Swim as they may, fish find no end to the sea; fly as they may, birds find no end to the sky. Yet fish and bird still remain in the sea and sky as they have for ages…birds would perish instantly if they left the sky, fish would perish instantly if they left the sea.

This all seems rather understandable by Dogen’s standards. But just when we’re ready for some kind of insight or conclusion, Dogen launches into an opaque series of Chinese anagrams:

以水為命しりぬべし、以空為命しりぬべし。以鳥為命あり、以魚為命あり。以命為鳥なるべし、以命為魚なるべし。

What do they mean?

It turns out there is a very precise and symmetrical structure here. To see how, let’s line it up like this:

以水為命 しりぬべし、
以空為命 しりぬべし。
以鳥為命 あり、
以魚為命 あり。
以命為鳥 なるべし、
以命為魚 なるべし。

i-sui-i-mei shirinu-beshi,
i-kuu-i-mei shirinu-beshi.
i-chou-i-mei ari,
i-gyo-i-mei ari.
i-mei-i-chou naru-beshi
i-mei-i-gyo naru-beshi.

Nishijima translates this as:

So we can conclude that water is life and the sky is life; at the same time, birds are life, and fish are life; it may be that life is birds and life is fish.

And Tanahashi has:

Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish.

Unfortunately, the only correct things about either of these translations are the nouns life, bird, fish, water and air. Both translators have missed the meaning of the central construct 以 A 為 B, translating it as simply “A is B”. The alternatives are hardly better; Waddell/Abe has “A means B”, Genku Kimura “A constitutes B”. Jaffe comes a bit closer with “because of A there is B”.

The Japanese are getting confused by the old kanbun habit of reading Chinese as Japanese, which in this case ends up as “A wo motte B wo nasu”. But actually the construction here is a common one in Chinese, for example 以海為田, which is something like “the sea as one’s breadbasket” or “from the sea one’s daily bread.” The 以 basically indicates something instrumental, and the 為 for (the benefit of). The entire phrase has an almost perfect English translation in the form of “A sustains B”. The sea sustains life.

Not content to merely mistranslate the central repetitive structure, the leading translators proceed to also mistranslate the modifiers on each phrase. The modifier on the first two is しりぬべし (shirinubeshi), which is neither Nishijima’s “So we can conclude” nor Tanahashi’s “Know that”–it simply indicates that this is something everybody knows. After all, when translated correctly as “the sea sustains life”, it is indeed something everyone knows.

The modifier on the next two phrases is あり (ari). This one Tanahashi simply ignores, and Nishijima invents “at the same time”. Actually, they indicate a declaration by Dogen; he is telling us something he believes we don’t know, and that is actually quite startling: that we can switch gears and think of birds and fish as being sustainers of life as well.

The final modifier is なるべし (narubeshi), which quite clearly means “it must follow”. One can’t imagine where Nishijima gets “may be” from this.

This whole section, then, is not some muddle of random Zen-like equivalencing of birds, fish, sea, sky, and life, but a carefully constructed syllogism, building upon what came before. First, there’s something we all know: that the sea and sky sustain life. Then, there’s something new Dogen is telling us: that the birds and fish also sustain life. Finally, there’s the startling conclusion: that life sustains birds, and life sustains fish, and life sustains, in the context of the overall analogy here, our very selves.

Taking a bit of poetic license and substituting “nourish” for “sustain”, we have:

You know the sea nourishes life;
you know the sky nourishes life.
I say the bird nourishes life;
I say the fish nourishes life.
Thus must life nourish the fish;
thus must life nourish the bird.

At the nitpicky level, should it be sky or air, or sea or water? Well, in the preceding part Dogen spells out “sora” (sky) in hiragana, so the corresponding character 空 in the section being addressed here can legitimately be translated as sky, rather than air. The Sino-Japanese character for “water” is used throughout, but by analogy with “sky” we prefer “sea”.

