The Meatyard

Laptop snd-hda-intel no head phone audio fix for Arch

2011-12-26T10:19:00.006-05:00

For:



[joel@moo modprobe.d]$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC269VB Analog [ALC269VB Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

The output above means that my audio is using card 0. This means I need to alias card 0 and slot 0. This is my modeprobe.conf:



#
# /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf
#
#disable autoload of ipv6
alias net-pf-10 off

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=auto

After you add those critical last three lines and reboot, if it still doesn't work you should try doing this below:

"That is likely a problem with the dump of the ALSA state. Remove the
file "/var/lib/alsa/asound.state" and run "/etc/rc.d/alsa stop" after
that. Then the current state is dumped into a fresh file and the error
should be gone."
- http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/Where-is-the-boot-log-td3380781.html

My Favorite Non-Metal Opeth Videos

2011-08-11T15:30:00.006-04:00

Five Flames From Software Engineers!

2011-08-07T10:37:00.015-04:00

From here: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html

1: Richard Stallman Verses Birth Announcements
(Kabuki-West is a mailing list for planning dinners and get-togethers in the San Francisco Bay Area)

Could people please not use this list to announce information of no particular interest to the people on the list? Hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day. While the whole phenomenon is menacing, one of them by itself is not newsworthy. Nor is it a difficult achievement--even some fish can do it. (Now, if you were a seahorse, it would be more interesting, since it would be the male that gave birth.)

Following your example, I might send the list an announcement whenever a new GNU program is written. That happens less often than babies are born, it does the world a lot more good, it reflects more conscious creativity and hard work, and some of the readers might actually find the information useful. Even so, I think most of the readers would consider this outside the scope and purpose of the list. Clearly that goes double for babies.

Of course, we have another place for announcements of new GNU programs. If some people like to read birth announcements, perhaps you should set up a suitable list or newsgroup. Perhaps rec.births? (While you're at it, start rec.deaths for obituaries--they're usually more interesting to read.)

These birth announcements also spread the myth that having a baby is something to be proud of, which fuels natalist pressure, which leads to pollution, extinction of wildlife, poverty, and ultimately mass starvation.

Perhaps the people who have decided to have no children should start making proud announcements, so as to set a better example. I could start. I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself.

Kabuki-West Replies: In summary:

Richard: Fuck off. -Eliot Lear
Fuck you. -Paul Traina
- No, thanks. I don't want to have children. -RMS
  - good -Peter Shipley
Fuck you, Richard. -Brent Chapman
- Boy, I really am getting popular. I haven't had so many offers before in just one day. -RMS
  - You mean that you are in no danger of getting laid. -Elaine Richards
Richard, You appear to be unclear on the concept. -Joe Buck
Richard, what Paul and Brent so succinctly expressed is quite approprate. ... To sum up: Fuck you. -David Muir Sharnoff
Please send your "fucks" via personal mail and refrain from using Kabuki-west for such messages. -Lile Elam
It appears that the problem of natalism is even worse than I thought. -RMS
Perhaps some people took my message as an expression of personal hostility. It was not based on hostility, just annoyance at a general practice on the occasion of one instance. If anyone felt bad because of misunderstanding this, I regret the unintended result, and I hope this message corrects the matter. -RMS
Wow, I think yall who sent "fucks" to the mailing list need to go back and re read RMS's msg. Has breeding become such a religion that the mere mention of a an oposing view ignites a fury of vile replies? If those people who sent "fucks" really want to feel strongly about something, maybe they should move to Iran and start worshiping Kholmeni or something. -Edjik
You people just have no sense of humor. I thought the original message was pretty funny and made a few good points (if it didn't, nobody would have been offended). I guess it's a shock for smug self-righteous breeders to learn that not everybody in the world thinks babies are cute and special. -Wayne A. Christopher
- Finally, someone read the message as it was intended to be read. -RMS
No, I think you are correct about the purpose of the list, but parents seem to be so flushed with hormones after they have managed to accomplish the same act that single celled life does, that they revert to the brain level of that afore-mentioned life. I appreciate your choice, the same one that I and my partner have made. -Doug Faunt
I'm somewhat surprised by the idea that a mere message from me could torpedo the happiness of parents. I'd think it wouldn't even come close to doing that. Not that I wanted to do that. The most I thought it could do was to discourage the posting birth announcements. -RMS

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

Next, from here: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html

2: Linus Torvalds Flames Andy Tenenbaum (who criticized the Linux kernel for its monolithic architecture and portability)

"I was in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, so I haven't commented much on LINUX (not that I would have said much had I been around), but for what it is worth, I have a couple of comments now."

"As most of you know, for me MINIX is a hobby, something that I do in the evening when I get bored writing books and there are no major wars, revolutions, or senate hearings being televised live on CNN. My real job is a professor and researcher in the area of operating systems......"

You use this as an excuse for the limitations of minix? Sorry, but you loose: I've got more excuses than you have, and linux still beats the pants of minix in almost all areas. Not to mention the fact that most of the good code for PC minix seems to have been written by Bruce Evans.

Re 1: you doing minix as a hobby - look at who makes money off minix, and who gives linux out for free. Then talk about hobbies. Make minix freely available, and one of my biggest gripes with it will disappear. Linux has very much been a hobby (but a serious one: the best type) for me: I get no money for it, and it's not even part of any of my studies in the university. I've done it all on my own time, and on my own machine.

Re 2: your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. I can only hope (and assume) that Amoeba doesn't suck like minix does.

...

If I had made an OS that had problems with a multithreading filesystem, I wouldn't be so fast to condemn others: in fact, I'd do my damndest to make others forget about the fiasco. [ yes, I know there are multithreading hacks for minix, but they are hacks, and bruce evans tells me there are lots of race conditions ]

-----------

Next, from here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=208

3: Eric S. Raymond Response to Microsoft Recruiter (Mike Walters)

From: "Mike Walters (Search Wizards)"

To:

Eric,

I am a member of the Microsoft Central Sourcing Team. Microsoft is
seeking world class engineers to help create products that help people
and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.

Your name and contact info was brought to my attention as someone who
could potentially be a contributor at Microsoft. I would love an
opportunity to speak with you in detail about your interest in a career
at Microsoft, along with your experience, background and qualifications...

...

Mike Walters
CST Senior Recruiter

Microsoft
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

Eric Raymond: "I called Mike Walters, who told me my name had been passed to him by his research team. I indicated to him that I thought somebody was probably having a little joke at his expense, and promised him an email reply. Here is my reply in its entirety":

To: "Mike Walters (Search Wizards)"
From:

I'd thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except
that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both)
couldn't get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats.
What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs
to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to
something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a
Satanist orgy?

If you had bothered to do five seconds of background checking, you
might have discovered that I am the guy who responded to Craig
Mundie's "Who are you?" with "I'm your worst nightmare", and that I've
in fact been something pretty close to your company's worst nightmare
since about 1997. You've maybe heard about this "open source" thing?
You get one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it
and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in.
But don't think I'm trying to destroy your company. Oh, no; I'd be
just as determined to do in any other proprietary-software monopoly,
and the community I helped found is well on its way to accomplishing
that goal.

On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be
heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but
develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone
will go superconductive.

But I must thank you for dropping a good joke on my afternoon. On
that hopefully not too far distant day that I piss on Microsoft's
grave, I sincerely hope none of it will splash on you.

Cordially yours,
Eric S. Raymond

-------

Next, from: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1063230

4: Torvalds Verses Poettering On Kernel Space Verses User Space Modification (this was about a recently released kernel patch to improve performance)

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:03 AM, Lennart Poettering
0pointer.de> wrote:
>
> Binding something like this to TTYs is just backwards.

Numbers talk, bullshit walks.

The numbers have been quoted. The clear interactive behavior has been seen.

And you're just full of bullshit.

Come back when you have something working and with numbers and better
interactive performance. Until then, nobody cares.

Linus

On Tue, 16.11.10 09:11, Linus Torvalds (torvalds linux-foundation.org) wrote:

>
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:03 AM, Lennart Poettering
> 0pointer.de> wrote:
> >
> > Binding something like this to TTYs is just backwards.
>
> Numbers talk, bullshit walks.
>
> The numbers have been quoted. The clear interactive behavior has been seen.

Here's my super-complex patch btw, to achieve exactly the same thing
from userspace without involving any kernel or systemd patching and
kernel-side logic. Simply edit your own ~/.bashrc and add this to the end:

if [ "$PS1" ] ; then
mkdir -m 0700 /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu/user/$$
echo $$ > /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu/user/$$/tasks
fi

Then, as the superuser do this:

mount -t cgroup cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu -o cpu
mkdir -m 0777 /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu/user

Done. Same effect. However: not crazy.

I am not sure I myself will find the time to prep some 'numbers' for
you. They'd be the same as with the kernel patch anyway. But I am sure
somebody else will do it for you...

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.

-------

Next, from here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477#c129

5: Lunis Torvalds Vs. Blaming Errors On Other Software (flash player bug in fedora)

Linus Torvalds 2010-11-30 20:50:25 EST

(In reply to comment #128)
>
> In Adobe's software.
>
> > I'm no great fan of flash but it's an essential part of life on the web these
> > days and I had thought that the Fedora project had finally put its days of
> > broken flash support behind it.
>
> Fedora's flash support is fine. Adobe's software is broken.

Quite frankly, I find your attitude to be annoying and downright stupid.

How hard can it be to understand the following simple sentence:

THE USER DOESN'T CARE.

Pushing the blame around doesn't help anybody. The only thing that helps is
Fedora being helpful, not being obstinate.

Also, the fact is, that from a Q&A standpoint, a memcpy() that "just does the
right thing" is simply _better_. Quoting standards is just stupid, when there's
two simple choices: "it works" or "it doesn't work because bugs happen".

Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That's how much
that paper is worth.

Reality is what matters. When glibc changed memcpy, it created problems. Saying
"not my problem" is irresponsible when it hurts users.

And pointing fingers at Adobe and blaming them for creating bad software is
_doubly_ irresponsible if you are then not willing to set a higher standard for
your own project. And "not my problem" is not a higher standard.

So please just fix it.

The easy and technically nice solution is to just say "we'll alias memcpy to
memmove - good software should never notice, and it helps bad software and a
known problem".

Buddhism Compared with Christianity

2011-07-30T15:52:00.039-04:00

I had a long conversation with a friend where I finally came to understand Buddhism as a complete and meaningful philosophy and find it stunningly beautiful. So even though I know very little about Buddhism, I wanted to post something about it and how it first made sense to me. (I think I took so long to understand it because there are just a lot of really bad explanations out there). Also I grew up reading some Christian apologists that did not give it a fair treatment, which may have contributed to the delay. Here are the striking points that came out of our conversation:

1: Possible proofs used for Buddhism and Christianity are similar.
Christians will look at the prophecies in the Bible (just to give an example, but other proofs use similar logic) and make some argument about how this means the Bible is likely be divinely inspired: There was no one previously who was able to predict the future (at least interesting events in the future) so someone who is able to predict the future shows that that person has access to either some controlling or knowledgeable power of the universe that is not of themselves. Since we associate this kind of idea with God the two are easily conflated (and probably for good reason). The majority of us seem to be looking for some kind of external purpose or guidance so it seems reasonable to take that desire and search for something that satisfies it externally. When this is found it is not easily dismissed as a coincidence. Just like when we eat food we do not think that we just happen to enjoy eating food, but that there is an external reason for that desire to have a purpose: namely to prevent starvation, which comes from our evolutionary development. So what is interesting is that one of the things that makes these arguments convincing is the preconceived idea or desire of, or for, an external purpose or guidance. But it is far from being the only thing. There is a narrative in the Bible and God builds up a relationship with the people of Israel and with many of the other characters. So it is also through our view of relationships and trust that we evaluate these arguments.

Similarly, a Buddhist might look at the psychological aspects of Buddhism and conclude that since these ideas of selflessness and acceptance are so helpful and so hard to come by at the time of Buddha, that Buddha must have had contact with some sort of greater power to get this knowledge. Since the more we practice selflessness and acceptance the better we get at it, we can extrapolate and say that it may be possible to attain control over our attitude and reach a state called enlightenment. As for whether there is some sort of narrative in Buddhism, I am not as familiar enough to talk much about the similarities or dissimilarities here. Although, you may be able to draw a parallel between the life of Buddha and how he related to his own emotions and the rest of the world and how he eventually learned to deal with them. There may be more to this than I know.

2: If Buddhism is correct, then all religions are different ways of looking at the same thing (with varying degrees of accuracy).
So with Buddhism, it is essentially your attitude that is most important. No matter what external truth there is, you can eventually create reality in your own head. Two people can look at a field and perceive totally different things depending on their attitudes. Someone in a bad mood can perceive all the unpleasant things, the gravestones and rotting wood, while the other person in a good mood only sees the beauty of the flowers and trees.

Some may protest at this analogy, do the two people really have total control over what they perceive about the field? No, but only because they are not enlightened. This isn't an accurate example though because it seems to imply that Buddhism means changing your perception of reality to be pleasant all the time. It doesn't. A truly enlightened person will not desire to have pleasant things and will not run from suffering. Nevertheless, the point is that if everyone has the ability to control their attitude (at some point) then (at some point) reality will not be important.

Christianity does have some minor similarities in the way it views worry:
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." (Matthew 6:34) Telling someone not to worry implies that they have control over that part of their attitude.

3: Although the psychological ideas in Buddhism are therapeutic, Buddhism takes the opposite and, some may say, more counterintuitive route than the majority of philosophies.
With Buddhism, what is ultimately important is in your head, not in reality (for your experience at least), unlike in most people's intuitive ideas about what is important.
The idea is that your brain and the rest of reality are one whole which creates your experiences and consciousness. So the idea of influencing your experience can begin by influencing your attitude which is the only part we have direct control over. Just like the famous Buddhist text says:

Where would I find enough leather
To cover the entire surface of the earth?
But with leather soles beneath my feet,
It’s as if the whole world has been covered.
Engaging in Bodhisattva Conduct, V, 13

For some philosophies this may depend on a refutation of the idea of self. If we had a self or a spirit, then there would be no guarantee that it would be completely malleable unlike the material world. If there is no self, it is the interaction of the attitude and reality which create what we mistake for ourselves in which there is nothing that we can't change and influence eventually. There are similar arguments in today's philosophy concerning the idea of consciousness not being dependent on your brain alone: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2009/mar/25/i-am-therefore-i-think/ There are some ideas in Christianity that are similar except the change comes from the outside. For instance the idea of internal spiritual rebirth is considered necessary for the ultimate importance: loving God (and hence goodness, look up divine command theory) and the second ultimate importance: salvation. (note these are just my own interpretations of Christianity) I do think Christianity differs from Buddhism in that it doesn't look at reality as being totally unimportant for the ultimate human experience. Christianity has a hell and heaven, and Buddhism (or some forms of it) have several. But the purposes of those hells and heavens are different. In Buddhism it is just part of the cycle, you are repaid for good karma or bad karma and there is no importance or meaning placed on staying in any particular part of the cycle. Instead reaching enlightenment and escaping the cycle is the goal (sort of, but you cannot really desire that either). With Christianity heaven and hell are places where justice is served.

4: One issue with Buddhism I have to think more about.
The most convincing argument for Buddhism that I have seen so far is that it is psychologically very therapeutic and that it would be very difficult to come to these conclusions about psychology before psychological studies.

Now the problem I have with this is that not only does Buddhism have you think of these things in this way for psychological purposes but it asserts that they are true, the denial of self, the assertion of your ability to control your attitude perfectly etc ... The thing is that psychology is notoriously tricky. We have a multitude of thinking traps where believing the wrong thing is actually beneficial. For instance, with the planning fallacy it is beneficial to believe that you have less time to do a task than you actually do. Another problem is that different ways of thinking about things in psychology may be more or less helpful for different types of people.

On the other hand there may be reason to think that these same things apply to science or any other discipline since we always work within the confines of our psychology. For instance, in science it may be beneficial for the understanding and modeling of quantum mechanics to have an interpretation of quantum mechanics that is easier to understand, but is actually much further from the truth, since science does not really deal with truth, just whether a model works well, and quantum mechanics is mathematics not any pithy analogies we can come up with for how it works. This goes even more so for history because it is a less testable discipline.

One question you have to answer before comparing the evidence for Buddhism and Christianity is: Is there less bias in our knowledge of history (the main place where most Christians draw their evidence from) than there is difference between the therapeutic methods of psychology and the actual truth? If this question cannot be solved through philosophy (in my mind that means being elucidated enough so that common sense pulls us easily one way or the other) then you just have to go with whichever answer is more intuitive.

Closing thoughts:
I am probably going to have to write another post correcting all the errors about Buddhism I made in this one. I will put a link to that at the end when I do. I have gotten basically all of my information from talking to a Buddhist (who himself has said that he is bad at explaining things about religion and expressing himself) But this is the first time I have understood Buddhism as a complete and beautiful philosophy and I felt like I needed to post something because I am kind of excited.

Where is gstreamer element xingmux?

2011-07-28T10:24:00.001-04:00

I don't know but this fixes"" it ... probably one of these packages. I think it is the "gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse"
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-dbg sound-juicer yauap gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse-dbg
My mother has light blue eyes.

Simple Code Comment and Uncomment in Vim

2011-03-30T10:23:00.003-04:00

to comment: CTRL-V then I then # then ESC
to uncomment: CTRL-V then d

From here and the comments:
http://hurley.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/vim-tip-comment-out-multiple-lines/

UPDATE: Yeah, the last version of the comment did not work because I left of the ESC at the end.

Not Plato's Dialogues

2011-03-29T16:26:00.002-04:00

NOTE: This is a revised version of a previous post that I have since removed.

I noticed that xkcd has taken to the habit of minimalism with comics by only having stick figures. I really like this because it lets the reader imagine more. I will give tribute to xkcd (and whomever else has done it before xkcd) by taking the experiment further and having comics with no graphics whatsoever. Enjoy!

