She Who Chatters

By the stars, would you look at the time!

2010-10-15T08:09:00.002-05:00

This has been a crazy few weeks for me. I was fired from my office job near the end of September (Pro Tip: It is never a good idea to say or imply that certain individuals ought to "do their fucking jobs or eat a bag of dicks." You can get fired on the quick-a-like.), but it's OK because I found another one within a week. It's a part-time telecommute, I can set my own availability for work, and I'm paid on commission, so it's rather close to ideal for putting myself through school. My formerly part-time job has become my full-time job, and I may be replacing that one soon as well, so long as nobody else in this town is really gunning to be a flooring sales specialist...

I also found out that I can pocket everything in my Roth IRA, which is tempting as fuck, but it's OK because I'm currently waiting for a call from a financial advisor. I imagine he will tell me, "No, bad D! Do not mortgage your future! Put all that money over here in our very large pile, and we will make your part of the pile even bigger." And I will say OK. But not before settling my outstanding debts and getting this Helluva bargain laptop! Well, maybe I'll set aside a few pennies for a Christmas miracle or two... no, bad D! Do not mortgage your future!

There is one good reason to mortgage my future, though, and that is to get a better future. So I have applied back to college. I have a measly 27 credit hours left to graduate, I have a plan to do it all by the end of next fall, I have applied and filled out my FAFSA, and I already have a pre-approved override from the department chair to get an independent study for a course which I need in order to graduate, but which is no longer offered (because I just kind of stopped going five years ago). Everybody tells me that my admission is a slam dunk because I'm a senior in good standing, so everything is coming up roses. It's looking like a blitz to my Bachelor's degree, then a year or two in a Master's program, and I will be a librarian! Hooray!

In the meantime, however, I have zero jobs where I can slack off, because one of them is paid on commission for work produced, and the other is overnight stocking in a retail store (it was the only full-time position available, and I needs the moneys). Since slacking off at work was how I got most of my writing done, I must sadly close the blog. I don't want to. I really don't. But I have been sucking at it lately - the consistent content thing, if not the writing skills thing - and I really need to put that energy towards school come January. Philosophy, as a discipline, is seriously starting to bore me now that I have all the Big Questions answered. And neuroscience is steadily encroaching on philosophy of mind's turf, so pretty soon I think the discipline of philosophy will be primarily one of historical bookkeeping and literary criticism. Well, even more than it is now, at any rate.

Look, the point is, when you know that there are individual brain cells that fire to make you perceive edges and contrast of a certain angle, in a certain area of the visual field; and others that fire when that edge is moving, but only at a certain angle; and others still that fire to tell you whether that edge or contrast is in the foreground or background... that makes it hard to take a guy seriously when he asks, "What exactly is the 'redness' of red?" with a dopey look of profundity on his face. It's a freakin' artifact of your visual architecture, dumbass! What is the good? It's a word we made up to describe the feelings we get when contemplating certain aspects of certain relationships. Fuckin' duh. Logic and epistemology are probably the only two sub-fields left which hold any legitimacy in my mind, but there are still some kooks who manage to get in and fuck 'em all up. Oh, well; that probably means there's room for my weirdness, too. At least for a year.

So yeah. I'm getting a little misty here, partly because I still haven't finished 101 Interesting Things, and partly because I don't think I'll be arguing on the internet any time soon. Thanks to everyone who has read, or commented, or linked, or just popped by and had a look-see. It's been fun, but I've run this organization into the ground, and I need to move on to bigger and better things. Bye!

Aggravation

2010-08-24T20:37:00.002-05:00

Ugh. This sucks. My computer is chronically overheating, and dying of it. I should get another processor fan. But my graphics card is also chronically overheating, which makes my screen go all wonky, and my network card is burned out so I have a USB-to-ethernet adapter, and it doesn't quite start up right, and when it does start up I get a weird message every time saying that an unspecified file can't be found (The file "//" cannot be found. Please make sure the path or directory is correct and blah blah blah), and I've got six other problems - that's not hyperbole, they have to do with jacks and compatibility issues between different programs and other startup things which I thought I had handled but mysteriously aren't - which are all beyond my ken and I'm pretty sure I've got bubble gum in there somewhere as a structural component. OK, that last one is hyperbole.

In short: I need a new computer.

Anyway. All this makes for an angry D, and writing is now too frustrating. Worst. Timing. Ever. I'm sure I won't be able to stand not writing soon, though, so this shouldn't be long. I give it 'til the end of September - which may sound long to you, but September is a busy month for me, between my dad's birthday and the accompanying family get-together, an engagement party for a friend, a housewarming party for another friend, and... and that's all my free time, pretty much, between the two jobs and all. So we'll see how it goes.

See you in October! Oh, and since I won't be posting just to announce it, it's almost a year since I quit smoking [cigarettes]! Happy Birthday, Dad!

Excuses! And a prologue. Or a foreword.

2010-08-08T23:37:00.000-05:00

Rawls' balls, I cannot do this non-weekend thing like I said I could. And now I can't even do the weekend thing like I said I could! The nice thing is that I can just say "seventy-hour work week", and know that I'm justified. The rotten thing is that there's actually a seventy-hour work week justifying it. Blargh.

So it turns out that the immune system is way the Hell more complicated than I thought it was. Also, I have been arguing on the internet, and that takes time away from studying things and writing about them. Hmm... need content...

Well, Jack informed me of a book called The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, which is exactly what it says on the tin. I want to write about that some time soon. Ebonmuse informed me of something which shall provide fuel for another 101IT entry, so I want to write about that, soon, too. And I didn't even cover clotting in my blood overview, so I'll have to squeeze that in somewhere, because it's complicated and interesting! But I haven't written anything about any of those yet. Blargh again.

OK, so I guess it's time to bust out the, uh, "big guns". As foretold in the prophecy, I am working on another book, entitled Tabula Rasa: A Novel Approach to Epistemology. Here is the prologue, though it may become a foreword, I don't know. Enjoy!

It is Friday, the fifth of May in the year 2000, the fifth day of the fifth month according to the Gregorian calendar. If not for the Leap Year, it would also be the 125th day of the year, or five cubed. Most of the world is looking forward to a pleasant spring weekend. This particular day is celebrated the world over for a wide variety of reasons that vary from place to place.

In the United States of America, the Mexican victory against overwhelming French opposition at the Battle of Puebla is celebrated, though it is confused with Mexico's Independence Day in the minds of many Americans. Citizens of Puebla observe the holiday, but it is little recognized elsewhere in Mexico. Other war holidays include Patriots' Victory Day in Ethiopia, signifying the end of Italian occupation in 1941; and Liberation Day in both Denmark and the Netherlands, commemorating local defeats of German forces in 1945. In politics, Kyrgyzstan celebrates the seventh anniversary of adopting their first constitution after breaking free of the former Soviet Union; the Council of Europe celebrates the fifty-first anniversary of its founding; Albanians honor those who died for their nation's freedom with Martyrs' Day; and King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand looks back across half a century since his coronation, just six years shy of becoming Thailand's longest-reigning monarch. Familial celebrations are peculiarly abundant: Japan and South Korea observe Children's Day, Romania observes Men's Day, Senior Citizens' Day is observed in Palau, Indian descendants in Guyana celebrate the 1838 arrival of their ancestors to work on sugar plantations, and the ninth International Midwives' Day is observed thanks to the efforts of the International Confederation of Midwives.

The feast of Blessed Edmund Ignatius Rice is also held on this day, his beatification occurring in 1995 when Pope John Paul II officially recognized as a miracle the strange convalescence of one Kevin Ellison in 1976. Ellison, then nineteen, developed gangrene in his large intestine as a complication from an appendectomy. Five doctors agreed that Ellison's colon did not have enough healthy tissue to see him through the next two days, but after a priest gave a relic of Edmund Rice to the family to be placed by Ellison's bedside, there appeared quite a bit more healthy tissue in Ellison's colon, and he went on to a full recovery. Two competing explanations seem to offer themselves for our consideration: either five practicing doctors made an egregious error, or a dead man cured intestinal gangrene through the strategic placement of one of his Earthly knick-knacks. When confronted with the opportunity to believe in either serious magic or serious human error, the Pope chose to affirm a belief in magic. One cannot help but wonder whether such a mind places greater implicit trust in the powers of deities or doctors.

Other uncelebrated but nonetheless historic occurrences have also marked this day throughout history. In 1981, Bobby Sands died in prison, ending his 66-day hunger strike in a two-day coma. In 1961, Commander Alan Shepard became the first American in space, launched 115 miles into the sky during a fifteen-minute flight. In 1925, John Scopes was arrested for teaching the theory of evolution to public school children, the first of many legal absurdities wherein scientists would be forced to struggle against the forces of parental ignorance in order to have an overwhelming preponderance of evidence presented honestly to the next generation. And in 1955, when the fifth of May was in fact the 125th day of the year, Jonas Salk witnessed the 500,000th (that's a five followed by five zeroes) London vaccination against polio, less than one month after announcing his discovery. All those fives, while certainly prominent, are utterly meaningless, arising as they do from nothing more profound than the arbitrary counting conventions of our culture.

Such coincidences occur regularly throughout history - roll six dice enough times, and they'll eventually all come up six. To the ominously minded, omens abound, and every chance event and surprising occurrence is positively laden with tantalizing but illusory auspice. Yet a question remains: what's the difference? How can we know whether we are dealing with doctoral error or divine intervention, especially when doctors might jump at the opportunity to gloss over a mistake, and priests might seek to rekindle the faith of a dwindling congregation? What is the difference between the meaningless parade of fives from Dr. Salk's footnote of a trip, and the highly meaningful parade of laboratory experiments that led him down the road to one of the most remarkable medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century? It certainly seems that we should want some way of knowing whether Salk's findings were attributable to chance, a medical one-in-a-zillion freak occurrence; surely another one-in-a-zillion freak occurrence might be five doctors completely missing part of a person's colon when that's exactly what they were poking around for, never mind the odds that a man in the sky cured gangrene overnight because the feng shui was just thus and so. When we decide to question our answers, where does it end? And what do we risk by dwelling on these questions too long, or answering them too hastily?

Call it fate, call it chance, call it blind cause and effect, but today is an auspicious day. Given enough time, good bookkeeping, and the human desire to immortalize today in the memory of tomorrow, every day is bound to become auspicious. But this day is extraordinary, even as every person goes about his or her business in a perfectly ordinary way. Children play on playgrounds, adults procrastinate at work, teachers teach and preachers preach, while street corner doomsayers shout the words of long-dead prophets at passing motorists and pedestrians. The doomsayers are wrong in many important ways, of course: the world is not ending, Christ is not coming, the end is not nigh, and no repentance is necessary. The prophecies that so move them today have moved them and countless others like them to similarly foolish acts, and other prophecies have moved others still to yet more foolishness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in one very important way, they are right: human civilization stands on the brink of collapse, as it has collapsed at other historical junctures.

Even for all that, you can't really give credit to the doomsayers for their inadvertent accuracy. After all, a broken clock is still correct for two glorious minutes of every day.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-five (b): Blood - Hemoglobin and Homeostasis

2010-08-01T21:31:00.005-05:00

"Hemoglobin is the key to a healthy heartbeat."

- Placebo, Haemoglobin

Blood - vertebrate* blood, at any rate - is red because the erythrocytes that float in plasma are red. The erythrocytes, in turn, are red because of all the hemoglobin in their cytoplasm. It's chock-full of the stuff. In the diagram below, the four green wire-frame looking bits (as opposed to the red and blue ribbon-looking bits) are the ferrous heme groups that bind up the oxygen you breathe into your lungs:

source

Oxygen diffuses into your red blood cells through the alveoli of the lungs, where each of those heme groups grabs an oxygen molecule. It's easy to do, since oxygen is fairly plentiful in the air we breathe. That may not seem like a whole lot, but it increases the amount of oxygen your blood can absorb by about seventy times, since otherwise oxygen could only dissolve into your plasma as a gas. Then, as your blood courses through your body, the lack of oxygen causes the iron atom in each heme group to lose its grip on the oxygen molecule it's holding, and the oxygen diffuses into nearby cells where it fuels the chemical reactions that drive you. That's... really all it is! Just pressure. Lots of chemical reactions, it turns out, are more like making soup than they are like building a machine, and the body's urgent need for oxygen in every cell means that a quick and dirty solution like this is all it takes (no fancy-pants calcium ion pumps or anything).

Of course, hemoglobin isn't the only solution to this problem. Molluscs and arthropods use cuprous hemocyanin, which does the same thing but has way cooler color-change action. See, deoxygenated blood is dark burgundy in color, whereas oxygenated blood is a more vibrant red. When hemocyanin is deoxygenated, it's colorless - but when oxygenated, it's blue. Look at this crab:

source

To be fair, hemocyanin bonds a little stronger to oxygen, which is what makes it so good for the invertebrates that use it, because they often inhabit oxygen-poor environments. On a related note, carbon monoxide bonds much stronger to the heme groups, rendering them useless because it never leaves, and this is why CO is such a deadly poison. Other solutions to the "Gee, I need oxygen in my blood" problem include hemerythrin, which is pink when oxygenated and colorless when deoxygenated, and the Christmas-themed chlorocruorin, which is red when oxygenated but green when deoxygenated.

OK, enough about other kinds of blood, back to your blood! After your erythrocytes have dumped their truckload of oxygen into your hungry hungry cells, they pick up the carbon dioxide to carry it to the lungs for exhalation. This is done in three ways: about 7% of your waste CO₂ is dissolved directly into plasma, 23% combines with hemoglobin, and a whopping 70% is transformed by carbonic anhydrase (which is in your erythrocytes' cytoplasm) into carbonic acid. The Alert Reader who is passing familiar with chemistry will notice that carbonic acid dissolves in water by separating into a negatively charged bicarbonate ion and a positively charged hydrogen ion (or, as physicists are wont to call it, a proton). The Alert Reader who is passing familiar with chemistry will also notice that free-floating protons in water tend to result in hydronium ions, and the negative log of the hydronium ion content is what is measured when we refer to "pH". Here is a chart showing what happens when your blood pH gets outside the narrow range of 7.35-7.45 that I mentioned when we spoke last:

source

The Alert Reader who is passing familiar with Greek will notice that everything outside of Normal ends in "-osis", which means problem (loosely translated). So how does your body fastidiously avoid such problems? Well, in the first place, it's not like all your cells take in oxygen at once and then pass off carbon dioxide all at once. That would just be silly. But your body is always metabolizing, all the time always until you're dead, and so it needs to keep a tight rein on your blood pH as you go through your varying levels of activity.

Blood is slightly alkaline, and your bones are basically load-bearing mineral deposits, so that helps at least a little bit (Fun Fact: consuming too much animal protein in relation to vegetable protein has been implicated in bone mass loss in females!). Short term pH imbalance can be corrected by altering respiration: expelling more CO₂ will increase the proportion of CO₂ dissolved in blood (less carbonic acid means more alkaline blood), and holding on to more CO₂ will increase the proportion held as carbonic acid (or H+ and HCO₃-) and increase acidity. In the long term, your kidneys respond by excreting the leftover acid or base that builds up in your bloodstream, and also regulating the amount of buffering ammonia in your blood.

Your blood also helps regulate your body temperature through the clever application of plumbing. Heat is generated in various organs such as the liver and the brain (even thinking is exothermic!), and blood acts as a coolant to help you avoid overheating by absorbing some of the heat and bringing it to the heat sink that is your skin. In addition to sweating, your body sheds excess heat by expanding its arterial walls, increasing blood flow to the capillaries near the surface of the skin where the heat escapes into the atmosphere, or at least into your sweat (if the surrounding air temperature is higher than your body temperature). When you need to conserve heat, your arteries constrict, reducing blood flow to the skin and extremities to conserve heat and thus maintain core body temperature. This is why the cold will often make you numb and pale: your thoracic cavity needs all the heat it can hold on to, and the rest of you is somewhat more expendable. Note that this is distinct from frostbite, which results from ice crystals puncturing cellular membranes and causing cell death (this is why frostbitten tissues are kinda gelatinous when thawed, and one of the key hurdles for cryonics to overcome in the quest for legitimacy).

OK, oxygen transport, acid-base homeostasis, and thermoregulation - check! Tune in next Wednesday when I chatter on about the army of your immune system!

* - There just had to be an exception, didn't there?! The crocodile icefish does not use hemoglobin, and is the only vertebrate known not to do so. It lives in sub-zero seawater where it can absorb all the oxygen it needs right through it's goddamned skin. Fuckin' icefishes have it so stupid easy.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-five (a): Blood - An Overview

2010-07-25T23:54:00.003-05:00

Leviticus 17:11 says, in part, "the life of the flesh is in the blood". This is one of those things where the Bible actually gets it right, but they really had no idea how right they were. It doesn't take any great leap of creativity to notice that draining the blood from an organism is, by and large, fatal to said organism: massive blood loss is so consistently fatal because blood does so goddamned much for us in the first place.

Blood carries oxygen, food, and water to living tissues; it carries waste to the kidneys, liver, and lungs; it maintains the police presence of the immune system and carries vital hormonal signals all throughout the body; it even has pressurized hydraulics and helps regulate body temperature, all within a narrow range of pH values (a tenth of a point, between 7.35 & 7.45). Your body is basically a sac for your blood, the universal fluid that ties every part and function together. They Might Be Giants explain it in broad strokes and easy language in The Bloodmobile:

They Might Be Giants - The Bloodmobile from They Might Be Giants on Vimeo.

In many ways, your life revolves around your blood: your bones make erythrocytes in their marrow, and your tendons (which technically aren't vascularized) hold your bones together in ways that (usually) don't impinge upon the flow of your circulatory system; your circulatory system, in turn, carries blood to the various organs you use to maintain the fuel supply within your blood, including the brain and heart with their minute-to-minute demand for oxygen; your digestive tract is a tube within a tube, busting up what you eat at the molecular level to harvest the aforementioned fuel before dispensing with the unnecessary bits; and your skin holds it all in and keeps unwelcome elements out.

Blood's very ubiquity made this an unusually research-intensive entry, and there's so much interesting stuff that I want to take it by parts. This weekend - and since I'm not spending all my time reading about blood, I'll actually have time to write about it, so it will actually be this weekend - I'll write about blood's role in respiration and homeostasis, ferrying oxygen and carbon dioxide hither & yon, and regulating pH levels & body temperature. Next Wednesday, I'll write about the immune system, which I would normally give its very own entry except for the fact that it all kind of takes place within the blood. And the following weekend, I'll talk about blood technologies and diseases, because they are also fascinating. Stay tuned!

101 Interesting Things, part forty-four: The Death Star Galaxy

2010-07-20T20:45:00.003-05:00

The Death Star Galaxy is easy to remember in two different ways: first, it's called the Death Star Galaxy, and second, its designation is 3C 321. The mnemonics practically write themselves!

OK, so what's so crazy about formation 3C 321, and what makes it deserving of the title "Death Star Galaxy"? Well, for starters, the supermassive black hole at the center of this galaxy is blasting apart a nearby orbiting galaxy. Here's an artist's conception, so you can see the sort of thing we're talking about:

Click for huge. Source.

Just so we're clear, here's a breakdown of the situation. There's a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, but no ordinary supermassive black hole: this one is emitting a jet of incredibly intense EM radiation. How intense? Intense enough to move stars. While jet emissions from black holes and other stellar formations are not rare, what is rare is to see one firing point-blank into a nearby celestial formation. Like, these galaxies are only about as far from each other as we are from the center of the Milky Way.

Heroes in lab coats are still trying to figure out what exactly causes these kinds of jets - I suspect the right hand rule, but the Devil's in the details. One strong possibility, though, is that the very process of blasting apart the neighboring galaxy will cause it to be re-formed around the area where the jet peters out. That is, assuming that the galaxies don't collide first. Dammit, why can't I live for billions of years so I can watch this sort of scene play out?

Here's a really cool animation showing how this plays out and giving a sense of scale to the operation: it starts by the event horizon of the supermassive black hole, then zooms out until you can see the whole scene. Check it out!

Cosmetic Brain Surgery

2010-07-11T23:09:00.002-05:00

Some time ago, I wrote about a church sign with an offer for a free trip. Well, the same church had come up with another offer, though it has since been taken down and I could not get a picture. I need to give myself more time to travel between jobs, so I can stop to take pictures of these obnoxious godvertisements. Anyway, this time their sign read, "Need a new look? Come in for a faith-lift!" As with last time, I came up with a few questions and concerns while mulling over their offer.

Unlike the trip to Heaven, this offer didn't have "free" anywhere in it. Is this faith-lift included in the "10% of your income for life" price of membership in their organization, or does it incur an additional charge? I just moved and had to pay double rent for July, so money's tight and I can't afford to be spending on unnecessary procedures. Do they offer installment plans? Or is it maybe like the Templeton Prize, where they pay you for your trouble in order to get free advertising?

As for the procedure itself, how exactly is it performed? Do they just permanently affix a god-walloping grin to your face? What if I want to express emotions besides generic oblivious felicity? I've heard that they can go in through the ear, with boring music and uninspiring sermons which are very slightly less anesthetizing and invasive than putting you under and cutting on your face. But if everyone's getting this routine procedure every Sunday, I don't know if it's really worth it. I mean, cosmetic surgery is all about looking better than your peers because you can afford to spend loads of money on superficial beauty. I'm not sure that the procedure to which they allude is really in keeping with their overall mission as a spiritual institution. Or maybe I'm coming at this wrong and it's spot-the-Hell-on.

Finally, I'm at least a little worried about complications. I've heard that these sorts of operations can leave one with eyes glazed over, taking the sharp edges off the world and making it look less dangerous than it really is. Also, making room for all that religion in one's head can require that chunks of the frontal lobe be completely removed, impairing one's decision making and critical thinking skills. What's more, I've heard that some people can come out so hopped up on God-smack that they've been left permanently desensitized to the plights of others, and thinking that this one procedure is a panacaea - like it doesn't matter who you are or where you live, all you need is more Jesus and your problems will go away. I've looked into the research, and some of the signs of a botched faith-lift include: thinking of one's demographic as a persecuted minority perpetually on the verge of acquiring the influence it already in fact enjoys, anticipating the end of the world with apocalyptic glee, advocating against real-world solutions to real-world problems because one is no longer capable of grasping coherent arguments or basic implications of evidence gathered through research, and experiencing diminished outrage against pedophiles when said vile monsters happen to also be priests.

You know what? I don't think I'm going to risk it. The offer seems sketchy, the procedure is of dubious value, and the risk that something will go horribly wrong and leave me with a lifelong cognitive impairment is just too high to ignore. I mean, I guess if you want to be able to feel more self-righteous than other people, and you don't mind abdicating reality to do so, maybe a faith-lift is right for you. Count me out, though.

Thoughts on "Food, Inc."

2010-07-04T21:59:00.003-05:00

I recently watched Food, Inc. (yes, it's two years old; no, I don't care), and I have to say, I agree with the advertising. This is an important movie, and everybody should watch it, for one simple reason. There are others, of course, and I agree or disagree with them to various degrees, but one reason I think any decent person could agree to is: it is important to know where your food comes from.

I also ought to say that I am a quality consultant in my office life, and so I am marginally sympathetic to the corporate perspective in this situation. I mean, I spend my downtime at the office reading up on things like process compliance an' shit. Just two days ago, I read about How To Think Like a Factory, and my mind is abuzz with ways to apply this to the call center floor which will be good for both the corporation's bottom line and the mental stability of us drones.

With those caveats out of the way, you should still watch Food, Inc. It's really well made, and it highlights some core parts of the industry that a great many people would probably prefer to ignore. Blissful ignorance is precisely why the food industry has been able to get away with this sort of thing, and if it makes people uncomfortable, then they need to be made aware so that they can vote with their dollars and pay the extra buck-two-ninety-eight to get a product that is brought to them in a way they can stomach.

OK, so I want to talk about how things got here, and not in terms of blame and disgust and harsh invective, but in terms of impersonal and perfectly logical (if unfortunate) progression. It's very simple. So simple, in fact, it's stupid. Try walking out into the street and asking people about "factory farming", and I can almost guarantee that a sizable fraction will think it's a metaphor, most will have vaguely unpleasant thoughts, a few will regurgitate very similar talking points (and probably smell of patchouli), and a tiny minority will have something well-informed and thoughtful to say. This is just the industrial revolution, applied to what you put in your belly every single day: a similar thing is happening in consumer electronics, Wired put out an article on it and called it "The Good Enough Revolution". In most of our day-to-day lives, quick & dirty is just fine, and top-of-the-line gizmos can be left for professionals and cutting-edge aficionados. Ah, but when you're struggling to feed your family, what approach is going to garner the most of your ~~votes~~ dollars? The costlier but more wholesome product, or the cheaper bulk product? Imagine this decision being made in dozens of millions of homes across the nation, and at the other end are chief executive officers who want to make as much money as they can and control as much of the market as they can. How should they do this? By trying to put out a costlier but more wholesome product, or by putting out cheaper bulk products? It all comes down to selection pressures.

What do you think a successful climber of the corporate ladder would do? I'm not asking what you would do, since you haven't climbed to the top of your corporate ladder - these decisions are in the hands of the ruthless opportunists who have climbed on the backs of their competitors to be where they are today, not the people who have made the decision to be satisfied with a modest existence.

So of course we're in the situation we're in today. It couldn't have happened any other way. No single person is to blame for this: we're all to blame. The producers are to blame for their production, and the consumers are to blame for their consumption, and no single person "decided" that this is the way it would go. This is the way it had to go. At least, so far. I dunno, maybe I'm just saying that because I'm a determinist, but the point remains that there's no great and powerful wizard behind the curtain. There's nobody behind the curtain at all.

I want to take some time to talk about some of the "gross" aspects of industrial food production, like chlorine baths. Actually, that's a great example in itself. See, if you've got a huge food operation, this is going to be a literal wellspring of opportunity for disease. Any disease that could infiltrate such an enormous and far-reaching niche would be hugely successful. But of course we don't want diseases to be able to carve out a niche in our food supply - we want our food supply to be a safe, standardized, idiot-proof sort of thing that we can set up anywhere and have a dependable outcome. We don't want to have to think about every single fucking food purchase, we want to be able to just pick something we want that's in our price range and take the rest for granted. We want factory farming, and so as a corollary we want to set up an over-the-top obstacle to give pathogenic would-be infiltrators as little opportunity as possible to survive and adapt. Corporations have an honest interest in making their operations disease-proof, because their customers can sue if something goes wrong. Food, Inc. has a segment where a mother relates the story of how her son fucking died from a food-borne pathogen. It's a goddamned tragedy, and I'm being perfectly serious about this: losing a child is one of the worst experiences a person can have, and for a whole lot of reasons, and if that death was caused by the food you put in that child's mouth, but you didn't make that food, then whoever did is going to fucking pay.

But now stop and consider the numbers. We're not talking about whether this particular child would have died or not, but the raw, impersonal statistics. This is reality, where things go wrong, and sometimes they go wrong in very bad ways, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it for good. Mistakes shall always be made, and someone will always need to pay for them, because we are a litigious people and that's how things go. As it stands, this is one child out of millions, and it's terrible and awful and a genuine tragedy, and the corporation paid something for their mistake - but what's the alternative? Let's say that we go all organic and local, and all our producers feed grass to their cows and butcher their free-range chickens under open sky and they all have twenty times fewer pathogens. This is great! Ninety-five percent less children will die of food-borne pathogens!

But what about the other five percent? For every twenty food-related lawsuits we have now, we'll only have one, and this is truly great news. But in order to save nineteen families from a personal tragedy, we'll have to upset the lives of an entire farm's worth of folks because I can guarantee that those honest, hard-working, wholesome farmers who fucked up once won't have the money to pay hot-shot lawyers to stop litigious citizens from breaking their banks. When something bad happens with less frequency, those few times it does happen become all the more significant, and someone will still have to pay. Now, personally, I think it's better that a few dozen families have their incomes destabilized in order to save nineteen out of twenty lives. This is a genuinely smaller cost. But it's still a cost, it's just diffused and lessened, and it bothers me when people think that going all-organic (or whatever the fuckin' buzzword is gonna be) will make everything turn to sunshine and rainbows. I dunno, maybe I'm just upset that not everybody is as cynical as I am.

Anyway.

Enough defending dehumanizing corporate practices as logical outgrowths of consumer disinterest. We should follow the film's advice and vote for the bucolic, sustainable approach to our food - y'know, the kind that costs more money because you'll have to train folks to do more steps in a process, which requires a larger up-front investment and blah blah blah - because if we don't, I can see where things are going. The corporations will continue to control the means of production, and pretty soon, complete nutrition will come in the form of convenient pills so that people can keep their bodies running smoothly without all those pesky calories that make you fat. I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to ensure that they stay slim and get all the nutrients they need without drinking Liquid Sanctimony? Sure, the act of actually eating will become a luxury, but that's OK because more folks will be able to eke out a decent living on less money. The cost of feeding oneself will become an increasingly known quantity, and when you combine that with the cost of housing and clothing oneself, suddenly we have a precise calculation of what the minimum wage needs to be to let people just barely keep their heads above water. And honestly, that's all you need: to tread water your whole life, with tax breaks for deciding to permanently shack up with someone and raise some offspring, and the requirements for this will also be a known quantity. Pretty soon, the middle class will be entirely eliminated, and the corporate overlords will manage the lives of their drones with vaguely humane efficiency, since they know exactly what they need to pay their workers to keep them alive without giving them the opportunity for their offspring to break into the upper class.