But I’m left with one nagging doubt. Is it not possible there was a transcription error that was never caught, and that the second pair should refer to bird and fish nourishing sky and sea? It would seem to make much more sense if it read (substituting “nurture” for “nourish”):

You know the sea nurtures life;
you know the sky nurtures life.
I say the bird nurtures the sky;
I say the fish nurtures the sea.
Thus must life nurture the fish;
thus must life nurture the bird.

And the cycle is complete.

Once upon a time there was a small toad named Nathaniel. Nathaniel was despised by everyone who knew him. Not because he was a toad, or because he pulled the wings and legs off of flies before he ate them, but because he could not be trusted.

One day at the forest tavern, where all the small forest creatures went nightly to get drunk, Nathaniel announced that he was never going to pay back the money he had borrowed from his little woodland friends. And he borrowed large sums of money from just about everyone.

So they killed him. And then they pulled his legs and arms off and ate him.

Why would I have been surprised that he went to the web? After all, that’s where you go for answers to almost anything these days. Sites like eHow will help you with everything with how to peel an orange to how to put on a condom to how to mow your lawn to additional tens of thousands of topics you would have to live a dozen lifetimes to even think about, not to mention care about. Yahoo Answers will provice guidance on that messy breakup with your boyfriend. Other sites will even help you with how to believe in God.

So the web is changing the way we as a culture pass on critical insights about our lives.

I now better understand the importance of focus on web-based systems to manage and report of authority. After all, if we’re going to be making life-changing decisions based on something we found on the web, we should insist on it having at least some nominal level of credibility.

The first way to establish that credibility is to base it on the author’s credentials or experience. But that can be easily exaggerated or faked altogether. The second way is based on some kind of voting or popularity system. But what’s the value of the votes of a thousand members of the unwashed masses who can’t spell, much less think? And centralized systems of credentials or popularity will inevitably end up being gamed to a fatal degree.

A “dialog” with the web about our personal problems is really a “unilog”, a plaintive one-way cry of cyrptic search queries responded to by frozen text on the screen, incapable of either understanding our problem or explaning itself in more depth. It leads, in the end, to horrible decisions such as the one my acquaintance ended up taking–to put himself through the wrenching process of leaving the company he had joined a mere two weeks earlier.

From the intro:

2006 was the year with the greatest density of neurotheological content on the blog, and these articles, taken as a whole, would I hope represent a meaningfully significant, if somewhat quirky, overview of the field.

Loyal readers of Numenware who read posts as they went up may have missed the discussion in the comments section, many of which are extremely informative. These comments have been included in the book, typos and all.

Buy Numenware 2006 from Lulu.com now. 140 pp., with an extensive (10 page) index. Digital version available for three bucks and change.

Now we jump:

Hundreds of mind-body experiements have been conducted–including placebo studies and research on the power of meditation and prayer–but few scientists have attempted to explain the underlying biology of belief.

Notice the huge logical gap here? The intro about the miraculously cured cancer guy was talking about the biological effects of belief. Now suddenly we shift gears and are talking about the biological underpinnings of belief. The two certainly could be related and may form some kind of feedback loop, but certainly it’s not correct to completely conflate them.

This type of confusion continues throughout the first chapter and the entire book. It’s almost as if Newberg dictated the book and never bothered to proof it. We’re told, for instance, that the book will propose a “practical model of how the brain works that will help you understand your own beliefs and the nature of reality”. Understanding my own beliefs sounds good, but also understanding the nature of reality? This is just muddle, with no idea where the boundaries between “you”, “brain”, “belief”, and “reality” might lie.

Next Newberg switches into a pseudo-New Age rap:

If we understand the neuropsychology of the brain [sic], our beliefs will be able to grow and change as we interact with others who have different views of the world. It is my hope that as we become better believers, we will exercise greater compassion in our search for meaning and truth.

