Unique insights on life and death from one of the Senate’s leading lights.

Tom Coburn (picture; official website) is the Republican Senator from Oklahama whose website says his priorities include “representing Oklahoma values.” Apparently Oklahama values include homophobia: during the 2004 campaign, he alerted Oklahomans to “rampant lesbian debauchery” in the state and warned that “[the gay] agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today.” And eugenics: Coburn sterilized under-age girls (he’s an MD) without their consent; in one case he says he got “oral consent” but “the nurse forgot” to get it written down.

During the Senate hearings on the confirmation of John G. Roberts Jr. as the 17th Chief Justice of the United States. Coburn took a break from the crossword puzzles he was caught doing during the opening statements to actually “question” the nominee:

Would you agree that the opposite of being dead is being alive?

My my, do we have a philosopher for a Senator here? The unnerving thing is that Roberts actually paused before answering, “Yes,” belatedly adding “I don’t mean to be overly cautious in answering it.”

But Coburn was not actually trying to philosophize about life and death, of course; he was just laying the groundwork for some simplistic posturing and blustering on the abortion issue:

You know I’m going somewhere. One of the problems I have is coming up with just the common sense and logic that if brain wave and heartbeat signifies life, the absence of them signifies death, then the presence of them certainly signifies life.

Hmmm. This is not only overly black and white, but also incoherent. He’s given two criteria, but what about the case where only one is present, such as Terri Schiavo (Wikipedia)? By this logic, does he think she was neither alive nor dead? And where do being pre-alive or pre-dead or in between dead and alive or dead but about to come back to life fit into this picture?
Undeterred, Coburn continues his muddled train of thought:

But for the listeners of this hearing, if, in fact, life is the presence of a heartbeat and brain wave, it’s important for everybody in the country to know that at 16 days post-conception, a heartbeat is present; and that at 41 days, right now, we can assure ourselves that brain activity and brain waves are present.

But if the heart doesn’t start beating until 16 days after conception, why is he against the morning-after pill? By his logic, isn’t the fetus “dead” at that point? (Too bad there’s not a morning-after pill for Senate elections.)

And as the technology improves, we’re going to see that come earlier and earlier.

Huh? Technology is going to make babies in the womb start having a heartbeat earlier?

I make that point because so many of the decisions of the Supreme Court have been made in a vacuum of the scientific knowledge of what life is, when personhood is, when it begins, when it doesn’t, when it exists, when it doesn’t.

So “scientific knowledge” is going to tell us “what life is” or “when personhood is” or “when it begins” or “when it doesn’t”? I’ll have to alert the scientists so they can get cracking on this. And by the way, what does “when personhood doesn’t begin” mean anyway?

And so that was for your information and my ability to put forth a philosophy that I believe would solve a lot of the controversy in this country.

In other words, thanks for listening to my confused monologue and the controversy would be solved if everyone agreed with my jumbled thinking.

I would certainly hope that our electoral system is still functional enough to wash away detritus like this. Then again, America gets the public servants it wants and deserves.

Senator, let me help with that six-letter word starting with A for 8-down: it’s ADDLED.

Larry King, our favorite geriatric talk show host, revisited the old why-God-lets-horrible-things-happen problem on a recent show, trotting out the Dalai Lama and baby-faced Christian tele-evangelist Joel Osteen to “explain” Katrina. The interesting thing was that both seemed to agree: stuff just happens.

KING: Your Holiness, how do you explain someone who believes in a higher being allowing this to happen to good people?

DALAI LAMA: Of course, from the Buddhist viewpoint, every event, every experience (UNINTELLIGIBLE) such a disaster, which is very, very painful, unspeakable sort of experiences. Are these things also, is it due to our own past karma or actions? And that is, I think, main causes, and the conditions the world climate conditions is changing, that also one factor.

Fine, but this is subject to misinterpretation. He does mean, doesn’t he, that the causal actions in question are generic, not some recent acts of evil on the part of the residents of the Gulf Coast that they are getting punished for, as some commentators, amazingly, have contended?

King continues: “But it doesn’t cause you, your Holiness, to question faith?”

