Steve Barnes' World Of Happiness

STEVE: (Singing) "There's a certain kind of thing I'd like to see before I die, and it isn't not not not not not not not not not not pie…"

DOUG: "…"

STEVE: "Wait, does that mean it's pie?"

DOUG: "I don't know, Steve."

Thanks, Jim Lortz, for the title that I'm sad I didn't think of.

The round number is accurate now – I'm exactly 10,000 days old. I've thought about doing a short film, a novel-length post, or a song.

But for now, I suppose I'm happy just to type. I love the world and the universe, and I've always felt perfectly enthralled to lie around under the stars with an astronomy book, or play with animals or with technology. That probably goes without saying for most of us.

The natural world is one part of my life, but the living animals are another. If I know you then you're one of them, and there's probably something about you that I admire, and which has affected me. In any case, and at the risk of being horribly exclusive, I'd like to type about the few people that spring to mind immediately as my best and most influential friends, in the approximate order that I met them.

Me, the person whose mind makes me up, assigned the name "Stephen Barnes" for purposes of normal convenience. My early memories include a number of dreams, identifying playing cards by the creases on the back, the births and company of a number of goats, visiting England, going into Tottenham and Beeton, spending hours in the company of our pet goats, and much more. Later, piano lessons, being given my family's first computer (an Amiga) as a gift, going to school, owning an NES for the first time. Later still, being allowed to use a video camera, going to Cookstown, and establishing an Internet connection from my house for the first time.

That seems like an extremely brief summary, but in that short a space, it's about as concise as possible. I do other stuff too.

My parents. My mother, Lorraine, who seems to have been vehemently concerned about my education-- such care I'll always be grateful for-- and my father, Stephen, whose natural balance of humour, attention to responsibility, and wonder at the world is still inspiring after… well, 10,000 days. It is, of course, their conjugation that defined today as a landmark for me.

My sister, Katy, who was born when I was three. I remember attempting to teach her some of this and that as we grew up, being in typical miniature wars with her which waxed and waned until giving way to a more-or-less steadfast union of siblings. Katy's undiluted intelligence, immutable care for animals, and passionate nerdiness persist more lucidly in her than most other people, as far as I can tell, and I admire her greatly.

My family extends one way around Ontario and another into Britain, and as with friends, I have memories of lots of them. At the forefront are my local grandmother (owner of a very long-lived cockatiel and a beloved mobile home, whose husband played the organ and owned that deck of cards), my English grandmother who inspired my early penchants for counting clocks and presented me with my first tea times, and my older sisters Amy and Sara who seem to act with one mind when in the same location.

Kelly Worden, who I met in grade one, has held my mental label of "best friend" longer than anyone. I remember abundant sleepovers and childhood afternoons wiled away on the trampoline with him, and some of the most relaxed and just-so conversations of my life have been had in his company. Now he's decidedly my only friend who deals with architecture, living in a beautiful corner of Ontario with one charming and soothing wife and a rabbit with the same attributes. For all the questions that still remain for me about marriage and rabbits, I trust Kelly too much to worry.

I met David Held the following year, in grade two. Now that I had my NES and David was an equally avid Mario fan, I remember the theme figuring into both our role-playing recreation at recess and the submitted results of our in-class assignments. I remember chatting with David during sleepovers when I was seven or eight, discussing more than one topic that I would later learn had been the ping-pong material of historic philosophers. My first play of Final Fantasy III, improvised singing album, and online videoconference all occurred with him. David has spent recent years working for Google and lives in New York with his also-new wife. On a side-note, I was proud and happy to join them in Vancouver before their engagement for my first bubble tea.

Adi Ashburner was in my class as a fourth-grade student when I was in fifth at Cookstown. Some things we had in common, such as our required participation in French class, our having read the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy before we met, and our in-class opportunities to use HyperCard to make substantial computer games for the first time. My first several films – still featured on my site – were written and filmed at typical Adi Ashburner high speed, and we continue to contribute to each other's film efforts with music, acting and writing. Adi is the kind of person that can create intricate, funny and thoughtful content without ever being prodded with a metal thing, which is something that I think more movie studios would do well to realize matters.

