Fun with numerology and the King James Bible

Not sure what inspired me to do this. Maybe it was the Hand of God. But for some reason I felt moved to see how long it would take to generate a histogram of the words in the King James Bible using a modern computer. The answer turns out to be about ten minutes of coding (in Python) and a second or two of run time.

The results have some interesting features.

The King James Bible contains:

789,634 words

31,103 verses

12,808 distinct words, of which 223 are possessives. Of those 223, all but four are also found in their root form. The four possessives that are not found in their root form are "barber's", "nachon's", "stomach's", and "fisher's". (The last one is, of course, found in the plural -- seven times in fact -- but the singular "fisher" appears nowhere in the KJV.)

4046 hapax legomena, including "onions", "cries", and "moist'.

The most common word is, naturally, "the", which occurs 63,919 times. The most common word that is not a conjunction, preposition, or pronoun is "shall" with 9837 occurrences.

The word "love" occurs 310 times and "hate" 87. "Good" and "evil" are more evenly matched at 720 and 613 respectively (with "holy" adding to the margin at 611). "Lord" appears 7830 times, "God" 4442, and "Jesus" runs a distant third at 983 plus 555 occurrences of "Christ". (Interestingly for Bible-code enthusiasts, no word appears exactly 666 times. The closest are "like" and "way" flanking the Number of the Beast at 669 and 664.) "Mary" rounds out the Catholic pantheon at 54, but not all those references are to the mother of Jesus. At least twelve of the 54 are to Mary Magdalene (I say "at least" because there are some unadorned references to "Mary" that appear to my unschooled eye to be references to MM, e.g. John 12:3), and some are to an assortment of other Mary's, like Mary the sister of Martha and Mary the wife of Cleophas. If God had really intended for us to pay a lot of attention to Mary the mother of Jesus, you wouldn't know it from the histogram.

You can explore the complete list yourself here.

The CSS Holy War

I'm not sure which is more striking, the fact that people are still posting comments on my CSS article, or the degree to which the discussion has come to resemble a religious one. Computer programmers talk about having religious wars about programming languages, but the term is usually understood to be at least partially tongue-in-cheek. I used to think that no one really got religious about these things. Now I'm becoming less sure.

I was really hoping to leave this topic behind but a comment posted today by someone who calls himself Pherdnut just pushed me over the edge. I happen to have a free hour between meetings, so against my better judgement I'm going to take this on yet again.

Pherdnut writes:

This would have been a better argument if:

What you suggest is impossible wasn't possible.

I never suggested anything was impossible. Go look it up. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Did you find the word "impossible"? No, you did not, because it isn't there. What is there is an explicit acknowledgement that all these things are possible:

Of course, all of these things can be fixed. But the point is they have to be fixed!
...
It [creating a three-column layout that doesn't have one of the many problems I cited] may be possible. I don't have a mathematical proof that it's not.

The problem with CSS is not that it makes it impossible to do the things people want to do. The problem with CSS is that it makes it hard. There is nothing inherently flawed about the CSS approach. The problem is in the execution.

But I don't want to talk about CSS. I want to talk about the tenor of the discussion. Consider this comment:

I recommend CSS Mastery, which gets straight to a lot of the stuff that confuses people about CSS...

I have not read CSS Mastery. I have read a lot of other material about CSS though, including several books, a boatload of web pages, and even some of the original source material. Does it matter that I have not read CSS Mastery? Pherdnut thinks so.

It's by Eric Meyer.

Well, actually, no, it isn't. CSS Mastery is by Andy Budd. Eric Meyer wrote a book called "CSS: The Definitive Guide."

I can assure that he knows a lot more CSS than whoever hacked together those tutorials you linked to.

How can I trust your assurances when you can't even get the most basic facts straight?

(UPDATE: I made an inadvertent but crucial edit in the above exchange. Pherdnut's full quote was, "I recommend CSS Mastery, which gets straight to a lot of the stuff that confuses people about CSS and also the CSS pocket reference which very quickly gets to the point when it comes to the specifics of how things are rendered (or supposed to be rendered) by the browsers. It's by Eric Meyer." The CSS pocket reference is indeed by Eric Meyer. This was simply an oversight on my part. I just missed the second reference, and thought the whole passage was talking about one book. I regret the error, but I stand by the substance of this post.)

But the question I want to ask is not whether or not "CSS Mastery" or "CSS: The Definitive Guide" or any of the other 41,803 results from an Amazon book search for "CSS" is a higher quality source of information about CSS than any of the sources I've actually relied on to date. The question I want to ask is: how is someone who doesn't know CSS supposed to know? Let us suppose for the moment that everything I've read about CSS (including the original source material from the W3C) is crap, and only Eric Meyer (or is it Andy Budd?) can show me the One True CSS Way. How fortunate it is that Pherdnut came along to set me right! What would I have done without him? Among the over 1000 comments that this post has generated in various venues, not a single person suggested either book before now. If not for Pherdnut, I might never have seen the light.

I submit that that in an of itself is a problem. But that's not what I want to talk about either. What I want to talk about is the form of the argument, which is something along the lines of, "Your conclusions about CSS are wrong because you do not have the necessary information."

On its face this doesn't seem altogether unreasonable, but in fact it is a very problematic argument. How much information is enough, and how can you tell? Suppose I read Meyer and I still believed that on balance tables ought to be used for layout. What then? Would someone else come along and say, "Oh, don't listen to that Pherdnut character, he's a moron, and so is Meyer. The person you really want to read is Arglebargle. He'll set you straight."

Notice how similar in structure this line of reasoning is to a truly religious argument: God doesn't answer your prayers? That doesn't prove that God doesn't exist, it just shows that you don't have enough faith, or haven't read the proper holy text. Maybe if you believed just a little harder next time...

Such arguments can never be answered, because there's no way to prove that you've attained a level of faith/knowledge that would falsify the hypothesis. No amount of unanswered prayers will ever disprove the existence of God to a true believer. Likewise, no demonstration of difficulty will ever convince the CSS true believer that there's a problem. The cause will always lie in the person experiencing the problem because there will always be some book he hasn't read or some technique or hack he hasn't mastered.

I think the reason that my original CSS rant got so much attention is not necessarily because I'm right but because I introduced some actual facts into the discussion, and nothing is more threatening to the true believer than facts. Notably, that claim is a hypothesis that can be tested by introducing some more facts into the discussion and observing the responses. Let's give it a try, shall we? Here are some more facts:

1. It has been claimed by the CSS true believers that using tables for layout is bad for SEO. You would think that if this were true, Google would say so on their webmaster guidelines, but they don't. In fact, the only reference to CSS and tables that I could find on Google is this entry from the Google blog:

If you are using a complex, multi-column layout for most of the content on your site, you might wish to step back and analyze how you are achieving the desired effect. For example, using deeply-nested HTML tables makes it difficult to link together related pieces of text in a logical manner.

The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized <div> elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result.

Note that this is not an admonition against tables, it's an admonition against deeply nested tables, which is an admonition that I thoroughly endorse.

There's another bit of evidence that the tables-destroy-SEO argument is bogus, and that is that if it were true there would be an absolutely trivial fix that Google could implement: simply standardize a class identifier that indicates that a table is being used for layout, e.g.:


<table class=for_layout_only>...


I submit that the reason they don't do this is because there isn't actually a problem to be solved.

2. A second claim made by the CSS true believers is that tables make a site inaccessible. But the W3C's own guidelines on accessibility say nothing about this, nor do the W3C recommendations on the use of tables have any mention of this. To the contrary, the latter page provides a few specific recommendations on how to make tables accessible to non-visual user agents.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough to convince you that the W3C doesn't agree with the CSS fanatics, check out their quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There you will find a whole pile of recommendations on how to make web sites accessible, including specific recommendations for using tables. There's also this:

Using CSS rather than tables for page layout (future link)

You'd think that if tables were so inherently awful the W3C would have given this item more attention.

You can actually test the effect of tables on accessibility yourself. There are publicly accessible screen readers out there. Pick one and run a table through it and you can see for yourself how bad the "problem" really is.

Let the experiment begin.

A new look for Rondam Ramblings

I've finally updated my blog template so I could add a TipJoy button. This is more of an exercise in market research than a serious attempt to make money. This blog is not and was never intended to make money. It's just a place for me to express my opinions so that anyone who cares to know what I think can find out. But today I got a reminder email from TipJoy that I needed to pay my bill (which I did), so I thought I'd try it out. Any money I make will be donated to charity.

I've decided not to add AdSense ads, at least for now, because I'm afraid they will prove too much of a temptation to abandon my editorial independence. Also, Google has been getting kind of evil lately.

CSS: the last word (I hope)

The flood of comments on my CSS versus tables rant has finally died down to a trickle. The final tally (as of 9 AM PST) was 146 on Hacker News, 198 on Rondam Ramblings, and a whopping 716 on Reddit (plus 921 karma points for Nicou). That smashed my previous record by a factor of four! There were also ~250 comments on my followup piece. Yowza! I wish I could say that I read every comment, but I didn't. After a while they started to get a little repetitive, and the ad hominem attacks in particular started to get annoying. But despite the fact that I didn't respond much because of the overwhelming volume, I did read a lot of them. And I wanted to thank everyone who commented, even the ones who attacked me. Notwithstanding accusations to the contrary, I did not write the piece as a publicity stunt. You will notice there are no ads on my blog, nor on my personal web page. [UPDATE: I've added a TipJoy button just to see what happens. Any money I make will be donated to charity.] I wrote it because I thought the CSS versus tables controversy could benefit from the injection of some actual data, and because I wanted to take a stand against what I saw as faulty arguments in favor of CSS. Nonetheless, as a writer it's always good to know that someone out there is paying attention, even if that attention is negative. So thanks to all of you.

