V: What do you want to do for a living?
R: I don’t know. Any suggestions?
V: Well, what are your goals in life?
R: Hmm… I suppose my goal in life is to know everything about everything.
V: In that case you should be an academic, but do you think you would be happy studying behind a desk all day?
R: No, I guess not… and I don’t care for academic culture either. So I suppose my goal would be to know everything about everything and to put all of my knowledge to good use. Are there any careers for people like that?
V: (sarcastically) Well we’re not feeling very ambitious tonight, are we?
R: Not particularly.

…

V: So there are no careers that match your life goals; what are your main interests?
R: My main interests are science, creative writing, art, architecture, computer programming, psychology, religion, history and politics. Probably a few others that I can’t think of right now.
V: (slightly annoyed) I said your main interests. Which one are you most interested in?
R: I can’t answer that question. I couldn’t bear to give any of them up.
V: (sighs deeply; pauses) What about hobbies? What do you do for fun?
R: Well, I like reading, hiking, bicycling, drawing, writing, playing piano. Also studying all of the things I mentioned above.
V: Studying? For fun?
R: Yeah, I can be kind of a nerd sometimes. The rest of the time I do those other things – you know, the hiking and drawing and stuff.
V: You’re hopeless. (shakes head; walks out of the room in exasperation)

OK, so the internet is abuzz with news of a new competitor to Google called Cuil.

It’s a bad sign when you’ve chosen a name that you have to tell people how to pronounce. Their press release, as well as the over 800 news articles covering the story, feel the need to inform us that the name is pronounced “cool.”

Of course, I only found all of that information by searching with Google. Despite the publicity, Cuil’s results are not yet aware of their own existence.

—

Seriously, though, Cuil has a pretty interesting concept. The suggested searches are usually pretty spot-on, and I really like the result page format.

The positives pretty much end there. Many of the pages that Cuil pops up with are link farms with little or no real content, and the results pages are pretty sparse on reference material. There’s a definite bias in favor of commercial sites, and against informational sites, news sites and blogs.

Most notably, Cuil seems designed to ignore Wikipedia articles. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that they haven’t really replaced them with any other general reference material.

If I search for “Rock Paper Scissors” on Google, I get a link to the wikipedia article, the world RPS society, various RPS leagues, and a couple of businesses. The same search on Cuil produces most of the same commercial sites – the leagues, the businesses, and a couple of online game sites that google misses, but without the Wiki link, the results page lacks any readily accessible information about what “Rock Paper Scissors” actually is.

Cuil’s bias against reference material goes deeper than just wikipedia, though. For example, a google search on NSString (the string class in the Mac OS X system framework), produces Apple’s framework reference as the first result, which seems sensible.

Cuil, on the other hand, correctly identifies the search as a reference to the Mac OS X API, but the search results are almost entirely mailing list entries. The official reference material for NSString is nowhere to be found.

—

Finally, Cuil also has a strange propensity to return “no results” pages for uncommon terms. If a term is uncommon, it seems like the search engine should be more able to come up with a good results page, since there are fewer sites to choose from.

Alas, even when sites exist, Cuil is unable to return results for some obscure topics. I suspect this is just a getting-off-the-ground issue – the number of no-results searches is dropping by the hour – but it’s not promising.

—

In my tests, Cuil does a great job if you are searching for large commercial or semi-commercial entities with official web sites, but a poor job of searching for reference material, user generated content (opinions, customer generated reviews, etc.), or general subject information. Current event information is also mostly missing or difficult to find.

They may improve, and I hope they do – but for the time being, I’ll stick with Google.

it just occurred to me that I have no idea why anybody would work as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company for more than a year. I mean, if you pull in a hundred million dollar salary, you could retire after your first year and spend a couple million dollars a year for the rest of your natural life. You could buy yourself a ten million dollar home – and pay cash. You could spend your days in passive leisure (if you’re lazy), or doing something you’re passionate about without having to worry about making any money at it.

The question becomes, then,why doesn’t anyone do this?

OK, so this post has got to be just about the most ridiculous piece of theology I’ve ever read:

To sum up: the idea that God will judge people and cast them into eternal destruction—hell—for all eternity is a great comfort to anyone who is angry about injustice. Those of us who teach the gospel or tell it to others have a wonderfully comforting message of damnation that will bring hope to all who put their trust in God. The more we speak of it, the more comfort we offer.

