Yarn, Ho! Elann is officially faster than Knitpicks. Knitpicks offers free shipping, though, so I figure they end up square.

Here is some more of the nice Peruvian Highland Wool, as well as the ball of ecru Den-M-Nit.

I can now get back to work on Brooklyn. I am also still reading Dawkins and the Creationists, alternately, with a novel for light relief.

The Creationist materials list a whole slew of identifiable and nameable positions on the creation/evolution question, and suggest that most of these positions are a matter of making up your own religion.

This is, I believe, a common creationist accusation -- that evolution, or rather the the study of evolution, is itself a religion. Dawkins is one of the few evolutionary biologists who really sounds evangelical. We are now free from susperstition! he crows. Everyone else in the world is completely wrong! At one point in The Selfish Gene he gleefully says that we can now answer "the child's question: Why is man?" The mind boggles a bit at the idea of a child asking that, doesn't it? Now imagine answering that questioning tyke, "We are all carriers of genetic information into the future, sweetie." Further boggling takes place.

Not that people don't make up their own religions. Ozarque recently had a discussion about religion which seemed to me to be largely a sharing of religious beliefs the people had made up.

The great advantage to making up your religion must be that you get to choose all the elements. You get to pick what things are right and wrong (to the extent that God, DNA, or the promptings of your physical processes allow you freedom on this), so you can excuse the sins that appeal to you and condemn the ones that you don't want to do anyway. You wouldn't have doubts. You would not have to exercise faith to accept or at least struggle with things that are hard for you to believe. You could choose the most charming rituals and holidays from all the old religions, and make up new ones of your own if you felt like it.

This is not at all like my own religious experience.

I do however plan a session soon of picking and choosing among the yarns. The Knitpicks order should arrive soon, as well. I just counted up the number of projects I had planned for the holidays, calculated the number of yards of wool I would need, and picked out colors to equal that total. So I now actually have a stash to choose from when I want to start a project. True, all the projects are already planned, but I can survey my stash and decide which colors to use.

Yeah, well, it is a small thrill.

Who knows what I might do? Well, I suppose everyone does, because inevitably, having made all kinds of wild suggestions to myself, I send the unsuccessful knitting to the frog pond and do it over, profiting if at all possible from my mistakes the first (or fourth) time around. This could be because I am a dull and predictable person, but I like to think that it is because I am rational.

And it is as a rational person that I am currently enjoying a look at the whole creation/evolution controversy. In particular, at the moment, I am thinking about the idea of purpose.

So here I am reading two sets of things, one of which takes the position that humanity's sole purpose in life is to serve as carriers for genetic information, the other that humanity's sole purpose in life is to glorify God. Into this already-interesting juxtaposition of ideas come words from two fellow xangans, The Water Jar and Kali Mama.

Now, neither of them was actually talking about The Meaning of Life at the time, so this is not so much a conversation with them as it is an example of my taking their words from their xanga refrigerators for my own philosophical soup.

The Water Jar said that parents should place their child's welfare so high that it could transcend morality.

Now, if we are simply carriers of DNA, hoping to keep that biological information around as long as possible, then that is surely true. Morality is not essential to reproductive success. Once we have produced sufficient offspring, we should -- as mere carriers of genetic data -- just die. Insects do. Dawkins, however, points out that the investment in offspring, from the point of view of long-term reproductive success, should also depend on the number and potential of the offspring.

We are talking about success in such a specialized sense that I think I have to clarify it, in case it is a new idea to you. "Reproductive success" over the long term means keeping your genes in the pool as long as possible. My friend the Poster Queen, for example, is an only child, married to an only child. They had one child, who as yet has no children. If she does not get around to reproducing, then the Poster Queen is not going to be anyone's ancestor -- and neither are her parents, nor her parents-in-law. Their genes will be out of the pool.

My brother, who has no children at all, does have a passel of nieces and nephews with whom he shares a pretty good percentage of DNA. Chances are excellent that his parents will end up having great-grandchildren. Should he never get around to reproducing, he -- though childless -- will still be more reproductively successful in the long term than the Poster Queen, who is already a mom. (Note that this is of course not dependent on their personal decency as individuals, which is in both cases beyond question.)

This matters to our philosophical question because short-term reproductive success appears to require different strategies from the long-term kind. If I am male, I might achieve impressive short-term reproductive success by impregnating a new woman every night (by force if necessary) and then abandoning her and moving on to the next one. However, according to the computer models, this turns out not to be a good long-term strategy. I might get lots of kids this way, but not so many great-grandkids.

