Thanksgiving‏ wishes from Barack Obama

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, Americans across the country will sit down together, count our blessings, and give thanks for our families and our loved ones.

American families reflect the diversity of this great nation. No two are exactly alike, but there is a common thread they each share.

Our families are bound together through times of joy and times of grief. They shape us, support us, instill the values that guide us as individuals, and make possible all that we achieve.

So tomorrow, I'll be giving thanks for my family -- for all the wisdom, support, and love they have brought into my life.

But tomorrow is also a day to remember those who cannot sit down to break bread with those they love.

The soldier overseas holding down a lonely post and missing his kids. The sailor who left her home to serve a higher calling. The folks who must spend tomorrow apart from their families to work a second job, so they can keep food on the table or send a child to school.

We are grateful beyond words for the service and hard work of so many Americans who make our country great through their sacrifice. And this year, we know that far too many face a daily struggle that puts the comfort and security we all deserve painfully out of reach.

So when we gather tomorrow, let us also use the occasion to renew our commitment to building a more peaceful and prosperous future that every American family can enjoy.

It seems like a lifetime ago that a crowd met on a frigid February morning in Springfield, Illinois to set out on an improbable course to change our nation.

In the years since, Michelle and I have been blessed with the support and friendship of the millions of Americans who have come together to form this ongoing movement for change.

You have been there through victories and setbacks. You have given of yourselves beyond measure. You have enabled all that we have accomplished -- and you have had the courage to dream yet bigger dreams for what we can still achieve.

So in this season of thanks giving, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to you, and my anticipation of the brighter future we are creating together.

With warmest wishes for a happy holiday season from my family to yours,

President Barack Obama

Grappling with a wealth of guilt

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 20, 2009

Young heirs seek moral balance between inherited windfalls, social responsibilities

 

The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes

 via: http://compassioninpolitics.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/the-girl-who-silenced-the-world/

 

Humanity in Focus recently featured “The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes“:

This was 16 years ago, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Rio Summit, Earth Summit (or, in Portuguese, Eco ‘92), a major conference held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, 1992. the UN international Environmental Conference.

Did anybody listen?

 

(hat tip: technology health and development)

This is a great speech by Severn Suzuki to the United Nations. More recently she wrote a book called “Notes from Canadian Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up For Change” and spoke out on the issues of responsibility and social change in an interview with the Tyee in Canada:

There are … so many amazing things happening right now…..

I’ve met a couple of people lately who have a very interesting attitude. They [said], “How lucky are we? How exciting is this time? How lucky are we to be alive when the forces of good and evil are just so clear, when we’re undergoing such a massive time of shift and when our actions really, really matter, for good or for bad?”

This is a really unique period in history and it’s a time when an individual can have more impact than ever before in our human history because of the Internet, because of communication, because of how easily we can travel. … We really have to realize how empowered we can be, how much we actually matter.

11 Britons that changed the face of technology

The UK innovators that helped shape the world of tech

20 hours ago | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Britain may no longer be in thepowerhouse of the world's technology industry, but we sure did some pioneering work in days gone by - and we're still pushing back the barriers in certain areas too.

To celebrate Britain's major contributions to the world of innovation, here are eleven Brits that have changed the face of technology - and some of them are still at it, too.

1. Sir Clive Sinclair

Sinclair may be looked back on with slight amusement because of the 1985 C5 electric tricycle, but we shouldn't forget his formidable contribution to the UK home computer market. He started with the ZX80, but it was with 1981's inexpensive ZX81 (which cost less than £50 for the kit version or £70 fully built) and the follow-up ZX Spectrum that Sinclair became an indelible part of computing history.

Read: Clive Sinclair was 'a cross between Einstein and Willy Wonka'

Sinclair had also released the world's first pocket calculator in 1972 – the £80 Executive which ran on hearing-aid batteries. He now concentrates on folding bicycles.

