Posted inScience

New sexual anxiety: length matters

Length of the index and ring fingers, that is. I learned this last night, watching a Discovery Channel program about the differences between men and women (I know, I know...you'd think, at the age of 54, I wouldn't need such education). One experiment with boys and girls was highly encouraging: they dumped a bunch of $100 bills from a balcony and filmed a group of young boys and a group of young girls separately trying to catch the bills before they hit the ground. The boys caught six bills, and the girls caught zero, nada, zilch, which goes a long…
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Posted inPhilosophy Plotinus Writing/Weblogs

Trusting truth

Here's a question: if we had a choice between knowing the absolute 100% truth about existence, or remaining with our current beliefs, what would we do? I posed this question during a talk I gave in Seattle last year, and I remember being met with a lot of quizzical faces (which isn't unusual for me when I speak, but I don't necessarily consider this to be a bad thing; if an audience is looking quizzical, at least they aren't asleep). It's a good question, though. Most of us believe in God, somehow or other. And most of us believe in…
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Posted inEntertainment

Bowling for Columbine

This was last night's enterainment at Salem Cinema, where the newly installed seats add a lot to our viewing enjoyment. Plus, you can drink a cup of decent coffee and eat some almost-healthy popcorn (probably truly healthy if you get the brewer's yeast option). Last time we went, before this, the owner made a nice little speech before the movie about the new seats, and how much she appreciated everyone's support over the years, and please turn off your cell phones, but if you don't, everyone in the theater should feel free to scream at you when the ringer goes…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Whew! Made it by ten days

Man, what a relief, to be ahead of the curve by ten days. Yesterday's Living Section in the Oregonian had a fairly extensive story about blogs, a.k.a. web logs, which this here thing is. So if I hadn't decided to start HinesSight on January 2, I'd be behind the curve right now. Instead, I'm ten days ahead of the (Oregonian) curve. Of course, I'm years behind the weblog pioneers, so from that standpoint I'm way behind the curve. Well, I guess I'm right where I'm supposed to be, which is preparing to send out emails letting folks know about HinesSight.…
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Posted inEntertainment

Minority Report

A great movie, absolutely, and our most recent DVD entertainment. I can only wish that I live to see a future in which you get to drive cars up and down the sides of buildings, as well as on futuristic freeways. And I loved how Tom Cruise, et. al, controlled computers with their fingertips. If I could control this damn crash-a-holic Windows XP piece of crap operating system with a sledgehammer (hmmm...not a bad idea, now that I think about it) I'd be happy. I enviously noted that throughout the entire nearly three hour movie the sophisticated computers seemed to…
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Posted inNeighborhood Plotinus Writing/Weblogs

Plotinus and coyote-control

It's nice to make connections between various aspects of your life. Here I am just now, editing my Plotinus (3rd century Greek philosopher) manuscript, and I come across a passage wonderfully apropos to our efforts to stop the killing of coyotes in our neighborhood. This bit is about Plotinus' attitude toward meat-eating, but I think he would be equally (if not more) aghast at the idea of killing an animal just because it is doing what comes naturally to it, and isn't harming any human. The quote in italics at the end is from Plotinus' Enneads, the collection of his…
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Posted inDogs

Canine perfection

Canine Perfection, the Sublime Platonic Form of Dog--Serena! (serenely posing near the headwaters of the Metolius River, with Black Butte in the background)
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Defragmentation, if it was only so easy…

Had to skip posting yesterday, due to a lengthy defragmenting process on my cranky computer. If you have never watched SystemWorks defragment a disk, consider adding this to your list of life's to-dos. Observing the process is strangely addicting. You start with a colorful map of your computer's amazingly fragmented hard drive, bits and pieces of files stuck here and there, all over the place. Then, through some mysterious process, the All-Knowing Optimizer goes about reshuffling those bits and pieces into a neat and tidy coherent system. Dot by dot, you watch (for hours, in my case) your computer change…
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Posted inSustainability

New name for “Fairview”

The sustainable Fairview development needs a new name. I gather one hasn't been chosen yet, though various alternatives have been suggested. Not surprisingly, I'm still attracted to the names I shared with other investors many months ago: "Terramore" and "Terros," with "Terramore" being my current favorite. I'll admit that Terros resonates too closely with "terror" for today's anxious times. I'm probably the only SFA member who likes Terramore, but that's OK. Diversity is what we're all about. It just has that wonderful Arthurian ring; plus, you get the generally recognizable Terra, followed by an interesting play on words--"amore," or love,…
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Posted inSustainability

Genesis World Energy: breakthrough or fraud?

