Brain Refuse Depository

Explaining What I Do

2011-11-27T18:17:00.000-05:00

One of the first things you do when you meet someone is explain what you do. Often, not much explanation is required--"I am a nurse" is pretty straight-forward, for example. For a while, I told people, "I am physics major, and I do research in astronomy." That's pretty easy to explain. People know what physics is, and they know what astronomy is. Explaining my research was pretty straight-forward too, "Right now, I'm searching the literature for guesses of stellar ages" or later on, "I'm looking for binary stars; it's a subset of a bigger projecting looking for debris discs--dust and stuff that orbits around stars and could form planets."

That stuff is really tangible. People know what stars and dust are. Overtime, I got better at explaining it quickly and simply. I'd forgotten how much tweaking it took to get it to that point; now that I'm in a new field, I have no routine for explaining what I do, and that's very strange. I'm passionate about what I do, but it's hard to convey that when I'm fumbling with how to explain my research.

The shortest explanation is to say it flat out--"I'm a computational linguist, and I do research in gradable modal expressions"--but that usually leaves them with a blank stare. The structure of the sentence telling people formerly and presently what my research is is nearly identical, yet the present one leaves them dumbfounded. I can't blame them, most people have probably never heard a single content word in the latter sentence, except perhaps for "I," "research," and maybe "expressions."

At this point, I try to break it down, starting with "computational linguist." In all likelihood, they've never heard of linguistics, and I lose most people here. I tell them that it's the scientific study of language, and they tell me who their favorite poet is.

In fact, linguistics doesn't really have good PR. Few people have heard of the field, and without any exposure to it, it's really hard to explain what linguists do. Most often, people's concept of the study of language is in some classroom with a teacher who wants to "free their mind," not in a formal context where language is broken down rigorously and elegantly.

On the other hand, physicists and astronomers have great PR. Most major projects are multi-million dollar rocket launches and magnetic loops capable of observing or replicating the beginning of time.

In fact, astronomers have had excellent PR for years. From Sagan to deGrasse Tyson, charismatic figure heads have been directing the public's attention at colorful pictures for years. Linguists are stuck with, at best, Noam Chomsky, who is rarely talking about linguistics in public appearances, instead preferring to talk about the Military-Industrial Complex.

It's a damn shame, as people are more interested in language than they realize. Sometimes, when you do explain what linguistics is, the concept really clicks. You can tell they get it, and one of two things happens: either they become very interested and you introduce them to the idea of voiced vs unvoiced consonants or ungrammaticality, or they become very defensive, striking a nerve with regard to the legitimacy of Black Vernacular English or the concept of generative grammar. Inevitably, people are strongly invested in their understanding of language, but few realize that they can seek a deeper understanding of something they do so systematically yet so effortlessly.

So at this rate, you can see my dilemma. I've only thus far explained what a "linguist" is, and now I have to tie it to the word "computational." This one's a little easier, as I just give examples--"machine translation, Siri, getting Google to know what you meant by your search, and not just dig up the words--effectively taking all that linguists have discovered and implementing it on a computer." So if people got "linguist," then the "computational" bit is easy.

This leaves me with "semantics," "gradable," and "modal" to explain. In themselves, they are not hard to explain, semantics being the trickiest, but then they have to be tied together.

So usually, after a long set of explanations, I end up with a blank stare and a dead conversation, and that's never a good outcome. I'm not sure how else to explain it, beyond dodging the topic completely, or just restricting myself to linguistics. That's tough enough to convey to most folks. Maybe I could take the pretentious route and say, "ah, you wouldn't get my research, it's too deep for your plebeian brain, maybe when you're reincarnated with a better brain," but that's just rude.

Perhaps I should leave it in the shallow, "I'm a linguist, and I study how people express possibilities." When they ask, "What do you mean?" I could respond with, "Well, I could explain it to you, but that would take a while," and then use that as an example of a modal expression. Maybe that's too meta, though.

Tarski's World: When and Where Grade Grinder's Cheat Prevention Fails

2011-10-03T00:37:00.002-04:00

For my semantics class, we have been using a "book" called Tarski's World to quickly learn, interactively, predicate logic. "Book" is in quotes because it's mostly a suite of software that is sold with the book for using predicate logic within a simplified world.

My feelings are mixed. Some of the exercises are interesting; others are tedious. What's come to bug me the most has been the grading software. It's very bad at giving decent advice, which, after banging your head against a computer keyboard for a while, is exactly what you need.

Sure, this process is frustrating, but in the end, I've learned a lot of predicate logic. On the contrary, what bothers me most is the false accusations the grading software generates--in particular, the claim that my solutions are "similar" to someone else's, effectively the suggestion that I'm cheating. As an academic, this is really insulting, and something up with which I will not put.

According to the link in the "you're a cheater" message, Tarski's World saves a 12-digit timestamp with every save. It claims the odds of two students saving a file at the same time is the same as winning the California lottery. This is accurate. When you upload a file, it looks at the other sets of timestamps that the file was saved with. If there are overlapping sets of timestamps at any point, the files are declared "similar."

However, the designers overlooked one thing. Some exercises require that you start with a particular world that Tarski's World has provided. Whoever wrote these files saved them at some point, and therefore, they are guaranteed to be similar by the above definition--the files originated at the same point in time and are therefore similar.

To verify this hypothesis, I opened up a Tarski's World world file. To my surprise, the file was nothing but plain text--no attempt of any kind to encrypt or obfuscate the file and timestamps. The dates immediately stood out as Unix time--that is, the number of 60ths of a second that have happened since January 1, 1970. However, using these whole numbers yields gigantic results--the standard time for one of the timestamps put me in the year 45000, which was clearly not the case.

I attempted to shorten the timestamps to find the Unix time within them; it's merely the first ten digits. The last two, I assume, are some kind of checksum. I tinkered with reverse engineering them, for fun, but I don't have that kind of time right now. More importantly, I knew where to find the evidence I was looking for and started piecing it together.

A "C" or a "D" precludes each timestamp. "C" stamps preclude "D" stamps. Sometimes, there are multiple instances of "D." What this looked like to me was "C" is some how a computer ID--maybe the time when someone installed Tarski's World on that particular computer. Checking one of my own C's, this turned out not to be the case, and it's probably the time when the file is opened. Either way, the precise meaning of the values is irrelevant. What matters is that I know the file was being tweaked around the time of that stamp.

I used Python's datetime module to handle the Unix times. The "D" and "C" values in the latter part of one of the files pointed at 2011. Checking out the "C" in one of the files, the Unix time portion of the stamp pointed right at 2004. This was a red flag and the cause of my commrades and I's woes.

So, to correct the Openproof Courseware website, it is not extremely unlikely that two files will be created at the same time. If those two files are meant to originate from the same file, they are guaranteed, by your definition, to be similar. Please rectify this, or at least mention the fact that "since some exercises were created by us you can relax blah blah blah..." instead of assuming that we're cheating because your work is sloppy. Then, I'll quit blaming you when my sentences are sloppy.

Also, you might want to look into not storing the timestamps in plain text. It would be incredibly easy to manipulate them, you could literally just... well, I won't get into that here. Someone who knows the files are plain text knows too much already.

Mary gets her case.

2011-09-15T18:09:00.002-04:00

Today, my syntax professor explained the sentence "I sent Mary a letter" and its equivalent "I sent a letter to Mary." While discussing the tree, he explained where the "to" comes from.

To start, the verb forces the accusative case on to the noun phrase "the letter," making the letter what was sent.

But then what about Mary? She desperately needs a case. She sends a text to UG, who then inserts a "to" for Mary, giving her a case, at which point she is satisfied.

That's not verbatim, but the set of words are the same.

A Few Venus Jokes

2011-08-28T18:58:00.004-04:00

Venus is likely the most inhospitable planet in the solar system. The greenhouse effect has driven surface temperatures are so high that they are warmer than Mercury, a planet closer to the sun. It is perpetually cloudy, rains sulfuric acid, and is absolutely bone dry; the greenhouse effect boiled all of the water off into space. The Russians sent few probes there, one sent back a picture of the surface.

If this looks crappy, bare in mind, it is the only picture we have of the surface of Venus, and it took 9 attempts to capture and transmit back to earth. In the test chambers they made for prototypes, they frequently would open the chamber after a test to find their work reduced to a puddle of molten metal.

Such a horrible environment yields some horrible humor:

On Venus, the sun rises in the West, but it's always too cloudy to see it.

On Venus, you could cry in the rain, but your face would get burned off.

On Venus, you could kill yourself, but Venus would kill you first.

On Venus, there's never a drought, but nothing ever grows.

map() | filter() | reduce()

2011-08-25T14:04:00.000-04:00

I've been learning Python slowly over the last two years. It's the first language I've used where I really have a chance to tinker with the tools of functional programming. At first, they appeared outright bizarre, but the pieces have finally fallen in place. A few weeks ago while running, I couldn't stop thinking about how awesome "map()" is. Hopefully, after reading this, you'll feel that way too.

Here's what map() does: it takes at least two arguments, a function f and n lists, where n is the number of parameters of f. Its output is a list where every entry is f(l_1[m], l_2[m],...,l_n[m])--that is, it takes every item in the list, puts it in f, then stores it in a new list and returns that list when it does.

Sounds kinda pointless, right? You could just use a loop to do that.

newList = []

for item in list: newList.append(f(item))

Map does this same thing more concisely:

newList = map(f, list)

Perhaps I haven't convinced you. Part of the value in map() is concision. It's clear, in the third piece of code, what you're doing--creating a new list by funneling list through f. Mentally, that is a simple procedure. To express it explicitly, with all its overhead, is more sophisticated. Someone reading the code would have to stop and think "ok, he's looping through all these entries, putting them in this array, then storing them in this array." All that overhead obfuscates; concision presents the operation with less mental overhead, allowing the reader--and the coder, for that matter--to focus less on the overhead and more on the algorithm at large.

Additionally, map() is optimized for its purpose--loops are not necessarily. As a consequence, you end up with faster runtime. Consider this script, where two sets of random numbers are funneled through testFunc:


import datetime

from random import randint



testFunc = lambda x,y: x*y+x



randFunc = lambda x: randint(1,50000)

setOne = map(randFunc, range(1,50000))

setTwo = map(randFunc, range(1,50000))





loopList = []

loopStart = datetime.datetime.now()

for x,y in zip(setOne, setTwo): loopList.append(testFunc(x,y))

print str(datetime.datetime.now()-loopStart)



loopStart = datetime.datetime.now()

mapList = map(testFunc, setOne, setTwo)

print str(datetime.datetime.now()-loopStart)

Running on my crappy laptop, the loop took nearly three times longer to execute.

There are two other functions that are just as cool as map(): filter() and reduce(). They perform different, albeit valuable, tasks. Filter() doesn't accept just any function, but requires a boolean function;

filter(lambda x: x>2, lst)

would be acceptable. Filter(), like map(), returns a list, but it returns a list of values from lst where the provided function returns true.

Last of all is reduce(), which takes a function of at least two inputs. To start, it takes the first two values of a given list and puts them in the provided function. Then, it uses the previous result as the first parameter and the next entry of the list as the second parameter. So, a sum, for example, would be:

reduce(lambda x,y: x+y, lst)

The real power with these functions is that they return lists, so once they produce a result, it can be nested in another one of the set. As another example, this one-liner removes dead "twirps"--those without any calories left--from the testTwirp array:

map(testTwirp.remove, filter(lambda x: x.calories < 0, testTwirp))

The invocation of filter finds the twirps that are dead; the map of those twirps into
their original list's remove method takes them out of the picture. The resulting list isn't saved, as it's just a large list of "None's."

Why People Haven't Adopted Dollar Coins

2011-07-30T03:56:00.003-04:00

I've heard that dollar coins haven't been widely adopted because people hate them. That's a load of crap. Dollar coins are wonderful--it's nice not having to fumble with your wallet to use a vending machine or make another small purchase. If I could get dollar coins, I'd be happy to use them.

The problem with dollar coins is ATMs. Most people, when they receive currency to spend, it is through an ATM. ATMs dispense $20 bills and sometimes, if you're lucky, dispense $10 bills. I'd prefer to have 10 dollar coins, but instead, I have a 10 dollar bill that someone has to break.

That someone is generally a large retailer. In effect, large retailers are where most people get smaller bills. If they chose to deal in dollar coins, we'd have them circulating by now.

Sure, at first, people will hate it, but I'm sure they'll approve once you warm them up to the idea. Eventually, they'll wonder why they ever thought dollar bills were a good idea at all.

Factorial Function One-Liner in Python

2011-06-30T17:49:00.003-04:00

I recently got a copy of the Python Cookbook. This is the first programming book I've picked up that one would call "advanced." That is, it assumes you know what an if-statement does. As a result, the book is rather refreshing.

I picked this book up because I've been looking for a solid place to read code, something I've heard advocated frequently among more experienced hackers. The book is full of code examples and explanations, and seeing how other hackers solved particular problems makes it clear why reading code is so crucial to coding better. In nearly every piece of code I've read through, I've encountered something new. My favorite so far is 17.9: Computing Factorials with lambda:

    f = lambda n: n-1 + abs(n-1) and f(n-1)*n or 1

So, this is the factorial function, contained entirely on a single line. A few subtleties of Python allow it to work, which the book explains quite well.

First of all, when a lambda form is defined, it isn't evaluated. This allows lambda forms to be defined recursively. Generally, lambda forms are not assigned names--they're "anonymous functions"--but they can be, as was done here.

The other trick--and the part that wasn't obvious to me--was the use of the ternary operator, which I'd never heard of before this. In C, there's a statement with the syntax:

    condition?iftrue:iffalse

So, effectively, this can be thought of as "Is condition true? Do iftrue. If it is false, do iffalse." In Python, the syntax is:

    condition and iftrue or iffalse

This allows you to write one line if statements. Combined with lambda, you can write one line recursive functions this way, where condition is your continue/escape condition.

Consider, also, the condition. It's not an explicit boolean statement. However, Python has implicit boolean evaluations. For example, an empty list "[]" evaluates as false. Similarly, "0" evaluates to false.

If you're doing anything more sophisticated, this is rather pointless. However, if you need merely choose between a base case or recurring, this is a simple, concise way to do it.

Natural Gas

2011-06-21T17:29:00.008-04:00

A lot of fossil fuel companies have been pushing natural gas as the next big solution to our energy problems. This doesn't surprise me, and for the short term it's the way to go. However, we shouldn't stop developing alternatives.

First of all, there is more natural gas available than crude. This is because of what happens to fossil fuels as time progresses. They begin as peat, then are compressed into coal. After a few more million years, as they're buried deeper and deeper by the rock cycle, they're compressed into what's known as oil shale--the middle state between coal and oil.

With a little more heat and pressure, the oil shale "cracks" into crude. However, we can speed up this process a bit, which is what we do when we dig up oil shale. It's rather inefficient; the amount of energy we get out of the oil is drastically reduced when we have to force it out of the ground. When we first started digging up crude, it would literally gush out of the ground. Now-a-days, not so much.

Deeper still under greater heat and pressure, crude oil can be cracked further; this is when natural gas is formed. It is the end result of the chain; there is no other fossil fuel with a better energy yield for the minimal amount of carbon.

As a consequence of this, natural gas supplies are far greater than crude. For the most part, we can keep digging deeper for natural gas; for crude, there's a limit. With large supplies, we could move to a relatively stable natural gas economy for the 21st century.

Although with advantages, natural gas has its problems. First of all, it's still a fossil fuel, which means it exists in limited quantities. If we are idiotic, as history has demonstrated, we will repeat the problem we are experiencing with oil right now. This time, as we burn through our next energy source, we can hopefully master the technology to rely on completely renewable alternatives.

Also, being a fossil fuel, it still produces greenhouse gasses. In fact, natural gas is a greenhouse gas--methane is the most potent of them all. Combustion cannot completely burn off all of the methane, so using it as a fuel source would increase the amount in the atmosphere. Additionally, any form of leakage during use would release methane.

In fact, leakage is a subset of another problem with natural gas--transportation and storage. Unlike gasoline and crude oil, which stay where you put them, natural gas likes to mix and mingle with the atmosphere. As a result, the containers needed to store and transport it have to be heavier and sealed better than those with liquid fossil fuels. This means that there's more overhead when using natural gas as a fuel source--for example, your car would have to be heavier, so its efficiency would be worse or range would be reduced.

This also begs the question of a natural gas wreck. Gasoline was chosen as a fuel in part due to its relative stability. You've probably seen plenty of movies where cars' gas tanks explode. For the most part, that's exaggeration. In fact, gasoline is rather hard to blow up, at least compared to natural gas. Liquid gasoline itself does not burn--it must be vaporized to do so. When it bursts into flame, the heat sets off a chain reaction, vaporizing more gasoline, allowing more gasoline to burn. Only with that chain reaction can gasoline burn.

Natural gas, on the other hand, vaporizes under normal atmospheric conditions, ready to burn. This higher volatility translates into a much greater explosive tendency. In a bad wreck, if someone broke the seals to their gas lines, their car would be ready to explode on the spot. No one wants that to happen; generally, lag time before the car explodes is helpful.

Another problem with natural gas is the extent to which we are willing to push for it. A process called fracking has been drawing a lot of attention as of late where natural gas deposits are pressurized to release previously unreachable natural gas. This process sounds gentle enough--however, many of these deposits are located near the aquifer, the place in the ground from where people obtain well water. The pressure seems to diffuse natural gas into the surrounding aquifer, resulting in flammable, bubbling well water.

Despite the potential risks, natural gas can solve our energy problems in the short term better than any other source. Like any other fossil fuel, however, it exists in limited quantities and is bad for the environment. Nevertheless, it's the next step in our progression of energy sources and buys us more time to get to something fully renewable.

If you'd like to read more about fossil fuels and peak oil, I recommend this book.

The Cost of Ads

2011-06-18T20:24:00.006-04:00

Recently, I installed Adblock and Flashblock on Google Chrome. I hesitated for a while--after all, websites had to get revenue somehow, and if it involved nothing more than a few pictures in constant motion, I was willing to accept that.

Although weary for the survival of the internet, I broke down and installed it because ads can be more than annoying. At times, the downright hinder access to information, like the pop-up hell pages in days yonder gone. Sometimes, they're downright malicious.

I couldn't take it anymore; between the paranoia and the nuisance, internet advertising had lost my trust. I was surprised with the results:

First of all, the internet was smoother. It was like the first time I used Chrome, all over again. No giant flash scripts to execute; no overloaded adserve servers to access.

More so, though, I was stunned how much cleaner everything is. Look at the website to the left--it's clear, for the first time, someone actually spent time designing it. The information is presented with out noise or irritation. It's quite incredible how much simplicity is lost when the advertising is there; the agitation that distraction causes detracts in a way that's hard to describe and costly in immeasurable ways.

After all, I don't want a free iPad. I know I'm not your "winner." I want to know the lyrics to this song, and I want to leave. Everything else is just noise. However, I'm surprised how annoying noise actually is. I thought I was a master at tuning it out, but now it's clear how exhausting tuning is.

Google vs Facebook: What?

2011-05-15T13:47:00.004-04:00

Articles have been floating around that suggest Google and Facebook are fighting one another. This always seemed bizarre, an apples-vs-oranges comparison.

Google is where I get information and check my e-mail. Facebook is where I make plans and look at funny pictures from the past weekend. These are completely separate domains. Occasionally, one company tries to bleed over into the role of the other (Buzz), and it has failed dramatically. They can't compete; they work in parallel.