Darwines (pronounced like Socrates): *walks into the break room*

Athena: Hey Darwines, what are you up to? :)

Darwines: Looking for sex.

Athena: !?

Darwines: As an experiment today I have decided to be totally honest with all my answers. Hence I am telling you what I am ultimately up to as a human being since nothing specifically is up at the moment.

Athena: But that sounds very... shallow... cold... creepy... adjectives fail me. You won't get much if you use that sort of honesty.

Darwines: My dear Athena, evolution may be shallow, cold, and creepy to us, but that is because we have deceived ourselves into thinking that true love exists and that our interactions are meaningful. In the end our only purpose is to replicate.

Athena: But just having sex isn't enough, you have to NOT use birth control and then you have to raise your offspring. (if you abandon them they won't be likely to reproduce)

Darwines: Yes a valid point, but trivial. I will just say: I am looking to have sex, then children, but not love (in the sense we usually use it). Love is but a sexual attraction to one's own mate or an instinctual attraction to one's own relatives, a chemistry of the brain.

Athena: But how are you going to raise your children, make sure your wife remains emotionally stable enough to help you, and make sure your children are sane enough to find their own mates?

Darwines: I'm not sure what you mean by “emotionally stable”, if I did I surely could explain it through chemical reactions.

Athena: You are forgetting the social game. Everyday you engage in a complex ritual to share resources with those around you and enable your family to be happy and successful (I guess that is what I mean by “emotionally stable”). One theory of how this works is through the mirror neurons in our brains. These neurons are theorized to be important for socialization because they fire in the same patterns when you do something and when you observe another person doing the same thing. Essentially these neurons allow you to subconsciously tune your ability to feel other people's emotions as they perform actions or let off body language cues in a social context. This ritual is partially (mostly) intuitive because of our mirror neurons, and although these interactions can be "explained" through chemical reactions and neurology there is no way to replicate them with a logical algorithm and hence there is no way to explain how to socialize totally accurately and rationally, until (maybe) we develop better artificial intelligence.
Darwines: Wow, I didn't know you were so logical, thats fantastic! So wait... I'm not offending you by arguing that everything is meaningless?

Athena: No, but I see no reason that defining and understanding something scientifically should make it meaningless.

Darwines: Well... because it then can all be reduced to physics or chemistry which are just math.

Athena: Well not really, like I said we can't even make algorithms yet for some things... like social interactions, and even if someday we do... what difference would it make to their meaning?

Darwines: Well... most people get offended because the feel it's a cold view. I thought you would too.

Athena: Well I don't. And I don't think you can argue meaning... at least I haven't seen of a way you can define it universally. Different people find different things to be meaningful, but you don't have to offend me to start an argument!

Darwines: And you are not offended at me for being overly scientific?

Athena: No, my problem with you was that you were not being scientific enough. You have such a shallow view of what it actually takes to maximize your replication!

Darwines: Ok because I am experimenting with total honesty and I see your point... I will adjust my original statement: I am looking to perform a very complex intuitive ritual with someone I inexplicably find my self drawn to. I will care for her and my family to my utmost ability and engage in an activity known as "love" to keep my children alive and happy for the longest time possible so that may carry on and do the same.

Athena: Oh that is starting to sound romantic! You're learning.

Darwines: Wait... but it's all brain chemistry! How is that romantic?

Athena: Because it is oh so very scientific and accurate (closer to being at least), hence romantic!

Darwines: Wait... would you like to get coffee with me latter?

Athena: Certainly! But only because I am using induction to predict that the more I talk to you the more you will learn and the more romantic you will become.

Darwines: !... :)

Athena: :)

*later at coffee*

Darwines: Could I ask you a question?

Athena: You just did...

Darwines: Oh I'm sorry...

Athena: Just don't do it again! Nah, seriously what is your question?

Darwines: When we eventually do get to the point where we can make an algorithm for social interaction and hence love... would you think it romantic if I read it to you, or printed out the code for you?

Athena: The code might be neat, but I would probably never understand it since the full complexity of normal social interaction is too much for conscious thought. And no... don't read it to me because it would be very long and I would fall asleep!

Bad Feedback

2011-03-14T13:06:00.008-04:00

*Megan walks into Dave's house*

Megan: So why do you stay at home and do nothing so much?

Dave: Because I am depressed.

Megan: Why?

Dave: Because I stay at home and do nothing so much.

COMMENT: The more I think about downward spirals the more time I waste hating them... dangit.

Wisdom From Youtube Philosophy: What do we mean by "song"?

2011-03-12T11:46:00.011-05:00

Comments taken from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtF75YwzfHA

Another site beat me to this idea:
http://stupid-youtube-comments.blogspot.com/

#

Well, the front page of comments here is littered with the arguement over wether it can be considered a song or not because there"s no singing, Well my prof. in university has made it quite clear that a song has singing in it, and ironically Jamesismynamo, Beethoven's 5th was part of the discussion of that class! Here's the dictionary's definition of a "song"; 'A brief composition written or adapted for singing.' Singing hmm?So now that that's over with, who wants to listen and shut the fuck up?
VioletFox19 5 months ago
Reply

#

@VioletFox19 Alright, at least you backed it up instead of just putting "its not a song asshole". Well that may be the dictionary definition of a song, but if I refer to all of the instrumental tracks I know as "compositions" it just makes me sound like a douchebag.

So I will continue to call this a song, regardless of its lack of lyrics. Sorry if that offends you.
JamesIsMyNamo 5 months ago
Reply

The Yak

2011-01-11T17:01:00.007-05:00

A persistent and pessimistic yak
A fact of matter and matter of fact
Was at my heals at school one day

It followed me here
And it followed me there
And could even climb the stair
All that day at school it stayed

From room to room I was tracked
By the persistent and pessimistic yak
Back to back with lack of tact

I turned around and gave a yell
What on earth and what the hell
Why do you track, is it something you lack?
Oh persistent pessimistic yak

It gave no answer but did moo
And gave me a look from xanadu
And held a razor as if to clue
With what it could not do

I protested this, but it did complain
This did just cause more strain
I had to shave the yak again
Again and again and again

Why Hardware Manfacturers Can Kiss my Shaven Yak: Dell is not always good for Ubuntu

2011-01-07T08:29:00.015-05:00

First see: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving
So I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop (model: IM501R-1655MRB) because I thought Dell was good for running Ubuntu Linux (you USED to be able to get Dell's with Linux pre-installed curse you for discontinuing that):
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Dell+-+Inspiron+Laptop+/+AMD+Phenom%26%23153%3B+II+Processor+/+15.6%22+Display+/+4GB+Memory+/+500GB+Hard+Drive+-+Mars+Black/1179918.p?id=1218231021132
(I was also unaware that most computers that run Linux well don't use AMD, and not only that but Dell uses different motherboards for their Ubuntu and Windows laptops)

As a result, when I install Ubuntu on it, it ran extremely slow (both processesors got to 5% at highest, even after I upped the cpu with "cpufreq-selector -g performance") and eventually after mucking around a little it rewarded me by freezing completely whenever it started up: it was unusable.

Imagine my horror when I tried to return it and found out I had voided my laptop warranty. How did I void the HARDWARE warranty? You guessed it: I changed the OS... I installed SOFTWARE! which was Ubuntu and voided a HARDWARE warranty! The only way to remedy this was to put Windows 7 back on, but...

1) The laptop came with no recovery disk.
2) I had wiped out the entire HD (where the recovery partition was).

I ended up torrenting the windows 7home premium 64 bit ISO, but it turned out to be 5.7 Gb, and I needed a double layer DVD to burn it. I finally solved my problem by downloading it from here:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/11/10/windows-7-iso-x86-and-x64-official-direct-download-links-ultimate-professional-and-home-premium/

Which was smaller than 4.7 for unknown reasons. There are some very cold yaks in the Andes right now. I now have an Asus U52F-BBL9 running Ubuntu 10.10 and it is kicking butt. Although I have not gotten the U52F-BBL9 to play sound through headphones and I have not been able to get it to go to sleep mode. (UPDATE: I have now fixed the sound issue) However, Ubuntu 10.04 had issues with the wireless card which is why I upgraded. 10.10 looks nicer, although the start up times are slower; I'm liking it overall so far.

A Higher Form of Paradox: Wittgenstein's infinite ladder

2011-01-05T13:16:00.026-05:00

Bertrand Russell's and Alfred North Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica" as a formal language was designed to prevent self reference by only allowing the language to refer to mere numbers hence eliminating paradoxes such as "this statement is false". The language was supposed have two characteristics among others defined in Hilbert's program:

1: Axioms that were strong enough to prove all true statements in arithmetic. (completeness)
2: The language was defined so that no contradictory statement could be proven within the language. (consistency)

In addition they wanted to eventually prove that their language satisfied these criteria. If this was proven then they would know that any statement in the language essentially could be sifted into two piles: provable (true) or unprovable (false). Because self reference was eliminated, things like "this statement is false" could not be written in the language and hence were not statements in the language.

However, Kurt Gödel discovered that because their language referred to numbers, numbers could then be used to refer to the language through a system called Gödel numbering, allowing statements such as: "this statement is not provable in this language" which in a complete system is essentially the same as "this statement is false".

If Gödel's statement were true it would be false and if it were false it would be true, but even further the statement merely refers to provability and hence we must essentially prove it before we can prove it. What is interesting about this statement is that while it is obviously not demonstrable true or false we can easily see that it is true.

This method of "seeing" I attribute to a conceptual ladder that Wittgenstein referred to in proposition 6.54 in his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus":

"6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands
me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out
through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw
away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly."

This is useful to a certain extent. It is true that even if we add another axiom to the formal language where Gödel's statement is defined as true, we must change the language in order to prevent it from being contradictory, hence "...not provable in this language" can no longer refer to "this" language which is where we get into further manifestations of self reference due to the increased complexity of the new language, but we can still see that the original statement in the original language was true. A sigh of relief follows.

But with my own nastier example, take the statement: "this statement cannot be proven as true through the methods of philosophy". It is obviously a philosophical statement but if it can be proven in philosophy it will be false and if it cannot be proven it is true. You may think that it is similar to the Gödel statement in that although we cannot prove it we can easily see that it is true because we can say philosophically that there is nothing about the statement that would determine its truth value without us first attempting to prove it since it merely refers to provability.
However this in turn causes it to be false because philosophy is any logical system we can think of and hence the same original statement will remain with us regardless of whether we add a further layer of abstraction to the methods of philosophy.

Is the statement false or is it true? Or is it undecidable which really does make it true? You decide... or decide not to decide... which isn't not deciding. Here Wittgenstein's ladder is infinite and we are forever climbing it by virtue of the statement referring to all possible logical systems of thought. Is this a higher form of paradox?

And They Lived Insanely Ever After!

2011-01-04T12:10:00.000-05:00

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1619629

Free Software and RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

2011-01-02T00:40:00.011-05:00

Free software is free as in freedom not free as in beer, better expressed by the french word "libre". Free software is defined as software which lets the user have these freedoms:

0: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

So you shouldn't be surprised to learn that plenty of free software developers get paid for their work and plenty of free software projects are actually supported by companies who don't want to pay for proprietary software and want the free software developers to work on specific features for them; in addition sometimes the free software developers will get to charge companies (that use their software) for tech support.

But just observing this misses one of the main points of free software. It doesn't have to be economically sustainable because a lot of people create it just because they love it. See why this actually works and motivates people to write free software:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Be Careful When Moving Things: 3 dots instead of 2 creates magic

2010-12-24T17:39:00.004-05:00

x@x:~/test/dir/dir2$ ls
disappear
x@x:~/test/dir/dir2$ mv disappear ...
x@x:~/test/dir/dir2$ ls
x@x:~/test/dir/dir2$ cd ..
x@x:~/test/dir$ ls
dir2
x@x:~/test/dir$ cd ..
x@x:~/test$ ls
dir
x@x:~/test$

UPDATE: It actually just changes to a file named ... it does not disappear

Copy Directory Tree Without Files (and optionally files in some of the directories)

2010-12-16T16:11:00.012-05:00

This will copy the directory tree under the input dir to the current dir (the dir the script is run from.


#!/bin/bash

for dir1 in $(find $1 -type d)
do
   dir2=${dir1/$1/"")
   mkdir -p .$dir2
done

This is if you want files to be copied from one of those dir's, in my case any dir named "fileparts".

#!/bin/bash

for dir1 in $(find $1 -type d)
do
   dir2=${dir1/$1/""}
   arDir1=(`echo $dir1| tr "/" "\n"`)

   mkdir -p .$dir2

   if [[ "${arDir1[${#arDir1[@]}-1]}" =~ "fileparts" ]] && [[ ! -z `ls $dir1/*` ]]
      then
      cp $dir1/* .$dir2
   fi
done

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/how-to-copy-tree-without-files-in-it-159404/

Xiphos Won't Display Greek Accents In The 2TGreek Module

2010-11-23T17:25:00.009-05:00

FIX: Go back to the original verse you were on when you turned the accents on and then you should magically be able to turn them back on. (for me it worked when I was on 1 John 1:1)

I Love Cows (animation by Cyriak)

2010-11-20T03:23:00.006-05:00

Despair

2010-10-24T21:39:00.032-04:00

Pedantic ramblings through basement gloom
He brings to bear a caustic flame on the blackness
Like a war cry sending shadows to flight
A pack of wolves that bay after nighttide
But it refuses retreat

Mutterings in an ancient tongue, or a tongue gone ancient
The ritual continues
Past ebon creatures and black mist that haunt minds left vacant
It lingers

It defies transcription and laughs at description
Past waking moons and sorry tides the devil feasts on worry

Yet it is not the stuff of nightmares
And neither the thoughts that bring terror
It is not the blackness
And it is not mere emptiness

It is darkness of all devoid and the void of all darkness
The absence of absence
And the nihility of null

It is despair

Fermented Fish

2010-10-21T23:27:00.001-04:00

"Prahok is obtained by crushing or grinding fresh fish after de-scaling, gutting and cleaning them. They can be crushed underfoot, like wine grapes, or processed by machine. After the fish is crushed, it is left in the sun for a full day, then salted and sealed in jars full of salt.

Prahok can be eaten after just 20 days of fermentation, but better quality Prahok can be preserved for one to three years."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahok

Several Useful Things In One Sorting Function

2010-09-11T16:46:00.013-04:00

So if you want to get all the files in a directory that have a certain extension and sort them by a number that is present in their name (because the normal "comparTo" annoyingly does not do this when you have two digit numbers even if the file names are the same and the numbers are in the same place in each one) you can do this:



@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public File[] getTSPFileArray(File dir){
if(dir == null)
{
 dir = new File("/home/x/Desktop/school/ar_int/data_ts");
}

File[] files = dir.listFiles();

// This filter only returns files.
FileFilter fileFilter = new FileFilter()
{

    @Override
    public boolean accept(File file)
    {
     return !file.isDirectory() && file.getName().endsWith(".tsp");
    }
};
files = dir.listFiles(fileFilter);

// Sort files by name.
Arrays.sort(files, new Comparator()
{

 @Override
 public int compare(Object arg0, Object arg1) {
  Pattern p = Pattern.compile ("[\\d]+");
     Matcher m1 = p.matcher(((File) arg0).getName());
     Matcher m2 = p.matcher(((File) arg1).getName());
     if(m1.find() && m2.find()){
      System.out.println(m1.group() + " compare with "+m2.group());
      return Integer.parseInt(m1.group()) - Integer.parseInt(m2.group());
     } else {
      return 0;
     }
 }


});

return files;
}

Did you like the climactic part where I pulled the numbers out with a regex pattern matcher?

I Could Strangle A Penguin

2010-09-08T06:00:00.003-04:00

I never thought I'd say that, but look at this trouble I've had with linux.
As you can see adding moo_0000.CM causes another file that is normally display with the command "ls | grep *.CM" to not be displayed:

x@sodaa-pg01:/usr/local/stbo/data/cm_files/TEST_airport/2010/06$ ls
bu faa-lab-jfk.20100601_0600.CM.bz2 fileparts
faa-lab-jfk.20100601_0000.CM.bz2 faa-lab-jfk.20100601.day.CM
x@sodaa-pg01:/usr/local/stbo/data/cm_files/TEST_airport/2010/06$ ls | grep *.CM
faa-lab-jfk.20100601.day.CM
x@sodaa-pg01:/usr/local/stbo/data/cm_files/TEST_airport/2010/06$ touch moo_0000.CM
x@sodaa-pg01:/usr/local/stbo/data/cm_files/TEST_airport/2010/06$ ls | grep *.CM
x@sodaa-pg01:/usr/local/stbo/data/cm_files/TEST_airport/2010/06$ rm moo_0000.CM
x@sodaa-pg01:/usr/local/stbo/data/cm_files/TEST_airport/2010/06$ ls | grep *.CM
faa-lab-jfk.20100601.day.CM
x@sodaa-pg01:/usr/local/stbo/data/cm_files/TEST_airport/2010/06$

Meditation Travels

2010-09-05T15:38:00.004-04:00

I've noticed several distinct mental states I get into when meditating. All these descriptions are pretty subjective and are a result of my imperfect memory as most of these experiences happened a while back. I also notice that as I meditate more I tend to have less of these experiences; I also don't try to experience them again. None of this was experienced with the help of drugs. Unless otherwise noted I have experienced this with no actual object of focus (no focusing on breath or anything else) but just clearing my mind of all thoughts.

1) "People Place"
I have been here once when I was rather sleepy and other times when not (I think). This state is extremely frustrating because you see people or beings talking to you, and sometimes holding objects, and you are interacting with them but when you come out of the meditative trance you can't remember anything that was said. I came out of this state once actually responding to something one of these people had said. I was saying, "you too", and I accidentally said it out loud in a quiet study area. I wonder if this "people place" is experienced by others when in altered mental states and is part of the reason why spiritualists say they have "spirit guides".

2) "Nonsense Land"
I don't remember if there was anything different about the meditation sessions in which I reached this place; the only description I can give you is that you tend to see or feel very nonsensical things and yet also feel that they are somehow extremely important.