In order to get to be an ancestor, I have to figure out not just how to pass on genetic information likely to lead to people who live long enough to procreate, but also memetic information making it likely that those kids will produce kids who will themselves have kids, and so on. It turns out -- according to the computer models -- that what I really need to do is not so much scatter seed as bring up people who will become good parents.Over the long run, it appears that altruism and general decency are more successful strategies than rape and pillage.

Now, it is important to remember that no one is suggesting literal strategies here. The hypothetical man does not at any point think "Gee, what could I do to keep my genes in the pool for a couple dozen generations?" Nor does the DNA plot or try to influence the man's behavior. It is simply -- according to the computer models -- that natural selection, over the long term, favors decent behavior. So, people who are genetically or perhaps memetically predisposed toward decent behavior will end up with more descendants, and that characteristic will tend to become more common. The mutation that causes us to perceive right and wrong as real is reinforced over time.

There is a bit of a problem with this, in that there is no evidence that people have become or are becoming more decent, more cooperative, or more moral as time goes by. A characteristic which is adaptive, and which is selected for, is normally obvious to us because it increases. We do not usually come around to deciding it is adaptive by saying, "Hmm, what could be the point of a conscience? Maybe it could be adaptive, according to computer models. Let's check."

Even if we are prepared to say that groups of people have become less warlike and barbaric in their behavior, it is very hard to support a claim that we as individuals are more moral than the people of the past. We don't even seem to have made any real changes in our concepts of morality, let alone in how well we follow through. An examination of history, literature, and religion will show us people who screw up in essentially the same ways people always have.

Kali Mama said that morality is necessary for social animals because it improves the success rate. Look at insects. And this is Dawkins's position as well.

Insects do sometimes cooperate, and they do certainly behave like creatures who experience themselves only as genetic carriers. Their home lives are, for the most part, appalling, so they may not be good examples of moral sense. They do not seem even to feel pain, let alone compassion or the pricks of conscience.

But there are people who hold that thoughts and feelings are just by-products of physical processes, like digestion. We interpret them as having some kind of importance, because it is adaptive for us to be meaning-seeking creatures. Ants go about their tasks as though they were very important, even when they are in ant farms and doing nothing of any value (besides carrying DNA around in their cells). And we go around pondering truths as though that were very important.

Under this model, morality and religion are just like bile and lipids. We just have a biological quirk that makes us experience them as thoughts and feelings. It is this idea, I think, that creationists consider dangerous about evolution. We could decide that reproductive success is not important to us, and then there would be no reason at all for us to strive for moral behavior. We could just ignore the promptings of our consciences, just as I have learned to ignore the inaccurate danger signals sent to me by my phobic reactions to things. "Ah," we would tell ourselves, "those are just by-products of brain functions. Total amorality for me!"

It is hard for me to imagine any rational person stepping from an acceptance of evolution, even of natural selection as a force for altruism, to a decision to become depraved. However, the rationality which I cherish could itself be nothing more than a by-product of a purely physical function. In which case the entire question is no more than a means of amusing myself while I re-knit the newsboy cap.

Hey -- I have come back because I just read sighkey's comment, and I want to change "by-products of brain functions" to "epiphenomena of biochemistry." It sounds much cooler. It would be dishonest for me to actually change it, so just read it that way in your head, okay?

The Headline News cap turned out pretty cute.

It even looks cute on the sheep. It does not look cute on me, but that may be because I am not as cute as the sheep. Or it may fit the sheep better. I do like it flat like this, rather than in the baseball-cap form in which Georgia wears hers (although she sure does look cute -- scroll down her page to see). I see more of these in my future...

It happens that I have found myself recently involved in discussions of, and in thinking about, creation and evolution. This is a little surprising to me because it is essentially a settled question for me, and for most of the people I know. However, #1 daughter and I are reading Richard Dawkins together, and my Tuesday night class is contemplating creation.

One of the things that has led many believers in evolution to conclude that evolution itself was all God's idea is the existence of the human conscience, and of goodness itself. C.S. Lewis has written on this topic with clarity and wit, and those who are interested in the question of ethics should read him. But The Selfish Gene argues that altruism and "being nice" are adaptive -- so it is still all about reproductive success, and human consciousness is purely trimming. Dawkins -- one of my favorite science writers -- is not only a bold champion for evolution, but is also one of the most prominent and evangelical atheists of our day. (If you want to read a lot of interesting folks getting very het up over this, check out The Panda's Thumb. If you want to read something by Dawkins, try this. And then go read his books, of course.)