You might have doubts that things could go that far, for the simple reason that pills alone won't fill you up - but have you heard of the Full Bar?

101 Interesting Things, part forty-three: sOccket!

2010-06-27T11:55:00.003-05:00

OK, raise your hand if you remember high school physics! Anybody? Doesn't matter. Look, when you have an electrical current traveling in a direction, a magnetic field will be induced around it. Gimme a thumbs-up with your right hand, and if your thumb is pointed in the direction of the electrical current, then your other four fingers are curled in the direction that the magnetic field will be rotating (like driving a screw). Mnemonically, this is remembered as the "right hand rule".

The reverse also works: should you manage to create a rotating magnetic field, an electrical current will be induced through that rotation. Curl the fingers of your right hand around the magnetic field in the direction it's rotating, and your thumb will approve of the direction in which the electrical current is being induced. Again, just like driving a screw. Hooray for electromagnetism!

Another kind of reverse also works. If you run an electrical current in a spiral, say with a coiled wire, a magnetic field is induced. Inside the coil, the right-hand rule is followed, and outside the coil, the force lines resemble a convection current. This principle is exploited in transformers (of substation fame, not Cybertron), where a third kind of reverse is employed: a coil of wire with electrical current running through it is wrapped around an iron ring, and the magnetic field induced in the iron ring then induces electrical current in a coiled wire wrapped around the opposite side.

Even cooler, you can pass a magnet through a coil of wire to induce an electrical current in that wire. Store that electrical energy in a capacitor, and you've created one of those battery-free shake-lights. Put it in a soccer ball, and you've got sOccket, bringing electricity to people who live without electrical grids!

The sOccket was invented by four classy ladies at Harvard, and I can't believe that nobody thought of this before. But it's great because in about fifteen minutes of kicking a ball around, you can build up enough electricity to power an LED for three hours. That may not sound like much - my rear LED bike light has run off a single AA cell for months - but when you consider that these folks currently rely on kerosene lamps, it suddenly makes a whole lot of sense.

You know what else makes a whole lot of sense? Exercise equipment as electrical generators. Turn your sedentary-lifestyle-inducing office into a gym! But I digress. One of the marketing gimmicks they're considering for the sOccket is "buy one, give one" so you can use your affluent first-world purchasing power to help improve circumstances in the third world. I'd rather just donate two, since I haven't played soccer in years, but I'm sure I can figure out some way to do that as well.

You can read more about the right-hand rule at Right-Angle Circuitry, or AC Electronics for Alien Minds (found via the xkcd blog).

Mary Midgley says you can't rock someone's world. Everyone and their grandma disagrees.

2010-06-19T20:10:00.003-05:00

PZ calls her a twit, and another hip & cool professor (name of ArithmoQuine) tries a more charitable interpretation.

PZ's right, but ArithmoQuine is being more helpful to the dialogue. Midgley is being a twit, saying that we ought not to turn the world-views of others upside-down and shake them for loose change. From her first sentence, "Science really isn't connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish", you can tell that she's arguing from human foolishness - just because people don't unfailingly connect science to their everyday lives doesn't mean that the connection isn't there. And yeah, sure, there's no One True sure-fire method for changing someone's mind on this or that topic (unless we count brainwashing, can we please count brainwashing?), but people change their own minds all the time and the words of other people often have something to do with it. Fuckin' duh. You'd think that a fellow philosopher, of all people, would have a clue about that. I mean, our favorite activity is sitting around in the lotus position trying to find ways to blow our own minds, and our second-favorite activity is sharing these techniques with others so we can watch them try it out.

ArithmoQuine takes a more effective tack and tries to grant Midgley the strongest case he can piece together from her writing. This is called the principle of charity, and it's how you avoid straw-manning the opposition: you help your opponent into the very best suit of armor the two of you can agree upon, and then proceed to show that not even this can withstand your A-bomb. (The A is for Argument.) And really, all Midgley can possibly be saying is that if you take on the underpinning of someone's whole damn world-view, then you're going to run into cognitive dissonance. Which is true. Who gives a shit?

Well, of course, we all give a shit. I mean, cognitive dissonance - well, our drive to resolve cognitive dissonance, more precisely - is what makes the rational world go 'round. And the irrational world. Rational folk, upon noting such dissonance, will reconcile the mis-match between their imperfect minds and obstinate reality by changing their minds to be more in-line with the observed facts. For clarity, I don't mean that this is how "people I'd call rational" consistently behave, I mean that when you do this, you are behaving as a rational person. The alternative, of course, is to try to force the world to fit your idea of how it ought to be when it's clearly not. This can often take the form of kicking the shit out of whoever's existence is causing you angst in order to preserve your idea of moral order in the world.

This is the kind of bullshit we're up against, and I don't just mean atheists: I mean people who accept reality and try to work within its confines. See, dropping your preconceptions about how you first happened to believe the world ought to be, and then accepting implacable reality for what it is, can help produce a kind of serenity that will allow you to become a peaceful, permissive, moral, fun-loving Dane. Siding with your preconceptions in opposition to implacable reality will cause you to brainwash your family and other miscellaneous fuckwits into becoming a national disgrace. Of course, these are the extreme ends of the spectrum and your mileage will vary: Denmark is towards the Very Good end, and Fred Phelps is towards the Fucking Horrible end, and most people pile up to form that smooth bell shape in the middle.

But this spectrum is a moving one, more of a travelling wave as we become ever more civilized over time. Those fuckers on the hump are better than the Phelpses of the world, but they sure provide a lot of dead weight for the Danes to haul along as they (i.e. the majority) passively reinforce the status quo by comprising it. This is where Midgley really screws the pooch: she claims in her closing that we need to try to improve existing world-views and take them on as wholes (good so far), with the implication that trying to actually change anything is a fool's errand. The comparisons to other changes in the status quo are numerous, easy, and left to the reader; ours is a campaign of memocide, and if ideas were people, then we'd be rotten to the core for even considering it. But they're not, so we can keep on truckin'.

Midgley is right, however, that plucking a few hairs from the beast won't kill it. The memes we're up against are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, and they're deeply entwined with other memes we don't like, such as patriarchy and tribalism, and the whole rotten thicket is itself a perfectly natural outgrowth of our very own psychological flaws, so excising this cultural tumor is going to be a task and a half. I said a-good-God-damn.

Midgley does make one profoundly stupid error, though, and I haven't seen anyone call her out on it yet, so I'm gonna. See, Midgley says,

Belief in God is not an isolated factual opinion, like belief in the Loch Ness monster – not, as Richard Dawkins suggests, just one more "scientific hypothesis like any other". It is a world-view, an all-enclosing vision of the kind of world that we inhabit. We all have these visions.

I call equivocation! See, the phrase "belief in God" could be understood either as the genuine world-view of theism, or as the "isolated factual opinion" of a particular person's particular belief in a particular deity (it might not be a clear idea, but it is a particular one). By not clarifying this ambiguity and then immediately trading on it, Midgley has committed textbook equivocation and should brush up on her basic logic. Sure, theism isn't an isolated factual opinion, but believing in this or that god sure the Hell is!

I want to note that believing in the Loch Ness monster requires belief in Loch Ness, and in general requires some sort of world-view. We all have them, as Midgley correctly points out, and there's no "escaping" from them. You can't just "step out" from your world-view without "stepping into" another one, since world-views are the very framework within which we evaluate our experiences. Formally, this is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis, and it says that no single hypothesis can be tested in isolation because every testable hypothesis rests on background assumptions. So naturally, every belief in particular gods is going to go along with some sort of world-view in the actual minds of actual people in the actual world. Those world-views are, by virtue of accommodating one or more gods, categorically theistic. Successfully excising particular god beliefs from a theistic world-view will require one of two things:

1) A different god must be placed in the god-spot, or
2) The world-view itself must be exchanged for a new model without a god-spot.

Since the god-spot holds up huge chunks of the cognitive tapestry for many, of course most theists will shuffle gods in and out of their god-spots, taking great pains to ensure that any god in which they can no longer bear to maintain belief is taken out of the rotation. This helps them avoid the trouble of opting for number two, which is shit. But shit is natural and if you try to avoid it then you'll end up full of it, and I suddenly don't feel like pursuing this metaphor any further.

Point is, it will eventually be cognitively easier to opt for #2 than to continue avoiding it, but there's no telling when for a particular person, and individuals vary wildly in this respect. Son of a bitch, you mean this is going to be hard? Oi, if I'd known that, I never would'a signed up!

Just kidding. All Midgley has done with the best possible version of her point is to clearly outline the problem before us with two scoops of pessimism. What does she want, a pat on the head and a warm glass of milk?

Cross-Post: How Many Books are in the Library of Babel?

2010-06-13T22:20:00.004-05:00

I remembered at some point in my cogitations upon qualitative wrongitude that I had actually covered something even wronger back on my Playskool blog. Here it is. I mixed up a couple things, like math at one point, and Borges actually lays out some of his figures in the story and I didn't take this into account. Research fail. But I wanted to mainly highlight that Garou is wronger here than the Creationists are in, well, any context I could think of, but he still manages to change his mind. Good on him! The difference, of course, is that Garou was willing to listen to reason and concede defeat instead of dogmatically defending his misconceptions. Anyway. Enjoy!

Jack and I were talking in Borders the other day about a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Library of Babel (Wikipedia page here - I've skimmed parts of it, and there are some differences between it and what we had talked about). In this story, according to Jack (and that's what I'm working with here, since this was the frame for the original disagreement), Borges describes a library containing a series of books, all 450 pages in length, and each book is one of all the possible combinations of characters that can be placed in 450 pages of space. Jack went into the details of the story, and then we started talking about just how many books that would be. After ruminating on all the possible combinations of Hamlet with any number of typos (including moving the word "fuck" one space to the right in successive iterations, as well as multiple repetitions of Hamlet and variations thereof, such as Hamlet-Tom Clancy Novel-Hamlet, or Backwards-Hamlet with or without the character of Hamlet being named "Backwards Hamlet"), Jack decided that it was more books than there are atoms in the Universe. I readily agreed.

I related the conversation to Silver Garou, who expressed extreme skepticism that there were more books in that Universe than atoms in ours. In fact, I believe his exact words were, "There's no way there's more books in that library than atoms in our Universe!" Or something to that effect. So today, I decided to do some math. By some standard measurements, there are 250 words per page, and a "word" - for publishing purposes - means six letters. Working with 450-page books, that gives us:

250 words/page x 6 letters/word x 450 pages/book = 675,000 letters/book

As for how many books this is, we can think of each book as a number - a long number in a strangely high base. For instance, if we were looking at all the "books" we could have using only the numbers zero through nine, and each "book" is only two characters long, that leaves us with 100 books - 00 thru 99 - or 1x10² books. Each of our Babel books is simply a number that is 675,000 characters long, and for each number in that series, we have a single book. In base ten, this would be every combination from 675,000 zeroes in a row to 675,000 nines in a row, for a total of 1x10^675,000 books. So... what's our base? That's determined by how many characters are in our total alphabet, as each one of those can be a digit in our number:

52 alpha characters (26x2 - for caps)
30 accented characters (tilde, both ways accents, umlaut, carrot, horizontal line - 6 accents over each of 5 vowels)
48 greek characters (again with the caps)
10 numbers
32 additional characters on a keyboard
2 more for the cedilla (that fuckin' French C with the curlicue beneath it, caps & lower)
1 space
TOTAL: 175 characters

So we're looking at 1x10^675,000 books - in base 175. So we're clear, this is a severe lower-bound number, as I'm excluding Egyptian/Chinese/Arabic/etc. characters. Mainly because I don't know how many characters there are in those languages. But anyway, imagine that you had to count to a number, but your first digit had to get up to 175 before you got to "10," and you had to get to 175 175's before you got to "100" (ten tens), and you had to keep counting until the number was 675,000 digits long, and then exhaust all of those possibilities (you get to stop counting right before the next number in sequence would make your number 675,001 digits long).

We would have 1x175^675,000 books in our Library of Babel. At least. The reason this works, in short, is that scientific notation is awesome. At length, any number can be represented as [number]_[base]x[base]_[base]^{[power]_[base]} - and each of those numbers has its own base. As long as you're sticking with the same base throughout, then you don't need to worry about notating it and that will give you your straightforward number (we use base ten most of the time, so we don't even bother).

A "base" determines how high you can count on one digit before you need to go back to zero and count with the next number, or when they all go back to zero you add another digit: base two (binary) counts 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1,000, etc. The pattern is that you get one number (zero doesn't count because it's 0, 00, 000, and so on), then have to increase the digit count to count higher, then you get two numbers, then increase the digit count, then get four numbers, and increase the digit count. Base three (ternary) counts 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 100, 101, 102, 110, 111, 112, 120, 121, 122, 200, 201, 202, 210, 211, 212, 220, 221, 222, 1,000, etc. The pattern now is that you get two numbers and then have to increase the digit count, then you get six numbers and increase digit count, then get eighteen numbers and increase digit count, and so on. In base ten, we humans count 1-9, 10-99, 100-999, and so on. The pattern here is that you get nine digits and increase, then 90, then 900. Here's the magic: 1, 2, 4; 2, 6, 18; 9, 90, 900; are all series of the same composition, namely (x-1)x10_x^(n-1), where x is your base (and n is your step in the series). Looks an awful lot like scientific notation, doesn't it?

I think this might be some universal language among base number systems, or just an easily-convertible method of notating numbers (which is useless for anything else). I don't know, I kind of discovered this on my own while trying to figure out the answer to this problem. There's probably a name for this, and math majors probably know it. I don't (but I know the math works). Whatever, the point is that you can convert numbers from one base to another by "exporting" that base like I've done - I just left some labels out. I started with the figure "1x10^675,000," but I should have notated it as "1₁₀x10₁₀^{675,000₁₀}," or "One, base ten, times ten, base ten, to the power of six-hundred-seventy-five-thousand, base ten." For an example of how this works, the number 365 (days in the year) can be represented as:

3.65₁₀x10₁₀^2₁₀

This gives us 3.65 (in base ten) times ten (in base ten) to the power of two (in base ten). The first number (3.65) gives you the first few digits of the number, the second number (10) tells you your base, and the third number (2) tells you how long your number is (10² means that two zeroes come after the one).

Now, I want to find out how big a number is if it's a one (in base ten) with six-hundred-seventy-five-thousand (in base ten) zeroes after it, in base one-hundred-seventy-five. I could shortcut this as (1x10^675,000)₁₇₅, but this is useless; I want my answer to be in base ten. So how do I do this? Well, using base ten throughout, 1x10^[anything] will give me that many tens, all "times" each other - 1 is just ten, 2 is "ten times ten," 3 is "ten times (ten times ten)," 4 is "ten times (ten times (ten times ten))," and so on. Just replace every time I said "ten" with "one-hundred-seventy-five," and even King Douchebag of Fuckhead Hill (don't ask) - who says he's shitty at math (I tested this on him) - can understand that this is like counting in base 175, converted to base ten. So, the number I want to find is 1₁₀x10₁₇₅^{675,000₁₀}, or "one, base ten, times ten, base one-hundred-seventy-five, to the power of six-hundred-seventy-five-thousand, base ten." I replace 10₁₇₅ with its decimal equivalent, 175₁₀ (just like 10₂=2₁₀=2₃, or 101₂=12₃=5₁₀ if you like advanced stuff), and do the math: 175^650,000, and put it back in scientific notation. Ka-pow, finished!

The trick, of course, is keeping your bases straight and knowing when to do the math and when not to. That done, it's a piece of cake, I swear! This gives us... too large a number, it turns out. No calculator I was able to find had the capacity to tackle that straight on. I had to break it down:

175^675,000=175^{6.75^10⁵}

This can also be written as (175^6.75)^100,000, and 175^6.75=3.8x10¹⁴. And, as everyone knows, (3.8x10¹⁴)^100,000=3.8x10^1,400,000. That many books. (EDIT: I fucked up. In my original calculations, I had somehow substituted 650K for 675K, and I did a double-plus un-good math when I decided that 175^(6.75x10^5)=175^(6.75^(10^5)), and that puts me at the same roadblock I'm at in the next problem (outlined below), so results are pending the math professor's review. I'd given an outline of the problem to King Douchebag of Fuckhead Hill with instructions to the math professor to show work, but he never came through. Hoo-ha! Edit over.)

Now our question is, how many atoms are there in the Universe? There are several answers to this question. I'm going to go with Wikipedia's calculations on matter content of the observable Universe, which yields two figures: a lower bound of 3x10⁷⁹, and an upper bound of 7x10⁷⁹. All the other figures I was able to find either corroborate these data, or are dramatically lower. The lower boundary is a rough-and-ready approximation of the number of atoms in all the stars, were they broken down to hydrogen atoms (so one helium atom is just two hydrogen atoms), and stars account for well over 90% of the mass in their systems. The upper boundary figure is based on the mean density of the whole observable Universe and its volume. Both of these figures account for all 80 billion galaxies, with the 3 to 7 x 10²² stars therein (in sum, not each). Even supposing that we counted all mass, not just normal atoms, it would come to about 1.75x10⁸¹ hydrogen atoms (were all mass converted into hydrogen). Keep in mind that though this is based on the "observable Universe," and there may be very much that we haven't observed, "the observable Universe" is every fucking thing we've seen, ever. Silver Garou suspects that these figures are "hugely off," but I don't think so - these numbers are still mind-bogglingly huge, just not quite on the order of the hugeness of those 450-page books.

Still, let's work in some margins of error. The orders of magnitude of difference here are, themselves, on the order of orders of further magnitude. Like, Creationists think the Universe is 6-12,000 years old when it's more like 15 billion; Bill Gates thought nobody could ever need more than 64K hard disk space and we've got terabytes; and then there's this (to be fair, Garou has simply supposed that there are far more atoms in the Universe than we can even get close to verifying, and by orders of magnitude, but on scales which it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend - he is not an expert in the field making a terrible prediction, or an asshole trying to shoehorn observed facts into taken-for-granted belief systems). Let's take this supposed number of atoms in the Universe and assume that it's off by the order of magnitude of itself, so:

(1.75x10⁸¹)^1.75x10⁸¹

...keeping in mind that 100¹⁰⁰ is 100 times itself, 100 times, this is like taking every atom in the observed Universe and splitting it into a number of atoms equal to the number of atoms in the observed Universe, and repeating the process a number of times equal to the number of atoms in the observed Universe.

Dammit. This also overflowed any calculator into which I put it, but it can't handle powers of more than two digits. But I have a sneaking suspicion it will still be short. I gave the problem to King Douchebag of Fuckhead Hill, and he's going to show it to some math professors tomorrow. We'll see how that goes. (EDIT AGAIN: That still didn't happen. But if anyone wants to correct my mistakes, or explain how to do the steps I'm missing, or even just link me to a page explaining how to do so, then I will happily correct it all!)

OMFG, the news is SUNG now?!

2010-06-08T00:15:00.003-05:00

Yes. Yes, it is. I give you auto-tuned news:

Seriously, this is the only way it could be made more of a spectacle, and less of a ridiculous circus. Ooh, and this one is good, too, because it involves autotuned talking heads talking about exceptionalism and smoking lettuce:

It's not a weekend. I need sleep. G'night!

Wait. OK, you also need to learn about the Federal Commission of T-Pain (bonus dragon charts included at no extra cost!), and the three greatest keywords EVAR for press coverage: pirates, drugs, gay marriage. News just don't get any better than this. I mean, unless it's good news, that is.

Pascal's Scantron: an atheist parable (part two)

2010-06-05T07:56:00.000-05:00

Click here for part one.

The grading machine was small, discolored with age, covered in dust like most of the things in the English department storage room. It had a cracked digital readout, a few buttons with the labels missing, and a slot with "INSERT FORM HERE" stamped next to it. I didn't care when I heard we found it, because I don't care about the forms anyhow - everyone else seemed to think it was some kind of miracle, though. A fight broke out over who would get to use it first, and Jimmy Dempster's nose got broken. We were finally able to agree that it had to be used in public, in plain sight of everyone, and what we'd cast votes to see who would get to go first and all of that. It took us two whole days just to decide how we were going to use it, for crying out loud. I stayed and watched because even though it wasn't important to me, the way everyone reacted would be very important to everyone.

Well, we all decided that someone from E-column could go first, since they were clearly the most excited about it. It seemed fair. Then one of those upside-down A-column kids could go, because they seemed like the most opposed group to the E-column crowd. Then we'd let a C-column kid go, then one of the "ABCDEABCDE" folks, then one of the kids who filled out every bubble, and then we'd go in alphabetical order by name from there (most everyone knew everyone else's name, so there wasn't any concern about cheating). Everything was fine, we were all agreed that we had found a fair way to resolve this little dispute, and somehow everything still managed to go straight to shit.

Brandon Anderson was the E-column kid who went first, since he was first alphabetically. We plugged the machine in, turned it on, made sure it didn't break down straightaway, and then Brandon put his form through. There was some humming and whirring, and then his form came out just like he'd put it in. He even asked, "So did I pass?" Nobody said anything for a while. Someone said he must not have gotten anything wrong, but then another person said that we didn't know if he got anything right either, and then another fight almost broke out. We decided to keep feeding the forms through, and then figure out what to do.

Jill Becker was next, the upside-downers' first pick. She fed her form through and nothing happened again, and this time we were a little calmer but still nobody said anything. A couple people started to say that maybe the machine didn't work right, but everyone else shushed them. I was starting to hope that everyone would just feed their form through and things would be nice and boring. Silly me.

Dick Benson stepped up, he was the "ABCDEABCDE" crowd's first pick. Not because he was alphabetically first, they also had a Chris Allen, but because they all paired off and played a rock-paper-scissors tournament and Dick won. Anyway, Dick fed his form into the grading machine, and there was this awful grinding sound. Something started to smell, and so we unplugged the grading machine from the generator and opened up the front panel. We got Dick's form out, but it was all chewed up, and we couldn't get the machine working again after that.

Pretty soon, people started arguing about what all this meant. Someone started saying that the machine ate Dick's form because he was wrong, that he should have stuck to one column instead of filling out all kinds of bubbles. I tried to point out that we couldn't be sure that Dick had anything to do with it, using one of those fallacies I learned from the logic book. I can't remember the Latin name, but what it says is that just because something happens after something else, it doesn't mean that the first thing caused it - there could have been something else going on that you didn't know about. You might as well say that Dick's form got eaten because he played rock-paper-scissors. I mean, for crying out loud, the grading machine was old and locked up in the English department closet for a reason, and that's probably because it wasn't working right in the first place, so we should see if we could fix it and then try again.

Well, nobody listened, of course. People started shouting that we shouldn't tamper with the grading machine any more, that we'd done enough by letting Dick put his form through and we saw how that went, and since Brandon & Jill's forms went through fine, we know that everyone else who filled out their form like them should be fine, too. Soon you couldn't tell who was yelling what since everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs. Then someone just reached out and punched Dick Benson right in the face. Then it was a dog-pile: some people tried to break it up, but they just got sucked into the fight, and by the end of it the bloody mess on the floor didn't even look like Dick any more.

Now, I mean, I just want to say this plainly, because I don't know how we let it happen: Dick Benson was beaten to death because a dusty old machine ate his test form. A kid fucking died over this. Some other kids got hurt, too, but cuts and bruises happen even when you're playing a game of soccer, and you get better from 'em anyhow. Dick's dead 'cuz he made marks on paper, and I think anyone who could let that happen is plain crazy, I don't care how strongly they feel about their precious fucking forms.

Well, not everyone feels the same way, I guess. Pretty soon everyone started saying that what happened to Dick was bad, but his form ruined the grading machine, so what could you expect? I tried to say that something ought to be done about it, but nobody knew who struck the killing blow, there were too many kids involved to punish all of them, emotions were running high so you couldn't really blame anyone, and it wasn't gonna bring Dick back anyhow, so who cares? Well, I care. I care about a person's life more than the way they fill out some form, and I think anyone whose priorities are the other way 'round is an idiot. And I think anyone who isn't bothered by a human life being lost because of a disagreement over unknowable matters is less than human.

So I left. I left that crazy world, and now it seems I'm in a crazier one. It wasn't just our school that forgot, apparently, but all I've found in the three days since I left are crazier and crazier people. Some of thesm have guns, and some of them are in gangs, and some of them just have some really off-the-wall ideas about how the world is. I have half a mind to try to help the school get prepared in case one of the gangs finds it, but all I can bear to do is find a quiet out-of-sight place to sleep at night. I don't know how to fix this, the world's really screwed up and I'm just one person. Maybe I can find some other people who aren't nuts, and help them. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, too. I don't know. But there's gotta be something good out there, and I gotta find it. Writing this down is a start.

With acknowledgment to Sam Harris, Blaise Pascal, and the Scantron company.

Pascal's Scantron: an atheist parable (part one)

2010-06-03T19:22:00.004-05:00

Whoa! I missed a weekend. Sorry about that. But I have part of a short story here, and I hope you like it. More this weekend, double-promise!

"What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible? Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity - like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yahweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in that it was actually written by the Creator of the universe?"
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, p. 23-24.

"I sure wish this life were a test and I could reason out the right answer, so that all my wishful thinking had a metaphysical justification embedded into reality itself, and then I could finally be confident that all this speculation wasn't just me jerking off."
- Pascal's Wager (abridged)

Where to begin? At the start? Or at the present? Or with my purpose? I guess I should try to sort all that out first.

My memories start about four months ago, on the first day of February, which I call the Great Forgetting. Today is the third of June. By my reckoning, it is the year 2010, though all of these dates are in dispute. I'm writing this down in case another Forgetting happens. There. Now for details.

Nobody knows how the Great Forgetting happened - or why, for that matter. Stories abound, of course, but nobody really knows. Here is what I remember: everything starts with a loud popping sound, and then I was aware of the room around me. I had a splitting headache, and a couple people screamed. Someone by the door flipped the light switch a couple times, and nothing happened. Then he stood up on a chair to open one of the light covers, and broken glass came pouring down on him. I laughed.

At some point, I became aware of the fact that I was holding a pencil. On my desk was a piece of paper, white with green markings on it. It looked fuzzy at first, like it wasn't quite anything in particular; as I stared, it became more sharply defined until I could read it. It was a form, a form for taking a test. What test, I didn't know. I had started writing my name, but I only got the first letter down: the letter D. That was all I had written on my form. It did not occur to me until much later that I was able to recognize the first letter of my name, but not my whole name. I could also recognize the names and purposes of many things, but not all things. Others seemed to be in similar situations.

It took us over an hour to figure out how to talk again, and in a few days we got settled into what our lives have now become. Within the week, we had eaten through all the school's food and started raiding local grocery stores for canned goods and clean water. Someone found a store with seeds, and now we have gardens everywhere around campus and even on the rooftops. We also built some rain caches, and there's a still being built by a few kids who know how to weld.

Even now, though, things seem poised for upheaval. Nobody really knows what's around the corner. We might get our heads screwed back on straight, but with all this craziness around, it seems a slim possibility. Somebody, thankfully, found an almanac - the latest one we could find was for 2010, and by measuring the daylight hours, we were able to pinpoint the equinox on March 20th and figure out the date and time from there. But not everybody buys it - some people insist it's the year zero, others that it's the year one, still others insist on two thousand (or even one thousand) and that the almanacs are printed in advance by benevolent outside cultures who are manipulating our brains and the world around us.

Like I said, there's a lot of craziness about.

Weirdest of all are these test forms. Everybody in the school had one, but nobody can find the test we're supposed to use the form with. None of the instructors' desks have test booklets. Every room had a television set in it, and most people think that the test was going to be delivered by some sort of broadcast. It makes sense, but there's no way to tell for sure. Everything that was plugged in or had a battery in it got fried at the Great Forgetting. Light bulbs burst, CRTs burned out, circuit boards cooked, watches melted on the inside, it's all gone. Things in packages work, as long as the batteries were outside of them - we used new stopwatches from the Phys Ed office to measure the days until the equinox. So even if the test was being delivered by television, there's no way we could tell what it was about today.

Consent is somewhat less than unanimous on this last point, to put it mildly.

It all started innocently enough, as I suppose these things tend to do. Some people filled out their forms out of habit. I can't really blame them, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and it certainly didn't do any harm on its own. But then people started comparing answers, and they started banding together according to how they filled out the bubbles. About half the people went straight down the C column, apparently since that was in the middle. If you ask them, they don't feel too strongly about their answers, they just seem to think that their forms ought to be filled out. Lots of people filled out the right-most E bubbles, maybe through some quirk of association - that's what's "right", after all. Some answered A, B, C, D, then E, repeating over and over; others filled out the first five in order and then stopped. Some filled out the front only, others filled out both sides - no way to tell how many today, since most of those who later filled out the backs of their forms now insist that they had them filled out all along.

