So Long, For Now

I have some news, so I'll cut straight to the chase: starting today, Guesswork Theory is taking an extended, perhaps permanent hiatus.

I made this decision about a month ago, when I had the unsettling realization that I will turn thirty next year. I know to some readers thirty will sound very young—and it is. But many heroes of mine produced exceptional work in their twenties. I've had one of those terrible moments when you realize just how quickly life is moving. When I think about all the things I hope to accomplish and experience in my life, this blog just doesn't leap to mind. But when I think of what I spend my time on each week, this blog certainly does. So a disconnect has arisen.

I have no plans to take down what I've written here, though if I do decide to start blogging again I will probably restructure it. I will also continue sharing things that fascinate me on my tumblr, bigfind.justinis.com (which is connected to Twitter, if that's your thing).

Garrison Keillor has taught me well the reason you should never quit: because when you do, it won't make that big a difference to people. I understand this decision isn't terribly significant. But as I read the words of the impressionable guy who sat down to write his first post here seven years ago, I can see I have learned from this experience. It was worth doing. I'm so glad I did.

If you are someone who has read this blog from time to time, left a comment or brought it up in conversation, there is no way I can thank you as much as I want to. It has meant a great deal to me.

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"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a [blog]." Edward Gibbon

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." Emerson

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the internet, we know that is not true." Robert Wilensky

"But he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves." Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly." G.K. Chesterton

Image: Michael Kalus

Top 10 Things That Have Recently Blown My Mind

1. Two weeks ago a video of an inventor asking the internet to suggest names for "the greatest toy in the universe" went viral. The inventor's name is Jaimie Mantzel, and he is one of the most endearingly eccentric people I've ever encountered. He lives completely off the grid on twenty acres in the Vermont woods, in a house he built himself out of boards he cut from logs using a home-built sawmill. One level of his home has a trampoline for a floor. His most (perhaps only) successful creation is a one-foot tall six-legged spider-like robot, which he recently sold to a British toy manufacturer. For the last five years he has been working on a twelve-foot tall version which will carry a human operator; he calls it the Giant Robot Project.

2. The cadavers used in the popular Bodies exhibit were procured from the Chinese police. It is possible they are the bodies of prisoners who were tortured and executed by the Chinese government. The company who owns, operates, and profits from the exhibit has admitted it cannot verify where the bodies came from.

3. In response to a Newsweek article that claimed they live in a "dying city," five thousand people in Grand Rapids, Michigan took part in the largest (and in my opinion, most heartwarming) music video ever created. It's a slice of pure Americana.

4. Segregation continues to die. All-white neighborhoods are now effectively extinct.

5. After trying for seventeen years, the New York department of education has finally won a ruling enabling them to evict congregations that meet in public schools on weekends, citing the separation of church and state. Erin put it best: people have truly begun to take "shall make no law" to a ridiculous level.

6. An incredible letter from a former slave to his old master.

7. For the past three years, Russian director/megalomaniac Ilya Khrzhanovsky has been filming a biography of physicist Lev Landau. To do this, he has created a full-scale replica of a small city from the 1950s USSR, in which thousands of actors live, in character, 24/7, and over which he rules as their Stalin stand-in.

8. A judge in Britain has ruled that the similarity between two separate photographs of double-decker buses in the same location is enough to warrant copyright infringement.

9. Last year a study found that for 8th graders in the United States, homework in science, English, and history had little or no impact on students' test scores.

10. Nevada has become the first state to make self-driving cars street legal. The car of the future is here.

Bonus thing: How close we are to having invisibility cloaks.

The Idea Clearing House: Part III

This post is part three in a three part series in which I clear out my backlog of blog post ideas and present them in a few short sentences. Here are parts one and two.

13. Just as religion has been twisted to support the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and the like, science has been twisted to support atrocities like eugenics and genocide. It has been used to excuse the brutal racism displayed in the Tuskeegee and Guatemala syphilis studies. New Atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens draw causal link between religion and perversions such as the Crusades, while religious people like Ben Stein (in the film Expelled) draw a causal link between science and perversions such as the Holocaust. Both are woefully wrong. Neither science nor religion as a whole is responsible for the evil misapplication of its ideas.

14. Despite having been whole-heartedly against 2008's bailout of Chrysler and GM, I am finding it very hard to argue pragmatically that they were a bad move. GM has completely turned around and is taking advantage of its dominance in Asia, the fastest-growing car market in the world. Though the turn-around was largely to GM's credit, the government's decision to keep GM from going under saved millions of U.S. jobs from destruction. On the whole, TARP helped prevent a string of bank failures which could have led to a second Great Depression and the nationalization of banks across America — and most of it has been paid back. I have to hand it to ol' GW: if you set ideology aside, TARP was a resounding success. What's an Austrian economist to make of it?

