Is Evolution Irrefutable and Compelling?

On my PL/SQL Challenge website, we have a feature called Roundtable, which offers an opportunity to discuss "big picture" questions relevant to Oracle programmers.

The current discussion (well, sharing, really) asks players to share the programming languages with which they work.

In part of my answer, I wrote:

I should learn new stuff...but, heck, I am 55. I have spent a very large percentage of the last 35 years in front of a computer or talking to other people about how to work best in front of a computer.

I'd rather learn other new stuff, so for the past year I have been intensively studying evolution. How truly incredible and amazing! Now there's a "language" that blows my mind: The coding in DNA is mind-boggling. The irrefutable and compelling logic of evolution is astonishing.

If you have not read about evolution lately (and certainly almost anything you learned in school was both superficial and is now out of date), I strongly encourage you to check out:

Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin
The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
The Darwinian Tourist, Christopher Wills
Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne

To which one player responded:


 ==> [The irrefutable and compelling logic of evolution is astonishing.] <==
Is religious zeal allowed on this site? If it is, I am very happy to hear. I have tons of it. Irrefutable huh? Huh. Sounds like religious zeal to me. Please let me know!

I responded in part as follows:

The irrefutable and compelling logic of evolution is astonishing to those of us who use and celebrate science to understand the world and live within that world. Evolution is accepted as fact within the scientific community (which is not to say there aren't a few scientists here and there who reject it, I suppose) and is demonstrated in virtually every branch of science active today.

and offered to start a discussion on my personal blog, where it would be more appropriate to delve into our different opinions about evolution.

So here it is!  I look forward to at least a response from Mike to get this going, and I would ask those who submit a post to tell me what books or articles by scientists that document the evolutionary process have you read. I am not asking if you believed any of it, but simply whether (and which) you have exposed yourself to this information.


 

ODTUG is my favorite Oracle User Group!

Each June, ODTUG hold its highly respected and enthusiastically attended Kaleidoscope conference. this year it will take place in Seattle. Lots more details here.

And several years ago, ODTUG added a community service day (CSD) on the Saturday before the conference, to give attendees an opportunity to "do good" while they enjoy the perks of a software conference (they are, after all, very perky!).

Yesterday ODTUG announced their CSD for 2014:

Nature Consortium in Seattle, Washington, strives to combine community, art, and nature. Be a part of this quest by joining ODTUG on Saturday, June 21, for our seventh annual Community Service Day. ODTUGgers will be working to eradicate several invasive plant species in the West Duwamish Greenbelt, one of the crucial wild spaces in Seattle providing a home to much of the wildlife thriving in this tech-savvy city. In keeping with the values of Nature Consortium, Seattle itself, and Kscope14, you will realize the culmination of community, art, and nature as musicians play in the forest while you work to better the environment.

This choice makes me both excited to, for the first time, attend a Kscope CSD and proud to be a member of ODTUG.

I happen to believe that fighting invasives is just about the most important thing and best thing a human can do in this world to compensate for all the awful damage we have caused to our very own beautiful planet/habitat. 

I look forward to joining what I hope is a group of hundreds of fellow-Kscopians to make a big impact in June!

Thanks so much, ODTUG!

Snake handlers and their faith - why not go all the way?

Just reading about another snake-handling pastor who died from a snake bite.

My feeling about these folks is: go for it. If you want to risk death for your beliefs, why not? It's not like there aren't enough people alive in the world to fill in any gaps you leave behind.

The CNN article mentions that people like Jamie Coots takes this passage from the Bible's Gospel of Mark literally:  “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

Reading that, I just had to wonder: so if you really do take it literally, why do you only handle snakes? It seems like you should also drink bleach before you start your sermon. That is a deadly thing, so "it shall not hurt them," right?

Obviously the answer is: Wrong. It will kill these people each and every time. Without fail.

So why do they handle snakes but not drink bleach or give comfort to humans who are dying from a bacterial infection that cannot be stopped by antibiotics?