A few filled out the A column, and then someone found a logic textbook and discovered that an upside-down A is the universal quantifier - it means "all". These folks turned their forms upside-down, saying that the world turned upside-down at the Great Forgetting, and now the A column is "right" and they all think this is some profound insight. Even though they didn't learn about symbolic logic until after they'd filled out their forms, they insist that they knew that's how they were supposed to fill out their forms all along, and for that reason. How the Hell do you argue with that kind of bullshit?

A tiny minority filled out all the bubbles, everywhere, and these folks say that all the answers are right and it doesn't really matter how you fill out your form, so long as you get along with everyone else. We're here in school to learn, they say, not to pick fights with each other. I tend to agree with their principles, just not with their reasoning, and these folks get along with the C-column crowd so nobody else picks on them, either.

I didn't fill out my form. I didn't write anything on it at all, except for that letter D which I had already written down. Most people who didn't fill out their forms at first later went and filled them out, usually out of pressure to fit in or avoid getting beaten up. Some of the people who still don't have their forms filled out just don't care. Some of them insist that we shouldn't fill out our forms at all, and anyone who does is an idiot. For my part, I just don't know what to put on it. I don't know, so I don't put anything. I think some of the ideas out there are interesting, but not one of them is for sure, and it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because we're here and we have shit to do that's just more important. So put whatever you want on your test forms, it's fine by me - but if you start telling people that they have to fill them out this or that way, and threaten to beat them up by the bike racks if they don't, that's when I think you're crazy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people here who I think are bat-shit loco.

Some of these nuts say that not answering at all is a form of answering. I don't know what they're thinking, since I most definitely did not fill out any of the bubbles. That strikes me as rather like saying that an empty plate is a kind of meal - fucking stupid, in other words. "Empty form, empty head," is another common taunt I hear in the hallways - this one usually comes from those folks who safety-pinned their test forms to their shirts, or who draw them in permanent marker on their skin. If that's what you want to do, go ahead. I mean, I think it's pretty silly, but they think it's silly to not answer, so I'm comfortable with living and letting live. They say I'll be sorry when we all get graded, that I can't get a high test score if I don't answer, but I don't even think that's ever going to happen. Especially not after what happened three nights ago.

It started a couple weeks back. We found old machines in the school's basement and in a lot of back rooms - covered in dust, but they weren't plugged in, so some of them still worked. There was a gas generator in the machine shop, where they taught automobile and manufacturing stuff, so we were able to get some of them running. First was an old record player, one of those simple dealies with the turntable and the flower-shaped thing for the sound to come out. People started recognizing some of the songs, which says to me that we can still have some of our memories jogged from before the Great Forgetting, just like we remember how to walk and how to speak and what tables and chairs are. But some people insist that it means we can know things "a priori", a word they got from one of those logic textbooks. I say the name of a song is just something you picked up somewhere, and it can be taught anyhow, so who cares?

We found more and more machines, in increasing complexity until we got to the burned-out stuff that was being used right up until the Great Forgetting. Some of the other kids, all kinds but mostly the C-column crowd, started to use the simplest machines and some of the library books and instruction manuals to figure out how some of the more recent ones must work. They're really, really smart - until they start to talk about how it was all left here as a puzzle for us to figure out, so we could re-start civilization on our own. That's when I start to roll my eyes and wish they'd stick to what they can find out and demonstrate. I mean, sure, it would be nice if there was a puzzle, if we were supposed to figure this all out (and there's nothing wrong with figuring things out, even if nobody tells us to do it), if all this was actually planned and had a grand overarching point. But I see no reason to think so. They ask how it all got here; I say I don't know, and they call me stupid for not making up answers.

I say that wanting an answer doesn't mean there is one, and making one up isn't better than admitting you don't know. I sure as Hell wish other people weren't so fucking confident in their made-up answers when we found the grading machine. I wish we never found it at all.

To be continued...

Dear The Internet: Today I made the cutest blasphemy EVAR*!

2010-05-23T22:37:00.006-05:00

Better late than never, right? OK, so Steve Bowen informed me on Thursday that Thursday was "Everybody Draw Muhammad" Day, which would have been cool if I weren't working fourteen hours that day. BUT! It reminded me that I had made a previous commitment, in a proud tradition of blasphemy, to blaspheme some more. Without further ado:

Click for huge. Oh, and also for ALL FOUR PANELS. It didn't take long because I'm un-skilled, it took long because I forgot. (My lack of skill is irrelevant to the delay.) Anyway. I think I hit the big five: pigs, dogs, the Kaaba, and liquor, all while drawing the prophet Muhammad and me spending some quality time together. Rock most hard.

If you're interested in the individual panels: 1, 2, 3, 4. Enjoy!

EDIT: Photobucket does not want to give me the full-size version of the four-panel thing in all of its irreverent glory, for some reason. If anyone knows of an image hosting service that's man enough to put up a 1044x3122 image on the free, let me know - otherwise I can be e-mailed for full-size versions, if anyone wants 'em.

* - With the possible exception of Moo-ham-ed, I must admit.

The Wrongest of Wrongnesses in the History of Wrongitude

2010-05-19T01:53:00.004-05:00

Editor's Note: Do I count as my own editor? I mean, I edit my own stuff, but... nevermind. Look. My last post was a little vapid, pontificating as I was on an overnight webcomic kerfuffle that ended up being wiped off the face of the internet anyhow. I feel kinda bad about it. So I'm breaking my "weekends-only" rule to say something of a little more substance. This is also the third post in recent memory where I have used the word "kerfuffle" for lack of a better term. Should I consult a doctor? Or just a thesaurus?

I recently read on Pharyngula about a paper by Doug Theobald (subscription to Nature required) calculating the likelihood that the proteins shared by all organisms on the face of the planet came to be shared by a concatenation of events besides common descent. In other words, regardless of the likelihood that life came to be in this or that particular way (which Creatards frequently yammer on about, assuming evolutionary teleology and all sorts of other bullshit), what are the odds that life came to be, as it in fact did, by other means than common descent?

PZ's summary and the news coverage make for fascinating reading - really, you should check it out - but I'm going to jump right to the number at the end and play around with it. That number is 1:10^2,680 against. So, sure, the common proteins shared by all modern organisms could have come about by some other means than common descent, but the odds are real fuckin' long against it. How long? So long. Like, it's hard to think of a way to be wronger, mathematically speaking - these guys are wronger than anyone has ever been wrong in the history of wrongitude (sounds like "longitude").

I have a phrase I use to describe "as sure as I get," and that is, "As sure as I am that the Sun's coming up tomorrow." This is meant to convey pretty fuckin' sure but not quite 100% certain (because I'm not 100% certain of anything, other than the fact that I am now having some kind of experience, and that I've always got room for doubt). Sure, something could happen so that the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, but the data so far suggest extremely otherwise. Just how much otherwise? Well, let's take every day in Earth's 4.54-billion-year history as a data point.*

4,540,000,000 x 365.25 = 1,658,235,000,000
(1.66 trillion, or 1.66 x 10¹²)

Hmm... that leaves us a shit-pot of orders of magnitude to make up. But yeah, it's settled: we're surer of common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow!

"But wait," comes the Creatard rebuttal, "You can't just count the days up like that, you have to take into account how many of us there are! After all, a large enough number of rabid IDiots can't be wrong!" Well, OK. It doesn't work that way, but we'll humor you. Let's just say that all 6.8-billion of us are Christians, and we have been since the Earth was formed. Not only is this over-generous to the literalists in giving them the actual age of the Earth rather than their Reader's Digest Condensed Books version, giving them all of the current population throughout all of Earth's history, and giving a decidedly democratic bent to our epistemology, it doesn't even come close.

(1.66 x 10¹²) x (6.8 x 10⁹) = 1.13 x 10²²

"But... but... twenty-two isn't nearly close enough to two-thousand-six-hundred-eighty," replies the anti-science crusader. "And I believe that your numbers are wrong with every fiber of my being." You know what? That's still not good enough. I'll give you a data point for every nucleotide base pair inside of every single cell of every person now living on the planet for every day throughout all of Earth's history - and you know what that nets us? Take a look:

(3.1647 x 10⁹ base pairs) x (1 x 10¹⁴ cells) x (1.13 x 10²²) = 3.58 x 10⁴⁵

Fuck! That's still not enough! OK, but what if every atom in the observable universe, itself a number beyond ordinary human comprehension, spawned a Universe with a special Earth with seven billion humans believing in Creation with every fiber of their being? Yeah, what then?! This is what:

(1.5 x 10⁸² atoms in the observable Universe) x (3.58 x 10⁴⁵) = 5.37 x 10¹²⁷

Just to recap, we've given a data point in favor of the Sun rising tomorrow for each of 3-billion-odd nucleotide base pairs inside of all hundred trillion cells in the bodies of six to seven billion people observing a sunrise for every single day (including leap years!) across Earth's four-and-a-half billion year history, repeated for every atom in the observable Universe. And given all of that, we're still surer that all life is related by common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow.

Suck on those numbers! Tomorrow's a dark day for creationism, epistemologically speaking. Yeah, I'd say the future prospects for monotheistic creation myths are looking pretty dim. We should just turn the light out on intelligent design, and leave the real science to light our path into the future.

OK, I'm done now, for real. Man, playing around with degrees of certainty is fun!

* - Yes, OK, to calculate the actual odds of the Sun not coming up tomorrow, I would have to calculate the odds of something happening which would prevent the Sun coming up. Fine. Not the point, and that's why this entry gets the "humor" tag. I'm just going to treat it as a chance event and assume the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, making it 1 failure out of 1.6 trillion successes. I need to keep this back-of-the-envelope compatible, after all.

Rambling Towards Consensus

2010-05-16T23:33:00.000-05:00

I wish there were some way for me to get paid for taking aimless, random wiki walks. Seriously.

OK, so there's this fancypants principle called the observer effect, which basically says that the act of checking things out will change them - observation has effects, in other words. It's hard for us to think about this if we haven't already been taught, visually-oriented as we are; our eyes passively receive photons, which trivially diminishes ambient light, but otherwise doesn't change much (Wikipedia's example of a tire pressure gauge is quite helpful, though). But when we're talking about a subatomic particle, we can't just wait for the relevant information to waft off of it from the background noise already present in the environment, we have to bounce an intelligible signal off of the object of our curiosity and that signal has an effect - bats would probably understand this better, or they would, if their prey responded to sonar. OK, last try: submarine captains understand. Fuckin' cripes.

Perhaps a better example, one I could relate to my pre-teen siblings, is the reason that an ice cube feels colder than ice water. Physically, they've got the same temperature and the same chemical composition, but why does one feel colder than the other? Well, because phase changes involve the transfer of energy: taking H₂O molecules apart from an integrated crystalline structure into a free-flowing pile is a process that requires work, and your body heat rushes to the task in the same way that a kid with a wrecking ball would jump at the opportunity to reduce a building to a pile of bricks. Since it takes more heat from you, it feels colder, even though it's not.

Now, before you jump down my throat, let me reassure you that I know the observer effect and the perception of temperature aren't even the same sport, let alone in the same ballpark. What I'm getting at is not this or that physical phenomenon, but rather the philosophical point that they both touch on: we are active participants in reality, and not passive outside observers of it. Thus, all that we do shall in some way be inherently tinted by bias, since you cannot view at all without having a point of view. This goes double for culture, including discussons concerning any aspect or element thereof. I am continuously amazed at the extent to which people - myself included - are able to avoid taking this fact into proper account.

That was my point, and here is my case: on Wednesday, an internet mans with a great many fans did proceed to poke fun at Wikipedia by sharing his idea for an imaginary entry on malamanteau. Well, some yahoo then went and created the actual page for it, which is funny but doesn't quite fit Wikipedia's policies for a wide variety of reasons which others have capably pointed out. (TL;DR version: Randall Munroe made a joke, and Wikipedia is not a compendium of webcomic jokes; if fans started using the word "malamanteau" in their speech, the comic would get a bullet under the inspired activities section; the media attention this kerfuffle has already generated would probably justify an "in the media" section, but that hasn't been done yet; if the term enters common parlance, then the origin and etymology and early controversy and everything could go on its own page. Gawd.)

These policies (and others like them) are at the same time both the source of my respect for Wikipedia as a project, and the reason that I'll probably never be an active contributor. I gave them a once-over and then edited the phrasing of the Two Envelopes problem, but while double-checking my work I fell into a rules rabbit hole from which I was only able to escape by saying, "Balls to this!"

Anyway, Randall Munroe is a Wikipedian himself, and he jumped into the discussion Thursday morning, saying, "Hey, this is cute but totally unnecessary. How about we all chill out?" (I'm paraphrasing.) He closed by saying, and I'm quoting now, "Also, just so you know, nobody used the word 'disambiguation' until you people showed up. <3">disambiguation was used long before Wikipedia, as a cursory search of Google Books before opening your mouth would have revealed." Munroe responded to this in the best possible way by saying, "Moreover, I took some measurements, and my mom barely sits halfway around the house! I'm starting to suspect you're not an entirely reliable source on these matters!" This, of course, caused the other party to get butt-hurt because someone more popular was not taking him/her seriously.

What this discussion has revealed is that Wikipedia does in fact have words that it likes a whole lot, but not the ones Munroe pointed out in his joke. No, these favorite words are things like notability, neutral point of view, and Wikipedia is not a dictionary. What I find hilarious about all this, however, is that the discussion about how this ought to be treated has become something of an issue unto itself: by trying to clamp down and say how not-notable the whole thing is, the ensuing argument has in the process become something notable. Looking at things jacks up pageviews; talking about things changes the state of the discussion; even looking for things will affect Google trends. Using the internet invariably amounts to participating in it, and trying to control it is often an exercise in futility.

Of course, now that I go to check the state of the discussion on Sunday night, I find that everything's been resolved (and all the links I had to points in the discussion are now broken, thanks). Now searching for the word will redirect you to something generic about xkcd without explaining anything about all the discussion that ensued, a fine compromise in that nothing has been accomplished but at least everyone has shut up. Jeez, you'd think all these people were married or something.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-two: Musical Roads

2010-05-08T00:04:00.004-05:00

So you know how when you're driving along the highway doing a hundred and ten miles an hour at two in the morning on maybe ninety minutes of sleep after drinking all weekend, and you nod off for a second and you're probably going to run off the road, but then you hear this obnoxious BZZRRRT sound as you cross into the shoulder? You can relate to that, right? No?

Well, OK, you'll just have to trust me that that's how it works. They're called "rumble strips," and some guy figured out that closer grooves in the pavement produce higher pitches and farther grooves produce lower pitches. Pick your speed, and you can make music:

It's called a musical road, and they've got 'em in Denmark, Japan, South Korea, and the USA. Here's another:

So yeah. There's not a whole lot to this, except that roads can be used as musical instruments. Which is awesome, don't get me wrong - I'm just saying, once you've explained the principle, there's not really a whole lot more you can say about it. I could get into the human angle, but I'm more fond of robots. So here's a robot playing a violin, which I think is also way cool:

Free Trip to Heaven! Details Inside.

2010-05-02T23:48:00.003-05:00

I saw the above on a church sign on my way to work the other day. In this town, you can't throw a rock without busting a church window - or at least I can't. There are churches every three to five blocks along the main thoroughfares, and every single one of them has a sign proclaiming this or that trite religious message. But occasionally there's something that brightens my day, such as this imaginary conversation fuel.

Of course, my first thought on seeing this was that I needed to go in and ask someone about this "free trip," acting like I was negotiating a business deal and completely ignoring the religion aspect. In the first place, what exactly is meant by "free"? I hear that you need to promise your soul to the right magical man in the sky, and souls are hot commodities! But if I could get into Heaven on the free, then I don't need to worry about my soul - I can keep it available for all kinds of other shady deals later on down the line, and still get through the pearly gates at the end of it all.

But even if this is one of those cases where "free" doesn't mean "no cost," but rather means "no monetary cost," then I've still got questions. Like, what about that whole "ten percent of your income for life" thing? That's, like, the complete opposite of any definition of "free" I've ever heard! But if I can get into Heaven and still keep all my money, then I suppose a soul or two isn't such a high price to pay after all.

Then again, all this haggling makes me a little suspicious of the whole operation. After all, there are all kinds of "free" deals where the thing you get is a piece of shit, more of a Lucky Strike Extra than something you actually want. Lots of people seem to be under the impression that Heaven is the Best Thing Ever, which sounds good at first; but when you read the fine print, it turns out that Heaven is actually more like Church Forever, which sounds about as boring as Hell to me. Even if that's not true, there are a million ways that Heaven might disappoint me, and only a relatively small number of ways that it might make me happy. For instance, say I enjoy illegal drugs and sex with multiple partners* - what does Heaven have to offer me in this department? Not a whole lot, it would seem.

This leads rather naturally to my last question: what kind of satisfaction guarantee do I get with this deal? I may not like Heaven, after all, so I'd like to keep my options open and know what else is available, or at least recoup some portion of my investment. I'd expect that the preacher (or whoever would listen to me this far) would tell me that the Bible is the guarantee, to which I would counter that the Bible is the offer - and offers aren't their own guarantees. What I'm after is something I'm promised in case the deal goes sour. What do I get if the offer falls through? This is where things ultimately get too shifty, even for me. I mean, I can't talk face-to-face with anybody else who has used this product, I can't try before I buy, there's no "double your money back" offer (or anything even remotely close) - in fact, I've got nothing whatsoever to suggest that this offer is even legit in the first place!

Maybe I'm in the wrong business. You know what? This gives me an idea for a business proposal of my own. How about you send me your money and prayers, and then I'll work with Satan to get roller coasters and water slides in Hell. The fastest-growing religion says God isn't too fond of bikinis, so I doubt that Heaven is likely to clear my building permits. But I'll bet that if I can bring in enough converts, Old Nick could be persuaded to let everyone party down. I've got the offer details somewhere around all these rolling papers, spoons, and hundred dollar bills... give me a minute...

* - Saying this to a preacher with a straight face would, by the way, be at once the most difficult and most rewarding part of the whole process, assuming I even got that far.

Video Games as Art

2010-04-28T21:39:00.001-05:00

As I said earlier, I'm breaking my "weekends only" rule to talk about aesthetics for a little bit. I don't talk about aesthetics a whole lot, mainly because it's almost entirely subjective, and I've been told I have a rather Vitruvian sense of beauty. Probably a relic of my Objectivist days. Anyway.

Roger Ebert says, and I'm quoting here, "I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art." Horse-shit, says I. To his credit, Ebert goes on to say, "Perhaps it is foolish of me to say 'never,' because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form." Still horse-shit, says I. Ebert's entire argument seems to consist of two scoops of snobbery, a dash of bluster, and his statement, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." Apparently, poetry is doubly artistic to Ebert. Also, by this line of reasoning, cooking can never be an art form because I have never eaten a steak that tastes as good as watching The Shawshank Redemption*.

PZ got in on the action, too, and pretty much everyone seemed to jump down his throat for agreeing with Ebert; I said what I wanted to say over there, so I'm going to say something different here. I could trot out my nihilistic "art is just a word and words are made up" routine, tearing down the enterprise of art so that any action could fit in - it would work, too, because art is a word and words are made up, and whatever you can do with a book/movie/canvas/rock can also be done with ones and zeroes on microchips. Not joking. But instead, I'd rather make a positive case for the game Braid, because everything in that game is done artfully, i.e. fuckin' full of art.

Below is the trailer for Braid, a nifty little number which I like to call "Mario with time powers." That's what it is. Ebert says of the game, "You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game." Way to completely miss the point:

"Taking back your moves" is the point in Braid; one of the first bits of text you encounter says,

Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake.

Not just one. He made many mistakes during the time they spent together, all those years ago. Memories of their relationship have become muddled, replaced wholesale, but one remains clear: the princess turning sharply away, her braid lashing at him with contempt.

He knows she tried to be forgiving, but who can just shrug away a guilty lie, a stab in the back? Such a mistake will change a relationship irreversibly, even if we have learned from the mistake and would never repeat it. The princess's eyes grew narrower. She became more distant.

Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we've learned from a mistake and became better for it, shouldn't we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake?

What if our world worked differently? Suppose we could tell her: "I didn't mean what I just said," and she would say: "It's okay, I understand," and she would not turn away, and life would really proceed as though we had never said that thing? We could remove the damage but still be wiser for the experience.

Tim and the Princess lounge in the castle garden, laughing together, giving names to the colorful birds. Their mistakes are hidden from each other, tucked away between the folds of time, safe.

In fact, all the game mechanics are similarly justified. The game does quite a bit of mucking about with the flow of time (Cracked parodied it with Time Travel Understander): the "time shadow" is about being able to pursue multiple courses of action at once in pursuit of a goal; the ring, which slows time as you near it, represents the burden of commitment; and so on and so forth. One may, of course, play the game only for the puzzles; one may also watch movies only for the action sequences. What is artful about Braid is that it incorporates its mechanics into the story, and at the end, turns the tables on the player:

After getting used to manipulating the flow of time, the player learns that Tim "lives backwards" from other people, kind of like Merlin. The end of the story shows the full meaning of this, when the player rewinds the entire level and sees that the princess has not been helping Tim, but running desperately to escape him. It's about the tremendous difference perspective can make, about communication breakdown, about the pain of regret and being unable to "fix it all." It's also, in a rather literal sense, about a bomb.

What I think is artful about this is that these ideas are encoded as metaphors into the game mechanics. The player's ability to solve the puzzles is taken for granted, the point is what the mechanics mean as a part of Tim's life. This is the art of Braid as a game: it is not an imitation of real life, but a way to experience someone else's life. It is a distillation of experience (Tim's) in which we may find parallels to our own lives, and this enables us to identify with the protagonist. Mashing buttons to get a man on the screen to move from A to B is how this idea is conveyed, but that is no more to the point than it is to say that ink stains on a bunch of paper stitched together are what make up every single book - in philosophical circles, this is known as the fallacy of composition (more specifically, the fallacy of mediocrity).

With that established, the rest is a piece of cake: the visuals are simple and elegant, the backgrounds are like watercolor in motion; the music is lovely, and becomes increasingly haunting throughout the game; and the story, while by no means completely original, is a good blend of homage to the hero's journey and literary puzzle (by which I mean you're not spoon-fed the answers, you need to piece it together yourself - making it far superior to most of the literature available today, to my mind). It's artful. It's artistic. It's art.

Ebert doesn't like it, and that's fine. He can stick to his pictures on a screen with accompanying soundtrack. Not every art form needs to be moving to every critic. But I think it's rather telling that Ebert closes his missive with a snipe at Kellee Santiago's acknowledgment that art requires patronage. I can think of no more powerful metaphor to illustrate the concept of an established snob trying to keep out the whippersnappers trying to break into his establishment.

* - I had several candidates for this statement, and I'd like to share them with you, The Reader, now:

Architecture will never be art because no building has moved me like a symphony.
Sculpture will never be art because no statue can capture the fluid grace of dance.
Photography can never be art because it cannot express the unlimited imagination like painting can.
Humor can never be art because it doesn't have the enduring resonance of tragedy.

I could go on comparing apples and lawn mowers all night, or at least find some humorous way to meaninglessly compare knitting and carpentry, but I'm sure you get the point.

Busy Weekend

2010-04-26T08:46:00.002-05:00

So my little sister CJ turned nine yesterday, and I was up in the Frigid Northlands all weekend to see her and my twelve-year-old brother each perform in musicals, too. What this comes to is that I was way too busy to actually write anything, because any time not spent playing with the kids was spent drinking with the adults.

Saturday night, my mom was fretting about all the stuff she's got to do for CJ's birthday. I use the present tense because the "party" party is next weekend. Now, to be sure, my mom's got a lot on her plate: it's an Alice in Wonderland theme party, so there's a lot of decorating to do, and a whole bunch of nine-year-olds to take care of, and she'll need a bunch of inside activities in case it rains, and did I mention that the kids are both in musicals? I reminded her that CJ was going to wake up in the morning to see her father putting the finishing touches on a playhouse he built from scratch in the back yard, her entire family is in town to see her and her brother perform and celebrate her birthday, and the following weekend she's having a Wonderland party with all her friends where they will be using red fabric paint to color white fabric roses which come with the invitations. To a nine-year-old, this is fucking magical. That's kind of what makes the whole thing worth it.

And yet, my mom is still worried that CJ will figure out that there's no Santa Claus before this coming Christmas. Argh. I keep trying to explain that we can still have family togetherness and wonderful surprises and Christmas Cheer without an all-seeing father figure who doles out rewards and punishments, but it just doesn't seem to stick. Oh, well.

Anyway, there's this whole kerfuffle about how Roger Ebert thinks video games can never be art. I plan to argue on Wednesday that video games are a medium and media are vehicles by which art may be conveyed, The End. Erm, that's way shorter than it's going to end up, but yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-one: Real-Life Ghost Ships!

2010-04-18T23:34:00.003-05:00

I was reading Dino Comics at work the other day - which I highly recommend, by the way (Dino Comics, that is, not wasting time at work with pixellated fun in Courier font - I must not have fun. Fun is the time-killer.) - when...

Wait. Let me start over.

This Dino Comics strip taught me about the Baychimo, allegedly the very best of boats. After looking into the matter, I agree. But I also found out about a bunch of other crazy ghost ship stories in the process, and today I am going to share them with you. We'll start with the Baychimo.

In 1931, Baychimo became trapped in ice, and shed her crew because they were holding her back. She broke free in two days, only to be boarded again by her once-and-future taskmasters, and so she got stuck again within the week (a little passive-aggressive for a boat, don't you think?). Most of the crew gave up and went home in planes, their flighty temperaments no match for Baychimo's determination. The fifteen who remained lasted about a month longer, at which point Baychimo - I'm not making this up - escaped under cover of blizzard. You go, boat!

Baychimo was spotted days later and boarded for the purpose of taking her most valuable cargo, then abandoned in the frigid sea to presumably die of exposure. But after seventeen bitter years of servitude to the Hudson's Bay Company, Baychimo decided to make the most of her newfound freedom and roamed the seas for thirty-eight years, despite repeated boardings from unprepared yahoos who didn't know what to do with her (or didn't have the equipment even if they did, anyhow). Techinically, that should be "thirty-eight years and counting," since she is only presumed sunk. I prefer to think that she drifted all the way to the Moon and is now renovating the abandoned dinosaur cities on its dark side. If you don't believe me, you're welcome to check, just let me know when you're going so I can also buy a ticket.

Next, we go back in time to 1872 to discuss the Mary Celeste. On the night of November 4^th, Captain Benjamin Briggs (of the Mary Celeste) met with his friend Captain David Morehouse (of the Dei Gratia) for dinner with their wives in New York. Both ships were headed for the Mediterranean, as it turned out, though Morehouse didn't leave for another week. But on December 4^th, the Dei Gratia spotted Mary Celeste about six hundred miles West of Portugal. Nobody was on deck, there was no distres signal. After two hours of staring at the empty ship, she was boarded and explored, with perplexing results:

Oliver Deveau, chief mate of the Dei Gratia, boarded the Mary Celeste. He reported he did not find anyone on board, and said that "the whole ship was a thoroughly wet mess". There was only one operational pump, two apparently having been disassembled, with a lot of water between decks and three and a half feet (1.1 m) of water in the hold. However, the ship was not sinking and was still seaworthy.

All of the ship's papers were missing, except for the captain's logbook. The forehatch and the lazarette were both open, athough the main hatch was sealed. The ship's clock was not functioning, and the compass was destroyed; the sextant and marine chronometer were missing. The only lifeboat on the Mary Celeste, a yawl located above the main hatch, was also missing. The peak halyard, used to hoist the main sail, had disappeared. A rope, perhaps the peak halyard, was found tied to the ship very strongly and the other end, very frayed, was trailing in the water behind the ship.

- Wikipedia on the Mary Celeste

Piracy, foul play on the part of Dei Gratia's crew, mutiny, and insurance fraud are all silly explanations, as many very valuable things were left intact, the captains of both ships were good friends, there was no sign of any kind of struggle, and the insurance payoff wouldn't have been worth the planning. Likely of importance was Mary Celeste's cargo: 1,701 barrels of commercial alcohol. Briggs was not a fan of such dangerous cargo, and the possibility of an explosion may have motivated him to evacuate the ship with his wife, daughter, and crew at a sign of trouble. A brief fire from alcoholic fumes might not have left any scorch marks on the ship, and could explain the hasty evacuation. If Mary Celeste ran into a waterspout (tornadoes of the sea!), "Lower air pressure resulting from a waterspout might have thrown off measurements of how deep the water level was in the ship's hull. A dipstick-like device was used to monitor water levels in the bilge. Low pressure could pull water up the tube around the stick, creating the impression of a sinking vessel." (Wikipedia again.) In either case, it's likely that the evacuating crew tied their lifeboat to the rope that was found frayed and trailing the ship.