3) "Dream space"
Here you have dream-like sequences that are more vague than dreams and more difficult to describe.

4) "Sleep"
This happens mostly with vipassana meditation where I focus on breathing.
This isn't really a place or a land; I have just noticed that if you meditate right you can make yourself very sleepy.

I wonder if we can come up with a list of altered states that all people can experience and could find the corresponding EEG measurements. Then maybe we could make a little bit more progress in psychology, who knows.

A Temperature Controlled Suit

2010-08-07T21:55:00.009-04:00

Where would I find enough leather

To cover the entire surface of the earth?

But with leather soles beneath my feet,

It’s as if the whole world has been covered.

Engaging in Bodhisattva Conduct, V, 13

We air condition or heat our houses rather than trying to change the weather but why don't we go further with this wise principle?

In the summer we should all wear clothing that has small porous tubes interspersed throughout it and a small pouch of water on our upper backs. By squeezing a hand pump we could disperse the water gradually as needed over the surface of our clothing hence cooling ourselves. If designed correctly I don't think this would be unduly cumbersome and it would prevent the mess you have if you try to cool yourself off by splashing yourself with water. Instead this suit would act as a more attractive form of sweating. While in the winter you would have to use a slightly more air resistant suit and use the tubes to pump hot air underneath, although this would require you to be near a hot air source almost constantly. May I suggest plugging your tube into this blog, as it is available on almost any computer albeit almost no google search.

A Pragmatic Approach To Philosophy

2010-06-25T23:37:00.005-04:00

"I was a pragmatist until I got high blood pressure, then I became a nihilist to pragmatically avoid stress. But as a nihilist it didn't matter whether I had high blood pressure or not and so I decided to become whatever the heck I wanted, which happened to be a pragmatist again. I realized that I was about to get caught in an infinite loop so I became an irrationalist, that way the infinite loop would no longer bug me. However, I then discovered that as an irrationalist I didn't need to start the infinite loop in the first place because nothing necessarily followed from anything else, and once again I realized that everything I had done had been pragmatic whereupon I became a pragmatist..."

Non-Savant Eidetic Memory

2010-06-13T06:00:00.001-04:00

The following are people to check out with regards to this subject. Although keep in mind that I cannot verify that these people are indeed NON-savants, but just that they seem to attribute their abilities to training and not genetics. Note: I also cannot totally verify the accuracy of their claims, as I only have access to news sources like the rest of us.

Andriy Tychonovych Slyusarchuk
Derren Victor Brown
Howard Stephen Berg

The first two are hypnotists, and are eerily similar as you'll notice when researching them.
Derren Brown has some interesting videos on youtube related to his memory abilities that are worthy of mention:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys0FP_7DbKo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evZmpsl3jI0

Brown also claims to use some education techniques that are difficult to believe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sej8Moh-Uls (part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlp6jIR0x14 (part 2)

All this interests me because of its possible applications to education.

A Few More Observations On The Is-Ought Problem

2010-06-06T06:00:00.003-04:00

Before you read this you might want to look at the previous posts on this topic.
A friend of mine recently suggested that all "oughts" contain a certain type of "is" and vice versa e.g., "stealing is wrong", is the same as, "you ought not steal".

I responded:
When we say, "stealing is wrong", we are saying that, "stealing has the same property as all things that ought not be done", or, "stealing has the property such that it should not be done". This still contains the, "to be", but it asserts the existence of a property that is undefined in terms of is; it asserts the existence of an ought. Searl is actually doing the exact same thing when he argues that institutional facts contain oughts because (and this is really funny), "ought" is never really derived from, "is", or vice versa, it is only the oughts that are hidden in the properties (which are asserted to exist by "is") that are brought into full view. Just like I did with the, "stealing is wrong", statement. "Is", is also inherent in the statement, "one ought not to steal", which is the same as, "an ought exists such that one would be in opposition to it by stealing", but this is trivial since all statements contain an, "is", since we can't communicate anything without asserting or denying the existence of at least properties (nevertheless this is fun to say anyway).

Great Jazz Guitarists (currently active)

2010-05-30T10:00:00.010-04:00

Here is my personal opinion, and the opinion of some of my fellow musicians who can actually play jazz, unlike me.

In terms of soloists I would say:
Allan Holdsworth
Scott Henderson
Pat Metheny
Frank Gambale
Mike Stern
Allen Hinds (can't believe I forgot him at first)

Of those Soloists who are good composers as well:
Pat Metheny
Allan Holdsworth
Mike Stern
Allen Hinds (maybe, haven't heard enough of his stuff)

My favorite overall is probably Allan Holdsworth, although Pat Metheny is probably the better all around composer--I just tend to like guitar solos.

Speaking of Holdsworth, my favorite one of his albums is probably "The Sixteen Men of Tain" although on youtube: "Red Alert" on the album "Blues For Tony" is probably the most awesome live jazz piece I have ever heard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faJM9qwVDgM

And one of my favorite solos is in "Ruhkukah" on the album "Hard Hat Area"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNn5SUcNtdM

My fellow musicians have similar opinions with regards to the names that you see above, although the details vary. For instance, some of them would rate Scott Henderson up with the best composers as well, it has a lot to do with taste.

Orthodoxy

2010-05-23T15:37:00.040-04:00

My friend Sam Gates wrote an interesting post (although annoyingly without capitalization). I wanted to make some observations interwoven with some of his (capitalization fixed):

"No major religion that I know of considers belief in a certain orthodoxical structure to be a core tenet to salvation. The jews worked out their salvation as a holy nation. The muslims have normative orthopraxy but their metaphysics are relegated to obscure mystics and lay philosophers. I am not nearly as qualified to comment on buddhism or hinduism, but from what I understand neither accord systematic theology the place that it holds in modern christianity. And why is this? Is it the centrality of the concept of faith? But what does that mean? The concept of having to believe the right thing about the trinity to save your eternal soul defies my synapses! Is a true knowledge of God really best summed up by a church doctor, or by the good Samaritan?"

I do think the centrality of the concept of faith is the reason that systematic theology holds such a place in Christianity because faith is a difficult concept to define, and sometimes to deal with (depending on how it is defined). How exactly do we even define faith? Is it putting our emotions first in a blind leap for an arrant ideal against all knowledge, like trusting in a spouse whether or not you believe she is trustworthy? Or is it as C.S. Lewis said in "Mere Christianity", "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."? I am for the latter, although I sometimes think this an oversimplification even though I have nothing better to suggest.

I certainly agree that according to Christianity someone doesn't need to believe the right thing about the trinity to have salvation. But I disagree with Sam's first statement that, "No major religion that I know of considers belief in a certain orthodoxical structure to be a core tenet to salvation." (depending on how you define orthodoxical). Because all religions require belief in some kind of structure to achieve whatever they aim for (whether or not it is salvation). For instance even people who just believe in Karma need to believe in the existences of right and wrong, or at least in the existence of pain and pleasure and that their own actions affect real things; whether this is an orthodox type of belief in Sam's definition I don't know, but it is a belief and I would like to know where he draws the line. If these people did not have this belief they would be incapable of doing intentionally good acts and so would not be able to achieve the implied objective of good Karma.

In the same way in Christianity it is impossible to achieve the implied objective of goodness or the forgiveness of your sins by asking it of the Christ if you do not believe that the Christ exists, whether your concept of the Christ is correct may be an important issue, but it is a side issue nevertheless, not affecting the implied objective. So to answer Sam's last question in my own way, true knowledge of God is best summed up by the good Samaritan, although the Samaritan needs to understand something before he can even be the good Samaritan, and according to Christianity goodness is defined as doing God's will, or God's will is defined by goodness (another problem in philosophy). So whether or not it disturbs your synapses, correct belief is a necessary component of almost every belief system, except maybe Zen, but I am not knowledgeable enough to know.

"Since James tells us that the demons believe, and tremble, we know that correct belief certainly is not enough to make one a Christian. But it's a necessary component, no? In addition to correct belief, we must have that certain nebulous something, that so many people seem to be so fuzzy on. but what is it that we need?"

Sam goes on to write beautifully about the relationship between God and the individual, and I would encourage you to read the rest of it for yourself because I can't do it justice here. I would only add that another nebulous something that is central to Christianity is the concept of becoming good and achieving salvation through being born again. The concept, as I understand it, is the dying of the self, or ego, where you become devoted to doing the will of God (goodness) rather than satisfying your selfish desires. And this is where I disagree with many Christian apologists when they make arguments like "Christians have more incentive to do good (or be altruistic) than atheists do, because a Christian believes God will reward our actions." The argument is true only in Pavlov's waiting room where we can remark without consulting Christian theology; once our name is called we realize that a Christian must desire to do good whether or not they are rewarded for it. This idea is summed up in Paul's statement (if it is not hyperbole) in Romans 9:3, "For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers..." And was expressed in the old testament by Moses in Exodus 32:32, "But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written."

For the atheist to yield herself to pure altruism and for the will-be Christian to yield herself to pure goodness are both concepts that defy comprehension, for how can selfish genes decide against themselves? And how can our ego decide to kill itself? There must be something already in us that allows this to happen. In the atheist's case this brings to mind a concept grasped at by Bertrand Russell in "A Free Man's Worship" and for the will-be Christian it suggests a direct intervention of God, and if it isn't her that makes this decision then where does this put Calvinism?

Taking my inspiration from Sam, I am going to tell you--after you have already worked hard to read through this long post--that I have no clue what I am saying.

Displaying Code and HTML On Blogspot

2010-05-21T14:54:00.003-04:00

So the best way I have found to post HTML on blogspot is as follows--since you don't have to install any plugins like greasemonkey and so will probably be the longest lasting way of doing this:
http://blogkori.com/how-to-show-htmljava-codes-in-bloggerblogspot-blog-posts/

It does use a converter called "quick escape" but it looks like it uses pretty standard html entities to escape the html.

However if you just want to post non-HTML code you can just enclose with this:

</div><div><pre style="border: 1px dashed rgb(153, 153, 153); padding: 0px; overflow: auto; font-family: Andale Mono,Lucida Console,Monaco,fixed,monospace; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px; width: 100%;"><code>

Put your code here.

</code></pre></div><div>

Usually when I post code I first use the html converter then enclose it, just because some code has html stuff in it (javascript) and because gives it that grey box that separates my code from my blabber.

NOTE: When you go back and forth from compose to html in blogspot editor your text might loose indentation (this is why I do all my editing in html. The padding option is set "padding: 0px" because otherwise it will sometimes cut off ending characters. For instance when I first posted this you couldn't see the ">" on the end of "<code>", although when you did a CTRL-A in the box and copied, it would still grab that character so the problem the padding can create is only in the display. There used to be a blog that had a converter on it that would enclose your code for you but I can no longer find it.

As a side-note, I learned about how to display HTML on blogspot when I was trying to post this method for displaying code on blogspot. You learn so much stuff from blogging!

Update

2010-05-20T19:40:00.000-04:00

This is an update to say that I will never post anything again (see previous posts)

Anything

2010-05-20T01:18:00.001-04:00

Update

2010-05-20T01:16:00.000-04:00

This post is simply to let everyone know that I haven't posted anything yet; yes, previously I have posted absolutely nothing.

Absolutely Nothing

2010-05-20T01:13:00.000-04:00

Screen Resolution Problems On Ubuntu 9.10 (and maybe other similar releases)

2010-05-17T22:08:00.000-04:00

So if your screen resolution is really low on Ubuntu and you can't switch to a new one after you add it using the xrandr command e.g. http://www.linuxreaders.com/2009/11/04/change-ubuntu-9-10-resolution/ http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1112186 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution
You may need to create your own /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Sometimes during an install it fails to create this, but for some reason you can still use Xorg or X to make it afterwards.

First you must stop the X server (thingamagig that displays stuff on your screen), so before you do this make sure you have a way to access these instructions, open a terminal and type (omit $):

$sudo service gdm stop

Now you should see a bunch of text and crap. If you aren't given a prompt to log in, press enter, and then you should be able to log in. To create the xorg.conf file type:

$sudo X -configure

$sudo Xorg -configure

It should now tell you where your new file is, and to test it by typing:

$sudo X -config filename

Note if you want the changes to be permanent you have to make your file have this path: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" If the X server doesn't start again you can type:

$sudo service gdm start

If your screen resolution is still the same then you might want to try using the update manager--or if the update manager doesn't suggest anything use Synaptic Package Manager--to download a driver for your graphics card (now since you have xorg.conf file, it may know exactly which driver you need). To figure out what your graphics card is you can either open up your computer, or you can type lspci or maybe something like "lspci" and look. Mine is:

@dell-desktop:~$ lspci -v | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)

-v will sometimes give you more details
If your Synaptic Package Manger is too freaking huge to use then you can try searching for drivers with the command line with "apt-cache search":

@dell-desktop:~$ apt-cache search xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd - X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI r5xx, r6xx display driver
xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd-dbg - X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI r5xx, r6xx display driver

You can still use grep to further narrow things down:

@dell-desktop:~$ apt-cache search xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd | grep dbg
xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd-dbg - X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI r5xx, r6xx display driver

For me, I had to first create the xorg.conf file then my update manager knew what graphics card I had and suggested a driver, but maybe in some situations you first need to know what your graphics card is to create the xorg.conf, I don't know.
If not even that works... Well graphics are overrated. You already know some command line stuff, just use that, it's faster anyways. To see how to do this: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ditch_gui_apps_for_command_line

The Essence of Free Software

2010-05-12T19:59:00.000-04:00

I'll let Richard Stallman do the talking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BBNxIlc31Y
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf
http://www.fsf.org/
http://www.gnu.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNewSense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ututo

Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

2010-04-28T20:04:00.001-04:00

There is a place where silence is deafening
Where words are unspoken, unthought, and unwritten
and the rain does not fall
A space where colors are tasteless, placeless, and faceless
and clouds crawl
An existence that is absent and present in zen
While coldly friendly and previously again

It is a feeling we find numbing the eternity of nil
A sense of nonsense and fiendish goodwill
An opening in the closure of time and essence
And a nightfall in the dawn of vacant presence

It shivers in stillness through timeless progression
With the undulating solid of happy depression
While a rabbit serves us carrots and gin

And then we find that we have not found at all
And when that we will that we won't
And again that we seek what we flee from
And chase what we avoid with our hopes

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

An Epistemological Nightmare (a clever story by Raymond Smullyan)

2010-04-03T20:45:00.001-04:00

(read it at the original site, if it is still up)
An Epistemological Nightmare

Raymond M. Smullyan, 1982
Scene 1

Frank is in the office of an eye doctor. The doctor holds up a book and asks "What color is it?" Frank answers, "Red." The doctor says, "Aha, just as I thought! Your whole color mechanism has gone out of kilter. But fortunately your condition is curable, and I will have you in perfect shape in a couple of weeks."
Scene 2

(A few weeks later.) Frank is in a laboratory in the home of an experimental epistemologist. (You will soon find out what that means!) The epistemologist holds up a book and also asks, "What color is this book?" Now, Frank has been earlier dismissed by the eye doctor as "cured." However, he is now of a very analytical and cautious temperament, and will not make any statement that can possibly be refuted. So Frank answers, "It seems red to me."

Epistemologist:
Wrong!

Frank:
I don't think you heard what I said. I merely said that it seems red to me.

Epistemologist:
I heard you, and you were wrong.

Frank:
Let me get this clear; did you mean that I was wrong that this book is red, or that I was wrong that it seems red to me?

Epistemologist:
I obviously couldn't have meant that you were wrong in that it is red, since you did not say that it is red. All you said was that it seems red to you, and it is this statement which is wrong.

Frank:
But you can't say that the statement "It seems red to me" is wrong.

Epistemologist:
If I can't say it, how come I did?

Frank:
I mean you can't mean it.

Epistemologist:
Why not?

Frank:
But surely I know what color the book seems to me!

Epistemologist:
Again you are wrong.

Frank:
But nobody knows better than I how things seem to me.

Epistemologist:
I am sorry, but again you are wrong.

Frank:
But who knows better than I?

Epistemologist:
I do.

Frank:
But how could you have access to my private mental states?

Epistemologist:
Private mental states! Metaphysical hogwash! Look, I am a practical epistemologist. Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions. Epistemology is the true foundation of philosophy. But the trouble with all past epistemologists is that they have been using wholly theoretical methods, and much of their discussion degenerates into mere word games. While other epistemologists have been solemnly arguing such questions as whether a man can be wrong when he asserts that he believes such and such, I have discovered how to settle such questions experimentally.

Frank:
How could you possibly decide such things empirically?

Epistemologist:
By reading a person's thoughts directly.

Frank:
You mean you are telepathic?

Epistemologist:
Of course not. I simply did the one obvious thing which should be done, viz. I have constructed a brain-reading machine--known technically as a cerebroscope--that is operative right now in this room and is scanning every nerve cell in your brain. I thus can read your every sensation and thought, and it is a simple objective truth that this book does not seem red to you.

Frank (thoroughly subdued):
Goodness gracious, I really could have sworn that the book seemed red to me; it sure seems that it seems red to me!

Epistemologist:
I'm sorry, but you are wrong again.

Frank:
Really? It doesn't even seem that it seems red to me? It sure seems like it seems like it seems red to me!

Epistemologist:
Wrong again! And no matter how many times you reiterate the phrase "it seems like" and follow it by "the book is red" you will be wrong.

Frank:
This is fantastic! Suppose instead of the phrase "it seems like" I would say "I believe that." So let us start again at ground level. I retract the statement "It seems red to me" and instead I assert "I believe that this book is red." Is this statement true or false?

Epistemologist:
Just a moment while I scan the dials of the brain-reading machine--no, the statement is false.

Frank:
And what about "I believe that I believe that the book is red"?

Epistemologist (consulting his dials):
Also false. And again, no matter how many times you iterate "I believe," all these belief sentences are false.

Frank:
Well, this has been a most enlightening experience. However, you must admit that it is a little hard on me to realize that I am entertaining infinitely many erroneous beliefs!