I did want to take time to respond to some of the common themes that kept repeating themselves over and over in the comments. I doubt this will stop any of these memes from reproducing in the future, but everyone else is getting their two cents in so I figure I'm entitled.

Theme #1: CSS is hard, and you have no business expressing an opinion until you've paid your dues and spent five years learning all of the ins-and-outs.

I already addressed this point in a previous post but this theme kept showing up even in the comments to that post so apparently I was still being a little too subtle. I utterly reject this view, and not just when it comes to CSS, but in all aspects of life. This idea that only the experts have opinions worth considering is not merely wrong, it's corrosive. It is -- to cite but one example -- what got us into this economic mess. The idea that the crisis "could not have been foreseen" is absurd on its face. Not only could it have been forseen, it was foreseen. It was predicted at least as far back as 1992 and probably earlier than that. You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor an economist to see that if you spend more than you make, sooner or later you will wind up in trouble.

Likewise, you don't have to be a CSS expert to see 1) a lot of broken CSS on the web, 2) a lot of people tying themselves into knots trying to do conceptually simple things. You don't have to be an expert to know that if text is spilling out beyond div boundaries everywhere you look, and people are proving their CSS studliness by doing something as simple as a liquid three-column layout, something is wrong.

Now, tables are not perfect. Much of the criticism leveled at them is valid. But it is unsound reasoning to conclude that because tables have problems you should therefore use CSS. CSS has problems too. That makes the choice between tables and CSS a valid engineering tradeoff. My personal quality metric is that all else being equal the simpler solution wins. The situation could change as the technology landscape shifts, but right now, that calculus comes down on the side of tables. Reasonable people could disagree.

(BTW, if you are a fan of arguments from authority, you should keep in mind that just because someone chooses not to wield their credentials doesn't mean they don't have any.)

Theme #2: CSS does not really have the problems you think it has, you just need to study it more.

I anticipated this argument as well, but again people didn't seem to notice. I knew people would say this, which is why I used someone else's code to make my point. People still didn't get it. They attacked the code anyway and said that those people didn't know what they were talking about. Here's the thing: on that criterion, no one knows what they are talking about. There is not a single CSS-based solution to the "holy grail" problem that does not have some deficiency or other. The mere fact that people even talk about the "holy grail" in connection with CSS ought to tell you something.

I don't have anywhere near the time to deconstruct every putative solution to the three-column layout problem, so I'll pick just a few of my favorite examples. The first is ChristianZ, who I am choosing to pick on because his comments were particularly vituperative. He held out his website as an example of three-column layout in CSS. I must confess, I think his website is looks outstanding. Trick is, it's not done in CSS. Turn off Javascript and suddenly it doesn't look so hot.

The second is Matthew James Taylor's oft-cited solution. Once again I have to doff my hat to what is truly a heroic effort to rescue a hopeless situation. As a thought experiment you might want to ask yourself why it is that Taylor's solution (nor YUI grids, nor anything else) has not emerged as the definitive solution to the problem. If you can't come up with an answer, try this: take Taylor's "holy grail" solution and modify is so that the left and right columns are not always butted right up against the edges of the screen. (BTW, even Taylor's solution suffers from the ubiquitous CSS malady that text will spill out beyond the div boundaries if it's too wide to fit.)

Theme #3: CSS is not meant for dynamic content

This one I did not anticipate. It was not a common theme so it could be that the commenter was simply wrong. But I list it here just an case anyone else has something to say about it.

That's pretty much all I have to say on this. Thanks again to everyone who commented.

On the semantics of HTML

Since we're having so much fun talking about tables and CSS and whatnot I thought I'd see how long I could keep the party rolling. Yes, I'm being ironic. I actually didn't want to get sucked into this. But I made an offhand comment in my last post that needs clarification:

HTML has no semantics beyond how it is rendered!

That resulted in comments like this one:


No. You're very, very wrong about this. The whole field of SEO exists because you are wrong. The title element, depths of heading, everything is used. Just because you can't see it being used, it doesn't mean it isn't.

It's commonly said that Google is the biggest blind user in the world. If your content isn't blind-accessible, it's likely to be less Google-accessible. Accessibility is for everyone.


This is too big a misconception to let slide, so here I go again.

First, notice that I did not say that HTML has no semantics. I said that HTML has no semantics beyond how it is rendered. It turns out that this is not quite correct, but the way in which it is not quite correct is subtle and rather difficult to explain. So I'll start with an example. There are two links there. They both go to documents whose HTML content is identical. The only difference between the two documents is the style sheet. Those of you who use custom style sheets in your browser will probably need to turn them off. Those of you who are blind (do I have any blind readers?) will completely not get the point of the example.

And that is precisely the point of the example.

Back in 1995 I wrote an essay for the Risks forum called the source of semantic content. Back then it was in the context of an attempt by then-Senator Jim Exon of Nebraska to pass legislation limiting the transmission of pornography on the Internet. The key sentence of that essay is as relevant today as it was forteen years ago:

[T]he semantic content of bit streams is in the eye of the beholder, and ... the apparent correspondence between bits and semantics is the result of engineering convention and not an inherent property of the bits.

Let me try to explain what I mean by that by way of a non-computer-related example. What gives words their meaning? One answer is that their meanings are given by their dictionary definitions. (The French take this to a whole nuther level.) This would be analogous to saying that the semantics of HTML are given by the standards published by the W3C. It is not an unreasonable answer. But it is wrong.

The best example I know of to show that it is wrong is so powerful that I almost dare not use it. It is the word "niggard", with an A, no E, and a D at the end. The dictionary definition of this word is, "A stingy, grasping person; a miser." A negative connotation to be sure, but on its face less offensive than some of the epithets that people regularly sling at one another. And yet the actual semantics of the word, which is to say, its actual meaning as measured in terms of the effect it has when it is employed, is radically different from its dictionary definition. (The word "ignorant" has a similar property. So does "liberal", at least in the U.S.)

Neither words nor computer programs derive their true semantics by fiat. They derive their semantics by the effects they have on the world. And the principal effect that HTML has on the world is that it gets rendered in browsers and those renderings are viewed by humans. The W3C and CSS purists can rant and rave all they want, but the fact of the matter is that what the HTML in the above example really means depends on which style sheet you use to render it.

And that is true for any HTML document. It's fairly easy to make a CSS style sheet that will take any HTML document and cause it to render in a completely arbitrary way. (How to do it is left as an exercise for the reader.) This is not just an academic observation; techniques like this are frequently used by spammers to get past filters.

The counter to this is that these people are undermining the true semantics of HTML. They are somehow "cheating" or "ruining the web" or some such thing. I have a certain amount of sympathy for this position. I am no fan of spam. The world would be a better place if everyone followed the rules. But this is just like arguing that the world would also be a better place if everyone agreed to abide by the dictionary definitions of the word "niggard". You can argue this until you are blue in the face. That will not change the fact that if you call a person with black skin a "niggard" you will likely cause more offense than if you called her a "miser". That is reality.

The reality for HTML is that its semantics are determined primarily by how it renders on the browsers that people actually use. And at the moment that includes IE6. The H1 tag doesn't mean "top level heading" because the W3C says it does. It means top-level heading because browsers by default render it in big bold type and as a block rather than inline. And if you believe that I have the causality backwards, that browsers render H1 big and bold because it means top-level heading, imagine an alternate world where the default style for H1 was NOT big bold type, and ask yourself how many people would use <font size=+10> instead. (Actually, you don't have to imagine. Just look at how many people use the "I" tag instead of the "EM" tag, or how many web forms are out there that don't use LABELs. Actually, I use "I" instead of "EM" myself. It's partly out of habit (when I started writing HTML there was no EM tag) and partly because "I" is less typing, uses up less screen real estate, and accomplishes the same thing for my purposes.)

Now, I said at the beginning that all this was not quite true, and the thing that makes it not quite is SEO, which is to say, Google. Google imposes a set of operational semantics on HTML that are substantially different from those imposed by browsers, and it is those differences that lie at the root of many a web designer's sleepless nights, and is responsible for the existence of the SEO industry. But here's the thing: even mighty Google has to yield to the operational semantics of browser rendering. Google puts in enormous effort to try to glean how a page will render, and not just extract its apparent content as defined by the W3C. The reason they do this is simple: if they don't they will be overwhelmed with spam. If Google could generate their index by rendering every page and running OCR on it they would. The only reason they don't is that it's prohibitively expensive.

By the way, if you still doubt that the semantics of HTML are inextricably bound to rendering, consider the P tag and tell me how you define a paragraph without talking about rendering. A paragraph is an inherently visual concept. If you doubt this, do the following experiment: take an audio recording of Barack Obama's inauguration speech and transcribe it. Now compare your transcription with the original text. Count the number of places you put in a paragraph break where there was none in the original text, and the number of places there was a paragraph break in the text that you missed. Now compare that count to the number of places where you missed (or added) the end of a sentence. Now ask yourself: why is there markup for paragraphs but not for sentences?

CSS and the meaning of life

Wow, my little CSS screed seems to have really hit a nerve. In just six hours it has hit #6 on the Reddit front page (up to #5 now). I didn't even submit it to Reddit because it has been ages since I was able to get any traction over there! All those karma points, they could have been mine. Oh well.

I would love to respond to all the comments, but the volume is pretty overwhelming. But this one really stands out as my favorite:

Yes, you are an idiot.