This is gobbledygook pure and simple. Our beliefs grow and change completely independent of any meta-level “understanding” we may have of neuropsychology or anything else. The concept of “better believers” is puzzling in the extreme–is Newberg trying to say that someone with an intellectual understanding of the phenomenon of belief, not that we’re going to get it from this book, is a “better believer”?

In discussing prejudice, skepticism and doubt, we are told:

Neurologically, such prejudice seems rooted in human nature, for the human brain has a propensity to reject any belief that is not in accord with one’s own view.

The muddiness of the logic here is astounding. I guess it goes something like this: “People tend to get attached to their beliefs and not accept new ones. Since people are their brains, or controlled by them, or something or other, then it’s actually the brain that has the propsensity to reject contradictory beliefs. And, since the Greek prefix “neuro” refers to the brain, let’s use the big word ‘neurologically’ and then claim that the prejudice is neurologically rooted in human nature.”

Next we jump to the interesting but completely peripheral issue of whether animals can have beliefs. What quickly becomes apparent is that Newberg has completely neglected to do the simplest categorization of types of belief. There’s Mr. Wright believing the cancer drug would work; there’s people believing in God, or political parties; and now we’ve got animals who supposedly have beliefs in the sense that they have an “ability to form new assumptions about their environment”, like dogs who “believe” their master will return. Geez, even amoebas have “beliefs” formed when they’re shocked. This is madness. My cat believes that when he ascends the stairway he’ll be on the second floor, or that in the morning Daddy will come down and pet him. For that matter, I “believe” that when I type a key on the keyboard the corresponding letter will appear in this blog entry. Whether or how those “beliefs” have anything in common with a belief in the Virgin Mary is the real point and the one that Newberg studiously avoids.

But wait, there’s more. Maybe inaminate matter–such as rocks–have beliefs! Because if their “smallest subatomic particles could have some form of self-volition or consciousness” then that would be sort of like a kind of belief! And if they did then all things in the universe would be connected in a great circle of consciousness! Just like the Native Americans believe! And the best thing is that believing in belief, believing that there’s all those beliefs out there, can bring us a sense of peace and equanimity!

Newberg cannot end the chapter without one final, confused segue, this time to beliefs as really cool things, with all kinds of benefits, that we should have more of, attributing to them tautological miracles such as “giving us our sense of ourselves” (we have beliefs, and we believe we have those beliefs, and we believe that we are the person who has the beliefs we believe we have, maybe?) and “helping us regulate the emotional centers of the brain”. Mine aren’t too regulated, and that’s due, I now believe, to me just not having enough beliefs!

According to a post to the computer-go mailing list, Tei Meikou 9-dan (pictured; GoBase bio), known for his expertise in computer go, characterized the Monte Carlo-style go program Crazy Stone (earlier post) as “at least 1-dan”, based on its winning performance at the First UEC Cup Computer Go Tournament. This is a huge milestone. Tei characterized moves 86 and 88 as “almost professional level” (see SGF game record).

One house of particular interest was the Bernays Family Residence at 1656 West 25th Street, since it was designed by S. Tilden Norton, the architect that designed our house. The two houses share the American Foursquare/Colonial Revival style, and have many features in common such as the front attic gable and porch extending halfway across the front of the house to the right. And this house, like ours, was turned into a rooming house in the ’70s and ’80s, with up to 30 occupants, before being lovingly restored.

View Larger Map

The LA Times recently published an informative article on this area. Prominent houses discussed include

• the 10-room Baker residence built in 1910 on West 21st Street
• the John C. Austin-designed, 5,600 sq. ft. house with 5 1/2 bathrooms (Austin also designed City Hall)
• the Kissam residence on West 20th Street—a three-story, 8000 sq. ft., 28-room Craftsman built in 1907 and designed by Frank Dale Hudson and William A. O. Munsell
• the 5,350 sq. ft. Asher home, built in 1904 on South Gramercy Place, where Marvin Gaye’s father shot the singer to death in 1984

Recentering el Pueblo is a blog written by a real-estate agent specializing in the area, and is well worth a read.