2. John Logie Baird

Although Baird died in 1946 and never saw television come to major fruition, he changed the world forever with his electromechanical system. It was in 1925, after years of experiment, that he transmitted the world's first television picture – the head of a ventriloquist's dummy at five images per second – after having transferred moving silhouette images two years previously. In 1926 he held the first public demonstration for a reporter from The Times in Soho at a scan rate of 12.5 pictures per second and the year after he performed the same between London and Glasgow. Colour, using three light sources, followed in 1928. In the same year he began making programmes for the BBC. He truly was a pioneer like no other.

[Image credit: bairdtelevision.com]

3. Chris Curry

Alongside Sinclair, Curry was the subject of the 2009 BBC docu-drama Micro Men. A former employee of Sinclair, Curry went on to co-found Acorn Computers, the company who went up against Sinclair to carry out the early-1980s BBC Computer Literacy Project and put a microcomputer into every school in Britain. Together with VLSI, Acorn developed the first ARM silicon chip for Acorn in 1985 – derivatives of which we still use today in smartphones such as the Apple iPhone. Curry and his co-founder Hermann Hauser did a deal for Olivetti to take over nearly half of Acorn in 1985. ARM was spun off. At the same time, Curry founded GIS (General Information Systems) who make contact and contactless smartcard products. Below are Acorn founders Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry.

[Image credit: stairwaytohell.com]

4. Alexander Graham Bell

Bell was a prolific inventor who experimented with acoustic telegraphy in the early 1870s in the US and Canada using vibrating steel reeds. After a period in which Bell had struggled with his invention (despite getting financial backing), he teamed up with Thomas Watson. Working in collaboration it quickly became clear that different tones could be transmitted via a single reed. Despite a wide interest in the field, Bell was first to the patent office in 1875 – with an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". Although advancements were made by others – especially Elisha Gray – it was Bell who went on to develop apparatus commercially and show it publicly in 1876 and 77.

5. Jonathan Ive

As the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, it's fair to say Ive has landed on his feet. But you have to hand it to him – he designed the look of the iMac, iPod and iPhone among others. Born in Chingford, he later studied Industrial Design at Northumbria University (as is now) and spent a short time in London before moving to the US in 1992. Although the eMate showed signs of the Apple we know today, it was with the pioneering first-gen iMac that Ive really came to the fore, with translucent finishes and colourful touches before moving toward the aluminium designs we know today.

6. Charles Babbage

Babbage was a mathematician and inventor who thought up the original concept of a computer as a device being able to solve mathematical problems to drive out human error. First thinking up the principles in the early 1820s, he came up with the idea of the difference engine. The Science Museum has since built a fully functioning machine from his design, but the original was never completed. Instead, he designed an improved version, again completed by the Science Museum in 1991, which performed calculations to 31 digits. Babbage then thought up the Analytical engine which was designed to use punch cards and could be described as the first programmable computer. And his influence is still being felt in diverse fields like nanotechnology.

7. Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt

Saying Watson-Watt is the inventor of radar is a bit like saying Bill Gates invented the home computer. But Watt, along with assistant Arnold Wilkins, designed a radio detection system that became crucial in winning the Battle of Britain in 1940. It tracked aircraft at distances of more than 100 miles from stations all along the East and South coasts of England. He had been deployed to the Bawdsey Research Station near Felixtowe in 1936 and gained a patent for radar in 1935. He later advised the US on air defence before moving to Canada and finally to Scotland.

8. Alexander Bain

Bain was a clockmaker who moved to London from Scotland. There he invented the electric clock, patented in 1841 using a pendulum kept moving by electromagnetic impulses. Bain also worked on an experimental facsimile machine in the 1840s and patented the chemical telegraph, which could print 282 words in 52 seconds.

