From my beloved comes this video, an a cappella tour of my video-gaming childhood:

Brilliant! 1-Up!

'Cause everything is rent...

I'll admit it - I'm not ready to be a homeowner yet.

I'm not ready financially. Gretchen and I have decades of higher education between us, and that comes with a cost. While she's still in school and we're living apart, buying a house would be crazy. Even once we move in together, it would be a tough sell, financially.

I'm not ready for the responsibility. I don't know how to fix minor plumbing catastrophes. I don't know (or much care) about proper lawn maintenance. I like having my lawn mown by the landlord, and my driveway plowed when the blizzards hit. I like being able to call in my broken water heater, and know that someone is taking care of it... and that it won't mean a hit on my checkbook.

I'm not ready for the commitment. Being tied down to a piece of property scares me. I've seen with one of my friends how hard it can be to move a house for a price you're happy with. With the next several years a big question mark, as my wife and I try to establish a life together for ourselves someplace, it doesn't make sense to be bogged down, even if I could joke about joining the "landed gentry." And with pastors (and possibly professors?) being more mobile than many middle class workers (and with housing still provided by many of our employers), I'm not sure owning a house will make sense down the road, either.

None of which is to rule out buying a house, if Gretchen and decide together that it's the right move for us. But it does make me want to shout a big "AMEN!" to Paul Krugman's recent column in the Times, questioning America's policy of promoting an "ownership society" of owner-occupied housing.

Why is it that my parents, friends, and parishioners are given a huge subsidy for owning their homes (deducting the interest on their mortgages come tax day), but we renters are given nothing but the finger by the IRS? What compelling government interest in home ownership justifies that kind of bias?

As Krugman points out, there are lots of arguments in favor of rental housing over against purchasing a home, particularly in tough economic times, and among workers who need to follow the jobs. He rightly wonders about the president's line of thought, when he utters in a speech: "If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country." Don't renters have just as vital a stake in this country? Are we really only second-class citizens?

For now, both my wife and I rent, brazenly defying (out of necessity or out of choice) the government's preferred mode of living for us. And we, along with a whole lot of others, are paying a hefty price for being renters in an "ownership society." It's hard not to wonder why our government throws such huge amounts of money every year at discourging what is, for us right now, the best choice.

It's public policy, but is it a good policy for the public? Mark me down as unpersuaded.

King Kong in ten words

Who'd have thought a monkey movie could break my heart?

Project Mayhem visits the Apple Store

Mmmm... Very amusing to spend several minutes showing fellow customers how to watch the YouTube video of an iPhone being pulverized by a BlendTech blender ("Will It Blend?") - on the store's demo iPhones.

I know... I'm SUCH a rebel. ;)

Argh - suicidal!

No, not ME... That stupid, obnoxious song!

If you really, truly haven't heard this tripe at least a dozen times ("you have me sooo-icidal, sooo-icidal"), I'm sure you can google "Sean Kingston beautiful girls" and partake to your heart's content. Which more than likely will be exactly thirty-four and a half seconds.

Me, I can't get through a meal at Subway without hearing it once, maybe twice. Supper at the Arches tonight, and there it was again ("you're way too beauooo-tee-ful, girl, you have me sooo-icidal, sooo-icidal"). Make it stop!

Here are my top five reasons for loathing this song:

1. Overplay. Seriously, even the best songs get tired when you hear them on about a 43-minute cycle in every public venue out there. This probably says as much about the generic, played-out state of Top 40 radio as it does about this song, but "Beautiful Girls" would be a lot easier to swallow if I didn't have to gag it down again and again and again...

2. Earworm. That's the proper name for getting a song stuck in your head. Researchers have identified all sorts of traits that make a song "catchy" in this way, and, I can testify to the fact that BG has earworm written all over it. And not in a good way. Much the same as "The Song That Never Ends," it's the kind of song you're not happy to have worm its way into your brain.

3. It rips off Ben E. King. One of the few positive things about th song id that it's got a good groove. Except that groove was lifted straight from "Stand By Me." So if you're humming BG, it might have something to do with the fact that it's Ben E. King's supremely catchy bassline you're hearing, not anything Sean Kingston cooked up himself.

4. Stupid ending. The song comes to an abrupt close with an effect that's supposed to sound, I guess, like a tape deck melting down. So is that supposed to be the sonic equivalent of of offing oneself? "Sooo-i-showww-darhhhhhhgh." Lame.

5. "Suicidal" for you - how charming. Maybe I'm becoming a fuddydud in my old age, but it really bugs me hearing a peppy, bouncy song whose chorus is the word "suicidal." The song's lyrics are moderately tragic, but the tone of the song makes it sound almost like a compliment to be "sooo-icidal" for a girl, if she's really "beauooo-tee-ful." There re some things that I just don't think are appropriate to trivialize, and the way this song makes ending one's own life catchy, flattering, and perfectly reasonable, reinforced every hour of every day, is just not appropriate. Sean K's lack of common sense and common decency toward those who have lost a TRULY suicidal loved one are sad.

Let's move on to the next mediocre #1 hit, and let this song find its way quickly into the waste bin of music history. With any luck Sean Kingston will be the epitomy of the one hit wonder, and I won't have to listen to his follow-ups, "Pedophilic," "Schizophrenic," and "Homicidal."

*end of rant*

You are an ancestor simulation

So says this article in the New York Times. Playing off a common thread in science fiction - that our lives might be lived within a completely virtual world, a la The Matrix - some artificial intelligence researches have come to the conclusion that you are almost inevitably a highly advanced program, being run inside an immensely powerful computer, decades or centuries in the future, by "posthumans" who are interested in simulating their ancestors - us.