Finally, we conclude our journey through ghost ship history in 2007 with the Kaz II, a catamaran which bore three men to mysterious watery doom. On April 18^th, Kaz II was spotted drifting by a chopper near the Great Barrier Reef. Once boarded, the Queensland Emergency Management Office found everything to be perfectly normal: the equipment was all intact (save one torn sail), the engine was running, a laptop was on, no life jackets had been used, and food was set out on the table (spooky!). There were just no people. Footage recovered from the ship, timestamped the morning of the ship's departure, showed a 360-degree view of surrounding scenery which allowed investigators to pinpoint Kaz II's location, as well as various other details which had been altered by the time of the ship's discovery, aiding efforts to piece together the story. The official report is, to my mind, a good piece of reasoning which incorporates all the evidence:

"On Sunday, April 15, 2007, at 10:05 A.M., the Kaz II was sailing in the vicinity of George Point. Up to that moment everything was going as planned but, in the following hour, their situation changed dramatically. The men hauled in the white rope that was trailing behind the boat and bundled it up on the foredeck, possibly to dry, next to the locker it was normally kept in. For unknown reasons, James Tunstead then took off his T-shirt and glasses and placed them on the backseat. The report says that since the men's fishing lure was found entangled in the ship's port side rudder, an obvious explanation would be that one of them tried to free the lure and fell overboard while doing so. Standing on the boat's 'sugar scoop' platform (a platform at the back of the ship close to the waterline) while the boat is moving is perilous and falling in the water is easy, but getting back aboard almost impossible. One of the other men then came to the rescue of his friend, while Batten, still on board, started the motor and realized he had to drop the sails before he could go back for his friends."

As he left the helm to drop the sails, a deviation of the ship's course or wind direction could have easily caused a jibe, swinging the boom across the deck and knocking Batten overboard. This could even have happened before Batten was able to untie and throw out the life ring to his friends. A blue coffee mug found near the life ring may support this. Since the boat was travelling before wind and at a speed of 15 knots, it would be out of reach of the men within seconds. The report states: "From that point, the end would have been swift. None of them was a good swimmer, the seas were choppy; the men would have quickly become exhausted and sunk beneath the waves."

But perhaps spookiest of all, the comic strip which started this all cannot be found! No, seriously, I'm glad I e-mailed myself the link, because searching for ghost ship or Baychimo with OhNoRobot doesn't turn it up (try it!). Oooh. Poor ghost ships, they wouldn't be so lonely if they weren't so hard to find...

Tsujigiri, by any other name...

2010-04-10T16:57:00.003-05:00

If you're a US citizen, then you're obligated to be aware of this (I had to hear about it from Pharyngula).

The news should be all over this - by the stars, that's what journalism is for - and yet we hear not a peep. The below video is probably not for the faint of heart. I watched it, and you'll get much more gruesome scenes out of Hollywood, but the problem is that it's real here, and what it shows is US troops firing on unarmed civilians including children:

For those who declined to desensitize themselves a bit more, here's the skinny: on the 12th of July 2007, a couple of Reuters reporters and about half a dozen other civilians were walking through town. Then, out of nowhere, gunships opened fire on them for no reason at all. Apparently, these boys never saw the training video on distinguishing cameras from AKs & RPGs. When guys in a van with kids showed up to help one of the wounded escape, the troops fired upon the van. Afterwards, as the children were being carried from the scene, someone remarked, "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle." Way to blame the victim.

In the New York Times, Lt-Col Scott Bleichwehl said, "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force." This is beyond lying and beneath contempt - this was not combat, it was cold-blooded murder. Aside from "coalition forces", every single word of that statement is misleading euphemism or blatant falsehood. Let me fix it for you, Scott, since you're apparently truth-impaired: "There is no question that men with guns were clearly engaged in reckless homicide against unarmed civilians."

Back in feudal Japan, samurai did something called tsujigiri, which was explained as a test of the samurai's sword. A warrior's life depends largely on his weapon (more on his skill and cunning, but still), so this is an understandable practice. Oh, except for the part where they test their swords on civilians in the street. That makes it ruthless savagery, plain and simple.

Epistemology and Spiders: This is how it should be done

2010-04-05T19:23:00.004-05:00

OK, so assessing and revising the contents and standards of one's knowledge has nothing to do with Mindless Self-Indulgence - if anything, it's mindful self-restraint. But one of my recent forays into the world of Science Blogs handed me a case-in-point so neat and pat that I just had to share.

A bit of background: there's this wonderful little program called Before the Dinosaurs: Walking with Monsters (buy!) which goes through the history of life from Anomalocaris to Lystrosaurus. It's just awesome, and you should watch it. One of my favorite parts of that program was the puppy-sized spider, mesothelae, which lived at a time of eagle-sized dragonflies because the atmosphere was so oxygen-rich that giant bugs could get away with enormous bodies and simple respiratory apparatus.

Now, I love spiders. I really do. They're nature's ninjas, out-ninjered only by certain species of squid and octopus (ninjas of the sea). So a spider the size of a small dog is, like, my new favorite fantasy pet. Excluding giant spider-steed, of course (what it loses in ninjery, it more than gains in bad-assitude). OK, now we're good. My point is that I was very fucking excited to hear about this mesothelae, so excited that I went around telling people about it for weeks.

Fast-forward to last week, and I see this Laelaps headline link while catching up on Pharyngula: Megarachne, the Giant Spider That Wasn't. My first thought: "Ooh, spiders!" Second thought: "Aww, fake spiders?" So I click through and read the whole thing, and as it turns out, Before the Dinosaurs was originally slated to include megarachne, but during production it was discovered that the giant spider wasn't a giant spider, but a sea scorpion. Well, shit on toast! But the show must go on, and so the BBC just re-cast mesothelae in the role that megarachne had been written to play and fudged a couple details (bah, details!).

If you're like me, then right about now you've got to have a tangled web in your head involving sense, reference, justification, and a couple theories of truth, all wrapped up in a package labeled, "D's beliefs about carboniferous arthropods". OK, now that I put it that way, you're probably not like me. But that's what was going through my head as I processed this article. Of course, sorting out that Gordian knot would be like trying to diagram one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's third-of-a-page sentences, so I took the Alexandrian solution:

"Huh. Looks like I was wrong."

Because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter that a bleeding-edge breakthrough in paleobiology took a backseat to a deadline, it doesn't really matter that there was still a kernel of truth in it, it doesn't really matter how much I love the idea of giant spiders, and it doesn't really matter exactly what labels or confidence levels I had for this or that bit of belief. What matters is that I became aware of one instance wherein my picture of the world failed to match up with the best our investigations have to offer. So I fixed it, The End. As Carl Sagan wrote,

Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
(The Demon-Haunted World, page 20)

So I was reading about this Jesus fellow the other day... or was it Krishna? Or Mithras? Wait, Horus! Or maybe even Moses... look, you see where this is going.

I don't think that argument suggests what you think it suggests.

2010-03-30T21:51:00.007-05:00

Alvin Plantinga recently made an appearance roundabout my neck of the woods. My good friend came out from grad school to see him, so I kind of had to go as well. I mean, catching up with a buddy in grad school and picking on a 77-year-old theist? How could I miss out?

I pick on Alvin because I like him. He's a lively and affable guy in person, and really quite bright - even if he thinks that entities can be defined into existence. I just happen to think he's sadly misguided, and in an innocent enough way to justify paraphrasing The Princess Bride. Anyway, the good doctor's talk was on his evolutionary argument against naturalism, a pretty decent piece of reasoning that just so happens to cut against him in the particulars. If you don't feel like clicking through, here's the Fucking Short Version:

1. The probability that human cognitive faculties are reliable¹, given naturalism and evolution, is low².
2. If we accept both naturalism and evolution, and understand premise 1, then we have a defeater for the idea that our cognitive faculties are reliable.
3. If we have a defeater for the idea that our cognitive faculties are reliable, then we have a defeater for any belief we may come to hold with those cognitive faculties (including a belief that naturalism and evolution are true).
4. Therefore, we should not believe that naturalism and evolution are true, because they are self-defeating.
Conclusion: Therefore, fucking magic!

Notes:
1 - Weasel word!
2 - So what?! The Universe is a big place and rare things happen all the time.

OK, we've some unpacking to do here. As for that first premise, Plantinga leans on a quote from Patricia Churchland on the utility of truth for evolved animals: "Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. ... Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost." Plantinga uses this to develop his point by saying that natural selection can only work on behavior, not on beliefs (nevermind the fact that beliefs often inform behavior - seriously, don't mind this for now!), and therefore the truth value of this or that belief is irrelevant next to how adaptive or maladaptive the organism's behavior is.

This is, well, true. Natural selection simply can't act on what you believe independent of everything else. Plantinga goes to great pains to make this point. All other things being equal (which they never are, but still, we're ignoring that for now), the truth value of a belief is in fact irrelevant to the evolutionary process. To put his argument in more Cartesian terms,

"My evolved brain is not perfect, therefore it screws up. Because it's all I've got to work with, I might not be able to know whether it's screwing up at any given moment, because it might be screwing up right the fuck now. Therefore, I can never be 100% certain that I'm in my right mind."

I want to press Pause to let everybody know that I am with him so far. Really and truly (I just conclude that we must live with "less than 100% certainty"). Here's where things start to get real funny, though:

"Since I can never be 100% certain that I'm in my right mind, I might even be wrong about that. Because this uncertainty is self-effacing, I ought not to buy it. Therefore, I shouldn't buy the reasoning that brought me to this conclusion. Theists don't have this problem because we believe that our brains were purpose-built by God, so we can trust them."

Not joking! He says, "If my brain is evolved (i.e. not built by God), then I shouldn't trust it, even when it tells me that my brain is evolved; so I'll go with a belief system that ignores the problem of self-doubt instead." I mean, Alvin Plantinga wouldn't say that he's ignoring the problem, but that's what he does. Look, just because cars can break down doesn't mean that my car is broken down right now, and anyway you don't need to believe in Platonic Devices to avoid the uncomfortable possibility that your car might break down tomorrow. You can in fact believe something with 95% certainty and accept that one time in twenty, you'll be surprised. I mean, holy shit.

Enough cussing for the moment. I'm going to go right for premise 1 by granting it: given naturalism (i.e. not supernaturalism) and evolution (i.e. not IDiocy), the probability that my cognitive faculties are "reliable" in any strong sense is fairly low. Now, neither Plantinga nor I wish to speak of perfect reliability here; he even gives the example in his talk that if you ask five different witnesses about a car crash, you'll get five different stories (he says that their reliability is in the overwhelming agreement upon background beliefs that make their stories possible: the crash occurred on Earth and not Mars; the crash involved cars and not boats; cars drive on roads and not rainbows; blah blah blah). However, in order to achieve survivability, some reliability is necessary: bees need to apprehend reality to a degree in order to dance out directions to their cohorts, for example. So we're talking about a gradient of reliability here, really. He granted this during the Q&A session.

But then, that really gives it up, from his end. When we speak of the probability (P) of a degree of reliability (R) occurring in nature, given no supernatural input and a competitive environment, we no longer need to speak in terms of absolutes. Rather, we have freed ourselves to talk in terms of how reliable we need to be, how long we have to get there, and how lucky we're allowed to get along the way. Early on, the demand for R will be low, raising P (since lower Rs are more achievable). As time goes on, R can be refined, and in a competitive environment this will bring about ever-stricter requirements for higher Rs - so larger timescales also improve our P. Now I, for one, was born a piss-poor thinker, and I had to be educated rather heavily in the proper use of my gray matter - this education, in turn, was based on a long history of competitive educational systems in a world of scarce funding, and informed by a long tradition based on accumulating and revising knowledge.

So really, to get the R which I enjoy this very day, I only had to be born with enough R to be worked upon by something that was more or less evolved in its own right to do just that. And looking back before that in history, I mean, wow! People were nuts! They believed all sorts of crazy shit; Hell, we still do! Even within humanity, we see wild variance for R, from scientifically literate skeptics at one end to mental patients and uneducated children at the other. The reliability of our cognitive faculties is a fluid thing which can be honed or stunted; it can improve or atrophy over time.

Now comes the question, "How lucky are we allowed to get?" After all, homo sapiens is but one species among many on this teensy little rock of ours. Would it not stand to reason that at least one organism, with enough time, would develop enough cognitive reliability to improve upon it more or less exactly as we humans have in fact done? Plantinga's response was to ask, "Well, who's to say that it would be us?" Argh. I pointed out that whichever species did that would be the one to have these sorts of conversations, and then Plantinga said, "Well, maybe it's dolphins and they have the good sense not to argue about such things." Thank you, doctor. By this point, I had pretty much asked three questions, and things needed to be moved along. Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted.

This post was featured in the 52^nd Humanist Symposium.

101 Interesting Things, part forty: Cnidocytes

2010-03-20T13:19:00.003-05:00

The C is silent, which may ease pronunciation. Cnidocytes are basically nature's single-use, single-cell harpoon guns. Not joking. Here, just look at this diagram:

source

OK, so yeah, that hair-trigger thing is called a cnidocil, and what it triggers is a load of calcium ions to surge into the main body of the cell. Then, thanks to the magic of osmotic pressure, water rushes into the cell from outside, turning the folded-in cell inside-out and propelling a tiny barb on a string into the offending organism at upwards of forty-thousand Gs. As you can imagine, these things don't come cheap: they're something of a pain to make, and so cnidarians (which, whaddaya know, are the things that have cnidocytes) also use chemoreceptors to detect whether or not they're dealing with a prey organism and then fire their cnidocytes in batches.

This is rather like a forward reconnaissance group determining that, yes, the enemy is here, and then a battery of artillery guns firing on the enemy position. Except that the forward-recon-group-slash-chemoreceptors are tasting the target to determine that they're the enemy. And the artillery-guns-slash-cnidocytes are hucking threaded needles full of poison really, really fast at the targets. Oh, and the gunners die after firing one shot. So it's really not like it at all, but now you should be picturing guys in camo licking their enemies, then a bunch of other guys in camo behind them hucking poisonous needles at the other side as they explode in death and organs (this may or may not be what I think of the army). Behold the power of imagery, and how I wield that power with something that might be like panache!

The point is that while we homo sapiens have refined the process a bit, jellyfish and anemones have been doing this shit for ages. Like, literally. Now I need to find something interesting that's not biology, before this turns into "Mother Nature Did it First: The Blog" while I'm not looking.

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-nine: Taste

2010-03-14T13:43:00.001-05:00

In philosophical circles, the "what it's like" of this or that experience is called its qualia, or if you prefer large and impressive words to small and difficult words, its phenomenology. Philosophers have rather admirably tackled this issue, with some of the famous (read: "familiar to me") examples including Nagel's What Is it Like to Be a Bat? and Jackson's Epiphenomenal Qualia. Much has been made of the importance of qualia in philosophy, case in point being Jackson's paper where he uses the very subjectivity of experience to argue for epiphenomenalism. Thankfully, he seems to have come to his senses, though I'm not quite sure how he missed the problem with "epiphenomena exert no causal effects; qualia are epiphenomenal; Mary's quale of red causes her to say 'wow'." Whatever, I used to think that a man dying and coming back to life in three days was a noble sacrifice instead of a stunt; I can't really judge this guy for missing the glaringly obvious.

Speaking of the obvious, I think there's a rather easy example available to dispense with the weighty implications attributed to qualia - in terms of both what qualia might imply, and what we might disagree on when speaking of qualia. The Alert Reader will have guessed by now that this easy example is the sense of taste. And speaking of abrupt transitions, it's time for a biology lesson! We begin with the Wikipedia article, because it is clear and concise, and I doubt my ability to abstain from plagiarizing it anyhow:

Taste (or, more formally, gustation) is a form of direct chemoreception and is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food, certain minerals, and poisons. In humans and many other vertebrate animals the sense of taste partners with the less direct sense of smell, in the brain's perception of flavor.

I want to make it clear here that we are talking about chemoreception, the sensing of chemicals. Not flavors. Flavors are the product of your brain, and they do not inhere in chemicals, but are rather the result of complex interactions between your neurology and what you put in your face. The quick & dirty breakdown is that your taste buds detect the molecular shapes of the things you eat (such as sugars, proteins, or alkaloids) or the presence of dissolved ions (acids are sour, salts are salty); then, nerve impulses are transmitted to your brain to tell it what's going on; then, you react to whatever it is that just happened.

This is what makes things like artificial sweeteners possible. You see, certain chemicals which do not occur in nature commonly (or at all) can trick your tongue into thinking that something is there which might not actually be there, just because they're similarly shaped in this or that way to the sort of thing that abounded in our evolutionary history. Case in point: aspartame. While the body still metabolizes it, aspartame is experienced by the body to be about two-hundred times sweeter than sucrose (though of a somewhat different taste, depending on who you ask), making its caloric content negligible for about the same amount of sweetness. Models of how sweetness works have grown in sophistication over time, the current model describing some eight reception sites and culminating in the development of lugduname, which is estimated to be some two-hundred-thousand times sweeter than sucrose.

Just in case we're not clear yet, let me say this in a different way: your taste buds are shape detectors and ion detectors which react with certain chemicals to send nervous impulses to your brain. The "taste" of this or that thing is the product of what your tongue tells your brain it is shaped like (or its pH value/alkali ion content). Seriously. Isn't that fucking weird?! And even weirder, there are substances called sweetness modifiers which temporarily but fundamentally alter the way sweetness is perceived, such as lactisole (which inhibits the taste of sweetness) and miraculin (which makes sour things taste sweet instead). I mean, whoah!

We were talking about qualia earlier, and now it's time to get back to that. I think that taste is perhaps the most vivid demonstration of the crowbar separation (thank you, Eddie Izzard) between reality and how we perceive it. Once again: shapes can be delicious, WTF. With touch, it's pretty easy to imagine sensations of pressure, wetness, or roughness being at least somewhat related to what's going on (with the possible exception of temperature - I mean, c'mon, rapidly vibrating molecules equals hot? Who comes up with this shit?). Same with perceptions of the visible wavelengths of light, or the audible wavelengths of sound. But taste? Give me a break! There just has to be some subjectivity going on here, because the "what it's like" is nothing like the "what it is"!

This also makes some of the debate about qualia seem rather silly. I'll briefly discuss two examples, first the analogical relationship between color-blindness and supertasting, then the inverted spectrum argument. I'll close with a quick Take That! directed at proponents of intelligent design, and a little treat for sticking it out through this interdisciplinary ramble.

First off, when we consider whether qualia are "the same" among different people, of course they're not. Nobody ever said they were, but when you consider that the colorblind see rainbows in a completely different way than most other people do, and that some people experience taste way more intensely than most other people do, then I think it becomes trivially easy to imagine that no two people experience the world in the same way. Even Epictetus was able to point out that two people can have wildly differing experiences of the same situation, and so it is not necessarily the world itself that causes us joy or suffering, but our attitudes toward it - what I would add is that a person may be just as powerless to change his or attitudes as to change his or her taste buds. Sometimes this can happen for no apparent reason, as with my early disgust and later love for mushrooms. Sometimes it happens due to experience, as with my aversion to light beer. Sometimes it doesn't happen no matter how hard you try: I will never be able to enjoy a resin spurge sandwich, because resiniferatoxin is so much more potent than capsaicin, it's not even hot any more (you just go into anaphylaxis and die).

With that in mind, the inverted spectrum argument is even easier to de-fang. For those who didn't click through (and I throw potholes all over the place, so I really don't blame you), the argument goes as follows:

1. Metaphysical identity holds of necessity
2. If something is possibly false, it is not necessary
3. It is conceivable that qualia could have a different relationship to physical brain-states
4. If it is conceivable, then it is possible
5. Since it is possible for qualia to have a different relationship with physical brain-states, they cannot be identical to brain states (by 1).
6. Therefore, qualia are non-physical.

Now, is it just me, or is the question simply beggared in premise three? I mean, if qualia could have a different relationship to one and the same physical brain-states, then of course they're not physical! Fuckin' duh! But this is exactly what is at issue. We see over and over again in the literature (Just look! Like, anywhere!) that when you change the sensory apparatus, you change the qualia. To a person who is relatively up on the neuroscience, while taste and sight vary greatly across the spectrum of human experience, the conceivability of two possible qualia X & Y for the same brain state Z is somewhere on the order of that for two possible diameters A & B for the same circle C. It's just that no two physiologies are perfectly identical (not even the same physiology at different points in time), so of course subjective experiences vary.

As for the IDiots, well, I'm just going to come out and say that ethylene glycol tastes sweet and is very toxic. So that's a poison detection failure right there. But let's not forget that to supertasters, a wide variety of totally healthy foods taste absolutely repulsive; and to non-tasters, a wide variety of potentially fatal substances taste perfectly fine. Oh, and how about the fact that the sense of taste is based primarily on superficial characteristics of molecular compounds, and is therefore rather easy to hack?

OK, so I'm done tying loose threads together for the night. Seriously, I got way too sidetracked while writing this post. I leave you all with the following cookie, as promised. This one tastes like tough decisions:

Click it!

You should read The Slumgullion!

2010-03-09T19:29:00.002-06:00

My friend Jack works in Navy SIGINT, which is fucking impressive. He's also a great writer and a gamer who thinks a lot (or thinks a little, but very well). He combined those interests at his old blog, Philosophy of Games, which had been up on my sidebar for a while.

Well, he's got a new blog now, called The Slumgullion. If you enjoy wordplay and randomness, then you should head on over and check it out! I'm a fan of his ghastly little tales, in particular.

Arguing on the Internet: Is there intelligent life on Earth? No, really - is there?

2010-03-06T00:01:00.002-06:00

The following is an elaboration on a conversation I've been having with paradoctor over on Daylight Atheism. This whole mess started with a rather scholarly discussion of the conceptual failings of IDiocy, segued smoothly into talk of abandoned dinosaur cities on the Moon, and so far has come to paradoctor asking me if I think there's intelligent life on Earth (whether seriously or facetiously, I cannot tell). Then I thought of the following.

There are days when I would be inclined to say, "No, intelligent life does not exist on Earth." But of course this is absurd, and I am not typically interested in advocating for absurd positions. Although I do freely admit that reality is absurd, I think the only positions worth taking are non-absurd ones - I agree with absurdists on a lot of things, in other words, I'm just not one.

In all seriousness, in my experience, what many people mean by "intelligent" is something along the lines of "has first-person experiences". However, we can't test for this directly, by the same line of reasoning that I can never "really know" what it's like to be a bat because I am not a bat. So we instead come up with things like the Turing test, which of course works for determining whether our candidate is able to do the things an intelligent agent is also able to do, but leaves the rather glaring problem that a Turing-complete philosophical zombie is absolutely indistinguishable from its genuinely "first-person experience-having" counterpart. Then comes Daniel Dennett to the rescue, "We are the zimboes," and blah blah blah.

As Dennett himself explains the idea, "Zimboes think^Z they are conscious, think^Z they have qualia, think^Z they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!" His point is that there is no meaningful difference between thinking and thinking^Z, therefore zimboes are no different from persons as we ordinarily think of them - le sigh... or think^Z of them - and if there's no difference between two things then they're the same. Of course, this leaves the problem of whether things we might not even consider to have first-person experiences are zimboes just like ourselves. We have no reason to think so, of course, but the whole point is what if we're wrong? Pascal's Wager of animism, in other words, with a weird line-drawing problem that seems to center around nervous systems or perhaps circuits (we'll get to this line-drawing later).

The other main camp I've encountered means by "intelligent", "can demonstrate learning", conveniently bypassing the p-zombie problem. Of course, on this analysis, dogs and mice are intelligent for being able to learn non-instinctive behaviors and solve problems - which is generally unproblematic, as they are cute and fuzzy to most people, most of the time. But even pigeons have been shown to form superstitious behaviors, which to me would indicate both an ability to learn and a high probability of first-person experience. The problem here is one of principled interpretation: we say that a mouse has "solved" a maze by reaching its end, having been motivated to do so by the conditions of the experiment; could we not then say that the elements in the Miller-Urey experiment "solved" their situation by forming amino acids, having been motivated to do so by the conditions of their experiment? Both cases involve watching the behavior of particular configurations of mass-energy in an artificial environment. While it might be unproblematic to attribute (admittedly limited) intelligence to insects, for they still have brains, even amoebas engage in what looks like hunting, and they're just single cells! In both experiments, the things being experimented upon merely behaved in whatever ways they could, and I see no principled reason to attribute one with intellect and not the other (given the smooth gradations that can be made at every step of the way in between). Could not we humans, for all our scientific endeavors, be seen as a mere means in reality's effort to understand itself? A sort of cosmic navel-gazing, if you will, in which introspection on things like "purpose" is itself our very "purpose"!

While such wildly irresponsible speculation may make philosophers feel good about themselves, the slippery slope cuts both ways here: we can show that many organisms which "demonstrate intelligence" are completely uncommunicative in ways that we are able to recognize, so who's to say that other things don't simply possess lesser and lesser degrees of intelligence, whether or not they have first-person experiences? I mean, sure, we can draw a line somewhere between fish and rocks, but precisely where we draw it will make a difference (I promise, we're getting there!). Cutting back, when we say that a thing "acts as if" it has a higher level of intelligence than can be reasonably attributed to it, what's to say that purportedly intelligent things almost certainly possessed of first-person experiences aren't merely "acting as if" they have intelligence? The mystical "I" at the helm of consciousness is, after all, a story that the brain tells itself, ret-conning and confabulating memories will-ye, nil-ye.

Dennett argues (very persuasively, I think) that consciousness is more like fame than like being on television, insofar as it happens distributively and by degrees rather than in a strict "on or off" sense. The degree to which we are aware of the calculations performed by our brains is, to my mind, rendered irrelevant - the parts of our brains that execute whatever steps they have learned to execute are no more intelligent than the components of a computer running an installed program (and no less!). Or as Edsger Dijkstra put it, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." But at the same time, any matter could be said to be "running" whatever "program" would perfectly describe whatever it is that it does. In fact, a biophysicist named Gregory Engels has discovered that plants accomplish photosynthesis at their level of efficiency by exploiting principles of quantum mechanics. The Scientific American version actually credits them with performing the computations, but my point is, what's the meaningful difference? (I suppose the "daffyrance" would be that the SciAm folks have never heard of pareidolia.)

So in one sense, "intelligent" is a word and words are made-up, so of course there's no intelligent life on Earth. In a more pragmatic sense, of course there's intelligent life on Earth, but the interesting question is how much of it can we call intelligent? Between these two extremes - nihilism and treating the matter as a necessarily open question - lies just a mess that relies on presuppositions and other motivations to get a clear answer. In short, the only clear answer is a semantically bizarre yet unequivocal No; Yes answers are by their very nature unclear and open to debate (which is awesome!). Of course, this won't stop a bunch of really sexy heroes sporting labcoats and degrees from pointing out which arbitrarily-arranged distinctions have this or that pragmatic value, and this is perfectly fine. But I have neither a labcoat nor a degree, I am instead interested in understanding the whole problem, and what this understanding tells me is that on the one hand there's nothing, on the other hand there's everything, and in between is just a mess. Viva la mess!

OK, finally. This all matters because a computer-based Synthetic Intelligence (there's nothing artificial about the Turing-complete sort of intelligence we're talking about here) would seem to warrant all the rights and responsibilities of any other person. And why not? If you were to upload your complete brain state to a sufficiently advanced computer to "run" you past the expiration of your organic body, would you not then be one such Turing-complete computer-based SI? Would you not want the termination or erasure of your process to be regarded as a murder? Anyone would! Including an SI "born" on a hard drive with no biological precursor. But how can you murder something that's not alive to begin with? And what about copies that modify themselves or blend with each other to the point of no longer being the same "person"? Do we need to count any form of intelligence as "alive"? Or can we simply regard the extinguishing of an intellect as "murder"? This would seem to handily resolve difficulties with people in persistent vegetative states, as well as the abortion of fetuses lacking brain tissues (at the very least). But eating meat would now well and truly be murder, unless we either genetically engineer brainless animals (which doesn't sound all that bad to me), or only eat animals that die of natural causes (which has problems of its own). We can push the problem back a bit by talking about legalistic "citizenship" rather than philosophical "personhood", but the issue remains that we want to make our in-group as wide as possible while still leaving the "stupid mass-energy" open to the sort of resource exploitation that we won't perform upon our persons/citizens/what-have-you. Double trouble if we assign intelligence to rocks, for "running" their "rock programs". (Then PETA changes their name to People for the Ethical Treatment of Mass-Energy, PETME, and comes up with new slogans: "Mining is murder!" "Minerals are people, too!" "Rocks are not ours to skip across the ocean waves or keep as pets in our homes!")

So to answer paradoctor's question, at long-winded last: there is intelligence on Earth in every way that counts; there is also life on Earth in every way that counts; but these do not always "go together". You can have unintelligent life, and intelligent non-life, depending on your definitions. In order to meaningfully answer the question, we need a more robust understanding of the problem with respect to which the question is being asked - it matters what else will be at stake. Or we could keep our answers provisional and revise them as new issues come up. I mean, it's not like we're codifying a religion here or anything.