Kris Palm has to be one of the most amusing and mysterious people I've met; we've shared a number of late-night gaming sessions, a number of film endeavours (including at least three holiday greetings with violent outbreaks), and a mutual tribute to Haggen's fondly missed after-midnight hours. Kris has acted in much higher-profile shoots than I've ever run, and, I think, continues to pursue that.

Lars Simkins is currently busying away at breaking into the film industry; he's become an adept visual effects guy with linked talents in programming, music and art. He's also supplied me with some of the most refreshing walk-based philosophical conversations (and some of the chipperest practical ones) I've had since moving here. I should mention the musical and placid Tom Geare in the same paragraph, since the three of us spent many a reflective and inventive evening together.

My first and favourite roommate Douglas Zwick is someone whose honesty, thoughtfulness and clarity make me wish that just about everyone was more like him. Doug is probably the only person with whom I can effortlessly chat about music and language at the level of detail that I think about them. He's already a consistently good singer, actor, composer-arranger, language-learner, and guy who pretends to hit you. He probably spends a lot of time thinking about all those things, but I know he also spends at least some of it working out his future as a game developer. I hope he succeeds at that, not least because my list to this point contains no friends who are prominent in that field, and I want more.

Other people with whom I've spent a lot of time and don't want to go without mentioning: Dan Rosart (mutual friend with David), Matt Jones (from Full Of Love), Gina Manuel (now with living child), Heather Williams (librarian, video game and anime nerd, and another adept linguist), and Lacey Oleson (noted roommate, skilled costume designer and well-rounded theatre major).

One special mention to all the students who endured my presence at Sehome during the 2006-2007 school year. They witnessed my first chance to be a scary and mysterious teacher, and – though I think their own experiences mattered more – I'd like all of them to know that I felt privileged every day to work with all of them. Those who were freshmen that year are graduating in a few months.

A secondary general mention to the other students I've worked with at Bellingham, Squalicum, Ferndale, and BAAY. A number of the most interesting and astonishing young performers I've ever seen are rising from those pools.

A tertiary specific mention specifically to teachers and colleagues beginning with Diane Skinner and Tom McCarthy, nurturing, unambiguous and insightful elementary school teachers. Sonya Morrison, upbeat and integral French teacher. Kay Hageman, the primary inspiration of all my choral activities in and beyond high school, and Teri Grimes, the equivalent for theatre. Leslie Guelker-Cone and Tim Fitzpatrick, choir-based lifelong learners and directors at Western whose relative speeds balance each other out well. Andy Marshall, idea-filled music director and artist.

A quaternary specific acknowledgment of the most inspiring people I haven't met: Richard Dawkins, who perhaps unintentionally helped dismantle my accumulated impression that writing was no good unless it had a lot of unnecessary metaphors. Dawkins uses many himself, but always and only when they're appropriate tools to assist understanding. He's also helped make up for my tragic lack of biology classes in school, a subject which he demonstrates is far more wonderful than anyone else ever mentioned; the more for his skilled authorship and dictation. He was also, I learned only recently, a great influence on Douglas Adams, who also belongs in this paragraph for his incredibly funny and vastly imaginative Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and other works; I had become a fan of those well before 5,000 days.

I must acknowledge Shigeru Miyamoto for his world-changing video game implementations (and his friend Koji Kondo, whose pieces kept my ear busy at the piano week after week as a child), and especially the legendary Nobuo Uematsu for the music that bound the entire Final Fantasy series to my memory.

Finally, though I already mentioned them in my last post, I feel I owe a great deal of thanks to all beings who have helped work out what this planet is and what we're doing here: Galileo for defending and promoting Copernican heliocentrism, Darwin for evolution, and Einstein for relativity are always the first to come to mind. However, science comprises thousands, and I feel so lucky that humans are generally passionate enough to go as far as we have on the quest for knowledge, and will continue to do so. I await as much more as I'll be alive to witness.

There are many more people I could and should mention, and there's probably a good chance you're one of them.

Thank you all.

Now for day 10,001.

