Why is everything Google makes so UGLY ?

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

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I love Mitt Romney. His hair is real cool, and he’s personally made about $400M from deals like Staples, where I buy paper for my printer. My parents were very fond of his dad George. Now Mitt’s running for President. The press is awash in speculation about whether his particular brand of Mormon magic is going to make it impossible for him to win the nomination or the election. Mitt’s eager to assert that Mormonism is just another regular old type of Christianity. Hey, Jesus is his personal savior.

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

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Amidst the ongoing shrieking of atheist banshees, it’s a relief to see Sam Harris address the question of the human search for happiness in a recent lecture:

…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.

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Last weekend we visited the Los Encinos Historic Park with Claire’s husband Robert. This park is all that remains of the grand Rancho Encino, owned starting in 1889 by Domingo Amestoy (picture), father of John B. Amestoy, the first owner of our new house.

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Feng-hsiung Hsu, one of the key contributors to Deep Blue (Wikipedia ) and now at Microsoft Research Asia, has published a manifesto proposing that go can be cracked by chess-like brute force techniques. Really?

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Western Heights is the neighborhood right to our west—bounded by Western on the east, Arlington on the west, Washington on the north, and I-10 on the south. When we were looking for a house we ran into this area, which contains some of the most fabulous, large-scale, sumptious century-old homes anywhere in LA.

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Time magazine has published a cover story entitled The Secret Life of Mother Teresa, revealing that according to her own letters she spent the vast majority of the years between establishing her hospice in Calcutta and her death in a state of deep spiritual desolation. In 1979 she wrote:

…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.

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My Uncle Bill died in his sleep last week at the nursing home in Lewiston, ID where he was spending his final days. He’s been cremated and his ashes will be scattered on the Alaskan ocean where he fished for salmon in his second career, alongside those of his late first wife.

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I just found out that Ted Nelson is continuing his decades-long, quixotic quest to reinvent the world’s basic document model, in the form of XanaduSpace 1.0, a recently released 3D document viewer that lets you see pan and zoom around a document universe with the transclusive relationships between documents represented as colored beams. You can download it here. This version is very close to demoware: there’s just one set of sample documents to be viewed.

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I called Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith” a “critically insightful” book. Now Sam has come up with a slight volume titled Letter to a Christian Nation.

The book has a bit of an identity crisis, however. The title would indicate he’s addressing Christians, but actually, as Sam himself says, it’s meant to “arm secularists”. As a result, the book has a preaching-to-the-choir flavor. But it’s interesting to consider: what is the long-term process by which the world can be brought to stop believing in magic? In particular, is it through arguments? I doubt it. The people on either side of this divide are talking different languages.

First, we need to separate the biological and cultural tendencies towards religion. It’s widely accepted—and the premise of this blog—that religion has a heavy biological component. To the extent it does, only evolution can address that problem. But it is not biology that compels people to believe that Mary was a virgin or that poverty-stricken Africans should be taught abstinence. We can accept that we will continue to have biological tendencies that leave us in awe of the unknown, or govern the neural processes associated with personal development, while still attempting to address the culturally-dependent aspects of religion which are causing people to kill each other, among other things.

So let us draw a roadmap for achieving a society where people no longer believe in counter-productive, harmful, and obviously stupid things. Given the arc of human civilization, I suggest this roadmap needs to extend over a century or more. Such a roadmap will alert us to what needs to be done now to promote the process.

A key element is the teaching of religion to children. This was highlighted by Dawkins in The God Delusion as well as by Sam in his new book. Although there is a natural attrition away from religion even among children of religious parents (rather extreme in my family’s case, where by my count only two of eight children maintain their parents’ beliefs), it probably averages less than 25%. Those that have discarded magical beliefs, however, are unlikely to have even one child who reverts to them. The issue, then, becomes the ratio at which religious belief decays. If it is 25% per generation, over a century the number of believers would be reduced by only 60%. If, however, the attrition ratio could be raised to 50% per generation, the number of believers a hundred years later would be reduced to a manageable 10%. But how can we bring one out of two people per generation into the ranks of the “brights”?

Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris appear to believe that the right approach is to talk real loud and take no prisoners. However, as mentioned above, that is unlikely to work.

We need a more sophisticated approach. We need to manage the conversation in a way which resonates with those we are addressing. We need to control the terms of the discussion. We need to establish simple, compelling themes which will resonate. A large part of this is semiological in nature—what are the words and messages which we want to create and disseminate?

For instance, consider the message “God does not exist.” We can embellish this message with all kinds of details, as Dawkins does, rebutting each and every argument that He might in fact exist. But the believers will simply tune this out. We need a message which, jujitsu-like, take advantage of the gullibility and proclivity to believe on the part of those we are trying to address.

I like messages of the form “God is X.” Such messages start off by accepting the premise that God does in fact exist. helping to guarantee their acceptance.

For instance, take “God is mean”. This leverages the nagging feeling shared by everyone that there is something a little bit wrong about a God that lets Katrina happen, that lets babies die, that watches over planes smashing into skyskrapers, and basically fucks all of us over more than we care to admit. It can’t be sugar-coated. Let’s spread this meme, gently.

Another example is “God is too busy”. Let’s face it—worrying about six billion souls is just too much work for One Guy. And that’s even before you think about the 10^23 other stars in the universe he has to worry about, a point made brilliantly by Carl Sagan in “Varieties of Scientific Experience”, which I’ll review in the near future. He’s so busy, he’s probably not really taking care of me like He should be, or listening really closely to my prayers.

Then we could go with “God is not that smart.” I mean, look at all the mistakes He’s made. We know he created Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib, but let’s face it, in the physiological design department we can’t exactly give Him an “A”. Just ask my knee doctor, who says one of these days I’m going to need a replacement.

Let’s spread these memes, focusing on them with laser intensity and refusing to dilute our message. As they spread and gain credence through society, people will not suddenly switch sides and start disbelieving—they will just stop caring about a God who is mean, too busy, and not that smart. That can get us to the 50% attrition per generation level and reduce believers to 10% of the current level over the next hundred years, at which point they will be nothing more than a minor nuisance.