Why mince words? I confess, I am not a CSS expert. I all but admitted as much in my piece, which is why I based my example on code that was not written by me, but by someone who holds themselves out as being a CSS expert. Maybe I'm so idiotic that I can't even tell a real expert from a snake oil salesman. But I submit that whatever the case, I am an very good company. The mere fact that the CSS wars have gone on for as long as they have is ample evidence that there are a lot of people out there who do not find CSS a model of intuitive clarity.

I don't want to re-fight the CSS wars here. Instead I want to focus on some things that surely we can all agree on, to wit -- that the CSS wars have been going on for a long time, that a lot of people have put a lot of effort into fighting them, and that very little progress has been made towards resolving the dispute -- and ask the following question: What conclusions can we draw from these observations?

One possibility, of course, is that one side is right and the other side is wrong, and that the people on the wrong side are simply dim-witted or intransigent, or both. I try (not always successfully) to take seriously the possibility that I could be wrong whenever I write anything. Maybe Dr. Howard R. Fine is right and I really am an idiot. One of the many problems with idiocy is that it does not yield readily to introspection. I take some comfort from the fact that the vast majority of the people accusing me of idiocy don't actually dispute any of the points that I made. But maybe I'm such an idiot that I'm not even worth educating (hard to tell from where I'm sitting). So the best I can do is to leave that on the table as a possibility and move on to the next option, which is, I believe, if it not a more plausible hypothesis, at least more promising as a potentially productive line of inquiry.

I humbly submit for your consideration the possibility that different people want different things out of life. It seems self-evident, but it can sometimes be surprisingly hard to wrap your brain around the fact that someone else doesn't want the same things you do. One person wants long-term maintainability while another just wants to get it done as quickly as possible. One person wants their web site to be accessible to blind people, another doesn't. One wants SEO, another doesn't care.

Underlying my conclusion that tables were the way to go was a tacitly assumed quality metric that not everyone shares. At the time I was writing I was not even consciously aware of some aspects of my own quality metric. For example, accessibility to the blind had not even entered my mind. It's just not something I have ever had to deal with, and about which I know next to nothing.

There are other aspects of my quality metric about which I was aware, but about which I was not explicit. For example, I tacitly assumed that having content spill out beyond the boundaries of its containing DIV is Bad. I think most people would agree on this and other tacit aesthetic judgements that I made, but not all would. A blind person, for example, couldn't care less where on the screen something ended up. (I'm actually guessing about this. I really know very little about how blind people navigate the web. Maybe someone can enlighten me.)

There are likewise tacit aspects of other people's quality metrics that manifest themselves in their comments. For example, a lot of people seem to think that anything that was done in the 1990's is automatically bad. It is certainly true that tables can be, and during the 90's often were, badly abused. But IMO that is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water. It's overreactions like that that led to throwing out Lisp with the rest of AI during the 80's, a mistake from which computer engineering is still not fully recovered.

And then there is one element of my quality metric which seems to be at the heart of the controversy: I believe that computers are meant to serve people and not the other way around. That means that if something inherently simple is difficult to do, it's wrong.

Not everyone agrees with this. A surprising number of people like things to be difficult. I have never understood this, but it is a fact. Some people revel in the intellectual studliness of mastering, say, C++ template programming or x86 assembler. I don't. I think C++ is a pain in the ass. Life is short, and I would rather spend my allotted time skiing or making love to my wife than worrying about whether or not I need to define a virtual destructor in my base class in order to avoid memory leaks. And that means that when I want, say, for something to appear centered on the screen, I want to be able to do it by typing "center" rather than "margin:auto". If I can't tell a computer to center something by saying "center", then as far as I'm concerned the computer is wrong, not me.

Like I said, not everyone buys in to this worldview. I don't get it, but it is surprisingly common. I think it might have something to do with job security. I first encountered the complicated-is-beautiful mindset when I was working for NASA. I had an idea for how to simplify spacecraft sequencing and make it less error prone. I figured everyone would love it. To the contrary, the establishment fought the idea tooth-and-nail (and still does to this day). And this attitude is everywhere. It's the reason the tax code is so fucked up. It's the reason the law is so byzantine. It's the reason that languages like C++ and Perl thrive.

I like simplicity. I think the computer should have to conform to my brain and not the other way around. That's why I like tables. They are simple, and they work -- for some value of "work".

Different people have different ideas of what it means to "work". For me, the ratio of effort expended to the quality of the visual appearance on the screen is paramount. I want to put forth as little effort as possible to get something that looks decent. (Yes, I'm a lazy bum. It's my greatest strength. Laziness is a powerful motivator for finding more effective ways of doing things, and it has served me quite well.) Everything else is secondary. I don't have any blind customers. I am not in any business where SEO really matters all that much. But your situation, of course, could be different.

That said, I do believe that some of the things said in favor of CSS and against tables are just flat-out bogus, and to point out some of those was the purpose of my essay. CSS is touted as separating layout from content. It doesn't. Maybe with the new table layouts in CSS3 that will change, but one of the external constraints that I have to live with is that what I do has to work in IE6. While the popularity of IE6 is mercifully in decline, the sad fact of the matter is that it still has a significant market share, and I am not in a position to ignore that much as I would like to.

Another common thread is that "tables are for tabular data, not layout." Why? Just because they are called tables? Here's a news flash: HTML has no semantics beyond how it is rendered! (That's not quite true. Links have semantics beyond their renderings. And maybe label tags. But nothing else in HTML does.) This is the reason that the "semantic web" is still a pipe dream. HTML was supposed to have semantics, but it doesn't. Giving real semantics to a markup language is really really hard. The history of computer science is lousy with failed attempts, from KRL to SGML.

Finally, a lot of people pointed to the Zen Garden as evidence of CSS's power. I remember seeing the Zen Garden for the first time and being blown away. But if you look closely you will see that it's not really CSS that makes the Garden beautiful, it's images! Don't get me wrong, the Garden is lovely, occasionally spectacular. But how much of the loveliness is due to CSS and how much is due to photoshop is far from clear. And this is to say nothing of the fact that the Garden completely sidesteps one of the most thorny issues for CSS, namely, dealing with dynamic content. If you know ahead of time what your content is going to be it's not hard to write CSS that will make it look nice. The challenge is writing CSS that looks good if you don't know ahead of time what your content is going to be. The Garden, beautiful as it is, has nothing to say about that.

I want to point out one more thing: I am not bashing CSS. I like CSS. Its goals are the right ones, and in many ways it is well executed. You can do some really cool things with it, often without having to work very hard. But layout -- at least the three-column layout that everyone seems to want -- isn't one of them.

Why CSS should not be used for layout

I wrote an essay about why CSS should not be used for layout. Unfortunately, I can't post it here because it relies on a whole bunch of embedded HTML and CSS. But I'm putting this entry up here in case anyone wants to comment on it.

You can also weigh in over at Hacker News.

Zed tells it like it is

My regular readers (both of you!) will have noticed that I haven't been posting much lately. This is because since we got back from our trip I've been busy working on a new startup. I don't want to say anything about it until we have something to show. But I'm pretty excited about it.

In the meantime, go read the best analysis of the current economic mess that I have yet seen (and I've seen a lot).

A skeptical look at global warming

I used to think that Bjorn Lomborg was a right-wing kook, but this video changed my mind. It's long (30 minutes) but well worth the time. Basically he makes the point that even if global warming is real and man-made (he concedes it is both), trying to reduce it still might not be a smart thing to do.

To be fair, one should be skeptical about the skeptic: one thing Lomborg doesn't take into account is the possibility of a catastrophic melting of the polar ice caps and the resulting sea-level rise flooding most of the world's coastal cities. It's hard to imagine what the silver lining would be in that scenario.

Photos! (Phinally!)

We finally managed to whittle down the 3500 or so pictures we took on our recent trip to a highlight reel with only about 450. Enjoy!

New release of lexicons code

For you Lisp geeks: I actually got a little bit of hacking done on the trip, and finished fixing a serious bug in my lexicons package for Common Lisp. More info in the C.L.L. announcement.

Pictures are coming

For those of you who have been emailing me asking about pictures from the trip, they're on the way. We took about 3500 pictures, and we've been working on winnowing those down. It's a fairly time-consuming process. Hopefully later today.

There's no place like home

We're back. Actually we've been back for nearly a week, but after forty hours in transit and ten hours of time zone change it has taken this long for me to get back to the point where I feel like I can write even semi-coherently (to say nothing of digging through six weeks of accumulated mail and whatnot).

Our trip home started the morning of November 30th with a drive to a little dirt airstrip in the middle of nowhere where we were picked up in a little ten-seat airplane.



This plane was going to take us to the Kruger International Airport in Nelspruit, about 45 minutes away. There we would have a one-hour layover before catching a jet back to Cape Town. It was about 11:00 in the morning and already nearly 100 degrees. Not even an hour into our little odyssey and we were already hot and sweaty. The plane was about twenty minutes late, eating up most of our layover margin. On top of that, we learned that we had to make another stop to pick up more passengers.

The second stop was another nondescript dirt strip in the middle of nowhere. We loaded on two more people and their bags. They were going to catch the same flight we were, so everyone was feeling a little tense about the schedule.

Everyone piled in and we taxied for takeoff. Now, this is about a 3000 foot long dirt strip, and there's a fairly stiff wind. We had landed upwind, and the pickup point was at the upwind end of the strip. So the normal procedure would have been to taxi back to the downwind end of the runway, turn around, and take off into the wind. But the pilot, aware of the schedule pressure, just jammed the throttle and took off.

Now, I figured that this guy does this for a living and he knows what he's doing. Besides, his life is at risk along with ours. But this airplane is no great performer. It's a workhorse. And it's pretty heavily loaded at this point. And it's hot, which makes the air thinner. And we have a tailwind.