Not only do the two work in separate domains, they work with completely different metrics. Google works to reduce user time; Facebook works to increase it. The longer users spend on Facebook, the more value it has. The less time a user spends on Google, the better Google has done as a search engine.

The fact of the matter is, if Facebook vanished tomorrow, I'd be sad about losing pictures posted from college and before. Then, I'd proceed with my life, increased productivity, and general sense of greater well-being.

If Google vanished tomorrow, my life would be in complete disarray. Over the years, I've migrated my e-mail, documents, and calendar to their services. Combine that with the fact that if I had to go back to Firefox, I'd be a cranky bastard.

Facebook is ineffectual. Sure, I use it a lot, because there's a lot of people there and its well-designed. On the other hand, my life is built around Google.

What are they supposed to be fighting over, exactly? The social graph? Ooh. Steve is friends with Joe. What does that even mean? They're probably not friends. In all likelihood, they're just acquaintances. What does that mean? Nothing.

How about advertisers? I don't care about advertising where ever I go. I never click it. Under most circumstances, it merely shrinks the content area of a site, making it harder to read.

Perhaps the clear cause for this "struggle" emerged last week. Facebook, apparently, hired a PR firm to spread anti-Google messages. This likely extends beyond this incident. The entire fight was likely contrived by PR firms. Once they got the ball rolling, bloggers and the news itself would keep it going. Being a Googlekiller is good for a company evaluation, allowing you to raise more capital and build more product. It's not quite fraud, but in the spirit of fraud.

Where's The State Certificate?

2011-04-27T17:31:00.004-04:00

Now that Obama has released his birth certificate, I wonder how long it will take the birthers to begin questioning the Statehood of Hawaii. My guess: tomorrow, though we won't hear about it for a month, when their inane blathering reaches critical mass for news media.

As for the answer, they should ask Dan Quayle.

Naturally Accumulated Biological Energy Repositories: The Future of Energy

2011-04-25T17:24:00.003-04:00

Life has existed on Earth for more than a billion years. During that time, many life forms accumulated energy and died. As time went on, they were buried underground and compressed by the earth, forming, literally, organic energy sources, born straight from life itself. These Naturally Accumulated Biological Energy Repositories, or NABERs, are widespread, many remaining untapped throughout the world.

This sounds bizzare, but with a simple, exothermic oxidation process, energy can be extracted from NABERs. The results are nothing worse than what emerges from typical biological processes.

A NABER reactor is safer than a nuclear reactor, as it lacks the possibility of a meltdown. It is less tacky than a wind turbine and requires less space than solar power. Additionally, there are nearly 3 yottajoules of NABERs available worldwide--that is 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules, so we'll clearly never run out.

IDLE is Awful

2011-04-16T03:10:00.006-04:00

When I first started working in Python, I used the built-in interpreter on the Mac. I was working in an astronomy lab at the time as an undergrad. For editing, I used the built-in text editor, TexTedit or whatever, and would run the Python scripts in a terminal window. They ran smoothly, and all was well.

When I started using Python at home, I started using Python for Windows. With it comes "IDLE (Python GUI)." It seemed nice enough at first, and I used it for a while.

It's only in retrospect that I can see that it was downright awful. The interface felt buggy. It forced upon me that four space shit--I know it's the convention; I don't care. Tabbing in any other text editor produces a tab, not four spaces. As a result of the "convention," the four spaces locked me into IDLE and made transitioning to any other editor difficult.

I'd had enough when I started testing applications that used Pygame. Nearly everytime I ran them, the editor would freeze and crash. Having to restart IDLE everytime I wanted to test my code made me very diligent about debugging but grow very distasteful of Python.

What brought me back? I had an idea for something, didn't want to write it in Java, and, although Lisp curious, didn't want to start on a new language. I wanted to prototype this thing, quickly.

Without IDLE, I happily exist on a crossbreed between VIM and command prompt. I know I could probably run my scripts right out of VIM with some hacky scripting wizardry--I don't care. I like my "IDE." My console window is a real console. My editor is my editor. They don't need to touch.

IDLE's so bad, it hurts Python and programming in general. When the IDE goes bad, new programmers blame programming. Programmers new to Python blame Python, even if subconsciously. I was all about programming in Python--after fighting with IDLE for a month, I stopped the project I was on all together. With IDLE being the most easily available approach to programming in Python on a Windows PC, can't something better be made available?

Of course, to use something better than Windows would be the first step.

Exceptionalism

2011-04-02T01:16:00.003-04:00

As long as I can remember, and long before that, people have been pushing products to magically reduce people's weight. They come in all sorts of forms--tapeworms, pills, exercise gizmos. They all swear they'll make weight loss easy and flawless while rattling off a list of quasi-technical jargon to validate their claims.

People must buy these things; otherwise, no one would keep making new ones. Do these consumers ever step back, look at the whole set of them, and think "hmm, if this last claim to easy weight loss didn't work out, is there any particular reason for this one to be different?" Other than catching up with the latest fads in marketing and design, the new varies little from the old.

Maybe, people think they'll be the exception this time. "Sure, that last weight loss drug was potentially lethal; this one, I doubt it." In fact, many people seem to think that almost all the time, and not just when contemplating which fat burner to buy. "If I speed, I'll get away with it because I'm special." Then, it's the cop's fault when they end up with a ticket.

Everyone lives in the best country in the world. They also practice the best religion in the world, which is different from all the others because it is theirs, and their religion must be right because all the other religions are wrong. After all, when they read from the Holy Book, they have tears in their eyes. That other Holy Book is a bunch of choppy, poorly-translated joke language. If it were a good religion, it would have been translated well into--or written originally in--their language, the best language.

Of course, because I'm aware that I'm not an exception, that makes me an exception and better than all the people who aren't exceptions. The smugness I feel is legitimate, unlike the smugness of all those other people, which is just unexceptional smugness.

Origins of a Few Programming Language Names

2011-03-28T21:28:00.003-04:00

In the Python documentation, it explicitly states that the name "Python" comes from "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and has nothing to do with snakes. This got me thinking about the origins of other programming languages' names. A few of the stories I know, but by no means do I know all of them. There's a lot of languages out there, so this will be nowhere near complete, but hopefully I'll cover the basics.

B: Unclear, but probably from BCPL--a previous language whose initialism stood for "Basic Combined Programming Language"--or from Bon, either deriving from Ken Thompson's wife's name--Bonnie--or an obscure religion whose practitioners murmur magic formulas.

C: C was an upgraded version of B.

C++: In C, as well as many other languages now, adding "++" to the end of a variable increments it by one. Naturally, then, "C++" is C incremented by one. Originally, C++ was called "C with Classes" because that's effectively what C++ is.

COBOL: "COmmon Business Oriented Language." Naturally, it was created by a committee.

BASIC: "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code."

ALGOL: "ALGOrithmic Language."

Java: It was originally called "Oak," but there was problems with trademarking that name. Effectively, the developers locked themselves in a room, spit out random words, and sent a list to the trademark lawyers. "Java" was fourth on a list of twelve, and the first to pass the test.

JavaScript: It was orignally called "LiveScript." The name was changed, some believe, to exploit the buzz surrounding Java at the time of its release. The selection has, at least, resulted in plenty of confusion.

MATLAB: "MATrix LABratory."

Lisp: "LISt Processing," since the entire language is parenthesized lists.

Pascal: Named for Blaise Pascal.

Perl: Originally, Larry Wall named "Pearl" for the Parable of the Pearl in the Gospel of Matthew. He discovered there was another language called "PEARL," so he changed the name to "perl." Later, the Camel Book changed the name to "Perl" because it looks better capitalized.

PHP: Orignally stood for "personal home page," though it has since been changed to be a recursive initialism: "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor."

Ruby: The birthstone of a colleague of one of the developers.

Edit: Fortran: IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System

Supermetapost: Drafts

2011-02-28T03:00:00.003-05:00

I mentioned in my last post that my posting has been sparse lately. It's not that I haven't been writing; it's just that many posts never make it past drafting stage. Since September 2010, I have started 25 posts; I have published 8. For many periods, this is a common thread--lots of beginnings, no endings. I want to explore why, here.

2004 Quality
You should avoid the archives. I keep them up in a spirit of completeness and transparency; however, I do not advocate many of the views I held back then in ignorance, naivety, and angst.

However, the way I start writing a post is about the same; I think of an idea and execute its development. More often than not, I could sum up the point of a post in a sentence. Getting there and going where it takes me fill in the rest. Sometimes, this produces really angst posts or posts where the only funny part is that I used the word "fuck" a lot. I don't post those anymore.

I never start writing.
Sometimes, I think of an idea for a post and then don't write a single word, or I'll write a few words, won't really see where it's going, and quit.

I get bored writing and stop.
If I become bored with writing something, I will stop mid-sentence. More often than not, the post will remain open for a bit on my computer, but I'll end up with a blue screen or reboot in a day or so and never see it again.

I realize, in the process of developing my idea, that I am wrong.
To support my points, I try to provide links, videos, and funny pictures. In the process of finding these things, if I find evidence contradictory to my point or lack of critical evidence, I abandon my post. This happened, for example, in a post I was writing about Senator Boehner's last name. Although I'm pretty sure his name should be pronounced "boner" in German, I couldn't dig up strong enough evidence for it.

I feel like I have to do it.
Most of my posts I write spontaneously, and a lot of the time, I don't really know where I'm going with them. When I feel like I have to be spontaneous... well, that's Valentine's Day. This might be what caused my present posting burn-out--the Moon of the Month experiment. Something similar happened when I started the RIAA Terror in Brief series.

The process of writing, in some ways, acts as a filter for shitty ideas. If you can't write them down, then they're probably not worth publishing. Some of these drafts, though, might make good posts still. I've done a few resurrections, though they're rare. Perhaps time will tell.

Hiatus

2011-02-10T17:01:00.002-05:00

I know I haven't posted in... almost three months. It's ok; I'm not dead. I've been applying to grad schools, etc. That's all that's been on my mind, and it's not fun to read about. Maybe it's not. Either way, I'll get back around to posting again. I just gotta get some momentum.

Moon of the Month: Miranda

2010-11-08T18:45:00.001-05:00

In astronomy, Uranus is perpetually the butt of jokes. The name is funny, but to compound this, the planet is made of methane, the primary substance of farts. Yes, Uranus really is a big, smelly, butt planet.

Astronomers don't feel much pity for the planet either. As Voyager 2 cruised through the solar system, scientists were delighted by beautiful images of Jupiter and Saturn--bands of color, complex ring systems. Then they arrive at Uranus to see this:

Sure it's serene and pretty, but there's no reason to take close-ups. However, the visit wasn't a complete disappointment; Uranus' saving grace is its moon system. It's got 27 of them, five of which are "major" moons. These were the first moons for whom the Greco-Roman naming trend was broken; they have the names of Shakespearean characters.

The first of Uranus' moons were discovered by astronomy's number one badass--William Herschel. He thought he'd discovered six moons, though only two of them bore properties that matched later observations. Miranda itself was discovered by Gerard P. Kuiper; he has the entire belt of debris in the outer solar system named after him.

Most of Uranus' moons are relatively plain looking--smooth balls with craters. Voyager 2 snapped a few pictures of them, and that's about it. That's all we know about them.

Then there's Miranda~~, the bad nut~~. Voyager snapped pictures of it too, revealing giant regions of scarps bisecting the moon's surface. Some of these scarps are estimated to be 3 miles high, such as Verona Rupes:

It's on the bottom left of the image, the lighter part. That is a vertical outcrop that ascends three miles. It sounds like a lovely place for basejumping, except that without an atmosphere, a parachute would be worthless.

Scarps are usually caused by some form of cooling. When most materials cool, they shrink. Because the inside of the body shrinks but the outside is already solid, the surface cracks and forms ridges.

This brings back a familiar question--where did the heat come from and why did it go away? It's suspected that Miranda used to be in an orbital resonance with another one of Uranus' moons--that is, they both interacted with each other gravitationally. This forced Miranda to have a more eccentric orbit than it presently does, inducing tidal heating.

Since then, Miranda lost its resonance. Its orbit became less eccentric, and without a source of heat, it cooled down, forming its present strange shape.

Other theories suggest that an earlier incarnation of Miranda was destroyed and reformed with its current shape. The truth may be some combination of both theories; such an impact may have heated Miranda as well.

As for knowing more, it will be quite some time. There are no plans in place to further explore Uranus. Although politicians and scientists may have a private desire to do so, there are places that are easier to reach and are arguably equally or more interesting. As a result, the Uranian system will remain unpenetrated for sometime more.

Remembering Prime Numbers Fast; Dividing with Less Guessing

2010-10-08T01:56:00.012-04:00

Edit: This is a shorthand form of the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

Way back in high school, I thought I was a genius. In my naivety, I thought I could solve the great prime number problem--that is, to find a pattern in prime numbers that predicts them without having to check via factoring.

At the time, I knew very little about proofs or logic or induction. I did, however, know how to write programs in QBasic, so I wrote a factoring program. Then I wrote a program that generated lists of prime numbers, and I let one run for two days, giving me a data set containing all prime numbers through the 2 millions.

I tried different approaches to analysis. I arranged and displayed the numbers in different ways. I never found the pattern. If I had, I'd be a millionaire right now, and that would be pretty cool.

I'm not a millionaire though; I'm studying for the GRE--the general GRE. Now, you may scoff at that, and perhaps you're worthy of that great privilege. I'm not. I scoffed at the SATs, and that bit me in the ass. I doubt I did more than an hour of studying for them. I did fine--it got me into college--but I'm sure I could have nailed them with some more practice.

Lesson learned, here I am. After four years of Physics, I'm drilling basic algebra. Why? When you're doing a Physics problem, you have hours to do algebra. You can space out and happily meander through mathematical meadows. You re-derive all the theorems of algebra that you'd forgotten because you don't want to memorize a few formulae. When you're doing a GRE problem, you have two minutes flat to determine unwavering truth. The mindset's different; it takes a little practice and memorization to adapt.

Every practice test I've taken has turned up at least one problem where prime numbers are involved. The first few are easy to recall: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, and 19. Those appear so frequently that it's hard to forget them. But what about the others? What about numbers that are far larger--say, 153--but not too big to be on the GRE?

I remembered one of the optimistic results I had during my prime number function hunting days. I'll first write it in the form I remember it in, then explain that:
1|1379
2|39
3|17
The left is the ten's column. The right contains entries from the ones columns that are, in fact, prime when combined with that tens column. So, the rows above say,
11, 13, 17, 19
23, 29
31, 37

If we keep this going through one hundred, it looks something like this,
4|137
5|39
6|17
7|139
8|39
9|7
This looks discouraging--there's all those holes in the pattern!

Let's take a look at the exceptions:
49 = 7 x 7
77 = 7 x 11
91 = 7 x 13

In fact, what I'd developed was a sieve. It's an incomplete one, but a sieve nevertheless. It seems to eliminate all numbers that have factors of 2, 3, or 5; these three factors make the sieve loop every 30 integers. I haven't proven it rigorously, though I can make a few hand-wavy arguments.

By inspection, it obviously eliminates anything with a factor of two or five. Anything that's a multiple of two is even; its first digit is an even number, and there are none of those caught by the sieve. There's a similar argument for five; any multiple of five's first digit is 0 or 5, and none of those are present.

As far as threes go, in the first row of the sieve, all multiples of three are even or divisible by five--12, 15, 18--leaving all four possible first digits. In the second row, the multiples of three are 21, 24, and 27, so only 3 and 9 remain to be prime. On the third row, multiples of three actually begin with three--33, 36, 39--so 3 and 9 are dropped, leaving 1 and 7.

How is this useful if there are exceptions? There's not that many of them--only three less than 100, only one, 91, that made me double-take. Looking at whether or not a sieve catches a particular number gives you a lot of information and can take a lot of the guess work out of division.

In fact, it comes in really handy when factoring. Factoring by random guesswork is tedious, but this can cut your guess time down dramatically.

Take, for example, 153. The sieve doesn't cut it out, and it's not divisible two or five, so it's obviously divisible three--the only other factor the sieve eliminates. 150/3 = 50, and 3/3 = 1, so its factors are 3 and 51. 51 is not blocked out by the sieve and not a multiple of 2 or 5, so it too is divisible by three. 51 = 30 + 21, so 51/3 = 30/3 + 21/3 = 17. So the factors of 153 are 3, 3, and 17.

Being able to factor speeds up any type of division. It eliminates a lot of the guess work, saving time. Saved time on the GRE effectively means a higher score because it leaves you more time to think.

That, and I really hate doing guess work. When I was in fifth grade, I remember being taught to "guess and check," and I thought it was the biggest waste of time. I still think that, because if I wanted to guess and check, I'd make a computer do it for me. Division, though, remains a guess and check problem, and on a test where I can't use a calculator, I'll take all the help I can get.

Browser Diversity: The Internet's Condom

2010-10-06T19:10:00.010-04:00

For the first time since the 90's, Microsoft Internet Explorer does not hold the majority of the browser market.

It's about time. The browser doesn't fully comply with W3C standards that say what an internet browser ought to do. I don't think it ever has, and they didn't try that hard to do so because they, at one point, controlled 95% of the market share. Why comply with standards when your browser is the standard?

This ends up being a huge pain in the ass for web designers. Take, for example, this game I've been developing. The part of the interface I've developed so far draws a map using 5x5 icons. Each of the icons is absolutely positioned using CSS. In Firefox and Chrome, the map renders properly:

This is what happens in IE:

IE, in one form or another, ignores the style sheets. It's rather insulting, really.

Once the Internet at large had enough, Firefox liberated us. It was the first browser capable of putting a significant punch into IE's market share, and more importantly, it introduced the idea that the browser you use is a choice. People using Windows had stuck with the default browser, but Firefox presented--for the first time--a viable option to switch to. Having changed before, users become slightly bolder to change again; the idea of changing browsers was no longer foreign.

I was a Firefox fan for a long time. Yesterday, I switched to Chrome. Why? I'd tinkered with it briefly and saw it going good places. Google is right about the speed too--it does things faster. I felt a little guilty about leaving my liberator and hero, but I realized it wasn't such a bad thing. As more people move on or move around, it'll make us all safer.

This seems a little counterintuitive--that as people spread out across multiple browsers, it will make everyone safer. After all, having one browser with all of the security flaws worked out sounds safer than many browsers with smaller teams working on the same problems, leaving potentially more flaws out in the open.

No matter how hard a team of developers works, every browser has security flaws. Sure, updates bring the number closer to zero, but they can never quite reach it. There will always be holes. If there's one browser, then that flaw leaves room for more damage--at IE's peak, 95% of users were at risk.

It reminds me of the cordyceps fungus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8
When one browser is hegemonic--like a single insect in the jungle having an edge--a single security flaw affects every user of the Internet. It brings everyone down.

A lot of the exploitation of browsers flaws comes from the fact that it can be profitable. Let's say an unscrupulous developer decides to write a script that forwards a user to a crappy search engine. The script makes it appear that the user clicked an advertising link for that search engine, and the unscrupulous developer gets paid for it.

In browser hegemony, it becomes very profitable for the unscrupulous developers to look for as many flaws as possible in those browsers. The resulting rate of return is very high, so even if those holes are hard to find, the yield makes them worth searching for.

On an Internet with browser diversity--the one we've started transitioning to--exploiting a single security flaw has a much lower rate of return, and doing so for profit is much more difficult. As a result, it's plausible that the business of exploiting browsers for profit could diminish. I don't think it will go away, but the increased difficulty will make it subside. Finding a security flaw in Firefox, at this point, gives you a 30% share of the market; IE, only 49%.