Note that Western Heights is considered part of the Arlington Heights neighborhood of LA.

Classes. The ES4 spec grabs the pre-reserved “class” keyword and uses it to, uh, define classes. All good and fine, but it’s just syntactic sugar replacing the current var CLASSNAME=function() {} idiom. Of course we have subclassing in the form of class BetterC extends C, but people have been doing this for years with existing functionality in JS1. And of course we have “final” classes. I suppose that could lead to better performance in some cases in a JIT environment. We also have static class variables, but we already knew how to do that. And lest we forget, we have interfaces a la Java.

Types. We’ve got types everywhere, including in weird Pascal like function declarations: function foo (string) : boolean. ES4 goes on and on: unions, named types, non-nullable types, subtypes, type comparisons, casts and wraps and conversions, type-based catch clauses, even parameterized types! If we’ve got types, we can do polymorphism! Guys, if I’d wanted a typed programming language I’d have chosen one to start with.

Namespaces, packages and units. In the so-called “programming in the large” category, we have namespaces, even though all current serious JS programmers and library builders already implement robust namespace management using existing JS facilities. Of course, if we have namespaces we need new syntax for declaring things to be in namespaces or specifying the default namespace to use. We’ve got packages and hey, we can import them with cool new keywords to do so. And there’s more: packages are then bundled into “units” which need more machinery to define and import.

Just plain weird. One of the most bizarre aspects of the new spec is this:

If the body of a function definition or function expression is a single expression whose value is returned, then the braces enclosing the body and the return keyword may be omitted. This tends to reduce clutter.

Example: function square(n) n*n // a definition

This is madness.

Pythonites on the committee manged to slip in triple-quoted literals, “destructured assignments” ([a,b]=[1,2]), and array slicing. What, no indentatation-based program structure?

I must applaud a couple of small points in the spec. First, trailing commas are now allowed in object literals: {a:1, b:2,}. Readable regular expressions are also a Good Thing.

Languages have identities, they have personalities, they have philosophies. Revving the language spec is all about respecting and extending that identity and personality and philosophy. One need look no further than Perl 6 and Python 3 for good examples. ES4, by contrast, is Frankenstein’s monster.

My Uncle Bill
By Nancy Myers Robrecht
September 28, 2007

My father, Ira Myers, grew up in Addy, a small town in north eastern Washington. He was the second oldest of five children and the only boy. Lenice was his older sister and married Bill George. Thus came into my life my favorite uncle, my Uncle Bill. Although I had other uncles and he had other nieces and nephews, including my seven siblings, we never had any qualms about identifying ourselves as “my favorite uncle” and “my favorite niece”. Uncle Bill and Aunt Lenice settled on a dairy farm in Chewelah, Washington. As a child, Uncle Bill’s farm was my retreat, my haven, one of my favorite places to go.

I remember driving, as a family, from Richland, Washington, where we lived, up through Spokane and into Chewelah, several times a year, usually once in the summer and again for Thanksgiving. I would get more and more excited as we got closer to my Uncle Bill’s. Often we would pick up my grandmother, Bessie Myers, in Pullman. When we first started going to Uncle Bill’s farm, he lived with Lenice and my cousins, Butch and Kara, in a small house without running water. There was a pump for water and an outhouse, also an apple tree. I loved my Uncle Bill: how he smelled of cow’s milk and alfalfa, the gentleness with which he took me on his lap and held me, how he teased me, how he took me with him to feed the chickens, milk the cows, and harvest the alfalfa. I loved his smile, his laugh and how glad he always was to see me; there was a special bond between me and my Uncle Bill.

After some years, Uncle Bill built a bigger house up on the hill. One summer when I was about seven, my mother and father decided I was old enough to go up to Uncle Bill’s all alone. They put me on the bus in Richland and my aunt and uncle came to Spokane and pick me up. How grown up and special I felt. I stayed a week or two, being spoiled and loved by Uncle Bill and Aunt Lenice. Thus began a ritual I continued every summer until we moved when I was fourteen.

