I never would’ve thought I’d prove this…

On a web board I subscribe to, someone put forth a challenge to us, that we should use logic to prove the existence of some god. The rules were as follows:

Rules:

1. Make sure the argument is coherent (using No logical fallacies)
2. Make sure the argument isn’t question begging/circular reasoning.
3. Make sure it doesn’t use equivocation, category, ad hoc pro hoc, strawman, red herring, compositional, or ad populus fallacies.
4. Define your terms, or when you use a word how you are using it.
5. If you can or know how.. form the argument in a syllogism if you don’t thats okay as well.
6. Don’t use “personal/emotional” “proofs” for the existence of god.. personal experience doesn’t work ..why? I have personal knowledge pink unicorns exist (if you don’t believe this statement then you will understand why it wont work.)

This is an impossible task for anyone who actually believes in a supernatural deity. Apologetics for millennia have not been able to construct a god that meets all of the criteria above; item 3 above is next to impossible, but part of the problem with the gods of all mythologies lies with item 4 above. If you are a believer — irrespective of the god or gods in which you believe — then item 4 will trip you up quite well. Take the Judeo-Christian god that is often defined (if at all) as being simultaneously all-merciful and all-just. These two traits are diametrically opposed to each other and can not possibly exist in the same entity.

So I thought about it and proved god’s existence as follows:

1. I am a human being.
2. A human being is made up of cells with the human genome, blood, bones, muscles, and organs which serve various functions.
3. A human being has a consciousness which is capable of making decisions and choices related to matters of all degrees of complexity.
4. Any choices made by a human being are driven by a combination of neurochemistry and available information.
5. Because points 2 and 4 speak to physical properties, they may be said to be measurable with the proper tools and equipment.
6. Something measurable with the proper tools and equipment can be declared to exist.
7. Because a human being is made up of things that are measurable, a human being can be declared to exist.
8. I am a human being (point 1), therefore I exist.
9. As a human being, I am capable of making choices (point 3).
10. I choose to define myself as “god”.
11. Therefore, god exists.

You could argue that point 10 is a form of question begging, and therefore a violation of rule number 2 above. If that is the case (which it very well might be) then rule number 2 is in direct contradiction of rule number 4 because the need to define terms could be in and of itself a form of question begging.

Therein lies the real problem with this mental exercise: define god in a manner that undoubtedly exists, and you’ve got the proof that’s being requested, whether you define god as yourself, or Charlton Heston, or as the series of natural processes that resulted in the formation of the universe, and then it’s just a question of logically demonstrating the existence of that god. It does nothing whatsoever to resolve the chasm that exists between the faithless and the faithful.

What a waste…

A lot has already been said and written about the Steubenville, Ohio, rape case. I’d like to throw my own voice into the mix. I’ve written before about my position on rape.

While the concept of rape itself is abhorrent by every stretch of the imagination, every trial for rape brings two very real — and at least in principle diametrically opposed — thought processes into the mix and in stark contrast with each other. In any crime, the accused is innocent until proven guilty. And I’d hate to imagine someone truly falsely accused of raping someone; that would be pure hell for the accused. Thus, the accused has the right to a fair and reasonable defense. Again, that’s true in any crime; I’m not singling out rape here.

The big problem with rape trials, then, is that — at least if you factor out the situations where someone threatens greater violence if the victim doesn’t accede to the wishes of the attacker — the only real way to put on a defense, is to deny that the crime has been committed.

There has to be a better way, pure and simple. I don’t know what it is.

Steubenville raised a glaringly bright light to one other aspect of rape trials that is equally troubling. I would consider this kind of trial second only to murder trials in that the pursuit of justice will not undo the crime that was committed. In a theft trial, the stolen goods can be returned or the victim can be compensated for their loss. The best the victims in a rape or murder trial can hope for is that the guilty parties will have learned their lesson and won’t commit their crimes again. Maybe with a bit of deterrence for others who might think they can do the same thing and get away with it.

Small comfort for the victim. Add in a community that rallied not around her, but her attackers, and I wonder how much the trial added to the trauma she had already endured. After all, her attackers were stars of the high school football team, popular, boys will be boys, and all of that bullshit…

A feminist appearing on Fox News recently suggested that the solution to the problem of rape is to teach men not to rape anyone. Although somewhat simplistic, she’s right. It’s not as easy as she made it out to sound, but it’s the right thing to do. In Steubenville, surely the culture of entitlement that the boys felt (thanks to their prowess on the gridiron) was a huge contributing factor. And we saw that in the way the community rallied around them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt.

The way the boys reacted to their sentence, I think they thought that entitlement would acquit them of their crimes. That’s at least the impression I got; the fact that they broke down when their conviction was handed down, proves that they’re human. When they get out of prison, I sincerely hope that they’ll allow themselves to be a cautionary tale. I hope that they’ll be willing to talk about the horrible crime they committed, how they sincerely regret having done it, and being a message of reason: telling other people not to rape. Just like that woman on Fox News suggested.

Without regard to what the boys do, though, I wish the victim can find some degree of consolation in the outcome of the trial. It’s not going to be easy for her to move beyond the trauma of both the crime and the trial itself. But she must. For her own sanity and self-worth. She was exceptionally brave just getting this far. Whatever can be done to help her move forward can and should be done. Let her become a survivor and let her example be an empowering example to women everywhere.

It’s the least that can be done, for a crime that can’t be un-committed.

International Women’s Day

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. Say what you will about the former Soviet Union and what they stood for, and their overall policies, if there’s one thing they got right — or at least tried to get right — was treating women as equals to men. Today is a holiday they came up with to underscore that attitude.