That's a much smaller incentive and, in the long run, makes things safer for everyone.

Moon of the Month: Enceladus

2010-10-04T00:47:00.005-04:00

Saturn has a lot of moons. About two-hundred have been observed, and it's suspected there are more. Most of these are tiny and orbit on very irregular orbits; astronomers only consider twenty-four of them regular satellites. Those we know much about are fascinating--each in a different way. Very little was known about any of them until the Voyager probes looked at them close-up in the early 1980's.

Before then, Saturn's moons were just dots. William Herschel--the same guy who discovered Uranus--first spotted Enceladus in 1789. Enceladus was the second moon in Saturnian system discovered despite only being the sixth-largest. Part of this was because William Herschel was a badass--he was, after all, the first guy to discover a planet that wasn't visible to the naked eye. On the other hand, Herschel had a little help from Enceladus and its albedo.

No, that has nothing to do with libido--unless you have an albino fetish. Albedo--particularly, Bond albedo--is the measure of "whiteness" of something, coming from the Latin "alba," meaning "white." Effectively, Bond albedo measures how much light a body reflects back into space divided by the amount it receives. Earth has an albedo of 0.29--that is, it reflects 29% of the light it receives back into outer space. Dark colored oceans, asphalt, and other things absorb the remaining 71%, which lingers as heat.

Most solar system objects are about where earth is, plus or minus 5%. Mars reflects about 25%; Saturn about 34%. Venus--with its notoriously thick sky that lights up evening and morning skies on Earth when its visible--reflects 75%.

Enceladus reflects 99%--nearly all light that hits it bounces off. The surface is pure white, covered completely in relatively new surface ice, laid down by active ice volcanoes--that's right, volcanoes that spray ice into space. Scientists were stunned when these were discovered, just as they were when Io's volcanoes were discovered. When Mars was found geologically dead, it was suspected most of the outer solar system was as well. Io came as a surprise; Enceladus, even more so. Io was much easier to explain; it's close to Jupiter and experiences tidal heating. Enceladus, on the other hand, was more difficult.

What fuels the volcanoes? Something has to keep the ice under Enceladus' surface a liquid. So, to look at the question differently, what is heating Enceladus? Enceladus reflects nearly all of the light that hits it back out into space, so clearly, the sun is not warming Enceladus. Tidal heating is suspected, but Enceladus' neighbors that are closer to Saturn are more geologically dead than Enceladus, so that's not the whole answer.

To make up the difference, It's suspected that the other portion of Enceladus' heat comes from one of the same sources as Earth--radioactive decay. Like on Earth, radioactive elements deep inside Enceladus break down slowly over time. These breakdowns release energy that warms Enceladus, eventually warming the thick layer of ice on surface, melting it, increasing its pressure, and forcing it to erupt. These "cryo-volcanoes" result.

The effects of Enceladus' volcanoes aren't just local. It's suspected--in conjunction with meteorite impacts--that they replenish Saturn's large, diffuse E-ring. Calculations have shown that particles in the E-ring ought to dissipate after millions of years--assuredly a long time, but short on the scale of the solar system. If they'd been around at the beginning of the solar system and not been replenished, they would have assuredly disappeared. Enceladus' eruptions--perpetually pumping particles into space--explain the continued existence of the ring.

Scientists have discussed exploring Enceladus further--however, exploration of Europa, it's been decided, is more important. As cool as Enceladus is, I agree. It's easier to get Jupiter, and Europa's about due for drilling.

Separating Spiritual and Supernatural

2010-09-22T19:40:00.010-04:00

A long time ago, someone created religion. I doubt that they sat down with their friends and said, "alright guys, we're starting a religion." That would require them to know what religion was--there would have to have been one for them to have a name for it. Instead, I'm sure their newfangled hominid brains meandered a bit--pondering questions about life with this newfangled language thing--finally concluding with, "I bet all these questions I can't stop asking have a common answer."

Among these questions were things like:
"How did we get to be this way?"
"What's it mean to be?"
"What happens when people die, and why am I sad when they do?"
"What will happen to the world?"
"Why is there weather, day, and night?"
"What is right?"
To explain these, they personified and discussed through metaphor. These metaphors were incorporated into supernatural beings, and those were--in most cases, after thousands of years--incorporated into one being.

In due time, though, when people looked really close, the questions weren't answered completely. "Ok, so the all-gerunding being makes the planets go around the earth, but why do they go backwards?" People started looking deeper at questions, abandoning the simple explanations found in religious and classical texts, and reaching for deeper ones.

This process resulted--along with high standards in rigor and definition--in what we now call science. This is also the origin between the conflict between science and religion. Religion presents protoscience--hypotheses to explain the world without the scientific method--incorporated into its texts. Science demonstrates that protoscience is false, but because one is an organ of religion, the two butt heads.

One way to abate the conflict temporarily was "to leave room for the creator." Newton did this--the mathematics backing his theory of gravity couldn't explain why the planets didn't throw each other out of orbit over long periods of time. Newton answered this question with the Hand of God.

Neil Degrasse Tyson discusses this "Hand of God" gap-filler in his essay The Perimeter of Ignorance, and he concludes that the belief in the supernatural acts as a crutch, stunting continued exploration in science. Sometime after Newton, Laplace discovered the mathematics to replace Newton's Hand of God. According to Tyson,
Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. "Sire," Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

It's an elegant statement, and I wonder if it's one that can be applied not only in science, but to the realm of the spiritual--the essence of being. From the birth of religion, humanity used religion to satisfy its spiritual needs--ones that, even in an atheistic context, do not recede. There's no reason to bind the spiritual to the supernatural. They remain inseparable because the entire discussion of spirituality for the whole of history has taken place in a supernatural context, but there's no reason this has to continue.

What makes this difficult--and why I haven't heard of anyone who's done it yet--is that I don't know where to restart the discussion. I don't think anyone does. Just as gods were necessary for humans to discuss the cosmos, people utilized gods to discuss the core of our being and purpose. We're surrounded by a metaphor gone mad.

There's no reason but tradition for which this has to continue. It's true that science can't answer all questions, but it's false to say that questions outside of science require supernatural explanations. Using them may be simple or satisfying--providing an answer to many of these questions--but that doesn't mean that they're right. They are merely pleasing--like a cigarette to the smoker. They provide temporary relief, but the addiction continues. A long struggle--quitting--offers the most viable long-term solution. In the short-term, it is difficult, but in the long-term, it will bear greater fruit than any ever-lasting life the smoker is pleased to contemplate.

This "short-term" may be a thousand years. The spiritual struggle remains unanswered from ancient times, and I'm sure a solution won't come quickly. The path beckons us, though; imaginary satisfaction dulls our hearts to the call, but on occasion, the question asks itself loud enough to feel again. When they hear it, people pander from the horror of ignorance to the supernatural explanations into which they were raised--the easy road.

Yet the cravings never leave.

Simcity's A Ghetto Now

2010-09-13T04:15:00.003-04:00

I haven't played Simcity 4 in a long time. I used to enjoy the game; I've spent quite a few hours in the mayor's chair. Somehow, despite all the extra features and graphics that have been added since Simcity 2000, something is wrong with the game--something I can't put my finger on that's forced the joy of creation to devolve into frustration.

I'll start with the big picture--the region.

One of the new features was the idea of a region; you build cities, and every region has multiple cities of different sizes. The cities connect to one another, exchanging demands for different zone types. In this way, you can isolate your nasty industries from your pretty, high-tech cities. People can commute between cities, allowing suburbia to develop around denser ones, eventually flowing into small, farming communities, just like real life.

This sounds great on paper. In SC4, it breaks down completely.

When starting a new region, SC4 provides two options--water or land. Land gives you a single, flat, empty plain. There are no terrain features, at all.

To solve this, Simcity 4 provides terrain editing tools. The tools are neat, but they fail to take advantage of the regional nature of the game. You can only edit one map at a time. Trying to create a mountain range that looks good on a regional scale and is built off of the nubs of nearby mountains is... difficult, to say the least. The region pictured above is one of the few built in regions--a map of San Francisco. Unless you want to leave the game and use an external program to generate a map, you're left with a handful of regions to play on.

So, you've accepted the site of an already well-developed city in real life. You start building the city. You drop a power plant--wind, coal, oil, or gas--and go on your merry way building roads, zones, and pipes. Roads, zones, and pipes. Roads, zones, and pipes. Roads, zones, and pipes. Roads, zones, and pipes.

This repeats until the city is big enough for a school, or a police station, or a fire station, or whatever. The game will tell you when that is. You build it; then roads, zones, and pipes. Roads, zones and pipes.

Then the game keeps going. Sure, there's small problems that come up here or there, like needing more schools or hospitals, but the problems are the same really: Issue X requires solution Y. Place solution Y on the map. They work the same, too. Each of them affects structures within a particular radius.

That's it. Even though they solve different problems on the surface, the problem is the same: area X needs coverage for solution Y. Couldn't more thought have gone into each problem? Say, for education, the game would require that the player to zone what neighborhoods go to which schools; for police, the game would make their optimal location a matter of ability to patrol areas or response time; firefighters would rely entirely on response time; for hospitals, the opposite would occur--it would be based on how fast sims can get to the hospital.

For every case, it should be about different problems being solved, not producing the correct numbers in the correct places over-and-over again. Each problem is parallel to the others, not orthogonal. They are different skins for the same problem. Perhaps some realism may be sacrificed to achieve a game with more unique combinations of solution sets, but radial projections of city services aren't very realistic either.

Terrain too does little to actually enrich gameplay--it's something that looks kinda pretty, gets in the way, but is always solved the same way--level it or build on top of it. Of terrain "challenges," the champion frustration is placing things on coastlines. Leveling coastlines so they're just perfect for a marina, seaport, or bridge--usually with my fingers crossed--can only be done through repetitive leveling efforts. There's no real formula for getting it right, so the only way to get it to work is guess and check. That's not fun; that's algebra.

The mother of all problems with Simcity 4 is guess and check as well, and it doesn't have a solution--at least, not out of the box. SC4's blight is traffic.

On the surface--and early in the development of a city--traffic looks like a fun problem to solve. At that point, it is. It's just a matter of upgrading roads to thicker ones. On top of that, SC4 provides you with a powerful tool for solving traffic problems--the traffic query tool. It does two things very intuitively: when you select roads, it shows you traffic going in and out of that tile so you can see where and why you have a bottleneck in one click; when you select buildings, it shows you the traffic that building produces and where it goes.

This tool is also quite a tease--a telescope to galaxies you'll never visit. Using it, you can build all the bus routes, subways, and superhighways available without turning your city into infrastructure, and most people still drive on the same damn route. They still contribute to the problem they loathe--the one that prevents a city from growing further. Perhaps this is Will Wright's own cute commentary on the human nature, but it's not any fun or realistic. As a result, the fully patched, Maxis version of the game cannot produce cities with the highest density buildings. The game is designed to have super-skyscrapers, but your cities will never have them without third-party corrections.

It reflects a lot about the game's designers when they fail to notice something that inhibits gameplay so dramatically. Will Wright made the original Simcity because he wanted to write a game he would enjoy playing.

When he wrote Simcity 2000, he had more resources available and added the things he wish he'd included in the original. Looking at SC4, it's as if they added pretty graphics, made sure it was stable, played a full map or two, and went on their merry way without really following through with the most important part of game development: enjoying it.

It shows, too. They hadn't designed a game that they wanted to play anymore, but a game they thought someone else would want to play. Making more Simcity games didn't appeal to a "broad demographic," so this dispassionate abortion was the final burn out.

They're wrong though--especially with the production of games that are "simplistic in nature and... geared toward a younger demographic." I played Simcity 2000 as a kid. It was hard, so initially, I used the cheats and used it as a sophisticated paint tool. Eventually, though I sat down and figured out how the game worked. I had to learn a few things, like the concepts of profit and loss, but it never inhibited the fun. SC2K turned economics into a puzzle, and that's a work of brilliance. Because the creator wrote a game he wanted to play, the result amazed everyone. Now, the creator's following up on something he's grown tired of, and his only new ideas involve prettier pictures--a gilded surface on a rusting core.

That's all Simcity 4 boils down to in the end--a sequence of pretty pictures. Even the buildings themselves just represent numerical values in a grand matrix at equilibrium; any change disrupts the system, which balances itself--maybe--and moves on. This was still ok in Simcity 2000; it was still novel. The designers could have used the amazing processing power of modern computers to explore further the development of cities' character--somehow diving into what makes cities unique economically and anthropologically. Instead, Simcity 4 gives us pretty pictures--a facade on top of a recycled concept. I played a lot of Simcity 4 looking for super-skyscrapers, but it was the heart of the city I never found.

Bragging Rights: Facebook Won, MySpace Lost

2010-09-04T09:08:00.005-04:00

Recently, an event made me get back on MySpace again. Well, it didn't force me--I went on voluntarily. I was trying to get in touch with a friend--my last friend who used MySpace exclusively. His page was gone. I was a little down-trodden, but so it goes.

I realized this morning, though, that he was the last reason I ever got on MySpace. I'd never have to go back. I remembered that four-years-ago, I made a step into the unknown based on what I could observe. MySpace was ugly; Facebook was not, so I decided to get a facebook.

As it turns out, I gambled right. MySpace lost, and they lost hard. But why? One of my reservations in gambling in their favor was their strong user base. How did Facebook overcome MySpace's biggest obstacle--a massive user-base? Why did they leave? And what did MySpace turn into?

Soon after getting on Facebook, I read an article--maybe it was in Wired--about how MySpace had been bought. This douche in a suit was quoted talking about how he was gonna make MySpace into this-and-that, probably something or other about media distribution. That was their first problem; they got bought and let a suit run it. Suits can't run websites. Their MBAs taught them about revenue, not users.

I'm sure the users didn't leave because a suit showed up. They probably cared less, or if they knew, thought it sounded good. The best image I got of why MySpace failed was on Facebook when they released their API. The entire website performed the internet equivalent of a riot. People did not want to see Facebook turn into "another mySpace." They knew that MySpace was tacky and couldn't be navigated without hearing hundreds of different songs, seeing tacky color combinations, and feeling irritated. Facebook users feared this would be the fate of Facebook.

So far, Facebook's been kinder than MySpace was. Initially, the applications were in "profile boxes." They looked cluttered, so most users avoided installing but a particular few that were popular or useful. These are being fazed out. We still have to put up with Farmville, but Facebook retains usability.

I haven't looked around MySpace in years. The site looks slightly cleaner, but still cluttered. There's a giant ad for Machete on top, and movies and other crap all over the front page. At first glance, I can't tell you what the hell the website is even for or why it's worth joining.

The main page still looks like a mess. Big gif ads, and I can't find anything. Oh, right, everything's located on a thin bar on the top of the page.

Ooh, I have messages, let's see what they say:

Mark your calendar to
go dorm shopping at
Walmart

Tuesday, Aug. 10 - Thursday, Aug. 12

RSVP

Shop early for the best savings and personalize your new college home.

Wow, Wal-Mart. That's cool.

I also have a message from Step Up 3D. Apparently, there is "Live Stream Tonight – Flo Rida, Ne." This is just exactly what I wanted, really. I didn't even sign up for this crap, and it's being deposited directly into my inbox. Thanks for the unsolicited junk mail, MySpace, this is just what I needed.

Ooh, I have a friend request. From a rapper I've never heard of. Named Atrophy. Good luck there, Atrophy, but a pro-tip--you should be concerned with your flow, not your friend count, and especially not your friend count on MySpace. MySpace is Babylon declining. Get out before it drags you under the sand.

Moon of the Month: Phobos

2010-08-31T00:40:00.001-04:00

Mars has two moons. The planet isn't very big, so these are tiny things. It's been suggested that they're not much more than captured asteroids; they don't look like much more than that.

Asaph Hall discovered Phobos--along with Deimos, Mars' other moon--at the United States Naval Observatory using their 26-inch refractor, the most powerful telescope in the world at the time.

Because he was the first guy to find Mars' moons, he was the first guy to discover Mars' mass. This is because the mass of an object determines how strong its gravitational pull is; gravitational pull determines how fast an object moves around a larger one. Scientists still use this technique to measure the mass of objects with deep space probes and groups of stars--as the object pulls on the probe or companion star, it moves differently. The change in motion--the acceleration--created by the object tells us the mass.

There's a big hole in Phobos--a crater that covers a large area of Phobos' surface--called Stickney. It's named for Asaph Hall's wife who apparently encouraged him in his search for satellites around Mars. The crater itself wasn't named until imaged by Mariner 9.

A few of Phobos' properties make it particularly unique. It is very porous. Some astronomers long ago suspected that it was hollow--perhaps built by Martians to protect them from radiation--but this has since been discredited. It wasn't a terrible hypothesis at the time. The idea that there such things as Martians was popular. It's also incredibly close to the planet--moving from rise to set in four-and-a-half.

Phobos is, however, slowly falling into Mars. Due to atmospheric drag, its orbit decays, spiraling over millions of years into the planet. This yields two possibilities. Phobos may fall directly into Mars in eleven million years, or it may break-up to form a ring in around seven million, the remaining pieces pelting the planet for millions of years after.

Phobos may prove useful in the future. Considering how close it is to Mars and how small the moon itself is, it may make a good substation for astronauts trying to land on Mars or return to Earth. It may also be the gateway to hell.

Introducing: Moon of the Month

2010-08-11T22:08:00.003-04:00

Image Source

There’s a lot of moons in the solar system--172 to be exact. We don’t know much about most of them. Sitting around watching the Science channel, I thought it would be cool to write little bits about each of them and what makes them interesting, publishing one every month. I’ve selected a handful of the ones we know a little more about and will write them in the coming months.

I will also continue to write regular posts. I always write them while I'm in the mood to do so, which is why they get posted so irregularly.

In a way, moons are a lot more exciting than planets. With a suit to keep us warm, pressurized, and breathing, all of them are places we could stand on, unlike most of the planets. Only half of the planets have tangible surfaces, and only half of those are cool enough to stand on. The rest are either too hot or too soft.

With 172 moons, there’s a lot more to stand on and to explore. All of the moons are solid bodies. Deep space probes are likely on par with humans when it comes to analysing gas giants, but solid bodies will be better studied when touched, when rocks can be turned over, and when a human can choose where to look and poke without delay.

In this series of articles, I’ll talk about some of these bodies, but I can’t talk about all of them. We haven’t poked around enough. It would be nice to think that we would explore more moons as I write about them, but apathy and expense have made space exploration painfully slow. Despite what we know, our base of knowledge about the destinations of our posterity is painfully thin but curiously tantalizing. The solar system is like the show “Lost;” the more we learn, the more questions we uncover. In science, though, there doesn’t have to be a vague conclusion in four years. We can explore forever.

I'll be posting the first moon in a few days and one per month after that. I have 14 moons in queue, though I may reduce or increase the number if we learn more or know less than I think we do. I also might burn out after a month or two. I've only done one other series, and I got sick of doing it.

A "Boner" Does Not Fabricate Skeletons: Conceiving an Emotional Horizon

2010-07-14T01:44:00.003-04:00

People often idealize the past. You'll hear bitter people--young and old--talk about how much better the world was during childhood and how factor X or Y swept through the world and corrupted humanity. On the contrary, little has changed. There have always been sexual deviants, religious extremists, and ruthless violence.