I had another uncle in Chewelah, Bill’s brother Jack, who had married another of my dad’s sisters, Joyce. Together they ran a big dairy farm. I was fascinated with the way the cows came into the milk house, were hooked up to the machines and the milk ran into the big tank in the next room. I was thrilled when my Uncle Bill finally deemed me old enough to drive the tractor to pick up the bales of hay. And he was very patient with me when I drove the tractor over one of the bales of hay. I also loved riding in the alfalfa wagon, with the reaper blowing the alfalfa over my head into the wagon.

Another favorite memory is playing in big barn full of hay bales. My cousins, Jackie and Linda, and I would remove some of the bales to make tunnels and play tag and hide and go seek. We would also swing from a long rope out over the loose hay and drop down into it. I loved all the animals on Uncle Bill’s farm, the kittens, the rabbits that I was always devastated when he butchered, the dog, I think he was a spaniel, named Taffy, and the chickens. I remember the first time Uncle Bill took me fishing. I was scared to death and hid under a tarp in the bottom of the row boat.

Eventually I became braver. Once my cousin Jackie and I rowed the boat out into the lake and got stuck in the water lilies. My cousin Butch had to come and rescue us. Thanksgiving on the farm was memorable too. Aunt Lenice would make the most delicious pecan pies. We would go sledding down the long driveway to the road. The one thing I did not like on the farm, was Uncle Bill’s mother, mother George. She was old when I was young and lived alone in a dark little house. She scared me.

When I was about twelve years old, I got my hair cut. Up until that time I had never had it cut and wore it in two long french braids. The hair dresser cut these off in tact. I gave one to my Uncle Bill and kept one myself. He hung his in his gun cabinet.

When I was fourteen my family moved east to Cleveland, Ohio, and I was no longer able to spend time each summer at my Uncle Bill’s. This was a great sadness to me. Some time after that Uncle Bill moved to Petersburg, Alaska, where Lenice died and he married my Aunt Marilyn. After I married, we lived in Tucson, Arizona, and Uncle Bill and Aunt Marilyn visited us and our six children there. It was so wonderful to see him again. We went on a great hike into the Tucson foothills and my Uncle Bill identified many plants for us. After we moved to Alaska, I was able to visit them several times in Petersburg where we always enjoyed fishing and visiting together. After we moved to Portland Aunt Marilyn would often visit us and we grew to love her too. Since he has been sick in Idaho my husband Terry and I have been able to visit him several times. Hugging him there, sitting and holding his hand while he slept, and joining them for meals, always brought back memories of happier times on the farm.

I am glad for his sake that he is gone now, gone to a happier place where he can walk without pain, where he can be reunited with his wife Lenice and his daughter Kara, and where the sorrows he experienced in this life are softened and understood. Just as he brought happiness to me and many others while he lived, I am quite sure he is bringing happiness to many souls on the other side. I will always treasure my experiences with my Uncle Bill and I am very grateful that he was a part of my life.

Take your pick. Google Maps. Google Reader. iGoogle. GMail. Every single page is relentlessly, fixately UGLY.

Once upon a time, pure, simple, HTML with no images, pages that loaded in milliseconds, had some value. Google, it’s now 2007. Guys, hire a user interface designer. Make your stuff easy on the eyes!

The reason why all of Google’s stuff looks like s**t is pretty simple. They are a pure engineering company. Once the engineers have gotten their latest and greatest feature to work, they’re hardly motivated to actually make it look nice. That’s wimpy.

The engineering model worked great when then only thing Google had to do was figure out algorithms to index and search billions of pages. It doesn’t any more. People want rich user experiences, they want eye candy, they want visual pleasure. Can you give it to them?