The class Partygirl and I are taking holds a completely opposite view. If evolution rather than the literal 6-day creation took place, the materials argue, then not just the rest of the Bible, but all moral standards are unnecessary and irrelevant to our lives. If we refuse to accept literal accounts of creation, then we have to accept that all religions are false, and any philosophical views of our own are just more false religions that we have made up.(If you want a quick look at the idea of a moral law, check it out here.)

As is so often the case for me, I am not convinced by either of these extremes. I am enjoying reading and discussing Dawkins with my daughter. And I intend to keep my mouth shut in class.

This will surprise some of you. I like a good theoretical argument as much as the next fellow. Probably more, in fact, unless the next fellow is a member of my family. Around here, creation vs. evolution is small talk.

However, what I like is a nice theoretical disagreement, not one which involves anger, personal attacks, or people deciding that I need to be saved.  I'll just discuss this with my daughter.

And I'd love to hear what you think.

I finished the knitting of the Headline News cap. I had given up entirely on the instructions, and just decreased as best I could figure out as I went along. Here it is blocking. The variations in color are the result of dampness, but the oddity of the stitches comes from figuring it out as I went along.

Taking the whole thing out and beginning again, or perhaps giving up entirely, might be a good idea, but blocking can do wonders. I will wait and see. I also have not completed the finishing of the brim, though it is knitted.

I can't really recommend this pattern. It might have worked better had I followed the instructions precisely, but I doubt it. I dislike idiosyncratic abbreviations like "pu" and "sm," even if I think I figured out what they meant (I had copied the pattern from a library book --there might have been a key in there somewhere). It seems counter-productive. Why not just use the standard terms? And the brim, though it is clever, is not as attractive in its shaping as it could have been. It does appear that my hat will turn out to be, as another knitter described it, a baseball cap rather than a newsie cap.

I may give this one to a little girl and make another in a larger gauge. If so, I might go ahead and follow the directions exactly and see what happens. Really, who knows what I might do?

This book is the source of the word "meme" -- you know, like the things people tag each other with on blogs. One blogger wrote that "meme" meant "Me! Me!" which struck me as a revealing piece of folk etymology. Really, a meme is a cultural bit that can be passed along just as the biological bits called "genes" are. Language. Songs. Knitting.

My knitting may or may not have gone awry. Brooklyn is waiting for reinforcements of ecru Den-M-Nit, so I am just doing my holiday knitting right now.

As I was puzzling over the Headline News cap, I remembered that one of my English knitting books recommended dressing tams (blocking caps, we would say here in Humburger-a-Go-Go Land) over a plate. Choosing a suitably-sized flat circular thing, I pulled the cap right over it, and found that it was indeed time to decrease.

So I went to the pattern, and found -- a single decrease on the leading edge of each stockinette section. On alternate rows. Surely not, I thought. This would give you nice spiral decreases, wouldn't it? And while I rather like spiral decreases, they would surely interfere with the cables. I am doing paired decreases. On every fourth row, in an effort to keep the speed of the decreases the same as the pattern.

I realize that I have, at this point, essentially given up on the pattern. Who knows what I will end up with?

There are still shawls sitting in my knitting basket. And, as I wait for wool to arrive in the mail, my stash of Highland Wool is calling to me, "Remember us? Fair Isle! Fair Isle!" I am resolutely ignoring all those hot wooly cries. It is easier than you might think, in this heat. Cotton, and small things. That's all.

It may be Talk Like  a Pirate Day, but this headline still startled me:

"Pirates Open Contract Talks With Bay"

Lawyers are into everything now, aren't they? Which bay was it? Botany? SF?

I thought we had agreed that it was going to be fall now (or spring, in the antipodes) and all the extreme weather was over. I was about to put out pumpkins and other orange things. And now here it is in the 90s. And the air conditioning is off, because I just couldn't bring myself to believe that summer was still around. So we are all being sweaty and cross all over again.

Fortunately, it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. If you are going to be sweaty and cross, why not do it with a little piratitude?

I have written about pirates before. So I will instead mention that today, in addition to being Talk Like a Pirate Day, is also #2 son's birthday. We celebrated yesterday with a meal with the grandparents and a cake and presents. The presents included the excellent D'Aulaire book and this neon sign, because you can never have too many neon signs in your bedroom.

We will continue today with further celebration.