Insert joke hear about how International Men’s Year can resume tomorrow.

But seriously, modern society is, well, patriarchal. This is hardly news. And it has been for quite a while. An educated guess as to when men claimed clout and power over women, would be around about the advent of agriculture, six to ten thousand years ago. Harvesting crops required physical strength and, whatever else is true, men are, on average, physically larger and stronger than women.

Bring in politics and religion and you’ve got yourself a self-perpetuating patriarchy.

There’s a mental exercise anyone can do, about determining whether or not you, as a member of a given group, enjoy a privilege that people not in that group don’t enjoy. Is there something that you take for granted, that other people might not even be available to other people? If someone asks for something you take for granted, why should you keep that something away from them? It’s like that one verse from the Phil Ochs song, “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”:

Sweating in the ghetto with the colored and the poor
The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor
Wouldn’t it be a riot if they really blew their tops?
But they’ve got too much already, and besides we’ve got the cops!
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest
Anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends….

But that song isn’t really about feminism as much as it is other forms of privilege.

There are issues that women have to deal with. That’s not to say that they’re not men’s issues, too, but they disproportionately impact on women, so we need to be made aware of the fact that it happens. Privilege is when you take something for granted so if you don’t know about a given problem, you can’t really be prepared to solve it.

One thing I do think, though, is that there’s no such thing as a purely “women’s” issue. If it affects women, it affects me. Take, for example, my position on rape, which I have expressed on more than one occasion. That said, I don’t think I can understand the trauma that comes from it anywhere near as well as a woman who has gone through the trauma, can. This is why, when it comes to raising consciousness about matters, we need to hear people most directly affected. And just like the Phil Ochs song above, there are songs to help us raise awareness of the issues. So how about this one?

Of course, that might be one of the best-known consciousness-raisers out there. There’s another song that is just as effective. It’s a scary theme, to be sure, but it’s the kind of thing we need to hear if we want to improve ourselves. I just love this song…

(Note that, if you recognize that voice but not the name, she’s the original Maureen from Rent.)

Of course, rape and child abuse aren’t the only issues that affect women. There’s a third topic — domestic violence — that needs to be addressed. I vacillate back and forth as to which is more pernicious: rape or domestic violence. The former is often a one-time trauma that devastates the person emotionally (and likely physically). The latter is a continual trauma that can be just as devastating, but recurs far too often for anyone to be comfortable with. And this may be the best consciousness raiser for that topic:

Maybe, just maybe, in honor of International Women’s Day, we could all just raise our awareness of these three problems. They’re certainly not going to go away if we ignore them.

GMO’s Again

There was an article on alternet last summer, which stated that the five most awful atheists are Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Penn Jillette, S.E. Cupp, and Bill Maher.

I think the biggest mistake the article makes ipls that it conflates atheism with scientific skepticism. It’s certainly true that there’s certainly no shortage of overlap between the two worldviews; something like 95% of all scientists are atheists. Of course, not all atheists are scientists (that includes me; I had a very bad experience with my physics teacher in high school that kind of soured me on science as a discipline…)

Bill Maher is fairly unrepentant in his animus towards organized religion and has only recently referred to himself formally as an atheist. (He had previously called himself agnostic). And he’s a great example of the lack of overlap between the two worldviews. I have written before about how I perceive Bill Maher’s take on medicine. He hasn’t said much about medicine in recent years and has taken on a new cause: the opposition to Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO’s, specifically as pertains to our food supply.

And I couldn’t disagree with him more about this. Through some form of selection or another — be in natural selection, selective breeding, artificial selection, or agriculture, by definition everything we eat, has been genetically modified. Whether it’s in a lab or in the ground, genetic modification happens all the time.

As I said above, I’m not a scientist and don’t pretend to be one, but I understand it well enough to know that genetic modification is the key to feeding a world where populations of plants and animals are dying out, the planet is getting warmer, and human population is increasing.

Simply put: we should not be opposed to GMO’s, no matter what we choose to call them. (I kind of like the term “frankenfood” even though it’s intended to be a fearmongering term…)

Some might argue that growing organic crops is preferable to GMO’s. On a small scale, sure. But you’re never going to be able to grow enough crops organically and feed seven billion people.

I’ve written before about GMO’s and how denial of science is neither a conservative nor a liberal phenomenon, as the following clip from last weekend’s Real Time with Bill Maher will attest. I have to forewarn you if you watch it: it’s painful to watch or even listen to. It’s kind of aggravating how close he comes to getting “it” but then swerves away on an anti-GMO kick.

Of all of Bill Maher’s “New Rules” I think this is the most painful one to listen to.

Now, I can acknowledge that Monsanto has done some shady things in the realm of patenting its processes, and for that they do deserve criticism. But that is an argument for patent reform. To use its patent-trolling penchant as an argument against GMO’s is essentially an ad hominem attack. Except, of course, Monsanto isn’t a human being. (But they are a person in the eyes of the law…)

Bill Maher has the right to his views and opinions. And it’s stuff like this that put him on the list of the five most awful atheists. But his position on this has nothing to do with whether or not god exists. It just shows that he’s not a scientist.

Then again, neither am I. Is the only thing keeping me off of that list, the fact that I’m not famous?

The Onion Fucks Up

The night before last, at the Academy Awards, the movie Argo took home the award for best picture. While director and producer Ben Affleck was speaking on the stage, thanking the academy and everyone involved in the production of the movie, the satirical newspaper The Onion crossed a line, with regard to the 9-year-old star (and Best Actress nominee) of the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, with the following tweet:

(I’m using an image of the tweet because it has since been deleted, but this is the internet and nothing is ever truly invisible…)

The Onion is known for its satire, often hard-edged and at times offensive to the people or groups whom they lampoon. That much is a given.