The idea that these are new is a romantic thought borne in not knowing how naive we were as kids. I'm sure I heard a fair share of dirty jokes as a kid; I just had no emotional faculty to process or organize those ideas, and I sloughed them off as nonsense or nothing more than people talking. "My woodie is in a pipe" would not register as a dirty joke for a kid, but something about the movie Toy Story.

As we grow, we start to see these dirty things come out as if they'd never been there before. In reality, they were there before, they just didn't register in our minds. Puberty first gave us the feelings, faculties, and experiences to understand dirty jokes. What resulted was the appearance of a temporal progression from purity to corruption, when the reality was the temporal progression of our own ability to process sexuality, drug use, and other facets of the whole experience of living.

Strange enough, as kids, we weren't aware that we were lacking massive emotional components of the human experience. Once we hit puberty and realized that these existed, we went ape shit. I wonder if there are further emotional dimensions of a similar nature that don't exist in the human mind, at all, but are theoretically plausible, similar to the idea of a fourth spacial dimension. To explain the idea of "4D," I leave this for Carl Sagan because I'm lazy:

It's hard to picture a fourth spacial dimension, but, as Sagan demonstrated above, the idea of one can be seen peaking over the horizon of our own set of three dimensions. Similarly, our spectrum of feelings have a horizon--there is a limit to the range of motion a human being can expereince. Unlike the theoretical horizon of a fourth dimenson, we crossed that emotional horizon as we've grown and experienced new feelings. Could there be something beyond that? Is there a limit to what can we feel no matter what we do, where we go, and how many drugs we've taken?

One of the most spectacular results of a discovery of an extraterrestrial may be this very end--not how many eyes they have or what they use to communicate, but their emotions. Then again, perhaps what they feel will be the origin of those other things that are fascinating, or perhaps those other things will be the origin of their feelings.

After all, our pricks are the source of a lot of our feelings, maybe that third eye will make them feel turquoise.

Let's Do the World a Favor: Send Justin Bieber to North Korea

2010-07-02T14:47:00.002-04:00

The details are available here: http://www.forkparty.com/4chan-sends-justin-bieber-to-north-korea/

Edit: Great success! Earth is safe once again.

Unobtainium This: Scientific Errors in Avatar

2010-06-28T18:19:00.002-04:00

I've quit gauging the science of Hollywood films--or any films, for that matter. I sense that most writers of science fiction films pick up an issue of "Popular Science" for inspiration. They stretch vague generalizations--whose exploitability is already exaggerated--about the nature of space and reality without fully exploring the causes and repercussions of those things.

As a person studying science, I found this irritating for a long time, but I eventually gave up. So long the plots and writing of films engaged me and the rules of the world created were consistent, I suspended my own sense of reality for the time my eyes enjoyed the film. I simply wanted to enjoy what I watched.

When I saw Avatar, I applied this policy. The plot wasn't great, but the visuals were fun. I accepted and joined the collective ride. Then I read this article, which opened with:
"The producer of "Avatar" is fond of saying that writer and director James Cameron does not write science fiction, he writes science fact."

The link is long since dead, but the rage I felt when I first read this was uncontainable... or perhaps, unobtainiumable. Either way, it's boiled beneath my skin for months and erupts here, now:

+ Floating Islands
The article I linked to above first discusses James Cameron's attempt at rationalizing the existence of floating mountains. They're simply not possible--not in the way the movie portrays and not with his explanation.

Cameron claims the mountains float because of superconductivity. He claims that unobtainium--the desired goal of the human colonists in the film--superconducts, and because Pandora is loaded with the stuff, it makes giant floating mountains.

What Cameron is referring to is something called the Meissner Effect. In short, if a magnet is placed near a superconductor and the conditions are right, the magnet can float. This is why unobtainium--when displayed in the office of the stock character "Greedy Corporate Bureaucrat"--is always floating in some kind of little... circle thing, probably a magnet.

This cause for the mountains' levitation would have caused major physical problems. For example, watch this video of the real Meissner Effect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be3qiux6Dow
Notice something--the magnet floating above the superconductor spins. This has to do with the way the magnet ends up floating in the first place. Just remember, the floating islands in Avatar were completely stable. None of them did flips or rotate, they stayed pleasantly upright.

It's not just that the islands were too stable to be supported by the Meissner Effect; they lacked its most fundamental aspect--the magnetic field. One of the fundamental properties of a magnetic field is that wherever there is a changing magnetic field, an electric current is induced. Even the Earth's magnetic field induces small currents in boats as they move throughout the globe.

The Earth's magnetic field is relatively weak--assuredly, it doesn't make islands float. If the islands in Avatar were held up by magnetism, any ship passing through would experience powerful induced currents in the hull of the ship. These currents would wreak havoc on the ship's on-board electronics, not to mention the hull itself. The currents have to discard their voltage somewhere; it would go right into the hull, causing the ships to heat up and explode.

I didn't see anything like that.

+ Large-scale Bioluminescence on Pandora is Improbable.
Bioluminescence is the production of light by organisms. Lightning bugs, of course, produce some light, but it was found en masse deep in the Earth's oceans. Organisms in these regions receive no light from the sun at all, and they adapted to these conditions accordingly. The light they produce has specific purposes--finding prey, attracting prey, communication, and others I can't list off the top of my head. This is a product of natural selection--residual limbs, such as the human appendix, exist, but nature is very good at plucking off inefficient or unnecessary organs.

In Pandora's case, the bioluminescence really serves no purpose. Not only does everything glow, it doesn't seem to have a purpose for glowing. One of Cameron's arguments for its purpose is that Pandora has a very long night. He neglected something, though:

Pandora orbits very close to a planet the size of Saturn. It acts as a moon far larger and, as a result, far brighter than our own. It is tidally locked in the sky all night. Nothing needs bioluminescence; there's plenty of light, all of the time.

+ That is NOT Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to Earth. It's also a triple star system--the third companion is very dim, but the two primary stars would be easily resolved:

This image was taken by Cassini, orbiting around Saturn. The white band spanning the image is a segment of Saturn's rings. The two dots in the center are Alpha Centauri A and B.

A binary system allows for two orbital possibilities: an orbit around one of the stars--an orbit that would be unstable, insurmountably hot, and--as a result--not conducive to life, or around both the stars, but that begs the question:

WHERE IS THE OTHER STAR? If you're going to put your story in one of the most meticulously studied star systems in the entire sky, get your facts straight. Adding a second star would have been a simple change--they could do it in the 1970's, without computer effects.

Again, I don't mind fantastic voyages when they admit that they are completely made up. They make me itch, but I can deal with that. Don't, however, masquerade as some sort of scientific imagination sage. The movie fails to stand up to reality with respect to electrodynamics, gravitational mechanics, astronomical fact, and natural selection. As a result, it comes with little surprise that one of the science advisors for the film claimed to have received a PhD that he was never awarded.

Get your facts straight before you step into science, or science will step on you.

Occam's Machette: The Betrayal of Simplicity

2010-06-11T01:41:00.005-04:00

I watched a God/No God debate this evening. I generally avoid these; I only leave angry. This one, however, had the banana morons in it, so I had to indulge.

I noticed a common thread during the debate--one spanning beyond the debate itself into arguments of other evangelicals--the use of "simple" arguments in favor of deity-centered conclusions. The simple, "common-sense" argument is effective, especially for those wishing to validate their own beliefs. The one abused most blatantly in the debate above is the creation-creator argument--everything with a purpose must be a creation, every creation has a creator. The creator of man--we call him God. This argument implies that everything has a purpose and establishes that with a few examples.

This argument has it's flaws, and I'm not here to disprove them. The argument continues to be used because it's simple. It's built on simple analogy between all things--everything's a creation, creations have creators. What really makes it hard to fight something so simple is that the counter-arguments--those that demonstrate the logical fallacies present in such "proofs"--are often long. This is because breaking down logical fallacies is difficult. It requires precise definitions and postulates to explain how common sense has been twisted in favor of a particular conclusion. It requires deconstructing an argument piece-by-piece to point out gaps. This takes time and, often, very wordy constructions because it veers on the abstract frontier of language.

Wordiness has another disadvantage; generally, it displays a lack of confidence and strength and can imply guilt. Someone who has to talk a lot is often defending themselves, and someone who has to defend themselves, we generalize, did something that requires them to do so. We rarely associate defense with someone being attacked; instead, we associate defense with someone hiding something. That sounds backwards, but guilty people defend themselves, and humans stereotype the guilt of the defensive guilty on to the defensive. Guilty people are generalized to have convoluted defenses full of lies and rhetoric and are often false, making--through generalization--wordy people false.

This isn't always the case, of course, but it's how we perceive someone trying to make a complex--perhaps insightful--point in a debate. Meanwhile, someone trying to follow this may become lost or bored, or view the speaker as weak and defensive, or even pretentious. Another generalization of people who speak quickly are smart people--for doctors and hackers on television, all they have to do is ramble really fast:

Looking smart is not always good. In many situations, it's very bad because it's just as asinine as trying to take the moral high ground over another person--effectively, an argumentum ad hominem. Looking smarter than your opponent makes you appear more likely to be right. It also makes you look like an ass, so people ignore you.

There's also a practical reason for longer arguments to be false--there's more room for error. In part, it's an error of logic itself. Logic itself has always been part of a mystical dominion. The Greek philosophers--the ones who established the Western tradition of knowledge--loved logic because it was perfect; they thought it beyond our mortal world. This disconnection from reality is indicative of logic. Using logic requires generalizations and assumptions; application to the real world involves squashing complex systems into abstract postulates.

In this process, information is lost. Most logical steps require some small approximation, and by the end of a long chain of logical steps, false conclusions can be drawn with carefully selected postulates.

With a plethora of reasons that make longer arguments harder to fight in the public eye of debate, longer arguments are judged--perhaps incorrectly--as wrong. It ends up a backwards perversion of Occam's Razor--the idea that out of a possible list of hypotheses, the simplest is generally correct. That, however, doesn't mean that it is always correct, and that idea can easily betray us, causing us to discard hypotheses that are longer because of our impatience instead of weighing their merits.

Malthusian Astronomy

2010-05-23T22:19:00.011-04:00

It's handwavy math time again!

Two weeks ago, I was on the road from Mississippi to Virginia, so I had a lot of time to think. One of the things that crossed my mind was the maximum possible human population of the Milky Way galaxy.

To do this calculation, I started with a set of very simplifying assumptions:

A human being requires a particular quantity of energy to survive every day.

Human beings can fuse hydrogen into food energy with 100% efficiency.

The human population has grown exponentially and will continue to do so.

These assumptions flaw the estimation, but they effectively provide a ceiling on the number of humans who can live in the Milky Way Galaxy. Waste will only serve to reduce the maximum number of people, as would less than exponential growth because time would be spent using energy and not contributing to more people, energy that would go into sustaining the unborn.

So to start, we have to figure how much energy is used by the human race daily. Effectively, that is:

 
Energy used per one person per day X Number of People = Energy used per day

To give these quantitative values, I'll have to make some more assumptions. For the energy used per person per one day, I'm going to use 2000 kilocalories--that quantity for which recommended values in the nutrition facts are based. (Kilo)calories are an actual measure of energy, which is why they can be used for this purpose. 2000 kilocalories works out to about 8.3 million Joules. Joules are the scientific measure of energy and will come up again.

For the number of people, we are assuming exponential growth. This takes the form of:


Population(t) = (Initial population) X e^(rt)

This may look vaguely familiar, even if you haven't had a lot of science--this is the same as the continuously compounded interest formula--"Pert"--taught in high schools.

The population formula tells us the number of people, making the energy used per day formula:


Energy used per day = (8.3 X 10^6 Joules/Person) X ((Initial Population) X e^(rt))

I've failed to fill in some quantities here--particularly, initial population and "r." For these, I go back to my assumptions, where I stated, "the human population has grown exponentially and will continue to do so." To fulfill this and fill in the missing variables, I will use two known dates and populations for the two unknowns--the population in 1950, roughly 2.5 billion, and the population in 2010, roughly 6.7 billion. January 1, 1950, then, is t=0, and January 1, 2010 is t=60*365. This solves for the two unknowns and gives us completely the energy used per day as a function of day.

Initially, when looking at this problem, I figured I'd be able to use a definite integral to solve it. Integrals are mathematical operations that add up infinitely small pieces of something between two points. This would be an easy integral, but it's not a valid place for one. This is energy used per day, not energy used per infinitely small piece of time, so the result wouldn't answer our question.

An integral won't work, but summation will. Instead of integrating the energy used everyday, simply add up the energies of each day, resulting in the total energy used. Because adding the energy of each day is a tedious exercise, we'll make a computer do it.

With all of this, I have an approximation of the total energy consumed at a particular time. However, I don't have an expression for the energy remaining or, at least, for the energy there in the first place. The energy remaining is:


Energy Available - Energy Used = Energy Remaining

Our fundamental question--when will humanity consume all the energy--in terms of this expression is "when will energy remaining equal zero?" We're relatively close--energy used we will know with brute force computer approximation. With energy available, though, we have to turn to astronomy.

To simplify our question, I'm going to treat energy available as energy available by combining all atoms of hydrogen in the Milky Way. About 17.6 MeV are produced in the creation of one helium nucleus. Scaling this to the entire Milky Way, along with a few unit conversions, there are about 4.34 X 10^53 Joules available. That's a lot of energy.

Exponential growth, however, is very powerful. Einstein once said that "compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe." It's the exponential that does it. Putting all of the information into the computer yielded the following date for such a fantastic Malthusian disaster:


Decimal year:  6417.92054795 Population:  2.43421421321e+42 Energy remaining:  1.98606230643e+50
Decimal year:  6417.92328767 Population:  2.43432759022e+42 Energy remaining:  1.78401311644e+50
Decimal year:  6417.9260274 Population:  2.4344409725e+42 Energy remaining:  1.58195451572e+50
Decimal year:  6417.92876712 Population:  2.43455436006e+42 Energy remaining:  1.37988650384e+50
Decimal year:  6417.93150685 Population:  2.4346677529e+42 Energy remaining:  1.17780908035e+50
Decimal year:  6417.93424658 Population:  2.43478115103e+42 Energy remaining:  9.75722244812e+49
Decimal year:  6417.9369863 Population:  2.43489455444e+42 Energy remaining:  7.73625996793e+49
Decimal year:  6417.93972603 Population:  2.43500796312e+42 Energy remaining:  5.71520335854e+49
Decimal year:  6417.94246575 Population:  2.43512137709e+42 Energy remaining:  3.69405261556e+49
Decimal year:  6417.94520548 Population:  2.43523479635e+42 Energy remaining:  1.67280773459e+49
Decimal year:  6417.94794521 Population:  2.43534822088e+42 Energy remaining:  -3.4853128875e+48

The exponential growth allowed, in effect, for daily energy consumption to reach the same order of magnitude as the amount of energy available in the Milky Way.
There are, of course, many flaws in this, as stated before--lots of hand wavy estimates, neglected factors. A more precise mathematical model could be constructed, but why bother? The forces that guide population growth over time are very complex, often escaping the mathematical domain--forces like culture, technological capacity.

One thing from this can be said with certainty--the population of the human race residing within the Milky Way will never exceed 10^42.5 people. There simply is not enough resources to create and sustain such a large population. To accomplish this, the human race would have to harvest every atom of hydrogen--from vast fields of low-density, monatomic hydrogen to stars themselves--without using any energy and convert it directly into food without any loss of energy. Thermodynamics directly forbids this, so this is impossible. Once again, this estimate is a ceiling.

10^42.5 may sound small, especially considering that there's a possible cap on population in the spacefaring distant future. Here, however, our notation betrays us. Writing out 10^42.5 looks something like this:
3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

There are currently 6,700,000,000 people, so 10^42.5 really is a lot of people. At the same time, it's strange to consider that there is a physical limit of population. Sure, on the Earth there are limitations regarding space and arable land, but aren't the depths of space effectively boundless? Not really--nearly any "effective" boundlessness can be caught up to with exponential growth at some point. It's only a matter of time.

Something I hadn't realized before was that, even in exponential growth, it's not the beginning that counts. Early on, during the simulation, the "energy remaining" column remained static. The energy consumed per day was trivial compared to the energy remaining in the galaxy. That is our current situation; the energy we consume really is small--in the scientific sense--compared to that available. It's only when the population is on the same order of magnitude of that of the galaxy where problems really kick in. Consuming energy in this same manner with our current population would last billions of years. With the rate of growth shown here, we lasted for thousands. It is the end, where the population is massive, where the situation really is hopeless.

We don't have to look at this from fatalistic perspective. We don't need to reproduce haphazardly into crises. Now is our chance to adapt our culture and way of living into one of survival. If the human spirit proves to be less inclined to live in quantity, then we may have a shot at living forever.

A Riot in This Town and I Missed It: JMU 2010 Springfest Riot

2010-04-11T20:05:00.002-04:00

I've always wanted to be in a riot. Sure, it's dangerous, but so are rock climbing and bowling. I'm not sure what draws me to it--perhaps a thread of anti-authoritarianism sewed into my moral fiber, perhaps I'm just bored with the endless rhythm of the world, perhaps a combination of both. I'm not really sure.

The riot started as JMU student's annual spring block party. There are two every year--one takes place the weekend before classes, the other is in the springtime, just before people really have to start studying hard for finals. These have been going on since I started coming to the school, and I'm sure before that as well.

They usually take place in Forest Hills, a long strip of town homes just off JMU's campus. I've heard that the town homes' leases are passed from frat brother to frat brother, though I'm not sure how valid that is. The town homes are setup in an ideal form for a block party--they are just barely off campus and a large plot of grass sits between many of them, allowing party-goers to remain on private property and not be charged with drunk in public. Every year, many wander off the sidewalk and end up with a ticket or in jail. Nevertheless, this doesn't curtail the event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Azgyvs4HA

This year, landlords apparently put a clause in many of the Forest Hills leases somehow preventing residents from holding the block party. This made little difference, as party-goers were still present in Forest Hills, and much of the party moved to Forest Hills Manor, just adjacent to Forest Hills. Forest Hills Manor is where most of the iconic video from the riot comes from, including this shot where riot police disperse a crowd with tear gas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wexfpL9yuII

The event apparently met the conditions for a riot. It certainly looks like one--a giant bonfire, large crowd, and extensive property damage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJJNTLwGLFo

It's natural to say that it won't happen, but I doubt that. The only thing that would stop it is students in the area realizing that they don't want their town homes damaged, but they don't own the places. Partying is more important than property damage. Sex is what got us here, as human beings, and where there's alcohol, there are easy women. Alcohol, however, is limited to those over 21. In the university environment, most of the student population cannot access alcohol, so those who can easily draw a large amount of vagina and vagina-seekers to their doorstep.

These events and their responses draw attention to the ability of JMU students to hold parties. This can easily increase the number of attendees in the future.

All-in-all, something seems missing in the whole debacle. It's really hard to empathize with those fighting the police--the only reason they're there is to get drunk and score ass. My parent's generation engaged in altercations with the police, but they were protesting the Vietnam War, not trying to get hammered. If you're going to throw shit at cops, at least have a good reason for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vqs9eql1W8
"It's not history, it's a bad idea!"

Minor Template Changes

2010-04-07T20:37:00.003-04:00

Things haven't changed much since I added the sweet blue square background, but that was a few years ago, so I figured it was time for a minor update. I moved the ads to the right and changed the font of the blog title--Arial Black is just more appropriate for this place.

You don't have to worry, though. I haven't been bought out by communists or collectivized by capitalists.

