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The problem with most products on the market today is that the long term effects of their ingredients are unknown. Case in point, soda pop. Many brands of soda pop contain an ingredient called Sodium Benzoate. Derived from benzoic acid, which is found naturally in many berries, it’s used to prevent mold in soda pop. Seems harmless enough and it is a “natural ingredient” that has been used for years. But here’s the problem, the long term effects are unknown. A recent study indicates that it might kill an important part of your cells. Without this part (the mitochondria), all sorts of problems can happen.

So what does this mean? Should I give up soda pop (and pickles, and other products with the ingredient). I’m not going to, but not because I’m afraid of the possible effects. In small doses, the body can handle many different toxins. The important thing is to monitor what you are eating, understand the ingredients and don’t limit your diet. If I worried about everything that could possibly kill me in the long run, I wouldn’t be eating anything.

That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to pay attention to the research. If there are indications that Sodium Benzoate, even in small doses is dangerous, I’ll take it out of my diet. The important thing is to be educated about what you are eating.

When Crown Shakur died of starvation, it wasn’t because his parents were vegans; it was because they were bad parents. A diet of beef broth and clamato juice would have resulted in Crown dying as equally as one of orange juice and soymilk. The fact that his parents are vegans is as irrelevant to his death as Christianity is to the burning of a girl by her father because “Satan made him do it” .

Nina Planck is using a tragic event to argument her beliefs in a “traditional” diet of meat and dairy, ignoring the fact that both are the heavy contributors to heart disease. She talks about protein deficiency as a “danger of a vegan diet for babies”, failing to mention that almost no child is fed a meat until well into their first year of life (assuming meat fed at all during their first years). She quotes studies showing vegan breast milk lacks enough DHA, without sourcing her material.

The fact remains that humans are omnivores that can eat anything and get the nutrients needed. Meat, one of many sources of protein, is just the most convenient and in a pre-industrial, diet limited world, was the only readily available source. But in today’s world we have access to foods that our grandparents wouldn’t have dreamed of. Tofu in the 50′s was a foreign word and hemp milk didn’t even exist. 20 years ago when I became a vegetarian, soymilk was gritty and only available in stores that smelled like patchouli and were run by people who looked a lot like Tommy Chong. Today I can go to the local Safeway and find have a dozen brands of soymilk as well as tofu. Advocating a “traditional” diet is like advocating “traditional” medicine from the 50’s. It may have been the best option at the time, but the world has provided us more options.

Children must be cared for by both their parents and their “village” (to, unfortunately, quote Hillary Clinton). It is the responsibility of the parents to provide primary care, including feeding and cleaning, helping them to develop. It is the responsibility of the “village” to ensure that the parents were doing this. Crown was failed not by his diet, but by those around him that should have taken care of him. Society failed him, not his diet.

(I wrote this some time back, but never published it. Part 2 will follow with an additional analysis)

The world can be a scary place. It’s populated, in part, by scary people with nothing better to do then harass and scare others. The internet multiplies that by adding the ability to almost completely anonymize yourself and also expose yourself to the millions of others who are part of the networld.

duclod man is representative of the first, an individual that terrorizes people by mail, keeping “himself” anonymous through the postal service. He hasn’t done anything physically, instead using the mail to terrorize people. He may be one person, or many. Who he is hasn’t been know. Until now.

The Advocate is currently running an article called Chasing the duclod man. It’s a fascinating read of one persons obsession to track down the duclod man, started when she received a letter from him. Her tracking culminated with the identification who who she thinks to be the duclod man. The article details how she came to this conclusion and how she found his website. And she published her findings. And then it got picked up by sites like Digg and Reddit. That’s when all Hell broke loose for the poor guy.

Using information the information from the article, I found the website that contained the articles duclod man’s name, real-world address, and phone number. The information has been taken down, but the damage was already done. A flood of people have deluged his guest book with obscene and threatening posts. They have suggested that he’s sick and should kill himself. He is guilty in their eyes and deserves to be killed. They represent the second group, the Internet anonymous who can attack and threaten because they feel like it. They are as equally cowardice as those that anonymize via the post office.