And there’s no question about it: this was offensive. And wrong. And, to be frank, not funny. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, nor do I know anything about Quvenzhané Wallis, other than the fact that she’s the youngest nominee for best actress in the history of the Academy Awards. So maybe there could be something here that I missed, but I sincerely doubt it…)

So the fundamental question is whether or not, even in a tongue-in-cheek sense, there are times when calling 9-year old girl a “cunt” is right. And I admit it: I can’t think of one.

This coming from a guy who believes that there is no such thing as a topic that’s so taboo, so off-limits, that we can’t make fun of it. Yes, attempts at humor with some topics can make you more enemies than friends, but I strongly support the right to make these kinds of jokes.

So the Onion did the right thing, the noble thing, the admirable thing, and apologized. As far as I can tell, the apology is sincere, although the line about “taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible” raises more questions than it answers.

The one big question that bears asking, is whether or not this was merely a lapse in judgment on the part of an indeterminate number of staffers at the Onion, or if something far more systemic was at play here. Hell, I don’t even know how much time elapsed between when the concept was first considered, and when it got posted. Or was this a natural consequence of a work culture that tries to be biting, hard-hitting, in-your-face, and, well, crude? That question will likely never be answered.

And, I’d like to reiterate that the Onion did the right thing by apologizing. One other question that does come up — and we won’t know this for quite some time — is whether this is going to have a lasting impact on the quality of the satire we see coming out of that website. The last thing we want is for a bigger named celebrity (in the realms of either entertainment or politics) demanding an apology because of the way The Onion lambasted them.

If it means anything, I’m hopeful at least about the quality of the satire, as evidenced by today’s satirical take on a big news item from yesterday: U.K. Cardinal Resigns in Wake of — Get This — Sex Abuse Allegations .

What is fame?

A couple of years ago, blogger PZ Myers wrote an entry in which he talked about one of his “gimme” questions on his final exams: name a female scientist. In that particular entry, he bemoaned the fact that the overwhelming majority of responses to this question, has been Marie Curie.

A few weeks ago, the comic strip Baldo had a series in which the father called the Kennedy Center because they have never honored a latino performer. It culminated in the person on the phone asking the father if he could name one.

Nobody was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this year. This was the year when the biggest names from the so-called “steroid era” were all on the ballot: Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens.

Rush will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in three months. Many people say — and I count myself among them — that this is long overdue.

The song Celluloid Heroes by The Kinks talks about the stars that are a part of the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard, astutely pointing out that there are names there that you might not recognize, but they were likely famous enough at the time of the stars being built into the Walk of Fame.

I was re-reading my old flashback blog entry on media celebrity. More than seven years have passed and I still remember who all of those people are, even if their names aren’t likely as well-known as they were in 2005.

What all of these individual stories have in common is the fundamental nature of fame. Take the science one. How many famous scientists can you name, regardless of gender? Sure, they’re out there, but if you’re not pursuing a career in science overall, the pool of names from which to pick is relatively small. The best known scientists of history — Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, etc… — undoubtedly didn’t work alone, but why is it that we know their names better than so many of their contemporaries? It’s because the pursuit of science doesn’t universally lend itself to fame in any era. Even today: go up to the average person on the street and ask them to name a famous living scientist. I’d guess that the most common answer you’d get would be Stephen Hawking. Even when there’s big science news available to the public. Can you name anyone who was actually involved in the construction or launch of any of the rovers we’ve sent to Mars? I can’t. Now this is a profession that, whether we like it or not, has been historically dominated by men. So with such a small subset of scientists who qualify as being famous outside of their professional circles, it’s not a huge surprise that women would be even more poorly represented in response to a question like this. Only now are women beginning to break into this, and that’s undoubtedly a good thing, but it’s still an uphill battle.

The same thing holds true for a USA-centric entertainment venue, seeking out latino performers. It’s starting to change now, but that doesn’t make it easy to find a pool of people to honor at this level.

The halls of fame are interesting in and of themselves. This is a group of people that selects members of their own group as being “famous”. And surely, within their groups, they’re undoubtedly famous, but outside of the group, it’s not a given that the general public would know who they are. The Wikipedia list of halls and walks of fame has no shortage of groups where I’d be hard-pressed to name, off the top of my head, a single person who might have been honored there. (Although I concede that the AVN Hall of Fame must be a fun place to go sightseeing…) Whether we approve of the steroid use of the baseball players who were collectively snubbed for induction or not, we can’t really deny that they were and are famous. It raises the question, though, of what a hall of fame truly honors. Achieving fame doesn’t necessarily equate to greatness within the field that honors them, but halls of fame generally cite exceptional achievement. This is especially true for the sporting halls.

The media are good at creating celebrity. But, as Andy Warhol once pointed out, we’ve all got fifteen minutes of fame in our lives. The media do have a hand in that, to be sure. Does that make fame even more fleeting in today’s media saturated society?

I’ll let you know when my name has wider recognition outside of my own circles…

Keeping and Bearing Arms

A little over a week ago, a man stormed into an elementary school, overpowered several people, and opened fire in a kindergarten class. In all, 28 people, including the gunman (who turned the gun on himself) — 20 of whom were children — were killed that day.

I have a six-year-old son in kindergarten, and the location of the school is in a town where I have many friends and work colleagues. When I visit my in-laws, Newtown, CT, is roughly the halfway point and I often stop there for lunch.

