transmit (and receive) information that has undergone such a rapid expansion rather than the content of what we are saying. We have become so fascinated with being able to interact with other people as instantaneously and often as we like that we have not slowed down enough to think of anything to say.

I can describe an enjoyable movie as awesome, rad, mind-blowing, good, great, amazing, fantastic, fabulous, spectacular, bad-ass, the bomb, wicked, cool, pleasant, superb, delightful, phenomenal, incredible, marvelous, neat, nice, groovy, super, splendid, or any of a dozen other equally synonymous descriptors. Somehow, though, I can't manage to find a word for the moment when a person first becomes aware of the concept of death. To my knowledge there isn't a word for the time in autumn when some of the trees have begun to lose their leaves and other trees are just starting to have their leaves change color and yet other trees still haven't caught up to them just yet. And what's the word for all the acceptable lies that we tell children with the intent to preserve a sense of magic and wonder in the world?