And there are trees at the end of the runway. Images from this video popped into my head.

I guess the fact that I'm writing this eliminates some of the suspense, but I have to tell you I was getting very, very nervous. I was watching the airspeed gauge creep up veeeerrryyy slooooowwwwllllyyyy and watching the end of the runway approach. About two thirds of the way down I knew that we'd reached the point of no return. We were going too fast to stop before we reached the end, but still too slow to actually take off. If the engine had failed -- or even faltered -- at that point we'd probably be dead. We cleared the trees with probably twenty feet to spare.

We landed at Nelspruit just ahead of the jet that was going to take us to Cape Town. To make a long story short, the flight was delayed by about an hour, so all our rushing was for nothing. The airport wasn't air conditioned, so by the time we got to Cape Town we were completely gross, and still facing an eleven-hour flight to London, and then another eleven-hour flight to LA. Fortunately, we were able to access some shower facilities at the airport. If not for that, I probably would have gotten no sleep at all on the flights and I'd probably still be recovering.

That nail-biter of a takeoff was actually the third bullet we dodged on this trip, the first being in Mumbai just a few weeks before the Taj Mahal Hotel was attacked. It turned out (we found out after the fact) that we were also just a few hundred miles from the Sirius Star when she was taken by Somali pirates.

It's an interesting part of the world, but I'm happy to be home.

Obama breaks another campaign promise

This makes two by my count.

Into Africa

From Richard's Bay we cruised through whale-infested waters to Cape Town, the last stop on our cruise. Everyone we've ever met who has been to Cape Town has raved about the place, and now I know why. It's one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen. Think San Francisco with African music. Like San Fran, it's situated on a peninsula with a bay on one side and the ocean on the other. Cold water comes up from Antarctica and keeps the place cool and windy but not freezing. The waterfront is lively and chock-full of great shops and restaurants. South Africa is making some world-class wines nowadays. And with the dollar being strong (for reasons passing my understanding) everything is ridiculously cheap. A top-flight dinner for two with drinks, wine and dessert is less than $100.

We spent three days touring around Cape Town and its environs, including a baboon walk. The area around Cape Town is lousy with baboons. They are wild, but accustomed to human presence so you can approach them quite closely. The government keeps close tabs on them, and each troupe has a little group of human "baboon minders" that essentially live with them and follow them around wherever they go. They are there mainly to insure that people don't molest them, and that the baboons don't get into trouble. (Skipping ahead a bit, at the Singita game lodge, where we are now, the baboons have figured out how to open the sliding doors on the units, which knowledge they employ to raid the mini-bar when people forget to lock the doors. Yesterday baboons stole someone's entire supply of anti-malaria medication.) We hung out with one troupe for the better part of an hour. I now have more pictures of baboons than I know what to do with.

The other wonderful thing about Cape Town (and South Africa in general) is the extraordinary level of service. Everywhere we go everyone is friendly and eager to help. I've never felt so warmly received anywhere else in the world, not even in my own country (maybe especially not in my own country).

This part of the world is absolutely chock-full of wildlife, and not just in the national parks and game reserves. Baboons, as I've already mentioned, are everywhere. We visited a Cheetah rescue facility in the Cape Town winelands and got to pet cheetah cubs. Cheetahs live a tough life. They are at the bottom of the large-predator pecking order, underneath leopards and lions, both of whom will kill cheetahs if given half a chance. But by far the greatest threat to these amazing cats is farmers killing them to protect their livestock. They don't actually rescue Cheetahs at this place; they breed turkish shepherd dogs which protect livestock from cheetahs so farmers are less apt to shoot and poison them. The cheetahs that they have are there to help educate people about their efforts. All of the cheetahs are cubs rescued from the wild when their mother was killed. They are hand-raised so they can't be re-introduced into they wild.

After Cape Town we headed into the African bush for the week-long safari. It was not quite as rustic as I imagined. I thought we'd be in places that were hundreds of miles from anywhere, accessible only by air. Not so. All these places are accessible by (mostly dirt) road, though it's a several-hour-long drive to the nearest city. But a small airplane gets you there in thirty minutes.

We've spent a week in the bush at two separate lodges, Rattray's at Mala Mala, and the Singita Lebombo, where i am writing this. From my window I can see a giraffe munching on leaves. (We've named him "Tiny.") And off in the distance, if you know exactly where to look and have a good pair of binoculars, you can see hippos bobbing in the river.

It gets ridiculously hot here, so the routine is to get up at the crack of dawn and do a morning game drive for three hours or so. You return to the lodge around 9:30 or 10 AM (when it's already 95 degrees or so) for breakfast and a siesta. For the more masochistic adventurer there are mid-day walks you can do, and we've done a few of those. Fortunately there are laundry facilities out here or we'd be through all our clean clothes in 24 hours.

Mala Mala is a private game reserve, which is to say, the land -- some 40,000 acres of it -- is privately owned. But it's adjacent to the Kruger national park and there is no fence on the boundary, so it is effectively an extension of the Kruger park. But because it's privately owned the guides are under fewer restrictions regarding where they are allowed to go. For example, Mala Mala land rovers are allowed to go through riverbeds; Singita rovers (because they operate under government license within the boundaries of Kruger park) can't.

We had amazing game sightings at Mala Mala. We saw all of the so-called "big 5" -- lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and water buffalo -- as well as giraffes, wildebeests, zebras, jackals, waterbucks, impalas (lots and lots of impalas) and so many different kinds of birds that I lost count. Some of the sightings we had were truly extraordinary. We saw four separate individual leopards, including a cub. We followed one around for over an hour. We saw a leopard with her cub and a kill up in a tree and hyenas waiting for scraps below.

To put that in perspective, leopards are the hardest of the big cats to find. Many people consider themselves lucky to get even a glimpse of a leopard off in the distance. And we saw so many that it almost got to the point where we were saying, "Ho hum, another leopard. What else ya got here?"

But the most amazing thing we saw was a pride of lions chowing down on a water buffalo. It looked pretty much like what you see on the Discover Channel, but there are two little details that DC leaves out: bugs, and the smell. A rotting water buffalo carcass smells unbelievably bad, and it attracts bugs by the zillions.

To truly appreciate the impact of this I have to go into a little bit of detail about the viewing conditions. We are in an open-air Land Rover. There is no roof. There are no windows. There are no doors. There are four rows of seats. The first row consists of two bucket seats, one of which is occupied by the driver and the other of which if full of gear. The other three rows are bench seats. Four guests sit in the middle rows, and the tracker (invariably a local, and invariably a man) sits in the back. Our tracker, a gentle giant named John, was truly amazing. He could see critters waaaayyy over yonder with his naked eyes while the rover was moving that I could barely make out with binoculars while sitting still.

Oh, it's night. So John was wielding this amazing spotlight to illuminate the spectacle before us: a water buffalo carcass, probably about 15-20 hours old at that point. The lions are all over it. Some of them have already eaten their fill and are lounging around with distended bellies. But a few are still going at it, ripping off hunks of flesh, while hyenas and buzzards wait on the sidelines. We're maybe fifteen yards from the kill and downwind. The smell is overpowering.

And up the beam of the spotlight, towards our rover, attracted by the light, is coming a continual stream of bugs.

Now, this is no ordinary stream of bugs. This is a stream of bugs drawn from a reservoir of bugs that have been gathering from far and wide for hours and hours, and is being attracted in the pitch darkness by the only light source for dozens of miles, and it's a doozy. This is like being at the end of a fire hose of bugs. They fly up to the spot light, slam into it, and fall onto the head of the passenger seated just below where John is holding the spotlight. Which just happens to be Nancy.

I have to say she handled it like a trooper. She did not shriek, or jump screaming out of the rover and go running off into the night, which is a good thing, because even with satiated lions around it very likely would have been fatal.

Before we went on this trip we'd talked to a lot of people who had been on Safaris before and they all raved about the experience. They used words like "amazing" and "life-changing." I have to say that while it has been amazing, I wouldn't call it life-changing. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that you get much better wildlife viewing on Animal Planet than you do out here in the actual wilderness. The extra reality that you get from reality is mostly not so pleasant: It's buggy. It's smelly. It's hot and sweaty. And most of the time it's boring. I'm glad I had the experience, but in retrospect I'm not at all certain I wouldn't rather have someone else go out there with a good camera and just give me the highlight reel.

Unfortunately, I didn't bring a good camera. This was a deliberate decision. We didn't want to weigh ourselves down with bulky equipment, so we decided to spend our long-lens packing budget on binoculars instead of cameras. In retrospect I think this was a mistake. We brought two pairs of binoculars, a lightweight Nikon Eagleview zoom, and a Canon with image stabilization. The Nikons are great; I enthusiastically recommend them. They pack a whole of lot binocular into a very little space and weight. But if I had it to do over again I'd leave the Canon EIS binocs at home and instead pack a camera that had more than a piddly little 3x optical zoom. Oh well, maybe when we go to Botswana.

A thought for Thanksgiving

From the better-late-than-never department I give you this.

Off the grid

I'm in the African bush. There is internet connectivity out here (wow!) but it's extremely flaky and intermittent, even worse than on the ship. It's up at the moment, but I don't know for how long. I may not be able to post anything substantive until I'm back in civilization. In the meantime, hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

That didn't take long

In what has to be the fastest, most brazen betrayal of a campaign promise in the history of American politics, Barack "Change We Can Believe In" Obama is apparently going to keep Robert "Failed Policies of the Bush Administration" Gates as secretary of defense.

Un fucking believable. Now I really want my campaign contribution refunded.

Travelogue: Richard's Bay, South Africa, and the cultural experience from hell

It was supposed to be a half-day game drive followed by a Zulu "cultural experience" including food and dancing. It turned out to be quite a bit more, er, authentic, than I had anticipated.

The game drive started a bit late (2 PM) and the drive to the Hluhluwe (the H's are pronounced sort of like a cross between SH and CH) reserve was a bit longer than I would have hoped (an hour and a half from the port in Richard's Bay) but otherwise it went smoothly. We saw an amazing collection of white rhinos, which this park is largely responsible for bringing back from the bring of extinction. (For those of you who don't know, the white rhino is so called not because of anything having to do with color. It's a mispronounciation of the Afrikaans word "weidt" which means "wide" and refers to the shape of the animal's mouth.) At one point there were six of them in view at the same time, one of which had a horn that looked like it was -- no exaggeration -- five feet long. Somewhere on my hard drive I have photographic evidence.

By the time we were done it was starting to get dark. We re-boarded the busses to drive to the Zulu cultural center, which we expected to be, well, a building, where we would be fed and watch some Zulu tribe members dressed up in native costumes for the tourists.

The drive was again longer than we had expected -- the better part of an hour -- and it took us into the middle of nowhere. It was dark like I've never seen dark before. I had never realized the extent to which artificial light has permeated the night time of the western world. Even in the middle of the desert there is usually a glow from a nearby town or gas station or streetlight. Here there was nothing. We were probably sixty miles from the nearest electrical outlet.

To my surprise (and perhaps dismay) our bus turned onto a dirt road and our guide announced that we had 5 km to go. It was a single-track road, and despite the fact that the highway we had just left was pitch black, it somehow seemed even darker here. We bounced along for a good half hour, and I started thinking to myself that it felt like we had travelled a lot more than 5 km, a suspicion that was confirmed when our guide started making calls on her cell phone (amazingly there was pretty good coverage out there) and having a rather urgent-sounding conversation with the person on the other end which included phrases like, "No, we didn't see anything like that. The sign says what again?"

We had taken the wrong road.

Now, you have to picture the situation here. We're in a bus on a single-lane dirt road many miles away from even a vestige of technological civilization (notwithstanding the cellphone coverage). The bus is quite a bit longer than the road is wide. Oh, and did I mention that there was another bus behind us? And apparently they didn't have a guide because ours suddenly stopped the caravan and went out to talk to the other driver.

About five minutes later our guide came back looking white as a sheet. The bus began to do an amazing twenty-seven-point turn maneuver that eventually got us headed back the way we had come. And our guide is looking rather urgently out the window saying something about snakes.

I learned later that our bus had run over a snake just before we came to a stop. We had injured the poor creature, but not killed it. It was writhing around on the ground in full view of the people in the bus behind us. When they saw our guide emerge from our bus they had tried to warn her, but the word didn't get through. Fortunately, the guide by pure luck never came in range of the snake because if she had it almost certainly would have bitten her, and she almost certainly would have died.

It was a black mamba, the deadliest snake in the world.

So we trundled back out to the highway, hung a left, and kept going up to the next dirt road. After a few more urgent phone calls we finally saw a sign for the Zulu cultural center, but when we turned in there was no hint of anyone being there. There were no lights, no buildings, no people, nothing. More cell phone calls, until eventually out of the darkness a truck appeared which lead us into a gravel clearing that served as a parking lot. Everyone bailed out, and someone started leading us down a path.

Now again you have to picture this. This is a tour group of about fifty or sixty people from a high-end cruise ship. The demographics are, shall we say, tilted heavily in favor of the retired. Some people are walking with canes. And we are being led down a dirt path in pitch blackness with no light at all except for a dim glow cast by a dozen or so cell phones, PDAs, and keychain LED flashlights.

After fifty yards or so (in retrospect -- it seemed quite a bit longer at the time) we start to see the glow of some kerosene lanterns lighting the path, which improved progress considerably. We eventually get to The Place: not a building, but simply a roughly constructed circular wooden fence making an enclosure around a bonfire and a large tree. Oh, did I mention it was starting to rain?

There are chairs set up in the enclosure and people start to file in and sit down when someone asks, "Is there a bathroom?" We've been on the road for several hours at this point so it's a fair question. The guide says, "Uh, the bathrooms are back in the parking lot where we just came from." There is some hurried negotiation and the guide agrees to take a landing party back to the parking lot.

Three minutes later a troupe of Zuli dancers exploded into the enclosure and started to do their show. I guess they got tired of waiting for us, the upshot being that all the people who went to the bathroom missed the show entirely, which was quite a loss. I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have wished at the time because I was wet and hungry, but in retrospect I realize that it's probably the most authentic cultural experience I've ever had and likely ever will. These were not westernized Zulus getting dressed for the tourists, this was the Real Deal. This place was in the middle of nowhere because this is where these people lived.

The dancing and drumming were frenzied and energetic, similar to Maori dancing but friendlier somehow. Oh, and the girls were bare-breasted. It was more National Geographic than Playboy, but it was cool because it highlighted the fact that this was real Zulu, not Disney Zulu.

After the show we were herded out of the enclosure and back down the path to eat. Off in the distance I could just make out the dimly lit outline of an A-frame. It had no walls, but at least it afforded some shelter from the rain. Unfortunately, half the tables were set up outside the confines of the A-frame. A mad rush ensued for dry seats, and an incredibly chaotic effort to raise umbrellas over the rest was mounted. Nancy and I managed to grab a pair of seats under the shelter, which unaccountably had dirty place settings and used wine glasses even though we were, as far as we could tell, among the first arrivals. No one seemed to be in charge. Our poor tour guide was at a complete loss. She looked as if she was attending her own funeral.

Eventually, and with the help of some of the passengers, clean dishes were issued and food and drink was distributed, though I decided that if the serving was so poorly organized that I wasn't sure that the curry chicken was a risk worth taking. I eventually made a meal of bread, potatoes and vegetables. Under the circumstances, it tasted quite good, and was probably better for me than my normal diet.

At last it was time to go home, and to put the capper on a string of disasters, we had to crawl home at about 30 miles an hour because (as we learned when we finally got back to Richard's Bay) the lead bus had broken windshield wipers.

I have never in my life been so happy to see an electric light.

Travelogue: Mobassa, Zanzibar, and adventures with T-shirts

I'm in Zanzibar. I never thought I'd be able to say (or even write) that with a straight face, but it's true. Zanzibar is an island off the coast of Tanzania. We took an organized tour of the Jozani forest where red colobus monkeys posed for our cameras. Before Zanzibar we were in Mobassa, Kenya, and saw elephants, giraffes, baboons, and cape buffalo. In between there is heartbreaking poverty mixed with a surprising amount of optimism and industriousness. The story really needs photos to do it justice, so I'll leave most of it for later, but there's one story I have to tell:

If you've never been to a third-world country I have to explain that the local street vendors have some very well developed techniques for extracting money from tourists. These range from endearing (dressing in native costumes and hustling photographs for tips or a visit to their shop) to annoying (dogged persistence) to dangerous (taxi drivers who take you someplace other than where you want to go and then shake you down -- this actually happened to a fellow passenger in Mumbai). Having been to a great many third-world countries now I've developed some effective countermeasures, the most effective of which is to not carry any money when I go out.

Going completely impoverished is not always practical. Sometimes we actually want to be able to buy stuff, and when we go on organized tours I always make sure to have enough cash to tip the guides at the end. So it came to pass that after the trip to the Jozani forest in Zanzibar I still had a few dollars in my pocket when I decided to walk around on my own for a bit. I managed to shake the street vendors and taxi drivers clustered around the pier, but a local tour guide named Ali glommed on to me and would not take no for an answer. He just started walking alongside me and talking. I did my best to ignore him (I've developed a pretty well honed ability to act indifferent -- it can be a vital survival skill in some places) but he was quite persistent, and after a while I decided that I actually liked having him around. He seemed quite knowledgeable, his English was good, and I thought that having a local with me might not be such a bad plan. I figured I'd let him show me around, I'd give him the rest of my money, and that would be that.

I got pretty comfortable with Ali, and let him take me to some places I would not have ventured on my own, like the local fish and meat markets. Tourists don't shop here. There is no refrigeration. It's 95 degrees with 95 percent humidity. There are flies everywhere. I've got a pretty strong stomach, and it started getting to me after just a few minutes. That Zanzibarians don't all succumb to food poisoning is one of the world's great wonders.

Up to this point there had been no mention of compensation, but I knew what was coming: we were walking down a little alleyway when Ali started on the standard spiel about how tour guiding is how he supports his family. I pulled out the wad of bills in my pocket and was slightly dismayed to find that there was a lot less money there than I thought. I was sure that I had a few fives, but I didn't, just a fairly thin stack of one dollar bills. It was still a pretty good payday by local standards (a factory worker in Mombassa makes 50 dollars a month) but what Ali was doing was skilled labor and I thought he deserved more than minimum wage. And the look on his face made it pretty evident that he thought so too. But it was all I had.

At this point it occurred to me that I had made a pretty serious tactical mistake. I had only a vague idea of where we were, and while I probably could have found my way back on my own it would not have been my first pick. And Ali could easily have walked me into a shakedown. But he didn't. He just took me back to the port, accepted the money that I had, and suggested that I might have something in my backpack that I could give him "as a souvenier". I didn't. I had sunscreen, bug spray, my camera and a pair of binoculars. So he said, "How about your T-shirt?" I said, "This T-shirt? The one I have on?" (And thought, "The one I've been sweating into all day?) He said yes. I figured anyone willing to accept a sweaty T-shirt as compensation for work needed it more than I did, so I took it off and gave it to him. If you are ever in Zanzibar and meet a tour guide named Ali wearing a grey T-shirt with an embroidered logo from Costa Rica, hire him. He does good work.

I liked that T-shirt a lot, but being able to tell this story was more than worth giving it up for.

Travelogue: Cochin India, Maldives, Seychelles

After Mumbai I thought I'd had my fill of India but we had another stop in Cochin. I'm glad we did because it completely changed my impression of the place. In retrospect I'm not entirely sure why. When we arrived the dock was crawling with soldiers carrying machine guns. Apparently there had been a terrorist attack in northern India, and the perpetrators came from Kerla, which is the state in which Cochin lies. There was the same poverty, the same dirt, the same crazy traffic, just on a slightly smaller scale. But there was also a certain ... je ne sais quois. We hired a private car to drive us around ($20 for two hours) and we got out into the countryside where things were not quite so frenetic. We saw fisherman working these amazing wooden contraptions that looked like medieval catapults but were made for lowering and raising fishing nets. The waters around Cochin have been invaded by a water plant that grows like kudzu on land, which is making it impossible to deploy the nets and ruining their livelihood. Everyone in Cochin was very friendly. I'd go back there.

From Cochin we went to the Maldives, where we spent the day walking around the capital city of Mahe. Mahe is built on a tiny low-lying island. The highest elevation is probably 10 feet or so, and it took us an hour or so to walk completely around it. In an unusual display of political prescience, the president of the Maldives is shopping around for a new piece of real estate to relocate everyone to when global warming turns Mahe into water-world. I was not much impressed with Mahe. We were told that there are beautiful tropical paradises in the Maldives, but we weren't there long enough to find any of them.

From Mahe we went to the Seychelles, to the islands of Male, La Dique, and Praslin (which is pronounced Pra-la). Note to the cruise line: two days is not enough time for three islands. The Seychelles are the tropical paradise that the Maldives were supposed to be but weren't, at least not for us. I think it's the most beautiful place I've ever been. La Digue in particular is the nearly perfect embodiment of the classical vision of a tropical paradise. There is barely a road on the island. Only about a ten minute walk from the harbor and there is no vehicle traffic at all, but there is still some civilization in the form of the occasional hotel and guest house where you can stop in for a Pina Colada. I also got to go scuba diving on Male, and it was the best dive of my life. I've never seen so many fish in one place outside of a fish market. I got up-close and personal with a five-foot stingray. There were lobsters the size of a... well, I'm not really sure what to compare them to. They were probably three feet from tail to tentacle.

The bad news is that the coral reef is almost completely dead. On the other hand, there was also some new coral growth, so there seems to be some hope for the future. But to see the reef in such bad shape was heartbreaking.

Bush: Faith Leads to 'Common Values'. Say what???

As if we needed more evidence that George Bush is out of touch with reality to an extent that borders on the delusional, the Washington Post reports that at a recent United Nations interfaith conference he said:


"We may profess different creeds and worship in different places, but our faith leads us to common values."


Right. Common values like freedom of speech. (Oh, wait, Islam does not believe in freedom of speech.) Like equal rights for women. (Oh, wait, Islam does not believe in equal rights for women.) Like freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. (Oh, wait...)

OK, well, the common values that religion leads us to are what has led the Sunnis and the Shia to get along so well. (Oh...)

All right, surely faith can lead us to agree that people should not be discriminated against because of the color of their skin (Oh, wait...) or their sexual orientation...

The sad fact of the matter is that there is not a single common value that "people of faith" all share. Not one. This is because faith undermines our evolved moral intuitions which lead us to know instinctively that, for example, it's a bad idea to kill a fellow member of your own species unless you have a damn good reason. This is why in the history of the world there has never been a violent conflict between two secular groups over ideology. Not once. But the pages of history are red with the blood of people who died for religious ideology.

"Faith leads us to common values" is not just wrong, it is perversely wrong.

Bush does offer up a clue as to how someone who is not overtly psychotic can come to believe such nonsense:


Bush said religious belief "changed my life" and "sustained me through the challenges and joys of my presidency." He also suggested faith can transform relations between nations and cultures.


No doubt the pressures of the Presidency of the United States (and the overwhelming magnitude of Bush's failure upon abject failure) are easier to deal with if one indulges in self-delusion. And long-time readers of my blog will know that I have a certain amount of sympathy for that position. But there is a huge difference between saying, "My faith helped me" (which can be true) and saying "Faith leads people to common values," which is manifestly, brazenly, and staggeringly false.

Travelogue: Mumbai (f.k.a. Bombay), India

To get to Mumbai (which the locals still call Bombay unless they are talking to tourists) we had to cross the Gulf of Kachchh. Yes, it's really spelled like that. Yes, the thought of responding with "gesundheit" crossed my mind too. I couldn't help but wonder if this was foreshadowing what was to come. India is so poor it can't even afford vowels.

Normally when a cruise ship docks in a new country all the immigration paperwork is handled directly by the ship, which keeps all the passengers' passports. But India, of course, had to make things difficult so we were told we had to reclaim our passports and present ourselves personally for an "immigration inspection" in the ship's auditorium. There we saw the couple who didn't have an entry visa and the ship's captain arguing with the immigration officials. The latest rumor was that the officials were being sticklers for protocol. There was, it turned out, a procedure for handling cases like this which involved the issuing of a temporary "group visa" which only allowed transit from the port to the airport. But this required a government escort and so could only be issued for groups of four or more people. There were originally six people in the same predicament, but four of them had decided not to roll the dice and so they got off the boat back in Abu Dhabi, so now there was only this one couple, not enough to qualify. As we left the ship the situation was still unresolved.

We had been told to expect heat, smells, dirt, and poverty, and to be on guard for pickpockets, which made me more than a little apprehensive. The best I can say about Mumbai was that it was not quite as horrible as I was expecting it to be. There were a few places -- but only a few -- where we were not accosted by beggars and street merchants. Elephanta island -- once you got past the gauntlet of beggars and street merchants on the stairs leading to the ancient Hindu temple -- was very impressive. The island is chock-full of monkeys who are more than willing to pose for the tourists from more wildlife-deprived areas of the world. The temple itself is a man-made cave carved out an enormous outcropping of granite. Inside it feels like a building compete with enormous columns holding up the roof and intricately carved statuary, but the whole thing is actually carved out of this single monolithic hunk of rock. Despite having been used for target practice by Portugese explorers (actually, explorers is too kind a term -- barbarians is probably more appropriate) the carvings are in pretty good shape.

But Mumbai itself is a nightmare. The last time I saw poverty like this I was in Peru, and there I saw it only through the window of the air-conditioned van that whisked us away to our five-star hotel (part of the tour package on our way home from Machu Pichu). This time we were there for two days, so we had the time to get out into the city. The conditions are shocking by western standards. We rode the local train to the Dobhi Ghat, the famous outdoor laundry where hundreds of people hand-wash other people's clothes in conditions that would give an OSHA inspector conniptions. (As Wikipedia puts it, "This area is strangely popular with foreign tourists looking for a piece of quintessential Indianness." Indeed.) Even just riding the train was an adventure. The train stops for only ten seconds (I timed it) and we almost got left behind on our return trip when we tried to board at a leisurely Western pace. The doors on the train remain open between stops, so falling out while the train is moving is a very real possibility.

But the train was a relaxing respite compared to driving on the roads. I didn't actually drive. I've driven all over the world, including many countries where they drive on the left, but I would not attempt driving in Mumbai, or anywhere else in India or Africa for that matter. Traffic in this part of the world is beyond insane. I am amazed that there are not more accidents. In six days of driving (or being driven) around we have yet to see a single traffic accident, a fact that borders on the miraculous.

I did a little bit of walking around some Mumbai side-streets where tourists don't normally go, an excursion which, in retrospect, may have been unwise. I learned later that one of our fellow passengers had been the victim of an attempted robbery in a taxicab. But although I got some strange looks, I never actually felt unsafe. Most of the people were indifferent to my presence, and those that weren't were friendly. I got to see a Mumbai fish market, which was shocking to my Western sensibilities. It was about four in the afternoon, and the wares were displayed at room temperature, which at the time was about 95 degrees (with 90% humidity). The smell was about what you'd expect under those conditions. Indians must have immune systems built like tanks.

As we departed Mumbai we learned that the captain had had a private chat with the immigration officials that ultimately resulted in the couple being allowed to go to the airport to catch their flight home. I can't help but wonder what the Indian government is thinking by making it so difficult for Americans to get into the country. I can understand being a little paranoid about immigration when you share a border with Pakistan, but come on folks, this was a sixty-year-old retired American couple on a cruise ship wanting to go to the airport. Was it really necessary to put them through the wringer like that?

Of all the places I have been in the world, India is so far the one I am least eager to return to. (Well, OK, so it's tied with Qatar.) I'm sure the country has much to offer, but the overhead just isn't worth it. There are a zillion places on this planet that will make me feel more welcome. I'll go spend my money there first.

Travelogue: Abu Dhabi, Fujaira, Oman (unexpectedly), and adventures with Indian immigration

Of all the UAE provinces (districts? states? what do they call them?) our favorite by far has been Abu Dhabi, probably because it has the most greenery. Ironically, I didn't actually get to see a whole lot of Abu Dhabi myself because I went on a dune-bashing excursion, which was a hoot-'n'-a-holler, but in retrospect probably not the most effective use of the time. I did get to see the world's third-largest mosque under construction, which boasts the world's first-largest carpet at 70,000 square feet. It was quite an impressive sight, though personally I thought it, like many things under construction in the UAE, was a bit over the top.