Epistemologist:
Why do you say that your beliefs are erroneous?

Frank:
But you have been telling me this all the while!

Epistemologist:
I most certainly have not!

Frank:
Good God, I was prepared to admit all my errors, and now you tell me that my beliefs are not errors; what are you trying to do, drive me crazy?

Epistemologist:
Hey, take it easy! Please try to recall: When did I say or imply that any of your beliefs are erroneous?

Frank:
Just simply recall the infinite sequence of sentences: (1) I believe this book is red; (2) I believe that I believe this book is red; and so forth. You told me that every one of those statements is false.

Epistemologist:
True.

Frank:
Then how can you consistently maintain that my beliefs in all these false statements are not erroneous?

Epistemologist:
Because, as I told you, you don't believe any of them.

Frank:
I think I see, yet I am not absolutely sure.

Epistemologist:
Look, let me put it another way. Don't you see that the very falsity of each of the statements that you assert saves you from an erroneous belief in the preceding one? The first statement is, as I told you, false. Very well! Now the second statement is simply to the effect that you believe the first statement. If the second statement were true, then you would believe the first statement, and hence your belief about the first statement would indeed be in error. But fortunately the second statement is false, hence you don't really believe the first statement, so your belief in the first statement is not in error. Thus the falsity of the second statement implies you do not have an erroneous belief about the first; the falsity of the third likewise saves you from an erroneous belief about the second, etc.

Frank:
Now I see perfectly! So none of my beliefs were erroneous, only the statements were erroneous.

Epistemologist:
Exactly.

Frank:
Most remarkable! Incidentally, what color is the book really?

Epistemologist:
It is red.

Frank:
What!

Epistemologist:
Exactly! Of course the book is red. What's the matter with you, don't you have eyes?

Frank:
But didn't I in effect keep saying that the book is red all along?

Epistemologist:
Of course not! You kept saying it seems red to you, it seems like it seems red to you, you believe it is red, you believe that you believe it is red, and so forth. Not once did you say that it is red. When I originally asked you "What color is the book?" if you had simply answered "red," this whole painful discussion would have been avoided.
Scene 3

Frank comes back several months later to the home of the epistemologist.

Epistemologist:
How delightful to see you! Please sit down.

Frank (seated):
I have been thinking of our last discussion, and there is much I wish to clear up. To begin with, I discovered an inconsistency in some of the things you said.

Epistemologist:
Delightful! I love inconsistencies. Pray tell!

Frank:
Well, you claimed that although my belief sentences were false, I did not have any actual beliefs that are false. If you had not admitted that the book actually is red, you would have been consistent. But your very admission that the book is red, leads to an inconsistency.

Epistemologist:
How so?

Frank:
Look, as you correctly pointed out, in each of my belief sentences "I believe it is red," "I believe that I believe it is red," the falsity of each one other than the first saves me from an erroneous belief in the proceeding one. However, you neglected to take into consideration the first sentence itself. The falsity of the first sentence "I believe it is red," in conjunction with the fact that it is red, does imply that I do have a false belief.

Epistemologist:
I don't see why.

Frank:
It is obvious! Since the sentence "I believe it is red" is false, then I in fact believe it is not red, and since it really is red, then I do have a false belief. So there!

Epistemologist (disappointed):
I am sorry, but your proof obviously fails. Of course the falsity of the fact that you believe it is red implies that you don't believe it is red. But this does not mean that you believe it is not red!

Frank:
But obviously I know that it either is red or it isn't, so if I don't believe it is, then I must believe that it isn't.

Epistemologist:
Not at all. I believe that either Jupiter has life or it doesn't. But I neither believe that it does, nor do I believe that it doesn't. I have no evidence one way or the other.

Frank:
Oh well, I guess you are right. But let us come to more important matters. I honestly find it impossible that I can be in error concerning my own beliefs.

Epistemologist:
Must we go through this again? I have already patiently explained to you that you (in the sense of your beliefs, not your statements) are not in error.

Frank:
Oh, all right then, I simply do not believe that even the statements are in error. Yes, according to the machine they are in error, but why should I trust the machine?

Epistemologist:
Whoever said you should trust the machine?

Frank:
Well, should I trust the machine?

Epistemologist:
That question involving the word "should" is out of my domain. However, if you like, I can refer you to a colleague who is an excellent moralist--he may be able to answer this for you.

Frank:
Oh come on now, I obviously didn't mean "should" in a moralistic sense. I simply meant "Do I have any evidence that this machine is reliable?"

Epistemologist:
Well, do you?

Frank:
Don't ask me! What I mean is should you trust the machine?

Epistemologist:
Should I trust it? I have no idea, and I couldn't care less what I should do.

Frank:
Oh, your moralistic hangup again. I mean, do you have evidence that the machine is reliable?

Epistemologist:
Well of course!

Frank:
Then let's get down to brass tacks. What is your evidence?

Epistemologist:
You hardly can expect that I can answer this for you in an hour, a day, or a week. If you wish to study this machine with me, we can do so, but I assure you this is a matter of several years. At the end of that time, however, you would certainly not have the slightest doubts about the reliability of the machine.

Frank:
Well, possibly I could believe that it is reliable in the sense that its measurements are accurate, but then I would doubt that what it actually measures is very significant. It seems that all it measures is one's physiological states and activities.

Epistemologist:
But of course, what else would you expect it to measure?

Frank:
I doubt that it measures my psychological states, my actual beliefs.

Epistemologist:
Are we back to that again? The machine does measure those physiological states and processes that you call psychological states, beliefs, sensations, and so forth.

Frank:
At this point I am becoming convinced that our entire difference is purely semantical. All right, I will grant that your machine does correctly measure beliefs in your sense of the word "belief," but I don't believe that it has any possibility of measuring beliefs in my sense of the word "believe." In other words I claim that our entire deadlock is simply due to the fact that you and I mean different things by the word "belief."

Epistemologist:
Fortunately, the correctness of your claim can be decided experimentally. It so happens that I now have two brain-reading machines in my office, so I now direct one to your brain to find out what you mean by "believe" and now I direct the other to my own brain to find out what I mean by "believe," and now I shall compare the two readings. Nope, I'm sorry, but it turns out that we mean exactly the same thing by the word "believe."

Frank:
Oh, hang your machine! Do you believe we mean the same thing by the word "believe"?

Epistemologist:
Do I believe it? Just a moment while I check with the machine. Yes, it turns out I do believe it.

Frank:
My goodness, do you mean to say that you can't even tell me what you believe without consulting the machine?

Epistemologist:
Of course not.

Frank:
But most people when asked what they believe simply tell you. Why do you, in order to find out your beliefs, go through the fantastically roundabout process of directing a thought-reading machine to your own brain and then finding out what you believe on the basis of the machine readings?

Epistemologist:
What other scientific, objective way is there of finding out what I believe?

Frank:
Oh, come now, why don't you just ask yourself?

Epistemologist (sadly):
It doesn't work. Whenever I ask myself what I believe, I never get any answer!

Frank:
Well, why don't you just state what you believe?

Epistemologist:
How can I state what I believe before I know what I believe?

Frank:
Oh, to hell with your knowledge of what you believe; surely you have some idea or belief as to what you believe, don't you?

Epistemologist:
Of course I have such a belief. But how do I find out what this belief is?

Frank:
I am afraid we are getting into another infinite regress. Look, at this point I am honestly beginning to wonder whether you may be going crazy.

Epistemologist:
Let me consult the machine. Yes, it turns out that I may be going crazy.

Frank:
Good God, man, doesn't this frighten you?

Epistemologist:
Let me check! Yes, it turns out that it does frighten me.

Frank:
Oh please, can't you forget this damned machine and just tell me whether you are frightened or not?

Epistemologist:
I just told you that I am. However, I only learned of this from the machine.

Frank:
I can see that it is utterly hopeless to wean you away from the machine. Very well, then, let us play along with the machine some more. Why don't you ask the machine whether your sanity can be saved?

Epistemologist:
Good idea! Yes, it turns out that it can be saved.

Frank:
And how can it be saved?

Epistemologist:
I don't know, I haven't asked the machine.

Frank:
Well, for God's sake, ask it!

Epistemologist:
Good idea. It turns out that...

Frank:
It turns out what?

Epistemologist:
It turns out that...

Frank:
Come on now, it turns out what?

Epistemologist:
This is the most fantastic thing I have ever come across! According to the machine the best thing I can do is to cease to trust the machine!

Frank:
Good! What will you do about it?

Epistemologist:
How do I know what I will do about it, I can't read the future?

Frank:
I mean, what do you presently intend to do about it?

Epistemologist:
Good question, let me consult the machine. According to the machine, my current intentions are in complete conflict. And I can see why! I am caught in a terrible paradox! If the machine is trustworthy, then I had better accept its suggestion to distrust it. But if I distrust it, then I also distrust its suggestion to distrust it, so I am really in a total quandary.

Frank:
Look, I know of someone who I think might be really of help in this problem. I'll leave you for a while to consult him. Au revoir!
Scene 4.

(Later in the day at a psychiatrist's office.)

Frank:
Doctor, I am terribly worried about a friend of mine. He calls himself an "experimental epistemologist."

Doctor:
Oh, the experimental epistemologist. There is only one in the world. I know him well!

Frank:
That is a relief. But do you realize that he has constructed a mind-reading device that he now directs to his own brain, and whenever one asks him what he thinks, believes, feels, is afraid of, and so on, he has to consult the machine first before answering? Don't you think this is pretty serious?

Doctor:
Not as serious as it might seem. My prognosis for him is actually quite good.

Frank:
Well, if you are a friend of his, couldn't you sort of keep an eye on him?

Doctor:
I do see him quite frequently, and I do observe him much. However, I don't think he can be helped by so-called "psychiatric treatment." His problem is an unusual one, the sort that has to work itself out. And I believe it will.

Frank:
Well, I hope your optimism is justified. At any rate I sure think I need some help at this point!

Doctor:
How so?

Frank:
My experiences with the epistemologist have been thoroughly unnerving! At this point I wonder if I may be going crazy; I can't even have confidence in how things appear to me. I think maybe you could be helpful here.

Doctor:
I would be happy to but cannot for a while. For the next three months I am unbelievably overloaded with work. After that, unfortunately, I must go on a three-month vacation. So in six months come back and we can talk this over.
Scene 5.

(Same office, six months later.)

Doctor:
Before we go into your problems, you will be happy to hear that your friend the epistemologist is now completely recovered.

Frank:
Marvelous, how did it happen?

Doctor:
Almost, as it were, by a stroke of fate--and yet his very mental activities were, so to speak, part of the "fate." What happened was this: For months after you last saw him, he went around worrying "should I trust the machine, shouldn't I trust the machine, should I, shouldn't I, should I, shouldn't I." (He decided to use the word "should" in your empirical sense.) He got nowhere! So he then decided to "formalize" the whole argument. He reviewed his study of symbolic logic, took the axioms of first-order logic, and added as nonlogical axioms certain relevant facts about the machine. Of course the resulting system was inconsistent--he formally proved that he should trust the machine if and only if he shouldn't, and hence that he both should and should not trust the machine. Now, as you may know, in a system based on classical logic (which is the logic he used), if one can prove so much as a single contradictory proposition, then one can prove any proposition, hence the whole system breaks down. So he decided to use a logic weaker than classical logic--a logic close to what is known as "minimal logic"--in which the proof of one contradiction does not necessarily entail the proof of every proposition. However, this system turned out too weak to decide the question of whether or not he should trust the machine. Then he had the following bright idea. Why not use classical logic in his system even though the resulting system is inconsistent? Is an inconsistent system necessarily useless? Not at all! Even though given any proposition, there exists a proof that it is true and another proof that it is false, it may be the case that for any such pair of proofs, one of them is simply more psychologically convincing than the other, so simply pick the proof you actually believe! Theoretically the idea turned out very well--the actual system he obtained really did have the property that given any such pair of proofs, one of them was always psychologically far more convincing than the other. Better yet, given any pair of contradictory propositions, all proofs of one were more convincing than any proof of the other. Indeed, anyone except the epistemologist could have used the system to decide whether the machine could be trusted. But with the epistemologist, what happened was this: He obtained one proof that he should trust the machine and another proof that he should not. Which proof was more convincing to him, which proof did he really "believe"? The only way he could find out was to consult the machine! But he realized that this would be begging the question, since his consulting the machine would be a tacit admission that he did in fact trust the machine. So he still remained in a quandary.

Frank:
So how did he get out of it?

Doctor:
Well, here is where fate kindly interceded. Due to his absolute absorption in the theory of this problem, which consumed about his every waking hour, he became for the first time in his life experimentally negligent. As a result, quite unknown to him, a few minor units of his machine blew out! Then, for the first time, the machine started giving contradictory information--not merely subtle paradoxes, but blatant contradictions. In particular, the machine one day claimed that the epistemologist believed a certain proposition and a few days later claimed he did not believe that proposition. And to add insult to injury, the machine claimed that he had not changed his belief in the last few days. This was enough to simply make him totally distrust the machine. Now he is fit as a fiddle.

Frank:
This is certainly the most amazing thing I have ever heard! I guess the machine was really dangerous and unreliable all along.

Doctor:
Oh, not at all; the machine used to be excellent before the epistemologist's experimental carelessness put it out of whack.

Frank:
Well, surely when I knew it, it couldn't have been very reliable.

Doctor:
Not so, Frank, and this brings us to your problem. I know about your entire conversation with the epistemologist--it was all tape-recorded.

Frank:
Then surely you realize the machine could not have been right when it denied that I believed the book was red.

Doctor:
Why not?

Frank:
Good God, do I have to go through all this nightmare again? I can understand that a person can be wrong if he claims that a certain physical object has a certain property, but have you ever known a single case when a person can be mistaken when he claims to have or not have a certain sensation?

Doctor:
Why, certainly! I once knew a Christian Scientist who had a raging toothache; he was frantically groaning and moaning all over the place. When asked whether a dentist might not cure him, he replied that there was nothing to be cured. Then he was asked, "But do you not feel pain?" He replied, "No, I do not feel pain; nobody feels pain, there is no such thing as pain, pain is only an illusion." So here is a case of a man who claimed not to feel pain, yet everyone present knew perfectly well that he did feel pain. I certainly don't believe he was lying, he was just simply mistaken.

Frank:
Well, all right, in a case like that. But how can one be mistaken if one asserts his belief about the color of a book?

Doctor:
I can assure you that without access to any machine, if I asked someone what color is this book, and he answered, "I believe it is red," I would be very doubtful that he really believed it. It seems to me that if he really believed it, he would answer, "It is red" and not "I believe it is red" or "It seems red to me." The very timidity of his response would be indicative of his doubts.

Frank:
But why on earth should I have doubted that it was red?

Doctor:
You should know that better than I. Let us see now, have you ever in the past had reason to doubt the accuracy of your sense perception?

Frank:
Why, yes. A few weeks before visiting the epistemologist, I suffered from an eye disease, which did make me see colors falsely. But I was cured before my visit.

Doctor:
Oh, so no wonder you doubted it was red! True enough, your eyes perceived the correct color of the book, but your earlier experience lingered in your mind and made it impossible for you to really believe it was red. So the machine was right!

Frank:
Well, all right, but then why did I doubt that I believed it was true?

Doctor:
Because you didn't believe it was true, and unconsciously you were smart enough to realize the fact. Besides, when one starts doubting one's own sense perceptions, the doubt spreads like an infection to higher and higher levels of abstraction until finally the whole belief system becomes one doubting mass of insecurity. I bet that if you went to the epistemologist's office now, and if the machine were repaired, and you now claimed that you believe the book is red, the machine would concur.

No, Frank, the machine is--or, rather, was--a good one. The epistemologist learned much from it, but misused it when he applied it to his own brain. He really should have known better than to create such an unstable situation. The combination of his brain and the machine each scrutinizing and influencing the behavior of the other led to serious problems in feedback. Finally the whole system went into a cybernetic wobble. Something was bound to give sooner or later. Fortunately, it was the machine.

Frank:
I see. One last question, though. How could the machine be trustworthy when it claimed to be untrustworthy?

Doctor:
The machine never claimed to be untrustworthy, it only claimed that the epistemologist would be better off not trusting it. And the machine was right.

The Abyss (first draft)

2010-03-27T17:00:00.000-04:00

Oh fair wind art thou not change?
But fairer still the stillness
And fairer still the absence of
And hence the great abyss

In the abyss we deny what is
And even more what isn't
For past, present and future lives
Are simply nonexistent

But out of darkness we perceive the light
And hence a world is born
Straining the absence brings the dawn of night
Where finally the abyss is shorn

And we are brought back nevertheless
To the theme of gone by days
Where intellect rained and strived
Showing us the way

There suspended we were in love
Watching to wane and wither
And in-spite of your will above
We were but a self taut tether

Because if thou gaze long into an abyss
It then shall gaze into thee
And if thou spake in cryptic tounges
So shall it be

For forces collide and powers clash to end all
But once the tumult subsides, they may indeed cancel

Conversations With Sasquatches Inhabiting Grocery Stores

2010-03-18T19:14:00.000-04:00

There are times, in the grocery store, where everyone thinks "I don't feel alone out here". Last week I got lost on a quest for the jalapeño mustard when suddenly I saw a large hairy object lumbering up the frozen food aisle. I immediately ran to see it up close and discovered that it was indeed a large hairy object. I decided to call it a Sasquatch. I invented the word Sasquatch. I have video evidence too, but it was very blurry, and unfortunately it was destroyed during my treacherous journey on the way out of the grocery store.

Looking back I shouldn't have been so surprised by what I saw. There were unmistakable signs beforehand. I found servings that were based on a 4000 calorie diet and advertisements in the hygiene aisle on how to attract females by making yourself extra hairy (marketing campaigns will always remain a step ahead of everything including zoology). But what surprised me more than seeing the Sasquatch was being able to talk to him, and exchange the wisdoms of our respective worlds.