And here’s the kicker, the author of the article could be wrong. She admits her conclusion is circumstantial and that there’s nothing directly linking the man to duclod. But the damage is done. He’s been “outed” as the duclod man and is being punished for it, regardless of whether he is or isn’t. People will continue to inundate him with insults and attacks until the site goes down. He will be destroyed because someone else wrote a convincing article connecting him to ducloud.

And that’s just sad.

Let’s get something straight. Lamont Thomas and Jade Sanders vegan diet did not kill their child. Their negligence as parents killed their child. I’ve seen dozens of articles with headlines like “Vegan Couple Sentenced to Life”, implying that their diet was the reason their 6-week old child died. That’s not the case. These parents fed the child a diet of soymilk and apple juice without formula (which there are vegan versions) or breast milk (which they should have done). It could have easily been beef broth and clamato and the kid still would have died. To point out that the parents were vegan in the headline implies that their vegan diet was the leading cause of his death. Their diet is as irrelevant to their child’s death as their race or religion. How often does the average parent feed their 6-week old meat and eggs? For as long as breast feeding has been around, children of that age have been breast fed (barring the last 100 years or so). It provided all the nutrition the child needed for the first year of life (and potentially longer). This isn’t a case of veganism gone bad, this is a case of parents gone bad.

Full disclosure, I am a vegetarian (strict, but not vegan). I am one of the rare North American obese vegetarians normally found in the wild foraging on soybeans and strawberries. I’ve been a vegetarian for the last 18 years and would not be classified as malnourished (pale and fat, but definitely not malnourished).

Edit: And of course, this appears today showing the bias of the vegan headline. Instead of “Christian Parents Burn Baby in Microwave”, this article points the blame to Satan and never mentions the parents beliefs.

I was disappointed by the atheist/theist discussion on Nightline. I watched both the edited and unedited versions and I found that the atheists just didn’t present a convincing argument against the theists assertions.

Don’t get me wrong, the theists didn’t do a good job either, but the atheists (both on stage and in the audience) came off as hostile and arrogant. The theists just recited the same old “first un-caused cause” argument and that everything has to have a creator arguments.

The problem is that the atheists didn’t come off as professional or confident.  Here are some of the points that really stuck out

• When one of the theists brought out a illustration picture of a transitional creature (croca-duck), one of the atheists actually uttered “numb-nuts” in disgust.
• When asked about Jesus as evidence of God, the atheists tried to argue that he probably didn’t exist. That’s a bad place to start. The emotions tied to Jesus and his life are strong and to deny him is tantamount to denying the Holocaust for many Christians.
• In the very beginning they declared themselves the winners because the theists mentioned the Bible and Faith in their introduction.
• At one point the atheists looked away during the theists rebuttle as if trying to negated their argument, while at another point one of the atheists started thumbing through a book (looking for stats that they should already know).

They came across as childish and un-professional.  The atheist audience was even more confrontational. When asked why the Perfect Machine called the human body could develop cancer, one of the theists tried to answer about suffering in general and was verbally assaulted to talk specifically about cancer. The people in the audience didn’t want to hear how cancer could be caused, they wanted to hear why (the theists argument was a valid one, that we live in a “fallen realm”, where disease and cancers affect us).

And the atheists missed a lot of opportunities to poke holes in the theists arguments. The first being a full out dismantling of the theists “uncaused first cause” argument. Even my cheesy statue analogy could have been used. When questioned about the origin of the atheist moral code, instead of arguing an evolutionary approach for societal rules, they should have started with Euthyphro’s Dilemma (they’re called books kids, pick one up now and again) then moved into how humanity evolved rules for living in a society as a counter point to divine inspiration. When questioned about transitional animals, they could have used simple arguments (I am a transitional form from my father to my son), instead of trying to bring in scientific names of fossils that have been found. When one of the theists brought up Albert Einstein as beliving in a god, using the quote:

In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human understanding, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God

the atheists could have counter with that particular qoute is attributed to Einstien by a third person and that in later life Einstein wrote:

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

And continued with at most he was, on occasion in his life, a deist.  As for the other “believers in god”, Newton, Galileo, Shakespeare, Copernicus, the atheists could have argued that they didn’t have much choice, under threat of death. The atheists arguments, while sound, lacked the mass appeal and simplicity needed for a good portion of people to understand the arguments.

