Top 5 Things That Have Recently Blown My Mind

1. Learning to tie my shoes.

2. There are currently one billion unwanted one dollar coins sitting in vaults across the U.S. with another billion set to be minted. Following the success of the state quarters program, a law passed in 2005 required the Treasury to create a series of one dollar coins featuring the faces of all the U.S. presidents, as well as an equal amount of Sacajawea dollars. Dollar coins are more cost effective than paper dollars (they stay in circulation ten times longer), but the trouble is Americans hate them, and demand for the coins from banks has been much lower than Congress expected. When the program ends in 2016, Congress will have spent $600 million creating coins nobody wants. (By the way, if coin nonsense is your thing, check out this rant about eliminating the penny, which costs more than one cent to make.)

3. A desperate man in North Carolina robbed a bank three weeks ago in order to get free health care in prison. This is what we have come to.

4. According to President Obama, bombing another country doesn't count as "hostility."

5. I've been hearing rumors about this for a couple years, but now it's finally a reality: a company called Lytro is marketing a point-and-shoot camera which allows the user to re-focus an image after it has been taken. I'm convinced it won't be too long before we will be explaining to our kids that when we were young, cameras had to be focused. You can try out a demo of this technology by clicking on different places on the image below (or go here for more).



Bonus Thing: Up to 10,000 shipping containers (which are bit larger than what a tractor-trailer pulls) are lost at sea each year.

Quotes: Education, Religion, and Na'aseh V'nishma

"Nine tenths of education is encouragement." Anatole France

"If you feel that Catholicism or Christianity or religion is not represented, by detractors or defenders, in ways that honor its profundity and beauty, live out its profundity and beauty. To do this is more telling than any argument." Marilynne Robinson via Carolyn Tapie

"Na'aseh v'nishma – we will do, then we will understand." Jewish saying

Google Voice Review

I have been using Google Voice for over a year now and I thought I would share about my experience for those who might be interested in using the service.

Google Voice is a free telecom service which provides you with a telephone number. Using Google's web app, you can redirect calls made to this number to any other number (such as your cell, home, or office number), or ring multiple numbers simultaneously. If someone leaves you a voicemail message using your Google Voice number, Google can transcribe it and email or text it to you. Text messages to your Google Voice number can be emailed as well, and they're free. You can use the service to  place calls over the internet, listen to your voicemail online, set up number-specific voicemail greetings, route calls from certain numbers to certain phones, place conference calls, block/screen callers, forward/download voicemail messages, record/archive calls online, and place low-rate international calls.

As for me, Google Voice has been primarily beneficial for my wife Erin's small business. Google Voice provides her a free, local work phone number which forwards to her cell phone. It just makes sense.

However, the benefits fall off sharply there. Erin has an Android smartphone, so placing calls from her Google Voice number (ensuring that when she calls someone, her Google Voice number will show up in their caller ID) is easy. However, if you have any other phone or smartphone, you must call your Google Voice number first and then punch in the number you're calling to achieve this. Or alternately, you can add your Google Voice number to the beginning of all the contact numbers in your cell phone.

In addition, because calls using your Google Voice number are routed through Google's system, you do not get in-network calling benefits if you use Google Voice. So for instance, if I call someone who is on Verizon from my Verizon cell phone, but I use Google Voice, Verizon will charge me as if I was calling a non-Verizon number.

The voicemail transcribing feature would be a huge benefit if it worked well. Unfortunately the transcriptions are hardly ever comprehensible. The most use I've gotten out of them is reading them back to the caller later for a laugh. Having my voicemail messages archived online seemed like a great idea at first too, but once I tried it I realized most voicemail messages are temporal; I listen to them quickly, respond, and then I don't need them anymore.

The biggest detriment to the service however is delays. Erin and I have both experienced delays up to 24 hours in receiving voicemail messages and texts made to our Google Voice number, and when using Google Voice to handle voicemail messages left to our primary cell phone numbers (another feature of the service). However this only seems to apply to cell phone notifications; Erin has never experienced a delay in email notification of a text or voicemail message. She is able to use the service by relying on her phone's email alerts to notify her of new voicemail messages.

