Category Archives: Pop culture

Computers suck up time

Last night, Carol said that suddenly her laptop shut down, and then told her to restart. My gut clenched — that’s exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago when the logic board died on my laptop. Sure enough, she couldn’t restart her laptop. Today, she drove it up to the Apple store in Cambridge, where I’m sure they’ll tell her to send it in for major repairs.

Of course this had to happen just when she is nearing the deadline for her book. Fortunately, she had been backing up her files pretty regularly. Unfortunately, she lost a day or so of work because she hadn’t backed up at all yesterday. Her bad experience reminded me to back up my own computer — it had been over a week since I last backed up.

Then today, my sister Abby called to talk about her blog. She’s been experiencing a flood of comment spam, and wanted help in controlling it. I thought it would take us ten or twelve minutes. We chatted on the phone while I installed various spam controls. Then I saw that WordPress had come out with a major security upgrade yesterday, so I started to install that. Upgrading proved to be a time-consuming process, mostly because I did not read all the directions ahead of time, which meant I had to repeat several steps. While I waited for files to upload I got to chat with Abby, so the whole process was actually kind of fun. Finally, after an hour and a quarter, we were done.

Now I have to go and upgrade the four other blogs I administer — this one, and three others. And I had better go and back up my desktop computer at work.

Even though they’re supposed to be time-savers, computers sure seem to suck up a lot of my time.

Hey, doesn’t that guy on TV look familiar…

Yeah, I was on TV tonight — for about two seconds, on channel 10 news in Providence, in a story about how First Unitarian is transferring ownership of a late 19th C. painting to a local museum. The painting, by Edward Emerson Simmons, son of a Unitarian minister, depicts the boy Jesus, so there I am on TV talking about Jesus. They also show me moving a refrigerator. I kid you not. Link.

More about the painting at the First Unitarian Web site: link.

Scams and dishonesty

In the most recent newsletter here at First Unitarian, I included a warning about scams and dishonest practices. I just heard from another minister who has been seeing similar scams, and is running a similar warning in his congregation’s newsletter. So I thought I’d share the warning, slightly modified, with the readership of this blog….

*****

There are a number of scams and dishonest practices going around right now of which you should be aware.

First, some Sunday morning scams. I have noticed that on a number of Sundays over the past few months, we have had people showing up just as our worship service ends and asking for money. In each case, the story is almost exactly the same: the person or the couple has been traveling from one place to another place, and their car happened to break down in New Bedford that morning, or the night before, and they are hoping that the good people of First Unitarian will give them some money. (The cover stories change over time. Six months ago, we were hearing a different story, with people came saying they needed eleven dollars to buy a bus ticket to Boston. But eight years ago, when I was at the Lexington, Mass., congregation, we were hearing the “we-were-traveling-and-broke-down” scam.)

While it is possible that one or more of these people are honest, this is in fact a common scam run by people who go to places of worship, a scam which I have seen over and over during my years working in urban and suburban congregations. I have instructed the staff of First Unitarian to say that we give no money out to anyone, and that we keep no cash on hand anywhere in the building. If anyone approaches you during coffee hour asking for money, refer them to the minister, or tell them that they should come to the office first thing Monday morning and ask for the minister.

Second, email scams. I have been seeing a huge number of email scams coming into both the office email address and my own email address. My current advice is simple. Do not respond to any request for money that you receive via email. Do not click on any Web site address that appears in any email message — retype the Web address yourself into your Web browser. And never, never, never give out any personal information via email. Even if the email message seems to be a legitimate charity, do not send money or personal information via email.

Third, when you are in any house of worship, remember that houses of worship are public buildings. Hold on to your personal belongings at all times, especially purses and wallets and anything valuable. There are thieves who specifically target houses of worship, both during worship services and the rest of the week, because these thieves know that some people let down their guard in a house of worship. Suburban churches are probably more vulnerable to this kind of theft, but last January a thief stole a laptop computer and digital camera during a worship service from the organ loft here. So guard your personal belongings.

The world is mostly filled with good people, but unfortunately just a few bad people can make things miserable for all the good people. Please be careful.

Oo, oo, I get one of those…

I don’t usually post images on this blog (I’m trying to keep my bandwidth down because I’m a cheapskate), but I can’t resist this one. Thanks to Boing Boing, I found the Order of Science Scouts, who are dedicated to “an ideal where science communicators can meet firstly, for drinks; secondly, for communicating; and ultimately, for networking.” They are issuing merit badges. I actually qualify for one of the merit badges.