Both teams were representative of the worst of their sides. The theists fell back to tired arguments and misunderstandings of science; while the atheists came off as angry and disrespectful. If they want a serious foot in the door of peoples minds, atheists need a better spokes person, someone clean cut and articulate. Maybe Barak Obama .

I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu+Beryl for the last couple of weeks and I continue to be impressed.  I haven’t switched over, yet, but I find myself preferring it to OS X or Windows.  Most of my app needs are met in Ubuntu except one: iTunes.

I like iTunes.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn good for multimedia organization.  It also integrates with my iPod (and I do like my iPod) and acceptably handles Podcasts .  I’ve built up a little eco-system around iTunes/iPod so that I can get my podcasts, listen to audio books, and carry my music everywhere I go.  I use Audiobook Builder to merge podiobooks and audio books into a single (sometimes multiple) chaptered file.  I use MP3Trimmer to clip annoying pre- and post-ambles from downloaded audio (curse you audiobooksforfree.com!).  It all (almost) just works together perfectly.  And it’s all centered around iTunes.  Without it, media is just difficult to use. 

I’ve tried AramoK and Rhythmbox (among others), and none are as easy to use as iTunes (IMO, nothing humble about it). They improve on iTunes in some respects, but overall the lack the same polish.  

I’ve also fallen in love with AAC chapters (enhanced podcasts).  With AudioBook Builder, I can merge a 10 file audio book into a single file, with each file being a chapter in the new file.  I can cycle back and forth as needed.  Similar capability has been added to ID3, but there aren’t any players I know of that support it (maybe I should add it to Rockbox).

Once iTunes is running on Linux (come on wine!) with iPod integration, I’ll have a better machine then my Mac.  Well, maybe if they get Photoshop CS2 running as well.

One of the core arguments for the existence of God is the “un-caused cause”. The principal is simple. Everything has a cause (or came from something). I came from my parents, they came from theirs, and so on. This concept is applied to everything in the universe including the universe itself. The universe must have come from someplace/thing. For theists, that cause is God, the “First Cause”. The atheist response is typically “where did God come from”, which begs the answer, God has always existed. The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t actually explain anything. It merely moves the question to a higher level. I would argue that it actually muddles the question unnecessarily. Let me take this into an analogy.

A man is confronted by two pieces of stone. The first is a small flat rock like one found along any river bank. The second is a sculpture of woman, perfect down to the last detail. Without any other evidence then what is before him he concludes the first is clearly the work of artisan, while the second is the product of natural erosion. Is this man a fool?

Obviously the answer is yes. The flat rock is much less complex than the statue, so to conclude the rock is a product an artist while the statue is the product of erosion is to conclude the complex is more likely to naturally occur the the less complex. So take that to the God/Universe argument. Is it rational to assume that the more complex God (the statue), with omniscience, omnipotence, and emotions, has always existed whereas the Universe (the rock), unintelligent as it is, merely existing without purpose, must have been created? Isn’t it more rational to assume that the Universe has always existed?

That’s not to say that God doesn’t exist, but the “Uncaused First Cause” argument doesn’t actually provide a reasonable answer.

You have 13 minutes to prove God’s existence. You can’t use religious text and instead rely only on science. GO!

It will be interesting to watch a discussion between theists and atheists on the existence of God. I find it amusing that the article only refers to the atheists as “the atheists”. They apparently don’t have names or produced a movie.

Sam at http://lujj.com/ was kind enough to send me an invite. Now I can see what all the buzz is about. Oh, and they have a Mac client. Now if only they had a Linux one as well.

Chris Lanier is giving away Joost invites on his blog. All you have to do is reply to his post and/or blog about it and you have a chance to win an invite. This is my entry, but you can click here to find out more and enter for yourself.