[Image credit: nms.ac.uk]

9. Sir Frank Whittle

Although German Dr. Hans von Ohain was also involved, Whittle is credited with inventing the jet engine. Whittle took three attempts to enter the RAF due to his physical stature. In his RAF course he had to write a dissertation and decided to write on future developments in aircraft design. Here he wrote about flight at high altitudes and speeds where propeller engines would not be sufficient. In the late 1930s he joined with retired RAF engineers to form a company to produce the jet prototype. In 1944 the company was nationalised.

10. Dr Lyn Evans

CERN's Large Hadron Collider may continue to have problems (with bread), but it's hardly a recent project – Welsh miner's son and particle physicist Dr Lyn Evans began working on the LHC project in 1994. He cites his French O Level – a requirement for him to go to university – as his biggest hurdle, telling the BBC that it's ironic as "since joining CERN, I spend half of my time working in French".

[Image credit: CERN]

11. Tim Berners-Lee

One of the greatest British tech pioneers of all, Tim Berners-Lee made the first proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989. His work was to change the lives of billions. After spending most of the 1980s working for technology companies in Dorset and a consultant software engineer at CERN, he wrote the first web server and initial specifications for URLs, HTTP and HTML. In 1990, he and Robert Cailliau established communication between an HTTP client and server. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 where he remains Director.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liked this? Then check out 5 technologies to thank the 1950s for

Influencing an Election with Crowdsourcing

An article in the New York Times highlighted an interesting new political tactic: campaign resources are being used to promote certain newspaper articles online, such that they appeared at the top of a Google search for a candidate's name.

This makes for a powerful propaganda tool. For example, a Democrat could promote a negative article on her Republican challenger, such that it appeared #1 in Google for that person's name. Anyone searching for info on that Republican would get an eyeful of criticism, giving them something new to think about. The fact that a newspaper article (a supposedly objective source) is used as the target makes its impact even more compelling.

This is a great example of crowdsourcing - not just because many people were involved, but because many people's websites were being used for a focused task.

Miserable Failure

You might recall the story a couple years back, where Bush's White House profile became the #1 result for the search "miserable failure." (Yes - it's still there.) This is an example of Google bombing: a mischievous version of a marketing practice called search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique used by companies to get more visibility in search engine listings. One interesting aspect of SEO has to do with links between websites.

Search engines add-up links from other websites as a form of reputation scoring: CNN.com has a "better" score than NPR.org - not because it has better news, but because more websites link to CNN articles than NPR articles. Link scoring is Google's search sauce, and it's become standard practice for all search engines.

Link scoring is crowdsourcing at its best, because the crowd (the universe of websites) is largely unaware that their actions are being analyzed and used to serve some secondary purpose.

Gaming the System

Google bombing (and SEO in general) introduces a new twist: the idea that this "crowd" can be contacted, requested to link to a specific website in a specific way, and create an intentional outcome.

All of this brought to mind a discussion I recently had with one of the Amazon reps working with Mechanical Turk. They have a provision in their terms of service that prevents companies from using their workforce for promotional work. So you can't hire an army of Turk workers to build links from other websites.

I thought this seemed unduly restrictive, because I'm a search engine marketer and saw Turk's potential as a useful tool in my work. The rep explained that Amazon was trying to avoid having someone come-in and use their workforce as part of some "gaming" effort.

Given the New York Times article, I'm inclined to agree with the wisdom of that logic... if somewhat reluctantly :)

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

 

With the prospect of China's economy surpassing the United States' in less than 20 years, the great debate today is over whether China will integrate into the existing world order or seek to transform it. Invoking the grand logic of the rise and fall of great powers, Jacques, a journalist, makes the case that China will dominate and reshape the global system. He argues that although China's first steps toward global preeminence are economic, eventually its political and cultural influence will be even greater -- and that, overall, "China's impact on the world will be at least as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably far greater." Jacques also claims that Beijing appears to offer the world an alternative route to modernity -- and therefore a different vision of world order. Having adopted the trappings of Western capitalism while embracing a more illiberal conception of social order, China is modernizing, not westernizing. Therefore, Jacques argues, its coming hegemony will reorient politics and society. But the book is better at describing differences between the East and the West -- their cities, customs, values -- than alternative logics of global order. It does not explore in any depth what it will mean for China to become a global hegemon. Hegemony involves building a system of institutions that other states seek to join, overseeing an extensive system of alliances, and providing public goods. The United States' liberal orientation has facilitated its leadership. It remains to be seen whether China can build a Pax Sinica without an open, rule-based world order.