Life is Complicated, but Ingrid Newkirk is Simple

2010-02-28T19:50:00.003-06:00

On Thursday I caught a couple minutes of the Orcas Gone Wild episode of Larry King Live as I made my "I'm almost out of here but I need one more" cup of coffee in the break room at work. I paid attention instead of tuning it out because I saw the smiling face of Ingrid Newkirk, PETA president and terrorist backer, arguing with what to all appearances was a Paul Hogan lookalike. I'm speaking, of course, about Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo. Just look at these guys! I'll bet if I asked, "Who wants an ice cream cone?", both of them would say yes.

I make fun of Jack Hanna because I like him. At least, based on this first impression, I do. I dunno, maybe he eats babies when he's not being tag-teamed by Ingrid Newkirk and Bob Barker (you can read the transcript of the episode here - not a whole lot actually happened, in truth). From what I saw, though, he seemed like a level-headed guy who argued from a position along the lines of, "Dying sucks but these things happen, and giving people exposure to animals is educational and fun." Ingrid Newkirk, however, is the president and co-founder of PETA, a double-speechy organization for which I hold quite a bit of animosity.

Now, I want to say here that I am all for the ethical treatment of animals. It's just that I suspect I disagree with Ingrid on exactly what that pesky word "ethical" means. I certainly don't think that it means, for example, paying for the legal defense of a man who firebombs a research lab - and if you have any qualms about animal research in principal, while we're on the topic, PZ lays out an excellent defense of just why we need to use other animals for practice, with a close to home case-in-point. At the end of the day, I think animals are deserving of rights when they're capable of upholding the responsibilities that come with them. This doesn't give humanity a license for fuckery, you understand, it just means that wild animals have a tough time playing the civilization game (Hell, humans have a tough time playing the civilization game). You can read a summary of PETA's foolishness here, and of course consider the source. I, for one, am suspicious of anyone and anything that claims to undertake an intellectual endeavor on my behalf, but I have to say they've got their shit together on this one (PETA makes it real easy for them, as it happens).

Anyway! This is about an orca, I swear! I think my favorite moment was when Newkirk blathered on about stuff everybody knows: this is a wild frickin' animal, a male as it happens, "raging with hormones" an' stuff. Christ on a bike, he killed his trainer, he didn't fuck her. According to witnesses - I couldn't get video of the actual incident - the orca grabbed his trainer Dawn Brancheau around her waist, thrashed her about, and then dragged her underneath the water where she drowned. This is how orcas kill their prey sometimes, and the orca probably thought of it as horseplay (but I'm not an orca psychologist, so you can take that with a grain of sea salt). Now, this is a fuckin' tragedy, OK? I understand that. It's awful that a human being died such a brutal, painful, death doing her dream job. But everybody dies, and I think it's better that she died doing something she loved rather than growing old and bitter doing something safe which she hated (after which she'd retire and have to deal with the problem of dying anyway).

This is what I think ~~Paul Hogan~~ Jack Hanna was going for when he said, "This young lady sacrificed her life and she would be sitting here today saying that she'd do it again for the great work she's done and Sea World has done to educate tens of millions of people over the last 46 years." Hanna also took some flak for making what I thought was an entirely appropriate analogy, saying that the dangers of working with orcas don't stop people from working with orcas just like the dangers of working in outer space don't stop people from working in outer space. Oh, and double points to abc10 in California for this report: after seeking to do some sort of exposé, I guess, they dug up all of four incidents across three decades and two continents, peppering their narration with weasel words and loaded language. But then, that's news for you, I suppose.

So while I'd agree that it's "unnatural" in the warm & fuzzy sense for an orcinus orca - which is more like a giant dolphin than it is like a whale, anyhow - to be taken out of its natural habitat and placed into an enormous aquarium where it does things that make people pay money to see it, I'd say that it's just as unnatural in the same warm & fuzzy sense for a homo sapiens to be placed into an enormous steel termite mound where it does things that make people pay money to not have to do them. Oh, I also don't think that there's anything wrong in principle with being "unnatural" in the warm & fuzzy sense, and I don't think there's anything particularly good about being natural in the first place (is there really an alternative, anyhow?), because I don't buy into the naturalistic fallacy. Now, sure, things like consent matter (really and truly!), but I'd wager that if orcas could talk, they'd say that choosing between cooped-up existences where they get steady meals and the total wild where they'll probably starve or be eaten is a tough choice to make. Or if you don't dig that, then at least dig my actual point, that life is complicated and this shit ain't as simple as Newkirk makes it out to be. I mean, she said that the animals at Sea World are swimming in their own diluted urine, as if that's not also true in the goddamned ocean. Fuck's sake.

I need to stop watching TV at work. It rots my brain and makes me ranty.

Just one year of blog...

2010-02-22T20:45:00.002-06:00

...is better than a lifetime of... not blog? I guess so. Look, there are bullets, and I need to bite them before I fizzle out and fade away in an anticlimax of mixed metaphors.

I've been doing a lot of soul-searching this past week, and I came up short on souls but long on answers. The TL;DR version is that I'm mostly done with this blog, and moving on to other things. I feel like I ought to explain why, so here goes.

Oi, where to begin?

First is the "bad news": Breath to Breath is cancelled. The things I wanted to do with the book no longer strike me as worth doing in the first place. So what if I can horrify people? Ooh. Scary. Ooh. I just don't care about that sort of thing as much as I did a couple years back when I wrote the first version of it.

Second, I'm starting to make some real damn progress with my therapist. Without getting too much into the gory details, one of my father's gifts to me over the holidays was a pair of binders that basically lay out the unwelcome adventure of my childhood in police reports, court transcripts, psychological evaluations, and correspondence between my father and the various professionals he had to deal with while raising me. I had no choice when I was a teenager but to bury all this and get as far away from it as I could. Well, I got far away, I got some perspective, and now I'm coming back with the tools to dig it all up and solve it, so that I can put it in its proper place. I've cried more in the last fifty days than I have in the previous fifteen years. But this doesn't exactly leave me with much emotional capital left over to invest in blogging, so I guess this has to go for now.

Third, I finally have some goddamned ambition! For as long as I can remember, I've just been vaguely happy to be alive but relatively aimless, drifting from hobby to hobby and never really applying myself. A lot of this was because I didn't want to have to fit in, and didn't really care about the hallmarks of traditional success. But, to be honest, most of it is insecurity and a general refusal to risk rejection. Well, I'm done being whatever I have to be in order to just barely get by. I mean, I'll still do that, just not merely that, and I'm going to knuckle down and take some steps to being what I actually want to be. I've done a lot of thinking, and really, what I want is to be a librarian: a specialist in the art of research, who keeps the books on our shared knowledge as a species. Sure, sure, things are getting increasingly digital, and the internet is huge, but it doesn't have everything. Yet. But even if it does by the time I get my Master's in library science, I'm sure I'll be able to adapt to the state of the art and go from there.

Fourth, to pay for all this ambition, I'm going to be getting a second job (again), which means that even if I did have the emotional wherewithal to blog, I wouldn't have the time (since I won't be doing the crazy sleep schedule like I did last year). I'm doing this because I need steady income I can budget with to save up for things like tuition and a car and what-not. Which brings me to number five...

Fifth, I'm going to look into advertising for The Quantum Mechanic. The only reason it got written in the first place is because I never once had to have a conversation about marketability - that would have stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks. But now it's done and ready to go, I just need exposure to get some market penetration. I'm going to be looking into the in-house advertising services on CreateSpace - after all, they would probably have a clue what they're doing here - but if anyone has suggestions then I am all ears. As of last week, I'm approved for the Premium Catelog over at Smashwords, but there are problems. For one, I think it's blank. Like, I think the book is not present in the latest version I uploaded, because when I loaded it on Stanza, it showed the title page and then that was it. WTF. So I'm going to be working on that some more this week.

I still need to finish 101 Interesting Things, though. That's one of my long-term projects, and I'll see if I can come up with at least one interesting thing every weekend. That seems workable.

Wish me luck!

Aw, Hell, who am I kidding?

2010-02-12T19:06:00.000-06:00

Ever since I finished The Quantum Mechanic, all I've wanted to do is write Breath to Breath. So fuck it, I'm doing that. I mean, on one hand, I got a book up and going and done and out, so I need a breather or something, right? On the other hand, I also wanted to write BtB before, during, and after NaNoWriMo, and now I don't have a thirty-day constraint so I can take my time and do it right.

Mainly, my problem was that Douglas could solve all of his problems and never really had to accept defeat. But then, of course, that was the whole point of the book: omnipotence solves fucking problems and doesn't merely accept them. OK, done and over with.

Now it's time for some horror.

The tagline for Breath to Breath is, "The end of the world isn't all it's cracked up to be." The title is taken from a poem I read in high school, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, by Alan Seeger. Seeger is a poet who fought and died in World War I at the age of 28. He wanted a glorious death at a young age, and his wish was granted: "He was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre, famously cheering on his fellow soldiers in a successful charge after being hit several times himself by machine gun fire." (Wikipedia) I have a Rendezvous with Death was published posthumously, and here it is:

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

I didn't really appreciate it when I read it in high school, but then again, I didn't appreciate most poetry I read in high school. Ironically, what made me appreciate the poem was an ad for Gears of War 2, a game with great mechanics, well-paced action, and a story that was lovingly handcrafted by people with nine-pound hams on the ends of their arms. God-god dammit-dammit. At any rate, Breath to Breath is going to be about horror, I want to reiterate that: I want to horrify readers, but in a can't-look-away sort of way that is still enjoyable to read. Somehow. That's my challenge here. Wish me luck!

Thoughts on "The Authoritarians"

2010-02-09T21:12:00.005-06:00

It's not often that a book makes me feel naive. I've felt enlightened, when reading good philosophy; enriched, when reading good biology; depressed, when reading about the dirty tricks of advertising psychology; stupid, when reading beyond my ken. But Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians is the first book I can recall that made me feel naive.

Mainly, I suppose, this is because I was already halfway there, but at the same time only halfway there. See, back when I wrote Boss of Bosses, I was joking. Now, it's a well-known fact that nothing is just a joke, but even my inner cynic was saying, "Yeah, sure, it plays out as if this were the case a whole lot - but I deliberately invented a just-so story, nobody actually believes this shit if you'd straight-up ask 'em."

See, that's where I went wrong.

Allow me to introduce you to the RWA scale. I'll be using that acronym a lot, so you'd do well to have your inner Morgan Freeman pronounce that as, "arwah." You can read the whole thing on page 11 of the book (17 in the .pdf), but here are a a few of the items:

Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.
It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people’s minds.
There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.
Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.
This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s traditional place in society.

OK, so agreement with those sorts of statements correlates very highly with disagreement on these other sorts of statements from the same test:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.
Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.
A “woman’s place” should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past.

There are twenty questions and on a nine-point response scale, this means scores can range from 20 to 180. Now, this is disguised as a public opinion survey and given to people who are not told that they're being psychologically profiled based on their responses, which means I was already a leg up and it's not really that impressive when I score a 26.

As an aside, what did surprise me was that although I scored absurdly low on the RWA scale (intro psych students in Altemeyer's classes average 75, their parents and also members of the USA's Libertarian Party averaged 90), and also on most of the other tests which are for things like how dogmatic or socially dominant you are, I paradoxically scored absurdly high on his test for zealotry (p. 124 book, 130 .pdf): "normal people" score in the 10-20 range on that scale, religious fundamentalists score around 40, and I scored a whopping fifty-four (it only goes to 72). Huh. I'm an un-authoritarian zealot*.

Anyway, what's important about the RWA scale is that high scores on it correlate very strongly to three types of behaviors: submission to authority, aggression on behalf of authority, and belief that everyone else ought to abide by one's own conventions. What's depressing to me is how much these things seem to "go together," and what infuriates me is how difficult it is to change this in people. There are ways to do that, of course: going to college, for example. Altemeyer writes,

"The drop [in authoritarianism] does not come from reading Marx in Political Science or from the philosophy prof who wears his atheism as a badge. These attempts at influence can be easily dismissed by the well-inoculated high RWA student. It probably comes more from the late night bull-sessions, where you have to defend your ideas, not just silently reject the prof’s, and other activities that take place in the dorms, I’ll bet."

Hanging out with other people, in other words. And it turns out that people tend to turn out a little less authoritarian than their parents, regardless. And what does every parent tend to want for every child? To go to a good college! So the good news is that, as we can see with this whole "civilization" thing that's been going on around us, authoritarianism tends to go down over time. I mean, we have to interact with different people, so as long as we stop any one monolithic culture from literally taking over the world, we ought to be in pretty good shape (in the long run, that is - if there is a long run).

One of the more interesting things Altemeyer talks about is the Global Change Game. Basically, it's Axis & Allies for grown-ups, but with money and birth control and climate change and such: you take five-dozen people and divvy them up among nations, have self-appointed leaders (called "Elites") select themselves in each region, then tell the Elites they're allowed to embezzle and whoever embezzles the most wins, and let them all go! When Altemeyer had groups play with like-scoring persons on the RWA scale, fun things happened: the low-RWA game had a record-low death toll, a huge amount of cooperation, and improvements in all areas of life for all regions; the high-RWA game ended prematurely in nuclear war, had the clock turned back two years to try again, and continued down a path of bickering and one-upmanship.

But then Altemeyer ran two different high-RWA games, one completely devoid of social dominators (people who tend to be low-RWAs but tend also to be cynical opportunists - the test is on page 164, 170 in the .pdf), and one with social dominators sprinkled about. Now, you see, about 5-10% of people score highly on both the RWA scale and the Social Dominance scales, and so some of these "Double Highs" would have made it into the first high-RWA game. As Altemeyer puts it, Double Highs "win the gold medal in the Prejudice Olympics," and their authoritarianism seemed to make up for the amorality of the low-RWA dominators, so the dominant game went about as awfully as you'd expect it would (oddly, much less embezzling - the more money in your pocket, the less you can use to get your team ahead of the next guy's, apparently).

But take away the dominators, and what do you get? A whole lot of boring nothing. No fighting. No teamwork. When stripped of their leaders, the high-RWA folks proved a rather uncreative and insular lot. The crises that reared their heads more or less ran rampant, nobody thought outside the box to solve their problems, everyone just tried to work on improving things for their own in-game in-group and they pretty much stagnated their way into mediocrity.

There's a whole lot more that I didn't cover (politics is what you'd expect, religion is what you'd expect, but the numbers show some alarming things), which is why you should go read it. Did I mention it's free? Go read it! Also, Altemeyer bares good portions of his methodology in the footnotes, and I found his numbers very convincing - his results lead to the conclusions he concludes, so long as he didn't falsify his data. He also holds himself to higher standards than other researchers, again, so long as he's not outright lying about what the generally accepted standards are. All in all, I found it a very accessible and rather gripping read, which is not something I ever thought I'd say about a psychology book.

* - Altemeyer opens the zealotry test by asking respondents, "Now I want to know, in my constantly nosey way, what you believe in. Do you have a most important outlook or way of understanding things? Maybe it’s a religion, a philosophy, a social perspective like socialism or capitalism. What do you use, more than anything else, to make sense out of things, to understand 'life'?" I thought about it and answered, "critical thinking." I read the first question, "This outlook colors and shapes almost everything I experience in life," and had the immediate knee-jerk reaction, "This is stupid. I'm not a zealot." But then I caught myself reacting to the threat of cognitive dissonance, and forced myself through the test, thinking carefully about what I really think, and yeah. I'm a critical thinking zealot - but I also know that acting like one won't get me my way most of the time (because being right and being successful don't always go together - thanks, critical thinking!), so I deliberately hold those types of urges in check.

So maybe it makes sense that when Silver Garou told me that everything written is true with a straight face at that one party, I nearly vomited. (True story.)

"The Quantum Mechanic" submitted for e-book publishing!

2010-02-07T23:07:00.005-06:00

As the link at right indicates, The Quantum Mechanic is soon to be published as an e-book. I took care of all the reformatting this weekend and everything is in order, all that remains is for the good folks over at Smashwords to give it the final go-ahead (I'm #211 in queue as of right now).

EDIT: As of right the Hell-ass now, The Quantum Mechanic is ready for sampling and purchase as an e-book at Smashwords! You can read 55% of it for free on your e-reader to see if you like the new fourth chapter and the way I've integrated the un-deleted scenes. Also, I've verified that it works Stanza on my iPod (I don't have a Kindle, and I can't get the .mobi-wranglin' app to work properly... though I may be doin it rong). While it works, so to speak, there are issues. The acknowledgments aren't displaying properly, and neither does my citation of a Carl Sagan quote in the Foreword. Like, this stuff is there in my source document, something just got bollocksed up in the conversion process. I'm looking into it, but the rest of the free preview (all the way up through the end of "A Little Piece of Heaven") appears to work perfectly.

Of course, if you want to read it now, you still can! The way Smashwords works, once you own a book you can download it infinitely (so you can keep up on any later updates at no additional cost, and they'll be posted here). It's all DRM-free, too. While the book is technically "copyright me," it's copyleft in spirit, which means that while there's no substitute for showing your appreciation in a "rent and groceries" sort of way, I honestly care more about getting my ideas out to people who enjoy them than I care about making money for my hobby. (This is why there are no license notes.)

DOUBLE-EDIT: BWAHAHA! OK, so the second edition is uploaded, converted, and approved! (The same link above still works.) The problem? I have the same problems. The acknowledgments still don't display properly, and neither does the Sagan attribution in the foreword. However, there is an exciting new development! You see, these problems happen if you view the e-book with white text on a black background - but they don't happen if you view the e-book with black text on a white background! What the shit-fuck-tits is going on here?!

No, seriously, if anyone knows what the Hell-ass-balls I can do to fix this, I'm all ears. I'm just pissed and too lazy to look it up right now. I'll continue to look into it once I get some actual fresh content up, but I will be tremendously grateful to anyone who's able to bring a solution (or even a suggestion) to me.

I should probably say something about this...

2010-02-06T20:03:00.003-06:00

Per KarateMonkey's request, I'm making The Quantum Mechanic into an e-book because CreateSpace doesn't do this, and I want people to be able to buy and read my book however they want. But they have a thirty-five page style guide, and I really want to understand the process so I can do all the reformatting intelligently and at one stroke (without paying someone else to do it), but going through all this is enough to drive me to drink.

Oh, who the Hell am I kidding? The fact that it's Saturday drives me to drink!

No, but seriously, I'm doing this e-book thing good an' proper, and then it's on to talk about The Authoritarians. Because that book makes me feel really naive. And I just finished it, so I really wanna talk about it.

Oh, and I also have a very important commitment to killing foreigners on the internet with my brother A tonight. I mean, they're different from us. We can't abide that shit!

The Importance of Perspective, or: Who WOULDN'T Want a Personal Slave?

2010-02-03T20:50:00.004-06:00

I'd like to say two things up front: first, that I definitely sympathize with those who suffer from ennui, from wanting more out of life, from a numbing dissatisfaction with the way things are going; second, that I don't know these women from Eve and their situations are probably more complicated than they've even openly and candidly admitted.

That said, Rant: On.

This past Sunday, I read Delia Lloyd complain that modern life is hard work. Fucking surprise! I read two of the pieces she linked by Sandra Tsing Loh, one transparently escapist fantasy which I can't tell if Loh actually pines after or not, and one rather longer slice-of-life lament which smacks of teenage angst in middle-aged terms. I'm sympathetic to Loh, I really am - but for shit's sake, this lady has some growing up to do.

The cockles of my heart are not nearly so opening to Lloyd (and that ain't much to begin with), probably for this bit alone:

...here's what we ate: cold pasta covered with leftover Tikka Masala sauce (tomato sauce inexplicably AWOL in kitchen cupboard), some soggy carrots cooked four hours earlier for kids' dinner, and the coup de grace: canned sardines. Yum.

This may not strike you, General Reader, as particularly infuriating, but what you have to consider is context, which at present means, "whatever the Hell I was thinking about five minutes earlier." In this situation, the context is that I had just woken up from dreaming about snowmobiling, which I have never done but long to do, and I marveled at the fact that our intellects have afforded us as a species the opportunity to transform what would normally be a difficult and harrowing experience (i.e. trekking across harsh, snowy landscapes) into leisure activity. Awesome! And while thinking of this, I assembled for myself a breakfast of leftover chili with fried eggs and Tabasco sauce mixed in, topped with cheddar cheese and green chiles for garnish. It was delicious, and it was reheated leftovers.

So I hope you understand what I mean when I say that I find Delia Lloyd's attitude comparable to a moist, aromatic pile of dogshit. It's unpleasant to step in, to look at, to smell, just to be around in general.

Seriously, this whining fuck-stain goes through a busy day doing things that most people regard as hallmarks of success, and complains at the end that she wants someone else to go through the boring parts so she doesn't have to. What is this happy horse-shit? She engages in a day's work of her chosen career path, has the resources to meet the wants and needs of her children, spends some quality time involving herself in her children's lives, then does a little more work before having a late dinner with her husband. Note that she does not reheat it at her option. And rather than just, oh, hire someone, she pines after someone to do the extra business of cooking, cleaning, and clothes-shopping for free? I am simply baffled by the... the... I dunno, the presumption of affluence, I guess? Maybe just the laziness.

To be fair, I'll bet she wasn't thinking about the day-to-day lives of our genetic ancestors as she went about her business. I'll bet she wasn't thinking as she prepared that day's meal, as I had been, of the marvels found in nearly every kitchen that allow us to prepare and store food from miles away, grown and prepared by someone we'll probably never meet, for consumption whenever we fucking feel like it. And I'll bet she also wasn't thinking about how children were our first retirement plans, about how the shotgun approach to child-rearing is regrettably still a necessity in certain parts of the world, or about how indulging the desires of said progeny is a luxury afforded to a precious and relatively modern few in the grander scope of our shared history.

In short, to understand Mrs. Lloyd's perspective, I have to concede an awful lot to general thoughtlessness. It's just a goddamned shame that she can't be more thoughtful in appreciating her life.

Then again, I guess I'm fucking lucky. I mean, my father taught me how to clean floors and sinks, but he also taught me the art of hinokishin. When I punched a hole through my bedroom door, he disciplined me by teaching me how to cut a door to size and hang it, making me fix the mess I had made. He taught me to thank lightning-struck trees for the wood they gave us for carving walking sticks, and to leave campsites better than I found them because it's the right thing to do and I'm not any more important than the next person to come along. And I guess Rant is Off now, because I find myself feeling sorry for these sorts of people who fantasize for something more without appreciating the full value of what's right the fuck in front of them.

IT CAME IT CAME IT CAME!

2010-02-02T21:32:00.003-06:00

OK, I know I said I wouldn't put anything up here until tomorrow, and that was coincidentally when the newest proof of TQM was supposed to arrive, but IT CAME TODAY SQUEEEEEEEEE!

Buy my book!

Yay yay yay! I'm an actual author now an' I can get money for the story I wrote an' everything! I'm so happy!

OK, but seriously, buy my book. This is probably the only time I'll be shamelessly and unapologetically pimping for myself, because now there's a link to buy it over in yonder sidebar. (Please buy my book!)

It's a particularly French flavor of boredom.

2010-01-27T20:01:00.003-06:00

Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

My inspiration has been severely inadequate this past month. I desperately hope this has gone largely unnoticed, but I don't wanna kid myself. I've been trying to make myself keep writing, but everything I write just looks like shit to me.

So: new plan! Since I am by nature a compulsive writer, and typically can't not write, I am going to take my best friend's suggestion and try to recharge my creativity batteries - I shall accomplish this by not writing anything at all for an entire week. I don't know if I can go that long without saying something about something. I mean, I have the internet, and the State of the Union Address is tonight. There will be no shortage of things to write about! But seven days from today, I should be chomping at the bit to just get my opinion out there, rather than getting depressed over my complete inability to articulate an idea in a persuasive or interesting manner.

Wish me luck!

Poison for Your Brain: The Stupid, It Burns (from both barrels)!

2010-01-25T19:15:00.004-06:00

So I skimmed over PZ's take on Adams' childish whining, but then Rhodopsin sent me Orac's scathing excoriation and I just had to read up. I even gave Natural News my e-mail address just so I could see the whole damn thing.

This is Poison for Your Brain, and not something serious like, uhh... something... else... so I'm just going to up & say that this guy's showing more ego defenses than Jessica Rabbit shows leg. (Pro Tip: that would be, like, all of them.) Can we go through the list? I think we can!

We've got delusional projection, denial, distortion, maybe splitting (that one's a bit more of a stretch); the whole article is a case in acting out, there's clearly some fantasy at work, I'll give him a free pass on idealization and passive aggression (since I took splitting and I'm already a little stretched); actual projection, and this is not a joke, we can see the jealousy and injustice collecting common to any martyr complex and/or motivated troll; I'll give him another pass on projective identification and somatization because I don't care to play doctor that seriously with him; OK, I guess that's it, actually. The neurotic defenses are missing, as far as I can tell, and the mature defenses are also completely absent.

Seriously, take a look at the Cliff's Notes. This guy needs to see a shrink before he offs somebody. This is just stupid. And all over a fuckin' internet poll, for crying out loud.

What the fuck?!

In other news, neocons apparently think that theories of truth are a big fuckin' secret. (Also via PZ.) Seriously, these people need to take into account that Wikipedia exists (how about libraries?), or... or... or I don't know what. Fuck, who am I kidding, the shit either works or it doesn't. It all depends on whether the masses are idiots or educated enough to see through the bullshit. Whoops, I think my cynicism is showing!

Quickies Before Bed

2010-01-21T22:05:00.002-06:00

Arguing with a cyberspace publisher is probably easier than arguing with a meatspace publisher. Still, it's frustrating to hear that my cover image needs at least 0.125" bleed on all sides after forgetting it from the first time; then to remember, "OK, I'll just add 0.25" to each dimension in Photoshop," but forget that it's 0.25" total and instead add 0.5" total; then to be told that I still don't have at least 0.125" bleed on all sides. Last I checked, 0.25 is at least 0.125.

Keep in mind that I'm doing all this fancible graphics work on a Mac I bought when I graduated high school in 2002. Yeah, the RAM upgrade I got with it put it at a total of half a gig. It takes me several minutes to open Photoshop, I have to watch a progress bar creep along every time I save, and making the .psd into a .pdf gives me nearly enough time to write another book.

Then again, I'm glad that it still just works. But still. Anyway, here are a few of the things that I've been looking at on the internet, which I think you should look at, too:

Via Rhodopsin, here is the most useful Amazon product review I've seen in a while.
That reminds me of this shirt, sent to me by Silver Garou (but, like, months ago). Look, if you haven't seen this before, you need to read the reviews. It's almost as good as this.
Via Pharyngula, The Counter-Creationism Handbook now has its own iPhone app! Awesome!
Via my crazy browsing habits, I somehow started by looking at Rise Against music videos, and ended at the most effective commercial in the world. I hate myself for liking this, you have to believe me.
Rhodopsin also just now sent me an interesting article where a dude takes an idea and some numbers and mashes them up with another idea and other numbers, and while I'm no longer really qualified to check his work (Hell, I can't even check calculus limericks any more!), it is at least an interesting coincidence.
I've also started reading Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, and I wish I'd read it back in 2007. Then I wouldn't be tempted to say that he stole my idea and went back in time to do actual research on it. (This happens more often than I'd like to admit. See also: James Downard's An Ill Wind in Tortuca, brought to me via Silver Garou.)

OK, that's enough out of me. I need sleep. And to get this damned book finished!

Bullshit Pulpit: The Doctrine and Dogma of Double-Deism

2010-01-19T19:31:00.000-06:00

I'm getting real sick of religious people getting their trump card of "God says so" in public discussion, so I am inventing a new religion to trump their trump. A "double-trump," if you will, hence the name: "Double-Deism." Today's post will detail the tenets of Double-Deism and how precisely these counter the tactics of whatever religiot you're arguing with at the moment. First and foremost is to remember to improvise, and turn the believer's own tactics against him or her. Counter any dismissal with accusations that your opponent is being intolerant and disrespectful of your carefully considered and deeply held religious convictions; brook no disagreement on the legitimacy of your theology by asserting that any statements discrediting Double-Deism (including this post's admission that it's a joke religion) are damnable heresy; and remember that your religion is ultimately whatever you say it is, no matter what.

Double-Deism is the belief in the generic anthropomorphic creator deity known as "Double-God." Double-God is simple enough to understand: whatever positive qualities are ascribed to your opponent's deity, Double-God is twice as awesome. Period. If someone tries to tell you that their god is infinite, and that Double-God can't be doubly infinite, prove your superiority with math. Proofs abound (it's amazing the bullshit that people will buy if you just say it right), but perhaps the simplest and easiest one would be to start by having your opponent consider the set of all even integers, the set of all odd integers, and the set of all integers. While each set is infinite in size, the set of all integers is equal to the other two sets combined, and so it is doubly infinite (or at least its infinitude is double that of the other two). Similarly, while your opponent's deity of choice may also be infinite, Double-God is simply twice as infinite.