The Sasquatch was very curious about all the claims made regarding white tea being better than green tea because of the higher level of anti-oxidants and he was wondering if he should move to a different grocery store to get some. I informed him that he should stop reading the blogs and pay attention only to the scientific studies, where he would learn that measurements in the lab do not equal the potency of the substance in the body, and that there hasn't been enough testing to support the popular claims about white tea. An NIH study with mice showed that green tea increased the antioxidant capacity in the plasma, lungs and heart, whereas white tea increased it only in the heart. So if you are a mouse, maybe green tea would be the better choice (but we are forgetting that I am indeed talking to a Sasquatch). He was enlightened, but he would soon take his revenge by enlightening me as well.

The Sasquatch happened to be an evolutionary biologist and he told me that his people evolved in the feminine products section of the grocery store. Sexual selection was simply too discriminatory about the feminine standard of beauty, and the rejects were left as lost and hairy big-footed wanderers on the evolutionary trail. They, however, regrouped and found like-minded mates, and have haunted the grocery store ever since, sometimes making money by posing for blurry photographs and videos, but they rarely encounter humans due to the massive number of grocery stores in the Americas.

At this point the author cannot continue recounting the tail of the great Sasquatches because he is overcome by emotion from being able to learn from and converse with such beautiful hairy creatures, but mostly from the embarrassment of composing such a long post about nothing but this silly subject.

A Philosophical Argument for Skepticism Towards Philosophy?

2010-03-13T13:14:00.000-05:00

At heart I am a rationalist and a pragmatist. And although those terms have vague meanings, they do express my love of reason, and my willingness to throw out certain concepts for the sake of practicality. Hence it is difficult for me to understand people who are irrationalists, who love contradictions, and who strive to prove that we can't prove anything.

However, I like to entertain and even argue for opposing opinions, so I will present the argument viciously described in the title:

Some types of philosophy (philosophy of ethics, religion, etc...), as most will agree, are very different than sciences. They can not be construed to progress towards something, and hence, we cannot use induction to argue for their efficacy. (As a side note I just want to complain about how depressing this is because it shows that we have to assume that whatever logic based system of investigation we set up is progressing towards the truth if it progresses towards any uniform opinion whatsoever. We cannot set up a system that judges it from the outside and does not have logical foundations of its own and hence we, if we take this path, cannot avoid being involved in an infinite regress)

We can easily see that a philosopher's background correlates with his beliefs more closely than say, the facts known by science at the time. From reading their biographical information we can also see that their background caused them to have those beliefs; for even though correlation does not prove causation, we can intuitively reason about the mental states of others. This is the type of reasoning that leads us to conclusions like, "The person who wrote this historical document is an authentic witness to these events, and is not making it up.", is necessary for doing history, and hence is not dismissed easily without a worse skepticism raising its ugly head.

And when we reason about a philosopher's mental state, the only difference is that instead of seeing what caused them to write a historical document (could be greed, theological reasons, or a will to express the truth) we reason about what caused them to come to their conclusions e.g., "From his writings, we can see that he puts great value on his father's arguments for the existence of God, and hence his upbringing caused him to be a theist." It also should be noted that some religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, depend on this type of reasoning since they are based upon events that are argued to have happened in history. Does an honest reading of most philosophers' biographies lead one to believe that philosophers' beliefs are caused by their background? If yes, we may proceed.

If most philosophers' beliefs are caused by their backgrounds then we must apply the same reasoning to ourselves and ask: "Is there anything that would prevent my beliefs from being influenced by my background?", or, "Are we greater than the greatest philosophers?". If no, it is then obvious that we must doubt our own beliefs based on the fact that they are caused by our background, and if philosophy leads us to these beliefs and then kicks the legs out from under them, we must regard philosophy as a useless system since accepting it accepts that it cannot overpower our arbitrary biases. And that's all there is to the argument.

I personally get out of this quandary by observing that while most philosophers may indeed be "greater" than I, most may not be honestly trying to overcome their background biases. And I also think that it is much easier to read a historical document and discover the reason (honest or dishonest) that the author wrote it than trying to discover whether philosophy, or background, was the reason for the beliefs of a philosopher. So an honest reading of most philosophers' biographical information may lead me to believe that philosophers' beliefs are caused by their background, but I may also believe that the percentage that really search for truth is very small, so small it cannot be detected as an undercurrent in the tumultuous tide of correlated beliefs and backgrounds. So I may still believe that if I honestly search for truth I will not be effected by my biases in the end.

This of course requires what some might call "faith" and maybe it even requires there to be a god, of some sort, to orchestrate philosophy in a way that allows for everyone to come to truth (for I can't assume that I am the only one capable when so many others are probably very similar to me). There is no guarantee (or even intuitive likely-hood) that our reasoning in other areas, such as science, is also efficacious in these types of philosophy and there are no useful survival of the fittest arguments when it comes to true philosophies. A pacifistic philosophy might be true, but it may have long ago been wiped out by a false but violent one. However, these are larger questions and will take a larger post to address.

The Mystery

2010-03-06T07:52:00.001-05:00

In the middle of the great darkness, past the infinite floating nothingness, you can take a right turn at the corner of the abyss and there boils a grand nebula. In this nebula there is a lively transfer of gas clouds billowing from star to star, and in these clouds there are cooler bodies flying about. One of these cooler bodies seems to be different. It is a luscious planet, green and pregnant in the mellow starlight, but that isn't what makes it different, for there are other lush planets. Instead, it does not have an elliptical orbit and hence is not married to any star but flits with deceptively effortless grace through the nebula, looping its mass around blazing novas, wrapped in the cool cocoon of interstellar gas and atmosphere; it flirts with the stars. And on this planet there is a lucky and intelligent species of clam.

These clams bask in the warm shallows composing poetry. Once a clam finishes a poem it opens its mouth and a swarm of tiny worm-like creatures swim with great purpose and organization to transfer this poetry to fellow clams. The clams evolved normally over eons until finally sexual selection grew bored of the old tricks for impressing mates and started an eloquent literary pressure, pushing for personification, alliteration, and metaphor. And mates there are, for since the clams have been around for so long it is often a close call between different poetic treatises, and the female part of the clam often ended up choosing a myriad of suitors at once (these clams had lost the ability to release eggs into the water, and hence some system of selecting which sperm to receive was desirable).

So great is the power of the clam's brains that in their free time (which is all the time) they compose music, tell stories, and occasionally try to figure out the meaning of life. Sometimes they bother with the trivial activity of composing rigorous mathematical equations to describe their surroundings, the activity we would call science. They had long finished their thoughts about the question: "why are we so lucky?"

As a side note, there is also a lucky but lesser creature that lopes about on the higher and dryer surfaces of this planet. It is a trickster and gossip; and through sexual selection for proficiency in these social games it has developed a brain powerful enough to occasionally grasp at the mysteries in its universe, but ineffective at proceeding much beyond that without becoming extremely confused. Nevertheless they brag voraciously about their ability to do so and pride themselves on the fact that they are most concerned with their own ontology and purpose--even though the majority of them are not so concerned and instead put the most importance on playing their tricks and games. They also are proud of being extremely pragmatic by concerning themselves with a complex system of trade based on a clam shell currency.

Paradoxically our story begins with them (the clams are too much for you to handle at this point). There is a philosopher named Nim, who is trying deduce the laws of the heavens through reason. Today (for it is always daytime because of the surrounding stars) she stares out of her makeshift telescope and wonders for the thousandth time how she and the rest of the planet's inhabitants appear to be so lucky.

She is committed to discovering the most elegant explanation: She feels that to have solved something you must understand both the question and the solution; therefore she cannot accept the idea of an intelligence being responsible for the planet's motions. She is getting to the core of the problem by scratching thousands of equations on somber clay tablets. For the past ten years, everyday at what would have been sunrise (for stars are rising all the time) she has carefully selected from yesterday's tablets and put them in her hand-cart, trundling them slowly up the dusty foot path to the edge of the cliff over-looking the sea. Here she has her telescope mounted, and through it she bravely looks like a thirsty explorer about to cross another desert, and every day after she carefully measures the positions of the heavenly bodies she lets out a scream and is forced to retreat from that desert; she dashes her tablets into the sea, and the sea--controlled by the same laws she so desperately searches for--will dash her tablets against the cliffs, wearing them away with mathematical certainty for untold eons into the future.

Today is a normal day for everyone except an extremely intelligent clam (which had found out the answer to the questions Nim is asking, and is in the process of deducing how to communicate with her) that abruptly became unintelligent when it had great difficulty figuring out what had killed it. Also today, Nim is approached for the thousandth time by two fellow philosophers by the names of "Rackand" and "Plaitna". Nim knows that she is going to have another repetitive argument where nothing would be solved.

"What ho!, oh Nim of the cliffs and great scribe of tabletures. We are honored to be able to kiss the ground you have walked on; may you live forever." Plaitna bowed as she said these words. "Yes great scribe of tabletures, I would be honored to be your slave" said Rackand as she also bowed. Nim had always been annoyed by the culture she grew up in because she did not see any point in saying things that you didn't actually mean--and she knew that they meant it far less than she for they had come to challenge her to a debate and would most likely gloat by reciting favorable parts of the dialogue word for word to their respective home villages--but nevertheless she is polite. "Greetings great Rackand and Paitna; I am not worthy to wash you; would you like to have some fresh clam?" (for it is mandatory in that culture to be hospitable) "Thanks a thousand, but we are not worthy enough to eat your food". "Please oh kind madams honor me by having this clam", "If it is to your honor then yes, may we have all your clams!". Nim let out a sigh, and the trio picked up sharp rocks and made their way down the cliff face to slice and wrench open the helpless creatures.

Finally over juicy clams the topic is broached: "What laws have you discovered today?" smirked Plaitna. Nim silently handed her a tablet and made a small circle around a section of scratchings. After a brief dexterous touch with a myriad of her glowing primary cilia Plaitna opined "This new property of the heavenly ether does not account for the collision witnessed last month", "I know" said Nim, "it bugs me, but that star formation will be in my view tomorrow." Now Racken jumped in, "I have come up with a new analogie for you to think on. Let us consider our questions, and ask the question 'why am I not incapable of asking questions?' and consider the consequences of answering 'because there is some universal law that causes me have questions', not only are you raising a bigger question than you are answering but it really does seem patently absurd. Wouldn't it be simpler to state that I am capable of questions because of chance and not because of some underlying universal law that causes me to be so? For those that cannot question simply cannot raise this question in the first place."

Nim sighed again "I could ask the question of 'why am I totally incapable of understanding your argument?' and ask myself whether it is simpler for it to be the fault of your argument or the fault of my understanding, where would that get us? You are also being too specific when you ask why you yourself are capable of questioning. The question should be: 'why is anyone capable of thought?', there should be a universal law behind that, and through the use of pragmatic induction we can see the effectiveness of theories that incorporate universal laws to explain reality. This is so foolish, both you and I said the same thing last year!". Rackand opined: "Simply saying my argument is at fault does not prove it to be so!.", "I did give an analogy as to why I couldn't even parse it! Thats the best I could do!" yelled Nim, who is now getting upset.

Excited by the fray Plaitna jumped in "It is interesting that we talk of simplicity. I want to remind you both that there was a time when our species would often forget conversations that they had only a few years ago and those with lesser talents than we were considered 'prodigies'. It was thought at that time that the dawn of our kind would lead to the theory of everything, and a philosophy as well, since it was possible for our ancestors to know everything worth knowing in all fields. But once they took over, the fields expanded and nothing was solved in the end, even though everyone knew more. What we need is not something that we can understand, per se, but something that is more explanatory, and isn't an intelligent force so explanatory in this case? Let me explain..." Plaitna began (while picking a shard of clay out of her clam), "It is not the question of why we continue to live on this planet but why it is the way it is in the first place, and to simply say that if the planet did not move as it did we would not be here to raise these questions solves nothing...". The argument ground forward but as Plaitna had ironically pointed out: nothing was solved, and the planet drifted into a gas cloud causing a phenomena that was close enough to night to say that it had fallen, and after much to-do with goodbyes the philosophers returned to their respective villages.

They contemplated the things they had repeated in their conversation (for there was nothing new) and those things included the observation of nothingness being indistinguishable from everything. The argument being: since every particle has its anti-particle and every energy its negation, then if all actions and particles happened to appear in an area they would cancel and not appear at all. Also contemplated was the theorizing about intelligence being subjective, where we ask ourselves if we are the most able to comprehend, and then observe that we cannot say this with certainty since we cannot know the mental states of other creatures or even the inanimate. In addition they theorized that intelligence may only be the brute complexity of material interactions and that, in this case, a star (for example) would be more intelligent than their own minds.

They were so busy contemplating these things that they did not properly disguise the clam shells that they had taken illegally from the coastal waters that belonged to Nim's village. This would start something similar enough to a war to say it was fought so ruthlessly that not even Nim's great library of tabletures was sacred.

After Nim's library was destroyed she exiled herself to an island and once again nothing was solved. Nim waded through the shallow waters wondering if her search for truth was entirely misguided. She wondered so many things that bright night as she hunted for clams. And at one point, in her sadness, she slipped on a clam and fell into the water and heard the most beautiful music ringing in her ear. But as soon as she shook out the water it was gone and in her self pity she even wondered whether the clams knew better than she, and then it struck her: There may after all be a universal law, a logic to everything, but it may be that these universal laws describe probability distributions in which all the events in the universe are pure stochastic chance. There may also be an intelligence that controls the movements of their nebula and planet, and if that intelligence was in fact the abyss that surrounded their nebula, it would be too brutishly complex for them to comprehend. If this was true, she, Rackand, and Plaitna would have all been correct, and yet so wrong. It was now impossible to describe luck, or much of anything else. It was a beautiful theory, and she realized that she couldn't decide if its beauty made it more likely to be true. Maybe it was the nothingness that was more beautiful after all. Nothing was solved; it was all chasing after the wind.

TO PROBABLY NOT BE CONTINUED...

Daniel Tammet

2010-02-06T17:16:00.000-05:00

I would recommend this documentary about Daniel Tammet. (this is part 1 of 5) It also shows some interesting things about Kim Peek whom Daniel meets during it. What is especially interesting though is that it shows how as a young child he was fascinated by patterns, and numbers and did very repetitive things. So it brings up the question as to whether his unique brain directly caused his ability, or his unique brain caused his interests and behavior which in turn caused his ability (or both). Because if you watch towards the end it shows that people can learn to do the massive calculations he does just as quickly with an abacus, and after a while they don't need the abacus, but only use it as a mental concept to visualize the numbers (just like Daniel uses colors and shapes). In fact in his book "Embracing the Wide Sky" Daniel argues that the differences between Savant brains and normal brains have been exaggerated. This would be a wonderful educational technique if we could simulate Daniel's learning behavior with educational software.

Also see my free university idea:
http://themeatyard.blogspot.com/2009/04/free-and-completely-online-university.html

In addition I want to thank Tammet for cooperating with scientists, and attempting to shed light on his unique ability, and share it with the rest of us. From the interviews I've seen of him he seems to be a very nice, and humble person. For more information on Tammet see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet
His blog:
http://www.optimnem.co.uk/blog/
His e-learning company:
http://www.optimnem.co.uk/

See Post Body

2010-01-18T17:18:00.000-05:00

See post title.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 5 (2nd attempt)

2009-12-20T15:01:00.000-05:00

Slept for 7 hours extra this morning. I was still tired for my 2PM nap though, although I didn't fall asleep. I am debating on whether to continue or not. I feel like I have gotten this far so I should continue, but I am also worried about how much time this is taking up, since I keep screwing up. I think I will see if it works through tonight, and then go from there.

UPDATE: I have decided to stop the experiment. Firstly because I said earlier that if I screwed up again I would stop. Well, I did screw up, and I want to get in the habit of keeping to my self promises. Secondly, I will be hanging out with some people this break who are supposed to help me learn jazz and other things. They are monophasic, and I think it would be pretty odd, and maybe even rude for me to have to tell them every 4 hours that I needed to leave them, and go out to my car to take a nap. Thirdly I do not plan on doing this for a long time, because I know that sleep is important for memory, and am not sure what getting so little will do for my ability to function.

Although the overall experiment was a failure, on the upside I did do it for 36 hours perfectly once (I did it perfectly for 40 or more hours but that was at the beginning, and I was rather tired all the time I was awake), and after that I only slept for 7 hours (which is normal for me). So I can conclude that I successfully replaced a full night's sleep with around the clock naps, and had no ill effect because I was only slightly tired while I was awake and because I jumped right back into the next night with a normal amount of sleep time. Finally I did have one nap where I remembered a dream, and therefore can conclude that my body is able to learn to compress my sleep cycle. Overall I am glad that I tried this, and may try it again next vacation.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 4 (2nd attempt)

2009-12-19T12:23:00.000-05:00

2AM nap: Not tired.

6AM nap: Might have slept a little.

10AM nap: Fell asleep, missing time experience, but no couldn't remember any dreams.

I think I am adjusting, I just have to be really careful that I don't get overly secure and careless. I am going to stay in the habit of always going out to the kitchen to work to stay away from my bed, and doing 60 jumping jacks whenever I get up, even if I am not tired.

2PM nap: Same.

6PM nap: Same.

10PM nap: Same.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 3 (2nd attempt)

2009-12-18T03:09:00.000-05:00

2AM nap:
Got into bed a few minutes late, but then I had another missing time experience so I guess I slept although not very deeply.

UPDATE: This is absolutely terrible, I slept for 6 hours again this morning. I have no idea why I did this, I just kept rationalizing with myself until I laid down on my bed because "I needed to think about whether I could continue the experiment". I think another problem was that my back started hurting because I hadn't been sitting right so I really didn't want to exercise to stay awake. At first I thought I would skip my naps because I wouldn't be tired but then I remembered that I was tired during some of the naps that I didn't expect last time, and if I am not tired I can just meditate which I think is worthwhile. I am also going to do 60 jumping jacks after each nap. I think if I get in the habit of doing this it will wake me up enough when I am tired to make proper decisions. I have decided that if I screw up again, even if I do the slightest thing wrong, I will decide not to continue the experiment because I may just not have the will power. This is because my brain keeps using the fact that I have so much time to do this as an excuse to screw up. Well I'm not going to let it do that anymore.