So, yeah, the news affected me.

The second amendment guarantees us the right to keep and bear arms. Or, more specifically,

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I’m not going to do a whole lot of parsing of the meaning of this particular constitutional amendment. The Supreme Court has decided numerous court cases in which the right has been infringed by some level of government.

There are a couple of things that do bear mentioning about this particular amendment, though. Unlike other rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, this one does not specifically state that congress may not pass laws that speak to owning a gun. Compare it with the first amendment, which begins with the phrase “Congress shall make no law…”

I think it’s safe to say that congress absolutely does have the right to state who can and should regulate the militia. (Note that the meaning of the word “regulate” has evolved a little bit in the more than 200 years since the bill of rights was passed. In the context as it was written, the phrase “well-regulated” means that it works the way it’s supposed to. Modern use of the word “regulated” speaks more to the process of ensuring that it does work the way it’s supposed to.

Let me state up front that I do not own a gun, and have no interest in owning one. And as long as you don’t want to require me to own a gun, I have no interest in taking your gun away from you.

You’re never free to do something unless you’re also free to do its opposite. You’re not free to own a gun unless you’re also free not to own one.

A lot of gun control advocates argue that the founding fathers didn’t foresee — nor could they have foreseen — the availability of weapons capable of firing off a hundred rounds with the pull of a single trigger. That’s true, but they also couldn’t foresee indoor plumbing. Or the telephone. Or the transmission of news from one place to another faster than a day. But the power of the weapons doesn’t make that much of a difference in the interest of maintaining security in a free state.

Gun rights advocates, on the other hand, argue that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Again, true, but you can’t deny that guns make it easier to kill people. Almost too easy, but you don’t need a high-powered assault rifle to prove that point. The same day as that happened, someone went into a school in China and, in a knife attack, went after 22 children. The body count was significantly lower because of the fact that the weapon of choice was not a gun.

As an interesting side note, there’s a reason why murder is monitored within crime statistics as being completely independent of just about any other statistic. The motivation to commit certain crimes can and will waver, but if you want to commit murder, chances are, you either want to commit it, or you’re asleep. Theft — in all of its forms — is a crime of need. Rape is a complex crime with lots of motives, but even the serial rapist will have times when he doesn’t want to commit the crime. Murder stands alone. There are times when I wonder if the only thing that truly drives fluctuations in the murder rate, is the accuracy of the shooter.

As often happens, then, with complex issues, is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Gun rights advocates and gun control advocates have a common ground: stopping tragedies like what happened in Sandy Hook, or Aurora, or Virginia Tech, or anywhere else where someone went on a rampage.

Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the NRA, gave a shameful response, and it would have been better if he’d said nothing at all. “Only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns,” is demonstrably not true. Whatever the solution is, it’s not more guns. When Ronald Reagan was shot, no one fired back at his attacker, John Hinkley. He was subdued, and Reagan was kept down, but it didn’t deter Hinkley from firing the shots in the first place.

What we need is to ensure that the people who do seek to purchase a gun, are qualified to use it and use it responsibly. From what I’ve read about Adam Lanza’s mother, she was a piece of work, paranoid that some mythical world government was going to come in and take away her freedoms. Even if he hadn’t gotten to her guns, I’d be a little bit worried that someone like her even owned guns like that in the first place.

I’d also like to encourage research into technologies that will make guns safer. By definition, guns are unsafe devices. But one thing that can be done to make them safer, is to do something that would prevent anyone other than the rightful owner of the gun from using it. A fingerprint recognition technology could be co-opted to prevent anyone other than the owner from actually discharging any bullets. This would prevent children from “playing” with their parents’ guns to disastrous results, and would also be good in situations where a gun falls between two people, there would be no need to scramble for it in a kill-or-be-killed scenario.

In fact, that kind of research would actually strengthen a person’s right to keep arms, to say the least.

There are other things that can be done that everyone would agree to. It’s just a matter of suggesting a few things and seeing what sticks.

Because the way the guns in the hands of a few deranged individuals have been going, the state is far from secure, and it’s becoming less free.

I Wonder What Would Happen to This World

On Thursday, December 7, 2000, I made a pilgrimage. I took the day off of work and then proceeded to make the three hour drive to Huntington, Long Island. At the top of a hill in the middle of the Huntington Rural Cemetary, is the grave of Harry Chapin.

I was nine years old on July 16, 1981, when Harry was killed in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway on his way to a benefit concert, and barely knew who he was at the time. As I grew up, and mainly in high school and college, I came to know who he was, what he accomplished, and why his death at a very young age was such a tragic loss.

I chose the date of the trip because that was Harry’s birthday. He would’ve been 58 then if he were still alive.

I made the drive alone. I know I didn’t have to do it alone; it’s just that the people who understood, couldn’t take the time to go. The people who could take the time to go, didn’t understand.

His tombstone is a giant rock. In the face of the rock is chiseled the opening verse to one of my favorite songs of his: “If a man tried to take his time on earth and prove before he died what one man’s life could be worth, I wonder what would happen to this world.”

I left at about 9 in the morning, got there at about noon, and walked around the cemetery for a little bit. When I couldn’t find the grave on my own, I went to the office, where they looked up the location in the records and I found it with minimal difficulty thereafter.

In all, I stayed by the grave for about fifteen minutes. I spent the time thinking, contemplating how the world had changed in the nearly twenty years since Harry last walked this earth, and how much we still need a voice like his.

