In the newspaper that Americans like to call The Times of London, my favourite Rabbi writes a rather thoughtful article about how The Argument from Design was never a very good argument anyway. So, while Darwin’s marvellous idea may have dealt a death blow to believers in a literal creation, thoughtful believers, like Britain’s Chief Rabbi, who think of those first verses of Genesis as allegorical had nothing to wonder about.

The Rabbi’s belief is founded on the mysteries that are safe from science’s searching eye.

In fact none of the most important truths can be proved: that right is sovereign over might, that it is better to be loved than feared, that every human being however poor or powerless is worthy of respect, that peace is nobler than war, forgiveness greater than revenge, and hope a higher virtue than resignation to blind fate. Lives have been lived and civilisations built in defiance of these truths, yet they remain true.

The believer might mention other mysteries, such as how did life evolve from non-life? How did sentience emerge? How was the uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness born? How did life evolve at such speed that even Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, was forced to suggest that it came from Mars? And the ultimate ontological question: why is there something rather than nothing?

We might refer to the arguments that persuaded the philosopher Antony Flew, late in life, to abandon his atheism. She might cite the curious paradox, noted by Richard Dawkins, that selfish genes get together and produce selfless people. We might wonder at the fact that Homo sapiens is the only known life form in the Universe capable of asking “Why?” And we might add, in the spirit of Godel’s Theorem, that there are truths within the system that cannot be proved within the system.

We would then say: None of these is a proof. Each, rather, is a source of wonder. The Psalm does not say, “The heavens prove the existence of God”. It says, “The heavens declare the glory of God”. Darwin helped us to understand how the many emerged from one. The more we know about the intricacy and improbability of life, the more reason we have to wonder and give thanks.

On the spectrum of belief, this falls somewhere between Science can’t explain everything and God exists outside our comprehension.

click for bigger diagram

I know, from reading Sack’s previous writings, that his God is the mysterious God that exists outside of our understanding and that’s the God that I am most interested in. It’s all too easy to dismiss the other Gods but this God is more powerful than the others because it does not really exist according to our usual understanding of ‘exist’. If the Koran had a name for it it would be The Undismissable One.

I enjoy a good paradox and I wish I understood what it means to believe in something that does not exist. I also wish I understood how Jonathon Sacks squares this belief with the stories in the Old Testament. [I wonder if Johnathon Sacks has a Google Alert on his name like Alan Kay has? (Hi, Alan!)]

In my Slippery Trinity, I called this kind of God The Mysterious God. PZ Myers calls it “Oom“.

Theologians play that one like a harp, though, turning it into a useful strategem. Toss the attractive, personal, loving or vengeful anthropomorphic tribal god to the hoi-polloi to keep them happy, no matter how ridiculous the idea is and how quickly it fails on casual inspection, while holding the abstract, useless, lofty god in reserve to lob at the uppity atheists when they dare to raise questions…It gets annoying. We need two names for these two concepts, I think. How about just plain “God” for the personal, loving, being that most Christians believe in, and “Oom” for the bloodless, fuzzy, impersonal abstraction of the theologians? Not that the theologians will ever go along with it; the last thing they want made obvious is the fact that they’re studying a completely different god from the creature most of the culture is worshipping.

She is Hillary’s ideological opposite.

But she is her gynaecological twin.

Since I have access to all the songs in the world I told Rhapsody to just play me some songs that you think I might like.

Rhapsody thought I might like to listen to some Kate Bush which was nice because I haven’t listened to Kate Bush since I was about thirteen with hormones and she was about 19 and hot and she lived in the same town as me - Bexleyheath.

I listened to a few familiar tracks - weird as ever - and then suddenly our Kate seemed to be singing “three point one four one five nine…”. That’s odd I thought and glanced at the title.

Sure enough, the song was called π.

“I wonder if there is a story behind the song?” I wondered. And googled.

The song is fairly recent and is a tribute to a man who is infatuated with everyone’s favourite transcendental number.

It starts…

“Sweet and gentle and sensitive man
With an obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers
And a complete infatuation with the calculation of PI

…and then continues with Kate singing the first 150 digits of pi…but she gets it wrong! She skips a few around 137!

Clearly Kate is much too smart to make a mistake like that and there is bound to be a fascinating explanation…and…the interwebs are full of them.

Some of my favourites:

the best Craftsmen always make one deliberate mistake in anything they create so that the Gods don’t punish them for their arrowgance.

The supposed mistakes in pi are all deliberate, and she has actually used them (and lots of other tricks) to embed a secret message in the song. It is our job to decode what that message is.

If that’s what Kate says pi is, then thats good enough for me. I’m hacking my calculator and patching my maths libraries.

And my favourite theory of all:

Kate Bush has been looking all her life for a man who is so geeky that he would notice an error in the Pi song. She’ll be reading your blog and fantasising about you now, you lucky bugger,

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter patty valentine from the upper hall.
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood,
Cries out, my god, they killed them all!
Here comes the story of the hurricane,
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin that he never done.
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

There are a countless attributes that I admire about Bob Dylan but the talent that still has me in awe - although I have heard the songs a thousand times before - is his talent for exposition.

In that first verse ofThe Hurricane, he lays down everything you need to know about Rubin Carter. A few short verses later and you know the whole story years before the real story even ended and in detail that the movie was barely able to touch.

And he does it in song after song.

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood.
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
Only a Pawn in the Game

Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children
And his cabin fallin’ down
Ballad Of Hollis Brown

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll

There was something about Bill Clinton’s speech today that reminded me of Bob Dylan.

After 8 years of republican mismanagement, the dems have been unable to put their frustrations into words without waffling or nuance or hedging.