2PM nap: Not tired, but did meditate a little, and was slightly tired towards the end.

6PM nap: Still not tired.

10PM nap: Still not tired.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 2 (2nd attempt)

2009-12-17T03:31:00.000-05:00

2AM: nap: Still not tired enough, but seem to be getting closer now.

UPDATE: 6AM nap: Exhausted, I think I slept, but like always I can't remember. I then was so tired that after I got up at 6:30 I set my alarm again for 7:00AM and after I got up then I was a zombie and sat at my table. I put my head on my arm and dozed off till 8:00AM, so once again I screwed up. But this time it is the least screwing up I have ever done, because first it didn't give my body a sleep longer than an hour, so my body wouldn't have gotten the REM sleep it needs at the end of a 90 minute sleep cycle unless my cycles have started to compress. Second I only overslept for an hour and a half total. Let us see if I am tired enough for my 10AM nap.

UPDATE 10AM nap: IT WORKED!
I was tired enough for this one, I spent the time before it almost dozing off leaning against my wall, and only checking my watch every few minutes. The last I looked at it, it was 10:03AM and I realized it was past nap time, then I spent a few minutes gets settled in my bed. The next thing I knew I was having a dream (although I thought I was still awake), partially about oversleeping and partially about my nextdoor neighbor telling me that she was robbing banks and stealing things. (not sure how the two are connected) I also dreamed that I reset my alarm to wake me up later. However, I woke up and it was 10:25. And I couldn't believe it because it felt like my dream lasted a lot longer. The conclusion I can draw from this is that my sleep cycle has been compressed from 90 minutes to much shorter. Usually REM sleep only appears after 90 minutes or longer, but I was dreaming, so I must have had REM sleep. Hopefully I can keep going. At first I was still tired after my nap (although less tired than before I took it) but now it is almost 11AM and I am sitting here typing this and I feel totally refreshed. Although I should note that I have not felt totally refreshed for the past 4 days so it might just be that I feel less worse, but to me at least perception is reality.

UPDATE: 2PM nap: Had an interesting missing time experience during this one, although I can't remember a dream if I had one. All I remember is lying there for a few minutes and the next thing I know the alarm is going off and I can't believe it is already 2:30PM.

UPDATE: 6PM nap: Don't know what happened here, maybe my alarm didn't go off right, all I remember is waking up at 7:30 and seeing that my alarm was set for 7:40, I think I had a dream and then it made me change my alarm, very sucky.

UPDATE: 10PM nap: Wasn't tired.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 1 (2nd attempt)

2009-12-16T10:40:00.000-05:00

After my 2AM nap (which I can't remember) this morning I think I slept on and off till 9AM, so I basically killed my whole schedule. This was because I kept having paranoia and I felt like I couldn't leave my room or else I wouldn't be able to deal with going back into my room, it was a very strange feeling. I was walking down the hallway in fear that something would jump out at me, I kept imagining all sorts of strange creatures lurking in the dark. So I ended up having to stay in my room and sit on my bed and read, which is a bad way of staying awake. At one point I just decided to stop the experiment, because I didn't think I would be able to deal with it. However, I'm going to try it again, make sure I don't see any scary videos on sleep deprivation, and see if the paranoia returns. If it does I'll see how long I can deal with it, but if I it gets to the point where I feel I might run out into the street and die if I hear another creaking sound, I think I'll have to stop.

I'm actually slightly optimistic right now, because now that I think about it again, doing this should be rather simple. I know that I can't fall asleep when I am sitting at the table outside my room working on my computer. I can read for a while out there, and if my eyes get to tired I can always go back to my computer. So I just stay out here when I'm not sleeping. Even though this is horrible, I am still excited about doing this, because this probably takes the most will power out of anything I have ever done. I was going to add in an extra nap somewhere, but I've decided that the extra naps don't really make me less tired, and I tend to fall asleep after them (which is what happened last time), so I am going to try to go to this schedule cold turkey once more. So I've already had my 10AM nap which went ok, because I can't remember anything during it, so I'll update on the naps that come afterwards.

UPDATE: 2PM nap: Was tired during it, so I guess it means that my body is learning something, but was not able to fall asleep. Am going to work on Esperanto now, maybe some quantum mechanics later.

UPDATE: 6PM nap: Was tired during this one too and it was relaxing to lie down, no sleep however.

UPDATE: 10PM nap: Hardly tired, still no sleep.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 3

2009-12-15T15:34:00.000-05:00

It is 5:20AM Dec 15th Tuesday, and my last day at mcdonalds is in the past. I was trying to work on my quantum mechanics book but I finally decided that my state of mind is not proper for it. Writing is much more natural for me and I don't really have to think much while doing it. My nap at 2AM was not very restful at all, although I don't remember the end of it, so I may have started to drift off to sleep towards the end.

I guess I'll post updates after every nap since it is so hard for me to do anything else:

UPDATE: Nap 6AM: Everything went better than normal, I don't remember a lot of the time that I lay down which means I must have been sleeping for most of it. No dreams however and no restful REM sleep, which means my sleep cycle hasn't been compressed enough.

UPDATE: Nap 10AM: I made the mistake of watching a very scary documentary on a case of a guy who experienced sleep deprivation when he decided to stay awake for 201 hours to raise money for charity and started hallucinating as a result. I started getting paranoid and worrying that I would have hallucinations and that I would experience vivid nightmares instead of vivid dreams. I remember screaming and jumping up at 10:07AM (during my 10AM nap) at a very slight sound, I also remember worrying that I would think two buttons on my coat in my closet were eyes watching me if I started hallucinating.

I don't think that this was psychosis (which can be one of the side effects of sleep deprivation) because these types of fears sometimes still happen to me normally (just not very often and at very low levels) but I think the combination of the documentary and my sleep deprivation made the fears serious, also I read about that Randy Gardner experienced paranoia as a side effect during his sleep deprivation, how serious a side effect it is, and how serious that means that my sleep deprivation is, I don't know. I then decided to insert another nap to help me deal with my paranoia, and I ended up not getting out of bed when my alarm went off, instead I just stayed in bed and turned it off, over all I slept for about 3 hours and was able to make my 2PM nap. I'm kind of ticked off at myself but at the same time I don't think I would have been able to deal with my paranoia in that state of mind without some real sleep, and now I am in a decent enough state of mind to work on quantum mechanics.

When I was getting paranoid I was considering ending this experiment, but I thought about it and realized that I only slept for 3 hours by accident today instead of 5 which was yesterday, and in addition to that these 3 hours happened much later in the day. So I think I am making progress and should continue.

UPDATE: Nap 2PM: The paranoid feelings are getting worse. I couldn't close my eyes because I felt like something would jump on me and attack me, and I kept thinking that there were things creeping around softly stalking me. I turned my light on, but that didn't help, I couldn't even start to sleep, so I called my friend and talked to him for a while, and that calmed me down a little. I really think I just need to get over this I am not in danger of hallucinating, it would take much more sleep deprivation to do that.

UPDATE: 10PM: was the same.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 1-2

2009-12-13T05:12:00.000-05:00

Note: I wrote this two days later (day 3 of polyphasic sleeping) using incomplete notes that I wrote these first two days, my apologies for the missing information.

The hard facts I have found out about this sleep schedule are here.
However I am anxious to see if I experience any of the beneficial effects alleged by bloggers like Steve Pavlina.

Day 1 Dec 13th
I am going to start polyphasic sleeping on a sleep schedule of thirty minute naps every 4 hours, so 6 naps a day total. At the very start of today I went with a friend to eat at Arby's, I got two eight piece jalapeño dippers and I told her to call me at 2:30 this morning (my first nap is at 2), and although I have an alarm I can always use the extra help. It is 1:22 AM right now and I am sitting in my apartment. I am slightly sleepy, I was worried that eating so close to my nap would be bad but my stomach seems to be settled down now. We'll see how it goes, I really want this to work. So far everything looks good, my only concern is what Steve Pavlina mentioned on his blog: that the hormones in animal products can effect your sleep patterns. Now I am not sure if this is true, but anyways, I am a vegetarian, but not all out vegan, and although I do not buy any animal products at the grocery store, I sometimes eat them when I go out to restaurants with people, like on this occasion I got cheese filled jalapeño dippers, hopefully they won't effect my nap.

8 am
I have had my 2 AM and my 6AM nap successfully, however I was not able to go to sleep during either one, the 6AM one came close, I think I have more trouble getting to sleep quickly than most people do. I am feeling slightly fatigued but this disappears almost completely when I focus on something like writing this paragraph. I am now going to go back to practicing guitar and then do some quantum mechanics. So far there has been no great temptation to break the schedule.

After my 2PM nap I started to feel like it was working, but then when I went to my shift at mcdonalds I had to take a nap in the break room at 6:00PM Dec 13th, which was very difficult and then I didn't get off until right before my next nap at 10:00PM, which I had to ride my bike back really quickly to make. So I ended up being way too energized for that nap and didn't even feel tired during it. So I was exhausted and during the next day I fell asleep after my 2 AM nap for about 5 hours, I was really disappointed.

My Reasons for Retreat

2009-12-08T19:49:00.000-05:00

I decided to modify this post, because when I originally wrote this I was rather down. I'll just skip my complaints about humanity and just list my projects:

My current non-school non-work projects are (in no particular order):

Establishing an educational free software project.

Setting up a server and website for personal use and for the aforementioned.

Researching and understanding the philosophical implications of not being able to have a uniform probability distribution over a countably infinite set, especially relating to the Boltzmann Brain problem.

Writing my own operating system based on Minix 3.

Learning to speed read.

Learning Esperanto.

Learning Bahasa Malay.

Leaning how to improvise properly over jazz standards.

Becoming better at meditation and hence learning to focus better.

I should note that not all of these are directly for the betterment of my community, but hopefully they all indirectly will be, because I will learn through them, and if I can't use the particular thing, maybe I will be able to use it later to inspire or to educate someone who can. It is about time I started focusing more and prioritized, if not now then when?

Killing An Hour (time, like a life, will never be renewed)

2009-12-02T01:47:00.000-05:00

The following quote was taken from here.
"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share."

~Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)

On Intelligence

2009-11-04T23:03:00.003-05:00

See the happy idiot.
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were an idiot.
My God! Perhaps I am.
(this poem was not written by me, as I am too much of an idiot to think of such things)

As an engineer (I think) I have a tendency to try and find the "best" way to make things work, or the "best" way to define things. The only problem is that sometimes what I call "best" is actually a relational property. Like for instance, "intelligent" which many have called me, and some of whom I have believed at certain times.

I am not intelligent; even given the term's standard meaning as being associated with scholastic prowess. I have always struggled with school, and with learning things in general, especially socially which has been the main reason I have had so much free time to learn things: there's no other idiots distracting me. But I have stuck with learning (albeit inconsistently) like a stubborn blood sucking tick, and on top of that I've been rather lucky. I just happen to have a propensity to solve problems that happen to be economically valuable Some may argue that because of this I am still technically intelligent. But I would point out to them that if I lived in a society where the majority of people dug in the mud and ate bugs for a living I would be considered a moron. (I would know all the wrong info)

There you have it. In fact I think even worrying (like I do) about whether you are intelligent is a sign that you haven't thought about the word's groundings in objective reality. Anytime you measure intelligence you have to have some sort of goal it is meant to help you accomplish, or some kind of problem it is supposed to solve. Well what kinds of problems should intelligence be good at solving? The most basic that everyone can agree on is the problem of survival. Well so much for that... One needs only to be aware of politics in conjunction with picking up a microscope to see just how much more effective our dumb and distant cousins are at solving this problem, and being extremely secure while they are at it. We fail as a species. What about being happy? Does anyone claim it solves that? I doubt so. Fools seem to me to be the happiest. (see start of post)

But all this doesn't even get at the deepest problem with our definition of intelligence; if you want to define intelligence you have to base it on something (I'm assuming it is not an axiom) and if you base it on something it is going to have to be on something someone thought of. The logic, as I hinted at before, if not circular, at least resembles an oblate spheroid.

A Free Man's Worship (a beautiful essay by Bertrand Russell)

2009-10-20T23:21:00.000-04:00

I copied the following from this site:

A Free Man's Worship

by Bertrand Russell

"A Free Man's Worship" is perhaps Bertrand Russell's best known and most reprinted essay. Its mood and language have often been explained, even by Russell himself, as reflecting a particular time in his life; "it depends," he wrote in 1929, "upon a metaphysic which is more platonic than that which I now believe in." Yet the essay sounds many characteristic Russellian themes and preoccupations and deserves consideration--and further serious study--as an historical landmark of early-twentieth-century European thought. For a scholarly edition with some documentation, see The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 12, Contemplation and Action, 1902-14. The text used here is from Mysticism and Logic.

To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:

"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.

"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: `There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.

"`Yes,' he murmured, `it was a good play; I will have it performed again.'"

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch--as such creeds may be generically called--is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.

But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation of our own conscience?

The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.

But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.

But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.

Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

BRS Home

My Errors

2009-10-08T13:41:00.000-04:00

I think it is good to get in the habit of admiting your errors. Hence this post. I have made following errors recently:

In my 2nd to last post I made the error of assuming that you could have an infinite uniform distribution. And afterwards in my conversation with Barnaby Dawson I made the mistake of saying that the principle of indifference leads to contradictions. (Actually the principle of indifference leads to contradictions only when unrestricted, and the principle is used in statistics) In the same conversation I also made the mistake of saying that you could prove that 1 can equal q+q+q.... where q=1/n and n is the number of q's, using mathematical induction (actually I am not sure if you can do this now, and the way I tried to prove it was not mathematical induction). So those are my errors so far this millenium. I will update my errors after the next one as well.

Pop Christianity and Carrie Prejean

2009-10-04T13:00:00.001-04:00

A particular area of Pop Christian influence really started bugging me when I heard some of my Christian friends talk about Miss California's (Carrie Prejean's) answer to a question at the "Miss USA" pageant. I have absolutely no interest in the pageant or in Prejean (and yes I know that this is old news), but I want to relate this incident to make some theological points:

Perez Hilton: "Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit, why or why not."

Carrie Prejean: "I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other.We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."

I have trouble parsing her sentences; if she meant "in my country AND family", and didn't just decide against saying "country" and replace it with "family" at the last moment, her answer seems to be "no", and that is what is generally assumed, and has probably been confirmed in subsequent interviews with her, so I will assume that as well. This answer has apparently caused her to become a hero to many Christians (she received praise from my friends as well).

Later, Perez Hilton called it the "worst answer in pageant history"; I don't know about pageant history *chuckels*, but Prejean probably isn't against gay marriage for secular reasons; she probably gets her opposition from her Christian faith, a faith which I do not think condones such opposition.

Therefore I have to agree that it was a bad answer for the following theological reasons: First off, as a good Christian, Carrie Prejean must believe that there are many more things wrong than just gay marriage: sex before marriage, and lust being among them. In fact, there is no indication in the Bible that God looked on these sins any differently; Jesus put lust on the same level as adultery (Mathew 5:28), and we don't have a comparison of adultery to homosexuality in the new testament; the only thing we can use to compare them in the Bible is in the old testament where the laws God gave to Isreal treat them with the same punishment (death by stoning); those laws also mandated stoning for working on the sabbath as well as many other things.

So one might ask the question, why does Carrie Prejean take homosexuality so seriously, and not also want to punish people for having sex outside of marriage? Does she also want to punish guys for watching videos of scantily clad women... like a video of the miss USA beauty pageant? It is also well known that she posed for nude photos at the age of 20 (after the age of consent); does she want there to be a law that will punish her for aiding and abetting lust? (to be fair she does admit that those photos were a mistake)
Or to go even further, does she want people to be punished for working on saturday?

Second, Carrie Prejean, as a good Christian, must also remember that the Apostles never talked about how Christianity should influence governments to make laws against Un-Christian behavior, in fact Paul states in 1st Corinthians 5:12 that: "For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?". In the Bible, the only time there were God-approved laws against gay marriage was under the theocracy of the nation of Isreal. During that time God gave laws directly to Isreal, but one thing that many people miss is that the laws given to the Isrealites were not given to other peoples, and it is recognized theologically that this was a special and temporary agreement (covenant) between God and Isreal. This is why Christians today generally don't argue that those laws should be applied here, America isn't Isreal and never will be. So where is Prejean even coming from?

This brings me to my next point. Third, Carrie Prejean, as a good Christian, most likely claims to be against theocracy (as most Christians do). And she must know that according to the "Declaration of Independence" among our unalienable rights are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." And it goes on to say "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." If this is the purpose of our government, why does Carrie Prejean think that we should use it to impose our personal standards of morality on others? If she wants there to be laws against gay marriage she needs an argument that gay marriage impinges on the liberty or rights of others, not that she personally thinks it is wrong.

One wonders how Pop Christians like her define "theocracy". If this is a democracy then all of us are responsible for making the laws of this nation; if we are looking to make laws that go beyond protecting our unalienable rights, and start to use our personal beliefs to restrict the non-malicious behavior of those with different belief systems, then our government is going to become an instrument for making laws in favor of whatever religion is the most popular. Imagine if a gay religion was the most popular; would straight people want this type of reasoning: "something goes against my religion therefore I have the right to make laws so that no-one else can do that something"?

Some Christians may argue that everything has an effect on everyone, and that it is impossible to separate religious morality from the protection of our unalienable rights. However, does this reasoning show up in the actions of Jesus? Did he report prostitutes to the authorities?.... the prostitutes that he frequently ate dinner with and talked with.

The responsibility is firmly set on Christians to control their own actions, as there will always be temptations whether or not laws exist to prevent them. And even if such laws do exist, one may ask whether they will encourage rather than discourage the behavior they have been leveled against by giving it the privileged title of "Taboo". One may also counter that when temptations abound would not God have knowledge of this and account for this in his judgment of the sinner?