I stopped at a pizza place on the way back before I got back on the L.I.E. and found myself wondering if it even existed thirty years before. Judging by the architecture of the strip mall in which it was located, I figured it was safe to assume the answer was ‘no’.

I hinted at this in my previous blog entry about the end of the world, but I didn’t come out and say it outright: the world is always ending, albeit not in the apocalyptic sense of the word. There is something different about the world today, than it was yesterday, and it will be something different again tomorrow.

Someone who is here today, will not be here tomorrow. Someone who is not here today, will be here tomorrow. Think of anyone who has died at any time, and ask yourself: how has the world changed since they died? Think of the musician Aaliyah, who was killed in a plane crash less than three weeks before the September 11 attacks. If we could somehow bring her back to life, would she even recognize the world as it is today?

You don’t even need to look to people who died before major historical events. Just since I wrote the essay about the end of the world (where I said that there were 18 verified people still alive who can be verified to having been born prior to the year 1900), the oldest person in the world — Besse Cooper — died at the age of 116. Now there’s no one left who was born in the year 1896.

Every day is different; the world is always ending. And it’s always beginning. I’m not saying this in an apocalyptic sense of the word. Or, for that matter, an even vaguely spiritual or religious sense. It just is different.

That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It is neither to be celebrated nor feared. If you’ve ever gone somewhere for an extended period of time and then returned home — for example, at college — you know that things change all the time. And it might take some time to get used to what changed.

I don’t particularly care whether or not that pizza place was there in 1981. If Harry Chapin were to return, he wouldn’t recognize the world in which we live today. Could he get used to it? Possibly, but we’d have a lot of explaining to do.

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake…

From 1998 until 2001, I worked in the tax department of a major financial company, overseeing the production of tax forms for clients for whom we had a tax reporting requirement. A particular incident from early 1999 sticks out in my head.

We had just produced the tax forms for activity that had taken place in the year 1998, and the phone calls with inquiries and complaints had started coming in.

Apparently, around about April, 1998, a customer who had been born in the year 1914, had an annuity contract that reached its annuitization date. Like all legal contracts, an annuity contract has an end date. And when that date comes around, the contract holder has to choose what to do with the proceeds.

With this customer, she didn’t choose anything and, by default, we sent her a check for the lump sum proceeds of the contract, after withholding the necessary taxes. Everything about this transaction was, simply put, normal. All calculations associated with the transaction, including the calculation of the taxable gain on the transaction, and the necessary withholding, were correct. There were no problems with actually cutting the check, and none of the information printed on the check stub seemed off in any material capacity.

There was one minor problem, though, with the transaction. Like just about every company around the world that used computers, we were making changes to our systems to prevent the infamous Y2K bug from being a problem. And in so doing, when we expanded her birth year out to four digits, the computer decided that she had been born in the year 2014 and not 1914.

So when we produced our tax forms, the form accurately reflected what we had distributed, but when the system subtracted 2014 from 1998, it came up with a number that was less than 59 1/2, and, as such, it said that it was a “Premature Distribution”.

If the only thing wrong with that tax form was an incorrect age calculation when literally everything else worked fine, I knew that Y2K wasn’t going to be that big of a problem.

If you remember, a lot of people were literally predicting the end of the world because of the Y2 K problem. In a couple of weeks, we’re going to come face to face with the next predicted date of the end of the world. The Mayan long-form calendar will come to the end of its current cycle on December 21, 2012.

The world doesn’t end when our calendars end — on December 31 every year — so it’s really strange to me that anyone might take the end of a written calendar seriously.

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to ask everyone to do a little experiment. Launch Microsoft Excel or some other spreadsheet program. In cell A1, I want you to key in a “1″. (Without the quotes, just the number). In the cell below it, you can either put in a 10, or the formula =A1*10 . Below that, put in a 100 or copy the formula from the cell above. Keep going until you’ve filled in a total of six rows, with the sixth row having the number 100,000.

Now highlight all six rows and reformat those cells as a date. (Format cells can be brought up by right clicking on a cell…) Make sure you format it in such a way that it displays the full four-digit year.

Depending on the software you use, you’ll see that the “1″ has transformed into either January 1, 1900 (which is how Microsoft Excel does it) or December 31, 1899 (which is how OpenOffice.org does it). The “10″ is either January 9 or January 10, 1900. 100 is April 9 or 10, 1900. And so on down the line. This is how the spreadsheet works with dates, and most computers nowadays perform this type of calculation. (Which is fair, when you consider that, as of December 2, 2012, there are a total of 18 unique verified people still alive who were born before January 1, 1900, according to the Gerontology Research Group.)

But take a look at what 100,000 became: October 14 or 15, 2173. That’s when our computer systems will need an extra digit to interpret our the dates. Any systems that only fill five characters in to their numeric representations of the date will need to have the field expanded. Otherwise, it might run into the problem that Hartford, CT, ran into in the late 80′s. A court clerk noticed that quite some time had passed without anyone from that city being called for jury duty. They did a little bit of research and traced the problem to a field expansion on a computer database, where the eighth character of the city name ended up falling into the next field over. so the D became not the last letter of the city, but rather a status code that the computer interpreted to mean “deceased”.

Feel free to bemoan the fact that computers control as much of our lives as they do. But nothing to do with computers gives me any reason to think the world is going to end. At least, not in the apocalyptic sense of the word.

And I feel fine.

Person of the Year 2012

For the past 85 years, Time Magazine has published their annual “Person of the Year“. With the exceptions of Calvin Coolidge (who was president when they first started giving out the honor), Herbert Hoover, and Gerald Ford, all US presidents in that time period have been named person of the year at least once, either while they were president, and/or the year in which they were first elected.

They’ve made some good choices over the years, and some questionable ones. But it’s not an easy task — irrespective of whether you agree with any given choice — to summarize an entire calendar year by singling out one person (or a group of people) as being the most influential on the events of the year.

One thing they’re doing this year is asking the visitors to their site to vote for their choices of who should be person of the year. They haven’t said what weight — if any — the online vote will play in their final decision, which will be announced on December 14. The people for whom you can vote are an interesting mix, to be sure. Here is a summary of my thoughts on each of the candidates

1. Sheldon Adelson. The billionaire who essentially funded Mitt Romney’s failed election campaign. He definitely left his mark on politics and the future of campaigns, but he doesn’t deserve person of the year.

2. Ai Weiwei. Considering the way the Chinese government treats their dissidents, we need to shine a glaring light on the actions of the government in hopes of getting them to treat their people better. For the most part, it’s a worthwhile cause, so I would not object if he were to be the person of the year, although he’s one of those people who could be the person of any year, and not just 2012…

3. Bashar Assad. The selection of the leader of Syria would certainly get a lot of raised eyebrows, much like the way the magazine has “honored” other political villains, such as Hitler, Stalin, or the Ayatollah Khomeini. For that reason alone, I don’t have any inherent problem with choosing Assad, but I don’t think he rises to the level of importance that the honor is supposed to represent.

4. Felix Baumgartner. I’m torn about him, to be perfectly honest. When he rode up in a hot air balloon literally to the edge of the atmosphere, and jumped out, it was a stunt by every definition of the word. When he landed safely and the news of his successful landing came across my phone, I thought “That sonofabitch pulled it off”. It took him 20 minutes to make the jump, and he actually exceeded the speed of sound at one point. That’s impressive. And a marvel of the science behind the equipment that kept him alive. But it was a stunt all the same. A marketing gimmick. He’d be an all right choice, but I don’t necessarily think that he’s “it”.

5. Joe Biden. I admit it up front: I was impressed with him when he ran for president in 1988 and have liked him ever since. Some people consider him a liability to the Obama administration, but I don’t see it that way. He’s certainly an interesting — an polarizing — character in American politics. Not a bad choice, but not the greatest for person of the year. At least, not this year.

6. Michael Bloomberg. The New York City Mayor has certainly made his mark on the city that never sleeps, and it’s probably peeing a little less too since he’s banned drinks larger than 24 ounces. But agree or disagree with this rule, I don’t think this kind of a rule makes that significant a difference in the grand scheme of things. I just hope that rule doesn’t extend to where I live, since that’s what I’d consider a “small”…

7. Bo Xilai. It’s weird. I’m sure there’s no shortage of corrupt politicians at all levels of any government, including that of China. I just don’t think his trials — including the criminal charges he faces — rise to the level of “person of the year”.

8. Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor is one of the few republicans who don’t make my skin crawl in this day and age, although I still think he’s a bit too cozy with the “religious right”. Christie did two things this year: first, he gave a very ego-centric speech at the Republican National Convention, and second, he was everywhere on TV after Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard. His visibility probably does rise to the level of “person of the year,” even if I can’t shake the sense that he’ll probably get it in a future year.

9. Bill Clinton. Speaking of giving memorable speeches at a US political party’s national convention, Bill Clinton wins this contest hands down. He might have even been solely responsible for exciting the democratic base in the election. The energy was palpably higher at the democratic convention than it was at the republican, at least based upon what I saw on TV. If he gets it, he would be the first ex-president to receive this honor. But precedent doesn’t really matter much to me for this honor. I’m not sure he’s any more deserving than any of the other nominees.

10. Hillary Clinton. The soon-to-be former secretary of state has definitely led our diplomatic corps over a difficult time. And she’d be as worthwhile a nominee as anyone currently holding political office.

11. Stephen Colbert. There are really only three shows on the cable channel Comedy Central, which have had any real lasting impact: South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report. (And the Daily Show never truly found its own until Jon Stewart came on. It wasn’t as good when Craig Kilborn was the host.) Stephen Colbert definitely deserves props for the way he skewers people like Bill O’Reilly in a subtle yet subversive way. Person of the year? Not alone, but I’m all right with this choice.

12. Tim Cook. In 1982, the computer was the “machine of the year.” Since then, two tech CEO’s have been named person of the year: Jeff Bezos in 1999 and Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple since Steve Jobs left the company to tend to his health, a few months before he died. He also stood in for Jobs while he took leaves of absence. Apple wouldn’t be what it is today without Tim Cook, that much is for sure. But it still feels wrong to give the honor to Tim Cook without the company having first honored Steve Jobs. They came close in ’82 but never did it. It’d be like honoring Steve Ballmer as head of Microsoft and ignoring Bill Gates.

13. Gabrielle Douglas. I can’t deny that she did kind of make the feel-good story from this year’s Olympics but I just have a hard time singling out any single athlete for this honor, especially someone whose name recognition comes from the Olympics.

14. Mario Draghi. Without downplaying other people on this list of similar notoriety, I think it’s safe to say that Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, is probably the single most polarizing figure on this list, and that’s saying a lot when you look over some of the other names here. The more prosperous individual nations in the EU have large numbers of people resentful of his policies that often result in bailing out other countries in the EU. And the resentment isn’t misplaced. But he definitely is an influential person.

15. Mo Farah. Mo Farah certainly shined in the Olympics this year, and gave his countrymen in Somalia something to actually feel positive about. But like Gabrielle Douglas above, I have a hard time singling out any individual athlete.

16. Sandra Fluke. I’m of several minds on her. When she testified before congress, she bore the brunt of the right-wing hatemongering machine, led by Rush Limbaugh. And no one deserves that. As it turns out, even Limbaugh’s supporters thought he went overboard with his commentary on her. But another brave woman who had to endure similar slander — at an even younger age — isn’t even included in this list. I can’t really think of Sandra Fluke as person of the year without also thinking that Jessica Ahlquist should also deserve it.

17. Roger Goodell. I admit it. Ever since my kids were born, I’ve lost a lot of interest in football. I don’t know that there’s a cause/effect relationship in this timing, but around about the birth of my older son, I started thinking about the football-as-war metaphor and I’ve come to realize that it’s a really bad metaphor. In war, there are no time-outs, no penalties, and no rules that say you have to retreat because someone grabbed the opposite side’s face-masks. And it moves too slowly to be an effective metaphor for war. This year, from what I’ve observed, has been an exercise in mediocrity for all but a few select teams in the NFL. So Goodell might be a bit more visible because there is no hockey season and basketball’s barely over its own labor issues, but that doesn’t really make him worthy of “person of the year.”

18. The Higgs Boson. I”m not sure that physicists have truly come to grips with the implications behind the discovery of a subatomic particle that has all of the properties of the heretofore elusive Higgs, but this year was one of those rare years when there was major scientific news not involving outer space. Not a bad idea, but I would think that the credit really belongs to the crew of CERN.

19. E.L. James. I would laugh my ass off if E.L. James were to be named person of the year. Her Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy brought erotica into the mainstream, even if there is better erotic literature online that’s free. That said, if other exceptionally popular writers, such as J.K. Rowling didn’t win, I can’t imagine how she should.

20. Jay-Z. If President Obama should thank anyone for his successful re-election bid this year, there are two people who deserve his thanks: Bill Clinton and Jay-Z. And to be fair, Jay-Z had a good year by just about any stretch of the imagination. But I’m not sure he deserves person of the year.

21. Kim Jong Un. Shortly before the end of last year, he became the supreme leader of North Korea. The satirical newspaper The Onion named him the sexiest man alive, which got picked up on by a Chinese newspaper and taken seriously. But under Kim Jong-Il’s son, we’ve seen by and large a “stay the course” attitude from the isolated country. No added beligerence, and no improvements. Until one or the other happens, I can’t imagine him being person of the year.

22. The Mars Rover. The SUV-sized vehicle that landed on the surface of Mars did something amazing: it didn’t crash, despite the intense difficulty of what it was trying. We launched it last year and it took nine months to reach its destination. Just to get a sense of the how hard that would be, an airplane won’t take off at the time it’s supposed to if the weather conditions aren’t good for a landing at its destination. There was literally no way to predict what kind of weather would be happening on the martian surface when the rover reached it, when we launched it. And that’s the most painfully obvious thing that could’ve gone wrong. I’m sure that there will be a time in the not-too-distant future that the technology that landed the rover will prove useful for more earthbound technologies.

23. Marissa Mayer. Marissa Mayer is an interesting choice even to be nominated, and is one of the few “new” CEO’s who deserve the nomination. She was one of the people who helped to make Google what it is today, and she was brought in by Yahoo! to turn its fortunes around. And one thing that’s true: the company’s stock price definitely reflects more investor enthusiasm in the company than they had a year ago…

24. Mohamed Morsi. Speaking of stock, since Time first announced the list of nominees, here’s someone whose stock has plummeted. The person who’s been leading Egypt since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, but who also has run into some political opposition from the country’s courts. Who knows what his political futures actually hold…

25. Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli politics are an interesting pendulum swing. It seems as though they go back and forth between leaders who take a hard line against the Palestinians, and those who want to try some degree of diplomacy. Netanyahu represents the former group. If there’s one truth to the matter, is that neither the hard line, nor the diplomacy tacks works all that well. So I can sympathize with the ongoing plight of the Israelis. I’ve written before about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but apparently I didn’t bring it over with my flashbacks re-posted from my old blog, which is no longer online following the shutdown of Apple’s MobileMe service. The gist of it was, the Israelis and the Palestinians have been at each other’s throats for so long, it’s impossible, any more, to get a sense of “who started it”, and both sides are now pretty much constantly reacting to the other. I don’t know if anyone’s going to be able to solve the problem of this conflict, but I can’t see how Netanyahu will ever do anything other than maintain the status quo, or worse.

26. Barack Obama. I wonder how future historians will regard the election of 2012. Some facts are undeniably clear: no candidate faced such well-funded or well-organized opposition, being attacked extensively to the point of it being slanderous, and still emerged victorious. Obama has proven himself to be a very mediocre president, but whom I’m not certain could be defeated. If we look back at all of the presidential elections since 1896 — and I’ve chosen this year because that’s the year when the departing president was the one who defeated the man who had defeated him four years prior — there were only five incumbent presidents who lost their re-election bids. (Please note that I’m counting the men whose official title was not president due to the fact that they were the vice president who assumed the presidency due to the death of the prior president, before the passage of the 25th amendment.) And 2012 had nothing in common with any of those five years: in 1912 and 1992, a strong third party candidate siphoned off a lot of votes from the incumbent. In 1932, the incumbent president didn’t stand a chance because of a devastating economic collapse on his watch. The incumbent in 1976 couldn’t shake the appearance of not having deserved the title because he was never elected as either president or vice president. And in 1980, the incumbent couldn’t shake off some general appearances of incompetence. None of those applied to the election of 2012. 2012 probably most closely resembled the election of 1936. Could a different candidate have unseated Obama? Possibly, but the Republican party had its own appearance issues, amidst a changing demographic of the country.