Clinton covered the whole thing in 159 words.

Our nation is in trouble on two fronts: The American Dream is under siege at home, and America’s leadership in the world has been weakened.

Middle class and low-income Americans are hurting, with incomes declining; job losses, poverty and inequality rising; mortgage foreclosures and credit card debt increasing; health care coverage disappearing; and a big spike in the cost of food, utilities, and gasoline.

Our position in the world has been weakened by too much unilateralism and too little cooperation; a perilous dependence on imported oil; a refusal to lead on global warming; a growing indebtedness and a dependence on foreign lenders; a severely burdened military; a backsliding on global non-proliferation and arms control agreements; and a failure to consistently use the power of diplomacy, from the Middle East to Africa to Latin America to Central and Eastern Europe.

Clearly, the job of the next President is to rebuild the American Dream and restore America’s standing in the world.

In the next few versus, he told the rest of the story - even before the real story has ended.

I think he might have just won the election for Obama.

They are saying almost the same thing, right?

“Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall.”

The NY Times Magazine has an 8 page article on Obama’s economic policy. It’s required reading for anyone who claims that Obama is long on rhetoric and short on specifics.

Some highlights for people who don’t like to read detailed policy specifics or don’t like registering to read free articles:

For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems to have ended without family income having risen substantially. Most families are still making less, after accounting for inflation, than they were in 2000.

As anyone who has spent time with Obama knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research. (James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at Goolsbee’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”) By surrounding himself with economists, however, Obama was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets.

“The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production,” Obama told me. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” But, he continued, “there are certain things the market doesn’t automatically do.”

When Reagan was elected, in 1980, tax rates on top incomes were so high that even liberal economists now say the economy was suffering. There simply wasn’t enough of an incentive for rich people to start new companies or expand existing ones, because so much of their profits would have gone to the federal government. Someone making the equivalent of $5 million in 1980 — in inflation-adjusted terms — would have paid a combined federal tax rate of almost 60 percent, according to research by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, two academic economists. (These calculations cover not only income taxes but also payroll taxes, capital-gains taxes and others.) Reagan, by the end of his second term, had cut this rate to about 35 percent. Clinton raised it above 40 percent, but the current President Bush has reduced it to 34 percent. So over the same period that the rich have been getting much richer before taxes, their tax rates have also been falling far faster than the rates of any other income group.

The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.

If there is a theme to the Obama tax philosophy, it’s that the tax code is not quite as progressive as you think it is. Most of the public discussion about taxes tends to focus on the income tax, which taxes the affluent at a considerably higher rate than anyone else. But the income tax doesn’t take the biggest bite out of most families’ annual tax bill. The payroll tax does.

McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year…[snip]…The bulk of Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy — about $500,000 of that $800,000 — would simply take away Bush’s tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn’t nearly reverse their pretax income gains in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, their inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled…[snip]…As ambitious as Obama’s proposals might be, they would still leave the gap between the rich and everyone else far wider than it was 15 or 30 years ago. It just wouldn’t be quite as wide as it is now.

The second criticism is that Obama’s tax increases would send an already-weak economy into a tailspin. The problem with this argument is that it’s been made before, fairly recently, and it proved to be spectacularly wrong. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on upper-income families in 1993, his supply-side critics insisted that he would ruin the economy. As we now know, Clinton presided over the longest economic expansion on record, the fastest income growth most workers had experienced in a generation and the disappearance of the federal-budget deficit. His successor, Bush, then did exactly what the supply-siders wanted, cutting upper-income tax rates, and the results were much worse.

Since the dawn of the Age of Reagan, the idea that government spending can be a good thing for the economy has been out of favor, even among Democrats. But it’s now making something of a comeback, particularly within Obama’s camp. His agenda calls for about $50 billion in new annual spending on various investments, including infrastructure, alternative energy and scientific research.

So I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan’s simple call for less government and lower taxes.

He paused for a few seconds and then said this:

“I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace.

“Now, that’s the story. Now, telling it elegantly — ‘low taxes, smaller government’ — the way the Republicans have, I think is more of a challenge.”

I clearly cherry-picked the good bits and you’ll have to read the article yourself for the more critical bits. But, if you enjoyed the McCain piece that I linked to a couple of months ago, you’ll enjoy this one too.

Called it

If Obama wins big in Iowa, Clinton’s strategy of running as a front-runner will need some re-thinking. She’ll have to go for some mud-slinging instead…which will do the opposite of help. Biden will drop out, endorse Obama and be his Veep.

Called this too.

I hope and predict that the final race comes down to Obama vs McCain in November.  Maybe they’ll skip the silly name-calling that usually passes for political debate in this country and actually debate the issues a little. Wouldn’t that be nice. It might even be educational. Inspirational even.

Missed this one though.

Word of the year: transcend. Remember, you read it hear first.

Not much sign of transcendence so far. Can’t be right all the time, I suppose.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

William James

I have had my Squeezebox for a good while now but I just discovered that I have been missing its best feature.

Squeezebox comes with SqueezeCenter - a piece of software that lets you remote control your Squeezebox from a PC.You can stream music from your hard drives or iTunes or any number of internet radio stations or subscription services. But the best bit is that SqueezeCenter is hackable.

SqueezeCenter is open source and has a plugin model and there are tons of plugins for it. Here’s my favourite:

Do you ever find you’re in the middle of listening to your favourite track when your other half suddenly announces that the volume is far too loud and turns it down for you? If so, this may be the plugin for you! VolumeGuard detects “unauthorised” changes in volume and stealthily restores the volume to its original level. Changes are made in small increments over a period of time, so with any luck they won’t notice!

I have wished for that since forever! Well done, writer of VolumeGuard!