Waitaminute, you ask, how can Dan (who is after all a minister) consider himself a Science Scout? Well, campers, I started out my academic career as a physics major, switching to philosophy as an undergrad under the impression that I would be able to answer deeper questions about cosmology as a philosopher than as a physicist, and because I mistakenly thought I’d meet more women. And I figure I actually do communicate about science just like a real Science Scout, since I have asserted on this blog that the current president of the United States is anti-science; and I sometimes identify birds, mammals, invertebrates, and plants that I mention on this blog in binomial nomenclature (e.g., Carol and I saw a Phoca vitulina on our walk today). Admittedly, my use of binomial nomenclature is pretty sad, but I do feel that calling George Bush anti-science should get me enough points to call myself a Science Scout.

So here’s the merit badge I qualify for: The “I left the respectable sciences to pursue humanistic studies of the sciences” badge, in which the recipient is now probably having a lot more fun than he/she did before….

science merit badge

I would also qualify for the “Experienced with electrical shock” badge (Level III), except I got shocked when working as a carpenter, not in the physics lab. I won’t admit to qualifying for the “setting things on fire” (Level III) badge. Or the “freezing things” badge.

Fashion faux-pas

Peacebang, the minister who writes the blog Beauty Tips for Ministers, sent an email message to me yesterday. Apparently she is being interviewed by a Major Daily Newspaper, and she gently and politely asked me if I’d mind if she held me up as an example of How Not To Dress. They might even include a photograph of me as a Bad Example. I told her I wouldn’t mind a bit, under the condition that they mention that I’m the minister at First Unitarian in New Bedford — as the great Universalist P. T. Barnum once said, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

The only down side is that Peacebang is going to point out exactly those things that Carol has been trying to get me to change for years now, so this article could make things a little difficult on the home front (I have visions of Carol doing the I-Told-You-So dance). But it will be worth it. We will post it on the First Unitarian Web site: “Come to First Unitarian and see Dan Harper, the minister criticized for his poor personal appearance in a Major Daily Newspaper! You will marvel at the fashion atrocities you will see!”

If the story actually gets published, I’ll provide a link to it. In the mean time, to demonstrate my geekiness I’m off to Boskone, the annual convention of the New England Science Fiction Association. I doubt I’ll have a chance to post tomorrow, so see you on Sunday.

“You’ve got to sit down”…

From the November, 2006, issue of Working Waterfront/ Inter-Island News, a publication based in Maine:

Vegetable fleet puts to sea

Here in mid-coast Maine, adventurous farmer-sailors grow Giant Atlantic Pumpkins, only to slice them in half, hollow them out, and put to sea in their veggie coracles. A recent pumpkin regatta in Damariscotta attracted scads of spectators.

Not your garden-variety pumpkins, these gargantuan squashes can tip the scales at a whopping 1,000 pounds or even more, but of course this is before they are converted to low-freeboard boats with decks and outboard motors….

Link to story and photos at the online version of Working Waterfront News.

You can learn more about how to grow, build, and sail your own pumpkin boat from a Bangor Daily News article:

“Commodore” Buzz Pinkham, owner of Pinkham’s Plantation Greenhouse and Landscape Center on Biscay Road, made his first pumpkin boat last fall…. “I was the first captain,” Pinkham recalled of his maiden voyage. “You definitely want to stay on center. You do not want to get out of line too much. We kind of went low-profile last year because we didn’t know if it would sink or tip upside down.”…

On Sunday [October 8, 2006], Tom Lishness of Windsor and Bill Clark of Bristol were hard at work crafting boats out of giant pumpkins. It’s a pretty simple job. First they cut and hollow out a 2-foot-by-2-foot “cabin” and then attach a plywood “deck” to the pumpkin with 8-inch bolts. On Monday the group plans to outfit their boats with 2 to 9 horsepower outboard motors. The only other additions are gas tanks and sand bags for ballast. Clark fashioned his boat from an 812-pound orange pumpkin. Lishness crafted “Moby Gourd” from a 712-pound white pumpkin.

“You’ve got to sit down,” Commodore Pinkham advised his sailors. “I don’t know if it’s really advisable to stand in it.”

Link to full article.

The Damariscotta event pales in comparison with established pumpkin regattas like the ones in Windsor, Nova Scotia [link], Nekoosa, Wisconsin, and Tualatin, Oregon [link], which can have dozens of competitors in several classes such as paddle-powered pumpkins, motor-pumpkins, and experimental craft.

I figured I’d tell you about this now so you can plan next year’s garden accordingly.