DALAI LAMA: No. Of course, there—I think, for me, as a Buddhist, the real belief of all causality causes conditions, causes an effect, go like that [moving hands in a large circle]. Of course, the—even Buddhist own time, in the very eyes of—in front of Buddha’s own eye, is some people to suffer. That means things happen due to their own previous action of karma…

For the Christian answer, King moved to Osteen, asking “How do you respond to that same question? The Buddha said it’s the natural evolvement of things. What does the pastor say?” (Was Larry calling the Dalai Lama “the Buddha”? And is there really a word “evolvement”?) Osteen’s answer was almost indistinguishable from the Dalai Lama’s, although he omitted the causality twist and focused on God helping you make it through just after He destroyed your entire city:

OSTEEN: Well, Larry, what I believe from the Christian faith is that, you know, God is control. We don’t understand why all these thing happen. I think some of them are just natural disasters and you know, I think that when we come out of this we know that God is right there with us, the he’s the God to comfort us and, I don’t think we can explain this. So, we don’t try to get bogged down in that, we just try to—try to remind ourselves that God is a good God and, he’s on our side and he’s going to bring this through—bring us through these times of difficulty.

KING: Why not question it? If he’s a good God and he’s on your side, why did he flood New Orleans, something he could have prevented?

OSTEEN: You know Larry, I don’t think there’s an answer to all that. I mean you could go and figure out—and try to figure out why are babies born abnormal and why did this happen, that happen? I don’t think you can figure that out, Larry. I mean that’s, the Bible says, “God’s ways are not our ways, he works in mysterious ways,” and so, I don’t—I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up. But you know, part of trusting God is having faith in the tough times. And I think that’s what we—that’s what we do as Christians right now.

“Intelligent Design” assumes we humans can distinguish between things which were “intelligently” designed and things which were not. Well, what about this?

This is from the website of Graham Hancock, an amateur marine archaeologist, journalist, and author of controversial books including Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age and Fingerprints of the Gods. The picture shows “the stone circles, or ‘labyrinths’ of Kerama [about 30-40km west of Naha, the capital of Okinawa], at depths between 27 and 33 metres. It has not yet been determined whether these are natural phenomena or structures that were worked by some ancient people when this land was last above sea-level about 10,000 years ago.”

Even more noteworthy is the nearby “monument” at Yonaguni (Wikipedia), 100 feet underwater at the very southern tip of Okinawa near Taiwan. Some people think its ledges, circular openings, and “pathways” are the result of natural forces, while others see the capital of the fabled “Mu” civilization of yore.

Dr. Gary Urton is one of the foremost scholars of quipu, the Incan system of knotted cords for record-keeping.

(The spelling “quipu” is Spanish. The Quechuan alternative is “khipu” where the “h” indicates an aspirated consonant.)

Dr. Urton is the author of Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records, where he unfurled the theory that khipus represent a seven-bit coding system, one that I found utterly unconvincing. In my review on Amazon, I picked apart his theory and compared his approach to discussing an Egyptian tombstone covered with hieroglyphics and spending all your time on categorizing them by shape and size without being able to understand a single one. Dr. Urton responded by saying “…my analogy to binary coding is just that, an analogy that is used to give the reader a general understanding of the type of system that is proposed…the theory of binary coding is put forward in this book in an attempt to find some new way(s) of working with these devices to move us to a new level of analysis and, hopefully, understanding.”

But I’m still not convinced. The theory is an “analogy”? It’s not supposed to be an explanation, but just an “attempt to move to a new level”?

Now the New York Times has reported important new research by Dr. Urton (see also the paper in Nature (subscribers only) and the report in Scientific American):

A new and possibly significant advance in deciphering the quipu system may now have been gained by two Harvard researchers, Gary Urton and Carrie J. Brezine. They believe they may have decoded the first word—a place name—to be found in a quipu, and have also identified what some of the many numbers in the quipu records may be referring to.

Any and all progress in deciphering khipus is welcome. However, looking at these newest findings from Dr. Urton (who has apparently discarded his 7-bit ASCII theory), I am once again underwhelmed.

It’s always been obvious that most khipus record numbers. To simplify a bit, the number 123 would be encoded in a khipu by tying one knot at the top of the cord, leaving a bit of space, tying two knots, leaving more space, then tying three knots, with a special twist indicating this is the last digit. That’s right—the Incas used base-10 arithmetic. The two major questions were: what was being recorded, and did some khipus encode non-numeric information—perhaps even a form of “writing”?

On the first topic, in his latest paper Dr. Urton merely “suspects” and thinks it “likely” that the numerical records are of labor quotas. (The Incan empire was sustained by a system of drafted labor.)

On the second, the “word” found and supposedly “decoded” was simply a 1-1-1 knot which is conjectured to be the name of the town where the khipu was found and presumably created. It’s like finding the number “367” on an Excel spreadsheet and imagining that it must be the code for the department of the guy that created it, and then saying that it’s a “word”.