15. French novelist Honore de Balzac said, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." I think how true or false a person believes this quote to be really gets at the heart of their political beliefs. As a centrist, I struggle deeply with it.

16. I am so tired of people assuming Christians are confined to the 'Christian' media industry ('Christian' record labels, 'Christian' publishers, etc). Stephen Colbert is a Christian. So is John Grisham. There are Christians working at Pixar and Apple and Random House and thousands of other creative companies. Christians as a whole are not responsible for the artistic swamp that is the 'Christian' media industry.

17. In 2009, a web developer in Brooklyn decided to splice up Star Wars: A New Hope into 15-second segments and ask Star Wars fans to recreate them in their own backyards. He instructed them to submit their creations on his website, and where he would splice them together into a new, fan-film version of the original called Star Wars Uncut. The result was posted to the internet at the same time the SOPA and PIPA bills were being protested. If these bills had made it into law, projects like Star Wars Uncut would be impossible without permission from Lucas himself, because current copyright law forbids derivative works. I encourage you to take a look at Star Wars Uncut and consider if it is a re-creation of George Lucas' film that steals his ideas, or instead a completely new piece of art. (On this point, it is worth noting that the vast majority of YouTube's content is illegal due to copyright infringement, but is not taken down because YouTube only removes videos at copyright owners' request. This fact appears completely unknown to most YouTube video creators.)

18. I cannot think of an election in recent history in which the leading candidates from the two major political parties (Romney and Obama) were more loathed by voters, both in their own party and the opposition's. This is the ripest time for a sensible third party presidential candidate in decades. Would that we had one.

19. As my friend Nathan Elmore discussed recently, so much of the worship music in the current American Christian consciousness focuses on the guilt of sin and the atoning power of the cross rather than the call of redeemed Christians once their sin has been expunged. I think this is reflective of the evangelical obsession with sin and checklist lifestyles that are so easy to understand and live, at the expense of what I believe is the deeper call of the Christian life: to love your neighbor and your God. As a worship leader, I hope to root out more good music that focuses not just on life after the cross, but life after the resurrection.

Image: LA Wad

The Idea Clearing House: Part II

This post is part two in a three part series in which I clear out my backlog of blog post ideas and present them in a few short sentences. Here is part I.

7. Everywhere I look, I find more smart people who think the world is not actually getting worse, we just underestimate our past depravity. Here's Marilynne Robinson: "There has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There's no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time."

8. I am uncomfortable with the modern tendency towards churches which revolve around one personality. A friend of mine (theologian Matt Tapie) shared a fascinating essay with me by John Yoder, who argues that the very idea of a lead pastor or minister was unknown to the early church. You can check it out in chapter four of Yoder's Body Politics.

9. It may be that Obama did not allow American citizens to be indefinitely (and unconstitutionally) detained by signing the latest defense appropriations bill. It may be that the president already had this power since Congress gave it to President Bush in 2001. Regardless, how could he sign a bill affirming it? If he feels so bad about it, how could he not demand it be repealed? How could a former Constitutional law professor live with such a decision? And where are all those folks who were so livid about the Patriot Act? Where is their outrage now?

10. You really should be careful about protecting your hearing. One in five kids these days has hearing loss, possibly because of the rise of earbuds and personal music players. The volume of the average rock concert is enough to cause permanent hearing damage after thirty minutes. No music is worth that. Get yourself a pair of these and be careful out there.

11. It is possible for taxes to be used as a force for good. Here in DC, a five cent tax on plastic bags has made huge strides in decreasing the number of bags dumped in the Potomac River (our main source of drinking water). Personally, the tax has been very effective in motivating me not to use plastic bags unless I absolutely have to, when before I wouldn't have bothered. As far as I can tell no one has been hurt by the tax, except perhaps the plastic bag industry—but I think they're doing alright. Other things I would support taxing more: oil, gasoline, carbon, and cigarettes.

12. Let's face it: you're probably never gonna quit Facebook, no matter what crap they pull.

Image: quinn.anya

The Idea Clearing House: Part I

I decided to start the new year I would clean out my long list of blog post ideas, much like I did last year. Below are six ideas which at one time or another I intended to expand into full blog posts, presented here in abbreviated form. I'll be doling out more ideas in parts two and three of this series. Enjoy!

1. Despite all the news last year about NPR's alleged Liberal bias, NPR's fantastic economics reporting is one of the major influences in my life that keeps me grounded in Conservatism. See this story, or this one, or this one, or this one for a taste of what I mean.