Wow, what a coincidence that I can contrive. It turns out that my 10,000th day out of the womb is also the birthday of the late Charles Darwin. I wonder why "late" is used to mean "already dead"… you'd think that "early" would be more concise. (Amazingly, it's also the birthday of zero of my Facebook friends. But seriously, we're going to need longer years soon.)

Anyway. I was reminded of Darwin while reading Pharyngula this morning, where good ol' PZ Myers links, as he does, to a news site's online poll. The question is "do you accept Charles Darwin's theory of evolution"?

For now, I suppose I'll have to continue taking that kind of poll as normal, because here I am in America, and after all, it's only the year 2010.

But it's so bizarre to me, that a poll ever appears on that question.

Yes, the question is grammatically correct. Yes, for any proposition, it's meaningful to ask whether people accept it. Yes, one of America's social strengths is the ability to say, type or ask anything you want.

Great. It's a meaningful question, and speech is nice and free here, so let's ask it. "Do you accept Charles Darwin's theory of evolution?"

But, wait a sec.

What's with the complete absence of "do you accept Einstein's theory of relativity"? Why haven't I seen that trusty weekly poll asking "do you accept that diseases can be caused by microscopic germs"? And how about "do you accept that our planet is going around the sun"?

What's the holdup, exactly? Speech not free enough for those?

Here's what I think. Even America has enough pride and dignity, when asked whether they accept that the earth is orbiting the sun, to free-speech any news site right back, probably with a mass request not to be insulted by that kind of poll.

Even America, one of the world's leading nations, can be proud that most of its citizens are well-enough educated to be confident in the orbital nature of our home sphere.

Germ theory? I think America's clear on that, too. Relativity? If they don't understand it, at least they're informed that the scientific community accepts it. (And if you don't, then learn about it… it's yet another awesome attribute of the way light and time and motion work in the universe. YouTube didn't always exist, but now it does, and it's full of great videos on just this topic. Here's a good-looking one.)

Before he would speak about evolution over the last decade, Richard Dawkins would sometimes reference the American Gallup Poll on the question of whether Americans believe in it. The first time I heard him do it was in 2006, announcing that reported belief was as low as 40%. It's a statistic that makes a point – imagine that only two-fifths of your fellow citizens believed that the earth was round. It seems like it'd be awkward to have a normal conversation with one of the majority.

This morning, I found that the Gallup group had also planned for Darwin's birthday with an updated poll on the same question. This time, the reports of belief in evolution totalled only 39%.

We're fortunate to have more detail than that. Belief in evolution increases from 21% (people with a high school education at most) to 74% (postgraduates). The better your education, the more likely you are to understand the theory and the evidence for it. Imagine that.

We're fortunate to have yet another point of detail. Belief in evolution is marked at 24% (people who attend church weekly), 30% (occasionally), and 55% (seldom or never). It's difficult not to notice that religion is an active force against science, or the trend that religious congregations think their preachers know more about biology than the world's biologists.

I'd love to think people merely seem not to understand evolution because of the few people who build Creation Museums, hold Creation Science Fairs, and are generally undignified enough to be as loud as they are ignorant. But, here we are. 39%, in the year 2010. The majority of America seems to be afraid and confused on this one issue.

Well, back to me. 10,000 days. And I've always wondered about everything. How old is the universe? How far does it go? And so on. If you're a human reading this, you probably know what I mean.

I probably predicted when I was a mere thousand days old that I wouldn't have all the correct answers to those questions by the time I was 10,000. And, yay, I'm right. But amazingly, I do have a few.

Einstein's theory of relativity is one of them, and because of it, you and I get to be among the first living things ever to know that light is a particularly special and limiting thing, and that time itself pivots with it.

Galileo's heliocentric theory is another, and because of that, we're among the first humans ever to know that the sun is bigger than the moon, and that the earth isn't at the middle of a large celestial diorama.

Darwin's theory of evolution is another one. Because of it, we're among the first humans to know about our own history, not just as humans, but as life forms. Since his original note-taking on fossils and geographic distribution, we've learned more about the way we're all related, and we're learning more all the time.

And a few others.

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin… this blog post is your present. Thank you so much for your inspiration, and your courage.