The reason that many Christians see Carrie Prejean as a kind of hero is because the influence of Pop Christianity is pervasive and wrot with contradictions to its very core. It is no wonder that Pop Christianity chooses another self contradictory figure as a rallying point.

The Belief in "Progress", and How It Relates to The Second Law of Thermodynamics

2009-09-13T13:24:00.000-04:00

A while ago a guy named Barnaby Dawson commented on my post with a link to his post. He was arguing that the second law of thermodynamics is not certain to hold forever and that even if it does, civilization can still survive and progress forever. I must say a very unusual argument, and I do find it very interesting, so I thought I would respond, but have only gotten around to it now. I will first address his comment, and then his post.

His comment:

"There is no uniform probability distribution of the whole real line. Any distribution you use must give greater weight to earlier brains than later ones (in the limit). So there may be infinitely many Boltzman brains and yet your probability of being one of them could still be negligible."

If there is no uniform probability distribution of the whole real line, then there surely isn't a skewed distribution that gives "greater weight to earlier brains than later ones", if we don't have evidence that we are more likely to be born (if you are an ordinary observer) or fluctuate into existence (if you are a Boltzmann brain) at one time rather than another we should assume a uniform distribution; he needs to provide evidence for his assertion that a skewed distribution is the default.

CORRECTION: I have since learned that you cannot have a uniform distribution over a countably infinite set and find this extremely disturbing. See my conversation with Barnaby Dawson over at "The Seed Of Reason".

And when we talk about the "real line" we shouldn't be thinking in terms of time in this universe. If our universe arose in a random quantum fluctuation we need to consider that there are doubtlessly other universes out there, and think in terms of whatever dimension distinguishes one universe from another in the multi-verse.

This is because we must consider not only that an infinite number of Boltzmann brains will arise in our universe if it goes into heat death forever, but an infinite number will have arisen in any universe (that continues forever in heat death), and that universe may have arisen enough eons before ours so that the number of Boltzmann brains in it has far overwhelmed the number of ordinary observer in both itself, and in our universe. However, if we look at it relativistically, from outside of our universe, everything has already happened since time is just another dimension that can be used merely to distinguish between things, hence the point may be mute, since the infinite number of Boltzmann brains resulting from a universe that continues forever after heat death are already "there" essentially in the same way that my table exists but I can't interact with it until I cover the distance between it and me. And with current scientific theories the default position will be to assume the universe expands forever, and lasts forever, all evidence points in that direction; although some interesting implications for Boltzmann brains my result from the possibility of "The Big Rip Theory" being true, but I do not have the knowledge of physics to evaluate them so I will pass over that in silence.

But even regardless of that, let us say we can assume that our universe is early. What then follows? How do I know that I am not one the infinitely many future Boltzmann brains? To say that my observations reflect reality, and that I am actually in the early universe I observe begs the question as to whether or not I am a Boltzmann brain.

Now for his post. He make several claims in his post.

He says that heat death is only inevitable:
1: If the universe is finite in space or matter.
2: And there is a lower bound to how much energy is necessary to perform a given calculation.
3: The second law of thermodynamics is not certain to hold.

These are all valid from a theoretical standpoint, but pragmatically they are, in my opinion, very far fetched. Even if the universe is infinite, usable energy is still going to be lost everywhere in that infinite universe. So the more usable energy the universe has, the faster that usable energy will be running out, but by random chance, in an infinite universe, there is always bound to be a part that has some neg-entropy. However, the likely hood that we (or any other civilization) is going to be able to find those random parts, and stay in them (as those parts are going to change) is ridiculously improbable.

As for energy required to perform a given calculation, it is certainly possible (as he argues) that there are an infinite number of elementary particles, getting smaller, and smaller as we can detect more, but it is not at all clear that it will be possible to redesign ourselves (or any other life) to make use of this. The current paradigm has the human race becoming more "advanced" and using MORE energy on a larger scale, not less on a smaller scale.

And finally for number three. The second law of thermodynamics is not certain to hold, in the same way that I am not sure if the sun will rise tomorrow, dark energy could decay, another inflationary Big Bang could wipe out our universe. But I assume the sun will rise tomorrow, because along with every other sane person, and scientist, I use the principle of induction. The default position is to assume that it will hold, unless we are given evidence to contrary. This is why we can have theories about the end of the universe, because we assume that the laws of physics will hold. What Barnaby is doing is misplacing the Burden of proof; no scientist needs to prove that any theory he makes will hold forever into the future. If the theory fits current observations, and is tested, it is accepted, and no one complains about human uncertainty, because that is what science is all about.

And most importantly, if Barnaby wants to doubt that one of the most well established laws of physics will hold by pointing out other failings in science, he must also doubt the continued progress of civilization that he so passionately believes in. We establish that civilization will progress in the same way that we establish that physical laws will hold: through induction. It doesn't matter that civilization hasn't always progressed, or that there have been some failings in scientific history; we can still latch onto the overall trend, and make an assumption about where things are going; in this case, I think it is that civilization will continue to progress (if we don't kill ourselves first), but that the second law of thermodynamics will end that progress eventually, along with all other progress, and life in our universe.

And finally I have a question for Barnaby. How exactly does he judge "progress", and what does it mean to him? Why isn't an empty universe in heat death, with no civilization, no life, and no suffering considered progress? There are many zen masters who would disagree with Barnaby's views. This goes back to the old is-ought problem; what Barnaby means by progress has to be physical and based on our own subjective view of complexity and intelligence. Whatever it is, it can't be moral progress, and hence, no one but a bunch of sci-fi geeks is going to give a rat's rear.

"Starts with a Bang" on the Boltzmann Brain Problem

2009-08-10T08:57:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine referred me to this site during an email debate about philosophy of religion. I won't get into the details, but basically our argument was over whether someone could logically trust their senses if they believed that the universe arose in a random fluctuation. I had come across this site before but I didn't remember why I had decided it was wrong. I dug through some old emails I had started writing to Alvin Plantinga (before I decided he probably wouldn't read long emails), and came across this (if I may pretentiously quote myself):

"The evolutionary process has a finite amount of time in which to work (because of eventual heat death), while Boltzmann brains have an infinite amount of time to appear in any given universe (that doesn't recollapse), and in the environment that birthed those universes. The ordinary observers created by natural selection simply drop out of consideration, being overwhelmed by infinitely more Boltzmann Brains."

I wrote back to my friend with a paraphrase of this argument. However, for some reason I still think there was more to my objection, but I don't have enough time to figure that out right now.

Anyways, the guy who wrote the article I am objecting to is an astrophysicist; so given my lack of expertise in the area, I should tread lightly. However, Don N. Page observes something similar to my argument in one of his articles so there's possibility that I'm not insane: "Theories in which spacetime can last too long seem in danger of producing too many Boltzmann brains" (Observational Selection Effects in Quantum Cosmology)

And I certainly must disagree with what the post implies in this statement:

"Although there have been a number of scientific papers in the last couple of years on this topic, none of them were written, apparently, by anyone with a very deep understanding of biology."

Physicists certainly don't need to have a "deep" understanding of biology to know that evolution happened, and to understand entropy and thermodynamics better than biologists.

In fact, there may be reasons for not even considering evolution (in our estimation of the ratio between Boltzmann brains and ordinary observers) because there is no reason that evolution should produce a conscious organism. Evolution only selects for behavior, and not consciousness, and there is no way (that I am aware of) to pose a concrete relation between the two. This may sound a little nuts, but if you look at the Chinese Room argument (here at IEP) or (here at SEP) you may understand. This is especially true of a consciousness that would be aware of what is actually going on outside of itself, and not just the strange characters (if you will) that it is manipulating.

All we know (assuming our senses are trustworthy) is that we have evolved, and are conscious (I am rather, I don't know about you), and if materialism is correct then consciousness is a result material interactions that, given enough time, can be replicated by random fluctuations, and who knows what else. However, we can go further and say that because of the principle of mediocrity we can't even say that our consciousness is the most likely form, or that other material interactions can't produce similar effects.

We can't say for sure that a radioactive rock hasn't had a conscious thought at some point in its life/half-life. How would it tell us if it did? Have we every been able to put ourselves in the "shoes" of a whirlpool or a dust storm? Is the mud possibly more likely to be a conscious observer than the plants or worms it turns into? or even us? These are questions that cannot be answered from a materialistic perspective. Evolution may concentrate what we subjectively label as "complexity" but it doesn't guarantee that this form of complexity is more likely to result in consciousness.

Indian Music Videos

2009-08-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

I have recently checked out the Indian popular music scene, and have gotten a soft spot for some of their music videos. I've decided to post them here (I don't bother embedding because I assume everyone knows how to use tabs, and with one of them the embedding was disabled).

Aishwarya Rai - Thoda Sa Pagla
Aishwarya Rai - Umrao Jaan "Salaam"
Kareena and Shahrukh in Marjaani Song Promo - Billu Barber
Kajra Re with Aishwarya Rai
Sanjana...I Love You (Kareena Kapoor & Hrithik Roshan)

Yes, I know this is quite different than most of the stuff I post on here, but I'm still co-oping and I'm trying to concentrate mostly on that, so I don't have as much time to think about philosophy. Enjoy!

A Short Summary of My University Idea

2009-08-08T11:47:00.001-04:00

The longer version is here. I have a shorter description on my facebook group for developers who are interested in helping me, and that is as follows:
We are looking for people who either have experience with programming, preferably as a profession, or are cognitive scientists, or psychologists who are interested in pedagogy, and learning.

This is an free educational-software project with the final goal of establishing a free, online, and accredited university with the main teaching tool as interactive software.

The plan to make it sustainable and attract good professors is to place more teaching responsibilities on software and other students so that the professors can concentrate more on research and consulting while, in addition, having a free workforce of graduate students to help them. The professors will get to keep all the money they bring in, including grant money (which normally has chunks hacked out of it before it gets to the professors in commercial institutions).

There are already student teachers at universities; if student teaching was made a graded course (graded by how well your students did relative to others) then it would encourage better student teachers. In addition these teachers could remember what first made the material click for them better than more experienced professors, and hence have a clearer understanding of difficulties students face when learning the material.

This is a group of people who are interested in either helping me program, or refine the aforementioned idea from the perspective of pedagogy, and learning. We were planning to do this in Java for the sake of being cross platform; however, now I am having second thoughts, and am open to suggestions. I may make this exclusively for Linux, as I think that would forward the goals of the rest of free software movement if our project is successful.

For more information see:
http://themeatyard.blogspot.com/2009/04/free-and-completely-online-university.html

and

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=79004426794

Enjoy, and join the conversation.

An Ode to Cheese

2009-07-21T14:31:00.000-04:00

(picture source)

I like cheese
Will you give me some please?
If you don't I will start to wheeze
For no one knows the power of cheese

When the moon is full
And there is a soft breeze
I turn into a ware-wolf
And prowl for cheese

And sometimes when the light purrs just right
The great black rainbow bursts forth in the night
And I fly slithering through the liquid grass
Parting thin rainbow roots en masse
And latch into the blackness with a latchless latch

And I climb and go skipping up through the stars
The radiance of which is cast far to far
Whereupon I find I have missed the moon
And will not devour its cheese anytime soon

Then the nights grow long as all fades away
And omnipotent switching switch grass turns to hay

And as the sun dies and passions wane
The only thing left in my weakening grasp
Will be the roll of cheese I've been clutching fast
Because it appears that I have lost my place
And exploded from lack of cheese in the abysses of space

Don't Wear Your Seat Belt, You'll Get Hit By A Moose

2009-07-16T22:42:00.001-04:00

I am doing a software engineering internship that requires a great deal of concentration, hence my lack of post erudition. However, I did want to have something for July.

Searching A String For A Date with Java

2009-06-30T18:34:00.001-04:00

The SimpleDateFormat class in java has a method 'parse' which returns a date. The 'parse' method can be used to sequentially attempt to find a date (in the specified simple date format) in a string beginning at the 0th character and ending at the last character. It will return the first valid date it finds.

A good way to do this is as follows:

import java.text.ParsePosition;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

public class searchStringForDate {

static public void main(String[] args) {

    SimpleDateFormat sdf =
        new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
    sdf.setLenient(false);
    String str =
        "junkCharacters11/01/1999" +
        "junkCharacters";
    ParsePosition pos = new ParsePosition(0);
    Date date = new Date();

    for(int i = 0 ; i < str.length() ; i++)
    {
        pos.setIndex(i);

        if(sdf.parse(str, pos) != null){
        pos.setIndex(i);
        date = sdf.parse(str, pos);
        break;
        }
    
    }

    System.out.println("date: " + date);
    //and print date in simpleDateFormat
    System.out.println("sdf date: " +
            sdf.format(date));
}
}

OUTPUT:

date: Mon Nov 01 00:00:00 EST 1999

sdf date: 11/01/1999

.........................

A few things to note:

1: This isn't the most compact way to do this, it is instead set up so as to show the user more things about the nature of the methods. Can you figure out the more compact way?

2: This is not a good idea for searching through a string that may have numbers before the date in any format that is similar to your simple Date Format. Even though the parsing here is set not lenient it will still parse things like, 1/1/09, and give you an output like:

date: Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 9

sdf date: 01/01/0009

I do not know of a way to parse only dates that are in the exact format you specify without first using a regex expression.

3: The break is there for a reason. If it isn't the program will continue past the start of the date in the string and it will get the last sequence of characters that could be interpreted to be a date, see "2:".

4: The 'setIndex(i)' after the 'if' is there for a reason also. Just testing to see if there is a date at the parse position causes the parse position to be set. (see ParsePosition class for more details)

5: Putting a - before any part of the date will result in that many months, days, or years being subtracted instead of added to the date.

6: Now you know how to find a date no matter how nerdy or ugly you are.

A Brush with Fate

2009-06-29T21:50:00.000-04:00

Coming home from work Maria Carzechoff was in a mood of acute blahness as she slithered off of her bicycle and onto the floor of her disorderly apartment. After the bicycle fell on top of her, she decided that slithering was an atrocious mode of transportation, almost as atrocious as her day. The thought crossed her mind to be thankful for not being born a snake, but then the thought of biting herself and slipping peacefully out this mad world made everything parallel once again.

She had been depressed for some time now, and her condition hadn't been improved by her boring and strenuous job, or by the loss of her scholarship to the college of her dreams. Once a logical, joyful, and bright young lady, she now was paranoid and bereaved. Inspite of all this, men flocked to her (she was still gorgeous), but she turned them all down, complaining that they could never make her happy because the universe had decided to make her sad.

She managed to cross her mind once again and block the bleak cognitions that screeched like harpies to be let in. In the moment of calm she spoke to her self: "I bloody well need a shower, I shouldn't have taken the long way home through that meadow." And grasping all of her fortitude, trudged into the shower, turned on the water, and stripped off her clothes (in that order) only to find that a massive tick had latched itself on to her stomach. She shrieked, and after a great deal of bumbling, and bumping, managed to pry the thing off.

Now she had a scape goat for her troubles, she would make this tick feel her pain, she would make the universe hate this tick, or the other way around, she didn't care to formulate her thoughts correctly at this point. Leaving the tick in the sink and her clothes in the shower, she excitedly tiptoed to the closet by her bedroom window to get her lighter, not bothering to consider positive chances that someone would be fixing the power line outside.

This lack of consideration was quite unfortunate for Jeff Bingham, who, when seeing Maria, reacted in a gentlemanly fashion by squinting and inquisitively brushing aside the leaves that blocked his field of vision in the excited manner of a biologist that thinks he may be discovering an outlandish new species of insect. Jeff suddenly felt extremely weak, and after a brief moment of thinking that he was in love, realized that he had actually touched the live power line, and fell like a rag doll to the earth. Maria, being unaware of Jeff's plight, so absorbed was she in her task, hardly noticed the lights flicker as she grabbed her lighter and ignited her stomach's former stowaway; it was only minutes later that she heard a siren, and throwing on some clothes, went to investigate.

"Oh my God! how did this happen?" she gasped into a paramedic's cold scruffy face. She didn't hear the answer, for at that moment she glimpsed the flashing light of the ambulance. "My window shades were open" she stuttered. "Yes?" the paramedic's face was now both scruffy and confused. "He must have been a gentlemen, turned away and lost his balance.... I killed him" she whimpered under her breath. There was complete silence as she bent over and kissed the lifeless (actually unconscious) Jeff Bingham on the forehead; the scruffy paramedics softened their gaze, for neither had they seen calm nor compassion in strife, and never had they foreseen such love in anguish.

Maria sobbed that night. The walls of her apartment held aloft the temple of dejection where she would sacrifice tears on the alter of her sorrow; she had built it to appease the gods of iniquity, to actuate the numens of her netherworld. "Oh how cruel I am", "I tortured and murdered a harmless tick", and "how could I think of a tick, when I have killed a gentlemen?" was the recursive mantra. It was almost past midnight when the pills she had accidentally overdosed on began to take effect. She was after all on depression medication while experiencing the effects of the aforementioned: memory loss. Something brushed against her window; something was about to pay a visit, something that was long overdue.

TO BE CONTINUED....

People Who Disagree with Me Have Fettered Minds

2009-06-28T20:27:00.001-04:00

Seeing as my co-contributor (Arthur Kalganov) is taking his bloody time responding to my arguments, I have gotten bored. The more bored I have gotten the more disagreeable everything around me looks, and the more I believe that everyone who disagrees with me has a fettered mind, and a deep psychological bias against sweet potatoes. (I am sad to say that I did not come up with this idea this guy "RLC" beat me to it): http://litcandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/fettered-mind-alvin-plantinga.html

I came across this masterpiece when I was looking for more quotes by Plantinga to put on my blog. I searched Alvin Plantinga quotes and the aforementioned blog post came up 8th. It looks like the top ranked non-theist sight for that search as well. The fun began almost immediately after I clicked on it.