Mitt just needs to answer a few basic questions for the media and the public:

• When God appeared to Joseph Smith to restore the gospel, He stated regarding other religions that Joseph should “join none of them, for they were all wrong, and…that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight.” Mitt, do you believe this?
• Mormonism continues to teach that polygamy pertains in the Celestial Kingdom, and supports that position with the rule that men may be married in the temple to multiple wives. If Mitt’s wife were to die tragically and he was to remarry in the temple, he’d be signing up for posthumous polygamy. Mitt, do you believe this?
• The church baptizes dead people so that they can be ready to accept Mormonism in the afterlife in order to achieve exaltation. Mitt, do you believe this?

…such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called “meditation” or “contemplation”—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.

He then challenges the Dennetts and Hitchens and Dawkins of the world to confront this phenomenon:

…we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.

He goes on to identify certain kinds of thought behaviors as a primary source of human suffering and talks about the availability of an extraordinary kind of relief. He discusses the mistakes garden-variety atheism is likely to make when looking at meditative experience, such as imagining that it’s like watching a sunset. Atheists ignore contemplative practice because of religious associations:

and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.

Atheists, he says, may try but will ultimately fail to purge the univese of mystery or the unknown or the unfolding, and this “does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.” The world’s obsession with Gods and religions cannot be beaten down with the stick of scientific objectivism, but only with a worldview which accounts for the full spectrum of human experience and its possibilities.

Thanks Sam. We really need a better book on this whole topic. And I think I know who should write it.

Art by Marcio Melo.

We found out a couple of interesting facts. John was apparently also referred to as Jean, and the B stands for Baptiste.

We found nice pictures of John/Jean and his wife Francoise, which are not available in the digital archives, but which we will try to get our hands on copies of to hang in our house.

We learned that John was deeply involved in the business of the ranch before moving to LA and entering the grocery business. He identified the opportunity presented by new cheap rail service from LA to Chicago and took advantage of it by planting barley on the rancho and shipping it to Chicago. Sort of like figuring out that YouTube can serve up your videos cheaply.

See also original article about Bob and Sakiko’s new house.

Hsu sets up as his strawman the “old AI” approach of mimicking human thought. But although the current crop of programs can be loosely lumped into this category, few believe that that is how go will be solved. The most promising direction is obviously UCT/Monte Carlo.

Hsu’s article would be best titled “Back to the Future”. He wants to trot out the old Deep Blue search+eval model with some tweaks to add another few orders of magnitude of analysis horsepower. He correctly identifies the two basic problems also discussed in my overview of computer go: the size of the tree and the difficulty of evaluation. However, his understanding of the latter problem is shallow at best. He says:

The second problem is the evaluation of the end positions. In Go you can’t just count up stones, because you have to know which stones are worth counting…before you can count a stone as live, you have to calculate several moves ahead just to satisfy yourself that it is really there in the first place.

This is completely wrong. You don’t have to just “calculate several moves ahead”. You have to essentially solve a problem which is as difficult as the original one.

The tweaks to the Deep Blue brute force model that Feng proposes as a way to solve the problem whose scale he is so egregiously underestimating include “null-move pruning” and caching the result of previous computations. And then custom hardware, combined with the inexorable advances in computing power that Moore’s Law gives us, could provide another four orders of magnitude, Feng suggests.

But is this anywhere near enough? The total of ten orders of magnitude probably is not enough in and of itself to deal with the greater branching factor in go, even with better pruning techniques, and that’s before we have addressed the problem of the hugely more complex evaluation function. Yes, it’s possible that caching could help there, but Feng underestimates the intricate interrelationships between local positions and the surrounding positions, which would require complex, time-consuming management of which cached solutions remain valid in what circumstances.

The bottom line is that the dynamic nature of go which makes it impossible to write a static evaluation function, even one million times slower than those used by chess programs, makes the entire Deep Blue model irrelevant. That is why the Monte Carlo model is so interesting.

Of course, if Microsoft is going to invest in this problem I’m sure they’ll figure these things out over time and their contributions will surely advance the cause of computer go. While they’re at it, why don’t they offer a $1M prize to stimulate external research as well?