Peak Oil's Not So Bad, Shit Happens

2010-03-31T12:33:00.005-04:00

When I was in middle school and high school, I was a big fan of what Paleo-future refers to as "apocalypse porn"--that is, media that preaches an imminent Armageddon, at least in our lifetime. Apocalypse porn has been around for a long time and appeals to people without any hope in their place in the prevailing socio-economic system, such as Roman plebeians or angsty sixteen-year-olds.

My favorite piece of apocalypse porn was probably the most believable--peak oil. If you haven't heard of peak oil, it's a pretty rational and straightforward idea. Every oil field has a rate of production that increases and decreases in a bell curve. Hubbard, the guy who thought it up, predicted a peak for the United States during the 1970's. While the oil industry laughed at him, production peaked. His predicted peak for the world was ~1995. This was delayed by the oil crisis in the 70's. Many experts think we have hit peak production; others think we are very close.

What makes peak oil so bad is not that we'll run out of oil--there will always be oil. The problem is that the price of oil will go up. As supplies remain constant or decrease, demand increases in the developing world.

Generally, oil is associated with driving, so this, at face value, sounds like it will just be more expensive to drive. Driving, however, is critical to the economy as a whole. Nearly all products and services involve an automobile somewhere in the course of their purchase and delivery. Therefore, higher fuel prices make all prices higher; they add friction to the economy and slow growth.

A lot of the peak oil literature delves into apocalypse porn at this point. People predict virtually spontaneous changes in prices and, as a result, food shortages, wars, and the breakdown of law and order.

The reality is not spontaneous. Prices can be thought of as direct, mathematical relationships, but in actuality, there's a delay in the communication and adjustment of those prices. This slows economic changes. The price of bread will increase steadily, but we won't wake up one morning where no one can afford food.

These price changes will increment over time. The actual adjustments will have to move around the economy a bit. Here's an example--let's say Farmer Joe has to increase the sale price of his wheat. Steelworker Bob then must pay more for wheat, and his wages increase once his union goes on strike for them. This increases the price of steel, which increases the price of tractors, which increases the amount Farmer Joe will have to spend reinvesting in capital.

The economy is full of many deeper, intertwined chains like these. Actual price changes take time to move from one part of the economy and reach equilibrium. As a result, the increases in prices are slow. This isn't a bad thing. Some people are barely at the line where they can afford to commute in an automobile. As the price of fuel increases, these people won't be able to afford to commute, and they'll have to chose an alternative mode of transportation such as carpooling, cycling, mass transit, or moving closer to their job so they can do one of those. Either way, these people stop spending money on gasoline, lowering demand a bit and bringing prices slightly down.

The price of oil will continue to increase, though this trimming of the hedge will soften the blow. This won't stop the price from continuing to rise, however, and demand for cheap transportation will drive the development of alternatives. Either serious money will be put towards developing alternatives, or people will change their life styles into more affordable ones--that is, they will move into cities instead of living in suburbs and commuting.

In either case, civilization will not collapse. The blow will be cushioned. Since more money will, for a time, have to be invested in transportation, the standard of living may decrease, but people will have to deal with that. It's nothing to panic about, and when the time comes--as it is now--the economics will redirect our goals and motives. It won't be pretty, but shit happens.

Why People Hate Police

2010-03-24T02:02:00.004-04:00

This evening, I was dropping my girlfriend off at her dorm. As I rolled on to campus, I glanced in my mirror and noticed that there was a cop following me.

This is never a problem for me. I'm a white male,* I drive a plain car, and I always drive the speed limit for a few reasons--the strongest being that I think cops are assholes, and I prefer to avoid interacting with them. Nevertheless, I find the situation unnerving. It's as if a starving predator is eying me or--less metaphorical--the cop behind me is judging all of the driving I ever do in that single moment. One little slip of some obscure traffic regulation that wasn't mentioned in the driver's ed packet, and I'm short $100 or more.

The drop off went without a hitch, and as I was waiting to pull out of the parking lot by her dorm, I saw two cars drive by me: one, an SUV, the other, a police car with its headlights off--only some dim yellow lights in their stead. The cop that had followed me earlier was a cruiser, like this one, and he followed the SUV and pulled it over. My guess is that it was the same cop, and that bastard was out for blood, tonight.

Something about the whole situation seemed wrong--perhaps not wrong, but at the least, predatory. The fact that the cop crept up on the SUV with his headlights off--as if he needed to sneak up on his target and lunge for the kill--exceeded necessity.

Cops are frightening. When I see one, I feel the same way as if I'm passing a bees' nest; I'm not necessarily going to be harmed financially or physically, but I could be for some reason that I may not be aware of. Bees sting without any real reason other than "feeling threatened." Police pull you over using convoluted traffic regulations,"because your tail light's out," "because something dangling off your rear view mirror could obstruct your view," or "because the tint on your windows is too dark."

The only reason a cop even gets on the road is for that purpose--to find you doing something wrong. Other cars are actually going places. Cops are out to nitpick your driving and charge you for it.

To aggravate matters, cops are "allowed" to break the rules. They can conduct high-speed chases, and in a more subtle context, they can drive over the speed limit to look for and catch speeders. They can use those little laptops while driving. In fact, it seems they can text while driving too:

In an individualist society like our own, things like this piss people off. Each person is recognized as, fundamentally, having equal value to others and equal rights, but the fact that certain individuals are excluded, no matter what reason or justification, makes us mad. They're people, just like us, why should they get to do something we can't?

Despite these behaviors that make people itch, cops aren't completely to blame for people disliking them. This is how cops enforce the law, and no one has thought of a better way yet.

People's distaste for police is most strongly correlated with how they justify breaking laws. They refuse to blame themselves for bad things that happen in their lives, and any opportunity to contribute ill-fortune to an outside source is welcome.

This allows us to maintain our pride, and we like that. If a cop pulls someone over for speeding too fast, it's easy and comforting to blame the cop. He's the one who brought the bad news and gave out the ticket. After all, he didn't need to single that particular driver out. People attribute punishment to cops, not to their own illegal actions. With responsibility displaced, the punishment achieves little.

*Police do profile individuals based on race. It's deplorable, but so are most police.

Dubai's Submarines

2010-03-23T00:51:00.002-04:00

About four years ago, I started hearing about this place I'd never heard of with a name as exotic as "Timbuktu." This place was called Dubai. From what I read at the time, the place was a glittering paradise in the making, with billions of dollars being invested in capital. The goal was simple--invest dwindling oil profits in real estate capital, and the real estate capital ought to pay back in taxes in the long run.

As I learned more, there were cracks in the glittering Dubai facade. Dubai hired thousands of foreign construction workers for cheap, paying them minimum wage to complete the world's largest construction projects, including what is now the world's tallest building.

It wasn't until recently that I saw this, a brief documentary exposing Dubai's darkside, making the desert miracle a mirage, centering around a Frenchman publishing a book about his own Dubai nightmare. He started a company to make personal-sized submarines. The company went bankrupt, and now the investors want to collect.

In America, the corporation would have taken the hit and sank. In Dubai, however, there aren't corporations, and the individual is responsible. They go to jail until they can pay their debts--jail makes that condition difficult.

Reflecting on this, some pieces came together. I remembered an old essay by Paul Graham called "The Submarine." In short, the article portends articles like the ones on Dubai. These articles are virtually written by PR firms, hired by businesses and countries to promote products and services with the validation of "journalism." The articles on Dubai wreak of the qualities described in The Submarine.

Then the irony really hit me; the video bashing Dubai itself, that too was a plug from a PR firm for that Frenchman's book. It's as if anything you hear about that damn place, some one paid for. Do they really do anything there but spend?

There is a Comet Running into the Sun

2010-03-12T15:36:00.005-05:00

Comets are large chunks of ice and rock floating around in space. When they get too close to the sun, they start vaporizing, literally, which is why they have giant, pretty tails. They orbit around the sun in gigantic, eccentric orbits. The earth too orbits around the sun, but its orbit is much less eccentric. Sometimes, however, various circumstances slow the comet down a bit, and it will make a final plunge into the sun. That looks like this:

That bright thing with the line is the planet Mercury. The long streak on the left is the comet.

You don't need to worry about the sun. It's a giant ball of plasma and fire that's been around for 4 billion years and has had plenty of comets--and probably at least one or two earth-sized objects as well as many, many others--smash into it in that time. Now, the comet, on the other hand... heh. At the least, I can assure you that comet will never harm the earth or anything else, ever.

For now, you can read more about it here: http://www.spaceweather.com/

The Beer Mug: Rendering Bowls Obsolete Since 2010

2010-03-09T17:15:00.004-05:00

I live in a house. It's a house with four bachelors and two soup bowls--that is, bowls that can hold a large amount of hot stuff. We have some bowls that can hold hot stuff but are too small, and we have some bowls that are big enough for soup but only hold cold stuff.

As you can imagine, a house full of bachelors eats a lot of soup, so this causes problems. What if three people want to eat soup? What if two people want to eat soup, but both bowls are dirty? Sometimes, I just don't eat soup as a result. Yes, that's pretty sad, but so is only having two soup bowls.

Today the soup bowls were dirty, I didn't have any other food in the house, so I needed a solution or I would starve. I always eat cereal out of cups, so why couldn't I eat soup out of a beer mug?

It worked. In fact, it worked so well, I'm never eating soup out of a bowl again. In fact, I don't think I'll use them for anything. Fuck bowls, they're useless.

Consider the soup eating method:
+ Stick spoon in soup.
+ Eat the good bits.
+ Drink broth.
+ Repeat until soup is vanished.

It does not differ greatly from the cereal method:
+ Stick spoon in milk/cereal mixture.
+ Eat the good bits
+ Repeat until good bits are gone.
+ Drink milk.

Bowls are not conducive to drinking--crucial to both cereal and soup consumption. Check this out:

It's like the mug was made for drinking!

The only part of the consumption method I haven't covered is the spoon sticking part, but I assure you, there is no conflict. You can't see the good bits in a bowl anyway.

The mug also has a neat property--a handle. You can pick up the mug and walk around with it, unlike a bowl, where you burn your goddamn hands moving it from wherever you warmed it to wherever you intend to eat it.

If anyone can think of a good use for a bowl, let me know. Otherwise, when I get my own place, I'm not buying any. I'm just buying a bunch of beer mugs. These things are cheap at Wal-Mart--like, $2, maybe. I can't remember. Either way, I was surprised how cheap they were, and now that I know I can use them for everything, I will.

"Then surely the party of God are they that shall be triumphant."

2010-03-03T12:04:00.003-05:00

"Then surely the party of God are they that shall be triumphant" is from the Quran and is on the Hezbollah flag. In fact, Hezbollah itself means "Party of God."

The irony of this phrase is that it could be completely turned on its head. If it's the party of God that shall be triumphant, then the party of God is defined by winning. If Hezbollah loses, they're not really Hezbollah anymore and never were.

Trains vs X: Trains always win.

2010-03-01T15:04:00.005-05:00

I'm a regular reader of a blog called Geekologie. They have posted there two videos of trains in epic circumstances. One of them is a train in a flood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzGwUhIXLDk

Another is a train going through a tornado. That's right, a tornado:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azV5bC2br-Q

I decided to see if there were more train vs X videos. Continuing with the weather theme, here's Train vs Snow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOr4ekEZ49s

Here's Train vs Tank from one of the James Bond movies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCMzeP_LnUM

There's some with animals. They're a little more morbid. NSFW language here... and animal death in Train vs Cow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrO8AFGi_rc

Not to be outdone, the Middle East tries to one-up the US with Train vs Camel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5WLrvRJCIw&NR=1
Looks like camels are the Middle Eastern equivalent of squirrels.

Canada has its own flavor--here's Train vs Camel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd-4JL_L4ro

Of course, it's sad watching animals die. They don't really know what's going on. This guy did know what's going on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q50hO0VBjKk&feature=related
And yes, I do know that it's not called "train vs truck." The ones with that name suck.

The lesson to be learned on top of all of this--trains always win. They will crush you--literally.

This is my 500th post.

2010-03-01T15:04:00.001-05:00

Now I'm going to make 501.

Stupid Contamination, and Snooki at JMU

2010-02-22T18:28:00.009-05:00

In a little over a week, a low-profile celebrity from the show "Jersey Shore" known as "Snooki" will visit James Madison University, the university from which I'm on the verge of graduating. The reaction has been vast--many students, fans of the show, embrace her arrival while others, including myself, loathe it.

We've all got different reasons, though. A lot of people, including this article from the Breeze, moan about the "moral depravity" she represents. I could careless. She or anyone else of legal age can do whatever she likes with her body; it's none of my goddamn business. That's between her, her fellow depravers, and her doctor.

It's not what happens inside her that I care about. It's what happens outside--the stupid. I've never watched the Jersey Shore. I'd be embarrassed to sit through an episode.

Nor do I even need to. These shows have been done before; this edition has salami. The episode summaries posted on MTV's website remind me of all the reality shows I've ever witnessed--a homogeneous mixture of petty drama and stupidity. In fact, the descriptions feature situations similar to those found on mySpace, the dominion of middle and high schoolers, filled with notes about how "I CANT BELEVE CHARLIE CHEEDED ON ME W/ SUZIE OMFG!>!!>!>!>!>!" Beyond the surface tension, there's nothing. Petty desires and ignorance leading to no resolution but more nothing, except--perhaps--what the editors desperately attempt to salvage in post-production, giving some "moral meaning" to the whole fiasco, strung into place with virtually scripted interviews and sappy exposes.

I really don't have anything, in itself, against stupid media like this. I avoid it, but there's a place where the line must be drawn. My university has invited a cast member of this show to come here and hold a public event.

When my university endorses this magnitude of stupid, it reflects upon the student body, faculty, and administration. By bringing any thing, person, object from that show, or anything else that cherishes irrationality onto my campus in an official capacity, it contaminates this university with stupidity. Even if the stupidity already present here merely gravitated this ignorance towards us, it reveals to the public how stupid we actually are. Perhaps some of us are not stupid, but outsiders will not be able to observe that, having been drowned out by the much louder, much more prevalent, stupid.

Sure, plenty of intelligent people enjoy getting hammered sometimes, but who's stupid enough to post it on YouTube?

Maybe it's already too late. Maybe the magnitude of stupid has passed a critical threshold, and it's no longer possible to salvage JMU. There's plenty of great faculty here, but having great sailors on a sinking ship doesn't save the ship.

In fact, those sailors were virtually given the finger last year. The University complained about not having enough money, so they gave none of the faculty raises. Meanwhile, they proceeded to start a high speed construction project where, in two years, they would completely revitalize the football stadium.

The whole gesture is under the misguided belief that somehow having a larger football program makes a school more... recognized? I'm honestly not sure what they're shooting for. There are few JMU football fans in the local area, and therefore there is little potential for revenue. The locals loathe the university, ironically enough, for students behaving in the way that Snooki represents.

Since revenue is impossible, the only remaining rationale for the football project is some kind of cargo cult school development. "Cargo cults" refer to islanders in the Pacific who, during World War II, witnessed American and Japanese soldiers marching and planes landing. In an attempt to obtain the same cargo--weaponry, planes, etc.--they performed the same rituals: marching, standing in bamboo control towers with bamboo headsets, waiting for the cargo to arrive.

It's as if JMU thinks making a football program great makes the school great. It's the other way around, if there's any connection at all. For example, you don't hear much about MIT football, and Harvard and Yale were major institutions before they had football programs.

The football and tweaking entertainment to the lowest common denominator--it's as if the university's growing into an entertainment venue for those looking to delay entering the workforce. The degree has little worth now--academic inflation has made it so that you aren't really guaranteed a job with a college degree. Graduation rates are more important than graduation quality.

The Bittersweetness of Futurology

2010-02-22T08:43:00.003-05:00

Futurology is a goofy word that stands for the study of the future. It's the rigorous effort to predict future trends--not what the stockmarket is going to do tomorrow, but whether we'll be on the moon in 30 years, what will science and engineering have produced, by when a woman ought to have become president--things that revolve around probabilities and general trends in the long term.

This is an old interview with Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show. He was presenting some of the results from the Viking lander as well as mentioning prospective results from the Voyager probes:

Watching this, I feel sorrow. Sagan and Denver discuss the launch of Enterprise--the test run of the Space Shuttle, the fleet of ships recently shut down and sold for 20 million dollars each. Denver talks about riding on the shuttle someday, something that never happened. In fact, the shuttle never took passengers for fun. Space tourism remains out of reach of all but a few who were willing to pay millions of dollars to the Russians to fly them up.

There's also a bit of hope. Sagan mentions theories about Io. The reality--that Io is covered in giant volcanoes--is far more exciting. Voyager showed us that the solar system was far more thrilling than the child of speculation.

At the time, the future was in space. Now, in that future, our lives revolve around something the speculation failed to mention--the Internet. It's something that we're all apart of, not a just a few hundred explorers as space exploration, at best, would have been. The Internet appeals to our vanity, something to which everyone can contribute.

RIAA Terror in Brief: Short Edition

2010-02-03T12:52:00.003-05:00

Way back when, I used to regular updates on the RIAA lawsuits. I still get the RIAA alert e-mails from Google News, and this article caught my eye. Really, it's a very good synopsis--with a few typos--of the RIAA lawsuits and their causes. Perhaps a similar argument backed by credible sources could give the record companies a kick in their teeth.

Hate Us. Love Us. So Long We Profit.

2010-01-25T12:45:00.007-05:00

Have you seen the chart?
It's a hell of a start,
It could be made into a monster
If we all pull together as a team.
This is a excerpt of lyrics from a Pink Floyd song which criticizes the music industry for operating like a used car lot. Ironically, this very album sold more than 13 million copies, producing more profit than the criticism contained in the lyrics inhibited. After all, people bought an album telling them the people who produce albums are assholes. To hear the message, you have to buy the album. You've already lost. The producers won because they profited, and that's what counts.

These profits keep companies and ventures alive, and once they live, their model is capable of propagating. Natural selection drives capitalism. Producers who behaved like sleazy salesmen succeeded, flourished, and propagated. Inevitably, many producers realized that there was money in rebellion, so it was packaged, brand-named, and sold. It doesn't matter what comes on the disk, as long as people purchase the disk, be they fifteen-year-olds trying to make father mad with the Sex Pistols or sixty-year-olds piling up all the recordings of Vivaldi ever made. If there's a profit, the venture lives on, even if degrading the image of the venture itself fuels its continued existence.

This natural selection extends beyond the music industry. Consider 24-hour news channels:

This was the election coverage in 1988. It's got a fancy pants introduction, but afterward, two people talking with a simple graph of results.

Look at this shit:

They've thrown enough pretty colors and stimuli in my face to induce a seizure. This eye-candy draws in viewers the same way that action films entertain. Explosions and cars and loud noises all make us hear something. They stimulate and hypnotize, and it works. People buy tickets; people watch 24-hour news networks.

In fact, it's the source of revenue for the news networks that makes this possible. If you watch the network, their ratings increase. When their ratings go up, they can sell their advertising slots for more. To profit, they only have to keep you watching. Even on the worst of news days, they keep spouting crap to make "Search for 12-year-old's Body" and "There's people running for president 12 months from now" seem like edge of the seat action, keeping you glued on the screen, and keeping money pouring into their pockets. To stop you from being bored, they'll throw in a flash of color and sound, and you will remain fixed.

As if the gilded mundane weren't awful enough, every time something happens that's worth hearing about on the news, executives assuredly shit themselves, even if those events involve the loss of thousands of people's lives. I'm sure news network CEOs had dangerously large stiffies when Challenger exploded, airplanes ran into the World Trade Center, and a major earthquake destroyed the nation of Haiti. I can't imagine the fixation on devastation within the management of these companies.