Steve Job’s Commencement Address

This is one of my favorite speeches of all times and was given by Steve Jobs at Stanford’s 2005 graduation ceremony. His philosophy of life and business is very similar to what I also believe in. That’s why, he’s truly a rock star and huge mentor to our industry. Hopefully, one day I also have the chance to share a similar message in a similar ceremony. Enjoy!

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Interview with Web Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen

 

Man vs. God

We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question "Where does evolution leave God?" Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.

But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.

Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.

There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of strength.

Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?

Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth ("Existence is suffering"), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.

—Ms. Armstrong is the author of numerous books on theology and religious affairs. The latest, "The Case for God," will be published by Knopf later this month.

Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do

Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.

Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most scientists' hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted around planetary islands throughout the universe—though sadly too thinly scattered to encounter one another. And if there is life elsewhere, it is something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turn out to be Darwinian life. The argument in favor of alien life's existing at all is weaker than the argument that—if it exists at all—it will be Darwinian life. But it is also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth, with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe.

What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws—it's happened often enough in the history of science). But although life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn't know about life we wouldn't believe it was possible—except, of course, that there'd then be nobody around to do the disbelieving!

The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst, can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves, whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply mysterious universe. But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a soaring Coast Redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea. Not once do any of these creatures disobey one jot or tittle of the laws of physics. Far from violating the laws of thermodynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged) they are relentlessly driven by them. Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on prey or spring to safety.

Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. And my bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may be found, anywhere in the universe.

What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe? What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods? Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.

—Mr. Dawkins is the author of "The Selfish Gene," "The Ancestor's Tale," "The God Delusion." His latest book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will be published by Free Press on Sept. 22.

Being Hillary Rodham Clinton

In an article in Wednesday’s New York Times about the vacation plans of the “God of Carnage” cast, Hope Davis spoke about how it takes a village — not to mention a good makeup artist and costume shop — to turn her into Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom she is playing in a biographical film about the Clintons and Tony Blair.

We asked Ms. Davis if she was taking any special preparations for the role in the film, which is called “The Special Relationship,” and is written by Peter Morgan (who wrote “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen”). Here is her answer, as well as additional photographs of her transformation process:

“To play Hillary Clinton? I’m kind of winging it. No, are you kidding me? I prepared obsessively. I mean, as much as I could in the time that I was given. Of course, with someone like Hillary Clinton, obviously, anything you want is on YouTube and at your fingertips there. This movie takes place in the mid-90s through the year 2000, so it was very easy to get a hold of stuff. So yes, I did as much preparation as I could.”

“It’s a drama, it’s not a comedy, so you don’t really want to be really imitating someone in the way that Darrell Hammond is able to do people’s voices kind of perfectly, and that becomes the show. It’s not really what they wanted us to do here. The director [Richard Loncraine] here has basically said, ‘I don’t care what her accent is like, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re telling a story.’ We did, of course, want to get as close visually as we could. I’m wearing some wigs and some teeth. The pantsuits have been made exactly to spec. There are some bright pantsuits.

And I’m definitely trying to get the flavor of her speech across. But she’s hard to imitate. Her accent has changed a bit over the years. In 1992, when she became first lady, she had quite a bit of Arkansas still in her speech from her 13 years there. That’s really gone now. So her accent has kind of shifted over time but she’s lived in very different places. So that became tricky. We’re trying to get the flavor of it without being overly specific.”