It seems pretty clear: snakes won't always bite them, and if they do, the bites are not always deadly. They are ready and willing to take a risk - and if they survive, they can attribute it to their spiritual purity, the hand of god, whatever.

The article also mentions that adherents to this selective faith 'say there are other spiritual reasons to handle serpents. Practitioners often describe it as a mental and emotional rush, as if they were touching the hand of God. "They almost always use drug metaphors, like 'higher than any high you can experience," said  Paul Williamson, a professor of psychology at Henderson State University in Arkansas who studies serpent handlers.'

Right and that, too: it gets them high.

Drinking bleach? I don't think you will get any sort of high from that.

I am agnostic when it comes to matters of religious faith and God. Maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't. So I don't really get religious people. But I do admire and respect people who stick to their faith and practice is without hypocrisy.

"Are you a runner?"

That's a question I get a lot.

I guess that's because I am not overweight and kind of tall....?

I can remember a few times when I really enjoyed running: both times they were more an adventure, in which running was the mode of transport. But generally, I have been bored by running so, no, I am not a runner.

In fact, over the past year, I have completely changed my views on exercise, and running is even less a part of what I do to stay healthy than ever before.

And for some reason I've decided to share my changed views with you. Maybe you will be interested. But at least when I am done, I can say: Good, I don't have to think about writing this anymore.

I'd been a member of Bally Fitness since 1988, when Oracle offered to subsidize membership in a fitness club (said subsidy rescinded two years later!).

But early in 2013 I decided that I had had enough of exercising on machines, inside sterile buildings, in order to stay fit. It's a pretty awful way to compensate for a sedentary life, when you think about. Moving your limbs through a series of limited, repetitive motions, while watching TV or listening to music or who knows what. That's not the same as living in the world, exercising our bodies as we evolved to live and thrive. Not even close.

So I quit Bally (by then acquired by LA Fitness, which promptly shut our closest club after the acquisition. Clever people) and now get my "exercise" by going outside for long walks, very occasionally a run, and most important of all (to me) fighting invasive species (buckthorn in Chicago, kudzu in Puerto Rico).

Cutting down trees, clearing brush, pulling out invasive sapling trees by their roots: great exercise! (so long as I do not injure myself, which I must confess has not been one of my strong points).

But I will admit that is not all I do. I am getting older each day, definitely well into middle aged now, and I am getting creaky. If I do not stretch, I am much more easily injured and I just don't feel good. Flexibility is a wonderful thing!

In addition, I have discovered the joy of a strong abdomen. I have found that as long as my "core" muscles are well maintained, I no longer have problems with lower back pain. In addition, I have noticed that I move around the world with greater confidence and (dare I say it?) grace - because my abdominals can easily support my torso as I move around.

So what does all that mean? That I do a set of abdominal exercises (crunches, situps, various things) each day.And a bunch of different stretches. Oh, and I've found that outdoor work involves lots of bicep activity, but not so much on the triceps. So I do some of that indoors, too (another key objective for me to stay in shape is to be able to play, hold, fly like airplanes, etc. the children dearest to me, and upper body strength is key for this).

Which brings me, really, to the basic point of this post (still with me?): I think that I am a fairly disciplined person, but I could never remember all the different stretches and exercises I want to do each day without a reminder. And I have found that unless I work from a checklist, it is all too easy to say "Aw, I don't feel like doing that one today."

So I put together a very simple grid that lists the things I want to do each day. I don't care about (for the most part) how many I do, just that I do it. And I don't beat myself up if I miss a day or a stretch. There's always tomorrow.

What programming languages do I use?

This month's Roundtable discussion on the PL/SQL Challenge is:

If you are on this website, you almost certainly know PL/SQL and SQL. What other programming languages do you currently use? How do you find they compare to PL/SQL and SQL?

We have been playing quizzes at the PL/SQL Challenge for several years; some of you almost seem like old friends to me by now. It is always interesting to find out more about players. Let's start from the professional side (perhaps the next Roundtable can explore our personal lives. :-) ).