2. Apple, Google, and Facebook's schemes for world domination include eliminating the middleman in the form of phone carriers and credit card companies. Their many free texting and talk apps are eating away at phone carriers' lucrative SMS and voice business, turning carriers into dumb wire companies like your internet service provider. In fact, Apple even attempted to bypass carriers altogether by creating an independent voice network powered by WiFi. Google is doing the same thing to credit card companies by enabling customers to use their phones as wallets. Once people are used to paying for things with their phones, it will be simpler and easier to use Google's payment and coupon products instead of credit cards and Groupon. As for Apple, mom and pop stores around the country are already using iPads as cash registers; just wait till you can wave your iPhone at one to pay. Apple will own both sides of millions of transactions.

3. I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about big ideas, but there are rumors that big ideas are dying. Neal Gabler argues in the New York Times that no one thinks any more (a common sentiment of folks his age throughout history), and Wired's Timothy Ferris counters that ideas aren't gone, just the "celebration of big, pretentious ideas untethered to facts."

4. The idea that Conservatives inherently do not care about the poor is a myth. Though I hesitate to play partisan politics (as the article I am going to link to unfortunately does), there is a decent amount of evidence that people who identify themselves as Conservative donate more of their time and money to both public and private charities than those who do not. This is also true of people who identify themselves as religious, possibly because empathy alone is a poor motivator for positive social change.

5. Can we just be honest for a second: politicians do not create jobs. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Sure politicians can make things more or less difficult for entrepreneurs, but saying that's the same thing as job creation is like saying you created a vase by not smashing it with a hammer. One of my favorite lines from The West Wing was from a Republican presidential candidate (saying what no Republican presidential candidate could ever say) when asked how many jobs he would create as president: "None. In fact, I'll cut jobs. I will reduce the number of jobs in the federal government. Now I know I'm supposed to tell you that my tax cuts are supposed to stimulate the economy and therefore create jobs. But entrepreneurs create jobs."

6. I'm convinced: should I ever have children, I will strive to praise their effort, not their intelligence.

Image: zetson

How to Convert PDFs to Word Documents for Free with Google Docs

Anyone who does a moderate amount of word-processing has at one time or another needed to convert a pdf into an editable format, such as a Microsoft Word document. For $449, Adobe Acrobat will give you all the tools you need. If you're like me, that's about $444 too steep. Luckily Google Docs offers a completely free solution. The formatting in the end product won't be perfect, but at the very least it will keep you from having to type your pdf into Word by hand.

Here's how to do it.

Giving Up What God Didn't Promise

I attended a church service a year or so ago during which the pastor spent some time illustrating ways Christians misrepresent Christ and the Gospel. He explained how Christians sometimes claim that if you come to Jesus, you will have happiness and contentment. Then someone comes to Jesus, and their family member dies in a car accident, and they reject him. Sometimes Christians claim that if you come to Jesus, you will be blessed with wealth and security. Then someone comes to Jesus, and a financial crisis takes everything they have, and they reject him.

The pastor explained: Christ never promised these things. He promised mercy, grace, and a relationship with him. But he also promised that this broken world would bring us suffering and persecution. When Christians make promises in the name of Christ which Christ never made, they set up new believers for disappointment and despair.

This much I've been taught before, but not in this way. It struck me that there is one particular false promise that I've bought for a long time. And every time God doesn't make good on this promise I've attributed to him, I'm left with disappointment, confusion, and often anger.

I believe God promised me that if I came to him, he would make the world make sense. He didn't, and it doesn't.

Now I didn't expect God to give me a reason for everything that happens, or to fully reveal the inner workings of the human condition, or give me a bankable answer to every spiritual question I have. But I'm starting to realize that deep inside me I expect God to provide a cognitive, cohesive belief system. A basic set of ideas which fit together in such a way that the world can be intellectually approached without fear of contradiction or complete confusion. I know that God is truth, and that he created this world, and therefore somehow my gut has concluded that if I follow him I will find a sublime coherence.

But I've looked in the Bible, and this promise isn't there. At no point does Jesus set a pile of philosophy texts on the ground in front of five thousand onlookers and promise, "Follow me, and all this will fit together."

I understand why Christians think it's there. Throughout the modern age religion has been accused of lacking any semblance of intellectual integrity. We have been accused of being sheep, of lying to ourselves, of believing in contradictions we pretend aren't there. We are accused of choosing fairy tales (dangerous fairy tales, at that) when plain and simple facts are laid before us. We want to defend ourselves, and to a certain extent we should. God is the creator of all truth and knowledge and we should seek this truth diligently and passionately. He has revealed much to us and he has even more yet to reveal. Belief in Christ is not a conceptual balm for the simple-minded.

Still, this world is full of mystery. There are many things God has chosen not to reveal, though sometimes they grate against my desire for truth and justice. God has given me himself, his son, and I am charged to let that be enough.

Image: TheOtter

Quotes: Frontier, Mystery, and Problems that Do Not Disappear

"The spiritual life cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier, and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed." Howard Macey via Melissa Guthrie

"The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing." Raymond Chandler

"God offers a way to live with questions that do not have answers, and problems that do not disappear." Del Glick