It's important to keep in mind at this point that, while you understand Double-God perfectly (because Double-Deism means whatever you want it to mean), you cannot expect the infidels to understand. Double-God has not revealed itself to them, and so they will be unable to embrace it. This means that you must always be very, very nice to the unbelievers: tell them in as sickeningly sweet of a tone as you can manage that it's OK, you don't expect them to understand the depth and sophistication of your faith as Double-God has revealed it to you. Really, it's no problem, they don't have to understand or believe you, they just have to take you seriously like they ask you to take them seriously. That's all there is to it.

The Alert Reader will have noticed that I referred to Double-God as an "it," and this brings us to the mystery of double-doubleness. You see, while many anthropomorphic deities are male or female, Double-God is twice as male as the male gods and at the same time twice as female as the female gods. But this is still only double (and doubly so), it is not quadruple. There's no such thing as "Quadruple-God," after all - that would just be silly. This also makes Double-Deism the first truly egalitarian religion ever, since the ~~mascot~~, I mean, ~~frontman~~, that is, central authority figure is both male and female (and doubly so) at all times and in all respects. This is not a contradiction because maleness and femaleness are not mutually exclusive, Double-God just makes the infidels think they are.

Double-Deism also has a central holy text known as the Super-Bible. Unlike other holy texts, which are written on physical pages in Earthly languages, the Super-Bible is a book of pure meaning that cannot be so contained. This is what makes the Super-Bible so much more glorious and awesome than any Earthly text. It also means that you can't just pick it up and read it cover-to-cover; so glorious a book is not meant to be sullied by mortal hands for mortal purposes. Instead, Double-God delivers divine revelations to true believers on an as-needed basis, using whatever book is handy at the moment. Infidels will see nothing but a mundane book, but true believers will see the Super-Bible as Double-God wants them to see it at the moment. Double-God can also show different believers different parts of the text at one and the same time, and nobody can prove that this is not what's happening, so everyone has to go along with it no matter what.

It's also important to remember that anything said to be from the Super-Bible that works against the point you're trying to make at the moment is despicable lies from an infidel who was making things up to discredit true believers such as yourself. And if you ever contradict yourself, you have the option of either A) denouncing your past assertions as the muddled ravings of your past infidel self before you saw the light (if this was a long time ago), or B) asserting that there is no real contradiction, only a failure to understand in the mind of your opponent (if this was not a long time ago). The Super-Bible is a perfect and true holy text, after all, and therefore cannot contradict itself. All you have to do is work backwards from there!

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the truth of Double-Deism is its eschatology. The miracle here lies in the fact that every doomsday prophecy is true. You see, every time someone said that the world was going to end, it actually would have, but for the fact that Double-God stepped in and saved the entire Universe. Double-God has to do this a lot, which is why it never has any time to perform stupid miracles or give private conversations to unbelievers. I mean, subverting the apocalyptic machinations of every other supernatural critter in the ~~human imagination~~ Universe is a rather taxing ordeal, because many of these entities are themselves infinite and omnipotent deities, and not even Double-God's doubly-doubled infinitude is enough to keep up with all of that noise and also tally the fall of every sparrow and attend to next Tuesday's football game. You take care of that shit yourself, and get some fucking perspective while you're at it, you fuckin' ingrate.

So yeah, this should be enough to get you started on being a full-fledged proselytizer for Double-Deism. Remember to stay flexible and improvise, and never give any ground to your opponents which you won't use against them later. For those of you who have never been infected with a religion before, it can be difficult to put yourself into the religiot mindset; just remember to start with "you're right," apply pareidolia and confirmation bias liberally, and "Double-God made a miracle happen" is a legal move. Also, you have to stay serious and nice the entire time, to drive home the point that you are sincere in your beliefs no matter how crazy they appear to be. Religious people do this all the time, after all, and we need to beat them at their own stupid game here. Keep those things in mind, and you'll be all set to flummox your opponents in public debate for years to come!

Examples for Practice:

Religiot: You can't have morality without religion!

You: Yes we can, because Double-God says we can.

R: You only believe that because you're deluded by faith.

U: That's not true, and we could still have morality without religion even if Double-God didn't give us permission. Double-God just confirmed this, I read it in the Super-Bible just now. Here, it says, "Humans can make a perfectly legitimate morality without religion, whether or not any deities exist. Double-deists understand this, independent of their faith. This would also be true even if Double-God didn't exist, which it does. The word of the Twice-Monarch, thanks be to Double-God."

R: [Deity du jour] created the Universe and everything in it.

U: Sure, but Double-God created that deity. They had a falling out, though, and now your deity just doesn't want to talk about it.

R: Life has no meaning or purpose unless those things are given to us by [deity du jour].

U: Sure it does! Double-God says so, right here in the Super-Bible! [Elaborate as in first example.]

Poison for Your Brain: Side hugs. I am not making this up.

2010-01-18T19:11:00.002-06:00

You need to watch this video. You also need to record your reaction to it on a video of your own and upload that to YouTube, because I am a schadenfreude junkie and I want to see your brain break. OK, that won't happen, but you still need to watch this video:

I don't think I can stress enough that this is not a joke. In a world where we are fighting over women's rights to reproduce or not, where relatively harmless cannabinoids are outlawed while addictive carcinogens are perfectly legal*, where you have to play primitive and silly social games to get laid because you can't just go out and pay someone to fuck you however you like, where legal contracts for domestic partnerships are only legal in certain places if the parties' plumbing matches in a certain way, where the same label of "militancy" is used to describe tactics of public debate and tactics of delusion-based violence alike - in such a world, there are people who are worried about the propriety of hugs. "Full-frontal hugs," that is. Side hugs, apparently, are OK. So is being a rough rider, I guess.

I feel the need to point out that I am not making this up. My friend Jack, who told me about this last night, said that he had to look up over a dozen internet articles before he was convinced that this is not a Poe. I only needed three, but then again, I've been to an Acquire the Fire concert. I've seen this shit in action firsthand.

These lunatics (and I mean that literally, these people are actually crazy in an important way) really believe that the mere chance of your groin coming into contact with the groin of another person, in a way that might possibly somehow be stimulating (if you've never actually had sex, that is), merits the overhauling of a nearly universal display of familiar affection. Double-you tee fuck. The killer, for me, is that even if you do their whole side-hug bullshit like you're posing for a photo, you still have to watch your hands, or you might inadvertently brush up against a nipple!

In a way, though, I find this almost poetic. Here is yet another religious warping of a perfectly natural part of being human, engineered to protect against imaginary harm in an impotent display of piety, to separate them from the unwashed masses in their minds while not actually accomplishing anything of substance at all. Really, it's religion in a nutshell.

* - For clarity, I think they should all be legal and the answer to abuse and addiction, like so many things, is therapy and education.

Dear The Internet: Today I made another blasphemy!

2010-01-17T16:10:00.005-06:00

OK, so I'm all about doing those things I say I'll do. Really, I am, I'm just a procrastinator, too. At any rate:

You can click that for huge. And, y'know, complete. So far. Look, this is like a progress report because I wanted to put something up, I'm just sick of Photoshop right now.

Anyway, in all my dawdling, I came up with a far grander vision for what I wanted this to be (with a little prodding help from Silver Garou and Rhodopsin), and I've scaled it back to something I can do in a reasonable amount of time. Two weeks isn't already past unreasonable, is it? I think I can safely tell you that a pile of puppies is involved. Stay tuned!

So that only took, like, a month...

2010-01-16T12:03:00.003-06:00

I swear, I can do decent work when I sit down and take my time. And get some feedback (thanks, Silver Garou & Rhodopsin!). Here it is:

Click for huge!

It's a wraparound, that's just the front. The click-through is bigger and has the whole actual thing. I'm giving myself the rest of the weekend to stare at this and see if anything is egregiously wrong with it, so if there's any feedback, the proof isn't shipping until Monday.

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-eight: Emily Rosa

2010-01-15T21:13:00.001-06:00

Today's interesting thing is also a person! Before I get to Emily, though, I want to talk about some really stupid bullshit. It's called Therapeutic Touch, or "TT" if you feel like making cutesy ga-ga noises. Good thing I do!

TT was invented from whole cloth by Dolores Krieger (a PhD & RN who really ought to know better) and Dora Kunz (a theosophist who apparently wouldn't know a gullibility zombie if it bit her on the face). Pro Tip: one did. My favorite part about Therapeutic "Touch" is that it's a misnomer. It's also known as "Non-Contact Therapeutic Touch," which sounds exactly as stupid as it is. That's right, kids: Therapeutic Touch does not involve any actual touching.

Because that would be icky.

Anyhow, TT is more or less the alternative (read: ineffective) medicine equivalent of prayer. You cook up a story about "energy support systems" (or "invisible sky genies," as the case may be), then you think really hard that you're engaging in some kind of action at a distance with any degree of causal efficacy. Then you wait and see: either something good happens because of whatever else was going on at the time, or nothing good happens and you blame something else. You don't even ape science by going through science-like motions (ahem, homeopaths), or use nifty rocks (crystal fuckers), or anything of the kind.

It's so stupid, even a nine-year-old could debunk it - and that's where Emily Rosa comes in!

When Emily was in the fourth grade, she decided that she wanted to see if TT was the shit, or just shit, so she decided to put it to the test at her school science fair. She got 21 bullshit-spouting blatherskites (or, as Wikipedia puts it, "TT practitioners") to participate in her experiment, which was very simply set up: picture a table with your standard science fair three-part display board, and there are two holes for hands in the bottom of the board; put an idiot on one side, and a fourth grader on the other, and have the idiot stick his or her hands through the holes. Then the fourth grader flips a coin to decide which of the idiot's hands she'll place her own hand over, and the idiot is supposed to tell the fourth grader where her hand is.

TT practitioners have described the energy field they claim to feel as having the consistency of gelatin or taffy; they say they can really feel it. Rosa's study put the lie to that, with the average idiot scoring a 4.1 out of 10 trials (chance would put them at 5). Emily's science fair project was so straightforwardly awesome (as opposed to backwards and crookedly awful) that it got published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, placing Emily in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person to have a research study published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Some incorrigible whiners have said, more or less, "Hey, no fair! She's just a fourth grader, she can't do real science!" Of course, the great thing about science is that whining accomplishes nothing; if you think you can do better than a fourth grader, all you have to do (and the only thing you can do) is actually do better than a fourth grader. You may have to perform at that level a few times for the sake of a little something called "statistical significance," but that's really all there is to it!

...or can't they?

Hating on Haiti

2010-01-13T18:40:00.000-06:00

So Rhodopsin told me about this enormous earthquake in Haiti a couple of nights ago, right after it happened. I was doing Something Else at the time, and the numbers he was saying weren't really registering with me, so I kind of ignored it (my apologies for that). Turns out, it was kind of a big deal.

Like, the biggest deal of its kind.

PZ and Ebonmuse have already talked about this, and about Pat Robertson's bat-shit fucking loco assertion that Haiti somehow deserved this for making a deal with The Goddamned Devil to gain independence. Not a joke. Here's the clip:

Robertson hasn't been the only one to spout inanities over this, either.

I wonder how much money Pat Robertson has? I wonder how much good he could do for the people of Haiti who have been devastated by this completely natural disaster? I wonder how much good he will actually do for these people? My initial guesses are, in order, "a fuck-ton," "a fuck-load," and "fuck all."

Well, I just went and did a milli-load of good for Haiti. Hey, Pat! What would Jesus do? You think he'd blame the victim? Eh, maybe you're right - that guy's got a spotty track record.

No, seriously, Haiti doesn't even have a FEMA, they need all the help they can fucking get. Direct Relief is one of the most efficient charities in the world. You can also choose to donate specifically to their Haiti response.

Humanist Symposium #48: A Winter Wonderland

2010-01-10T23:55:00.003-06:00

A hearty welcome to one and all for this forty-eighth edition of The Humanist Symposium! This weekend, it's gotten down to twenty below zero (Fahrenheit) in Central Illinois: the solstice is past, but winter proper is just getting started as we've only gotten our first "real" snowfalls in the last three weeks or so. Similarly, I had thought that my paucity of posts would end with my return from the frigid northlands, but the togetherness and celebrations were just getting started as I caught up with old friends who had come back to town for new year celebrations and what-not.

The season seems to permeate even our Humanist blogosphere: the theme of this symposium, from reading the entries, is clearly a wintry one. We start off with the starkest reason for the season, death and rebirth. No matter what the superstitious zealots among us may say, the real reason for the season - and I've forgone the scare quotes because I actually mean this - is the death and rebirth of the Sun. In the northern hemisphere, our star wanes from the autumnal equinox until the winter solstice, that particular rotation of our Earth with the fewest hours of daylight in the entire circumstellar cycle.

Graham Phoenix will deliver our opening sermon, some thoughts of his on Death and Departure. A reflection on a Humanist memorial service, which I sincerely hope shall be given to me on my demise, he says of his departed friend:

She believed so much in people, she had no spiritual beliefs. Spirituality, religion, to her was a con that exploited people. There was no God, no after life, nothing beyond the memory someone holds in their heart for a person. So her touchstones were nature and people. Her funeral was a humanist one, first I have been to.

From Graham's description, the service seemed less a "goodbye" and more a "remembrance." It seems to have rubbed him the wrong way, which is a shame; or perhaps it was simply inevitable that he should feel some loss at his friend's passing, and no memorial service could ameliorate that. This dovetails well into our next entry, Greta Christina's thoughts on Atheism, Death, and the Difference Between Pessimism and Realism:

It bugs me when atheists with a more bleak view of death than mine present that bleakness as a logical consequence of atheism, the inherent and natural result of not believing in God or an afterlife. It bugs me partly because I disagree. Obviously. But it also bugs me because it treats a question of personal opinion and philosophy and perspective as if it were a question of fact.

Greta reminds us of the role that emphasis and perspective have on our outlooks in life. The particulars of what we emphasize about our lives on earth, and what perspective we take on the things that come our way, go a far longer way than many wish to acknowledge towards shaping our lives. As a case in point, Michael Fridman reflects upon the role of luck in his life and concludes that he is Living on Borrowed Time:

If we don’t get ourselves extinct, if things go well there may be a time in the not too distant future where (due to a growing population and improving living standards) most humans who ever existed will have had the same cushy conditions. This tirade will become obsolete — since based on a historical view I should have lived well past 25. But until then, it at least seems clear to me that we should stop romanticising the past — and in the words of a TED speaker I don’t remember, start romanticising the future instead.

Well said! We should all strive to help build such a future, where "there but for the grace of chance go I" sort of luck can apply to as many as possible. Although, I suppose that it couldn't really be called "luck," per se, at that point.

But sometimes it is appropriate to romanticize the past, if by "romanticize" we mean "think fondly about." Andrew West reminds us of this in A Humanist Miracle, comparing and contrasting the 1947 original A Miracle on 34th Street with the 1994 remake. Like all good reviews, West extrapolates the comparison between the two movies into a lesson we would all do well to take to heart:

Even if Christmas was 100% described in the Bible, we’d still get to strip the weird stuff and enjoy the rest. This isn’t rude or disrespectful – we’re not preventing others celebrating, but we’re not bound by their rules, because we’re not in their club. There’s no copyright on celebration, and nobody gets to forever assign meaning to ritual. I don’t care why we put up coloured lights – I just like pretty lights, dammit! This is the pleasingly secular message of Miracle 1947: celebrate however you like, and don’t worry about what other people think, but stand firm in your convictions.

This is the sort of lesson we should be looking for in all our daily lives, taking the opportunity to live out our values as TechSkeptic does while Shoveling Snow:

Some days, if the storm is real bad, I'll go around and help two or three people dig out their cars. I get offered money, I get asked what I want. I tell them I don't want anything, I just want them to help someone else out some time. Yeah, I saw the movie "Pay It Forward". I think its a pretty good idea, even if the reality is that almost no one pays it forward.

The great thing about such thoughts is that, if enough people behave like that, it becomes reality. These nice little things are, after all, the whole point in a very important way. We don't just advocate for Humanism because it makes more sense or is more rational or has its underpinning supported better by the evidence. I mean, of course it does those things, too; but instilling Humanist values into a population seems to make that population better, to the best of our ability to tell. Godlessness, on a large scale, is good for people. And a good thing, too, as Adam Lee presents some encouraging statistics and solstice well-wishing in Happy Holidays! Atheism is Growing!:

What this shows, as I've said before and will doubtless continue to say, is that we should ignore the brow-furrowing and finger-wagging of the Very Serious theologians who sternly inform us that we're doing a disservice to our own cause by advocating and defending it in public. We have every reason to believe that atheist campaigns of persuasion are working, achieving their intended purpose of convincing more people to become atheists and weakening the social prejudice that treats religious belief as immune to questioning.

This should provide some comfort to the Mandi Kayes of the world, who have seen "meaning" connected to "religion" for too long by far, and fallen under the illusion that there is any necessary connection between them at all. As Mandi writes in a post on Fulfillment,

There are far too many people, including myself, who have never taken the time or effort to find their own sense of fulfillment in their lives. I’ve always relied on my pre-fabricated bubble to give me everything I thought I needed in my life. And when times get tough, I fall back into the familiar.

So here’s to finding real fulfillment within yourself in 2010.

Cheers!

Cheers, indeed! Keep fighting the good fight, even when it goes into your own head. In the greater scheme of things, we should be so lucky as to be able to worry about things like leading fulfilling lives, rather than worrying about having a life at all. Life is complicated, and Andrew Bernardin reminds us of this in The Mundane Secrets to Happiness:

When I first moved to Florida I noticed this about my new area: store clerks and other service providers seemed so much nicer. Sunnier in disposition. Now I know why that may be so. While it is not “something in the water,” it could be a bunch of things in the wider environment that lend themselves to more satisfying life experiences. And so the greater number of genuine smiles and warm words.

The "little things' really do add up, they're what we make our lives out of. Think about it - is your life made up of a few "big things," or a whole bunch of "little things?" Bernardin drives the point home with a bit of applied rhetoric in What to Do About Woo in the Family:

I rarely respond well to being publicly bitch-slapped by the truth. Instead, I appreciate having a breadcrumb-trail of clues placed before me so I may make the progress and then own the conclusion myself.

Nothing like applying a little bit of constructive psychology to the family, eh?

We'll close this symposium on life, death, meaning, and family togetherness by coming full-circle. Cubik's Rube brings us to a vexatious close with his thoughts on a Daily Fail and Akmal Shaikh:

But amidst all this vagueness, there’s one thing I’m pretty damn sure of.

And that’s that, when China executes a British citizen, whatever your thoughts on capital punishment in general might be, the correct response is not “I’m glad he’s dead, and the rest of his lot should all go the same way.”

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty much the gist of this Daily Mail article by Leo McKinstry.

I read it, and so should you, and I have to say that I am pissed. McKinstry's impermissive deontological Othering is exactly the sort of thing we need to be fighting against. Law is not good in and of itself, drugs are not bad in and of themselves, and if you have such a huge problem with something that your society needs to kill people to stop them doing it, then you're probably barking up the wrong tree. Last I checked, the measure of civilization was how permissive it is in letting people do whatever they want so long as they don't harm others. Letting people fulfill themselves in a manner of their own choosing is the logical consequence of expanding our moral circles, and McKinstry's shrieking demagoguery is precisely the opposite of that.

So, in closing, let us Humanists go forth and shovel some snow, so to speak. Let us find fulfillment in making the world a more fulfilling place, let us spread the good news of our message to all corners, let us improve the lives of our neighbors and thereby also help ourselves. And let us do all of this with a happy heart, in full knowledge of the sobering fact that death comes to us all. After all, spring is coming. See you in three weeks at The Purloined Letter! Peace and love to one and all.

Bullshit Pulpit: The Gospel of Godlessness

2010-01-06T18:51:00.002-06:00

My roommate, Silver Garou, recently saw this salt stain where his car was parked when he was visiting his girlfriend:

Click for huge!

He was kind enough to share with me, and now I want to share it with all of you. Now, everyone knows that A is for Atheism. Clearly, this is a sign from the Universe that he should keep on in his faithlessness and spread the gospel of godlessness. But there's a deeper meaning here, and that's what I want to explore today.

We begin with Douglas Gasking's proof that God does not exist. It is elegant in its simplicity, and it goes something like this: the impressiveness of an act is the product of both its inherent difficulty and the handicap to the actor; the creation of all existence is the most inherently difficult task imaginable; not existing is the greatest handicap imaginable; therefore, God (i.e. the most impressive actor imaginable) must have created all existence without existing himself. Otherwise, we're just not talking about God.

What's so amazingly powerful about this little bit of argumentation is that it succeeds where every other ontological argument fails: it explains how God could create all of existence, which is completely senseless when you consider that if God was around then he would have been all of existence. By positing God firmly outside existence (i.e. in the idea space of nonexistent entities), this ontological argument finally explains how stuff comes from nothing in a way that those science-challenged blatherskites can finally understand!

At this point, I think I should point out a key difference between Gasking's argument and all other ontological arguments, namely: Avicenna, Anselm, Plantinga, et al. have always sought to establish God's existence with their syllogistic gyrations. But they fail as a category for the simple reason that the existence of an entity cannot be positively established by argumentation alone. However, the impossibility of an entity's existence (and thus the necessity of its nonexistence) can be established by argumentation alone. To wit: from the definition of a square and the definition of a circle, we know that square circles cannot possibly exist, and thus we know that pro wrestling is fake. (As an aside, compare the commercial success of pro wrestling with that of religion, and then try to tell me with a straight face that the dim-witted mouth-breathers who believe in either of them aren't just plain retarded - and don't bother getting offended, because I didn't just make a slur; I mean that these people literally have a crippling mental disability.)

At any rate, Gasking's argument is not properly ontological, but rather the antidote to such foolishness. As a decoupler undoes the work of a coupler, Gasking's is a deontological argument. Since deontology also means duty-based ethics, we are therefore duty-bound to accept Gasking's argument by ethics, which is always the most important reason to do anything. We just have to buy it, no two ways about it, and anyone who says she doesn't buy it is lying to you and probably to herself as well because she hates God. Yeah, that's right: believing in God equals hating God. Furthermore, this argument applies with equal force to all possible gods (and even most of the impossible ones!), cancelling out all possible ontological arguments for those possible gods, forever, The End. You just can't argue with logic like this.

Perhaps the most elegant aspect of this whole scene, however, is that it also makes sense of the platitudinous deepities spouted by empty-headed theists. A "deepity," for those unfamiliar with the lingo, is Daniel Dennett's term for a profound-sounding statement with two interpretations: one of which is literally true but entirely trivial, the other of which would be profound if it were not manifestly false. Dennett's example is the statement, "Love is just a word," because of course the word "love" is just a word; but the referent of love is not a word, stupid. My favorite deepity is, "The only thing you can see is light," which sounds profound but is no more amazing than, "The only thing you can hear is sound." And so deepities like Karen Armstrong's "God is the God behind God" become obviously true when we replace the word "God" with what we really mean by it: a nonexistent entity, a nothing. Nothing is the nothing behind nothing. "God created all of existence" becomes the rather innocuous (and also scientifically supported) "Nothing created all of existence." "We're on a mission from God?" More like a mission from nothing! God is the source of morality? Oh, I get it now! Nothing is the source of morality - it all makes sense now!

And if a nonexistent entity could create all of existence, then of course it could also perform the comparatively trivial task of forming a salt stain to speak to an atheist. The message from God is clear as the salt crystals in which it is written: "I don't exist, so don't believe in me; and tell other people not to believe in me, too." So hop to it, folks! Go spread the gospel of godlessness!

Quickies Before Work

2010-01-06T08:19:00.002-06:00

Got my tablet & stuff in the mail, so now I gotta draw that thing I said I'd draw. Also! I need to finish re-doing the cover for TQM, because that totally didn't happen over solstice vacation. And in the field of Participating in the Internet, PZ Myers is proposing a 2013 meetup in DC - I'm in, and so should you be! Speaking of PZ and Participating in the Internet, The Friendly Atheist has a poll about who is the most godless atheist of 2009. The options are "PZ Myers" and "Everyone else in the Universe combined." I picked PZ, because "everyone else in the Universe combined" includes theists, and there's no cancelling out how much godly idiocy they have (you can't be, like, negatively theistic - theism is already a negative thing! Rimshot!). Anyway, you should vote.

Yes, you.

Right now!

Legal Round-Up!

2010-01-05T00:01:00.000-06:00

So it's been a new year for almost a week, but I've been in the frigid northlands since the 23^rd which basically means that I'm incommunicado because one of my family's computers has like forty-five viruses (that I could find), and the other is a five-year-old Mac. Argh.

Anyway, we've got a bevy of new laws going into effect, so I thought I'd take some time to go over a few of them. In completely arbitrary order:

Three States Forward: ...and one state back. New Hampshire and DC joined Vermont and Iowa in legalizing gay marriage, bringing the total to five states. Maine backed out like California in a November referendum (Iowa is poised to do the same, if things don't go well), Massachusetts and Connecticut are still going strong.

Drive-by Communications: Wisconsin, Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas banned texting while driving, bringing the total number to 28 states to pass such measures. You also can't use cell phones at all if you're in a school zone (hands-free devices are still allowed). In the sensible traffic laws department, Wisconsinanians are now allowed to pass on the shoulder and make U-turns when the Moon is in the second house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

Eat Right, Or Else: Raise your hand if you know why trans fats are bad for you. OK, if your hand is in the air, you can scroll past this. If not, then you should read up: our enzymes suck at breaking down trans fats, and they're accordingly more likely to accumulate in your bloodstream and clog your tubes. So California banned them.

Oregon Recognizes Religion as Disability: Well, sort of. Oregon passed a law that "redefines 'reasonable accommodation' to be more in line with the ADA." Consider the definition of delusional disorder:

Delusional disorder is characterized by the presence of recurrent, persistent non-bizarre delusions.

Delusions are irrational beliefs, held with a high level of conviction, that are highly resistant to change even when the delusional person is exposed to forms of proof that contradict the belief... Typically, while delusional disorder sufferers may be distressed about the delusional "reality," they may not have the insight to see that anything is wrong with the way they are thinking or functioning. Regarding the earlier example, those suffering delusion might state that the only thing wrong or upsetting in their lives is that the government is spying, and if the surveillance would cease, so would the problems. Similarly, the people suffering the disorder attribute any obstacles or problems in functioning to the delusional reality, separating it from their internal control. Furthermore, whether unable to get a good job or maintain a romantic relationship, the difficulties would be blamed on "government interference" rather than on their own failures or omissions. Unless the form of the delusions causes illegal behavior, somehow affects an ability to work, or otherwise deal with daily activities, the delusional disorder sufferer may adapt well enough to navigate life without coming to clinical attention.

Die ~~In a Fire~~ of Cancer: Florida, Michigan, and Arkansas joined nine other states in requiring cigarettes to turn off when not in use. North Carolina and Virginia joined 28 other states in passing some manner of smoking ban, refusing to let restaurant owners (or bars in 25 states) decide for themselves whether they'll be smoking or non-smoking. Oh, and you can't smoke with someone under 16 in your car if you live in New Brunswick.

Fun fact: the EPA's infamous December '92 study linking secondhand smoke to lung cancer was shot down in July '98 in a 92-page Federal trial for basically being a piece of shit (less-than-92-page rundown here). The short version is that secondhand smoke is gross to some people, which is a reason to allow business owners to forbid it on their property, but it is ultimately no more harmful than seeing boys smooch each other - though it's really gross to some people!

There are over 40,000 laws going into effect, and I'm not even going to bother summarizing them all (especially the silly ones, like Texas teens being unable to go to tanning salons without parental consent). But if you, Alert Reader, can come up with some more interesting ones that are either new or changing as of 01/01/2010, I'll be happy to add them in with credit!

Dear The Internet: Today I made a blasphemy!

2010-01-04T19:35:00.005-06:00

Ahem. Inspired by Saturday's Daylight Atheism, I cooked up a little blasphemy in my kitchen just now to tide me over until I get the rest of my stuff in the mail. All of the below photographs can be clicked for huge.

Can you guess where this is going?

Wait for it...

I'd say "boo-yah," or something similarly triumphant, but the thing is, I don't give a fuck. Like, I know that some book-burning, cartoonist-threatening, bacon-hating shit-heads with carp for brains would get their undies in a bind over this, but they're stupid, so who cares what they think?

OK, that's enough pointless nonsense for now. I'll wait for the death threats to roll in, and follow them up with Miss Piggy kissing Mohammed (unless you, the General Reader, can give me something even more blasphemous to draw).

Follow-up here.

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-seven: Music

2009-12-30T13:05:00.003-06:00

Music is probably one of the "realest" things there is, if "being real" can be considered a continuum and not just a binary thing. If you're having trouble imagining a spectrum of realism, think about how real chairs are: well, OK, on the one hand there are actually chairs in the world, but on the other hand there are just atoms arranged chair-wise. But those atoms are composed of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and those things are a little bit "more real" than the chair-like arrangements into which we place them. If you can dig that. Or it could be that, since words are imaginary, I'm just playing a pretty word game. Your choice, I guess.