• What language do you use most of all in your work? Do you consider this your primary language or just the one you have to spend the most time with?
• What languages do you use now? Preferably this would mean you used the language on a "real" project in 2013.
• What languages do you plan to learn? Why? Do you need it for your job or do you simply want to expand your horizons?

Here's the answer I posted there today:

What technologies to I use?

I suppose everyone on this site knows the answer to this question:

1. PL/SQL
2. SQL (in a rather ignorant fashion, relative to my level of expertise in PL/SQL)
3. HTML (I know, I know, it's not a programming language, but I can't have just two languages. Too embarrassing)

Years ago, I was a FORTRAN programmer.

I happened to get a part-time programming job in a University of Rochester research lab and lo and behold! Time to learn FORTRAN.

So I did, and used that knowledge to get jobs all the way through 1986. FORTRAN in a bank, Fortran in a pharmaceutical company, FORTRAN in an insurance company.

But, fortunately, as I moved through various FORTRAN jobs, I also started to work with these strange things named databases - on DEC "mainframes" like DEC10s and DEC20s.

Which then allowed me to think I might be able to work for Oracle with their even newer relational databases. That was a pre-sales job (standing up in front of groups of people and showing them how amazing SQL joins were!), but fortunately I arrived just in time to welcome SQL*Forms 3 and PL/SQL. Ah! A nice easy language that even I could "master"! (I only took three programming classes in college, all "101" courses on Algol, Lisp and something else....)

I suppose I should learn some new technologies. Ruby on Rails sounds very cool - the name, I mean. I don't know anything about the language itself. Python? How fun is that?

I should learn new stuff...but, heck, I am 55. I have spent a very large percentage of the last 35 years in front of a computer or talking to other people about how to work best in front of a computer.

I'd rather learn other new stuff, so for the past year I have been intensively studying evolution. How truly incredible and amazing! Now there's a "language" that blows my mind: The coding in DNA is mind-boggling. The irrefutable and compelling logic of evolution is astonishing.

If you have not read about evolution lately (and certainly almost anything you learned in school was both superficial and is now out of date), I strongly encourage you to check out:

Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin
The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
The Darwinian Tourist, Christopher Wills
Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne

A Letter from "Oyster Shel"

My father, Sheldon Feuerstein, was a large presence in our lives and the lives of many others. He was a big man, physically (and, sadly, overweight for too many of his later years, which contributed to the diseases that led to his death in 2010), but it was more than that. He was smart and honest and eloquent. He could also be very stern and, before he passed middle age, manifested quite the temper. But he was a deeply compassionate man, especially for members of the family. Many nieces, nephews and cousins remember him with a love and deep fondness that sometimes surprises me.

Who knew that the man who insisted I throw away and redo my math homework because it had an erasure, who sent me up to bed without dinner because I did or wouldn't do [whatever], who demanded that I mow the 2/3 acre of a lawn even though I was wracked by allergies, could be so warmly encouraging and loving to my cousins? Ah, humans - such complicated creatures! :-)

I visited my mom in Florida last week (oh, the green! the sun! the warmth!) and we looked through my dad's stamp collection and many old papers stored in the safety deposit box.

Most of it was the "usual" - birth, death and marriage certificates, honorable discharge papers from the military (Dad was always disappointed that all he did as a soldier was move around to different bases in the US, never fought, served overseas. That's probably why he so looked up to his great Irving Effron, who was a Jewish Marine (quite unusual) and served in the Pacific. Check out this great NY Times letter about him - subscription probably required), and so on.

But then inside a small, old envelope, we found a real gem: a letter Dad had written to his oldest sister, Belle, and her husband, Max, just before he was going to be Bar Mitzvahed:

 

I especially love the line: "where would you stick Jeffrey?" The idea of "sticking" Jeffrey (another very large human being in multiple senses, and just thirtenn years or so younger than my dad) anywhere is very amusing....

Love you, Dad! Miss you, Dad!