gentry i/o

It's funny because it's true... because it's funny

Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert go head to head to ferret out which is the true faith...

Catch a Seagull

OK - and now for the full effect, here's a post on something completely inconsequential... but friggin' amazing...

Performancing makes bloging a snap

So I've found a little tool called "Performancing" (sic) that makes it really easy to blog from within firefox while on a page (presumably a page about something you want to blog... It's pretty friggin awesome, methinks... you can do things like copy text:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easily. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.

And you can even drag-and-drop pictures (!) there are some little details that I'm not yet sure about (mostly UI) but for the most part I'd say this little thing is a dream. Too bad the company has called it quits, though out of its ashes a new biz may be rising... And now to click the publish button and see if this goes live...

Turn it back on!

Ok - so only blogging when I've got an axe to grind or a product to release hasn't exactly resulted in a proliferation of content... it would be fair to say this little site is, well, dead. And who cares? No one, that's who. But then there's the fact that I find all sorts of funny and interesting crap online and rarely share it with anyone... and now that Randy and I have got Bring A Trailer dialed, built solely from all the crap he digs up, I'm convinced it doesn't have to be so hard. So: first step is to find some lazy del.icio.us like way to add posts for cool shite I dig up. After that all I gotta do is use it. Piece 'o cake.

Standpedia

Justin and I would like to invite any Standpoint users who are interested to check out our newest experiment in social belief management: Standpedia. A close sibling of Standpoint, Standpedia leverages the PointMap technology employed at Standpoint in a wiki-like collaborative environment to create a social encyclopedia of controversy. Standpedia is of course in its infancy, but we welcome your thoughts, comments, and suggestions.

Carolina

Carolina on Democracy Now

Carolina on Democracy Now

Democracy Now, a daily show syndicated on 400 TV and radio stations around the nation,  dedicated a show to immigration today. They opened with my CAIR short video, followed by a phone interview with Carolina from Guatemala (which she has since been deported to ). If interested, you can watch a streaming version online here. The original film can be seen at http://films.gentry.io

Church of the Saviour: Now Online

I am excited to announce that an ongoing project titled inward/outward has finally gone online. inward/outward is an ongoing, online conversation about lived christianity as understood from the 60+ years of inward and outward journeying over at the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. I say "over at", but in reality one of the things that makes CoS so special is that their ecumenical approach to following Jesus over the last half-century has resulted in quite an extended family of co-followers all over the world. To date the Church has suffered from having no real online presence to speak of, in large part because it is, strictly speaking, non-existent, having died some time back to give life to a number of offspringing churches. Gordon's not your average preacher, and in order to keep the church from getting too big it split up a number of years ago and dissolved itself as an organization. Crazy, right? Peachtree and The Crystal Cathedral and all the rest would be -- are -- laughing all the way to the bank. But like the proverbial mustard seed this crazy little church continues to thrive in its own, gospel-like ironic way. Now, there's a quirky blog added to the mix -- one that hopes to pick up where the Daily Dig left off with daily inspirational emails, only instead of using them to drive some sort of conversion (a la Bruderhof), we'll use them to help readers connect with each other, so that that silly little mustard bush can keep on truckin'... It's our hope that inward/outward will become a sort of hub for the extended CoS community and a 'watering hole' on the journey of life for those who are so inclined toward the rediculous idea of taking Jesus seriously. I for one look forward to trip.

The Constant Gardener: Is there fact in that fiction?

At the end of The Constant Gardener, amidst the credits, there appears this curious quote from John Le Carré, author of the novel from which the film comes:

Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world. But I can tell you this: as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.

Now there's a thought. More here. At least one horror in the film is unquestionably true: the raids that Justin Quayle barely survives while hunting down Dr. Lorbeer are based on the 20-year history of kidnapping, torture, murder, and brainwashing of young boys in Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan by Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army. I have been learning a bit from Josh about the history of the LRA and Kony's long-standing capacity to avoid capture. This guy, evil incarnate, and quite possible the world's best example of a terrorist, has been raping and pillaging for 20 years and apparently no one can do anything to stop him. How does that happen? I mean, the war in Iraq is about evil and terrorism, not geopolitical strategy, right?

Unask the question

I want to talk now about truth traps and muscle traps and then stop this Chautauqua for today. Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But there’s one trap that isn’t...the truth trap of yes-no logic. Yes and no—this or that—one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros, that’s all. Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu.

Mu means "no thing." Like "Quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said "Mu," meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions. That mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. It’s just that, as usual, we’re trained not to see it by our heritage. For example, it’s stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for "one" and a voltage for "zero." That’s silly! Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state. They aren’t at one, they aren’t at zero, they’re in an indeterminate state that has no meaning in terms of ones or zeros. Readings of the voltmeter will show, in many cases, "floating ground" characteristics, in which the technician isn’t reading characteristics of the computer circuits at all but characteristics of the voltmeter itself. What’s happened is that the power-off condition is part of a context larger than the context in which the one zero states are considered universal. The question of one or zero has been "unasked." And there are plenty of other computer conditions besides a power-off condition in which mu answers are found because of larger contexts than the one-zero universality. The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn’t cheat, and nature’s answers are never irrelevant. It’s a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty, to sweep nature’s mu answers under the carpet. Recognition and valuatian of these answers would do a lot to bring logical theory closer to experimental practice. Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. In these cases he considers the experiment poorly designed, chides himself for stupidity and at best considers the "wasted" experiment which has provided the mu answer to be a kind of wheel-spinning which might help prevent mistakes in the design of future yes-no experiments. This low evaluation of the experiment which provided the mu answer isn’t justified. The mu answer is an important one. It’s told the scientist that the context of his question is too small for nature’s answer and that he must enlarge the context of the question. That is a very important answer! His understanding of nature is tremendously improved by it, which was the purpose of the experiment in the first place. A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answer. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the "phenomenon" that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! There’s nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. It’s just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance