Please, no labels...

I hate being labeled. I understand the need to categorize things, to sort things in our minds, to organize the world around us in an attempt to understand how things work. My children love to compare things and understand the similarities and differences between the objects around them. This is an entirely human response. But I would hope that we’re a little more profound - a little more complex - than the quaint labels that people would like to stick on us.

Do not try to call me a conservative or a liberal. My opinions and beliefs on specific issues are driven by thought and argument, not because of someone else’s agenda. On some issues, I hold a more politically conservative opinion (I am pro-life and pro-small government), but on other issues I would be called a political liberal (I am pro-gun control and against the death penalty). I am fully willing to argue my belief on any one of these issues independently. But I won’t defend any of them against a charge of being “conservative” or “liberal.” The labeling is meaningless outside of a discussion of the issue itself. I have voted for both Democrat and Republican candidates based on the issues that I feel are important at the time and the candidate’s stance on those issues. Voting this way requires a lot more effort than simply choosing the “D” or “R” box on the first page, but it more accurately reflects how I feel about the officials that represent me.

I even flinch from being called a Baptist. I proudly attend a Southern Baptist church for two reasons:

• I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and feel more comfortable in the structure and traditions of that denomination.
• In general, the doctrine of the Southern Baptist denomination holds fairly closely with my own beliefs.

However, I would hope that someone wouldn’t merely look up “Southern Baptists” on Wikipedia and assume they understand what I believe about any given issue. There are, in fact, practices with which I do not agree, but I stand firm with the fellowship of believers to which I am bound. I attend a Baptist church, but do not assume you understand everything about me because of that.

Despite our need and desire to categorize the world around us, there are rarely such simple black-and-white differentiations. We should challenge ourselves to understand issues and the subtleties and complexities of people’s opinions, rather than be lazy and rely on simple labels to define how we respond to those around us.

For those considering buying an e-book reader

This year, I bought my first e-book reader, the Kindle 2. I'd resisted buying the first generation Kindle. Despite my love of gadgetry, I try to avoid buying first-generation technology. The price tends to be very high relative to the usefulness of the technology (there’s a premium fee for being an early adopter, as iPhone buyers learned when the price of the device dropped drastically mere weeks after its initial release), and I prefer to wait for bugs to be worked out. I was a little wary about going the e-book route; I couldn’t imagine giving up the feel of paper, and I was concerned that the books I wanted to read wouldn’t always be available. Nine months after getting my Kindle, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back.

Right now, there are three primary competitors in the e-book reader market: Sony’s PRS, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes and Noble’s just-released Nook. While each one has some technical advantages over the other, my belief is that the storefront availability of books is much more important than any hardware differences. Regardless of how good the reader itself is, it hardly matters if the book you want to read isn’t available on it.

I’m worried that, as the e-book market itself expands and stabilizes, we might even see some publishers retaining exclusivity rights to certain devices; i.e., Publisher A will only put their books on Reader X, while Publisher B will only put their books on Reader Y. This is similar to the current videogame market, where some games are only sent to certain consoles, so if you want to play every game out there you have to own every console. Ultimately, I don’t believe this business model is sustainable for e-books, and we’ll end up with something more like the current downloadable music model, where the files you download are standardized and playable on any MP3 player - likewise, the books you download will ultimately be readable on any device.

If you’re considering buying an e-book reader (and you very well might be, as it’s one of the big sellers this holiday season) and are trying to decide which model to buy, I would encourage you to go to the device’s website and see if the last five or ten books you read are available for a specific device. The website Ebookchoice.com can help with this by showing what books are available by device, but their catalog doesn’t seem complete yet. Again, I can assure you that it won’t matter how great the hardware itself is if you can’t get the books you want toread.

For the Kindle, I’ve learned that not every book I want to read is available, but there are certainly enough available to keep me reading. The advantages of owning the device far outweigh the slight decrease in availability, but those advantages may not be relevant to everyone.

Multiple readings

As a rule, I try to avoid reading multiple books at once. I'm not great at juggling multiple storylines or thought processes, and once I start a book I like to press through it as quickly as possible so I can move on to the next one. That being said, I'm actually moving back and forth between six books all at once right now:

• Say Goodbye to Whining, Complaining and Bad Attitudes... in You and Your Kids by Scott Turansky. This is one we're reading as part of a small group with some friends. We're supposed to get through one chapter a week, so it'll take about three months to get through the whole thing.
• Choose the Life: Exploring a Faith that Embraces Discipleship by Bill Hull. Part of ANOTHER small group we're in. I'm about halfway through. It's very challenging to my long-bred idea of how to "do church," and there are elements that I find very difficult to come to terms with. But it's certainly pushing back some of my horizons.
• The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann. This is my current "fun" book, the one I read while relaxing in bed or laid out on the couch. It's a story of post-Victorian era explorer Fawcett and his quest for a lost city in the Amazon jungle. Basically, it's about a guy way manlier than I can even conceive.
• NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson. As a rule, I find parenting books kind of faddish. It seems to me that parenting should be a pretty instinctive thing. I don't mean we shouldn't THINK about how to parent, or that it should be EASY, but that over-analyzing it doesn't seem like the right approach either. This book documents studies showing that much of what we would consider the obviously correct approach to parenting can be wrong. This is one of the most eye-opening books I've read in a long time.
• Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages by Daniel Nettle. This one is a tough read, so I usually only get through a chapter or so at a time. The writing isn't really superb, and many of their conclusions seem a little naive and politically-motivated, but the subject itself is interesting enough to keep me coming back.
• Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Alister McGrath. This is the book that is absolutely kicking my butt. I asked a friend of mine for a suggestion about a biography of Martin Luther and he steered me to this epic tome about everything Reformation-related. I've found that I can't read it right before bed - it gets my brain spun up and I have trouble going to sleep. The problem is that the book is enormous, so it'll take me quite a while to get through it. But as a protestant Christian it's amazing to me to see the way so much of what I believe came to be.

The nice thing is that all of these except Choose the Life are on my Kindle, so I'm not having any trouble keeping track of where I left something. Hopefully I can finish a couple of these out before Christmas and get my list down to a (relatively) more manageable four books.

Flashforward

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is one of the most poorly-written books I've ever read. While an interesting basis for a sci-fi book, the execution is extremely sub-par. Sawyer writes like a fifth-grader who is telling his class about a summer trip to Disney World.

Much of the book takes place at CERN, a particle accelerator in Switzerland. Sawyer adds details about the location clearly included only to prove that he's been there, completely unnecessary details like where the fire extinguishers are located. I understand the need to include details in order to create a picture in the reader's mind, but much of the minutiae he includes is completely extraneous.

On the opposite end, the characters are shallow and underdeveloped. Many are there simply to create a structure on which to develop a plotline; we care little about where they're going or why. Ultimately they seems like a set of people who are all just wandering in different directions with no clear purpose.

Most annoyingly, the characters have a tendency to deliver long, very artificial diatribes that allow Sawyer to communicate his philosophies. Science fiction has a long history of comparing and contrasting science and theology, and when done properly it can be very thought-provoking. In this case, the practice was too in-your-face, too overt to be taken seriously. I did not for one minute believe that these characters would actually have conversations such as these.

The book was the basis for ABC's new television show of the same name. Seeing parallels between the events of the book and those on the TV show is interesting. The premise of the book itself is intriguing, but the flaws are too numerous make it worth struggling through.

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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John H. McWhorter


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Since I listened to his downloadable lecture series about linguistics earlier this year, I've enjoyed McWhorter's down-to-earth but well-informed way of communicating how language has evolved. This book focuses primarily on how the English language itself has come to be, with an emphasis on how Celtic and Norse languages influenced Old and Middle English. McWhorter is good at describing rather dry topics in ways that keep the reader engaged. I suspect this isn't the last book on this subject that'll grace my Kindle...

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Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 - 7:35 PM

I rinse out the rest of my beef stew from the bowl and put it in the dishwasher. Ann has listened to me cry tonight for things even I can't comprehend. She understands that it is hard to deal with all the unknowns of the situation. She understands that we'll probably never know anything about the recipient, how he lived, how he died. But she knows that there was no other choice to be made. We had an opportunity, a moment in time to do something for someone else. We can't even say whether it was successful or worth the effort. But, she says, we would do it exactly the same way next time. She is - as always - right.

The National Marrow Donor Program connects people willing to donate bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells to people genetically identified as possible recipients. The success of their work is dependent on having a large database of potential donors in order to create the best matches for those in need. To learn more go to Marrow.org, or consider joining the registry.

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 - 12:30 PM

Today is the first day we'll be conducting an integrated sim with the Japanese simulator for the HTV mission. I've been preparing for this sim for about a year now and am totally living on adrenaline. As the adrenaline slowly wears off, I plan to transition to caffeine. The ten-hour sim doesn't start until 3:00, but I want to have plenty of time to get ready, to mentally prepare for a long night of what are sure to be some very stressful situations. My cell phone rings; an unknown number. It's a representative from the National Marrow Donor Program. They think they've found a match and would like me to come in for further testing. I agree, set up an appointment to go to the blood bank, and hang up. Added to the stress of the upcoming simulation, it feels like too much to process right now. I file it away for later, remembering the last two times I got this call and how it turned out to be nothing. Probably won't be anything this time either.