I’ve always been a fan of Ted Nelson’s computer-science-on-acid sort of approach, at least that’s how I think of it. Although I don’t claim to understand his work that well, I can lay claim to owning an original copy of Literary Machines (Amazon).

But I’m trying to figure out why XanaduSpace is useful. I see the application in academia and research, and I’d love to have something like this to help me with my Dogen translations. And sure, it looks great for lawyers and legal documents. But is it really worth the trouble for the other 99% of the documents in the world?

I have to say that Ted seems to be moving farther and farther afield. In his keynote at HT07, Ted attempts to generalize the physical presentation of text beyond old-fashioned rectangular pages to text streamers and “crawls”, overlays, flying paragraphs, and even fountains of text and rippling surfaces, and shows a demo with pages rolled up like toilet paper. That’s all great fun but it seems less than central to any core information model and for that matter is pretty much covered by technologies such as SVG anyway.

…the silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see—listen and do not hear—the tongue moves but does not speak…I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have free hand.

The sad thing here is not Mother Teresa’s darkness, or dryness, or loneliness, or even torture, terms she herself used, but rather the fact that she never found how to accept this emptiness or see it as a blessing or at least an indispensable phase. Instead, she remained stuck in denial, imagining a convoluted scheme where some friend praying for her would would help her let God have free hand—as if it was not precisely His free hand that had her where she was in the first place.

Almost as startling is the ludicrous assertion by one theologian that “Come Be My Light,” the new book in which Mother Teresa’s letters were published, will “eventually rank with St. Augustine’s Confessions … as an autobiography of spiritual ascent.” How one could view Mother’s vast, empty, arid mental vistas, and her unyielding refusal to accept them, as “spiritual ascent” simply boggles the mind. Other theologians are even more divorced from reality, spinning ridiculous stories about how Christ’s absence in Mother Teresa’s life was “part of the divine gift”.

The hyperprolix Christopher Hitchens, whose new book “God is Great” is to be reviewed here shortly, has a typically simplistic analysis of the situation:

She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person.

As in his book, he throws out the spiritual baby with the religious bathwater, failing to understand the crucial difference between a simple lack of belief and the experience of emptiness.

When in Kolkata several years ago, I visited Mother Teresa’s tomb. Standing before it, I sensed at least a bit of her spiritual void. People today are so starved for goodness, or the appearance thereof, that we not only award Nobel Prizes to people that set up facilities to take care of a few dying people, but then once they themselves die move to bestow on them religion’s highest posthumous honor of sainthood.

I didn’t know Uncle Bill all that well, but remember Thanksgivings at his farm clearly. He was one of the two George brothers who married my father’s sisters Lenice and Joyce. As described in Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory, “They lived on farms on the east side of Chewelah [WA] that were so close to each other they were almost touching, just a little bit up the hill, on Cottonwood Creek Road. The Thanksgiving festivities were always at Uncle Bill’s place. He had a nice three-bedroom house that he’d just built [see picture]. Across the road, you could still see the primitive one-room log cabin Uncle Bill and Lenice had lived in when they first moved there, with its smelly outhouse. We children loved to play in the big red barn on Uncle Bill’s place. It had a kind of second floor, piled up with bales of hay. They kept the hay up there so they could just drop it down through special openings into the feeding troughs for the horses on the first floor of the barn. But you could move the bales of hay around and make passageways and tunnels and little secret rooms. My older sisters and I would play up there for hours during our Thanksgiving trips.

“But Uncle Bill’s main business was dairy farming. He had a herd of several hundred cows. Some of the cows were named for family members, including the one named for me: Bobby. They pointed her out to me but I wasn’t too impressed. The cows were milked twice a day, as all cows must be. Bored and stinky and farting and shitting, their tails flicking away flies on their backs, their huge udders hanging pendulously low, the cows needed to be lined up in front of the entrance to the milk house. (Sometimes, being creatures of habit, they would line themselves up.) Around the perimeter of the milk house ran a passageway with several dozen stalls, into which the cows would be led one by One. An important role in this process, which I proudly fulfilled even as a six-year-old, was the shit shoveler, who walked behind the cows as they ambled along the milk house hall, and scooped up the moist, malodorous patties they left behind—cows could shit all they wanted outside but the milk-house needed to be kept reasonably tidy.

