This I Believe

I have been thinking about what I would write to the "This I Believe" program on NPR for a long time. Listening to the essays on the radio and through podcasts, I've often considered going through the exercise of writing one myself, but what I would write has been an assorted variety of whatever is on my mind at the time.

I believe in a lot of things, but when I started thinking about how I would explain my beliefs to my new son when he gets older, I realized that I could sum it up to say that I believe that nothing is absolute.

I would normally dive into the topic of beliefs by explaining the difference between things we know and those that we just suspect without concrete evidence. In a classical science versus religion debate, you can separate beliefs as ideas you hold to be true in the absense of proof, versus ideas that are supported by observable facts and can often be recreated by an experimenter. Belief in religion, by definition cannot be proven.

Some people believe that religion and science are, by their nature and definition, opposed to one another. They believe they you can't be a scientist of faith or a true member of your religion and also accept science. While there are areas were science and faith directly contradict on another, the vast majority of the ideas that religion deals with and the tenets that make up science do not have anything to do with each other.

While I believe that science holds the best hope of answering questions and solving the great mysteries of life, it does not and cannot answer some of the important questions in life, from the simple to the profound. Should we treat each other nicely, is murder wrong, or is it wrong to benefit at the expense of someone else's suffering.

You can't prove or disprove a moral code.

By my definition, religion is not confined to matters of organized faiths. I've never liked the idea of a group of people persistantly proclaiming that they know the unprovable truth about the deepest mysteries of life and humanity and everyone else is deluded. Because faith has no prove, I believe it has to be approached as a tenative or possible thing. In fact, religion's best power is the ability to have people explore their path in life and make corrections when things are going off track. But beyond major religions, I believe there are many other mysteries in life that are worth exploring. Ghosts, reincarnation, telepathy, human energy, and precognition are all areas that are more like religion than science. That doesn't mean they aren't interesting or important, just that no one has written a book and organized a church around them.

Sometimes science is seen as a way of exploring religion. Experiments have been done to measure the weight of a human soul, for example. Other times, scientific discoveries have threatened religious doctrine, such as when Copernicus described how the earth goes around the sun. Religion and science survived the battle that arose from that new idea, but both were changed.

Not anchoring your beliefs, yet being certain of what you know and not adrift in confusion is a good way to live your life. I believe it's best not to deal in absolutes. Even science rewrites theories from time to time when new evidence arises. Keeping your mind open and not getting stuck in absolutes is the best way to greet the new things that you encounter in life.

New Intellectual Property Model for BioEnergy Tech Development

I sent the following letter to Barack Obama and his Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

I would like to see a new form of technological development applied to bioenergy and alternate energy development. It would borrow elements from the aircraft and ship building during WWII.

During that time, the rules governing the competing goal of intellectual property rights (proprietary ownership of methods and designs) and rapid development through sharing knowledge were re-written. We need to share technological information in order to bring energy source changes to the public quicker.

A wiki style forum to share ideas in particular fields would have the advantage of bringing all the designers and developers abreast of the latest developments, as well as producing a consensus design that will provide standardization (and therefore more rapid diffusion) of the emerging technology.

In order to reward creativity and incentivize design efforts, we need to come up with a hybrid intellectual property rights formula. I propose that we use government money to fund selected pilot plant projects, with the stipulation that all design development will be instantly published and widely disseminated. This allows private individuals, research organizations, and private industry to develop technology without shouldering the huge capital expense of R&D. In exchange, technologies developed will be un-patentable, or patented for free public use. In some situations, we should offer patents that do not allow the patent holder to restrict use of the technology by others, in exchange for some licensing fee.

Using this plan, an example would be development of an algae energy plant. We could set the pilot plant up at some medium sized city's wastewater treatment plant, and start the job of turning the waste stream into clean water and algae based bio-fuels (ethanol and biodiesel, as well as livestock feed). University based researchers could test strains of algae, industry representatives could try equipment to convert the algae to lipids and starches, and engineering or research firms could be brought in to administer the pilot plant (and in the process learn how to plan and sell the plants to future customers).

Please consider the need to alter the current rules of intellectual property in order to speed development of our future alternative energy technologies.

Thank you.

Mike Jones

What Happened

I would add a couple of words in there to make it more salty, but I'll keep it clean.

I read former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened.

I am not impressed.