The NYT thus goes completely overboard when it says that this “discovery” could “resolve a longstanding controversy by establishing that quipus included a writing system. That in turn would help explain the ‘Inca paradox,’ that among states of large size and administrative complexity the Inca empire stands out as the only one that apparently did not invent writing. The paradox would be resolved if indeed the quipu encode a writing system as well as numbers.”

This is absurd. A three-digit city code is not a “writing system”. Dr. Urton says “the use of conventional signs is my definition of writing.” Wrong. Using signs for numbers is not writing.

Another aspect of the new research is the finding that khipus formed a hierarchy, sort of a medieval Andean roll-up. The same numbers were found on two different khipus, and it’s believed that on the first it’s the Excel SUM function adding up all the individual numbers of hours of labor or heads of llama or number of virgins or whatever it was, which was then brought over to the second khipu as a line item to be added up into some kind of regional grand total. That’s interesting, but hardly surprising.

Sadly, we will probably never find the equivalent of the “Rosetta stone” for khipus. It’s essentially equivalent to the problem of someone in the year 2500 trying to unravel record-keeping in 2005 when all they have is 700 Excel expense reports. Urton and other researchers are now entering all extant khipus into computers to find new patterns—but there simply isn’t enough data there to crunch.

The King Tut Exhibition had its first stop in Los Angeles—and how could we possibly miss something like this?

And of course one of the first things the exhibit taught was how the ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife and that all the stuff they put in the tomb was designed to help young Tut navigate that afterlife more successfully: boats to take him across the equivalent of the Styx, assistants, tools such as knives, you name it.

But what justification do we actually have in support of the concept that the Eqyptians believed in the afterlife? After all, there are many alternative explanations as to why they might have buried a king together with objects in this particular fashion. And parts of the theory are questionable. For instance, if the Egyptians had truly believed that their Pharaoh would be resurrected and enjoy an afterlife, why did they include models of objects instead of the real thing?

When my family’s beloved Shiba-ken “Wanda” was hit by a car and died, we placed her toys in with her in the box sent through the cremation line. We did not do so because we believed she would be playing with them in an afterlife. (Were there indeed an afterlife for dogs, such a miraculous phenomenon would certainly include all the toys Wanda could have wanted, ones much better than any we provided during her mortal existence.)

Just as we were doing with Wanda, my strong sense is that the Egyptians were honoring King Tut’s memory and revisiting and modeling his life through the decorations in the tomb.

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki, I’ll share some relevant passages from Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory.

President Truman, in a diary entry from July 25, wrote: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.

“He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance.”

Many of the scientists did not want to drop the second bomb, or even the first. But Groves had been adamant. Consumed by the desire to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt his success in building the monstrous new weapon, he lobbied vigorously for its use. Finally the military managed to convince Truman to drop the bomb on a real target, instead of making a demonstration like many scientists recommended, but Truman insisted the target be military. Fortunately, that took candidates like Kyoto and the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo out of the running. Unfortunately, it was then an easy end-run for the military to claim that Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, was a military target, since of course, both cities did contain factories producing war materiel. The orders that went out on the very same day of Truman’s diary entry, July 25, made no mention of military vs. civilian targets, and simply designated the entire cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among others, as targets.

The bomb detonated over Hiroshima, “Big Boy,” was a uranium bomb, which Hanford had nothing to do with. It was dropped on August 6 1945. Riding along in a separate plane, named “The Great Artiste” and carrying monitoring equipment, was a certain Major Charles William Sweeney. Three days later Sweeney, commanding a B-29 named “Bock’s Car” after its usual pilot, Capt. Frederick Bock, dropped “Fat Man,” so named for its pudgy shape, over Nagasaki, a little Japanese port town on the southern island of Kyushu. Nagasaki was not really a strategic target, other than being where a Mitsubishi plant had produced some of the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor. When Fat Man was ignited, conventional explosives violently squeezed the softball-sized capsule of Hanford plutonium inside until its density reached the point of supercriticality, causing a nuclear explosion. The fierce blast wind, heat rays reaching several thousand degrees, and deadly radiation generated by the explosion crushed, burned and killed everything in sight and reduced the entire area to a barren field of rubble. Hanford’s plutonium had performed its work admirably.

Bock was much less creative in naming his plane than one Capt. George Marquardt, who came up with the cute moniker “Up an’ Atom” for the weatherplane he flew along on the run.