“The central part of the milk-house was a cement-floored area three or four feet lower than the surrounding hallway and stalls, so that the men working there could quickly move to a stall containing a new cow, apply the udder cleansing solution, grab the udder attachment device hanging by an accordion cable from the ceiling, and attach it to the udder of the cow in question, one plastic tube for each red teat. Vacuum action in each tube started the milking process, stimulating nerves in the teat to send a message to the cow’s brain, which responded with a hormone instructing the teat to start giving out milk, a phenomenon known as “let-down—the same thing that happens when a calf starts to suckle, or a human baby, for that matter. The milking machine technology used in Uncle Bill’s milk-house had its roots in innovations in the late nineteenth century which succeeded in imitating the pressure of human hand on cow teat, or later, the pressure of a calf’s mouth.

“The milk drawn from Uncle Bill’s cows flowed through the tubes, also known as cups, and up a flexible plastic tube into a system of transparent pipes as big around as your arm running across the ceiling of the milking hall. It was quite a sight—all the white fluid coursing across the ceiling through the piping. The milk in the pipes headed to the next room, where it flowed into a massive stainless steel holding tank. This tank had a huge stirring blade that rotated at the leisurely pace of about once per minute. Uncle Bill would open up the top of the holding tank and hold up little Bobby to let him peer down on the lake of thousands of gallons of absolutely fresh, warm ivory-colored milk. Once a day, the Carnation truck would pull up, unfurl its hose and attach it to the outlet which allowed it to suck out all the milk in the tank into the truck and take it to the dairy where it would be processed into milk, cheese, cream, and butter to be delivered to homes across western Washington to build the bones and teeth of America’s next generation. My uncles made a good living off this business.

“Uncle Bill and Aunt Lenice had run a pipe from the tank directly to their kitchen in the adjacent house. So they literally had “running milk.” You held your glass under a tap and turned it on. What came out was utterly fresh, warm, creamy, unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk. Drinking this milk, it was impossible to avoid realizing that it had been produced by a living, breathing animal.

“All the women, including my mother, Grandma Myers, and Aunt Lenice and Aunt Joyce, Daddy’s two sisters who married the two George brothers, would spend all day in that kitchen preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Normally, two to three dozen guests would attend. This year there were twenty-seven….The turkeys were quite fresh, because they just went outside and grabbed a couple of unlucky ones and brought them over to a place in the yard with a kind of platform where they chopped off their heads. I learned that it is not only chickens, but also turkeys, which continue to run around even after their heads have been chopped off. What kind of signals continued to race along the nervous pathways of the decapitated fowl telling their muscles to place one leg before the other? After the blood stopped spurting from their necks and the headless turkeys stopped running around and were plucked and cleaned, they were roasted.

“Besides your basic turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and creamed onions, these Thanksgiving feasts specialized in pies. I remember an entire table covered with more than a dozen pies: cherry, apple, pumpkin, mincemeat, pecan, raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, loganberry, blueberry, serviceberry, huckleberry, gooseberry, and chokeberry.”

Goodbye Uncle Bill.

David Myers (no relation), chef at Sona, the restaurant near Bob’s old place in West Hollywood, has high praise for Kokekokko: “Old-school yakitori. They also serve chicken sashimi, from the breast and from the leg. It’s very soft, kind of like toro. It’s so smooth.”

Kokekokko is in Little Tokyo downtown. You’ll often find yourself waiting for a table, or waiting for your food once you’ve ordered. That’s OK. Wash down your sticks with some sake from their reasonably good list.