It's terrifying to think that folks that demented could be letting you know what's going on in the world. It's absurd, but capitalism and natural selection allow it to work and to continue. CNN was the first 24-hour news network, and its success bred copies with their own variations, all growing to become more obnoxious than when the whole circus began.

It's got to stop. There's raving lunatics yelling at us through our televisions, delivering a pre-processed world to us, simplified by the ideologies of the network we prefer. They know what words to say and nerves to pinch so that we feel something. If they exploit that dead twelve-year-old's face or convince us that some presidential candidate will destroy the free world thirty seconds after being inaugurated, we feel something and become invested. They say things because they know how to make us feel things, and we feel angry or afraid, or use anger to hide the fear they expose. It provides us with stimulation in our mundane lives which lack danger or meaning.

The stimulation is empty, and we'll soon be back for more. The lunatics will tell us what to think again, and our blood will boil because something apparently threatens our ideological identities and sheltered sensibilities. If you haven't either of those yet, then you can find some rockstar who will offer one to you, one that centers around sticking it to the man, the very man you paid to hear him. It may be hypocritical, but at least he makes you feel something. You'll soon be back for more, and that keeps the whole ironic system alive.

Facepalm

2009-12-18T22:46:00.003-05:00

"Scientists themselves also come in for more negative assessments in the poll, with four in 10 Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment. That's up significantly in recent years." I don't know how you can argue more than four hundred years of rigorous experiment and observation. The whole theory derives from models, based on rigorous measurement, and disputed over hundreds of times--still being disputed, but for refinement, not existence.

Disagreeing with science is like disagreeing with your own eyeballs. There may be another way to observe the world, but eyeballs are the best you have. Science has a higher caliber for proof than eyeballs and ways to measure how its own vision is wrong. Your own eyes lack this rigor. This is why, at times, science may appear to contradict common sense and intuition, when in actuality, those things cannot comprehend the reality of nature.

From Superstition to Politics: Following the Path of Fail

2009-12-09T20:22:00.006-05:00

I was reading this article on Seung-Hui Cho. You know, that guy from Tech. Yes, that one.

His mother knew he had problems. Apparently, instead of seeking counseling for him, she went to a bunch of churches to pursue help because he was under the influence of demonic power. The attempted exorcism did a lot of good.

This is not uncommon. Instead of using science--a set of rigorously tested assumptions--people continue orthopraxic rituals and acknowledge shamanistic figures, practices spawning from ignorance and fear that was born in antiquity. They never question why these rituals are performed or with what authority these charlatans speak.

Astrology's among the worst of it. It has a wide and regular audience; horoscopes appear in newspapers around the United States regularly. I'd like to create a decisive, logical argument against it, but astrology is impermeable against--and beyond the realm of--logic. Therefore, I leave this task to a man far more eloquent than myself:

Here, Carl Sagan demonstrates astrology's downfall--results are not repeatable.

Repeatability is central to science. It's based on the assumption that an underlying set of laws guides how the universe behaves, and that this set of laws allows anybody who understands them to predict the behavior of the universe. If I do something--say, drop a rock off a cliff--then set things back up the way they were before I did it--pick-up the rock and bring it back to the top of the cliff--and do it again--drop the rock from the exact same place--the same thing will happen. I can't account for everything--minor fluctuations in airspeed between the cliff and the ground, irregular shape of the rock--but many of those things are insignificant. Not only will experiment demonstrate that fact, but I can calculate it through a language of pure logic--mathematics. As far as I can measure, the rock will land in the same spot time-and-time again.

Repeatability allows scientists to agree on a lot of things. They can verify one another's results and come to a consensus because their basis is reality, and that doesn't change from person to person. Astrology, however, changes from astrologer to astrologer. Their predictions contradict one another, showing they have no basis in reality, but from some personal, creative interpretation of an alignment of celestial bodies. Of course, this interpretation is always vague enough that it can't be proven wrong and can always be twisted into some kind of correctness--a correctness that suits the needs of those thirsty for mysticism.

Despite disagreeing, the predictions of astrology share one common thread. Astrology gives people what they want to hear--that the burden of responsibility for the events of their lives lies beyond themselves, and that life will drop good and bad things into your lap whether you like it or not. Nothing could be further from the truth. If astrology gave accurate advice, it would tell you to work hard and smile.

Reality's too harsh for most people.

More threatening than astrology, religions actually have a common basis--generally a book or set of books. The books, however, are archaic copypasta of already inaccurate eye-witness accounts. Worse yet, people accept these things because these things say they should be accepted. It's as if, instead of presenting to you an argument here, I simply said, "fuck you, I'm right." Anger causes me to degenerate near that point at times. Nobody bases their life around those blog posts, but people base their lives around books whose foundation is of equal academic merit.

In history, such primary sources are often all there is to describe a historic event and can qualify as evidence. Even then, they are taken in context--the speaker is considered and analysis reflects this. In science, eye-witness accounts mean nothing. Reality requires repeatability. In religion, however, claims are made about reality without evidence, furthermore proclaiming that it itself is the precise word of God, issuing no proof but a threat against your soul--whatever that is. Some sects have a theology that actually addresses the context of the writers, but few attempt to tackle the recursive "word of God" claim.

People forget that someone had to sit down and write the book, and that it's incredibly easy to write the phrase "this is the word of God." Even if it's not explicitly written, it's easy to read into something, and if you really want the Bible to be the precise word of God *poof* divine insight.

If you don't think it's easy to delude yourself, then I'll show you that a particular document is clearly socialist. Before you read the original, I'll interpret:

--
The author begins by introducing a new nation--a unification of people. Socialists use "people" in conjunction with their beliefs as frequently as they use the word "share." For example, America is to United States of America as China is to People's Republic of China. He then states that all men are equal, another piece of ideology befitting Communist swine.

The author then states he stands on a battlefield where a battle testing that nation took place, and he embraces the sacrifice of thousands of lives so that the nation may live. He poses the nation as a greater power, one more important than life itself. State worship is a frequent theme in Socialist propaganda, so it's no surprise he should justify slaughter in this way.

He passionately restates his justification, then states that we should use these deaths to inspire the continued existence of the work of the nation. He says the nation shall have a new birth of freedom--what freedom is he talking about? Freedom of speech? The people would never stand for that. He is talking about freedom from bourgeois oppression.

"Under God" is just a figure of speech.

He concludes with something so damn Communist, the black print becomes red. "A government by the people, for the people, of the people shall not perish from the earth." The Socialist "people" here is used with emphasis. The people create the government, the government serves them, the government is made of them. It is a "People's Republic," and this document is a staple of Socialist doctrine.
--

Of course, this analysis is botched. The document is famous as all hell, and if the ending didn't give it away, here's a link to the original. My point here was not to show that Abraham Lincoln is Socialist, but that it's easy to read into anything however you damn well please.

This problem extends beyond religion or superstition. People ruin politics this way. By cementing in the idea that one side is an enemy, they can read the actions of their opponents as automatically wrong without looking into the benefits or consequences.

The result is non-sense. Their judgment is without reason, instead based on impulse no deeper than attaching their opponents name to the word "bad;" they've accepted their own party's name on faith.

It's an ignorance rooted in superstition, a fundamental flaw of the entire human psyche, and I'm certain it will be rooted out of thought someday. I may be wrong, but I'm willing to admit it because I know that's the stronger position. Time is the sieve of truth.

Sylvestre Matuschka

2009-12-08T04:38:00.002-05:00

Apparently, this guy obtained orgasms by destroying trains and killing people.

I see a man with a boner next to an old dynamite detonation plunger. I wonder why I wander around Wikipedia, only to end up with images like this in my head.

Swiss Hypocrites

2009-11-29T20:37:00.002-05:00

The Swiss banned minarets recently because they are a sign of "Muslim intolerance." This is no different than the ban of rosaries and crosses because they're a reminder of Christian intolerance.

If you don't like seeing minarets, pay attention to the fucking road.

If you think society is becoming more violent, you're still relying on "History: The Eurocentric Fairy Tale."

2009-11-16T09:46:00.004-05:00

Consider this form of capital punishment, this form of entertainment, these spiritual awakening journeys, and this get-together that happened between the years of 1940-45.

Short-sighted ramblers pontificate that society is becoming more violent. On the contrary, those authors forget that they are viewing small trends in a larger scheme, trends apparent now in an age with more information and greater visibility. They forget that they have eyes and think that the contents of their eyes are the reality they view.

You're Doing It Wrong: Driving

2009-11-13T01:03:00.003-05:00

This post was originally going to be titled "You're Doing It Wrong: Police." That's how my reasoning began.

You rarely see police walking. Police are almost always found driving around in vehicles with "POLICE" written in intimidating, massive font on the side. When not in blatantly obvious cars, they're in cars with giant spotlights poking out the front, trying to sneak around and bust you for driving too fast.

This, of course, ends up being their only interaction with most people--when they're in trouble, wherein the cop lectures the potentially guilty in a patronizing manner. Even if it's not when they're personally in trouble, they're only found at the sight of trouble or where there's likely to be trouble. It's natural, then, that people ought not like police because their presence only means bad things.

Were police to walk everywhere, they wouldn't be driving in seclusion, and their presence wouldn't necessarily entail bad things. Additionally, their interactions with the community would allow them to prevent more harmful crimes than bored kids loitering and speeding tickets; they could receive tips by word of mouth from community members who trust them. Plus, if they lived in the communities they patrolled, they would be personally invested in their success.

This problem has a flaw--walking. Nobody does it anymore. A cop couldn't stop people from speeding while he's walking around, and he can't chase down criminals in cars. In fact, he'd make an easy target for gang members with nothing to do but gun down cops.

The fact that people drive everywhere doesn't just isolate people from police, it isolates people from each other. Instead of individuals seeing the faces of people while the commute to work, they see their headlights, slanted like scornful eyes. They take no concern for the humanity of the people on the road with them; people call the product of this road rage. The entire process of driving causes stress, both the commute itself and the process of parking--there's never enough of it, and people have to act like vultures just to succeed.

This sort of constant stress is not only unnecessary; it's awful for your health. Not only would people commuting by self-propelled means add humanity of the American commute, the exercise itself would relieve stress and improve health. Problems caused by over-consumption--such as obesity--would be resolved. When you do need to drive long-distance, travel costs would be lower.

Sadly, there's no economic motivators for such a change. The automobile is deeply ingrained into the fabric of the suburban-city metropoleis, discouraging slightly-interested individuals from beginning the transition to a pedestrian society. It's going to take massive change--like economic collapse--to make a difference. The people who would not benefit from this change are the people in charge, and they'll fight their damnedest to stop the world from falling apart. Sad to say, conflagration is too distant to hope for.

No Favicon

2009-11-05T23:20:00.003-05:00

I noticed today that the "favicon" I've used on this blog for a while is missing. I'd forgotten that I was hosting it on Geocities which shut down the other day.

If I get around to it, I may create a new one. Till then, enjoy the blogger "B."

How to Gauge Teachers: Correlation

2009-11-04T18:33:00.002-05:00

Standardized tests are one of the worst things to ever happen to the Western world. Inhumane, uncreative, and stressful, they force teachers to teach to a test instead of creatively envisioning and practicing new teaching techniques. They fail to analyze the thought process of the student and reward rote memorization.

They aren't going away either. It's the only technique anyone has come up with to measure the performance of students effectively and cheaply. Non-multiple choice tests are expensive and slow to grade.

Action has to be taken to ensure that schools are improving. One of the central proposals to do this is to get rid of teachers whose students fail standardized tests.

Such a proposal isn't fair to teachers. What if their students just don't give a shit? Teaching is easier than inspiring. They're both difficult, but a student who doesn't give a damn is destined to fail no matter how good a teacher is.

Instead of firing teachers whose students fail, why not fire teachers whose students' grades do not correspond to their standardized test grades? Grades are an indicator of student performance provided by a teacher. Standardized tests should verify this indicator. If the indicator is off, then a teacher is too harsh, forgiving, or ineffective.

This system verifies that a teacher is teaching in the way that the state requests. After all, this ought to be the goal of a standardized test. State-mandated standards are at heart horseshit, but a world without them is a pipe dream.

The Media Sucks

2009-11-03T03:51:00.002-05:00

The media sucks.

If you don't believe me, go watch CNN right now. Turn it on. It looks like a circus; there's holograms and panic and emotion and screaming and death flu this, president/war that.

What a waste of time. Give me the news and shut up. We don't need strobe lights, we need information.

YouTube just Doesn't Provide Raw Footage, It Provides All of the Camera Angles

2009-09-26T23:10:00.004-04:00

Check out this CNN footage of the G20 protests:

Not a good enough view? Check out this guy who was closer half way through this video:

Isn't that cool? At the beginning of the first video, you can see the cameraman of the second video. That's how much information is available on youTube.

The Right Word(s) in the Right Place Can Change Everything

2009-09-16T19:38:00.002-04:00

This cracks me up.

Mental Mentality! Healthcare Hysteria!

2009-08-20T13:33:00.008-04:00

Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare Healthcare

You may or may not have heard of this woman. If you haven't, then this is an instance where using the word "cunt" is appropriate. I know that it's strong language, but it's adequate here.

People who stand in her position are an oxymoron--her husband is working three jobs and still can't afford health insurance, but she remains opposed to universal healthcare. Another anti-health activist was injured and solicited donations to pay his medical bills. Yet these people remain completely opposed to universal healthcare despite the potential benefits to themselves.

Some how, someone has convinced these people to act in a manner that is detrimental to themselves. In a mixture of abstract concepts, loud mouths, and flat-out falsehoods, either a brilliant designer or a mob mentality has driven these people like lemmings. It's done so well that over half of Americans believe that there will be "death panels" in a universal healthcare system.

An aside, there already are death panels--to a degree--of just a frightening nature. Actuaries assess the risk of future events in a person life. With the likelihood of particular risks, they determine insurance rates for individuals. There already are people in private insurance firms whose job is to determine how expensive it is for you to stay alive.

To understand what's going on, consider cui bono. The uninsured protesters do not benefit, and there's no real effect to the insured because they'll get to keep their plans. Likely, the parties with the greatest loss in a system with universal healthcare are private insurance firms. Of course, their lobbyists get the big bucks to push politicians in big directions.

Money can push politicians, but there's not enough to push the people. The people move by means of abstract concepts: pride, morals, values, patriotism, freedom, hope, etc. In this case, it's about protecting American values--in particular, American capitalist values. They've been convinced that the free market will be destroyed if healthcare is socialized and, once that is done, that the entire country will fall under fascist control.

If the country were capable of falling under such a regime, it already would have. Social security and drivers licenses already make a pseudo-national ID system, and that's one of the great fears deriving from the existence of socialized healthcare. Between the patriot act and mob mentality of the modern United States, if there were to be a fascist regime in the United States, it would already exist.

These absurd statements have put Obama on the defensive--the worst place in the world to be. Defense exists to deter defeat. Offense exists to win. Deterring defeat will never yield victory, and a player on the defensive is bound to lose. Obama's response to the death panel rumors was denial--completely defensive. Instead, he ought to have gone on the offense. He should have used the transparency he promised to call out the lobbyists. Instead of saying, "there's no deathpanels," he should have said, "there are people who don't care if you're sick so they can make money."

After all, this is about Obama himself. Obama's opponents want him to fail. They want to break the hope and to stop the change. Breaking the healthcare promises will surely leave Obama a lame duck. Don't let it happen.

Five Years of Logorrhea

2009-08-17T15:33:00.002-04:00

My lab partner just pointed that this is the fifth anniversary of this blog. I've missed the anniversary every year, so this is just a damn lucky day.

I don't know where the logorrhea banner went. I had it on imageshack, I think, and it vanished. Since another year has passed, it's time for a new one.

If you're on Facebook, you might not be able to see the many internal links on the syndication of this post. Go to the original site.

To celebrate, I'm going to drink alone and brag about my huge repertoire of posts from the last five years... jesus fucking christ, five fucking years. I was in high school when I started this blog, and I knew everything. Now, the end of college is on the horizon, and I know nothing.

Let's have a retrospective:

+ I used to write rants on my DeviantART page. Someone on DeviantART said I needed a blog. I haven't posted on DeviantART since then. Well, I have, but not really.

+ I started the blog on August 17, 2004. Holy shit. That was a long time ago. I don't think Bush had even been reelected yet. In fact, I complained about it here.

+ The Vacuum Suckers post was great. It was the first post I wrote that had some essence of quality.

+ At some point, I added little features. These include the cycling subtitle, the n years of logorrhea banner, and the cool blue background.

+ RIAA Terror in Brief: For a while, I attempted to sum up events in the RIAA lawsuits thinking that they would someday end. I quit after a while because re-reporting shit is incredibly boring. I can't even find all the posts, though it looks like I wrote 6 of them. I'm not sure; the search tool is acting funny.

+ I've posted nearly at least one post per month, except for a brief hiatus after September 2006. This is because I was a college freshman, and drinking heavily was more exciting than having an opinion on the Internet.

+ Some posts were subtle. They still make me laugh. Others were blunt. They make me shake my head in shame. Yet some were so blunt that they still make me laugh. However bad, I refuse to delete old posts. They're there. At some point, I thought posting them was clever, so they will stay. Deleting them defeats the point of this blog.

Some questions and statements, as to the future:
+ How many of the 6,400 visitors to this blog, how many were simply bots searching for e-mail addresses to spam and websites to catalog into search engines?

+ Will posting quality improve? Will reader counts increase? Will I actually make money off this blog? (Answers: quality cycles, doubt it, doubt it even more because it depends on the result of the last question)

+ There will be more funny pictures. In fact, I might make one for every post I do. This is because I like eye candy, and my posts have grown longer over the years. A few pictures might help make those long blocks of angry text more bearable even to me.

+ The logorrhea banner will return. I didn't realize it was broken.

A reminder to the readers and myself--this blog is intended as nothing more than practice. Practice writing, practice ranting, practice web...siting. You're reading what's on my mind, barely revised, unreserved, apathetically produced.

I could do better, but I'm lazy. This is for fun. I'm not going to write a piece, sit on it for a week, and perfect it. That is not as much fun. This has no attachment (I hope) to my career, and I sure as shit don't make money off of it. It's a firing range for my literary skills and the rubbish that comes out of angry gun. It is a brain refuse depository. Nothing more. Enjoy my scraps.

The Consequences: Ending Social Networks

2009-08-17T13:57:00.004-04:00

In the last four years, social networking exploded into a multi-million dollar industry and is now looking at a dangerous decline. While experts ask why, their balding heads fail to understand the youthful minds fleeing the networks.

I still regularly use Facebook. MySpace I've avoided like the plague for years, and only occasionally drop by to say hello to some people I can't reach otherwise. Facebook is still useful, but there are reasons people are leaving, and I seek to address that here.

--
Here's cause for the exodus:

+ Society does not differentiate weekends from weekdays.
The weekends are separate from weekdays, and it doesn't really matter what the hell you do on the weekend, so long you remain productive and uncompromisable during the week. Society does not share this opinion, particularly employers, parents, coaches, and school administrators.

The strongest reason users leave social networks is for employment. There's a common fear amongst job-seeking students that their future employers are perusing through their Facebook pictures looking for--god forbid--red cups. Facing the dire consequence of starving, students have left Facebook and MySpace altogether.