Fat Man almost did not make it to its August 9 date with destiny. There was a firing unit on Fat Man’s front that needed to be connected to a cable going through the bomb’s innards to a radar antenna on its tail that detected when the bomb was at the right altitude to ignite. Technicians in the Marianas from where the flight was to take off were trying to hook up the bomb on the night of August 7 when they discovered to their horror that both connectors were female; somebody had threaded the cable through the bomb backwards! There wasn’t enough time to disassemble the bomb and reverse the cable. Without telling anyone, the two got a soldering iron and some extension cords. They secretly, and very carefully, removed the two plugs on the cable and swapped them so everything fit.

The technicians evidently did their job well, since the bomb detonated as planned. Sweeney recalls that as he watched the bomb falling free on its forward arc, the somewhat bizarre thought flashed through his mind: “It’s too late now. There are no strings or cables attached. We can’t get it back, whether it works or not.” The mushroom cloud was “multicolored…intense…angry…mesmerizing…breathtaking…ominous.”

Convenience stores—shortened to “conbini” in Japanese—are ubiquitous in the Land of the Rising Sun. FamilyMart (website) is a giant in the category, with sales of nearly one trillion yen (US$10bn) and over 10,000 stores blanketing the archipelago.

Now “FamiMa”, as it’s known, is making a big push into the US, thinking an upscale, Japanese-focused concept can be successful here. The press release crows: “First lifestyle speciality all-in-one community to open in West Hollywood! LA gets the first taste of Famima’s “premium experience”. I’m honored. The new store is just up the street from my house, a 15-minute walk (Google map). The press release continues:

West Hollywood. California has always been a trendy place for firsts… design, fashion and food to name a few. Now add to the list, Famima!! A new lifestyle specialty all-in-one community store (Premium Grocer + Quick Service Restaurant + Convenience Store) concept that is thoughtful in its modern design and sophisticated in its product offerings is set to open on July 20, 2005 on the corner of Santa Monica and La Cienega Boulevards. With an appeal that is pop, hip, and Gen-X all in one, Famima!! is superbly positioned to be West Hollywood’s newest hot spot this summer.

Having visited the new store the first chance I got, I can say that the concept works well for me, compared to other “competitors” like 7-11 that basically make me want to kill myself every time I step foot in one. I like the range of foods they carry, including of course lots of Japanese candy (like Pocky) and instant noodles and even rice balls, magazines (which they need to beef up their selection of), and drinks. There’s a little restaurant which I didn’t try, fresh foods, coffee, and even stationery (although it seemed overpriced). The store is friendly and bright and attractive. It has stuff I want and need. I’ll be back.

FamiMa is going to roll out quickly in the US. The West Hollywood store is the first of 250 they plan to open over the next five years. I wish them well. But I have some suggestions. They don’t seem to understand that people drive cars over here, and need to be able to identify the store from the street, then quickly grab a convenient parking spot. And I’m not sure the “FamiMa” name works—maybe they should go back to “Family Mart” over here. I know they had to bring people over from Japan to staff the stores but they should make sure those people function a little better in English. And they need to work on their website. Finally, where is the Yakult? Good luck, FamiMa.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Trinity Test. Here’s the description from Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory:

As my father returned to Pullman for his sophomore year at WSC in the fall of 1944, the construction at Hanford was complete, at a total cost of $230,000,000 (equivalent to more than ten times that amount in current dollars); the reactor was started up on September 26, 1944. The plutonium manufacturing process had never actually been validated—there had been no time—so it was not surprising that the reactor sputtered and died. It restarted itself, then stopped again. An urgent call went out to Enrico Fermi, the inventor of the process, to analyze the problem and devise a fix, which he did.

The cans taken to Portland and from there by train to Los Angeles on February 2, 1945, contained the first few grams of Hanford plutonium, laboriously extracted from the uranium isotopes produced in the reactors. In California, the cans were turned over to a junior army officer from Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the actual bomb was to be constructed. By May 1945, a system was in place where regular shipments of Hanford plutonium were being made to Los Alamos, using one-kilogram jugs that looked like big thermos bottles, in convoys protected by submachine guns. The scientists at Los Alamos labored mightily and finally produced a test bomb containing Hanford plutonium at its core, which they named “Gadget.” It was detonated at the Trinity Test Site near Alamagordo, New Mexico at 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16. Seeing the detonation, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head scientist of the Manhattan Project, recalled a line from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu text he had been studying: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The cloud reached a phenomenal height, over 50,000 feet. The blast was certainly a rude morning wake-up call for one particular wild jackrabbit, found dead and partially eviscerated eight hundred yards from ground zero after the blast.

