Finally the spooks are catching on to gait recognition—something I’ve known for years was a key identify trait. Not only personal, but cultural. You’ve got a highly identifiable Japanese walk; it stands out on the streets of LA whether the person in question is a 23-year-old chappatsu tourist in cutoffs or a 58-year-old oyaji.

What’s next? I think we need gait retraining services. Sounds like big business! Imagine the Arab terrorist who could be trained to walk like a Mexican, confusing even the best gait recognition software!!

We Incas do believe in an afterlife. That is the reason for our ghoulish practice of mummifying our dead. Luckily, mummification is quite easy in our Andean climate, requiring nothing more than removing the internal organs and then exposing the body to the bracing mountain air. The point of doing the mummification, of course, is so the spirits of the dead can come back and reclaim their bodies when the time comes.

Personally, in my role as combination of emperor, commander-in-chief, and supreme spiritual leader, I thought that this little fiction about the afterlife was a useful way to help motivate our average citizen to keep up the excruciatingly hard work that I, my predecessors and successors all demanded of them. It was no coincidence that “heaven” in our religion was a place where there was no more work to do and you could just relax. That was a key part of the management model I developed—if people work harder they create more value. That simple.

I never actually thought that in the year 2001, precisely 600 years after I died, I would have the chance as I did in fact to come down and reclaim my mummified body, which had sat silently for decades in the eerie hall of the mummmies in that grandest of all temples, the legenday Coricancha, in our imperial capital of Cuzco, until it was hurriedly taken out and hidden to protect it from the marauding Spanish. Sitting with me along one side of the hall to my right were the mummies of my eight predecessors, starting with Manco the Great; and to the left my son and grandson, the only two Incas who had died before those nasty Spaniard conquistadors showed up. Across from us, lined up on the other side of the hall, were the mummies of our queens or “Coyas”. I think both myself and the other mummies all looked quite good, thank you very much. Our skin was in pristine condition, and our hair was the same quality and in the same pageboy style as it had been in life. We all had on our very finest clothing, and the golden eyeballs we all had in certainly must have completed our unique look.

In any case, when I first saw your 21st century society, I was flabbergasted by the advanced you made. My great-grandsons certainly must have thought the Spaniards were a highly advanced civilization, with their mastery of the written word, and instruments of war, such as swords and metal armor, with the help of which they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of my defenseless countrymen if the course of taking over our empire. Of course there is no comparison with the automobiles and airplanes and computers and advanced political business models that the modern era has developed.

On second thought, though, the machines are nothing more than some artifacts of your civilization. And the political and business models are inferior, I think, to those that I pioneered 600 years ago. This book is meant to show you details of those models, and explain how well they worked both in our primitive Incan society of more than half a millenium ago, and could work in today’s society. Along the way, I also want to give you a peek inside the fascinating world of the most advanced society existing at the time in the Americas.

In Our Final Hour, Martin Rees says there’s only a 50/50 chance humanity will survive this century. My favorite choices for civilization to end are physics experiments which could disturb space-time and change the laws of physics, which might, for instance, destroy our atoms. Another experiment could cause all the matter in the earth to collapse into particles called “strangelets” and thus extinguish life.

I recently checked out Ancient Paths, having been recommended by a friend.

In an nutshell, Craig Hill is saying that the ancient Hebrews had it right, with arranged marriage and cultural rituals marking life transitions. I am somewhat sympathetic here. But he then goes on to applaud stoning of adulterers, and claiming that the degeneration of modern society has given rise to homosexuality. Guess what, Paul. Our modern society is actually progressing beyond how adulterers are treated in places like Nigeria. And study homosexuality, and the incontravertible data that show that it has existed in all human (and animal) societies since record-keeping began. Especially here in West Hollywood.

Bob’s new personal site uses TextPattern, a great content management system. Installation was a breeze. The system combines traditional CMS functions with weblogging kinds of functionality.

The new LA Cathedral was designed by Rafael Moneo, the Spanish architect who also designed the Getty Center here in LA. Judge the design for yourself—to me it looks like he thought he was designing another museum instead of a church.

On April 30, 2003, Sakiko and I got the chance to attend one of the first concerts on the new organ at the new cathederal. This is a Dobson organ, with 4 manuals and 105 ranks. One unique thing about it is its height—85 feet, in order to fit into the dimensions of the cathedral.