Brooklyn's left sleeve is complete. Notice the tiny quantity of ecru yarn there by the sleeve. This is obviously not enough for the second sleeve, so I will have to get more yarn before I can continue. I have therefore gone ahead and done an Elann order to go with my Knitpicks order. I think the Bawks, being cabled, will look much better in the lighter and more subtle colors of the Peruvian Highland Wool anyway. We will see.

We do not take the day off from the HGP for Talk Like a Pirate Day. Obviously, I will not be cleaning closets on such a day, or making cookies, but the shopping part of the week's tasks can surely be done. "Arrr! Ship that ecru Den-M-Nit off to me right smartly, me beauties!" I can say, or "Avast, me hearties! No rush on that special order, as I won't need it till Christmas, belay me!"

This book explains how palm oil and high-fructose corn syrup came to be the main ingredients in American processed food and how convenience foods and fast food came to be the predominant source of sustenance for many American people. I think that later in the book there will be discussions of the health effects of this, but I am currently just in the politics and economics section.

You may have noticed before that I find the connections between economics and history fascinating. If you do, too, you should put this book on your reading list. The same author has a new one coming out that looks at the prescription drug industry, and is planning one on cell phones, so you can see that he has his finger on the pulse of U.S. industries.

But this may not be a comfortable read for all of us. I think that I can read this book cheerfully because I do not eat much processed food or fast food, and use palm oil strictly for soapmaking. When I checked the labels in my kitchen, I found HFCS in the bottle of corn syrup left over from last Thanksgiving's pecan pie and in a bottle of barbecue sauce which I bought from laziness when I didn't feel like making my own. If you visit fast food restaurants 22 times a month (this is their goal for you, I was astonished to learn) and have a kitchen full of convenience foods, you might want to skip this book. It does make you want to go check the labels in your kitchen.

The Headline News cap is getting bigger. I changed needles sizes up to 5s. I increased at either side of the stockinette sections. I knitted a good many more repeats in the unshaped section than the pattern specified. So I now have a healthy-looking hat. I also have no real idea when I should begin decreasing. The pattern said I could go up to 5-7" for dreadlocks or "big hair", but I am not convinced that this will actually make the hat larger. It seems as though one would end up with a tube rather than the slouchy circle I am wanting. When you sew a newsboy hat, after all, you cut a couple of circles, not a tube.

Adding to my uncertainty in the matter is Brooklyn, whose sleeves keep growing and growing and growing. We have gone past gorilla length to orangutan length, it seems to me. I feel that I should have begun the decreases several inches earlier than I did. I am also worrying that I will run out of the ecru yarn.

What is the connection between the two? Well, in each case I am using a published pattern. From a book. With an editor or two, no doubt. I want to make the item as pictured. I am not trying to make it "just like that, except with a different neckline and length and stitch." I am just following the directions. And in each case, I have lost faith. I don't believe the pattern any more.

So it is probably me, isn't it? This causes me to doubt my ability to judge appropriate sizes, and wonder whether I should not have just left the hat as it was originally written.

In an attempt to follow the instructions from last week's HGP, I sent in my Knitpicks order. I am making a dozen wool things, and I figured that I needed about two skeins for each. So I was thinking I would just order up a couple dozen skeins of Wool of the Andes. It appears to be the best bargain around, and I heard good reports of it in the blogs, including from our own Ruby Plaid.

However, I did not do that. I ordered about half that much. Why? Well, I was not sure about the colors. Elann's Peruvian Highland Wool comes in a greater range of colors, for only about 50 cents more per skein. And this way, if I have to order another ball of that ecru denim cotton, I will  not be as resentful of the shipping costs, because I will be able to add in a dozen skeins of Peruvian Highland Wool. Or, having tried the Wool of the Andes, I will love it so much that I will cheerfully order another dozen of it. Or, I will run out of time and only be able to make half a dozen projects, and not have excessive yarn hanging around.

The HGP for this week has us thoroughly clean our bedrooms, including closets and dressers. We are to put a meal and a batch of "goodies" in the freezer, buy 1/8 of the gifts we intend to purchase, and begin spending an hour a day working on our handmade holiday gifts. Had I followed the instructions from last week properly, this would just be a matter of grabbing the plastic bag marked "Grandpa" or whatever and plunging in. Since I did not follow the instructions properly, there will instead be a certain amount of hemming and hawing and deciding, not to mention waiting for the yarn to arrive and debating about ordering more, but let's just admit that I enjoy that and move on.

Tomorrow is #2 son's birthday, so today we are going to meet my parents for lunch at the local Palais de Fried Chicken. I will be eating grilled fish, because I have lately been very far from eating as I should, and have resolved to begin today to return to Eating Right.