The A-bomb—its history and its existence—provides us with a rich palette of colors to draw our own pictures on topics as varied as the nature of the physical world, war, man’s thirst for knowledge, and death.

[Photo by Jack Aeby]

Sanyo Electric, the sprawling Japanese electronics conglomerate, has its fingers in just about everything. They make TVs and solar batteries and cogeneration systems and air conditioners and digital cameras and phones and semiconductors. They’ll install things for you or deliver them for you or build you a house or send you temporary workers or even put up your folks in one of their nursing homes. Therer are 332 Sanyo companies around the world.

But Sanyo is in trouble. They managed to lose almost $2 billion in 2004, and have a staggering $10 billion mountain of debt.

Now Sanyo has unleashed an astonishing transformation. They’ve elevated a woman—Tomoyo Nonaka—to the post of CEO, with the founder’s grandson relegated to mere President and COO. Nonaka is the most senior woman in the Japanese business world by far, a Japanese Carly Fiorina who still has her job.

And there’s definitely a woman’s hand visible in the visionary new plan that Sanyo announced. There were the obvious things, such as cutting debt, selling stuff, shuttering factories, firing people, cutting costs. What’s more interesting is the new Sanyo vision: Think GAIA, becoming a “company to make the earth rejoice”. “living in global symbiosis”, “leaving a beautiful earth for the children of the future.”

Make fun if you will, but this is a vision of startling breadth. Now it simply remains to be seen how, or if, the company can actually bring this vision to bear to reinvigorate and revitalize its slumping businesses.

There’s more to the vision. Sanyo has grouped its competencies and technologies into broad areas, which it calls “programs”, with catchy names:

• Blue Planet: address global environmental problems
• Genesis III: develop sustainable clean energy society
• Harmonious Society: create a rich society overflowing with love
• Product Circulation: move to a zero-emissions, completely recycled, undamaging product life cycle

Finally, there’s an actual implementation plan, dubbed “Sanyo Evolution Project”, with three parts. The first, known as “Business Portfolio Evolution Plan”, calls for Sanyo to completely review and revamp its business portfolio, focusing on CO2 compressor technology, solar cells, and home appliances, while building five new “solution” areas:

1. Symbiosis and ecosystem solutions
2. Recyclable environmental solutions
3. Global energy solutions
4. New-generation commuter solutions
5. Family relationship solutions
6. LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) lifestyle solutions

They’ll also refocus R&D strongly based on the new vision. They’ll reorganize their network to lessen product and geographic dependencies.

The second part of the implementation plan is called the “Corporate DNA Evolution Plan”, designed to revolutionize the corporate culture, organization, and management processes. They’ll strengthen the corporate identity and establish a global headquarters with clout. The third part consists of the restructuring steps mentioned at the top of this post.

Sanyo has come a long way since Iue Toshio (ja.wikipedia.org) started making bicycle headlights back in 1947 in Osaka. We certainly wish them well in what they are calling their “Third Beginning”.

58% of the American population now say that God’s importance in their lives ranks 10/10. Church attendance is up.

Good news? Hardly. For one thing, while spending more time sitting in church we are still electrocuting retarded black teenagers and killing Iraqi civilians with smart bombs. And much of the increased interest in things spiritual is frittered away listening to lectures in buildings with stained glass windows or dabbling in ESP, UFO’s, astrology, or yoga.

On a related note, in 2001 59% of all Americans said they were deeply interested in the meaning and purpose of life—a higher percentage than other societies, and up from 46% in 1995. What accounts for this fixation? In his new book, America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception, Wayne Baker presents a novel theory: we are desperately trying to resolve the contradiction between the traditional and the self-expressive.

A contradiction which is uniquely American, as the fascinating World Values Survey shows. According to the four surveys carried out in 80 countries over the last 25 years, the USA ranks below zero on the traditional vs. secular/rational scale—far below our industrialized sister countries and at the same level as Poland. (Japan is tops here.) At the same time, America falls on the high end of the survival vs. self-expression scale, which you would expect given its level of economic development. The chart below shows this in the form of the so-called Inglehart Values Map.

Baker is saying, in other words, Americans’ fixation on meaning and purpose is pathological, a desperate, misguided, and ultimately futile attempt to bridge the gap between an almost medieval religious traditionalism and the self-expressive possibilities of modern society.