For those not looking to jobs, risks remain, particular those of Facebook pictures leaving and wandering into the eyes of parents and coaches. Generally, parents aren't too pleased seeing their children drinking, vomiting into a toilet after drinking, and drinking after vomiting into a toilet after drinking. After all, if Steve's mom is friends with someone who was tagged in an album with Steve in it, and that someone did not put up the privacy settings, Steve's mom can see the album. Steve is now grounded. Students who fear such repercussions fled social networks completely.

Additionally, school administrators have somehow acquired the right to punish students for things they do while not in school. No clue how that works, but just the same, if the school gets its hands on pictures of its students drinking, they will be punished.

The social networks can not stop these pictures from getting to unwanted eyes. No matter what safety nets social networks allow you to put up, it doesn't make a difference. It was once said when some encryption code for hacking DVDs or something was leaked that "getting something off the internet is like getting pee out of a pool." Pictures are the same way. Once something's on the Internet, it easily ends up everywhere and cannot be taken down. The best way to stop it is to keep it off the Internet in the first place, and the equivalent of holding one's bladder is staying off Facebook.

+ Petty Drama
Who cares if Janelle and Davey broke up and got together five or six times this week? Facebook will let you know, immediately. Stacey cut her toe on a rusty nail and is dying because of tetanus. Great. People use Facebook--myself included--to complain about shit that nobody cares about. Since there's nothing there but worthless bickering, who's going to be there at all?

+ You've Been Bitten! Join the Fight: Vampires vs. Zombies
Facebook introduced "applications" a year or so back. This was done to compete with MySpace--completely unnecessary--and draw in revenue--equivalent to selling-out to the man. The result of the development of applications was a large number of apps who's entire goal was get people to invite more people to the app. This produced a large number of "games" that aren't really games at all, but manual spam bots. Of course, each of these had a series of banner ads or were selling upgraded versions that did nothing new.

Not only did the games suck, but if you didn't accept, you'd likely find 60+ invitations in your user inbox telling you that you have pokemon or a secret waiting for you. If you did accept, your user page would be trashed with tacky, worthless boxes of rubbish no one cared about. Continually still, the games flood the newsfeed with "MICHAEL GOT A CHICEKN IN FARMVILLE. JOIN THE FARM FUN WIN BLUE RIBBINZ."

At least "Stacey is dying from tetanus" is entertaining.

+ Creepers
More afflicting women, Facebook--like any social network--is full of creepers. This risk was significantly lower when Facebook was an elitist student club, but since Facebook is available to the public, creepers run amok looking for women with whom they hope to couple. This doesn't even involve dinner and a movie, but centers around flat-out solicitations.
--

I've considered MySpace dead for years, but a lot of these forces are new to Facebook, pushing a lot of users out with their novelty, and making the decline a series of business decisions by Facebook. Instead of relying on the solid product they had developed, they sought to expand earnings. It turns out that empathy for the users is a useful force in business after all.

Besides declining product quality, the very nature of social networks makes them vulnerable. No matter how elitist, all groups have creepers in them, being that the world has creepers, and any group is just a subgroup of the world. Additionally, the "pee-in-the-pool theory" of the Internet makes any information put on it impossible to take off, including pictures of yourself in the fetal position, covered in your own vomit.

People could take the existence of this information as a demonstration of the facts of life, but old people aren't ready to hear that and like to pretend that half their generation didn't smoke weed 40 years ago. Instead, we'll get to hear about how the youth are corrupt and how social networks "ruin lives."

Hollywood

2009-08-13T12:14:00.002-04:00

I was watching Terminator II the other day. I hadn't seen it in a while, and if you haven't, remember that it's very good. It was also one of the first movies to use computerized effects, and it did so effectively. It did so in small, subtle places, such as whenever the liquid metal guy changes forms. They were peppered on for where creating the effect with real life materials would have been impossible.

The film features one shot of a helicopter going under a bridge. I doubt that someone actually flew a helicopter under a bridge, but the helicopter was definitely a real one. Perhaps it was on a track, but the shot looked great. This is something that Hollywood alone has the resources to do: smash-up cars, construct elaborate sets, blow-up buildings, and shoot miniatures, or, in short, do expensive things in real life. They have the capital to do massive scale productions.

Or at least, they did. The use of real life effects has slowly transitioned to computerized effects. Take, for example, the film "I am Legend." Most of the film's budget likely went to Will Smith's salary. The film utilized computerized effects to create zombies that look like they came out of an enhanced version of Poser. It was quite pathetic, really. With all of the capital available and all their resources, they used the computer to create villains which, at the time, were beyond the computer's ability to capture.

The use of the computer allows one to do things that traditional effects did not permit, but it has a restriction. Unless you're creating something far beyond the imagination, that thing will look fake. Humanoid zombies are not far beyond the imagination, leaving the zombies in "I am Legend" to be visibly computer generated and unrealistic. I can't even tell you what it was about them--perhaps a smoothness, something often the downfall of computer effects. I'm not sure.

When watching Terminator II, I put the pieces from "I am Legend" together. Hollywood is trying to use the computer to cheat us. Instead of trying to make the best films possible with the best effects, they're cutting costs. It also reveals their weakness; anybody nearly has the resources at their disposal to do what Hollywood is doing now.

With a good camera, a decent computer, and the right software, one can make a video production with effects on par with "I am Legend," or better. These only cost a couple thousand dollars, unlike multimillion dollar Hollywood budgets of films past. What one lacks is the visual effects experience--by dicking around with the software tools or taking a few classes, one can obtain that--and the acting talent--which is present everywhere, if you look hard enough.

It's ironic that the tools that make Hollywood become obsolete also destroy the traditional distribution scheme. Piracy through the Internet is rising and looks to completely undermine the whole system. The future of film is in your basement, on the computer, and digital.

The Truth

2009-08-09T21:09:00.001-04:00

This man says it: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/lax/483318927.html

Gates Caller Just Wants Free Beer with Obama

2009-07-29T15:38:00.002-04:00

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/911_caller_in_g.html

Why is this woman having press conferences? Who cares why she called the police? The cop was an asshole--like most cops--and the professor was being an asshole because cops are assholes--like I would. If all I need to do to have beer with the president is get a PhD and get arrested, I'm down with that.

Subscribe via SMS

2009-07-23T23:18:00.001-04:00

Facebook has a feature where you can subscribe to your friends via SMS. Everytime they do something on FB, you get a text message.

That's just creepy.

Joe Biden's Job is to Say Stupid Shit

2009-07-23T11:46:00.004-04:00

It seems that everything that comes out of Joe Biden's mouth is fucking stupid. It's a trend that started with Swine Flu. If you can't remember--when interviewed about Swine Flu--Joe Biden said something along the lines of "I wouldn't go on an airplane right now; hell, I wouldn't put my family on a plane."

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I don't want him to shut up though. Sure, he says stupid things, but he makes Obama look better. After 8 years of a president that made us look bad, it's about time we had a president that looks good.

Lady Gaga, and Why Music Lost Its Magic

2009-07-21T11:04:00.003-04:00

I recently acquired a taste for Lady Gaga. Four years ago, I would have rather beaten my head against a cement curb, but my tastes have grown as I've aged, and now I'll listen to just about anything, whether or not I even like it. Lady Gaga infected my soul quickly, and Pokerface became a habit.

Listening to Pokerface on loop, I noticed something. The song had four distinct phases:
+ Introduction
+ Main Sequence
+ Breakdown
+ Conclusion
In fact, all of Lady Gaga's songs had this pattern. Each phase plays a particular role in the overall dynamic of the song:

+ The Introduction steadily introduces the main sequence of the song.
+ The Main Sequence is the main beat, chords, and refrain of the song. When one thinks of the song, this is what they remember.
+ The Breakdown conflicts the Main Sequence. It sounds strange and may be in a different key from the Main Sequence.
+ The Conclusion features elements of the Main Sequence, but with tones that make the song feel complete and concluded.

All of Lady Gaga's songs are patterned like this. But once I noticed this, I noticed it in nearly every song, ever. It's more subtle sometimes, but nearly every song has this pattern.

Take, for example, Beethoven's 9th. Oh yes, the 9th. It's in four parts. The third is distinctly different from the other three, and the fourth contains elements of the whole song to conclude it.

Listen for it. Listen to Lady Gaga first. Then put on your favorite songs. It's all over.

*Post script: This probably isn't new, and the musicians out there are going to tell me "yea, that's called X." Please, do tell. I'd like to do more research into this.

Sarcasm is Context

2009-06-20T03:38:00.004-04:00

The Internet communicates quickly. It also drops a lot of data behind. Through this text, all that is communicated to you--the reader--is that which the writer chooses use. Good writing communicates exactly what I want to get across to you within the context of what is written. This blog rarely delves into sarcasm without some sort of obvious deviation from the usual style. Within the context, sarcasm is clear; a lot of data is transmitted with every post due to the context it is posted in, even if the amount of text is limited.

People on the internet think that sarcasm is transmitted automatically through the Internet. It is not. Particularly, on a message board, unless a poster's style is well know, it is unclear whether a poster is applying sarcasm. Even in real life, if a person is not well know, their tone communicates sarcasm, and therefore, in real life, people communicate sarcasm easily.* People who write poorly on the internet often attempt to communicate sarcasm and fail. They are bad writers because they think the internet communicates their tone. They fail because it does not, and their writing fails to as well.

By the way, the context of me writing this post, I'm shit-faced on my computer at four in the morning in my underwear. People on the Internet--I'm sure--have more surprises than that.

* Incredibly socially awkward people frequently do not communicate sarcasm through tone. This is why they are awkward.

Why Do People Listen To Celebrities?

2009-06-15T21:32:00.002-04:00

Recently, Jenny McCarthy's drawn a lot of attention to herself by speaking out against autism and blaming the disease on the use of vaccines. I've never done any research on the topic, so I'm not going to draw an conclusions on her opinion. However, I'm still entitled to draw a conclusion on her; that is, I can clearly see she needs to shut the fuck up.

Celebrities running their mouths about topics they know very little about are not new. Take Tom Cruise for example. He's not a psychiatrist. I doubt his credentials or research experience in any way grant him any right to say what he says.

They're not doctors. They don't have PhDs. They may have not even finished school. Yet for some reason, the media magically grants celebrities time to talk about things they never spent any time studying. Sure, they spent perhaps three or four hours with one "expert" on the topic they come to endorse. Hey, they may have even read an article in Popular Science on their topic of choice. Somehow, by some means, the media still publishes their opinions.

How do celebrities even get into the business of running their mouth? They're good at it. That's how they became celebrities in the first place. When some organization wants someone to talk for them--someone who is damn good at talking--they weasel some celebrity into it, likely with linear combination of wads of cash, nice dinners, and tears for the children.

Once they've got them in hand, getting a celebrity to be a spokesperson is easy. All the celebrity has to do is regurgitate information along with some hint of emotion. That's no different from acting where they had to regurgitate lines along with some hint of emotion.

Celebrities don't know what they're talking about. When a celebrity runs their mouth about... anything, do research for yourself before listening to them. Unless, of course, it's a celebrity scientist.

The Pirate Bay Wins A Seat In European Parliament

2009-06-09T12:48:00.003-04:00

I usually don't post news, but this is pretty awesome:
http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=79094

Believe This

2009-05-15T17:53:00.002-04:00

If you rely on the existence of God to establish and maintain the sanctity of human life, then you don't know what a human being even is.

Codding with Obscure Scrabble Words

2009-04-13T15:04:00.004-04:00

The game Scrabble provides a unique opportunity to learn the back alleys of the English Language. Because the game forces the players to think of words out of a combination of letters, people think of just about any combination of vowels and consonants. Desperate attempts at forming words often results in stumbling upon obscure words.

To really demonstrate this, I'm going to play some Boggle. I'm going to pull everything that sounds like a word out of a few Boggle games. Then, I'll drop the words that aren't words, save the one's that are, and write a story out of the obscure ones. I expect it to be unintelligible.

Let's see where this goes. To start:

gone
dook
kooe
goost
dog
god
doss
cod
sed
dest
dests
mog
gode
doke
voke
kosoe
soke
moced
moce
noced
noce
nocs
noc
goes
tsen
good
soe
moe
codes
code
sod
good
goods
cods
gone
mone
voost
vooe
vook
ness
nedo

Second list:
foe
fou
fuo
fuse
her
ten
fet
teb
bet
hey
cey
nous
nouse
ben
hece
net
noet
foet
soet
son
hecy
hecn
hec
fen
nofe
nof

Let's cut down the words. These are the ones that are real words:
gone
dog
god
doss - to sleep in any convenient place
cod - to fool
mog - to move away
soke - a feudal right to administer justice within a certain territory
goes
good
goods
code
sod - to cover with sod
ness - a headland - a cliff
foe
fou - drunk
fuse
her
ten
fet - to fetch
bet
hey
nous - mind, reason, or intellect
ben - an inner room
net
son
fen

I'm going to get rid of the less obscure words, because they're not the reason I'm doing this exercise.

doss - to sleep in any convenient place
cod - to fool
mog - to move away
soke - a feudal right to administer justice within a certain territory
sod - to cover with sod
ness - a headland - a cliff
fou - drunk
fet - to fetch
nous - mind, reason, or intellect
ben - an inner room

So, from those:
A fou sodder once would always cod and doss through the soke of Judge Tamanar. Since he was always fou and acted without nous, his ill-disciplined ways landed him once in the ben of a rich aristocrat. Judge Tamanar ordered his sheriffs to fet the fou sodder, and Judge Tamanar told him to mog or he'd throw him from a ness. While the fou sodder mogged, he fell off a ness anyway.

Now, with the "translation:"
A drunk sodder once would always fool and sleep in any convenient location through the jurisdiction of Judge Tamanar. Since he always drunk and acted without reason, his ill-disciplined ways landed him once in the inner room of a rich aristocrat. Judge Tamanar ordered his sheriffs to fetch the drunk doffer, and Judge Tamanar ordered him to move away or he'd throw him from a cliff. While the drunk moved away, he fell off a cliff anyway.

Both paragraphs convey very precise information. The obscure words are beneficial in that they increase the concision of the paragraph. Yet despite the great value in this concision and precision, the words have their connotations, but since they're so obscure, I don't know them, nor does the reader likely know them. As a result, despite the precision of using such words, a lot of meaning seems missing even if the definition is known. In fact, the same ideas can be conveyed with greater precision and connotation by using more familiar words:
A drunk sodder never did his job and was a bum in the jurisdiction of Judge Tamanar. Since he was always did stupid things, his alcoholism led him to passing out in a rich aristocrat's house. Judge Tamanar had the drunk arrested and threatened to throw him from a cliff if he did not exhile himself. While leaving, the drunk sodder fell off a cliff anyway.

Of course, my attempt at using the words is forced, and the story I created to use the words is better conveyed with other words. It's likely that the content of the story was conceived with concepts--and therefore, words--that are more familiar to me. This forces me to wonder if learning the words would expand my imagination itself through the concepts they convey, increasing the possibilities of things I can imagine.

But before I expand my nous, I think I'll doss a bit.

America: Maxing Out the Credit Cards

2009-03-17T03:21:00.003-04:00

"Quick, send out an EMERGENCY STIMULUS PACKAGE. CUT TAXES. HOLY SHIT, we've gotta cut taxes, otherwise, we won't have as much money in our pockets. After all, I want that TV. The 60" plasma. Without a tax cut, I can't... have it. What kind of land of dreams is this without 60" plasma TVs?"

Politicians have been elected for years on the premise that they will cut taxes. Yet at the same time, the politicians can't cut spending for fear that the army won't get to buy any new tanks or that some advocacy group will shit themselves when they hear they won't get their entitlement funds. Therefore, politicians wave a magic wand and do the impossible--increase spending and cut taxes. It turns out that politicians are angels.

Angels perform miracles in one of two ways. The first option is to create more money. This sounds like a great idea until one considers that inflation would wreck the value of the dollar, and the only way to compensate at that point would be to print more money, causing hyperinflation. Therefore, angels perform miracles with a second option--they sell bonds.

Bonds are a way of getting money now and paying for it later. It's not that different from a credit card. You get money now and pay it back later... plus some more, you know, just to thank the lender for the favor.

So since there isn't enough money already, and the money needs to get paid back at some point--plus a little more--where does the money come from? And what about the little bit more? The angels perform the same miracle; they sell more bonds.

It's completely unbelievable. For years, our country has been pulling the same sad trick that has led thousands of Americans into bankruptcy. In essence, we're using credit cards to pay off our maxed out credit cards to continue a fucked up spending spree.

That's exactly what it is. It's fucked up. We're selling our country out and rewarding politicians who do it. Great job America, you've fulfilled the fears of our forefathers: "mob-ocracy."

When the Chinese get pissed off and foreclose, expect warm days in major cities and bulldozers at the Federal Reserve Bank.

Space Age? Pft

2009-03-05T12:08:00.003-05:00

The Industrial Age had an attitude of "make it bigger" and "make more of it." No event epitomizes this attitude more than World War II, where we made bigger guns, bigger armies, and bigger bombs, all culminating with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II epitomized the Industrial Age, but the last series of events that really kept with the bigger/more of it attitude were the Apollo flights. Though it didn't match the quantity condition, the "make it bigger" concept lived very strong in the Apollo Program.

Thanks to the Apollo Program, its era has been named the Space Age. But other than a couple of men landing on the moon, there's not that much space in the space age. The name hangs around from a sense of optimism at the time--that in the near future, man would live in space, and that one could buy a ticket on a rocket on a daily basis.

This optimism did not prove to be true, or near true, and a man hasn't been on the moon since the 70's. This period in time really marks the end of the Industrial Age, not a piece of the Space Age. The Space Age simply hasn't happened yet. Instead, around this time, bigger/more segued into the beginning of movement of information for cheap and easy. The Internet had began development in the 50's; it's early development sets a beginning to a gradient between Industrial Age and Information Age.

"You Ain't My Bitch, Nigga. Buy Your Own Damn Fries."

2009-02-07T04:41:00.002-05:00

Barack Obama is the greatest president who's ever lived. This is why:

http://www.aprilwinchell.com/wp-content/cache/supercache/www.aprilwinchell.com/2009/02/05/barack-obama-is-tired-of-your-motherfucking-shit//index.html

Lol 25 random facts

2009-02-04T03:37:00.003-05:00

I'm kidding. I didn't participate in that Facebook meme. Instead, I'm complaining about it.

The whole thing reminds me of one of those bad icebreakers they force you to do at group events you don't want to attend. For example:
"Ok everybody, we're gonna stand in a circle. Everyone go around, say your name, then say (what animal you would want to be reincarnated as/one embarassing moment/your major/one fun fact...)."

Sure, and that can be great when you're new to a place, but the people that get tagged are the person's friends. They're supposed to already know the fun facts or learn them as friendship grows. People build friendships on trust, not telling each other cute anecdotes.

Since these lists are useless, why do people keep doing them? Vanity. The author of every list gets to present to the world how truly unique they are, yet they're following a trend everybody else is doing. Uniqueness by fashion--great, it's the Internet's incarnation of Hot Topic.

Limitless and Pure Awesome: Flying

2009-01-31T22:42:00.001-05:00

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Service? My Ass

2008-12-23T17:06:00.003-05:00

Reflecting on the campaign, John McCain repeatedly mentioned that he spent his life serving this country.

His military service I recognize as just that: service. He put his life on the line serving America. That is noble and significant.

His time in politics is not service. Political power is a privilege. He isn't doing us a favor, he's been granted sacred and important tools to lead us. It has burdens, sure, but above that, it's a privilege we've permitted our leaders to use.

Someone in service is a volunteer and taking a job no one wants to do. There's plenty of people in line for political power, and as soon as those in charge do something asinine, we can drop them and try on the next guy.