Our final stop in the UAE was in Fujaira. We didn't actually get to see much of Fujaira itself because we went on a "mountain safari" tour that actually took us into Oman. (Oman is an interesting country geographically. It consists of three non-contiguous pieces.) We drove up a canyon to the top of a mountain. Despite being dry as a bone, people live there. I have no idea how they survive except that they raise goats. I would have loved to learn more about how the locals live, but we had a very taciturn guide who barely spoke English, and even though we hardly stopped we still made it back to the ship with only a few minutes to spare before we set sail again and headed for India.

And thereby hangs a tale.

Of all the places I have been in the world I have never encountered immigration hassles of the like that we have had getting in to India (though I am told that Brazil and China are even worse). Our adventures with the Indian immigration bureaucracy actually started months ago when we first had to fill out the paperwork to apply for a visa. The process is absolutely byzantine. You can't just get a form to fill out, you have to fill in your information on a web site. Now, I'm a computer security expert. I know all about how easy it is to use personal information to hijack someone's identity, and how easy it is to hack a web site in order to obtain such information. So I am very, very leery of entering personal information into any web site, let alone one put together by a foreign government. But there was no getting around it. We either took our chances on their web site, or we didn't get into the country. So I grudgingly filled in my name, birthdate, social security number, and a whole host of other personal details, some of which my own mother doesn't even know (yet). And then I did the same for my wife in order to spare her the trouble.

When I was done, the site said, "Are you sure that all this information is correct? You will not be able to make changes once you hit submit."

Now, keep in mind that the information I had entered did *not* constitute the official visa application. It was being used to generate a pre-filled-in paper form that I would have to print out, sign, and send in to the embassy. So I didn't pay much attention to this warning because I figured that in the worst case if I had made a mistake I could just start the whole annoying process over again and generate a new form. So I clicked "YES", printed out the forms, and gave Nancy hers to review to make sure I had everything correct.

It turned out that I hadn't. One of the things the form asked for was "name at birth." Nancy was adopted, and I had put down the name she was adopted under, not her actual birth name. So I swore up a blue streak and went to redo her form.

But the site wouldn't let me. As soon as I entered her passport number it said, "You already have an application pending. You cannot start a new one."

Apparently whoever programmed the Indian embassy's web site had never heard of a denial-of-service attack. (Fortunately, whoever programmed the Indian embassy's web site also apparently didn't know much about computer security in general, because it turned out to be pretty easy to hack the site to let me generate a new application anyway. For a country that prides itself on its software industry they are certainly not putting their best foot forward.

It gets better.

A few weeks after submitting the applications we get a letter from the Indian embassy with an extra form for Nancy to fill out. I had listed her occupation as "writer" and so she had to sign an affidavit swearing that she was not going to conduct any "journalism" while she was there. The irony made us both laugh out loud. Nancy writes children's novels. And it would be more accurate to call her an "aspiring writer" as she has yet to publish any of her books. And she doesn't keep a blog. (The icing on the cake was that when we finally got our passports back, I had been given a multiple-entry visa, but she got only a single-entry. We confirmed with the embassy that this was because she is a writer. From now on she has instructed me to put down her occupation as "homemaker.")

But wait, there's more.

Back in Qatar we met a couple with an interesting predicament. They had been told (in writing) that their Indian visas would be handled for them by the cruise line. They were scheduled to disembark in Mumbai and fly home on non-refundable business-class tickets. But the cruise line had dropped the ball and their visa applications had not been done. As far as they knew, they would not be able to leave the ship. Apparently a number of other people were in the same predicament, and some of them decided to leave the ship early and fly home from Fujaira instead. But these guys decided to roll the dice and hope that the Indian officials would let them go to the airport.

I'm being called to dinner so I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the next installment to find out what happened to them. :-)

A word about smoking

I found myself having a conversation with some people who smoke, which made me feel the need to say this:

Dear smokers: I am a non-smoker, but I will defend to the death your right to smoke. While I believe that reasonable restrictions on smoking (like on airplanes and in restaurants) are a necessary evil, I think that some recent efforts to ban smoking outdoors and in private homes go too far.

But there's something you smokers really need to understand: smoking stinks. When you light up a cigarette, or even worse a cigar, it smells to me about as unpleasant as if I'd dropped trou and took an explosive and sloppy crap on the seat next to you, and that is no exaggeration. The smell of cigarette smoke turns my stomach. It is vile. It is ranks right up there with diesel exhaust, rotting fish, and severe halitosis on my list of things that I would just as soon no inhale the scent of. Please keep that in mind the next time you want to light up.

Thank you for your consideration.

Travelogue: Bahrain and Qatar

After three days in Dubai we boarded our ship and headed for Bahrain and Qatar, two countries that I never in my wildest dreams ever imagined that I would visit. Bahrain is an island in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and there is a causeway that connects it to Saudi Arabia. Qatar is a peninsula also connected exclusively to Saudi Arabia.

We weren't in either country long enough to really get to know the place, only a few hours in each place. We were actually scheduled to go see a camel race in Qatar, but we forgot that we had signed up for it and ended up going to the local market instead.

I felt quite welcome in Bahrain. We spent most of the day in the national museum, with a few hours wandering around the local souk or market. We got around by taxi, and the drivers were mostly friendly and helpful.

Qatar, by contrast, was quite possibly the least welcoming place I have ever been. Normally on a cruise all the immigration paperwork is handled behind the scenes by the ship, which holds all the passenger's passports until the end of the cruise. But in Qatar everyone had to collect their passports and clear immigration individually. It only took us ten minutes, but we were told that some passengers were delayed by an hour and a half (we were only there for six hours). There was a shuttle bus from the ship which took us past the old souk (which is where we really wanted to go) and instead dropped us off at the City Center, a modern shopping mall that looked just like any other shopping mall in the world (complete with Starbucks Coffee) except that the writing was in Arabic. We took a cab back to the old souk, which was pretty much dead. We were virtually the only ones there. We were told by one surprisingly candid shopkeeper that Qatar has no local products (except oil). Everything in the souk -- including the shopkeepers -- was imported from somewhere, mainly India.

Wikipedia says that Qatar has the highest GDP per capita in the world. It was not much in evidence in the old souk and its surrounding areas. It looked pretty much like any other third-world country. In retrospect it occurred to me that everyone we saw there, and probably in Dubai too, was an expatriate. We likely never once laid eyes on a native Qatari or Dubaian. (Our cab driver in Bahrain was a native.)

One of the most striking things to me about Dubai, Bahrain and Qatar is the extent to which Islam is manifest in day to day life. You can't miss the afternoon call to prayer. It is broadcast over loudspeakers from minarets in every direction, sometimes with unintentionally comic results as imams improvise incompatible melodies and rhythms for the words "Allahhu Akbar." Women -- not all but many -- wear abayas, often with veils covering their faces which I personally find very creepy. Some women wear what appears to be a metal face mask that looks to me like it came straight out of a medieval torture chamber. I wanted to take a picture, but I could not work up the courage to do so. I was afraid that if I did it without permission I would cause offense. I was likewise unsure whether it would even be appropriate for me to ask. So I didn't. (Hm, I can't find any images of these masks anywhere on the web, so maybe photographing them really is a touchy thing to do.)

Like Dubai, both Bahrain and Qatar were hot and humid. I wouldn't rush to revisit either place.

(NOTE: we were told by supposedly informed people in the U.S. that Qatar is pronounced like the word "cutter", with the accent on the first syllable. But everyone we asked in Qatar pronounced it like most Americans intuitively do: kah-TAR, with the accent on the second syllable. Actually it sounded a bit more like kah-TEHR, but the difference was subtle.)

Travelogue: Dubai

(NOTE: These travelogue entries are not being posted in real time. I'm posting from a ship with a veeeeerrrryyy sssssllllooooowwwwww and very flaky internet connection. Though I am ever mindful that it is an absolute miracle that I can do this at all, posting from here can be quite trying. Also, as you will see, I had a good reason to not post anything until we got out of India. So the next few posts were actually written over the last two weeks.)

Dubai is the furthest I've ever been away from home -- 11 time zones and Google Maps only knows how many miles from LA. (The slow and flaky internet connection makes it an ordeal to actually look it up right now.) It's an 11 hour flight from LA to London, then another 7 from London to Dubai. By the time we get to immigration 24 hours have passed from the time we left home.

Dubai is quite possibly the greatest real estate scam of all time. Geographically, it is an absolutely god-forsaken place. It gets hot enough in the summer, we were told, that the pavement melts tires. Even in late October it was sweltering, and it's not a dry heat. The proximity of the warm waters of the Persian Gulf (which the locals call the Arabian Gulf) keep everything nice and steamy, but not wet. It's humid, but it never rains.

To add insult to geopolitical injury, there isn't even any oil here! And yet in this dusty steam-bath of a place a colossal modern skyline is rising, like Vegas on steroids. It is an orgy of construction whose centerpiece is the Burj Dubai, which is already the world's tallest building by an enormous margin even though it is not yet finished. I'd read about it and seen pictures, but nothing compares to seeing it in the flesh. It is incredibly, audaciously, bodaciously tall. Even looking at it with my own eyes I had a hard time believing it was real. And an even taller building is already on the drawing boards.

"Audacious" is a pretty good word to describe Dubai. In the middle of this steam-bath you will find Ski Dubai, an indoor ski resort with real snow. No need to pack a parka. They provide everything you need, including warm clothing. If that's not audacious I don't know what is.

