Web, c. 2007

I’ve been spending too much time online for the past two decades. But recently I’ve been reducing my screen time, and — surprise, surprise — I feel better. That’s why I’ve reduced my posting schedule to about once a week.

But back in 2007, I lived way too much of my life online. I spent way too many hours writing daily blog posts, commenting on other people’s blogs, hanging out on Twitter, producing a weekly video, watching other people’s videos (back then, blip.tv was the place to really hip creative videos), and on and on.

I also created several random websites, just for fun. Recently, I found the HTML code for a whimsical website I created in 2007. What happened was this: Carol had a website called fishisland.net which she used to publicize ecological projects. Last year, that site got taken over by malicious actors. Our web host shut it down for us. I told Carol I’d restore it but never got around to it (I’m limiting my screen time, remember?).

Well, this week I came down with a nasty head cold. I couldn’t sleep last night because my cough kept waking me up. So I wrapped myself up in a sleeping bag, and tried to resuscitate the hacked web site. And lo and behold, I discovered what I had forgotten — that fishisland.net had originally been my website, that I had hand-coded it in HTML 3.0 with state-of-the-art CSS. The hackers had trashed everything else, but plain old HTML is pretty robust, and I was able to resuscitate the website pretty much as it looked in 2007.

Here’s the resuscitated website. The only real problem I ran into was that the full-size photos had disappeared; I had to take the 200px-wide thumbnails and scale them up in GIMP. Actually, the whole website looks so primitive today, but back then it looked pretty slick. If you’re into HTML, check out the CSS — can you believe how few lines of code it required?

However, don’t try to look at this website on your phone — it will look like crap. And that’s really the big change in the web since 2007. Back then, no one looked at websites on their phones. Now, more than half of all web views are on phones.

Screenshot of website.
A screenshot showing what the resuscitated website looks like.

Update (1/31/25):

A little bit of thought and research revealed that it is in fact possible to have a static HTML website render reasonably well on different sized screens (e.g., laptop, smartphone) without building a responsive site using Javascript. In the case of this website, my CSS originally had an ID selector that styled the second nested div (the first div sets the background color, this div sets size on the screen) as follows:

#wrap {width: 42em; margin: 0 auto;} 

I simply changed that to:

#wrap {width: 95%; max-width: 42em; margin: 0 auto;}

Duh. So obvious. Of course I also had to change padding and margin for various other CSS elements so the site would look OK on a smartphone, which took some time. I also added the following line to the header:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Now the site works reasonably well on various sized screens. Is it as good as a responsive website? No. And I’m sure I’ll find more problems. But I had fun, and I like that the CSS is compact and manageable.

And now I’ve spent waaaaay too much time staring at screens today.

Asian art scavenger hunt

On Sunday, Tracey and I are taking the Coming of Age class for First Parish in Cohasset and First Parish in Norwell into the Harvard University Art Museum.

The point of the trip is to look at Asian art that depictions deities and sacred objects. This gets interesting because Asian religious/cultural traditions have different understandings of divinity than Christianity (or the other two Abrahamic traditions).

For example — is Buddha a deity, or not? The answer: It depends. In some art works, Buddha appears very human; in other art works, Buddha appears more than human. (Similarly with Jain tirthankaras.) And what about Hindu deities? They are clearly gods, but they also have human-like characteristics.

In Western culture, we tend to think all deities are like the Christian God, transcendent and far above humanity. But Asian art reminds us that there is a scale of divinity, from ordinary mortals through divine humans, and through human-like deities, all the way to transcendent unknowable deities.

So that’s the purpose of the scavenger hunt — look for works of art, then figure out how divine a being is portrayed in the art work. To show you better what I mean, here’s the first page of this year’s scavenger hunt:

If you’re near Cohasset and enjoy ukulele…

…I’m helping organize a free ukulele workshop. The online registration form is now live. Here are the details:

Woman holding a ukulele shown in profile.
‘Ukulele workshop leader Anne Ku with her Pepe Romero “tiny tenor” ‘ukulele.

FREE Ukulele Workshop with Anne Ku

Sun., Feb. 9, 2025, 2-4 p.m.

What: Free ukulele workshop led by Anne Ku. Anne says: “I’ll teach you the 20% you need to know, to play 80% of what you want to play.”

WhoAnne Ku is a well-known Boston-area ukulele teacher and workshop leader.

Where: Location: 23 N. Main St., Cohasset, Mass. Parking map (PDF).

Downloadable flyer (PDF)

More info about the Cohasset ‘ukulele circle, who are hosting this event.

The workshop

2 p.m.: Fun with Ukulele — for all levels, but especially useful for beginners.
3 p.m.: Common Chord Progressions — what you need to know to play your favorite songs.

Doors open at 1:40 p.m. Be ready to start at 2 p.m. with a tuned ukulele. Need help tuning? Show up early and we’ll help!

Bring your ukulele, music stand (if you have one), and water bottle. Tea and snacks will be provided.

Registration

Please register at the link below. This workshop is customized to workshop participants, catering to all levels. The more you describe yourself, the better the fit.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Alternate definitions for “socialism”

Sometimes I wonder why the religious right, and the political conservatives, express so much disdain for “Marxism” and “socialism.” It kinda makes sense that the religious right might dislike “Marxism” and “socialism” so intensely, because Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses,” and because many Marxist-Leninists promote a crusading atheism that wants to get rid of religion entirely.