Brainstorming Church 2.0

Tonight, Peter Bowden and I went in to Boston to check out the Emergent Church service in downtown Boston (more about that in a later post). On the way back, we stopped in at Diesel Cafe in Davis Square to have a cup of coffee and talk about how we could radically rebuild Unitarian Universalist congregations.

“You’ve heard of Web 2.0?” I said. Web 2.0 is a vague term which includes things like social networking Web sites, blogs, YouTube, wikis, and so on. “Well, I want to do Church 2.0.”

Peter liked that term. “Yeah, if we even say ‘Church 2.0’ that immediately implies that all other ways of doing church are just a little bit outdated.”

So then we started brainstorming what Church 2.0 might be like.

First principle is simple: Church 2.0 is relational. It depends on building decentralized connections between people. But Church 2.0 uses a variety of modalities to build connections between people, and not just traditional Church 1.0 modalities such as Sunday morning worship services and committee meetings. It also uses new technologies to help people connect, including:

  • Streamed videocasts of worship services (for shut-ins and people who just couldn’t/wouldn’t come to church that week)
  • Podcasts of sermons you can listen to on your commute
  • Minister’s blog(s), and blogs by other religious professionals: DREs, musicians, etc. — where you can exchange ideas and comments with church staff
  • Other blogs?
  • A wiki for lay leaders, to facilitate transparent and accessible governance
  • Regular email delivered by a service like “Constant Contact,” so you can customize the kinds of email you want to get from the church
  • Maybe some kind of social networking site?
  • What else?

Not everyone is going to have good Web access (although Church 2.0 will have computers with Internet access available during social hour), and not everyone is going to want to use all the different modalities. That’s fine. The real point is that Church 2.0 doesn’t exist in just one modality — it’s not just Sunday morning worship and social hour, delivered to a relatively passive congregation by a small group of lay and professional leaders. Church 2.0 exists in a decentralized web of interactions. And the different modalities each deliver slightly different content. For example…

  • Regular Sunday morning worship with a sermon
  • Podcast with recorded sermon, reading, and one or two pieces of music from Sunday morning
  • Midweek video reflection with that week’s worship leader, a self-contained reflection that also leads in to the week’s worship service
  • Email version of the “Wayside Pulpit” delivers a quote to your email address each week, which relates to the upcoming sermon topic
  • An online sermon discussion group (forum or moderated email list)
  • Discussion group during social hour to help the preacher plan the next week’s worship service

…all of which relate to Sunday morning worship, but each of which addresses the topic of Sunday morning worship slightly differently.

We also brainstormed a little on how Church 2.0 will help congregations meet the needs of church members after peak oil. The Web site of Church 2.0 would have a map of the surrounding region, showing where church members live (click to send email, though you don’t see the email address), and where regional small groups meet (click to get contact info).

That’s about as far as our brainstorming got. Some of the ideas we came up with are crazy or impractical, no doubt about it. Some are just stupid. At this point, we’re just brainstorming. But both of us feel pretty strongly that we need to be looking at radical change in the way we do church — and that we don’t have much time to make that change happen.

Participate in the Church 2.0 discussion on the Church 2.0 wiki!

Anti-science, grr…

One of the key aspects of Mr. Crankypants’s religion is that his religion is compatible with science. Call him pro-science and pro-religious — in fact, Mr. Crankypants would be proud if you called him pro-science.

Politics is not usually a topic for this blog, but there is little doubt that the current administration in Washington is anti-science. Mr. Crankypants likes to read “Bad Astronomy,” a blog written by an astronomer named Phil Plait who writes periodically about what he has come to call White House tampering of science. For example, Mr. Plait has written on White House attempts to legislate against evolution, and about how the White House distorts the science around global warming. Recently Plait wrote about how the White House has managed to slash NASA’s budget, despite what Congress had budgeted for NASA. Why slash NASA’s budget? –follow the link to the article by James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and you’ll discover that the White House doesn’t like the fact that some of NASA’s research has been providing additional confirmation to the fact of global warming.

Hansen’s article includes a great quote by Richard Feynman:

The only way to have real success in science… is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be.

Mr. Crankypants can’t help thinking that at least part of the reason the current inhabitants of the White House are anti-science is due to their self-professed religious viewpoint, that of Christian literalism — a religious viewpoint that dismisses solid science like evolution, atmospheric science, psychology,* and the Big Bang — because the evidence conflicts with the way the White House feels the world should be.

Religion need not be anti-science. Mr. Crankypants’s religion is compatible with science. What about yours?

* Psychology is on the short list, because psychologists have long since determined that homosexuality is not a form of mental illness, i.e., it is not aberrant behavior — a determination which conflicts with the way the White House feels about the world.