And that's only the beginning. They are building not just one but *dozens* of artificial islands chock-full of hotels and villas, all financed (again, we were told) not by oil money as we naturally assumed, but by pre-sales. Dubai boasts the worlds only seven-star hotel, The Burj al Arab. Thanks to having a local connection we were able to get a tour of one of the suites. There are no "rooms". The smallest suite is 1900 square feet in two stories. The place is over-the-top in almost every way. There is not a square inch of those 1900 square feet that is not gold or purple or red or blue. It's Aladdin meets Louis XIV. Rates start at $2000 a night. Drinks (which are all we allowed ourselves) start at about $30.

With all this building going on, you'd think that we would arrive at a nice shiny new airport with a nice shiny new jetway. No such luck. Such an airport and jetway are indeed under construction, but we got there a few months too early. (We also booked a little too early to take advantage of Emirates Airlines new non-stop Airbus A380 service from LA. Oh well, maybe next time.) Instead our plane just parked on the tarmac and we walked down the stairs and onto waiting busses which drove us around and around before depositing us at immigration. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, the enormous hall was full and the lines were long. The dour-faced immigration officer looked over our passports for a very long time before grudgingly deciding to allow us to enter, all without ever saying a word. We were told later that it might have been because we have entry stamps from a visit to Israel three years ago, and that sometimes people who have been to Israel are denied entry into the UAE altogether and have to turn right around and go home.

Remember that when I get around to telling you about India.

Bigotry is alive and well in America

News travels fast these days. Even on the other side of the world in the middle of the ocean we're getting live updates on the election via satellite TV (Fox news only unfortunately) and Internet. But my happiness about Obama's victory and the Dems solidifying their hold on Congress is dampened by the fact that all over the country ballot measures are passing that deny gay people the right to marry. I particularly mourn for my dear friends Derek and Gary who were married just a few weeks ago in a beautiful ceremony that brought tears to my eyes. If, as seems likely at the moment, California's Proposition 8 passes their legal status will be thrown into limbo.

There is some good news for the long term: those who would relegate gays to second-class citizenship tend to be older, so chances are good that this injustice will right itself in the fullness of time. But it will take years, and that's a shame. And the stain of dishonor that this will leave alongside slavery and Jim Crow will never be washed away.

I do note with some relief that anti-abortion measures are failing across the country, including a resounding defeat in Colorado for a measure that would have defined a fetus as a person from the moment of conception. So on balance there is more to celebrate than to mourn this day. But the work of digging ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into over the last eight years is not over. Indeed it has barely begun. And the next election is just two short years away. I fervently hope that the Democrats don't make the same mistake that the Republicans made after their victories in 1994 and 2000: overreaching, tolerating corruption, and putting ideology ahead of sound policy. I am optimistic, but I wouldn't bet my entire life savings on it.

Dispatch from the other side of the planet

I noticed today that this blog actually has some followers! So for you loyal readers (both of you) I thought I owed you an explanation of why I haven't been posting lately: I'm on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean. That would actually be a better excuse than it is if I didn't have internet connectivity from here; obviously I do (which is a frickin' miracle) but it's spotty. I just wrote up a post about the election, but when I hit the "send" button I lost my connection and the draft as well. I may try to recreate it, but right now I'm feeling pretty frustrated.

I was going to keep a travelogue, but wanted to wait until we got out of India for reasons that will be apparent once I actually get around to telling the story. But it anyone is interested in keeping up with my travels leave a comment and I'll try harder to get updates out in real time.

Is it rational to agree to disagree?

Had an interesting exchange with Eliezer Yudkowski earlier that led me to this paper. I still haven't finished reading it, but I just had to post this passage (which, by the way, is summarizing a mathematical result, not just stating an opinion):


In the vast majority of disputed topics, the available evidence does not pin down with absolute certainty what we should believe. A consequence of this is that if there are no constraints on which priors are rational, there are almost no constraints on which beliefs are rational. People who think that some beliefs are irrational are thus forced to impose constraints on what priors are rational.


This ought to be required reading for any atheist who looks down their nose at a religious person.

I also have the feeling that it might be possible to construct a formal mathematical defense of withholding information in an argument even if both parties to the dispute are rational. The intuition goes something like this: part of a rational agent's worldview is a Bayesian prior about the how much weight one should lend to an opinion espoused by someone else. When one party in a dispute makes a statement, the other party updates not only their estimates regarding the subject matter of the statement, but also their estimates of the reliability and rationality of the speaker. For example, if someone says to me, "Men never walked on the moon. It was all a conspiracy." I am less likely to be persuaded by other things that they say. A rational person can map this phenomenon into their own reasoning and conclude that they are more likely to persuade someone that A is true if they do NOT say that B is true even though they believe that B is in fact true (and even if B *is* in fact true).

UPDATE: another gem from the paper:


These common criticisms suggest that most people implicitly uphold rationality standards that disapprove of self-favoring priors, such as priors that violate indexical independence. These criticisms also suggest that people in fact tend to form beliefs as if they had such priors. That is, people do seem to think they can reason substantially better than others, in the absence of much evidence favoring this conclusion. People thus seem to violate the rationality standards they uphold. And as we have mentioned, such tendencies seem capable of explaining a great deal of human disagreement.

I'm getting through!

In last night's debate, Obama finally did what Democrats should have been doing for years and re-framed the abortion debate by stating an obvious truth: "No one is for abortion."

Maybe he reads my blog. :-)

UPDATE: People are noticing! There may be hope for the future after all.

Abiogenesis and the art of persuasion

In my previous post I wrote:

evolution says nothing at all about how life actually first arose.

which prompted Don Geddis to respond:

your words suggest the connotation that nobody knows anything.

Yes. That was deliberate (including the "suggest" and "connote" part.) The reason is that I was not attempting to write an informative piece on evolution, I was trying to write a persuasive one. These two are not mutually exclusive. Being informative often works in service of being persuasive, but not always. And IMO not in this case, at least not entirely.

Regardless of whether one is trying to inform or persuade, the cardinal rule of writing is always know your audience. The target audience for any persuasive piece on evolution has to be someone who has not made up their mind, otherwise you are tilting at windmills. There is no hope in trying to persuade a confirmed creationist, and there is no point in trying to persuade someone who already believes in evolution.

Someone who is on the fence about evolution is very likely to be young (simply because young people in general are less set in their ways than old people) and religious. Atheists, almost by definition, believe in evolution already. Because they are young and religious they are also likely to be insecure because young people in general are insecure, and because it is a challenge to be religious in this modern world without a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. It cannot be lost on even the most die-hard fundamentalist that scientists manage to get some pretty wizzy results on a regular basis with no apparent help from God. (I do not mean to say that being religious causes insecurity, only that they are correlated. Indeed, many people turn to God because of their insecurities. The causality can run both ways. But an insecure atheist, while not unheard of, is a rarer beast.)

The second important rule about persuasion is to know your competition. In this case, the competition is very, very good at being persuasive. Consider that site from the point of view of my target audience. Right there at the top of the page in BIG BOLD LETTERS is "TOP 10 MYTHS ABOUT EVOLUTION." Very hard to miss, and very hard to misinterpret. And if you dig in to the so-called "myths" they all seem, in the absence of rebuttal, plausibly mythical. Not only that, but the short, readable summaries are all accompanied by three references for convenient (but not overwhelming) follow-up. Some of those followups appear to the untrained eye very much like they were written by someone who knows what they are talking about.

I assumed that my target audience would be familiar with though not entirely persuaded by the standard creationist critiques, and that they would be of a mindset to take those arguments seriously because 1) they seem plausible on their face and, more importantly, because they reinforce the comforting worldview that God exists, that He loves them, that there is a better life waiting after death, yada yada yada. Moreover, such a person would be on their guard when they read my piece because they would have been warned that evolutionists are trying not merely to deceive them, but to lure them away from God.

So it would be a serious, borderline fatal mistake to be arrogant or to overplay one's hand, or to bring up a line of argument that was even remotely vulnerable to a creationist critique, however misguided such a critique might be. So I deliberately chose to include in my argument only elements that were already familiar, non-threatening, intuitively plausible to anyone who watches television, and absolutely rock-solid in terms of verifiability. That the earth has layers is indisputable (and indeed indisputed). That we understand DNA is not disputed by anyone except O.J. Simpson's lawyers. That there's a volcano on Hawaii making new land, and a chain of ever more eroded islands extending from there to the northwest is indisputable. Moreoever, none of these facts by themselves are directly threatening to the worldview of a young, insecure Christian.

Abiogenesis is a whole 'nuther kettle of fish.

For one thing, abiogenesis is not a theory (in the scientific sense of the word), it is at the moment still just a hypothesis. A very well worked out hypothesis. A very plausible hypothesis. But a hypothesis nonetheless. To throw that into the mix for a target audience that almost certainly doesn't understand the difference between a theory and a hypothesis and a "fact" would be counterproductive.

Second, abiogensis is much more threatening than evolution. Even creationists accept that evolution occurs; the only argument is over the extent (the false dichotomy between "micro" and "macro" evolution). So even though I find abiogenesis plausible and I'm fairly certain that something like it is in fact responsible for the creation of life, I would undermine my goal of persuasion by saying so.

Finally, I don't really care if someone believes that God created life. My goal is not to turn religious people into atheists, like Richard Dawkins would like to do. I think that is neither possible nor desirable. Religion is not the enemy, extremism and fundamentalism are the enemies. There is really only one verse in the Bible that I take issue with, and it's not in Genesis. It's John 14:6. If I can plant even a single seed of doubt in someone's head that there may be paths to salvation other than Jesus Christ then my life will not have been lived in vain.