At the console was Christoph Bull, a well-known local organist known for his great improvisations—one of which he graced us with at this concert as well. The program included Vierne, Alain, and Durufle—maybe Bull thinks this is a French romantic organ at heart? Bull is the organist who at a concert last year at First Congregational Church picked my suggestion for an improvisation theme—the Beatles’ “Michelle”.

More information about the LA Cathedral organ.

XSLT obviously has much in common with functional programming languages. But it’s not really functional, because you can’t pass around functions (which in the XSLT world are the things called “templates”) as first-class objects, right?

Wrong. Dimitre Novatchev has come up with the amazing hack of using namespaces as a way to identify functions. To pass a function, he passes a placeholder element from that namespace; then the function can be invoked using XSLT’s basic template matching mechanisms. In his article The Functional Programming Language XSLT —A proof through examples—he then goes on to implement major parts of a FP library using his technique. A must-read for the XSLT geek.

Found an interesting article by Carl Bielefeldt of Stanford: Circumambulating
the Mountains and Waters. I don’t know Carl, but it seems like he’s one of the pre-eminent Dogen scholars we have in the West. His article is about translating Dogen’s “Mountains and Waters Sutra” in particular, and translating Dogen in general. He has great insight into the whole question of translating loosely versus translating literally. Suddenly my past musings on this issue in the context of computer manuals seem very shallow. He says:

Of course, there are lots of ways to translate, each with its own virtues and vices. When the translator doesn’t understand what the author is talking about, probably the safest approach is to keep as close as possible to the author’s language. Every translator has to cook her text, but the trick in this approach is to try for no more than medium rare, so the reader can still taste some of the raw juices of the original words.

Yes—but there’s a difference here. Eating a picee of meat, raw juices are raw juices and the eater can taste them as they are. But once something is translated, from Japanese to English in this case, the raw juices are gone forever. (In culinary terms, it has at least been “seared”!) It doesn’t really seem to me, for example, that using the word “practice and verification” (for 修証) in your English translation is leaving any “raw juices” for the reader to enjoy. Unless he’s a Buddhist scholar, and can back-translate in his head to the original Japanese—but in that case, why is he reading an English translation in the first place? Carl goes on to say:

The chief virtue here, at least when all goes well, is that the translation will have less of the translator’s own ideas.The chief vice is that the translation will be hard to read,with a foreign feel, full of odd diction and unusual syntax. Sometimes, this minimalist approach may catch more of the author’s style; other times it can distort the style, making what may originally have been smooth and flowing for the native reader into something twisted and clunky. Sometimes, it can make a passage seem more difficult or more exotic than it really is, turning what was fairly easy and idiomatic into something strange and fraught with unintended mystery; but it can also preserve some of the original strangeness and keep open mysteries that are inherent in the text.

It’s nice to objectively list the trade-offs between more and less literal translation like this. But the real question is: how do you weigh those trade-offs, and what side do you come down on? Personally, I think Carl has captured the negatives of literal translation extremely well here and they far outweigh the smaller number of positives. “Hard to read”, “distorted style”, “clunky”, “strange”—I couldn’t have come up with better words to describe the vast majority of Dogen translations I’ve read.

More basically, I think it is a false dichotomy to say that there is a tension between something smooth and something faithful. The implication that a translation might read smoothly just because the translator has “papered over the cracks” is wrong in my opinion. On the contrary, clumsiness often results from a combination of not being faithful (usually due to not understanding the source text), and lack of effort in crafting the target text. If the text is understood, and the effort is taken, the result can naturally become smooth. Carl now goes on:

Every translation is a bunch of trade-offs, every translator is a negotiator between author and audience. But when the negotiations get tough, as they often do with Dogen, I guess I’d rather let the reader wrestle with the difficulties of his medieval Japanese diction and syntax than make her read my own ideas in easy English paraphrase…

But wait. You are going to let the reader “wrestle with the difficulties of the medieval Japanese diction and syntax”? I’m confused then. If you’ve translated something at all, it’s in English now, so you’ve already made some large percentage of the decisions, right or wrong, about how to parse and interpret the Japanese and turn it into English. You can’t avoid responsibility by leaving clumsy structural remnants of the Japanese lurking in the English syntax and vocabulary and let the user sort them out for you.

Let’s say I am arranging a Bach cello suite for the piano. I could simply transcribe each note in the original into the corresponding note on the piano. But why would I bother to do that? I want to make this into a piano piece—with the harmonies appropriate to that instrument. Yes, that requires me to have an understanding, or perhaps even to guess, about what harmonies were in “Bach’s head” when he wrote the piece. But presumably I’m doing the piano arrangement because I am a musician and student of Bach and can make good judgments about such things that will make my piano arrangement pleasing and in some sense causative of analogous emotions to those someone feels when listening to the original cello piece.

