Down-time

I could say that I've been on hiatus, but it feels more like down-time.

Down-time, as in when the condition of a computer (or car) suddenly transfers from running, if not running perfectly to not running until a lot of time can be dedicated to the repair.

It feels strange, because several events have slipped past me that I intended to comment on. On the one hand, about a week ago I finished my numerical exploration of the topic of crimes motivated by hate. On the other hand, I still have several other trains of thought to pursue on the subject.

I also lost track of several other threads of thought during the past week.

Along the way, I performed a work of service (restored a computer system to working order for a relative), visited family members, and attended meetings.

If there's anything good about being a graduate student in a discipline, it is that it involves no policy meetings, and few training sessions. Now that I am a graduated student employed as an adjunct professor, I get invited to such meetings.

Of course, my input wasn't really important at these meetings--but I was included on the invitation list, and I didn't want to begin my employment by shirking something I'd been asked to attend.

Along the way, I have begun to form plans. Either I will find a way to get a Doctorate in my field, or I will find a way out of academia and into the professional world. My current position is tenable as transition job, but not as a permanent position. Most openings for permanent employment in academia have a PhD as a requirement.

In saying this, I reflect that I haven't begun the central part of my work as an adjunct yet. Classes begin tomorrow morning.

Which reminds me--I have classes to prepare for.

Hate Crime Statistics--more comments

In my original approach to hate-crime analysis (below), I took on what I think of as the public perception of hate crime.

To wit, the way that popularizers of the apparent problem of hate crime speak (and the way their media accomplices report the issue), hate crime appears to be a problem for minorities--whether of skin color or of sexual preference.

In browsing the FBI's Hate Crime statistics in the Uniform Crime Report, I find that their published data includes hate crimes against people of all races, colors, and creeds. At the very least, the police agencies of the nation are not blind to the possibility of black-on-white hate crime. As an example, I'll refer to the 1996 report. Table 1 of the report (on page 11 of the PDF file) reports hate crimes by Bias Type. Among the 5,396 race-motivated hate crimes reported that year, a total of 1,106 were listed as Anti-White. Another 3,674 were listed as Anti-Black--showing that black-skinned people were much more likely to be the victim of such crimes than whites.

The 2004 statistics showed 4,042 race-based crimes reported. Of these, 829 are listed as Anti-White, while 2,371 are listed as Anti-Black.

Both of these numbers do show that hate crimes against minorities are reported at a rate well above their representation in the nation's population. However, considering that the population of black people nationwide is in the millions, the per-capita crime rates look very low. Given a current nationwide population of 296 million, the number of blacks in the United States is 12.8% of that, or 37.9 million. At those numbers, the quoted levels of hate-crime (2,371 events against blacks) give 6.24 events per 100,000 population.

Both the nationwide population and the nationwide percentage of blacks came from the U.S. Census Bureau's Quick Facts pages. However, they are 2006 numbers. The 2004 numbers weren't as readily available from the Census Bureau. But the 2004 FBI report claims that 254 million people were covered by the police agencies which filled out hate-crime reports. If I assume that blacks were 12.8% of the covered population, the math works out to 7.28 events per 100,000 population of blacks.

Either way, the hate-crime rates against blacks pale in comparison to the levels of other types of crime occurring in the United States during 2004. More than 1 million occurrences of violent crime (murder, manslaughter, rape, and assault) were recorded in the United States that year--for a rate of 465.5 events per 100,000 population. Slightly less than two-thirds (62.5%) of those crimes were aggravated assault.

It would appear that while hate crime is noxious, it does not occur nearly as often as more pedestrian crime. Hopefully the rate will drop in the future--but the rate is already quite low.

Updated Number Games: Hate Crimes and Southerners

[Edited somewhat, with a much better presentation of data.]

At least a week ago, Deep Thought discovered that the FBI official statistics for hate crimes in the United States show some surprising things about hate-crime patterns in the United States. Perhaps the most surprising is the number of New England states which dominate the high end of the reported hate-crimes list. Bloggers Grim and Steve Dillard filled in with their own commentary on this discovery.

Like Grim, I distrust the phrase "hate crime". I find the definition of hate crime to be rather lacking; it appears to apply a special label to some crimes of hate while downplaying or ignoring other crimes motivated by hate. Most definitions of hate crime work with a broad brush against racist crimes perpetrated against certain minorities. Among other things, these definitions ignore intra-race crimes motivated by hatred over economic position or social class.

With that caveat in mind, I decided to take a closer look at the latest FBI statistics. No matter how poorly-defined, the numbers did appear to bear out the claim. But none of the people who posted on the subject of hate crime gave a close look at the difference between total crimes reported and the per-capita reporting rates.

The following list came from the 2004 FBI Uniform Crime Report. The list was sorted, and the top and bottom 5 states on the list are shown below. Following each state name is a number indicating the number of hate-crimes which were reported in that state during the year 2004.

Number of hate crimes reported:

California (1393)
New Jersey (769)
Michigan (556)
New York (386)
Ohio (353)
...
North Dakota (8)
South Dakota (7)
Wyoming (4)
Alabama (3)
Mississippi (2)

The FBI data also contained a handy number indicating the population in the regions covered by the reporting agencies. (Some agencies apparently did not report any hate-crime data to the FBI.) A little spreadsheet arithmetic later, and I had a sorted list of hate-crime reports per 100,000 population in the affected regions.