The best definition for music that I ever heard was, "organized sound in time." Now, the sound of music (phenomenologically speaking) is just vibrations in the air wobbling your eardrum and then turning those wobbles from air vibrations into liquid vibrations, followed by tiny hairs in your inner ear picking up those vibrations and telling your brain that you're hearing sound. But what's behind that is a bunch of rhythms, and what makes music interesting is the arrangements of (and relationships between) those rhythms. I don't just mean time signature and beat, I mean the rhythm with which the air must vibrate to carry, say, a C#.

Now here's where the "realness" of music comes in: the relationships between those vibrations are a matter of mathematical proportion. While it's fairly arbitrary what names we give to our notes and what scales we use, these rhythms have a direct relationship to the bits of reality from which they are constructed. What precisely that means is up to the reader, but the fact remains that sound (or more generally, rhythm) is a direct expression of the properties of reality that produce it. There is a key difference, however, between rhythm as we perceive it and rhythm as it actually is, and here I want to illustrate the point by reference to some of the differences between Indian and Western music.

Both Indian and Western music are based on the physics of sound, but whereas Western music only recognizes twelve notes in an octave, Indian music recognizes twenty-two notes in an octave. Interestingly, both styles typically choose only seven notes in that octave range to play in a piece, and this determines the key of the piece. While the variations of Western music typically involve play with harmonic progression, Indian music tends to focus its complexity on melody and rhythm: in an Indian performance, the audience can keep a steady rhythm while the performers play around, and then they meet back up and the audience is impressed with how they each went and played with the rhythm and then managed to meet back in the middle. In a Western performance, the audience just kind of sits and listens while everyone stays in the same rhythm and plays different parts in harmony. And whereas Western music tends to have a "mood," Indian music has a time of day: Westerners have happy music, sad music, suspenseful music; Indians have morning music, afternoon music, night music. And that's just skimming the surface! (A more thorough read can be found here.)

The point is, a Westerner might call Indian music dissonant and arrhythmic, while an Indian might call Western music repetitive and dull. Each would describe their own music as rich and soulful and all kinds of other positive adjectives, while the other thing is "just weird." Which you like seems to be based only on where you grew up, the local style to which you have grown accustomed, like language or an accent: Indians have three distinct sounds which Westerners seem to translate all as the "D" sound, and Westerners seem to do this thing with migrating Rs (which is why a Bostonian will "wash the cah," while a Texan will "warsh the car").

But underneath that style is the same physics, the same vibrations, the same travelling disturbances through reality. Much like language is all about communicating ideas, music is all about communicating rhythms; but while ideas are only in our heads, rhythms are actually "out there in the world." I think that makes music and rhythmic expression a little bit more real, more interesting, more visceral, than the things that we do with language alone.

Family Togetherness > Ideology

2009-12-28T14:47:00.002-06:00

I got into town late on the 23^rd, and everything since then has been a blur of cooking, eating, drinking, wrapping and un-wrapping... y'know, family togetherness. But on the 24^th, my family went to a Christmas Eve service at the local Episcopal church. I had just shown and explained my book to my mom and her girlfriend, and they seemed to be really impressed with the fact that I cranked out a word count in a month and then followed up to get my proof copy, but only now - now that I've written a book, it seems - do they understand that all my talk of God being imaginary means that I actually don't believe in God. Like, I've been an atheist longer than I've been an adult (if you count 21 as adulthood, that is), and so my mom seemed to hem and haw and hesitate about asking me to come to service, even though I haven't done so for years.

There was one exception, two years ago: my youngest brother and sister were in the pageant, so I put up with being bored for an hour to support them. Oh, I also went to a church when my choir director died - he was a great guy, and celebrating his life/honoring his death was worth acting against my "church is stupid" principle.

Well, I told my mom that I'd sleep on it, and so I did. I woke up thinking that I really didn't want to go, but it meant so much to other people, and it's really not all that much trouble for me. Oh, they also have a gay pastor at this church, which sweetened the deal for me: like Pat Condell, I don't want there to be gay clergy only in the sense that I don't want there to be any clergy, but I have no problem with someone wearing a certain set of clothes just because of how they choose to stick it in the naughty place. And maybe if churches become inclusive and permissive enough (which, historically, has defined what church is not all about), then my problems with churches will just go away and religion might become a positive thing in the world after all. Or maybe my head's in the clouds, I don't know.

Well, Christmas Eve slipped by, mostly. I had to help the kids accomplish their lists for the day: E had to finish a present for Mom, C had to clean her guinea pig's cage because it hadn't been done for weeks, that sort of thing. And my task was to make the Jell-O for Christmas dinner, since it was layered and required brief periods of attention between long spans of inactivity. Just my style! Anyway, I'm in the middle of making Jell-O (four of seven layers in), still wrapping presents, my brother A & my father haven't shown up yet, and mom tells me it's time to go to church. They're heading out the door right now! We gotta go!

Well, OK. I'm thinking to myself, "I could go to church and be bored but have a little bit more family togetherness - which we're getting anyway - or I could stay home and do useful things that actually accomplish something. Hmm..." So I said that I needed to get to a stopping point, but if Dad & A were going and the whole family would be there except me, then I would go. I called my dad and left a message as the rest of the crew headed out the door. Well, Mom calls me from the road to say that they have actually seen my father's vehicle on the way, then my father calls me to say that he's bringing A to church and wants to know if I'll be there.

Ugh. Fine. OK. "Yeah, I just got to a stopping point. I'll throw on my boots and coat and I'll be right along." I briefly consider a shot of rum - just to keep me warm, you understand - but then I think better of it. I'm only five minutes late, and according to the program, they're still singing the prelude hymn. I sit down amid hugs and whispered greetings and smiles, all of which I return, and then hear the priest say, "Blessed be the one, holy, and living God."

The congregation responds, "Glory to God for ever and ever."

The priest continues, "Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen." (You see, I kept a program. It's all annotated an' shit.)

The first reading was from Isaiah 9, which seems to be all about the Lord's people coming together to live in peace while all those ungodly folk live their awesome lives in civilization. Read it. It's civilization versus the country bumpkin believer, and God comes along to lay low the people who actually try to improve their lives and feel good about themselves for it.

It wasn't all backwardness and foolishness, though. There was some humor, too! At one point, the pastor said, "Therefore, according to his command, O Father," which I totally heard as, "...according to his commando father." It gave me the giggles and I had to explain by passing notes. And at the end, when we were about to sing Joy to the World, the pastor realized that we skipped over Silent Night and said, "Wait! We forgot Silent Night! It's just not Christmas unless we sing Silent Night, after all." That gave more people the giggles, so I had no problem laughing along.

So, OK, an hour of boredom, but at least everyone's nice. There was no Hellfire or brimstone, no shrieking condemnations of difference, just a bunch of innocent god-walloping nonsense with a central message of love. I can't quite get behind that on account of the nonsense, but it could be a whole lot worse. And it made for a great conversation starter, too! At dinner, my mom started telling me how the congregation has shrunk with the gay pastor, and she told me about how she ran into one of the no-longer-attending families while she was out shopping and asked why she hadn't seen them at church. She responded that there had been some changes, at which point I said, "Huh. Cute. A bigot in civilized clothing." I got to talk about Conservapedia and their stupid project to remove liberal bias from the Bible, too. Then we actually talked about the Bible, and how it's a mixed bag and you can get whatever you want out of it depending on how you go into it. Good conversation!

There was something of a reprise last night at my grandparents' place (they have a 26-acre valley for a backyard, so this is where the sledding happens). I got to talk about my book again, and my mom brought up that I came to church, and then she brought up the Conservative Bible Project again and I got to talk all about it. So it was good, in the end, because the family unbeliever got to rally with the rest of the crew against what we all recognize to be idiocy. And at the end of the day, I really don't care what people believe, so long as they leave their unprovable crap at the door when it comes to telling others how to live their lives. There's a difference between "You should take your full course of antibiotics to cure an infection" and "You should refrain from sticking it in the naughty place in thus-and-such a way because it makes baby Jesus cry." They know the difference. They just... believe some things that I find silly.

Whatever. I probably believe some things that they find silly.

Oh, I had entirely forgotten about the Jell-O, but of course church didn't get blamed. I just went out to buy more and picked up where I had left off. It came out great!

Turning off my computer...

2009-12-23T17:30:00.001-06:00

...and so begins my sojourn to The Frigid Northlands. Happy whatever you do, everybody!

A Matter of Scale

2009-12-22T07:28:00.002-06:00

I have to thank Silver Garou for pointing me at this video of the Universe as we see it:

It reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex from Adams' Hitchhiker trilogy. Then there's this, from Rhodopsin:

The Universe is such a huge and awesome place! And while I'm at this, I should also mention that cl linked me to Symphony of Science a few weeks back, which is great stuff! What's not to love about auto-tuned prose from great science popularizers, set to ambient techno with imagery from science programs? Here's Our Place in the Cosmos, which features one of my favorite Dawkins quotes: "Matter flows from place to place and momentarily combines to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing - I find the reality thrilling."

Enjoy!

Arguing on the Internet: Writer's Remorse

2009-12-21T20:45:00.000-06:00

I've been re-reading my response to Sarah Braasch, both in light of the comments left there (and in the DA thread), and because I re-read things often to try to get a different perspective on them. Well, now I've got a different perspective on my own words, and I feel compelled to say something about it. Here I go!

The more I read what I wrote, the more it comes off as a couple pages of "I don't like your style, young lady!" It strikes me more and more as finger-wagging nonsense, and I always get pissed when people do that to me, so why would I do it to anyone else? As both Sarah and Ebonmuse have said, the criticisms are valid ones - but what was I criticizing? Well, Sarah didn't genuflect before the facts in a manner suitable to my tastes - she didn't cite sources when making points. Why did that stick in my craw so much? Because... because... because facts matter, dammit, and if you don't keep track of where you get them from, then you might be wrong and then... and then... well, you'd be wrong.

But was Sarah wrong in anything she said? Umm... no. As Ebonmuse was kind enough to point out, the facts are on Sarah's side here - while her apocalyptic tenor* may indeed have been hyperbolic, I think such hyperbole is justified by the facts in this case. And ultimately, the availability of that justification is what matters to me, not whether it's laid out right the Hell then and there. Missionaries do in fact bring their death cult with them and tie it to what comforts of civilization they also offer, and their death cult is in fact anti-civilization, anti-health, and anti-sanity. How better to bring about the end of the world than by poisoning all that is best in it, both in practice when giving aid to people, and in the public mind by causing the disease to be consistently linked with the cure? Oh, and for clarity, disease=unevidenced superstition (but I repeat myself!), cure=secular civilization (oh, I repeat myself again!).

To be fair, nobody goes all the damn way to Africa just to ruin a bunch of strangers' lives. These missionaries, of course, have nothing but the best of intentions in their heart of hearts, I'm sure of it - but who's always saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? Must be someone who believes in Hell...

Anyway, I think I got a little carried away with my academic desire for citation. But this ain't Wikipedia, it's not even college, and so picking nits over something like that just seems inappropriate now that I've had a couple days to think about what I wrote. My first reaction to her piece was that it was moving and well-written, and while that admittedly does rely on the sort of background that she and I share (i.e. growing up amid religious insanity), we do in fact share that background, and I think appealing to that is no bad thing. As Sarah said, this is not academic writing, so my criticisms are at least a bit out of place.

I guess what I'm getting at is that everyone's an asshole from time to time, and I think I just took my turn. Sorry about that. I should have thought about what I was saying before I said it, and then I might not have gone off on a tangent about... nothing at all, really.

* - I try to use the phrase "apocalyptic tenor" at every available opportunity, because I read it here and it's awesome (it's also awesome here). But am I the only one who thinks of a giant Luciano Pavarotti destroying Italy when this phrase is mentioned? That would be quite an "apocalyptic tenor" indeed! Man, now I want to see giant Luciano Pavarotti wreck the Vatican... that would be awesome, too! Also, today's Dinosaur Comics is pretty awesome, too (fortune cookie moment).

Too Awesome Not to Share

2009-12-19T11:57:00.002-06:00

This was just too amazing to leave alone on the internet:

click for big, source

So yeah, this site is just awesome. It might even be called "epic," in a "win" sort of way. For the win.

Arguing on the Internet: Whose Work Is Sarah Braasch Doing?

2009-12-18T15:16:00.004-06:00

So I've been thinking about Christian Missionaries Are Doing God's Work, and re-reading it with a more critical eye. I started off liking it a whole bunch, but then again, I started off agreeing with Sarah in the first place. Now, I think the piece (as a stand-alone essay) expects perhaps a bit too much from the reader, or bites off more than it can chew. Maybe both.

I'm not troubled by the initial revulsion at the missionaries on the plane. I think it's an understandable emotional reaction all on its own, and the conversation Sarah relates between her and her friend shows a great opportunity for growth. My issue starts with "The Ghion was a sea of entitled whiteness."

I understand that First World folks can (and do) cop an attitude of entitlement, especially when they think they're helping others and see any inconvenience as ingratitude (or some such horse-shit). But this is never shown, we are simply expected to believe that an attitude exists without ever seeing it in action, rather than presenting it as a reasoned conclusion from any observation that was shared with the reader. Sarah says, "The only dark faces were those of the employees and the babies," but aren't those the people who live in this country? And isn't the point of a hotel to accommodate its guests? And why on Earth is she complaining that children are being taken from an impoverished nation to a home with parents who can provide for them? I understand that the situation these children are being brought into is far from perfect, ideologically speaking; but I think it's a damn sight better than the destitution in which they would otherwise be raised.

Then there's this bit: "I would have been more than happy to forego any creature comforts to not be staying in the same hotel as every other overfed Westerner in Addis Ababa. ... I decided to soak in the tub for a little ablution." Now, maybe she had no choice in terms of which hotel to stay in. I'm just saying, it makes for a rather awkward juxtaposition to say, "I'd sacrifice X to escape Y; but now I'm going to indulge in X without getting away from Y at all!" When you don't have a choice about Y, sure, you may as well do X anyway. Just sayin'.

Moving on, there's the conversation with the other missionary (from a story logic perspective, this would have been an excellent place to capitalize on that aforementioned growth opportunity). Sarah asks, "Why can missionaries and evangelicals and proselytizers sense a former believer like sharks detect blood in the water, like rapists and child molesters can smell the lingering odor of victimization emanating from the pores of the abused?" I didn't know that they could! But in any event, it doesn't seem like this particular one is doing anything of the kind. Sarah, by her own admission, isolated herself - she put herself in a position where she looked lonely, and this other person seemed to be trying to make friends with her. She reined herself in and remained civil, but it seemed unnecessarily strenuous for her to do so. Was she starting off in a confrontational mood, I wonder?

At the end of it, Sarah simply leaves as soon as her cigarette is finished, which is coincidentally when the missionary is at her most vulnerable. Why not take this opportunity to exercise a little patience and do some missionary work of her own? Moreover, what is this Christian likely to say to her friends about the encounter? Would she glowingly recount the friendly conversation she had with the atheist, who wasn't a fire-breathing Satan-worshipping demon but actually a nice person just like her? Or would she probably have something else to say? Perhaps something that reinforces her preexisting notions about atheists?

As for her conclusion and call to action, I'm half with her, half confused. On the one hand, I agree that the actions of missionaries cause direct and real harm, but on the other hand, Sarah doesn't seem to acknowledge how screwed-up the pre-existing superstitions and circumstances of these people often are. It's not like the Christians need to tell these Africans to believe in the supernatural, they do that on their own already. Really, the harm that the Christians do is... well, yeah, by mis-educating them on sex, they actively contribute to the spread of disease. By not correcting misogynist attitudes, they reinforce those attitudes. Christians are throwing fuel onto an already blazing fire of primitive superstitions, and the fact that the transplanted primitive superstitions are linked to the civilized help these people bring makes for a detrimental juxtaposition on the world stage. Sure.

However, I think her point would have been better served if she limited it to showing how the actions of American Christian missionaries are detrimental to their goals. They want to help people? Great! Go help people! Oh, but if you also want to spread your religion, then there's gonna be a problem. 'Cuz, you see, we checked, and it turns out that religion is bad for people. Her points at the end, backed up with some statistics (perhaps links to news stories concerning the torture of witches inspired by missionaries, or wars started over ideas spread by missionaries, or really any kind of data at all), would have admirably served this purpose. But "they are the apocalypse?" Sure, Christianity's a death cult and all that - as Pat Condell points out, the defining moment of Christianity is its founder's death, and all the benefits accrue after death, and so on and so forth - but I think a bunch of unsubstantiated sneering renders such an apocalyptic tenor a bit needlessly hyperbolic. To wax verbose.

So yeah, as I'm sure can be gleaned from the feedback Sarah's received already, the stuff she talks about isn't entirely unreasonable. However, to someone who doesn't have a background of experience that is remarkably similar to hers, to someone who doesn't know about the racism/sexism/elitism/entitlement that often runs rampant in God's chosen cults, this could come off as a bunch of condescending and confrontational bullshit. That objection could easily be removed with the simple inclusion of a few supporting facts, even anecdotes: perhaps a story of a missionary berating a hotel employee, if such a thing did in fact happen. A good piece of activist writing should educate the reader on problems, not simply state them and blame them on somebody. Or it could just be a rant, but then it ought to get the rant tag, so people know to take it with a grain of salt.

From Metaphysics to Politics: High horses and the myth of identity.

2009-12-17T00:01:00.004-06:00

I'd like to start today's philosophical sojourn with a thought experiment. Cut off your pinky in your mind's eye. Are you still yourself? Of course you are. What about your arm? Without your arm, you're still yourself. Both arms, both legs, even your torso - if you could survive as a Futurama-style head in a jar, you'd still be yourself. You'd have lost your gastroenteric and spinal nervous systems, and those go a long ways farther to influencing your "brainy self" than most people realize, but you'd still more or less be you.

The same goes for your hair color. If I woke up tomorrow with blonde hair, but otherwise the same, I'd still be D. If I woke up tomorrow with green skin, I'd still be me. If I woke up tomorrow in a body of the opposite sex, I'd still be who I am, that one thing about me would have just been changed independently of all other things.

How about your past? Take any day of your life, and delete it from your history. It could be the most important day of your life, but you were still you before it, and you'd still go through the changes you'd go through afterwards (although perhaps a radically different set of particular changes) in a continuously changing flux of "you." The same goes for each and every facet of your personality, every emotional reaction you've ever had, and so on and so forth. Take yourself apart, and where is the "you?" There is no "essence of you," aside from a constantly-changing patchwork mish-mash of atoms and the events those atoms have been through.

There is no such thing as "you."

Lots of people, yourself included, have "an idea of you." And as the philosophers Parker and Stone have reminded us, an idea doesn't need to have a referent in order to have effects in the world. The idea of you is a real idea, but it is not the same thing as you any more than your idea of a duck is an actual duck (for clarity, your idea of a duck is not a duck). Actually, when you get right down to it, there's no such thing as "a duck," either (just "atoms arranged duck-wise," which is practically the same thing but not exactly), because all language is language of convenience. So even though there's "really" no such thing as you on the one hand, of course there's "really" such a thing as you on the other. To remain intellectually honest, however, we have to keep both of these senses in mind when we talk about ourselves so that we can make sure that we're not confusing the two in our own minds, conflating them when speaking to others, or equivocating between them while trying to make a point.

Why do we need to do this? Well, to not do this would be careless and stupid, I think. Do you want to be careless and stupid? I don't know. I sure don't. But there's no law saying that you can't be careless and stupid, so to each his or her own, I guess. Keep that in mind for part two, coming soon! (Guess what? Soon is now!)

Much has been said lately, in the corners of the Universe that I frequent (I'm not just talking about the internet here), about all the wrongs that have been done to this group/person at the hands of that group/person. It's a real shame - I'm not being facetious or sarcastic at all here, it really is a shame. Suffering is a part of life, it's not all flowers and rainbows. But then people go and do something weird: rather than actually try to work together to do something constructive about it, some douchebags seem to want only to whine and whine. They seem, for whatever reason, unwilling or unable to get outside their own heads and stop taking things personally. Yes, these things often affect them personally, and that's rotten, but even though it's very real in one sense, it's all in your head in another important sense. Both senses are valuable, because while the former can help you motivate others to be on your side, the latter will help you make your case without whining.

Now, I want to get one thing very straight at this point: some people talk about their problems because they want sympathy, and some people talk about their problems because they want solutions. Some people only respond to talk of problems with sympathy, and some people only respond to talk of problems with solutions. Doing only one or the other of these is incomplete, and that's the TL;DR version of my beef today. As emotional creatures, we need sympathy - so give it when you can! Really! Be sympathetic to your fellow human beings and their experiences. But problems are for solving, too, so offer solutions as well! And when you tell people about your problems, be grateful for what sympathy you do get, and also be prepared to make progress and move towards solutions, which will involve taking a little advice, because it's probably coming your way anyway. So be a little tough on yourself, swallow your pride, and take whatever comes your way as an opportunity to learn.

Or did you think you had the right to tell other people how they ought to respond to you? Or the ability to control how others think of you? You're not the main character, y'know. Everyone's got problems. Sure, lots of people don't know what it's like to be you, but you don't know what it's like to be anyone else, either, so stay off that high horse. Besides, at the end of the day, the world is under no obligation to take you seriously, and you're not entitled to anything. Every single part of you, every facet of your personality, every choice you've made, every word you utter, every action you take, is subject to question and ridicule. So what?

So what, ideed. This is not a rhetorical question, I really mean this: take anything that's happened to you, any injustice you've suffered, whatever storm you've weathered. Ask yourself, "So what?" And keep asking it. So it's wrong - so what? So, it hurts! So what? So this is bad for the whole world! So what? Keep asking so what, and you'll see that dwelling on the negatives is pointless - it's the wrong attitude to take. Yes, it hurts and is bad and is unfair, and yes, that sucks, and yes, that's awful. But so what?

So, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do something. "I shouldn't have to!" Wrong attitude, asshole. "I already am!" Really? Awesome! Again: so what? We'll go a better way this time: so I'm fixing problems. So what? So I'm making the world a better place! So what? So, things are going to be a little less awful now. So what?

So, hopefully, you're happy with what you're doing and you've found some meaning in your life. So what? Well, isn't that the point? Hasn't that been the point all along? How we survive is what makes us who we are, so how are you surviving? Are you throwing a tantrum, literal or metaphorical, petulantly tapping your foot as you wait for the world to conform to whatever idea of fairness or justice you think it ought to automatically respect? Or are you getting over your bad self, taking care of your own damn needs, and dealing with people by giving them what they need to get on your team and work with you? One of those approaches works. The other is stupid.

This is politics: dealing with people, giving others what they want in order to get them to give you what you want. It's not always fair, it often sucks, but it's how things work. And if you get enough people on your team, you can get things headed towards your way in the long run. Doing this in the best way possible requires an uncommon level of honesty and self-awareness that can only come from refusing to let your wounds define you. If you choose to forge your identity (and imaginary as it is, we all have an identity) from all the wrong that's been done to you, if you insist upon emphasizing your victim status, then you cannot reasonably expect anything other than continuous failure and misery.

But even if you do everything right, then you will still suffer failures and setbacks from time to time. That's just how things go sometimes. It sucks. And things aren't always this simple, I know. What I'm saying is, simplify things for yourself. Are you missing some advantages enjoyed by others in society? That sucks! So take them. If you got a sub-par education, go to the library and give yourself a better one. Shitty social circle? Make new friends. Low self-esteem? Start taking steps to improve your life and build your self-esteem on that. Heal your own wounds. Take control of your own life. You can't ever do it all the way, and you might not win, but you can start, and you can keep at it, and you can refuse to let the bastards keep you down. And then you can put yourself in a position to help others like you, because you'll have something to offer, even if it's only the wisdom of your years or the experience of what doesn't work. I mean, you can't fix everything right away; but you can't even start to fix the world until and unless you've started fixing yourself. And complaints never fixed anything.

This post was featured in the 47^th Humanist Symposium.

Call Ripley! A little bit of Holiday Honesty, for a change.

2009-12-16T00:01:00.003-06:00

I totally stole this from the Atheiskeptihumanist forums (so extra-special thanks to UberPest!). My "penance" is to tell you all to go register there! It's a pretty simple portmanteau, you can bookmark it if you can't spell it, and the community needs more members - which means that the earlier you get there, the more relevant you'll be! And while you're at it, you should also check out Atheist Nexus, too. It's like the Facebook of atheism. On to the news!

Boss Creations is dedicated to putting Christ back into Christmas. Don't laugh, this is Serious Business. OK, laugh because it's stupid and nobody with half a brain gives a shit. Also, laugh because they're literally jamming their symbol of medieval torture into a pagan symbol of a pagan holiday in a desperate bid for cultural relevance, just like the church did in metaphor when they tried to co-opt the holiday all those years ago. You see, the church can't torture people into believing any longer, so now they just bludgeon us all with symbolism - as Boss' front page says, "It's not just a tree - it's a movement!"

What. The. Fuck.

So I'm kind of alarmed by this whole thing, but I find their misguided attempt at cultural dominance to be cutely honest. I'd like to see Jesus up there, myself, beaten bloody with a little INRI above his head, maybe a banner wrapped around his naughty bits saying something like, "Blood Sacrifice is Just Awesome! Fuck Yeah!" Oh, for a fun time, ask any Christian away from the internet what INRI stands for - ten bucks says they won't know, but we need a statistically relevant sample, and I guarantee I'll come out on top across, say, a couple hundred randomized trials.

I also wish these nutters were somehow forced to accept the historical fact that Christmas was co-opted from pagan solstice celebrations. Seriously, the evergreen decked out with shiny baubles and fairy lights, the gift-giving, mistletoe, all that crap - pagan, pagan, pagan! The real killer, though? Christmas trees are against the Bible, for serious! Someone needs to inform Marsha Boggs, Boss Creations' owner-slash-crazy-ho-bag-in-residence, who apparently hates inclusion because it doesn't show her particular sect the special deference it does not deserve at all. I'd love to see the look on her face when Jeremiah 10:2-4 is read to her.

Of course, she'd probably do the Christian thing and ignore reason. She knows what she believes, don't confuse her with the facts. Christianity is whatever she says it is, godammit, and there's no way the Bible could be against her because... wait, there is no because, that's just a fact. Right, guys?

Outrages Are Outrageous!

2009-12-15T00:01:00.006-06:00

Thanks to Rhodopsin for tipping me off to this tidbit: last Tuesday (12/8), the Canadian sci-fi writer Peter Watts got a little out of line with border patrol, and was brutalized out of all proportion for it. (other sources)

Now, I don't know if anyone told this guy, but the police run on authoritarian dick-waving. That goes double for border patrol, who imagine themselves the defenders of Our Glorious Nation against foreign threats. Sci-fi writers aren't exactly high up on the list, as foreign threats go, but creative types in general tend to have a problem with bowing to authority for its own sake, especially of the dick-waving variety. But the people who pursue power tend to be the people who want it, and provoking such types is usually risky business as they are wont to exercise said power at the slightest provocation - such as a foreign writer asking police why they're searching his vehicle.

What we have here, you see, is a misunderstanding: Watts, reasonably enough, didn't seem to understand that when an officer of the law wants to search your vehicle, the officer gets what the officer wants whether you like it or not. This makes no sense, but it's how things work. Watts also didn't seem to understand that disobeying a direct order from a police officer, such as "return to your vehicle immediately," is a crime. Could he have been justifiably cuffed and hauled in to station, at great embarrassment and perhaps some minor financial expense? Sure.

Should he have been beaten, maced, and then dumped over the border after posting bail with no coat or vehicle during the first major storm of the season, only to be charged with felony assault by his assailants? Hell fuck no!

OK, so now the tables have turned and it's border patrol who's out of line. In order to do things like not lose all of his everything and send the message that This Shit Won't Fly, Watts needs about three metric boat-loads of cash. He has maybe a quarter of a metric boat-load of cash at present, being the critically acclaimed but not really all that popular author that he is. So if you have some extra scratch lying around, you can make a PayPal payment to donate@rifters.com, or send a check in the mail to Peter Watts. He's made his books free on the internet, so you could download them and donate the money you'd save.

Actually, I remember being intrigued by his Rifters books ever since I read Anatomy of a Rifter some years ago... I think I'll toss a twenty his way with a Christmas download and finally take a look at what he's got to say. Rhodopsin, remind me if I forget, because this is important to me.

Bus Crazies Gone Wild!

2009-12-14T21:46:00.002-06:00

So I was riding the bus to work this morning when I overheard a man talking to another man about teh innernet. These were Serious Men, who do things like Talk Shop, so I can understand the instinct to appear knowledgeable. For my part, well, I don't know - I'm not a doctor. But I have friends in high places - people who occasionally take the time to explain things to me, like how a computer works at the transistor level (it's a physical logic gate - so cool!) and stuff like that. Computers are still magic to me, at some ambiguous level - it's along the way from "transistor be logic gate" to "game go on screen" - but it's magic that I can at least listen to intelligently. And now I'm hyphenating too much - back to the story about making fun of posturing idiots.