Frankly, I think “literal translation” is an oxymoron. It is translating into a language that does not exist.

In his April 25th article in Science, titled Farmers and their Languages, Jared Diamond hypothesizes that “language follows agriculture”. As other scholars have already proposed, he muses that Japanese may have been derived from a language brought to Kyushu by Koreans (the “Yayoi” immigrants) who introduced their rice farming technology there, around 400 BC. Under this theory, Japanese was based on one particular Korean language known as Koguryo (whereas modern Korean is said to be based on the language of Shilla). Other researchers, though, view Japanese as more of a mixture, or even pidgin, of the language brought by the Yayoi invaders and the indigenous Jomon tribes.

John Horgan recently wrote in Slate about why he thinks Buddhism doesn’t work. He says:

Eventually…I concluded that Buddhism is not…rational…”.

Stop the presses! Buddhism is not rational!

What’s next? Horgan the restaurant reviewer, criticizing a Mexican restaurant because it doesn’t serve sushi? Why not criticize it for not offering dry cleaning services either?

Horgan says,

Together, these tenets [reincaration and karma] imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.

Gee, bringing Santa Claus and cockroaches into the discussion seems like going sort of overboard, although I know that as a big science writer Horgan needs to keep his prose lively. But actually, neither reincarnation nor karma, understood correctly, have anything to do with a cosmic judge.

Horgan moves on to point out, rightly, that it is often more useful to consider Buddhism as a roadmap to personal growth, focused on meditation practice, but then claims that “meditation’s effects,,,[are]…highly unreliable”, and that “[m]editation can even exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people.” Well John, you’re a reporter or a journalist or a writer or something, right? Why not tell us whatever results you experienced from your own meditation practice, since you say you did join a Buddhist meditation class four years ago? And you know as well as anyone that any practice targeting emotional growth, including pyschotherapy for one, can and does (and probably should) create “negative” effects—as a stage in the process. Are you saying that any practice that exacerbates depression at any point is bad or wrong—a point of view that reveals an extremely shallow grasp of the nature of depression itself?

Horgan goes on to claim that Buddhism raises as an ideal “perceiving yourself as unreal”. Then he proceeds from this cartoon-like characterization to the conclusion that perceptions of unreality can also be caused by drugs so they’re bad; or that perceiving yourself as unreal might cause you to stop caring about human suffering. I doubt if he could find a single Buddhist teacher anywhere in the world (did he talk to one?) who would describe the Buddhist ideal to be thinking of yourself as unreal (it’s closer to thinking of yourself as very real, I would say). Of course, his account would not be complete without pointing out that some masters have had various personal quirks—drinking too much, say—and claims that this invalidates a supposed Buddhist tenet that reaching enlightenment is supposed to make you a paragon of virtue. I would say that reaching enlightenment is supposed to make you “you”.

We have to wait until the end of the article to figure out what Horgan is really trying to say. Turns out he isn’t really down on Buddhism specifically, but rather all philosophical and religious frameworks. Of course it seems odd that the minute he gets done complaining that Buddhist practice can aggravate depression, he himself is proposing a sort of ultimately depressing anti-philosophy:

The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can…accommodate science’s disturbing perspective (that human beings are accidents).

In fact, I would say that Buddhism accommodates, or more accurately presages, this perspective perfectly. But that’s probably hard to see for a person like Horgan who has already put all religions into one big box in his mind, and implicitly and explicitly forcing his expectations and preconceptions of “religion”, based on his experience with Western ones, onto Buddhism. Yes, it’s hard to look at a new philosophical framework—but what’s the point if you’re just going to evaluate it in terms of your old one?

I’m wondering why Horgan joined the meditation group and started to get interested in Buddhism. Most people would do such things because they felt some disconnect in their lives, because they felt the need for some kind of answer. It’s fine that Horgan did not find his answer in Buddhism. Did he find it somewhere else? Did he decide he didn’t need an answer or already had it? His article would have been so much more relevant if he had given us even basic clues about his personal experience.

I’ve read Horgan’s 1996 book, “The End of Science”, and I greatly respect his ability to shine light on complex questions. That’s why it’s unfortunate that he did not bother to take the extra steps either in terms of his practice or his thinking or his writing to actually illuminate what insights Buddhism has to offer.