The argument is fleshed out at sites such as The Simulation Argument:

[A]t least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

In other words, the stronger you happen to think the case is that one day our computers will be powerful enough to create a fully simulated Earth, circa 2007, the greater the chances are that you happen to be living within such a simulation yourself... unless, for some reason, our descendants are unwilling, unable, or uninterested in SimCity-ing us.

Even more bizarre is the following thought: What happens when the artificial intelligences within a simulation approach a posthuman level of development themselves? In theory, at this point they'd be able to launch their own ancestor simulations - simulations taking place within a simulation - a virtual machine, to use a common concept in computer programming. As anyone who's run Windows on a Mac (back before it could run natively on one) can tell you, the problem with virtual machines is that they eat up resources. So if we're living within a simulation, our existence depends on the resources of whatever computer we're running on. If millions of us begin running our own ancestor simulations in "computers" that are, in reality, virtual machines running on the real computer, we could unwittingly consume all the processing cycles we depend on to keep our world running! Or, alternately, our posthuman creators might simply set our program up to terminate before that could happen, in order to keep their systems running.

Could the world end in a Blue Screen of Death? Could it be terminated in order to free up resources for whatever the posthuman equivalent of iTunes happens to be?

Also interesting - If we're living in a simulation, how should we conduct our lives? What will best guarantee that our program will continue? One academic suggests that, all things being equal, artificial intelligences would do well to care less about others, live more for today, make our world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around us happier and more interested in us.

Theologically speaking, it's an interesting argument - perhaps the strongest case science could put forward for a "creator" of some sort who is completely outside of our universe, who is watching us with interest, who perhaps interacts with her creation (even entering into it via an avatar, most likely as a famous or important person), and who has complete freedom to write (and break) the rules of our universe as she sees fit. The boundaries between science and metaphysics blur quickly in this sort of thought experiment.

God as a posthuman videogamer? I'm not there yet. ;)

But there's definitely something disturbingly compelling about the entire idea.

In the end, it matters little to me whether I exist as matter in a biological body or as an application in a supercomputer of the future - the life I live now is the only one I've got, and however it happens to have come to pass, there's nothing "artificial" about the loves, joys, pain, struggles, convictions, desires, and hopes that fill my world. I exist - and all this exists - because the Creator has called it into being, and whatever that means at the end of the day, it seems to me to be a profound gift.

Hey - it just occurred to me: Al Gore really did win the presidency in 2004 2000, and we're part of an advanced simulation of how the world would have fared if George Bush had remained in office instead! Hmmm... that's actually depressing. Ctrl-Alt-Delete. ;)

Edit: Yes, yes... so my political timeline was a bit distorted, as Shawn pointed out. At least in this simulation, Gore got screwed in 2000. It was Kerry who got swiftboated in 2004.

Seriously weird...

So I'm listening to the radio on a station I've never bothered with before (I'm usually tuned to NPR or my iPod), when on comes a commercial promoting Hormel meats at Cub grocery stores.

Nothing especially strange about that, except for the fact that the shopper being "interviewed" in the commercial happened to be Shawnee, wife of my old chum Shawn (insert your own "cute" comment here). They live in St. Paul, hundreds of miles from here - not exactly a voice I'd expect to be hearing all the way down here by Madison, even if I knew she'd be in a radio commercial...

The announcer even observed that Shawnee's expecting (look for their firstborn just before the Big Event in Indiana), and asked if she would keep "Hormel" in mind as a baby name! (Clearly they didn't realize that Steve Jobs had that particular product placement deal clinched months ago...)

How often do you just happen to catch someone you know hawking sausages pork tenderloins and discussing her pregnancy on the radio? *LOL*

Way to go, Shawnee... My day has been made! :)

Update: Shawn's got the spots posted on his blog. You can listen to the Twin Cities, Greater Minnesota, and Wisconsin versions there.

Make mine chocolate

As many of you know, Gretchen is the proud "mom" of three adorable, feisty bunnies - Riley, Maggie, and Duncan. They're house rabbits, which means that they're house trained, just like a cat, and (except when Ellie's around) pretty much have free run of Gretchen's place. It's the most natural thing in the world, once you get over the fact that it's a trio of rabbits and not pooches - but what's the difference?

Gretchen's a saint, and has rescued each of her bunnies from an unhappy past, giving them a good home. Do you remember all the dalmatians that got abused or abandoned when families realized that caring for just one, not 101, was more effort than they were willing to spend? That happens every Easter to bunnies. Thousands of them are given as "cute" Easter presents, only to face neglect or worse when the cuteness wears off and the reality of a pet that can live ten or more years sets in.

In 2002, in an attempt to address the problem, the Columbus House Rabbit Society began a campaign to educate the public on the realities of living with a rabbit, and to discourage giving live rabbits as Easter gifts. Using ceramic pins in the form of chocolate bunnies as the symbol, the campaign's goal is to spread the message that rabbits should not be casually acquired and to educate the public about the special needs of these often-fragile creatures.

Real bunnies are living beings with significant needs. However cute they might look in an Easter basket, they should only be given to someone willing and able to give them a good home and all the care they need. That's just common sense, and common decency.

The Columbus House Rabbit Society's site, "Make Mine Chocolate!" gives lots more background, and an opportunity to get the word out this Easter.

Gretchen and I can only give a home to so many bunnies. ;) Please, this Easter, give cute chocolate rabbits that the kids can nibble the ears off of. Let the real ones find the homes they deserve.