Except for birthday cake. #1 son and I went to the bakery with the handsome baker and found a wonderful cake ready-made. #2 son had expressed a desire for a chocolate cake with white icing, and I had intended to make him one at home, with reasonably healthy ingredients, no palm oil or high-fructose corn syrup or anything. #1 son persuaded me that this would be an error.

However, not having called ahead as we usually do to have the handsome baker make a cake to order for us, we had to sneak over there yesterday and hope they had one on hand. Fortunately, after we had discussed removing the flowers from the one they had in their case, the nice ladies there found one in the back which was not girly. Having a girly cake would be almost as bad as having a healthy one, you know?

#1 son also found an excellent candle alternative -- a sparkler in the form of #2 son's first initial. We expect this to be a huge success.

(I discovered, by the way, that the nice lady at the bakery who decorated #1 daughter's wedding cake was the Pillsbury Grand Champion cake decorator this year. I hadn't even known that there was a Pillsbury Grand Champion. Just goes to show.)

It is official. This unreadable sign says that fall is here. If the farmer's market is announcing it, it must be true, right?

It was certainly a lovely fall morning. We went down to the square to buy some apples, and managed to get green beans, leeks, salad mix, tomatoes, bitter melon, and squash as well.

Also bread from this stall. Do you see all the smoke? There was smoke absolutely pouring out of the construction site behind the bakery stalls (there are four). We asked some people about it, but they didn't know what was up. No one was allowing the smoke to spoil the bucolic pleasure of the morning, even though we could hardly see through it at some points. "Oh, I think it's fog," said the young lady purveying cinnamon rolls, in a truly amazing feat of denial.

We once had a fire at our store (in the wall between us and the Chinese restaurant next door, to be precise). People kept shopping. The firemen came in two trucks, tramped through the store with their hoses and axes, and chopped through the wall, and people still shopped. "I'm sorry," I would say, "we're having a fire. Can you come back tomorrow?" "Oh," they would say, "I just want one thing and I know right where it is." Sang froid or stupidity? I don't know. Anyway, we also ignored the smoke.

Here are the folks with the bitter melons. They also had winter melon, hot peppers, and eggplants, but we restrained ourselves. We also resisted the long beans.

It is easy, at the market, to end up with more produce than can be eaten in the week. Of course, the best thing then might be just to eat more vegetables. I am not at all sure that my boys would be persuaded by this argument...

There was not much fruit left, apart of course from apples. Raspberries, at a price more suited to a jewelry store than a market stall, but that was it. Plenty of vegetables and flowers, though.

There were some surprises as well. This stall had cotton blossoms. It can't have been intended for spinning, given the prices and the quantity, so I suppose it was for putting into flower arrangments.

There never has been a whole lot of cotton grown here, though most places grew a bit for home use. Rural people usually kept a patch up through the Depression, in fact, to sell in order to buy shoes so the kids could go to school. I didn't ask the grower what she had in mind with these, but we petted them a bit.

There is a knitting stall. The knitter uses tree branches for handles on her purses. She also uses all natural materials and does quite a nice job on her knitting. Her color combinations are ugly, to my mind, so I have never been able to buy anything from her, even though I would really like to encourage her. She did have a newsboy cap, though. In an ugly combination of yarns, and with a knitted crown and an odd little crocheted brim. I really had to exercise self-control to keep myself from picking it up and measuring all the parts. Or even closely photographing it. It was just right as far as size and shape went. Sigh.

Mayflower found me some pictures of the Headline News cap which persuade me that mine needs to be bigger than it is. So I am considering my options.

I could switch to 5s and perhaps then to 6s. And then of course back down as I decrease.

It might be that simply making the unshaped section longer will do it. This is the pattern's recommendation for accommodating "big hair." #1 daughter does not have big hair, but the general idea of making it larger is there.

I could increase in the sections between the cables. There would have to be some math involved in this, of course.

The smart thing to do would be to find a cap of the right type and size and measure it. Then I could calculate properly.

This "newsboy" style of cap is now worn, I think, by stylish girls and old men. #1 daughter, when she said she wanted a cap like this, refered me to the caps that hang on pegs in the back of the church for the old guys who are going directly from church to the golf course.

We are off to the farmer's market in a few minutes here. It is a glorious day, and certainly not one to be spent entirely indoors. I do have to shovel out the house at some point, and I intend to bake ginger snaps, but those things will give me time to consider how best to alter the newsboy cap.