As for me, I've simply resorted to using my Google Voice number only when I need to give someone (such as a mechanic or someone with a home phone) a local number, since my primary cell phone number still has an out-of-state area code. This, along with the advantages for small businesses, seem to me to be the best use of the service. Free text messages and voicemail transcribing are great, but only if they're on time. Reliability is key.

Image: sanberdoo

Update 6/20/11: I'm told Blackberry also has a Google Voice app which allows you to easily make calls from your Google Voice number.

Our Shadow Government

Here's a quick quiz for you: has federal funding for NPR been cut recently? How about this one: has the 2010 health care legislation been repealed?

"No" is the answer to both, but I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone make a reference to NPR's funding being cut in conversation. As for the health care reform act, one in five Americans think it has been repealed, and another quarter aren't sure:

Source: KFF.org

In last week's thoroughly depressing Republican presidential debate, Michelle Bachman was again bragging about the bill she introduced to repeal the health care act. It may seem obvious that proposing impossible-to-pass legislation (such a repeal would never make it out of the Senate and if it did would be vetoed immediately) is a waste of time and taxpayer money—but here the benefit is clear: House Republicans managed to convince almost a quarter of the country the representatives had actually done something. They got a ton of political capital for sitting on their asses and appearing to work.

The NPR strategy was similar. Early this year John Boehner relaxed the House rules so that anyone could propose an amendment to the budget bill that was making its way through Congress, and Republicans started tacking on everything from eliminating Planned Parenthood to defunding scientists who research global warming. Of course none of this had a snowball's chance in hell of making it into law, but the lightning rod nature of the issues at hand was the perfect bait for a news media that cares much more about controversy than what is actually important for people to know (Weinergate sells papers, bombing Yemen does not). Thus a whole bunch of people who don't have the time or inclination to follow bills through Congress (i.e., to do the news media's job for them) wound up thinking NPR is on its own now.

Not only are people convinced the government has done things that never happened, they also believe the government hasn't done things it actually has. A report published last August found that 25 percent of people using food stamps, government housing, Medicaid, or welfare said they had never used a government program. Forty percent of those who use Medicare or veteran's benefits said the same, as did 53 percent of those with student loans.

We may have government by the people, but those people have no idea what they're doing.

Instrument of Peace

It's not exactly a big secret that the vast majority of worship music is just terrible. After many years of playing in worship bands, Erin and I became worship leaders at our church last year, and I was given the responsibility to choose what songs we play. It's something I love to do, but given what's out there, it's a difficult job.

Last week a friend of mine sent me an open letter to Christian songwriters penned by Brian McLaren in 2004. I share many of McLaren's desires for better music for the church. In his letter, McLaren asks for less music about the personal experience of Jesus taking our sin away (as I've come to grips with many times on this blog, interacting with sin is not the focal point of the Christian life). He asks for more music about God's kingdom coming on earth, more music about serving our neighbors, more music that connects us to the spiritual ideas and traditions of our Christian ancestors, more music that discusses the lament and suffering as well as the peace and joy of the Christian life. He asks for less war metaphor, more songs that speak to folks unfamiliar with church, more lyrics that speak of non-Christians with love and respect, more musical variety in style and rhythm, and for the love of all things that are holy, more poetry-infused lyrics that reflect a passion for the beauty of the written word.

Not to be one who piles on criticism without offering to help fix things, in 2007 McLaren teamed up with songwriter Tracy Howe Wispelwey to produce an album titled Songs for a Revolution of Hope, which aimed to create music that matched McLaren's vision for Christian songwriting.

At first I was excited to learn this, my hopes high that I had discovered a treasure chest of music that threw a wrench in the gears of the trite and shallow worship music machine. But then I listened to some of McLaren and Wispelwey's music, and the sad truth was inescapable: I just don't like it that much. The lyrics certainly resist formula, but the music just doesn't inspire me.