Hate crimes reported per 100,000 population

District of Columbia (8.8524)
New Jersey (8.8402)
Michigan (6.1810)
Montana (6.0419)
Massachusetts (5.9276)
...
Iowa (0.7916)
Wisconsin (0.6716)
Louisiana (0.6287)
Alabama (0.5690)
Mississippi (0.1975)

Neither of these measures favors Southern states for occurrences of reported hate-crime.

However, my home state doesn't fare too well. I suspect that hate-crimes are reported most in areas with large urban centers that have a polarized racial climate. That climate is definitely in evidence in one of Michigan's large urban centers--the region near Detroit.

However, that metric doesn't explain the presence of Montana near the top of the list.

The general conclusion still stands: the states of the Old South are generally much lower in reported hate-crimes than the nation's capitol and the MidWest/Coastal states with large urban centers.

Sunday Thoughts: Miracles

[Note: this is Part 3 of on ongoing weekend series. Part 1 is here, Part 2 here.]

In my continuing trek to identify and clarify my pattern of belief, I find that my last post ended by mentioning something very important.

Of course, I also realize that I missed a great chance to drop names. I was focusing rather sharply on a particular Jewish rabbi of Roman times, and I mentioned that miracle-stories flowered in his wake in an extraordinary way.

This man--the most influential Jew of his times, and one of the three most influential Jews in the entire history of the world--is not often remembered as such. Indeed, his ministry left him at odds with the Jewish leaders of his day. They questioned his authority, authenticity, and mission. Indeed, those Jewish leaders openly charged this rabbi with seditious rebellion before the Roman provincial governor. The governor did acquiesce to their demands for an execution, albeit not without some hesitation.

So the Jewish rabbi now known as Jesus died a criminal's death at the hands of the Roman army.

And I return to the subject of miracles. Because the story of the followers of Jesus--followers of the Way, as they termed themselves--doesn't make much sense outside of the miraculous.

Before I begin to defend the miraculous, I notice that modern humans have not lost all ability to believe in miracles. We use the word in ways which seem strange--if some denizen of the First Century were brought into contact with modernity, he might deduce that moderns worship deities known as 'science' and 'technology'. Perhaps he would consider the Geek Squad to be special priests, and the payments to the Geek Squad to be offerings by those who are unable to be priests of the Deities of Binary Data and Silicon Logic.

I hope my point is plain: people refer to the miraculous when knowledge and power from outside of their understanding intrudes into their everyday world and alters their life. However, my example is from the world of humans, where people are involved at every level. That may limit the usefulness of the example.

Looking at belief in miracles (especially as expressed by Jews and Christians throughout history), I see that they assumed an orderly, predictable pattern of normality to exist in the world. Miracles were alleged as extra-normal events, signs that the Power that had spoken the World into existence was doing things to get the attention of His human audience.

Later humans--many using the orderly style of thinking that made them priests of the human structure known as Natural Science--would be tempted to castigate these miracles as slap-dash fixes in an imperfect plan. Other temptations were to belittle the miracle-stories as mis-understood natural events. Resurrections from the dead are hard to countenance under this system of thought--unless comas or misunderstood faintings can be invoked.

If anyone holds that the material world is all that exists, and that super-natural stories are automatically fictional, then miracle-stories must be false--or be explainable by natural means.

That opinion is not product of scientific study; though scientific study can make it easier to arrive at. It is an opinion that precludes any evidence to the contrary.

I could say much more about miracles and the modern scientific mind--it should suffice to say that though I am very familiar with the sciences (especially their language, the language of mathematics), I do not share that assumption about all miracles. Some miracles are better-attested than others; many criteria can be applied while deciding which miracle-stories are credible.

At many places in the story leading to the life of Jesus, we can stop and ask how historic the received story is. Understanding which miracles are credible can be daunting. But the whole narrative falls apart if we deny the existence of God, and His ability to communicate with human prophets and priests.

The story of the life and ministry of Jesus--and of the growth of Christianity in the wake of his death--makes little sense outside of acknowledgement of his resurrection. His disciples had to be transformed from a scattered group of dispirited man to a cohesive group with a shocking message about resurrection from the dead. This message was preached against official opposition from Jewish religious authorities. Within their lifetimes, they faced threats of death from Roman authorities for their beliefs.

The essence of their teaching, preserved as the Apostle's Creed, taught that Jesus was (a) Divine, (b) born of a virgin, (c) had died, (d) had arisen from death.

Eliminating assertion (a) would require the followers of Jesus to explain away certain very important sections of the Gospels. Eliminating assertion (b) would have been rather hard if anyone from Jesus' home-town could find evidence otherwise. Eliminating assertion (c) would require that the Roman soldiers, experienced executioners, manage to miss the fact that their victim was still alive--and then miss Jesus' vital organs with an spear thrust up into the side of the chest. Eliminating assertion (d) would require that Jesus' body be hidden by interested parties--after those parties overcame or slipped past a posted guard of soldiers, broke the official seal on the tombstone, and moved said tombstone.

Of course, most of the above explanations come from the Gospels. At which point, the question becomes as much a question of which historical records to trust as it is anything else. But that question raises a good number of other questions.

Why did Jesus' disciples willingly publish stories in which they hid like cowards until Jesus arose from the grave? Why did they willingly suffer death rather than recant? Why did the scurrilous rumors about Jesus' parentage not spring up until much later? If the story of the Roman guards was invented, why did their contemporaries living in Jerusalem not question the story of the resurrection? If the Roman guards did fall asleep on the job, why were they not punished? (I think the usual punishment for sleepy dereliction of duty was death.) If the tomb itself was mistaken, then why did the residents of Jerusalem not shame the new believers by pointing out the mistake?

As with the general idea of miracles, someone who is already convinced otherwise will probaby have a counter-explanation ready for every pieces of supporting evidence for the miracle of the Resurrection. Is the Resurrection convincing?

Compelling proof may be hard to come by--but I've already alluded to the proof that I consider most compelling. Of the 11 disciples faithful to Jesus on the night he was executed, 10 were later executed themselves for following Jesus. The last died in exile. Among the fellow-believers who knew Jesus, and those who came to belief after the Resurrection and Ascension, many thousands died violent deaths for the same reason. The persecutions were sporadic; during and in between the persecution, a large body of writing grew up and was distributed. That body of writing survives in incredible quantity today: for each surviving copy of Homer's writings, hundreds of copies of the Gospels survive.

Did these men and women die for a lie? Or did they die because they stood as witnesses to the ultimate inconvenient truth? When they lived in peace, why did their neighbors remark so well on their community of love and pursuit of virtuous life?

The growth of Christianity is one of the hard-to-explain movements in history. The religious life was dominated by the gods of Rome. Mystery sects flourished around characters like Mithras, Diana of Ephesus, and Dionysus. Philosophers pondered the Unknown God of the Stoics, or the duality of the Manichees. Worship of the Emporer was encouraged. The Jews fit into a special legal niche; they quickly excluded the developing Christian belief from their exempt status.

Somehow, amid that panoply of religion and philosophy, the Christian faith grew until it became a viable contender for the official religion of the Empire.

The story is much bigger than I have outlined here--I again feel as if I am cutting a very good story short. Actually, several equally good stories.

But I'm trying to outline things that appear to be fundamental truths about the world. I am also trying to set the stage for the interpretation of that truth with respect to modernity, and my own success (or failure) in living that interpretation out in the real world.

I suspect that a careful inspection of failures in living out of beliefs is the part that will prove the most troublesome. Not that this observation requires any wisdom on my part--simply that it is so easy to see such failings in other people, and it is also very easy for those people to be unaware of the failing.

Meetings

One thing that has kept me away from the Internet access (hence, away from blogging) has been meetings.

The meetings are all related to a future job--but perhaps I'd better start at the beginning. The job is not exactly the one I'd had in mind for the past six months, but it does seem to fit my skill-set better.

In the middle of my attempts to find a job outside of the academic world, I ran into Professor R., and old friend of mine. I described to this friend the trials and travails of a math (and former engineering) student of trying to find a job involving computer programming. Prof. R., a professor at the first University I attended, was quite pleased to learn that I'd received a Master's Degree in my field. She then hurriedly encouraged me to pursue some kind of position at that University. She claimed that if nothing else was available, an adjunct position might be open.

So I did apply for that postiion. And I received an acceptance notice within two weeks; much better turn-around time than can be found in applications for a corporate position. The position provided a better connection with the academic world than I'd hoped to find.

On the other hand, the position of adjunct instructor is a temporary position. The pay is not extravagant, and the benefits are not readily-tangible. Non-tangible benefits may include better networking and a fuller set of references for future pursuit of teaching-oriented positions.

Shortly after receiving this first offer, I got into contact with every community college and University in the Metro region. Another University has offered me a position.

Both of the Universities require me to attend orientation sessions, training classes, meetings, etc. These events have swallowed up several days during the past week.

Other events have been swallowing time usually spent online. Among those events, one of my younger siblings is preparing to attend University for the first time. (This particular school is not one that have any chance of teaching at, for the time being.) I've not been forced to help him much, but I am doing so anyways.

Life goes on.

Among the things that I have the desire to blog about (but not hte time) is the recent popularity of TracFone cell phones among young men of Arab descent. There are several explanations possible, but none of them appear to explain all the reasons behind specific characters purchasing hundreds of such phones from remote Wal-Mart locations.

Another curious event was the discovery (by several bloggers) that the reported incidence of hate crimes in the United States is much greater in states like Michigan and Massachusetts than in states like Alabama and Virginia. Again, several possible explanations present themselves. Among the explanations is incomplete reportage, or uncertain definition of the phrase "hate crime". Like the phrase "politically correct", "hate crime" appears to be an unnecessary addition to the language. If an attitude or event is offensive to the public order of the polis, its incorrectness should be immediately obvious. Likewise for crime--a large number of crimes occur under the motivation of hatred. Those that do not appear to involve hatred usually involve indifference towards the lives and well-being of other citizens; this indifference usually produces results indistinguishable from crimes motivated by hatred.

Perhaps there is a good explanation of the need for both terms--but the explanation eludes me now, and I can't hazard a guess as to where I could begin to find it.

Another interesting angle is, I suspect that I've known for some time where to find hate crime in my home state of Michigan. Trouble is, I don't know if it's the kind of crime that would be reported as hate crime.

But that can be explored later, alongside of my weekend explorations into mythology, metaphysics, belief, and logic.

More Sunday Musings...on Tuesday

[Note: this is Part 2 of an ongoing series. Part 1 is here.]

On Sunday, I did try to organize my thoughts some about another post on mythology, religion, and why I believe what I do believe.

On Sunday (and on Monday) events and people in the non-virtual world conspired to prevent me from blogging.

To continue from where I was last time, I sketched the history of a particular mythology--I tried to approach that history and outline its strangeness, the way in which a particular pattern of culture and faith belied all expectations.

Why would a belief system born in the desert remain dominant after the people had settled into an agrarian life in Caanan? Why would it remain after the depredations of various empires, with their imperial culture and religion?

Sitting atop a trade route which ran from Egypt to Babylon, and among the remnants of peoples who had worshiped many other deities, the Hebrew culture was pushed towards a syncretistic synthesis with surrounding belief systems. Warnings against this mixture fill the writings of the Jewish prophets. At the very least, we see that a large subsection of the Jewish people did take part in this synthesis. They worshiped the deities of their neighbors, thinking that these deities of farming would help them as much as the old tribal deity of the desert. But another part shied away from any mixing of beliefs. These people tried to stay true to the beliefs of their fathers.

Many powers vied over control of the trade routes through Caanan--from the urban culture of the Philistines and the charioteers of Egypt to the fearsome Assyrians. The dynasty of David, king of Israel, was eventually dethroned by the imperial power of Babylon. Later, Persian cavalry, the hoplites of Alexander, the armies of the Ptolemies and Seleucids, and finally the Romans legions swept over this little corner of the earth. Sometimes, the imperial power tried to destroy the local religion. Sometimes, it tolerated--or even supported--the local religion. Through those events, this faith survived. It is probably not alone in its survival, although the total number of non-Imperial religious ideas which survived the long centuries of turmoil was small.

One of the characteristics of the Jewish faith was that it encouraged literacy. The Hellenistic culture that supplanted nearly all other Mediterranean cultures in the wake of Alexander's conquest was not totally illiterate--indeed, the contributions of literate Greek-speakers of that time are still acknowledged as seminal works in philosophy, ethics, political theory, logic, and mathematics.

However, the Hellenistic culture didn't encourage literacy in the way the Hebrew culture did. After the destruction of the first Temple of Jerusalem, Hebrew worship had centered around reading of their sacred books: the Law, the Writings, and the Prophets. Any enclave of Jewish culture anywhere in the world needed copies of these books, and members who could read them. Schools of rabbis had grown up as caretakers of the religious teaching.

Simply put, Greek-speaking people didn't center their religious practice around the productions of philosophers and geometricians. They could hear the plays and poems performed by actors and bards, but didn't place supreme importance on the correctness of the reading, or the application of a lesson from the performance to everyday life.

This observation leads me to the other distinctive of Jewish culture--literacy was cultivated as a part of encouraging moral behavior, and thinking about moral issues. This legacy of moral thinking was wrapped up in the mythology and religious teachings that were distinct to their culture.

The Judaic faith during the early Roman empire was not a monolithic practice. Two dominant schools of rabbinic thought existed, and the relationship between Roman governors and Jewish religious synods made some
Jews agitate for another Maccabean-style revolt to drive out the pagan empire. Other religious purists had set up a quasi-monastic community in a desert location some distance from Jerusalem. Each of these schools of thought made some claim of being a caretaker of the truest expression of Judaism.

Lastly, there was one itinerant rabbi who seemed bent on shaking things up. This single rabbi, without connection to the Empire, to the high synod known as the Sanhedrin, with no advocacy of violent revolt against Rome, and without preaching a separatist faith--somehow made an impact greater than any of the other groups mentioned.

And I feel myself bumping into a subject that I've managed to avoid so far--the subject of the miraculous. Because the story of this rabbi drowns in references to miracles--healings, reading of thoughts, impossibly-large crowds fed by one person's lunch-bag, incredible control over forces of nature.

The other side of this rabbi seems pedestrian--more of the moral teaching which the synagogues had been providing for centuries. But the teaching seemed to astound people--the speaker carried a bearing of simple wisdom and deep authority.

And there's the third side of the story--this rabbi claimed something that did not make any sense at all in the tradition of the Jewish religion. He claimed to be Divine.

There is an obvious question that I've ignored so far--actually, a couple. One is on the subject of miracles, and the other on the subject of why I think a mythology is anything more than a human invention--or a particular ancient religious teacher anything more than a human being.

So far, all I've done is recount stories, and give hints at supporting evidence. It is safe to say that since I am writing about a religion that I believe to express the truth about humanity and the Cosmos, that I see supporing evidence everywhere I turn.

I do want to give a better explanation of what I believe--but I also want to explore the understructure of belief. I'd like to take a look at what belief is, why people believe, and how various religious authorities can be compared.

I also want to continue this discussion on an approximately-weekly basis. It's the kind of discussion that profits from long breaks to gather thought. However, that may also mean a certain amount of repetition.

So I kindly ask my readers to bear with me on this journey.

Terrorism hits home

[UPDATE: the men in the case discussed below have since had charges against them dismissed. Doesn't mean that they're behavior isn't suspicious, just that nothing can be proved at the moment. I have my suspicions, but I can't back them up either.]
International terrorism strikes me close to home this time.

But perhaps that's not exactly what happened.

To begin with, suspected terrorists were found in Ohio recently. After what is described as a routine traffic stop, police found a number of untraceable cell phones and large amounts of cash in a car driven by a young man. The young man and his fellow-traveller, both graduates of a high school in Dearborn, Michigan, have Muslim backgrounds.

This is where it strikes close to home. Dearborn is on the southwest side of the Detroit metro region, within a short drive from the region that was my childhood home. Dearborn contains, among other things, one of the largest populations of Arabs on the North American continent. A significant number of these Arabs are Muslim.

This is not the only group of Arab-American males who have been found with large numbers of prepaid cell-phones. A group of men was apprehended after trying to purchase several hundred such phones at one time, in a small town in the "thumb" of Michigan.

For those not familiar with Michigan geography, a quick look at a map of the state might help. The lower half of the state is remarkably similar to the shape of a man's hand. The region known as the thumb should become quickly obvious--it is on the east side, north of the Detroit Metro region. These arrests were made in Caro, roughly in the upper-middle of the thumb region.

This has been a bad week for suspected terrorists. Whether or not these men are guilty, they have some explaining to do. The pair of young men apprehended in Ohio appeared to give two different stories to the police aout their reasons for investing in pre-paid cell phones. The threesome apprehended in Michigan had hundreds of cell-phones, apparently purchased at retail.

There are claims that these phones might be re-sold at gas stations. However, I wonder why they would purchase phones at retail for re-selling in another retail location. Don't gas-stations already have wholesale-purchase connections for the plethora of things sold inside the station? Why send family and friends to out-of-the-way locations to purchase them from Wal-Mart stores?

At the moment, most of the press accounts about the young men have included some friend or relative who claims that they are the victim of racial profiling. I could believe that racial profiling was at work if I saw a news story like this every week, and a large number of the arrestees were soon proven innocent. But these are the only two such stories that I have seen within the past year, and I can't think of a good explanation for either one--except that the young men were gathering equipment and information to support some illegal activity.

It could be claimed that dozens of racial-profiling-based arrests have happened, unreported. Even if that is true, it does not follow that these particular arrests are the result of racial profiling. Also, even if all the others were innocent--which I do not know, as I also do not know that there were any others--then it does not follow that these men are innocent.

Further, if dozens of young Arab-Americans have been harrased by police for the crime of Driving While Arab, then the friends and relatives of these young men should be able to tell stories of previous times this has happened. The news stories containing claims of racial profiling have been curiously empty of such comparison-stories.

Until I hear of such corroboration, I will disbelieve that such profiling has been happening on a regular basis.

As I outlined above, even if profiling has been happening--or has happened only in this case--that does not exonerate these men from suspicion. They still have to explain their deeds. If they are innocent, then they will be exonerated.

Vote-counting Technology

After a day spent running a polling location for a Primary Election in my State, I had many thoughts to share about vote-counting technology.

The State of Michigan recently implemented a new voting system state-wide, using an optical-scan ballot. It is a system very familiar to high-school and college students all across the nation: when making a choice, find the oval adjacent to your choice and fill it in. In the case of voting, we use an inkpen rather than a pencil, so that the vote cannot be erased.

This method creates a physical record of the vote, as well as making it easy to check for spoiled ballots on-site, before the voter leaves the polling location. Assuming that the voter accidentally voted for two in a column which read "Vote for not more than one", the ballot will be rejected by the vote-counting machine with an explanation that the voter had "Overvoted" a section. The voter then gets a choice to re-cast the vote, or leave the mis-voted section uncounted. In the event that power is lost at a voting location, or the electronics of the counting machine go haywire, the vote can still be cast and placed in a lock-box on the machine until the counting can be done properly.

I suspect that similar machines are becoming a de facto national standard in elections, especially with memories of the election results of the year 2000 in Florida.

In retrospect, the technology to do this with both punch-cards and optical-scans has probably been available for two decades. Two pices of core technology have to be avilable to allow such a vote-counting machine to work properly. Those are (1) a system to produce electronic data from a punch-card scan (or Xerox-style scan), and (2) a microprocessor which can use a set of rules for interpreting and storing the results.

Necessary supporting pieces of equipment are operating-memory and long-term-storage memory for the microprocessor, a special replaceable memory-chip to contain the instructions for interpreting the votes, motors to help move the ballots through the scanner and into storage, and locks to secure the box of ballots, the microprocessor, and its memory-pack.

The core technology was being used in the market two decades ago. The scan mechanisms for punched-cards have been in use since the early days of computing. Microprocessors (with RAM and EPROM support) have been available since the late 1970's, and gained wide commercial use during the 1980's.

This vote-counting technology could have been used widely in the 2000 elections. Or in the 1996 elections, the 1992 elections, possible even the 1988 elections. Enterprising local agencies could have experimented with the technology during earlier election cycles. I suspect that a talented engineer could have constructed a test-bed version of such a vote-counting before the 1980 elections.

But since elections are run by many thousands of local government agencies, I'm not very surprised that the technology has not been adopted widely until now. For one thing, funding is always short for a government function that usually happens twice a year (during even-numbered years). Secondly, the Clerks who handle elections are often in an elected position with incredibly low turnover, meaning that the elections have been run by the same person, with the same subordinates, for a long time. Such people are usually slow to use new technology (costing lots of money) when the old way seemed to work fine last time.

Thus it took a hotly-contested election result which depended on the dangling-chad-counting skills of a few functionaries in Florida to get these many thousands of clerks to think about better ways to run elections.

Primary Elections

I almost wish the State of Michigan had a hotly-contested Primary campaign. Whether for better or for worse, we didn't.

Even so, that didn't make the job of Election Inspector any less strenuous.

Primary Elections are generally pretty boring for the Inspectors. Last time I worked during a Primary Election, I took a novel by Neal Stephenson to read. This time around, I had a Leo Tolstoy novel with me. In both cases, I got a significant amount of reading in during down-time, when there were no new voters to sign in and no equipment failures to diagnose and fix. Around the reading, I had several short conversations with fellow-Inspectors. But being the only male (and only person younger than 35) on the team, I was generally left alone.

Turnout in the precinct I worked in originally seemed average as far as Primary Elections go. Slightly less than 10% of the registered voters in the precinct showed up to vote. Statewide, approximately 18% of registered voters showed up. Thus, we were definitely below average in that respect.

As I sat at the table to check in voters, I was irked again that I couldn't, by law, demand ID from all the voters who showed up. However, some of the voters on the list (provided by the offices of Terri Lynn Land, Secretary of State in Michigan) were marked with a special code that told me to verify their address, or double-check them against valid ID. Often, voters would ask me if they were in the right precinct. They would often approach the table with ID in hand, so that I could check them on the list.

I was also surprised at the fellow Election Inspectors who seemed not to know what a Primary Election is. Several said out loud that they didn't like the fact that voters had to pick a Party and vote only on that Party's ticket. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the Primary is used to select who will be on the ballot in the fall, and that the Primary is organized by political party.

To give an example: if a person wished to vote for Keith Butler as Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, and then wished to vote for Jennifer Granholm as Democrat candidate for Governor, all the partisan votes on their ballot would be invalidated. This restriction was bemoaned by many voters, as well as at least two of my fellow Election Inspectors.

There was, of course, a non-partisan section on the ballot. In these sections, voters were voting on who would actually hold the office (as a judge in the local court), rather than who would be running for office in November. In our county, non-partisan sections on the ballot also contained a vote on a property-tax renewal.

The job of Election Inspector is tiring, even when business is slow. The precinct I worked in saw an average of 7 voters per hour during the entire day. However, we had an average of 6 voters per hour during the first 11 hours of voting. The rate picked up in the last two hours, but not enough to form a permanent line at the table to sign in. (The rate seen during the last two hours, as well as the total number of voters, is left as an exercise for my readers.)

After 13 hours of helping voters, interspersed with a couple of half-hour breaks, we closed for the day. Closing involved a rush to take down signs from the gymnasium walls, count ballots issued and ballots left unused, verify the number of voters, check for write-in votes, run triplicate copies of the voting results from the vote-count machine, bundle the ballots into a special case for transport back to the City Clerk, and sign many pieces of paper to authenticate the accuracy of the vote-count. The ballots, and all the paperwork, was then returned to the offices of the City Clerk.

I will probably do this job again come November, when I will expect many more voters to show up. It's not a Presidential Election, but the State will be choosing whether to replace our current Governor.

Spotty Access--and Sundry Sunday Thoughts

I have been plagued by an inability to regularly access the World Wide Web. Perhaps "plagued" is too strong--my regular access has been hampered.

At the moment, I am living on dial-up. (After more than three years of full-speed broadband as my regular mode of access, I am browsing at a bandwidth-rate that feels more like crawling.) This isn't due to significant problems--it's partly an opportunity, partly a challenge. It is mostly the fruit of me volunteering my free time to house-sit for a friend who is much less interested in high-bandwidth connections to the digital world.

However, I've also been involved a series of events that have played a curious role in my life. As part of relocating back to the region I grew up in, I've ended up re-connecting with many old acquaintances and friends. Many of these friends are from the religious organizations that I'd always been a part of--my religious family, so to speak.

This has brought several thoughts to my mind, one of which is this: I know that my beliefs affect the way I think and write. Yet I rarely spend time elucidating them.

Even more curious, my background should make me the opposite. When I compare my pattern with those in my spiritual family, I find that I am the least loquacious of them about my faith. Of course, the pattern of thought I generally see involves an implicit assumption (and often explicit statements) that a Divine Hand directs and guides many of the small coincidences and significant events in each person's life.

I could easily try to outline my own understanding of this concept--but I feel a desire to begin at the beginning, rather than at the end, where my thoughts and actions are. I might even find that my thoughts and actions are more the result of habit than of careful thinking.

To begin with, I am well aware of the existence of atheism. When a man says he does not believe in the existence of any deity, I disagree with him there. It's not a guarantee that I'll disagree with him on everthing. What I think of as the distinguising trait of atheist thought is what I am tempted to call the mythology of belief in non-belief.

Why would I not call it a mythology? It contains a simple story about things the myth-makers thought were truly important. It contains villains and heros, and it probably beigns with an idyllic perfect past. If it does not, it still claims that the present state of the world contains many bad things, the results of the nefarious deeds of the villain(s) and his (their) accomplices and dupes. The mythology also contains a promise of a perfect future--or at least an improved future, where non-religious thought runs unimpeded, discovering great Truths about the Universe and Man.

This shows something that I discovered a long time ago--every system of belief (or non-belief) in religious things includes reference to some form of this mythology. I have given the general outline of most complete mythologies. Not all believers have such a complete mythology, although almost all will, when pressed, eventually reconstruct something like this.

I have also long known that pure logic cannot work without reference to some fundamental, non-deduced truths. Steven den Beste, one of the better bloggers I've ever read (incidentally, also an atheist) wrote about this back when he was writing the blog U.S.S. Clueless. He wrote a significant article about to inductive logic, the method by which the human mind makes large leaps of intuition about the whole Universe using a small slice of it--a selection of all experience and learning acquired thus far--as raw material.

Upon reading this, I agreed with den Beste on at least one thing. Religious belief (or doubt, or non-belief) begins with a choice of what sources to trust. This choice is usually the result of inductive logic. We can use logic to help us in this quest--I could mention at least one religious document which I have never trusted the validity of; this doubt is because the historical section of the document is riddled with historical errors. However, when trying to decide the existence (or non-existence) of immaterial Powers and Beings which are the nature of belief, the discussion always devolves into which source is considered trustworthy, and why it is considered trustworthy.

So what is the foundation of what I believe? What do I intuit that then becomes a basis for deduction, or more intuition? (Any readers who are familiar with G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis may recognise some of my thoughts. However, they are not my only source.)

I begin with another reference to the plethora of mythologies in human history. From the first time that humans put paint on a rock wall and the first inscriptions of symbols for words on rock, humans have always been expressing mythology. Further, mythology has always been full of spiritual beings, magical powers, gods, demi-gods, and demons. It is the kind of thing that men believe in without outside interference--or perhaps with it. If a person tries to withhold forming an opinion until all the evidence is in, they may find that they have no idea whether or not extra-natural Powers have been seeding human consciousness with mythological ideas since before recorded history. The evidence would look the same to us whether they did so or not.

Next, it seems that most mythologies follow a history--they are begun by a mythographer and/or mystic, they grow, they accrete additions onto themselves, and they eventually die--whether by neglect or by famine, pestilence, and war, mythologies die.

A simplistic view of history might presume that many mythologies tend to evolve towards some form of monotheism. Yet this tends to ignore the many lifes and deaths of mythology that predated modern monotheism--and the one seemingly undying theology that has held an obscure race together through thick and thin.

A family of desert tribes had long been cemented together around a monotheistic faith. Their common culture became a foudation for conquest; later, their ancient nation flourished and died. This belief survived several waves of deportation, massacre, persecution, and diaspora. Between these waves, it occasionally received protection. More often, it was ignored. It stood outside the various polytheisms which were established by imperial powers.

Later, this system of faith suffered grievous bouts of hostility with one of its own offshoots--a family of faith that had, paradoxically, become much larger and more successful.

Yes, the mythology of Jews has this as a point of uniqueness--it is the longest-lasting mythology that I have ever heard of. Comparing it with the mythologies of the great empires of its day, I can see little reason that this mythology survived. It was distinct from them in some ways, but similar in so many others.

The survival could have been an accident of history. It could have been because this mythology contained a better answer to the problems of man than the other mythologies of its time. It could have been a particular stubbornness of the culture spawned by the mythology.

Or it could have been because the mythology contained deep truths about man and the Universe--truths which not all liked to learn, but that at least some were glad to hear. Truths that many cultures tried to hide from, or at least distort to make their way of life easier to live with. Truths that brought man into closer relation to the immaterial, super-natural Being who had made him.

I don't claim that the historical evidence proves this. I do submit that this history of mythology needs a little explanation. It doesn't make sense--though not all of history does--but there is no obvious reason why it happened. And the answer to the question of why is tightly bound to the answer to the question, "Do I believe this mythology to contain Truth?"

I dare not take this post too much further tonight. I merely stop at this point, and invite the reader to return later, if they so wish.

Election Inspectors

I believe I've already blogged a little bit about the upcoming Primary Election in my state.

In Michigan, it appears to be impossible to run for a position in the General Election without first winning a Primary Election. Thus, nearly every incumbent is running unchallenged in the Primary. Most of the expected challengers who will be running in the General Election in the fall are also running alone for the party nomination in the Primary Election.

I mention this because I am involved in the upcoming elections. On Tuesday, the 8th of August, I will perform the duties of an Election Inspector. The position is paid (although not very well), and puts me in the position of verifying voter eligibility and the privacy of the ballot, as well as verifying the final count for the precinct that I'll be working in.

The Election Inspectors never work alone. They always work in teams of 3 or more, and a member of both major parties always needs to be available.

It is a job that I have performed in two different municipalities, during 3 election cycles. Most of the time, the Primary Election is a very slow day. I've several times seen tax initiatives offered up on the non-partisan part of the Primary Ballot, on the general principle that it is much easier to pass a tax increase during a Primary Election than during a General Election.

This job has also brought me into close contact with the methods used to identify voters. The methods are good, but not strong enough--in my opinion, at least. A voter must enter on a form their name, address, and birthdate. They must then present the form to an Election Inspector, who verifies that the information is correct. By State law, the Inspector is not allowed to demand a check of ID. We can request, but the voter is allowed to refuse to show it.

Admittedly, it may be hard for an imposter to match a name/address combination with a birthday. It is much harder for an imposter to match the name, address, and birthday with a valid photo ID which resembles the imposter.

This conundrum is doubly strange in light of another piece of information. About a decade ago, the Michigan Secretary of State set in place a new, State-wide voter list. This allowed various City Clerks to register voters, but kept the same person from being registered on two different local voting lists in the State. This new state-wide list was implemented so that any time a person changed the address on their Driver's License, they would be asked if they wanted their voter's registration changed also. Most people complied--no extra paperwork was involved, and their name would appear on the correct voting list at the correct time.

With this new system in place, no one seems to have thought that this is almost a guarantee that almost all of the voters will have an easily-verifiable form of ID in their pocket. Not only that, but those few voters who don't have a driver's license could still get a state-approved photo ID from the same office that handles the Driver's License and Voter Registration.

This seems to be a good way to make voter fraud very hard to happen. A quick check of a photo-ID card should drastically reduce the probability of false-positives in the process of verifying voting eligibility. It should also not produce a high number of false-negatives--that is, there shouldn't be a large number of voters who arrive at the polling location without valid photo ID.

There already exists a system to deal with people who have somehow fallen through the cracks in the current voter-registration system. The Election Inspector is told to refer those cases--the voters whose names are not in the Registration Lists, or who are marked as having received Absentee Ballots--to the Municipal Clerk who oversees the process. The Clerk has the authority to grant or deny a ballot to that voter, as well as the ability to void a received Absentee Ballot. The Clerk canlso send the voter to the correct precinct location if they have tried to vote at the wrong location. The Clerk should also have the resources to verify information about voters without photo ID.

This is one of the few things about being an Election Inspector that disturbs me. I get a chance to help voters, as well as to do my part in ensuring a fair counting of the ballots cast. I also get a chance to greet many of the people in the neighborhood.

The coworkers are usually pleasant. The hours are long, but usually not onerously so. We are told that electioneering cannot happen inside the election center--which precludes the Election Inspectors discussing anything that is on the ballot, and most related political questions. During Primary Elections, we can do a dress-rehearsal on any new equipment, before it gets used during the General Elections. (In this election, the entire State is using an optical-scan ballot system. Many localities used punch-card ballots in earlier elections, so this is a new system that needs to be field-tested.)

It's an interesting job, and a vital part of keeping the Republic going. It's also generally a little-noticed job. The balloting troulbe in the Florida elections during the year 2000 underlined the role of State Secretaries of State and County Clerks in the decision of elections. But everyone seems to have missed the role of the Election Inspectors. They were the ones who oversaw the ballots being cast, and should have warned the voters about confusing ballot-pages, double-votes, and poorly-punched chads on ballots. However, such warnings are rather hard to issue to individual voters when the Inspectors are busy verifying voters, and a line of at least 30 people has been at the table for 5 hours.

In short, the news people could have canvassed communities looking for Election Inspectors to help report how that mess occurred, as well as report whether the various Clerks had prepared the Inspectors properly for their job. Accusations of race-based denials of voting rights could also have been investigated in the same way. The Elections Inspectors would have seen it happening, if it had happened. If it didn't happen, they could have verified it.

Anyway, it is an important job. And I'm going to be making sure that I do my part of the job well. One opportunity to do the job well is on this coming Tuesday, and another is coming in November.

Post-Hiatus

I unexpectedly ran into a series of events which kept me away from blogging.

Perhaps most disappointing, I missed an appointment to discuss Bill Whittle's latest writing.

Whittle attempted to take a look at a piece of the world that appears obviously simple, and asks why people don't see the amazing forces at work behind the scenes--the forces that make thousands of people work very hard to supply electric energy, logistics, camera-work, editing, and production skills to an event like the Oscars.

Using that as an example, Whittle tries to describe the forces that make an economy--and a society--work, and ranges across a large variety of subjects and ideas.

Several of the bloggers I've read have simply linked to Whittle, with a short quote and an urge to Read The Whole Thing.

Others have probed his article more deeply than I can at the moment--Grim's comparison with Chesterton at the beginning of his post is enlightening. He also touches on the question of what role genetics plays in determining what kind of people--and what kind of ethical culture--can be expected in the future.

Whittle's main point is that there is not much of a genetic difference between a tribesman born in the remotest part of Africa and the children of an average American family. One prospect that is raised in response is the possibility of humans being able to shape the skills and abilities of their progeny using genetic knowledge.

Will any deliberate alteration of the genetics of children (to produce either better mathematicians or better janitors) alter the way in which society works? Will the ability of parents to influence the destiny of children make the parents more powerful than their altered children?

Is it a difference of kind or a difference of degree with historical flows of genetics and race? Under our current system of reproduction (and limited genetic knowledge), the average American family has much more prospect of their children living to a healthy age and passing on their particular genetic mix than an African family in war-torn Sudan (or a similar family in Bosnia a decade ago, or a similar family in Lebanon now). Cultural patterns, politics, and wars all influence the ebb and flow of races and any associated genetic peculiarities. Humans have been doing this to each other since prehistoric times.

As a related observation, it can be noted that certain groups of people--Jews, Chinese, and Japanese among them--show a regular tendency to produce shrewd businessmen and intellectuals of a very high caliber. This could be an example of culture, of genetics, or a mix of the two--but whatever the cause, the effect is observed in many places around the world. (I am indebted to Thomas Sowell for publishing an exhaustive piece of work which covers this, as well as many related piece of data on notiecable traits of various races.)

I mention this to show that some genetic tendencies have already been observed in subgroups of the human race. However, the genetic markers for particular abilities--or even for tendencies towards those abilities--remain unknown. It is not even known whether future genetic knowledge will be able to guarantee certain traits in children.

It is worthwhile to ask what we could--or should--do with such knowledge. But I urge caution. Few people have been able to successfully predict the ethical dilemmas posed by technological advances.