If you did not like Bush and ran out to buy this book in order to hear all the dirty little secrets about the Bush administration, hoping to hear about how corrupt and incompetent they are, this is not that book.

This is a book where a boot licking weasel tries to have it both ways. He's trying to essentially say that everything we believed was right, but we just botched the execution. I'm not particularly impressed with Scott as a great thinker of the day, especially after listening to his analysis. In the few times where he actually brings up a thorny and interesting subject, rather than taking it on and analyzing it a little, he says "that would take a whole other book to explore that subject." This is code for, "if we looked closer at that, we'd see even more glaring flaws in our ideology, so let's just skirt by the issue." More than anything else, it's a regurgitation of the endless stream of talking points that the Bush Administration is so famously known for, a strange continuation of the endless right wing propaganda, while also trying to somehow point out its flaws and explain why he wasn't responsible for where it went wrong.

Some times, he does incredible reversals. He talks about this horrible contentiousness in Washington, and how Bush wanted to rise above it and play a more honorable game, but the evil media or the evil entrenched politics of Washington sucked him into behaving just like everyone else. Then he starts bashing the Clinton administration. He has the gall to say that all this attack politics got completely out of control in the way that the Republicans continually attacked Clinton, and then to imply that it was Clinton's moral failings that brought it all on, or worst yet, the way Clinton defended himself helped cause the partisanship.

He spends a lot of time talking about what an attack dog Rove was and how he put politics above all other considerations when it came to making decisions. At the same time, this is the guy he strove to impress more than anyone else and he heaps praise on him for what a smart operator he is.

The way he spins the run up to the Iraq war is that Bush never really cared about Weapons of Mass Destruction, that all he really cared about was spreading Democracy and Freedom in the Middle East, but that he did not feel the American people would buy that, so he was a little disingenuous about why he REALLY wanted to go into war.

He gives little glimpses about how the personalities in the White House inter meshed and worked together. He says that Vice President Cheney would never give his opinion to President Bush in front of anyone else, and even within the staff, no one really knew much about what he thought or just how much influence he had.

I hope Scott makes enough money from this book to live on for the rest of his life, or that he has a plan for a career outside of politics, because there's nothing in this book that will endear him to either party. In the end, it's a sad book, of this lonely little man that just wants acceptance for himself and validation of his ideas to a polarized public that is unlikely to give him either.

Genghis by Conn Iggulden Book Review

Sometimes you get an unexpected bonus. I checked out an audiobook, Genghis: Birth of an Empire and started listening to it without reading any background on it.

After a few chapters, I finally thought "what is this story about?" The main character was a guy named Temüjin and he did not seem to be headed for any greatness. Before I spent too much time on a story that might not be anything like what I expected, I looked it up.

I knew the book was fiction, but it's that genre of book that is fiction in the sense that no one could have know the dialogue or minor action. The background or overlay of the story is accurate. I guess you could call it fictionalized history or historical fiction.

Genghis Khan lived around the year 1200. As you can imagine, there are not very good records of this time. However, he apparently dictated his history at some time in his life. All original versions of his history in his native language are lost, but a Chinese translation survived. This is what Conn Iggulden's book was based on.

This is a story that really grips you. You can imagine the harsh conditions and the tough life that the Mongol people endured. Temüjin was betrayed and abandoned with his family when he was 12 and not only managed to live, but went on to unify a group of tribes that had been warring against each other for as long as they could remember. The book takes you up to the betrayal of the Chinese ambassador and the defeat of the Tatars. There is a second book that should take you into some of the other conquests, I am definitely going to listen to it.

It was fortunate to find this book as an audiobook. The problem is that the names mess you up. They don't pronounce their K's, so the tribal leaders were actually called "Han". The images that stick in your mind when you listen to the story are the way they shoot their arrows when all 4 feet of the horse are off the ground, so that they get a steady shot.

It's not hard it imagine a life this harsh, with survival of the fittest making the tribes grow stronger each year, and constant warfare honing the warrior skills to a peak. The only thing that was missing was for someone to come along and unify the tribes into a single unstoppable unit.

It seems like a time long past and no longer able to give us lessons for today, but strength coming out of adversity and failure being a primer for success are two things that could be considered pertinent for today. Also useful, the thought of a unifying leader that can bring everyone together and make for an unstoppable people.