However, McLaren's words are still fresh in my mind, and I am on the lookout for music that breaks out of the "love songs to Jesus" gridlock. Recently another friend serendipitously introduced me to the following song, "Instrument of Peace" by the Paul Colman trio. It's old, originally appearing in the City on a Hill series back in 2003. But its lyrical focus on the need to become a minister of forgiveness, peace, and reconciliation and a member of God's present kingdom impressed me—plus I kinda liked the music.

Paul Colman Trio – "Instrument of Peace"


So the search is on for music like this, and I could use all the help I can get. If you have a worship song that you like, which doesn't conform to the "three chords and a cliché" pattern of modern worship songs, please leave a comment here or email me via the link in the sidebar and let me know!

Image: Accretion Disc

Evolution of a Bass Line

Long before there were ridiculously awesome YouTube video mashups, there was hip-hop:

1981


1982


1991


1994


2010

Love in the Time of Tech

A wonderfully written NYT editorial by novelist Jonathan Franzen has been swirling around the internet lately, and a dear friend of mine encouraged me to write some thoughts here after I expressed some disagreement with it. The article's original title was "Technology Provides an Alternative to Love"—and it had some beautiful things to say about love. But I wish Franzen had left technology out of it.

After an introduction relating how we anthropomorphize our tech gadgets into magic, "sexy," self-serving dispensers of instant gratification, Franzen makes the central blunder of his piece with the following statement:

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

The problem of course is this isn't the goal of technology at all. Or rather it limits all of technology to the systems behind on-demand movies and online pizza orders. Technology's crafters do not aspire to remake the world into a Mecca of instant gratification, devoid of hurricanes and heartbreaks. The goal of all technology is to enable its user to accomplish a task that serves some purpose. Some technology is used for noble purposes (mosquito nets, water purification) and some is not (assault rifles, uranium enrichment).

If you think about this a minute, you'll realize how silly it is to limit technology in this way. Consider the story of the space program, of men and women staring at the night sky, longing to walk on another world. Can we say that their centuries-long struggle to engineer a craft that would finally take them there is a triumph of instant gratification, of remaking the world so that it pleases us? Or is it about exploration, ingenuity, and discovery? Think about any piece of non-consumer tech: MRIs, particle accelerators, the hammer, the printing press, the wheel. Is this all about extending the self?

Even Franzen himself knows it's not. He goes on to delineate "consumer products" as those "whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it," and places jet engines and laboratory equipment in this category, ignoring that these are technological devices. And this reveals what I think Franzen really believes: he doesn't have a problem with technology; he has a problem with consumerism.

It's advertising and consumerism that have turned loving into liking and pushed the message that "if you love somebody you should buy stuff." It's not the computer, or the internet, or even Facebook's source code that created the Facebook 'Like' button Franzen despises. The like button was created by folks who had the world's biggest social network on their hands and wanted to monetize it. To do this, they needed to connect companies with Facebook users and turn them into customers. This is what consumerism does. It tells you that the world can be an extension of the self, that you can have anything you want instantly, that you can ignore the pain and sacrifice of real love and get a girl who will do nothing but please you, if only you will hand over some cash. Technology has little to do with it.

If you choose to ignore what Franzen has to say about technology and social media (when oh when will people get over the idea that Facebook friendships corrupt real friendships?) and focus on what he has to say about love, you'll wind up with a truly beautiful piece. The second half of the article is full of gems like this one, about how love is about specificity and sacrifice and surrender:

"And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self."

And this one, about giving up trying to save the world (which you cannot do) and learning to love small pieces of it beyond measure (which you can) instead:

"When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?"

Tanks and tractors, pistols and plowshares... technology as a whole has no telos. Franzen set out to tell us something truthful and beautiful about love and got a little lost along the way. But it's no trouble; he made it after all.

Image: Sam Howzit