27. Michael Phelps. One of the best athletes in the world, and definitely the best swimmer, Michael Phelps has stood out for quite some time lately. He performed amazingly in the olympics this year and deserves all of the accolades he has received. But like Gabrielle Douglas and Mo Farah, I’m not sure he deserves to be person of the year.

28. Psy. The only person whose name I didn’t recognize among the list of people nominated this year, he can boast the most hits of any video on YouTube, with the song “Gangnam Style.” Despite the immense popularity of this video, I have never seen it, and I wouldn’t recognize the song if I heard it on the radio. From what I understand about the song (never having actually heard it myself), it’s catchy, stupid bubble-gum pop. Between this song, “Call Me Maybe,” and “Friday,” the status of pop music is not a positive one. No. He doesn’t deserve to be person of the year.

29. Pussy Riot. Now this is a cause I can support. A Russian punk band that was arrested for speaking out against the leadership, it’s chilling to think that they were arrested in the first place. Not in the year 2012. And certainly not in Russia after the death of Leonid Brezhnev. Any reservations I might have about naming them as the people of the year, are entirely due to the question of how many other people might be imprisoned and about whom we’re not hearing. Yes, they deserve it.

30. John Roberts. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is the single most exclusive club in the United States. We’ve had 44 presidents (43 if you count unique individuals), 61 speakers of the house (55 if you count unique individuals), and 17 chief justices. And the chief justice does two things: first, he hears cases just like all of the other justices, and second, he is responsible for the entire federal judiciary. It is clear that John Roberts has an eye to his role in history, if some of the decisions he’s been involved in are any indication, most notably the affirmation that Obamacare is constitutional. He definitely made his mark on the country this year. And he might even deserve person of the year. It would be an unusual choice, but not undeserving.

31. Mitt Romney. What can I say about Mitt Romney? He ran an aggressive campaign against the president even if, as I have formerly pointed out, it was an uphill battle to say the least. In just about any presidential campaign, a vote for either the democratic candidate or the republican candidate is generally for one of three reasons: (1) the voter likes that candidate the best, (2) the voter dislikes the other candidate more, or (3) the voter votes for the candidate of his or her chosen party. One of the reasons why Romney lost, was because he got very few votes in category 1, if the primary season taught us anything. He almost always was second place behind someone else who would later implode. Even if he had somehow come out victorious in the election, I’d have a hard time justifying him as person of the year.

32. Karl Rove. One of the more bizarre aspects of this election, which was related to the opposition Obama faces, was the certainty of Romney’s victory among those who live and get their information from within the bubble of the news outlets that oppose Obama. Karl Rove exemplifies that bubble, judging by his tirade that his own employer — Fox News, which was the primary messenger of that organized opposition — had called the election for Obama too early. He doesn’t deserve person of the year; he deserves to have his head examined.

33. Paul Ryan. The vice presidential candidate in the losing ticket this year, Paul Ryan also gained some notoriety for writing a budget that proves he takes Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged a bit too seriously. While I have to admit that I loved watching him backpedal against his favoritism for Ms. Rand when someone called him on her atheism, he doesn’t deserve Person of the Year.

34. Jon Stewart. Even though they’re separate shows (now), few people deny the combined importance of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for exposing the lies not only of public officials but also of the news media themselves. The Colbert Report spun off of the Daily Show a few years ago, but their respective hosts are inexorably linked. As I said above, if Colbert deserves to be person of the year, so, too, does Jon Stewart.

35. Aung Suu Kyi and Thein Sein. Aung Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and has been working to gain a greater degree of freedom in Burma (or Myanmar, depending on how you want to spell it). Those efforts have been long and hard, but thanks to Thein Sein, Burma is on the road to freedom and prosperity. There is no greater symbol of this, than the fact that President Obama himself visited the country in November. Any hesitation I might have about these two people being honored as people of the year, comes from taking the media to task for not better informing us of how Burma has improved.

36. Undocumented Immigrants. Perhaps no group of people played a more interesting role in American politics, than the undocumented immigrants. Personally, I prefer the term “undocumented” to “illegal”. Both are accurate descriptions, but the latter implies that their misdeeds rank alongside of crimes like larceny, embezzlement, or any of the violent crimes that we have out there. They are a group of people that can split the Republican Party: the pro-business side that wants to find a path to citizenship and the side that sees them as illegal and wishes to toss them all out. Obama secured the hispanic vote squarely when he found a way to give undocumented people the path to citizenship, especially if they came here as children.

37. Xi Jinping. The next big name in Chinese politics, I will be curious to see how he guides the country over the next ten years, and I’m honestly not sure what to expect of him. Time will tell, of course, but certainly the very fact of his power assumption is interesting, when you consider that his father was purged by Chairman Mao. He’s got potential, but I don’t think he’s person of the year. Yet.

38. Malala Yousafzai. Now here is a powerful symbol of actions of the year. Shot by the Taliban for daring to learn and be educated while being undeniably guilty for being … female, she got out of Afghanistan, and, while she was recuperating in England, had the audacity to … try to learn more. Like Pussy Riot, she is a symbol of defiance against an authoritarian regime, with the primary difference being that few people doubt the evils committed by the Taliban, whereas the Putin regime tries to put on a positive public face. She deserves recognition, no question.

I think, in the end, that Malala Yousafzai and Pussy Riot jointly deserve People of the Year in 2012. Let’s call it modern Grrl Power Internationale…