Never forget--politicians don't do us a favor by being in office; we do them a favor by putting them there. Don't let them tell you otherwise.

This Blog Needs Funny Pictures

2008-12-20T23:10:00.003-05:00

The Flaw of the Law

2008-12-19T16:30:00.003-05:00

If I wanna know the perihelion of Venus or Thomas Jefferson's birthday, I can find out in under a minute (to be exact: 107.48*10^6 km and April 13, 1743). If I want to know my legal rights, I'm in tough luck.

For example, let's try "am I required to produce ID upon request in Virginia." The best match I got was from a forum, but there were no authoritative matches on the matter. All of the posts on that forum were probably heard by means of grapevine, and in fact, most people get their legal knowledge by word of mouth. The majority of my legal rights and limitations I've heard from friends.

In fact, with no readily accessible source of information on the matter, to educate myself regarding the law, I have to pay a lawyer. Depending on how much I can afford to pay, I can pay to learn a sort of correct version of the law or a kind of somewhat more correct version of the law. Therefore, unless I can afford it, I will remain ignorant to the law.

Ignorance of the law is no defense against the law, but if the means to end that ignorance is limited--particularly, by how much money I have--the law is flawed. The government needs to provide some medium through which the public can read and know the law.

I Know Why You Get Spam

2008-12-16T00:47:00.002-05:00

Spam is a big problem apparently. I never noticed.

I have two e-mail addresses. One of them I've had for about four years now. The other I've had about two. The second e-mail address I plan on switching to, eventually. I just haven't got around to it. Predominantly, I use the first.

The reason I plan on switching to the second is that it is my real life name. If I want to build a career and all that good stuff, I've gotta have an e-mail address that reflects me, professionally. The e-mail address I use predominantly now is not my name. Hell, it's not even in English, or any spoken language for that matter.

When I log in to my real name e-mail, I notice something everytime; there's spam in it. Every single time, hands down.

I started wondering why. After all, I've never used the thing. In fact, I've used my current e-mail WAY more than my real name one, and I haven't got a single bit of spam on it--well, that's not so true, but pretty close. Not a single bit has arrived in the inbox.

The only possibility I could think of was that my real name e-mail address is just that--my real name. It's a name a spambot that has an infinite amount of time to do everything at nearly zero cost would come up with randomly. However, my primary e-mail address is derived from a dead language, and it's spelled wrong. No machine would ever guess that e-mail address.

In short, if your name is John Smith, and you're e-mail is smithj4 or jsmith4 or johnsmith, you're fucked. If your name is Pokako Lemanko, and your e-mail address is lemanp or pleman or pokakolemanko, you're not going to get spam. You're just too original for a machine to conceive.

Days are Dead

2008-12-10T03:00:00.002-05:00

The standard definition of the change of days is at midnight. Frequently, "tomorrow" has come up in conversation, wherein one person says "LOL u meen today."

But is it tomorrow yet? Not exactly. In fact, for a long time, I used a waking definiton of today. During a period of time where I'm awake, that is today and remains so till I sleep. Tomorrow is what happens after I've decided the sleep I had is a night's rest.

This definition, however, has its own problems. The clock read 11:00 pm when I rose from bed. The day of the week was Tuesday. So is it my Tuesday or my Wednesday?

The 1930's: The 1920s' Hangover

2008-12-08T12:29:00.001-05:00

Re: Re: You're Doing It Wrong: English Teachers

2008-12-06T13:26:00.003-05:00

A friend of mine responded to my post "You're Doing It Wrong: English Teachers:"

I re-posted it for sake of context, and it's a good argument.
---

Friend wrote
at 10:51pm on December 4th, 2008
(Sorry this was so long I had to put it in a word document and break it up lol.)

I came across this yesterday and couldn't help myself. If you’re going to speak of making a valid argument, while I find your own (regarding English teachers) interesting, certainly not without some tangible degree of merit, I find it even more porous and flimsily constructed on generalizations. I wholeheartedly agree with your point regarding the delivery of a convincing argument – it “has less to do with the argument and more to do with the delivering.” However, in my opinion, your claim “the people who teach delivery are the ones responsible for the Internet sounding like it’s full of stupid people” is, as you have characterized the human race, not at all stupid, but it does flirt shamelessly with the average. I find it strange that you acknowledge the ignorance in assuming people on the Internet reflect the world’s population while simultaneously lumping another group of people, English teachers, together in an incredibly generalized and unflattering heap.
Report - Delete

Friend wrote
at 10:51pm on December 4th, 2008
Our disagreement on the subject (your claim being that people sound stupid because English teachers are “doing something wrong”) may stem from possible differences in our views of the educational system. I believe learning is more the responsibility of the pupil rather than of the instructor, dependent on the student’s motivation and effort rather than on “answers” (if there are such things in the realms of literature and debate) fed to and gulped down by the lazy pupil. I believe, in terms of education, you reap what you sow. Perhaps it is the student, rather than the instructor, who deserves some of the rebuke you flippantly pawn off on the English teacher. I don’t know the names of each President of the United States, but to blame this lack of knowledge on History teachers everywhere is just silly. It is clearly my own fault; if I were genuinely interested in learning that information, or how to deliver a convincing argument in this case, I would make the effort: learn it, practice it, and make it my own endeavor, fueled by the desire to acquire that knowledge or skill. Perhaps your argument would be more aptly named “You’re Doing It Wrong: Students.” I recommend “The American Scholar” by Emerson if you haven’t already read it. He presents a similar case obviously more eloquently than I can.
Report - Delete

Friend wrote
at 10:54pm on December 4th, 2008
If that argument does not appeal to you, and if we were to assume that the dismal linguistic state of Americans on the Internet is fully the fault of the English teacher, then we’d need to take into account why that is the case. Surely it cannot be as black and white as you construe it to be, because very few things are ever black and white, right? It’s no secret that studying or teaching literature (and accordingly, debate) is less likely to put food on the table than say, a degree in the medical field. To consider the student’s socio-economic status and thus how the financial motivations of students across the nation surface in the subjects in which they aim to excel would both challenge your argument and add depth to it if you were able to incorporate it effectively. While I certainly acknowledge that argumentative skill is imperative to a student in science or medicine just as it is to a student in English, clearly the responsibility of teaching delivery is perceived as belonging solely to the English instructor. I’m of the philosophy that it all comes down to personal responsibility, but if that doesn’t jive with you, perhaps take a closer look at the significant budget slashes inflicted on Humanities departments in America under the Bush administration. Those truly passionate about English or debate or any subject in the humanities, really, may be less inclined or even unable to follow that calling because of economic strain. In that case, is the English teacher to blame? Or is it the system which inhibits the passionate from spreading the source of their fervor? The system which calls for English instructors to teach based on a Standardized Learning Test to meet government quotas instead of delving into the classics upon which literature was built and which instilled awe in the instructor in the first place? In this case, your argument would be more aptly titled “You’re Doing It Wrong: Government.”

Sorry to rant. I like English teachers :)
Report - Delete

---
So here's a few comments and my response:
---

"I find it strange that you acknowledge the ignorance in assuming people on the Internet reflect the world’s population while simultaneously lumping another group of people, English teachers, together in an incredibly generalized and unflattering heap."

Yes, I am generalizing English teachers. I've also had incredible ones, but out of 13 years of school, only two of them I would characterize as such.

"I believe learning is more the responsibility of the pupil rather than of the instructor, dependent on the student’s motivation and effort rather than on “answers” (if there are such things in the realms of literature and debate) fed to and gulped down by the lazy pupil."

I agree. However, most teachers do not demand such out of their students. If apathy were infectious, many teachers have allowed themselves to be infected by their students instead of spotting it and stomping it out. The system is self-sustaining, but with a group of pupils moving through the system every thirteen years and a group of teachers moving through every thirty years (an estimated average), it's hard to blame a group that's in flux for a constant problem.

"In this case, your argument would be more aptly titled 'You’re Doing It Wrong: Government.'"

Oh yes. Couldn't agree with you there more, but that's its own set of issues.

---

It's true, the teachers aren't entirely to blame and especially not as a whole. I did leave out the fact that some of the best teachers I've had have been English teachers. I'd point out particulars, but I'm not in a mood for flattery. Nevertheless, they were diamonds in the rough.

There are ways to fix the problem that I hadn't pointed out either. One of those is the fact that we have lumped two subjects into what we call English: Writing and Rhetoric being one and Literature being the other. Perhaps it's more efficient to clump the subjects into one, but there's plenty of things that are lost.

One of the lost topics is technical writing. English teachers are often forced to use literature as the source material for any sort of research essay that must be taught despite that most of their pupils will never need to write a literary essay. Instead of teaching technical writing--something that could be applied to any field of study in the sciences, engineering, or even business--students are asked to contrive a thesis about a couple of books. Unless you're going to study literature the rest of your life, it's not a useful skill. Useful skills could be derived from it, but starting with the real deal is better in the long term.

English curricula are still modeled after a pre-internet world where writing was planned out far in advance and done slow and tediously. It never was adapted to a time where publication is quick, immediate, and without paper. This adaptation will be possible once our generation comes of age and makes the curriculum appropriate for our world... I should hope.

You're Doing It Wrong: English Teachers

2008-11-30T09:25:00.002-05:00

Apparently, a lot of people on the Internet are stupid; at least, that's what the Internet things. Yet, even assuming that the Internet contains an equal selection of all the people in the English-speaking world, that would mean that most people are stupid. Most people are average, but they're not stupid.

Sounding stupid is easier than it sounds; a lot of delivering a convincing argument has less to do with the argument and more to do with the delivering. Delivery is something that's taught. Some people may be more talented than others, but the fact remains a fact--delivery is taught. The people who teach delivery are the ones responsible for the Internet sounding like it's full of stupid people.

These people are English teachers, and the fact the Internet sounds stupid points to them doing something wrong. They aren't teaching people to deliver convincing arguments or deliver anything lol

I'd offer up some way to fix things, but I can't think of any. I'm pointing at a burning car and saying the car's on fire, get a new mechanic.

Holy Shit

2008-11-13T18:05:00.000-05:00

What a day:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081113152007.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081113151456.htm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Fomalhaut_with_Disk_Ring_and_extrasolar_planet_b.jpg

USB

2008-11-11T09:31:00.002-05:00

In response to the creation of USA, there was USB, a low-grade European consumer substitute.

Knock Knock Barack

2008-11-11T09:20:00.002-05:00

At the White House:
"Knock knock barack?"
"Who's there?"
"I already said, it's Barack."

LOL WAT CHNAGE OABAMA HAS NONE PLANS

2008-11-07T12:18:00.005-05:00

For the conservatives out there who haven't figured out how to use the Internet yet and still think Obama has no plan, here's a link to Barack Obama's plan for America:

http://www.change.gov/

Hopefully you guys can read.

All due respect to my intelligent conservative friends... unless you hadn't figured out the Internet either.

The Second Quote of the Decade

2008-11-05T00:36:00.001-05:00

"Oh my God, did you watch that speech, dude?"
-Bala

No Religion of Peace

2008-11-03T18:14:00.002-05:00

While it receives a lot of attacks, a lot of people are defending Islam as a religion of peace. Yet there do exists verses in the Koran that emphasize the destruction of those who oppose Allah, just as those exists that emphasize peace. The Bible has similar poorly considered plot holes. For example, despite Jesus' message of peace, check out Psalm 139:21-22 (KJV):

Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.

In both religions, a message of love or a message of hate can be contrived from the proper holy books. It all depends on what's needed that day of the week.

The extremists--the Muslims who hate the West, the Christians who hate the East--they're all the same. The use a different book, but they center their message around hate and supremacy. The rest of the folk is the same too--they believe in love, and the extremists want to scare the folk into hatred too.

It's in the eye of the beholder. Let's put all the extremists in a giant pit and let them duke it out... or work it out. I'd bet on the prior, but the latter would be quite the triumph for love.

Obama's Resume

2008-11-02T14:21:00.003-05:00

One of the major attacks against Barack Obama has been his apparent "lack of experience." There is a reason this is an issue--experience yields something crucial to leadership--but if Obama can satisfy this reason without the experience, he doesn't need it.

Experience yields wisdom. If one has been through a situation before and dealt with it--either right or wrong--the hindsight of that success or failure yields wisdom. A wise man can identify that a situation is analog to a past one and use the hindsight he developed to solve the present situation. This is the reason math and science students do homework problems, athletes train, and the greatest wise men are old.

Every step of the way, Obama has dealt with situations using vast and quality hindsight, and he's done it in such a way that his solution has been effective in the short term and long term. This is foresight, and it's a quality that Augustus--the greatest leader who ever lived--possessed. Perhaps he doesn't have the most extensive resume, but he's demonstrated through his actions that he has everything he needs to be an effective and powerful president in a way that no list could.

It's been argued that it doesn't matter if Obama's a good leader, that his stances on issues are sour. Yet it is his foresight that guides his stances on issues, so because he has leadership qualities, these lead him to the best stances for the short term and long term success of America.

Men like this--ones with incredible leadership capacity, hindsight, and foresight--only arrive when they are needed. We need Barack Obama; the fact that he's here demonstrates that.

The Astronomer

2008-10-27T11:13:00.000-04:00

Speaking of ranking the various disiplines---
Politicians think they are Economists.
Economists think they are Social Scientists.
Social Scientists think they are Psychologists.
Psychologists think they are Biologists.
Biologists think they are Organic Chemists.
Organic Chemists think they are Physical Chemists.
Physical Chemists think they are Physicists.
Physicists think they are Mathematicians.
Mathematicians think they are God.
God...ummm...so happens that God is an Astronomer.
---Vinay Kashyap (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), originally appeared in the Annals of Improbable Research, republished in the Washington Post

The Internet's Balls Haven't Dropped

2008-10-27T04:16:00.002-04:00

There's a classic image. I'm not sure how old it is. It's definitely not PC, but I don't think anything is on the Internet. It really gets the point across in the way the Internet would.

Above all, the point it makes is that arguing on the Internet bears no fruit. Ever. You're not going to convince someone that Barack Obama is awesome or that John McCain's penis might fall off. A lot of people have realized that, but most of these people have been on Internet boards and forums for a long time. They know that these arguments only end in people forgetting that they were in an argument or the thread getting locked and people getting banned. Either way, the argument was a waste of time better spent.

A lot of people haven't realized this yet. They still read things people post on the Internet, get angry, just HAVE to tell EVERYONE their opinion, and above all, prove that that loser from Wisconsin is WRONG.

Give it a few more years. People will realize the fruitlessness of these things; they just haven't had time yet to do so. The human race as a whole is still learning about this Internet thing and how it works.

This Internet thing's gonna be a lot different a century from now. That's because all the people that were here when it started will be dead. They'll be presented an Internet where most folks have realized its purpose, potential, and how to work it, and as a result, the people will be different.

I can hope.

An Argument Against Joe the Plumber

2008-10-16T20:49:00.004-04:00

Government has existed for approximately seven-thousand years. Generally, it has had a single purpose--maintain the rule of law. Part of those laws have been laws to continue fund the continued of existence of the government--taxes. Without taxes, there's no government, and without government, there's no order.

Without order, I'm fighting for my life everyday. Murder has no consequence except guilt, and that guilt varies from person to person. Therefore, it's better we have order, which means it's better to government, which means it's better to have taxes than no taxes.

Each person has a certain amount of wealth, and to survive in a society's economy, each person must have a certain amount of wealth to feed, clothe, shelter themselves. If the taxes exceed that amount of wealth, then people will suffer from the government. If the government causes suffering, then the people will revolt against the government, and the very existence of a revolt causes an end to order. With order being the very purpose of government, a lack of order is a flag that the government has malfunctioned.

Since people who earn less wealth have more trouble feeding, sheltering, and clothing themselves, for the sake of order and the government's continued existence, they have to keep more of their wealth. From this, the portion of the population who can afford to eat pays more of the tax--that way the government that protects their wealth will continue to exist to do so.

(My logic's a bit choppy, I wrote this on the fly. I'll iron it out more later.)

Internets

2008-10-13T03:48:00.002-04:00

A lot of people bitch about how artificial the world is now-a-days, and I'm one of them. Advertising convinces us to buy things; grammarians convince us to speak certain ways. On the internet, we'll have neither of them.

The Internet and its communities continually satirize the artificial and break convention. They make things that are "real," that weren't created for any particular purpose or reason but to be. People communicate with speed and concision. The good things rise up and the bad things fade away; it's a capitalism of time and attention.

We're Changing the Language Again, rtard

2008-10-13T03:37:00.002-04:00

Steadily, common phrases used over the internet have been converted into abbreviations. These abbreviations become acronyms. For example,

Original Phrase/Meaning | Abbreviaton | Pronounced Form
laughing out loud | lol | "lawl"
good game | gg | "jeej"
rolling on the floor laughing | rofl | "roffle"
too long; didn't read | TL;DR | "teal deer"

The process reminds me of cockney, a form of slang which has left a permanent mark on English. I expect something similar to occur from netspeak.

Sleepless, Period

2008-10-06T19:07:00.001-04:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2079113/

I really don't know what to make of this. I doubt it's really as miraculous as it sounds.

All the Time In The World

2008-10-05T23:16:00.002-04:00

A man was dying on the field of battle, and he cried out to some god or any god to save him; that to save his life, he would take any penalty or cost. Before him, some god appeared and said, "You shall live forever."

So, he does nothing but eat lunch at a small diner in Columbia Furnace because he can always do things tomorrow, and he has all the time in the world.

Fuck "To Hook Up"

2008-09-23T00:04:00.002-04:00

The expression "to hook up" did not exist in a sexual context until recently; it can't be more than ten-years-old and is definitely a phrase used in such a context almost exclusively by our youthful, sexually blossomed generation.

Yet this word's infancy leaves its meaning ambiguous. I can't figure out what the hell it means. As if the "baseball" euphemism--changing definitions depending on how old the speaker is or where the user came from--weren't ambiguous enough, now we've got a word that people exchange all the time, yet have given no explicit definition and use in a context where no definition can be drawn. Here's a few places where the line could be drawn:

Holding hands?
Making out?
Do shirts have to come off?
Does some action with the naughty bits have to go on?

...or is the term exclusively for fucking? One friend gave me that definition, but that seems like the word is thrown around a little too frequently and would be more appropriate if the definition was more lenient.

So, enough of this speculation, and on to what the REST of the internet speculates. The American Heritage Dictionary says:
hook up
1. To assemble or wire (a mechanism).
2. To connect a mechanism and a source of power.
3. Slang
a. To meet or associate: We agreed to hook up after class. He hooked up with the wrong crowd.
b. To become romantically or sexually involved with someone.
c. To marry or get married.

So I can throw out 1 and 2, and if 3a were the definition I was looking for, everyone would be hooking up, all the time, everyday, and that just doesn't make sense. 3c isn't valid either, otherwise most this campus would be married, and it isn't.

3b seems to be what I'm looking for, but it remains ambiguous. What exactly is romantically involved? What if you exchange some suggestive glances back and forth? That's not hooking up.

Apparently, I'm not the only one this confused.

The most decisive place I've seen is here, and it seems pretty clear that the majority of folks agree hook-up means sex, but the Urban Dictionary definitions clearly point in both directions, even the top rated ones.

I'm just going to avoid this word all together. If anyone uses it, I'm asking for a definition. In its place--when I speak--I'm using making-out and fucking. I think those words have pretty clear definitions, and I like being clear.

Awesome

2008-09-13T15:38:00.000-04:00

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.

I wanna start longboarding now.