(emphasis mine)

News from Detroit: Somebody Stole Jesus.

A man in boston staged a rally to protest high gas prices. The only problem is that he was the only one to show up.

Apparently nobody else could afford the gas to get there.

This post won’t matter to most people, but I finally gave up on using web addresses*. I invested 20 seconds in configuring OmniWeb’s address bar to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature**.

Now I get to my school’s web site by typing “Cal Poly Pomona” into the address bar instead of www.csupomona.edu. I get to the city’s web site by typing “Rancho Cucamonga” instead of www.ci.rancho-cucamonga.ca.us – I never have to look up a web address, never have to remember if the site I’m looking for is a .com, .net, .org or .edu, and I don’t have to worry about cybersquatters. As long as the good folks at Google keep doing their job, life is good.

—

* Obviously, my web sites still (and will always) have web addresses, because pretty much everyone else still uses them. I promise, though, that Google works better.

** If anybody else is interested in doing this (and is using OmniWeb), all you have to do is open up the shortcuts preferences and wire the * keyword to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%@&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky

The chairwoman of the Georgia Republican Party says that John McCain is “kind of like Jesus.”

…without prejudice.

Let’s do a thought experiment for a second. Imagine what the country would look like if 60+ percent of high school graduates had the opportunity upon graduation, instead of going to college, to start a business. They would each get 4 years of guaranteed food and shelter, $20,000 in seed money, up to $18,000 in federally backed interest-deferred loans, and no expectation of any revenue until the 5th year. Would anybody turn down such an opportunity?

As it turns out, the United States of America would turn down such an opportunity to fuel our creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. This is something that we, as a nation could afford to do. I know we could afford it, because that’s exactly what we spend to send our workforce to college.

That is the opportunity cost (to the country) of a college education. According to CNN, the average cost of attendance at 4-year public colleges is over $5000 per year (x4=$20000), and USA Today reports (based on census data) that 63% of our high school students attend college after graduation.

Students are also eligible get up to $18500 in student loans over the course of a four-year education – $3500 for the first year followed by $5000 for each of the subsequent 3 years. They (we) aren’t expected to pay back the loans – or to generate any kind of return on their education at all – until after they graduate.

To add fuel to the fire, we have this bizarre notion that anybody with a college education is more qualified to do anything than anybody without one. I just don’t believe that 63% of the jobs that are being done in this country actually benefit from a college education.

And yet the numbers speak for themselves – is this really how we as a nation have chosen to invest in our future?

[Update: I suppose I ought to clarify that I’m not anti-education. Education is a great thing, and absolutely necessary in certain professions. I do think, though, that there are a great many of the jobs that are being done by college graduates that don’t benefit much or at all from an extra four years of classroom education.

I think that in many cases, our society uses success in college as a way to identify people who are hardworking, diligent, self-motivated individuals rather than a way to actually teach people necessary skills. The problem, then, is that sending people to college is a woefully inefficient and only marginally effective way of assessing their personality traits.]

You know, the most depressing part about this year’s democratic primary is that pretty much every result after Iowa and New Hampshire can be explained by assuming the worst about everyone: Mysogynist western-plains cowboys, racist Appalachian rednecks, blacks who reflexively support the black candidate, latinos who reflexively oppose the black candidate, sophist urban intellectuals, etc., etc., etc.

Every single negative stereotype about American voters has been faithfully upheld.

Good. Freaking. Lord, People.

We all know it’s sad when a 13-year-old commits suicide, but this is a clear abuse of the law.

In case you didn’t click that link and read the story, the deal is that a woman in Missouri, posing as a 16-year-old boy, contacted one of her daughter’s friends on MySpace. When she tried to break off the relationship, the girl committed suicide. Now, the FBI is invoking a law written to stop hackers from committing identity theft in order to charge the woman with a crime.

Look, guys: creating a fake profile on MySpace is not “Gaining unauthorized access to a computer system in order to obtain information,” even if it violates the MySpace TOS. If it were, then the 500 people on MySpace who claim to be God are also felons. (If you think that blasphemy should also be a felony, consider instead the 425 people who claim to be Thor.)