But wait. The definitions for “socialism” and “Marxism” are not always the definitions you’ll find in the dictionary. For an example of what I mean, let’s go back in time to 1963.

Not long after Martin Luther King, Jr., was released from the Birmingham jail, White terrorists bombed the house of King’s brother. This violent act provoked a violent response from the Black community, which in turn prompted the infamously racist Governor George Wallace to respond with even more violence: he sent in state troopers who mercilessly beat Black people. Jonathan Riedler takes up the story in his book Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the Struggle That Changed a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 124:

“The violence of the state [of Alabama] was the physical expression of an ideology of white supremacy…. George Wallace had sworn to the Alabama State Assembly that he would squelch ‘agitators’ and ‘integrationists’ who aimed to ‘destroy the freedom of Americans everywhere.’ Twenty-one times the legislators applauded him. Not long after the bombing, when President [John F.] Kennedy moved federal troops to Alabama bases, Birmingham’s lame-duck mayor, Art Hanes, fulminated against ‘bayonet brotherhood’: ‘They gonna tell the people of Birmingham, “You’ll love this nigger at the point of a bayonet, whether you want to or not” … This is Socialism of the rankest sort.’…”

Note that in the above example, Art Hanes is not using the dictionary definition of socialism. For him, “socialism” has an alternative definition: it is government action that prevents him from committing acts of racial violence. He perceives this as infringing on his rights as an American, and he defines anything that infringes on his rights as an American as “socialism.”

This helps me understand some of the visceral emotion I sense when people reference Marxism” and “socialism” in today’s political debates. There are times when opponents of “socialism” and “Marxism” are not using the dictionary definitions for those words, but rather more emotionally-loaded meanings pertaining to race.

The wrong kind of atheism

Still reading Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). When Gutting interviews Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, he asks Ruse about Richard Dawkins’s arguments against the existence of God. Ruse has a good reply:

” Like every first-year undergraduate in philosophy, [Richard] Dawkins thinks he can put to rest the causal argument for God’s existence. If God caused the world, then what caused God? Of course, the great philosophers, Anselm and Aquinas particularly, are way ahead of him here….”

There actually are interesting arguments to be made about the various proofs for and against God, but Dawkins remains stuck at the level of a certain kind of college freshman who is both ignorant and arrogant.

Noted without comment

From an interview with Howard Wettstein, in the book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), pp. 58-59:

Gary Gutting: “You say you’re a [religious] naturalist and deny that there are any sujpernatural beings, yet you’re a practicing Jew and deny that you’re an atheist. What’s going on here? What’s a God that’s not a supernatural being?”

Howard Wettstein: “Let’s begin with a distinction between participation in a [religious] practice and the activity of theorizing, philosophically and otherwise, about the practice. Even an advanced and creative mathemetician need not have views about, say, the metaphysical status of numbers. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, is rumored to have said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status; he was highly skeptical about philosophers’ inquiries into such things. He had trouble, or so I imagine, understanding what was at stake in the question of whether the concept of existence had application to such abstractions. Feynman had no worries about whether he was really thinking about numbers. But ‘existence’ was another thing.

“It is this distinction between participation and theorizing that seems to me relevant to religious life.”

Another niche hobby

An entry under the category of Niche Hobbies: handbell change ringing.

If you’ve read Dorothy Sayers’s murder mystery Nine Tailors (or watched the TV version), you know what change ringing is. It’s very English: you have a tower with eight or so bells, and a bunch of people stand around and ring the bells in certain defined patterns. If you don’t have a tower full of bells? Then you can use handbells, and you get handbell change ringing.

One musician describes handbell change ringing like this: “A series of 4-12 bells are rung in a series of mathematical permutations. Remember work with 12-tone tone rows in 20th-century music theory class? This is similar in practice, but with diatonic notes.” Also, to my ears it sounds much better than most twelve-tone music.

Click on the image below to see a video of handbell change ringing in action.

Four people sitting in a circle, each ringing two handbells.
Screen grab from the video. Note the looks of intense concentration on the faces of the ringers.

This is the kind of niche hobby that’s going to appeal to a certain kind of person: someone who likes mathematical patterns, someone who likes cooperative efforts in small groups, someone who likes the meditative effect of intense concentration, and so on. OK, I admit it: that someone could probably be me. Since the last thing I need right now is yet another niche hobby, I’m fortunate that there’s no handbell change ringing group near me.

General info on handbell change ringing:
handbell change ringing bloglinks to change ringing websites

Math and change ringing:
a bit about math and change ringing — Prof. Sarah Hart of Gresham College gets into group theory and change ringing

Instructional materials:
quick overview for conventional handbell ensemblesthe cross-and-stretch techniquethe ringing on bodies technique (ringers move, not bells) — instructional bookhandbell change ringing for beginners (booklet) — change ringing for handbells (more advanced) — instructional websitehandbell change ringing online simulator (for solo practice) — methods for three bell ringing (with a tenor behind, that would be 4 bells = 2 handbell ringers) — cross and stretch demonstrated (the video with stuffed animals is particularly clear, believe it or not)

Performance videos:
3 people (easy to follow the changes) — blindfold handbell change ringing4 person cross and stretch (watch closely) — 6 person cross and stretch