I vote for fraud, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong. Genesis World Energy claims to have made some sort of amazing breakthrough in fuel cell technology, such that you will be able to hook up their gadget and power your whole house with just a wire to the electrical box and a garden hose. If that sounds too good to be true to you, you're in agreement with a bunch of skeptics in some newsgroups who consider Genesis World Energy a fraud in the making. Here's an excerpt from their website. I smell "pyramid scheme" and "techno-cult." But,…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Brian’s manuscript reading

click to enlarge Over Christmas I did a complete reading of my 450 page "Return to the One" manuscript to a wonderfully attentive audience. No one budged from their chair, asked for a bathroom break, or even made a sound. Many thanks to my daughter, Celeste, for lining up most of these folks. She's known them since she was a little girl, and might even be able to still remember their names.
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Posted inBooks Writing/Weblogs

Stephen Hawking and me

Watching the "60 Minutes" piece about Stephen Hawking last Sunday, I came to realize that Stephen and I have a lot in common. To wit, I've read every page of "A Brief History of Time" and so, I must presume, has Stephen. The reporting was that millions and millions of copies of this book have been sold, but only a few dozen have actually been read (a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but not by much). "This is a book," said a minister with a sense of humor, "that you buy and put on the shelf, never to be looked at again,…
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Posted inSustainability

What’s sustainable?

The Buddhist conception is that everything changes, continously. This rings true for me. The earth is changing; society is changing; the people around me are changing; I'm changing. Nothing is sustainable, in the sense of unchanging. The best we can do is flow with change, to manage it as best we can inside and outside of ourselves. So, when I look at the colorful maps of Sustainable Fairview in the master plan, this doesn't look like anything real to me. It's a static picture, not a dynamic unfolding. Those of us responsible for the development of Sustainable Fairview should spend…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Coyote debates

There was some good coyote debating going on at the Spring Lake Estates board meeting at our house last night. Laurel and I appreciated the concerns of the sheep-raisers, but we weren't convinced that shooting coyotes is the solution. Tim Jaskoski correctly pointed out that much research shows that killing coyotes does nada to reduce the coyote population, long-term or even medium-term. Some people have the anthropomorphic attitude that coyotes go up to the body of Joe Coyote, shot by an angry sheepowner, and say, "Ooops. We've got to get out of this neighborhood. Look at what happened to good…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Backhoes are beautiful

Everyone in Spring Lake Estates should extend a huge "thank you!" to Craig Snively and his backhoe. With the help of several neighbors, Craig and company enlarged the "emergency" spillway on the right side of the dam, which currently is pretty much the main spillway--with the trickle tube partially blocked. So far, it looks like the water is flowing out faster than it is flowing in, which is a good thing, obviously. If the reverse happens (water coming in faster than it goes out), grab your shovels! (or, better, Craig's backhoe)
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Posted inEntertainment

13 Conversations About One Thing

We watched this movie on DVD last night, and ended up with the familiar art film feeling of, "Ah, that was interesting, though not particularly pleasant; now we're even more confident that life has no answers, as if we didn't know that before." It is always refreshing, though, to have a movie end with all the loose ends still flapping, rather than tying them up tidily like Hollywood usually does. And the theme, happiness, can't be beat. Who ever gets tired of trying to figure out this happiness thing? Having written a book called "Life is Fair" (published non-commercially in…
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Posted inEntertainment

Synchronicity, surely

One mere minute after posting the "13 Conversations" message below, in which I pondered questions about happiness, I opened up an email from my sister that contains the answers. Well, maybe. Carol Ann thought this column by Mark Morford from SF Gate.com sounded like me, maybe because it is titled, "Resolutions For The Damned For 2003: More veggies, louder orgasms and, of course, defy ShrubCo at every possible turn" Yeah, as a verbose vegetarian liberal I'm in favor of all three, so she's right. Most of the piece will irritate Bush-lovers, but the ending bits of advice hold true for…
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Posted inSustainability

Sustainable Fairview overview

We're looking forward to being part of the progress of Sustainable Fairview in 2003, and beyond. Here's an overview of the project, excerpted from the recently completed draft master plan. If you aren't familiar with Sustainable Fairview, whose name, blessedly, eventually will be changed to something better, it's worth taking a few minutes to read this summary. I (Brian) have never been that much of an environmentalist, even though I'm married to a fanatic recycler, tree-planter, and defender of wildlife. Periodically I manage to take our tin cans, glass, and cardboard to the local drop-off site, but that has just…
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Posted inAbout this site--start here

Welcome to HinesSight

I’m a retired health policy analyst with a lifelong interest in philosophy, spirituality, and politics. I’ve got three blogs: Church of the Churchless, HinesSight, and Salem Political Snark. I live with my wife, Laurel, and Mooka, our Husky mix, on ten acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. The four books I’ve written are shown at the bottom of the right sidebar, the most recent being Break Free of Dogma. My website is https://www.brianhines.com
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