The way the FBI is interpreting this law would allow them to pin a conviction on pretty much anybody they wanted to, and that’s just a bad idea.

I finally caved and installed Windows Vista. First impression: What does Microsoft have against menu bars?

Via Wizbang, New Orleans station WWL-TV reports that an Army Corps contractor repaired the city’s floodwalls by stuffing them with newspaper.

The corps does not seem to be particularly concerned.

As an Episcopalian, I’ve always admired my church for taking a very Communion-centered approach to Christianity. So what I’m about to tell you is a little bit of a shock to me.

One of my mid-week spiritual inputs is listening to Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Bible Church podcast. Mars Hill is a non-denominational megachurch in Grand Rapids, MI. Being a small-church Episcopalian from south Louisiana, you can imagine that it was kind of difficult for me to admit that a Yankee megachurch pastor actually had a decent message…. and yet I listen.

Anyway, in last week’s Mars Hill podcast, before the actual lesson started, Rob was talking about Communion (This is the April 13th edition if anybody wants to go look it up in iTunes and listen to it):

There are people who come down to the front and try to get communion as fast as they can and get out of here as fast as they can… Some of them leave a half hour or 25 minutes before the service is over. That’s called the drive-through Eucharist, and it is kind of somewhere between the body and blood of Christ and McDonalds. We aren’t into that.

<snip>

If, for some reason you can only make it to 35 minutes of the service, then maybe there’s a service earlier or a service later, or maybe Jesus just doesn’t fit into your life. That’s fine, but let’s be honest about it and not try to trivialize something that’s very sacred and profound

Naturally, I was totally floored by this. I belong to one of the most Eucharist-centered churches I know of. We do communion every week. Our sermons are kept under 20 minutes so that the Communion service is the absolute focus of our worship… and yet, I would totally fall over dead out of shock if I heard such a direct and eloquent defense of the Eucharist in the Episcopal Church.

I wonder if our fear of confrontation is damaging the things we believe the church should stand for. I mean, seriously, nobody should have the edge on the Episcopal Church for communion-centerdness.

There are four things I want out of life: clean water, healthy food, a roof over my head, and to change the world.

(or “Here we go with this again")

OK, here’s the deal. Several years ago, I wrote an Easter story for the now-defunct runningincircles.com. I got in the habit of re-publishing it every time Easter rolls around, and it remains by far my most popular post since I started my first web site in 1999.

In that vein, I present to you for the fourth year in a row, A Roman Soldier’s Easter.

Obsidian Wings points us to a great comment by Ezra Klein on Geraldine Ferraro’s* comment that Barack Obama is lucky to be black:

“Obama is not a woman, nor a white man. He’s who he is. To say that if he were different, things would be different is to say nothing at all. As a white woman, maybe he would have led a military coup and established himself dictator. Who knows!? Hell, if he were a slightly less inspiring speaker, or had an off-night at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he wouldn’t be in this position either. Similarly, if Hillary Clinton were a black man, it’s unlikely that she would have been a national political figure for the past 15 years, as it’s unlikely that she would have married another man from Arkansas, and unlikely that the country would have put an interracial, same sex couple in the White House. But so what? This is an election, not Marvel’s “What If?” series.”

* = who?

Sorry the commenting system is broken right now. I apologize and I’ll have it up in a couple of minutes.

[EDIT: Comments are working again]

OK, this NYTimes Op-Ed is a little over the top. He’s writing (about a week too late) about Hillary Clinton’s “Ringing Phone” ad:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

I’d guess that people who spend their lives studying “pictures and symbols of racism” are likely to see racism regardless of whether it actually exists, because this is just downright insane.

Apparently the New York Times thinks that sleeping children == Klan Members. Riiight.

I'm kind of glad I'm not a Roman Catholic right now.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1308679,00.html?f=rss

[EDIT: The Catholic News Service explains why the media reports were misinterpretations.]

Wow. Have I really not written anything here since Easter? Damn.

I guess I'll have to write something this afternoon.

[Update: OK, "this afternoon" was a little bit optimistic. I do have a post that I'm actually working on, though, and it will be up this weekend.

Also, somebody remind me to add a date/timestamp to my template.]