So this guy says he couldn't do the research he needs to do because "they blocked all the social networking" and now he can't even "get on IM." He tried to Google what he needed, apparently, but it "brought up something else all on its own," and so he was all like, "delete delete delete!" Because it was, you see, "an adult, umm, it was a porn site." Well, fuckin' surprise. Apparently nobody ever told him that that's what the internet is for. I thought to myself, briefly, "Who does this yahoo think he's trying to fool?" But then I looked around on the bus and answered my own question. And now I think my elitism is showing. Oops!

So I started talking to Typhinius about this, because it was hilarious, and he courteously explained to me that if spam clogs all the tubes, then that will slow down my pixels. I countered that the law of supply and demand has created a preponderance of lesbian porn, and that if nobody watches it, then it's just going to pile up and start spilling out to all the other sites. We'd better get cracking! Keeping on top of internet porn is Serious Business!

Fast forward to work, and I'm talking video games with one of the tech guys, when one of the people who does actual work walks in and starts asking him for help with her home computer. She was using terms like "computer box" and "the button by the volume knob" (I'm not making this up, I swears it!), so I knew what I had to do. I practiced at poker face for a while, then when there was a lull in the conversation, I asked her, "Are you sure your spam filter is working properly? If too much spam clogs your tubes, then that could cause your pixels to slow down."

She looked at me and nodded - knowingly. Part of me died a little.

But then tech guy came to her rescue, and said with perfect sincerity, "Don't listen to D," as if I weren't even there! Whatever, he did the right thing, and I cracked up because I could no longer keep a straight face.

Speaking of non sequiturs, this reminds me rather of Our Lord Jebus. You see, the tubes are our brains, and the pixels are our thoughts, and Jebus is the spam. When spam clogs the tubes, your pixels slow down, they get all fuzzy, and it's hard to see what's going on. But this is OK, really, because thinking is hard. You don't want to bother with all that tough work, do you? So let Jebus clog your brain tubes with his blood or spam or whatever, and blur out all those sharp-edged pixels. It's the stupid man's anti-aliasing.

Or you could install Skepticism brand spam filters, and keep your tubes clear and flowing properly. Sure, you might not like some of the things that pop up on your screen now, but those things were there anyway - you just couldn't see them before because of all the Jebus spam! And then you'll know that when other people talk about lesbian porn overflowing onto other sites, they're talking out their asses, so you don't need to worry about that stupid apocalyptic crap. And then you can start worrying about things that actually need to be worried about, like misogyny and homophobia and hunger and poverty and disease. You know, real problems, not the made-up problems that the Jebusites are constantly fretting about.

My Photoshop skills are not what they used to be...

2009-12-11T02:55:00.003-06:00

But I guess that's what happens when you only do MS Paint diagrams for... uhh... years. Yeah, years. Jeez.

Anyway, I'm upset with a few elements of the cover. OK, four. Mainly the metal face bits, because I can't even follow a polykarbon tutorial right any more. But it's not total crap, and it will work as a cover for the proof copy so I can at least make sure I did the magic right on submitting things. Here, have a look-see:

I also decided, oh, about forty-five minutes ago that I wanted to do something besides plain black for the background - but I had accidentally made the background part of the layer I was working in, so I totally fucked myself. After that, it was mainly just saying, "Fuck it," and wrapping up so I could just get my damn proof copy already. So if anyone has awesome Photoshop skills - or any kind of awesome art skills, really - and feels like whipping up a 5x8" cover at 300dpi, it will probably be better than mine. And you'll get credit in the book, too! It's win-win, I promise!

Anyway, I guess that's what I get for trying to rush everything at the last minute and not sleeping since... umm... shit. I woke up on Wednesday morning and have been going ever since. Is it Friday already? I have shopping to do! Good thing I'm off work today.

EDIT: I also added a handy page for browsing the Un-Deleted Scenes.

What is this "sleep" of which you speak?

2009-12-10T04:24:00.002-06:00

Everything is in order, continuity is established, and like three typos were fixed. Seriously, I scoured the whole thing in the last like twelve hours and it's all good. Now I just have to register at Create Space and upload! Oh, and the cover, too. And dedication, acknowledgments, about the author, etc.

Friday, for serious.

Update!

2009-12-08T07:00:00.002-06:00

So I didn't hear anything from the NaNoWriMo people about what I got for winning this year. But then Rhodopsin picked up Borderlands (which is a sweet game, despite the fact that it's side-by-side split screen and Modern Warfare 2 controls - and you can't fucking change either of those things! Dammit!), and Silver Garou & I have been working on getting the achievements to unlock the ODST armor for our internet avatars (because unlocking sweet gear for your internet persona by playing games is like the best marketing gimmick EVAR). What does this mean? It means that D becomes very lazy. I managed to write enough to cover the Riley Williams segment just in case I wound up wanting to remove it, but other than that, I haven't worked on The Quantum Mechanic since the 30^th.

But then I got an e-mail at like 9 pm last night stating that we winners do get a free proof copy, and since I want to get this ready in time for Christmas shipping, everything else is on hold until I've got that all ready. Just so y'all know.

By the way, "in time for Christmas shipping" means Friday. Like, this Friday. So I'ma get crackin'!

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-six: Cordyceps, scourge of the jungle!

2009-12-05T15:02:00.006-06:00

Cordyceps is one of my favorite kinds of parasite: a zombie parasite! That is, a biological zombie parasite, not a memetic zombie parasite (religion, nationalism, etc.). What do I mean by "zombie parasite?" I mean a parasite that overwhelmingly alters the behavior of the host, like rabies (which makes its host restless, vicious, and thirsty), in a way that makes it dramatically more likely to cause the parasite to spread. The common cold, influenza, ebola, these just straight up kill you (or get killed) and it's a pretty boring fight. But zombie parasites make you do things that you could imagine the parasite straight up asking you to do, and you say "Yes." Just like religion!

Check this out:

Footage from Planet Earth.

Cordyceps is a real monster, albeit a beautiful one. It can make floor-dwelling ants, which would normally spend their entire lives on or beneath the ground, climb. And it looks cool, too! Check out some of these sweet photos:

source

Seriously: so awesome. But don't ever mutate! You can click on any of those "source" links for bigger (and more!) images, and you can also go here for even more shots. Great stuff!

Cross-Post: The Man with the Bag

2009-12-02T17:18:00.005-06:00

My mom was fretting about there not being enough money this year for all the Christmas miracles she'd like to have happen. I tried to comfort her, so I asked what made Christmas magical in her youth, expecting that she'd reflect on things like family togetherness, a few nice surprises, and the hoopla of celebration; instead, she looked me in the eye and sadly said, "Santa," as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. My first thought was, "You child," but then I realized that calling her out on this would do no good, so I tried to constructively point out what really made Christmases good for her: the actual good things.

Anyway, the Santa Claus lie (and misinformation with intent to deceive is lying, no matter what your intentions are) is still being perpetrated upon my youngest siblings, so here's this.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one in my family who doesn't think it's OK to believe something false because it makes you happy. There are only two situations where we do this: the "Bunny, Tooth and Claus" trinity, and religion. My parents have asked me to keep mum once again about Santa Claus, insisting on perpetuating the myth in young E’s mind. I assured them that I would maintain my position of evasive neutrality – really, it would only do more harm than good at this point, and he’ll soon figure it out for himself, anyway. Plus, he’s not even my kid. After that, C’s practically in the bag. Next on the hit list: the Easter Bunny, and then the Tooth Fairy!

I want to take a minute to clarify something, though, lest it go misunderstood: I love winter festivities. Sure, a few people turn into raging dick-bags when discussing the proper etiquette of how to greet someone, and fuck the haters (I say “Happy Holidays” a lot because I don’t really identify with the religious reasons behind any of them and therefore don’t really wish well for any holy day in particular, but if someone wishes me Merry Christmas or Happy Chanukkah, I’m content to interpret that as a wish that I have a good time throughout the season), but by and large, most people get a whole lot nicer. Also, winter is awesome and gift-giving is one of my favorite traditions. On the one hand, yay free stuff; on the other, it helps you get to know someone and keep them in mind when you’re shopping for something you think they’ll enjoy. I also think that the history of the Santa Claus myth is a fascinating case study in memetic evolution; however, as with any other work of fiction, I think the myth is valuable as a myth and only as such.

A lot of people are willing to get on one’s case about such things (like my parents), and I find it puzzling that they treat this with such idiosyncratic uniqueness. One of the more idiotic attacks that I hear is that if I don’t endorse the systematic teaching of the Santa Claus myth to young children as fact, then I must hate fun. It should be obvious that one can enjoy an end without approving of every single means available to achieve it (disapproving of rape doesn’t mean that someone hates sex). Similarly, I don’t have to hate Christmas to harbor qualms about one or two aspects of certain groups’ celebration of it – for example, the over-commercialization of the season, of which many people of varying creeds disapprove.

A more subtle approach is to say that I’m simply being no fun on this one subject, in this one respect – I take it too seriously and am making a mountain out of a molehill. I can actually respect that position, so long as I’m afforded the opportunity to defend my own, which is my goal in this entry (and this isn’t really directed at anyone who’s likely to read it, it’s mainly shit I would tell my parents if I thought it would do any good). First and foremost, Santa Claus is a symbol, and symbols are important: they shape the way we think, teach us lessons, and often serve as paradigm cases upon which we may base more pragmatic beliefs or courses of action. As a symbol, I think Santa Claus is actually a good thing; it’s the treatment of this symbol – the teaching of it as literal fact to young children, the reasons for doing so, and the attitudes with which this practice is commonly regarded – to which I take exception.

I also want to take a moment to head off any accusations that this is a thinly-veiled rant against religion. I don’t want there to be any veil at all, really, but this isn’t about religion specifically - it’s about the perpetuation of a tradition which I think is both totally unnecessary and harmful to a certain degree, yet paradoxically enjoys what I think is an undue amount of respect in mainstream culture. It just so happens that this is the same kind of problem I have with religion. These two issues share a huge amount of overlap, I make no bones about this. However, I wish to confine the discussion here strictly to Santa Claus. Once again, this is a beef I have with parents in general, and mine in particular.

As I said, I like the Santa Claus symbol, because it appeals to the naïve intellect of children but also bears out on a more mature reading. He’s a magical man who lives beyond the reach of human civilization and gives gifts to people in accordance with their conduct by means impossible to us mere mortals. To the child, this translates as, “Behave well and get stuff you want.” And, really, I think that characterizes the experience of children in most decent households: good behavior is rewarded, bad behavior is reprimanded. Good symbol. Us adults know, however, that sometimes a severely unethical course of action, when rigorously pursued, can still net a positive result for the agent (for example, the Enron fiasco, wherein corporate pirates robbed a lot of innocent people of money they deserved and – injustice of injustices! – were only lightly reprimanded for it - the punishment in no way fit the crime).

Good behavior, on the other hand, often goes unrewarded for a very long time, and sometimes is never rewarded at all. Obviously, the karmic reciprocity embodied by Santa Claus holds little sway over real life, but I think that the symbol here serves not as a lesson, but as an example: should we not strive to make our society such that the good are recognized and rewarded, and the wicked are chastised? This is not a mechanism by which the world works, but rather an embodiment of values which I think many of us share. Reap what you sow, and all of that.

Additionally, I think there actually is a much deeper lesson that is instructive (as in the children’s example), rather than exemplary (for the grown-ups): you can cheat other people, but there’s no cheating reality. If you do a good job at something, then that will be reflected in the product of your labor; if not, then it’s garbage in, garbage out. There are exceptions to this, of course, but this is the general rule. OK, maybe this last one’s a stretch, but still.

The problems arise when we consider the teaching of this myth not as a symbol, but as a literal fact. In the first place, it’s a lie: misinformation with intent to deceive, plain and simple. This, on its own, is not much – it’s the context and the consequences of actions that determine their moral content, not their mere descriptions, but I think this should serve as a warning sign. Lies generally turn out bad. And let’s not forget the enormous, conspiratorial scale on which the Santa Claus myth is foisted upon young children.

When taken as literal fact rather than fable, the “be good, get stuff” ethic can be disheartening to children when compared to how things actually play out: if Santa Claus is really magical, and satisfies the wishes of children based on their behavior, shouldn’t you be able to get anything you want if you’re just good enough? And if you don’t get what you want, then doesn’t that mean you’ve been a bad child (or not good enough)? And how come Tommy, that spoiled brat next door, got what he wanted from Santa, but you didn’t? What’s this guy up to, anyway?

Of course, this isn’t the way it always goes down, but my point is simply that Santa isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There’s also the fact that a lot of kids, upon learning that Santa isn’t real, are heartbroken: obviously, this is a cherished belief, since they’re not saying, “Huh, I thought there was something strange about that whole story, I’m kind of relieved to learn it was all hooey.” This effect has a double-edge, I believe – on the one hand, it provides evidence that belief in Santa is a good thing while that belief is maintained (and that’s the killer); on the other hand, the more cherished the belief, the harder it is to let go of it.

So yeah, Santa’s got his up-side, sure, but there’s also a down-side which I think a lot of people underrepresent. It’s kind of a wash, though, as most of this business goes down at an age that many don’t very clearly remember, so who cares? Let’s look at the ostensive reasons behind Santa, then; or, just what this myth is used for. “Be good, or Santa’s gonna give you a lump of coal in your stocking.” That’s a threat, right there. A fairly innocuous one, to be sure, and almost always empty. However, what strikes me as sleazy is that the source of the threat is externalized from the threatener: Mommy or Daddy is threatening to do something you don’t like, but under the guise that it’s a threat from someone else, an all-seeing and implacable judge of right and wrong who – wait, I said I wasn’t going to talk about religion.

The other side of that coin is that when the kid gets stuff they really like, who gets the praise? Not the people who did the actual work to make the Christmas Miracle happen, but the unseen benefactor in the sky – err, I mean, at the North Pole. Dunno what I was thinking there, innocent grin is me! (Look, I find it tremendously ironic that Santa’s like training wheels for a monotheistic deity, but so few outgrow the latter as they outgrow the former. No further comment on that, I promise.) In all seriousness, though, I do honestly think that the substitution of a false and magical justification for good behavior, in lieu of a rational and Earthly one, is a bad thing – both for the fact that it’s empty and wrong, and for the precedent it sets at such an impressionable age.

Look, one may say, all of this is small potatoes. The whole point of Saint Nick is that it’s an entertaining fantasy that’s fun for kids to believe while the magic of childhood lasts. Right? Still bad, says I. The fact that it makes you feel good to think something is true does not mean you actually ought to think it’s true. Take romance, for instance. Say one of your coworkers fancies another: do you think it would be good to make that person believe the feeling was mutual, knowing that that’s false? Of course not, you’re simply setting them up for disappointment – either quickly, when they start to act on those affections and get embarrassed, or gradually, as they wait for the other person to act on affections which are simply not there.

The same principle applies, and the same thing happens, with jolly old Kris Kringle. Perpetuating the illusion just adds to the let-down. And the whole “magic of childhood” tack kind of rubs me the wrong way, too. The message, as best I can tell, is that “magic is fun, reality is boring” (or “childhood is fun, adulthood is boring”). I find that false, and frustratingly so. If magic were real, then it would be like any other part of reality: discoverable, usable, investigable. There would be nothing special about it, just like there’s nothing special about computers (which, to my mind, are a kind of magic). As far as I can tell, what’s exciting about magic is not that it’s magic, but that it’s different. Kids who know there’s no such thing as Batman can still have fun playing Batman with their friends, or Hell, playing Cowboys and Indians when they know that they are not in fact cowboys or Indians. I did. Shit, I still do this stuff whenever I roleplay.

“Something Different,” every now and again, is exciting. It breaks up the routine. And you don’t need to think it’s true to have fun, you just have to pretend and have a functional imagination. Plus, reality is fucking exciting, too – you just have to know where to look. Boredom sets into the boring mind, and all that good stuff. Plus, the “magic” of childhood never really has to die, anyway. I find that, as an adult, I have more access to the stuff I liked doing as a kid, and now that the responsibilities are my own (which, to be sure, carries its own price – a price I pay gladly, by the way), I can determine when and how I do those things to a much greater extent than I could as a child. Being a grown-up fucking rules (and screw you, Mom, cake is a breakfast food!).

The point with all this is that I don’t have a problem with Santa decorations, or Santa floats in parades, or any of that nonsense. Go nuts. Really. Please, just, do whatever you like – I like the Santa myth, and adults know what’s up, so it’s all in good fun (for real). But when it comes to treating it like fact in a misguided attempt to "magic up" your kid’s childhood, I mean, nothing good comes of that which can’t be had by more wholesome means, and the bad stuff could all be rather neatly avoided by treating it like a superhero comic and telling your kid that it’s not true, it’s just a fun story. That’s really the source of my confusion: why the Hell isn’t Santa Claus treated just like Batman or Spider-Man?

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-five: Ye Olde Science Repository

2009-12-01T19:47:00.002-06:00

I saw on Pharyngula today that the Royal Society is putting up a bunch of their oldest stuff online!

One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.

They've got this super sweet timeline browser that takes you through the history with pretty pictures, and the papers touch on everything: meteorology, optics, medicine, anatomy, geometry, astronomy, everything! It's awesome!

OK, so this is really like sixty interesting things in one, but still: looking at the world to figure things out about it? Best. Idea. Evar! But enough out of me, go and learn!

The Quantum Mechanic: Un-Deleted Scenes!

2009-11-30T23:59:00.002-06:00

I've got all these handy navigation links in the chapters, but none for the Un-Deleted Scenes, so I've added that here (as well as a link from the Epilogue that points to this page). Here you go:

1: Douglas Wins a Prize.
2: Douglas Reads Too Much.
3: Douglas and Alvina Fall in Love All Over Again.
4: The Entropic Engineer Loses Himself.
5: Science Happens!
6: Victor Playtests the Device.

Rock most hard. Have a great one, everybody!

Dear The Internet: I Win!

2009-11-30T21:10:00.000-06:00

Look, see? I also donated some money and have a halo because of it. Oh, and I have a winner's badge thinger over on the right, too. Hopefully I can get that back in sales, if the CreateSpace deal is still going.

So yeah, I'm still not done writing, I just crossed the finish line. But I will post what I have when I finish this last un-deleted scene, and then it's time to arrange all the parts together for publishing. I want my hardcopy before Christmas!

More later, as I finish this last vignette.

EDIT: Finished! Final wordcount is 50,475. Moved this bit so it's "after" the last un-deleted scene (which should appear right below this, if I've done my math right). Hooray! Enjoy!

The Quantum Mechanic: Un-Deleted Scene Six

2009-11-30T21:08:00.000-06:00

UN-DELETED SCENE 6: Victor playtests the device.

On a rocky planet circling the Sun at odd angles, a battle has just ended. Victor puts his weapons away, eats his fill, and then resumes his journey. The destination is not so important as how he gets there, but at the moment, he needs to make up some time. He visualizes wheels in his mind, designs a simple but effective drive train, then goes down to all fours while the device goes to work.

Hard rubber forms into tires around cartilaginous wheels. The discs calcify, and Victor's hands and feet are fused over the axles. His knees lift up from the ground, and callused pads nudge the wheels into motion. He's off. Victors leg bones are re-shaped, pulled out of joint, and arranged into pistons to more effectively drive his body. Along his spine, improvised neural architecture translates his thoughts into the proper motions, and then suddenly, being a motorcycle comes as naturally to Victor as walking.

The road is in a state of severe disrepair. Chunks of pavement jut out at odd angles, potholes threaten to jar him out of his smooth and calculated motions, and the odd tree and crater disrupt the road entirely at points. Victor presses on, his weight shifting to pull wheelies, bunny hops, and occasional leaps and bounds. His path of travel weaves through and around the encroaching wilderness, leaving only the occasional squirt of lubricating saturated fat. But it is enough for a quick and clever observer to follow.

Something approaches from the horizon, vaguely behind him. It moves with frightening speed, faster than sound. Victor decides to make his stand on a nearby overpass. His pistons disengage, and he gradually decelerates as muscles weave themselves into braided coils. Multipronged chitinous hooks form at the ends, and launch themselves at the overpass as Victor rolls underneath. Victor pulls his weight back, tightens his cords, and lifts off the ground. One of his hooks loses grip, and he loses balance - the device compensates by using the gyroscopic inertia of the still-spinning wheels to correct his pitch. Coming down from his arc now, the wheels disengage and Victor curls up to roll to a stop on the raised concrete. New arms and legs have formed before his tendrils have completely retracted, and now the metals he has been carrying with him are put to use: tiny bits of acid-cut shrapnel are chemically welded to each wheel, and as a rocket launches, Victor's eyes plot an interception course. The rocket is fast, but stupid, and the weaponized wheel is a small price to pay to take the explosive out of the picture. Victor hurls it with great power and accuracy, then winds up for his pitch at the jet itself.

At this height and range, the jet cannot change course quickly enough to dodge the incoming projectile. Instead, it launches a guided missile upon its target's position. The wheel tears through a wing, then the jet veers off before jerking toward the ground for a crash that shall be drawn out over several miles. As it nears its quarry, the digital pilot notes that Victor is tricking the missile's guidance algorithms into striking the concrete of the overpass - the man will be damaged, but not for long. The pilot's last thoughts before impact concern transmitting vital data on the new talents displayed by the target back to central intelligence.

Victor comes to rest after being thrown by the blast, watches the dying aircraft sail off into the distance. He notices a couple of nearby abandoned vehicles, checks them for any remaining gasoline. Two have had their caps removed, all unspent fuel either siphoned off or evaporated. The third one has about a quarter tank left; he drinks up the fuel, metabolizes it into more stable compounds, then heads off to search the wreckage of the plane, snatching up vegetation in passing to add to his biomass. By the time he reaches the first scraps of metal, he is a hulking colossus, picking up the twisted wreckage one piece at a time and arranging them as spines upon his back. They will be useful later, but there is nothing for him to do with them now.

After following the trail left by the felled hunter, Victor finally comes upon his prize: the remains of the cockpit. He is in luck, for the computer failed to wipe its mind before dying. Victor analyzes what is left of the machine, divining its home from the clues left in the dead slab of its brain. Nearby is a mostly intact fuel tank, too; this will be handy in time. Victor places what is left of the plane's nose upon his head, a mocking mask of his erstwhile pursuer, then forms himself into a great snake and sets about slithering across the plain at great speed.

After some time, Victor nears a deep forest. There are eyes everywhere: in the sky, under the ground, and especially in the trees. Without losing speed, Victor shifts his true brain to the rear of his body, letting his leading body act as a decoy. He writes subprocesses to handle navigational problems, then watches as his body courses through the thickening wood before him. Soon, he hears a buzzing from uncomfortably close; a swarm of stinging metal insects is upon him, injecting all manner of deadly substances into his body: corrosive acids, neurotoxins, engineered bacteriophages, retroviral scramblers. With his true brain at the rear, Victor is able to quarantine the infections as they attack his body at the mechanical, nervous, cellular, and chemical level, attempting to screw him up and shut him down from every angle all at once. He sheds the infected portions, sprays a few weapons of his own into the air, watches the swarm crumple and fall. He is wounded, but not mortally so. He presses on.

Near to the ocean now, he must find a way to cross. Flight is dangerous, for he is slow in the air; swimming upon the surface leaves him open to attack from all angles; the sea floor is slowest, but safest. Victor decides to take the low road, pitches down the seaside cliff, sticky tendrils shooting out to grasp the cliff face and control his descent. Into the salty surf now, he hugs the rocky bottom, thousands of tiny finned appendages guiding his tremendous length at every step of the way. He has far to go, and not much to help him along the way. The jet fuel is metabolized a little at a time to fuel electrolysis which Victor uses to separate oxygen out from the water; the remaining hydrogen is also spent as fuel, in stages and stages. A trail of bubbles and tracks in the sand is all that Victor leaves behind.

But after a time, with quite a ways left to go, Victor is consuming his own biomass just to keep moving. High above, he hears a broadcast signal: he is being watched. His position has been pinpointed. It is only an eye, no threat to him and not worth pursuing, but his position has been compromised. He keeps moving, makes an estimate of the time that is left to him. Soon, he comes across a hydrothermic vent in the inky blackness of the deep. Velvet tubeworms and albino crabs are both a meal and a textbook to him, as he adds their biomass to his own and learns their metabolic processes. He refines them, streamlining the chemical act of eating to something more suitable to his ideas of efficiency, then digs into the sea floor as muscular cords weave themselves into a large, stretchy bladder. Victor improvises valves to suck the vents into himself, and when he is of a suitable buoyancy, he releases his grip upon the earth and shoots up to the light.

Higher and higher, he virtually screams past all manner of ecosystems layered between the surface and the depths, bursting from the water in a plume of salty spray. He rises into the clouds, slowing down now as he forms his body into a large airfoil. Flattening himself, waving through the air like a magic carpet, Victor finally lets his breath out and forces the gas out behind him. Let them look at the sea floor; he has risen above that and now surfs among the clouds. He sacrifices altitude for speed, descending into a flattening path of travel as he achieves an ever more aerodynamic shape, arranging his various metal fragments to cut through the air as precisely and usefully as possible. Gravity has a great deal of work to do for him, and he squeezes the inexorable attractant to the very last drop, even at the expense of his last bits of extra biomass.

The coast is in sight now, and off in the distance a gleaming tower looms. As Victor descends back to sea level, gliding upon leathery flaps, he loses sight of his enemy's citadel but remembers its location. Plunging into the sandy beach, he grinds down his most useful-looking chunks of metal into deadly blades, then sheds the excess as he goes off in search of food. He is able to photosynthesize fuel from starlight, but it is a slow process and he cannot maintain his speed for very long with light alone.

There is a flash in the distance, and a bullet tears into Victor's head before he even hears the shot. He has learned to hide his true brain away from all of the obvious places, so the injury is but a minor inconvenience. However, his sensory apparatus has been damaged, and so he is not able to anticipate the next several bullets to tear through his body. Pain soon gives control to instinct, and Victor flattens himself against the ground, weaving around the thin grass to avoid betraying his presence. Safe, invisible, motionless, Victor then sorts out the damage to determine the general directions of these newest assailants. Winged automatons descend from the sky, flaming swords in hand, ready to cut their quarry down at the first sign of motion.

Victor waits for the right time to strike. He is invisible, colored and textured as his surroundings, inviting his would-be killers to tread upon him. One soon does, and he works his way inside, inflating a viciously bladed dummy body to be cut down by his own hand as he infiltrates the neural architecture of his host. He then mimics the expected chatter for a downed enemy report, sees into the whole communication network that tracks the progress and elimination of his partners in this game. He is inside the machine now, and by the looks of it, the first to infiltrate the network undetected. In his hidden mind, he reflects briefly upon the difficulty of determining whether another player has infiltrated the network as stealthily as he has. He sees the snipers now, knows their precise positions, but they are no longer a threat to him. He is dead to the system, a cypher born anew into this subverted soldier. No other devices have made it this close to the citadel, so the cadre of clockwork angels is ordered to return to the gleaming city on the hill.

Victor flies into the air in his new body, slipping easily into formation with his companions as they make their way home. He sees the glorious city in all its splendor as they approach, all of the din and furor surrounding the ivory tower at its center. He realizes with glee as they approach that that is their destination: he has infiltrated the honor guard of the central processor, the guardian angels of that angry machine trying to destroy him and his fellow players. Victor analyzes the memories of his host, determines the power structure of the central processor. There are failsafes upon failsafes, and he cannot simply cut one cord to bring down the entire house.

But he can destroy the building.

As Victor's host and companions take up their positions, roosting around the very top parapets of the ivory tower, he waits. They settle into their hibernation routines, and then Victor springs into action. He pitches forward, dives down along the face of the edifice, and lights his flaming sword as he nears the foundation. At nigh-supersonic speed, he corkscrews through the walls and supports, cutting the outer wall and inner structure to ribbons. Before gravity can take its toll, he is out and free, the fleeing traitor with a glittering tail of pursuers as the central processor for the whole city comes crashing down behind him. They are on to him, but it is too late by far. Machines wither, crash, and die as their centralized brain has all its supports torn out from under it, crushed beneath its own weight. The world skips a beat, resets, and Victor stands before a gunmetal gray automaton crackling with orange lightning.

"Congratulations, Victor. You win. Again."

"Why, thank you," he responds. "It gets easier every time."

"Still," the Quantum Mechanic responds, "I would have expected another to surpass you by now, as you have surpassed others in your own time." Victor blushes, flattered by the game master. "So, how do you feel?"

"I feel great! Triumphant. It is good to defeat an enemy, if only an invented one."

"What do you mean?" The Quantum Mechanic's face is inscrutable as ever, but its shift in posture indicates confusion.

"Well, you know, the central processor is only an enemy because we call it an enemy, and it acts like one. In reality, it's just a part of the bigger picture. Playtesting and all that. It's a honing implement, not a true enemy."

"Well, on that analysis, all enmity is invented." Victor pauses for thought.

"You know," he says after a few moments, "That's right."