RLC starts out:

"Alvin Plantinga, philosopher, apologist and sometimes defender of "intelligent design" has written a review (response?) to Dawkins' The God Delusion that nicely demonstrates the difficulty of employing reason when hampered by absolutes of personal philosophy which preclude particular avenues of investigation and understanding.

"One could see this as a variant of confirmation bias, but for the moment, I'm going to give it another name. I'll refer to this syndrome as "the fettered mind."

"I do not mean for this to be pejorative. I suspect, as I have said previously, that we all have idiosyncratic cognitive obstacles with which to deal. One of mine, for instance, may be the fact that I just can't wrap my head around the idea of eating sweet potatos. Yeah, yeah, you can tell me all day long about how good they are but it won't wash, I can't go there.

"In the case of discussion of theism, there are places that some theists, even philosophers of religion apparently, appear not to be able to go - the most relevant to me (and this post) being the locus of discussion within a frame of the non-existence of God."

From what RLC writes it almost sounds like Plantinga needs psychological help (maybe RLC as well). And why does RLC think that Plantinga has a "syndrome"?:

"Consider the aformentioned piece by Plantinga. It begins with this,
'Richard Dawkins is not pleased with God:
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal…."
'Well, no need to finish the quotation; you get the idea. Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let's hope for Dawkins' sake God doesn't return the compliment.)'
"...Dawkins is not displeased with God, he hasn't chosen him "as his sworn enemy." For heaven's sake, Dawkins doesn't believe in God!..."

The fact that Plantinga made a joke (although not a great one) clearly shows that he has a fettered mind that is simply incapable of conceiving of the possible non-existence of God (which is apparently why he has spent so much time producing arguments related to it). My goodness, Plantinga doesn't even realize that Dawkins is an atheist; Plantinga must be crazy!

Now to be fair RLC's post does not degenerate into the psychogenetic fallacy; he does provide some arguments against Plantinga's, and I'll stop this nonsense and respond to them here. First RLC says (I'm sorry I just can't resist quoting him):

"Plantinga's joking demeanor aside, I think his response reveals a cognitive difficulty with the notion that one can bring the full focus of rational observation to the enterprise of describing God.

"Later in the article there is another, more deeply seated example of this. In rebutting Dawkins' version of the infinite regress problem, Plantinga says,"

RLC then quotes Plantinga's argument that God is simple (according to classical theology). Here Plantinga is arguing against Dawkin's assertion that God is himself complex and would need a more complex creator (this is only one of the several ways Planting argues against Dawkin's assertion). Assumably Dawkins thinks this is true because complex things can only be produced by things that are more complex (which is why Dawkins believes so strongly in totally naturalistic evolution). (Plantinga has also elsewhere pointed out that the only conceivable things that we can refer to as complex are material, and the fact that God is a spirit precludes us from judging his complexity with a material perspective.) RLC then responds to Plantinga:

"It's fascinating to me that Plantinga doesn't seem to see the inherent problem with these arguments. In responding to Dawkins' ideas in The God Delusion, he is addressing an assertion that God is likely not to exist, that the theistic world is engaged largely in accepting one or another version of complex and convoluted "mythology." To which, mystifyingly, Plantinga responds by citing that very mythology as evidence to the contrary."

Mystifying we can assume that any argument against classifying a school of thought as "mythology" is irrelevant if the argument makes any references whatsoever to the school of thought. If someone tells me that horses don't exist and therefore that everything written about horses is mythology because "there are no magical animals that have a uni-horn" is it a fallacy to say "wait a sec... I think you are mistaken about the properties of horses"? Is citing a book about horses (to show them that their definition is mistaken) circular because we are citing "that very mythology" to show that it is not a mythology? Do I really have to explain this one?

Next he takes issue with Plantinga's response to Dawkin's take on the fine tunning argument, and quotes Plantinga where Plantinga says:

"Well, of course our universe would have to be fine-tuned, given that we live in it. But how does that so much as begin to explain why it is that alpha[the arbitrary name he gave our universe] is fine-tuned?"

RLC responds:

"Obviously, it doesn't purport to explain why the universe is "fine-tuned," it is meant to explain why the attitude that accepts these kinds of arguments is misguided."

Plantinga never said that the anthropic principle purports to explain why the universe is fine tuned. That is why he said: "But how does that so much as begin to explain why it is that alpha is fine-tuned?" The anthropic principle says that because life is delicate we must live in a universe that is finely tuned for it, but it doesn't explain why that universe is that way; it only explains why we live there.

RLC then goes on to spout more irrelevancy:

"But unfortunately he loses the plot in the confusion of theistic givens. What Plantinga should realize, where he able, is that it makes no more sense to say "look at how this universe fits me so well" than it does "look at how God must have wanted me to be exactly who, what, where, and when I am today" if there is no overriding theological conviction."

Plantinga is not saying "look at how this universe fits me so well"; he previously stated that this was obvious: "Well, of course our universe would have to be fine-tuned, given that we live in it." Plantinga is saying (and RLC totally leaves this out of his quotes from Plantinga's article) that:

"It still seems striking that these constants should have just the values they do have; it is still monumentally improbable, given chance, that they should have just those values; and it is still much less improbable that they should have those values, if there is a God who wanted a life-friendly universe."

If we consider all possible worlds there may be plenty of universes with naturally occurring fine-tuned constants, but there may be more fine-tuned universes that have a god who set those constants. This argument rests on the assumption that the most likely explanation for improbable (in this particular sense) non-evolved things is intelligence. It is more of analogical argument and might be summarized as: "from our experience we can see that non-evolved things that exhibit the characteristics of being delicately balanced to achieve something complex (in this case life) are more likely to be designed than to come about by chance". As Plantinga puts it:

"It's as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if there is such a person as God."

RLC then finishes his argument with an exquisite gem:

"This self-centered illogic is neatly summed up by the Douglas Adams quote,
'. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"'
"I think we've all felt this intuition, to some degree, at one time or another. I suspect it's partly a result of the way our brains are wired to see the world. But when it informs a perspective that cannot conceive of a universe without God, that perspective is severely hamstrung when trying to discuss matters of the intersection of science and religion."

A puddle (if it had physicists to look at its surroundings) could observe that there are many different ways it could be a puddle; in fact, any hole in the ground would do. It could even be a puddle floating in space. But the ways that life can fail vastly outnumber the ways life can succeed (at least, so I've heard) if we use the constants as a reference point which is the only thing we have so far (that I know of). Admittedly it is not a concrete argument because we do not know everything about the birth of our universe or the laws of physics (what they depend on etc...) or even the existence of other universes. However, from the information we do have the argument may (I am not a physicist) be compelling.

RLC concludes by attacking Plantinga's famous evolutionary argument against naturalism (which RLC has obviously never even researched; he in fact doesn't even name it as such)

Once again I cannot resist quoting him:

"But on toward the end we find one of the most ubiquitous examples of flawed arguments propagating from the fettered mind."

Anyways, RLC argues against the EAAN thusly:

"A theist, more specifically a theist unable to properly frame the argument, cannot conceive of truth as separate from Truth. But if one is able to imagine, and for the purposes of discussion frame his arguments from the point of view of, a universe without God one can see that truth need not involve metaphysical absolutes. Simple, adaptive strategies can be sufficient. In that frame "truth" can mean the results of cognitive processes that help us to survive and flourish. Thus, contextually, truth can be as simple as: "eating this allays my hunger."

"If we are able to divorce ourselves from the need for overarching, soul-comforting, law-giving absolutes we can see that most empirical truth is merely an epistemological extension of observations like the above..."

Right, truth only consists of things that help us survive which includes philosophy of religion of course. From this perspective RLC actually does believe in God. Evolution has selected for belief in God (as is evidenced by the polls) just as it has selected for people who eat, therefore the statement "God exists" is true. Do I actually need to rebut this one, much less take it seriously? You know what, it is futile for me to even argue since any argument I put forth will involve "metaphysical absolutes".

I will conclude with another delightful quote from RLC:

"If fettered mind syndrome is a problem we all share to one degree or another, and I think it is, then it behooves us to understand and mitigate its effects upon our ability to reason contextually. I try not to tell other people that they are silly to eat sweet potatos, that such things are foul tasting lumps of unnatural origin. I try to see my own personal blinders within the greater context of any culinary discussion.

"Seems to me that some theists could benefit from imagining a universe without sweet potatos."

I blame the color scheme

2009-06-15T05:55:00.001-04:00

I blame the color scheme.

The Is-Ought Problem: Contra Kalganov, and whoever else disagrees with me

2009-06-14T19:12:00.007-04:00

As you all know (and by “all" I probably mean myself) my co-contributor, Arthur Kalganov, has written a post most eloquently titled "IS my bitch=logic" on this blog, where he takes issue with one of my arguments in my last post "The Is-Ought problem: Thoughts on the ought". His views are greatly mistaken, but don't blame him because it is logically impossible to NOT be mistaken when arguing against me.

Anyways, he starts out:

"God created us
God is transcendent
God says we have purpose
Therefore we ought

This is a clearly fallacious syllogism."

Clearly he did not have to point this out, as I should not have to with this. Let me continue the enlightenment of our audience by pointing out a faulty syllogism of my own making:

"I say something to you
You think this means that I trust you
You think this means that you can have my cookies
But screw you!
Therefore you cannot have ANY of my cookies!"

This is a clearly fallacious syllogism and the thing it has in common with Arthur's is that it has absolutely nothing to do with my argument. I don't write out the syllogisms for my arguments because most of them are analogical, and I think the ones that are syllogistic are easy enough to derive from my sentences.

But if we leave out the analogical parts we can construct a pseudo-syllogistic argument with some reasonable assumed premises. Note, the first premise is more difficult to assume and although I didn't provide evidence for it, let us assume it is true for the sake of argument. (my argument is a hypothetical one e.g. "if this then that") I got to first premise in my previous post through an analogical argument from the premise that God created the universe:

1: The universe is an institutional fact (since God created it to be so)

2: Institutional facts entail oughts by their very make up

3: The oughts we may ascribe to the universe are not real, but only faultily perceived, or of our own invention (since we did not create the thing, we did not create the fact, and we could not have created its entailed oughts)

4: Therefore God created the only oughts for the universe

5: The oughts entailed by an institutional fact apply to everything that is part of that fact

6: We are part of universe

7: Therefore the oughts God created apply to us

And lastly:

8: There is nothing known, and especially, no known system of moral values outside of God and his creation

9: Therefore there is no other system that we can compare to God's

10: Any moral ascription of value must be in relation to some other moral value (e.g. “This is good” implies that there also exists something that is not as good)

11: Therefore, there is no way we can reasonably say "God isn't doing what he ought"; yet we can, in a sense, say “God is doing what he ought” if he is always internally consistent, and follows the oughts he created us to be a part of.

Other than one or two extrapolations, this is the same argument I voiced in my last post. So, with which of my premises does Arthur take issue? Well, I'll save the rest of my takedown of Arthur for last; first, I would like to make a series of observations that should better set the stage for his ultimate crash through it.

O1: How do we define ought? Since the possible definitions are:

"moral obligation: duty"

(Merriam-Webster)

As well as: "—used to express obligation (ought to pay our debts), advisability (ought to take care of yourself), natural expectation (ought to be here by now), or logical consequence (the result ought to be infinity)"

(Merriam-Webster)

When I use "ought" I will only be using it in the sense of obligation or moral duty. The last three definitions on Merriam-Webster.com can confuse the meaning of the moral ought, but this is merely the fault of language, and can be overcome by defining it at the beginning of an essay, such as I have done. For instance when someone says “a good parent ought to take good care of their children” they mostly likely are using ought to denote natural expectation: “good parents generally do take good care of their children.” This is not what I mean by ought, I mean ought in the way it is used when saying: “ALL parents ought to take good care of their children.”

Also, we should note that I define facts as the logical descriptions -whether social or scientific- that we derive from our observations of “things” (i.e reality). I will argue that things entail facts, and that some facts entail oughts in an unbroken chain.

O2: Are oughts relative to goals? The most prominent of my assumptions for this argument is that oughts are objective, like facts, and not just relative to everyone's perception. (this is the basis of premise #5) Some may object that oughts are relative to whatever goal you are trying to attain, and that the term “ought” only makes sense when appended with a silent “in order to such and such.” So by this reasoning we “ought” to do meritorious things in order to be meritorious, but we also “ought” to do evil things in order to be evil. Yet, this is not how we define ought, “one ought to do evil things in order to be evil” sounds off. It should be “one MUST do evil things to be evil”. “Ought” (in this sense) always implies that you ought to be doing it, and doing evil is not something we think we ought to do; evil is excluded by the definition of ought.

O3: Do oughts exist? Almost everyone has a certain idea of what we ought to do; people when caught in the wrong hardly ever say “to hell with morality!”; they always try to argue that somehow they actually are doing what they ought. The fact that a small number of people don't follow this institution no more implies that ought is relative than the existence of a small number of hallucinating people implies that facts are relative. Likewise, when I see an object it is not the light that bounces off of it, or the touch of it that makes me think it is there (although those things are usually necessary); it is a certain feeling that my perceptions do indeed represent an object, and not just something I'm imagining, or not just pure sensual stimuli that happen to originate from a discrete area. There is no evidence against these latter hypotheses, yet we don't consider them. When we say “this is wrong” we are implying the existence of an ought; and we can no more reject the idea that when our intuition says “this is wrong” it is grasping at a real thing than we can reject the idea that objects actually exist. (although oughts exist in the same sense that facts exist and not in the sense that objects exist)

O4: What exactly is an ought? What exactly is an is? When asking “what is is?” or “what is ought?” a circular definition is inevitable: “Is is existence.” “Ought is what ought to be.” We could define them in a different way; we could say “Is = existence”, but equals in this case would mean “is” and existence (∃) would mean "is" as well; hence, we are left with “Is is is.” We can try something similar with ought, like “doing what you ought is doing the morally correct thing”, but isn't this circular as well? We may reduce it to “doing what you ought is to do what you ought”, since the morally correct thing is what you ought to do. However I try to define them, I run into a circle; they are so basic they cannot be reduced; therefore, in any argument they must be considered axioms. This is one way "ought" and "is" are alike.

O5: Are oughts entailed in institutional facts? To quote John Searle:

“When we assert "He made a promise" we commit our self to the proposition that he undertook an obligation. In exactly the same way, when we use the word "triangle" we commit ourself to its logical properties. So that when we say, e.g. "X is a triangle" we commit ourselves to the proposition that X has three sides. And the fact that the commitment in the first case involves the notion of obligation shows that we are able to derive from it an 'evaluative' conclusion, but it does not show that there is anything subjective (matter of opinion, not a matter of fact, or a matter of moral decision) in the statement "He made a promise", any more than the fact that the statement "X is a triangle" has logical consequences, shows that there is a moral decision involved in the committed use of the word "triangle".” - “Speech Acts” (p. 194)

To apply Searle's reasoning to my chess analogy; when people play chess, it is implied that they have undertaken an obligation to follow the rules of chess, or whatever version of chess they have decided on. No one would take someone seriously who said "I didn't loose because I didn't agree to play chess with the checkmate thing" because their rules are entailed in the very make up of the definition of their version (since their version of chess isn't their version if they play it by different rules). Now, they do not HAVE to play fairly (it may be possible that they can get away with cheating); obligation is different from logical consequence. However, this does not change the fact that they have already undertaken an obligation to play by the rules. Hence, we can no more say that their obligation (ought) isn't entailed in the institutional fact of chess, than we can say that a triangle having three sides isn't entailed in its fact.

O6: Why should we accept the way the creator defines the universe rather than our own definition? I got around this objection in my last post by arguing thusly:

“....you would not have much respect for someone who came in during the middle of the interpretation of a legal contract, and without providing evidence said “it actually doesn't mean that because I don't think it should mean that". You would want to know what it actually meant from the writer of the contract...”

If you wanted to know something (a fact) about an entity then who's judgment would you put more value in? Someone who declared “I know what this is”, after coming along at a random time and observing the entity, or someone who had designed that entity in the first place? If you had a choice between accepting a definition of the universe that a human gave you, and a definition that the omniscient creator of the universe gave you, you would always choose the latter (if you could assume that both weren't trying to deceive you). And if you accept the definition for the fact of the universe, you accept whatever oughts are entailed by that fact because they are part of it.

Now what is wrong with Arthur? As it turns out the source of our troubles may be merely linguistic; here he confuses the ought of natural expectation with the ought of obligation (see heading: How do we define ought?):

“The whole universe is the board, the rules, and two computers that play by the rules. Now, the rules of the game are the "institutional oughts", our universe functions based on. If I drop this apple it ought to hit the ground, if the apple doesn't hit the ground, we aren't playing chess.” (underlining is mine)

Apples certainly aren't under any obligation to hit the ground; what he really means is that “If I drop this apple it WILL hit the ground” However, maybe some apples are intelligent and potent, and have signed an agreement with the universe that they will obey gravity, and let's say that they can choose to do this, or not, of their own free will. Then those apples would have an obligation to follow the law of gravity under the institutional facts of "agreement" and "contract". Which leads to the question "Arthur, how do you like them apples!" However, there is no use in continuing my critique of Arthur's post until he and I are on the same page when it comes to the meaning of “ought” in my argument.

Now let us recap my observations:

O1: There are several things we can mean when we say "ought"; the one I am concerned with is the one that implies moral obligation.

O2: These types of oughts are not relative to goals, because to say "we ought to do evil things to be evil" doesn't make sense and should be "we MUST do evil things to be evil".

O3: Our intuition implies that oughts are real, and is the same type of intuition we must use to infer that objects actually exist.

O4: Oughts must be considered axioms of humanity, since any attempt to define them results in a circular definition.

O5: Oughts are entailed by some facts in the same way that facts entail logical properties.

O6: If there is an omniscient creator that could tell us how to define particular facts, we would always accept his definitions over others (if we assumed that neither of them were trying to deceive). Once we accept the definition of the fact we must accept whatever oughts are entailed.

Also see my previous post on the topic.

The Final Problem

2009-06-14T16:34:00.000-04:00

Sherlock Holmes, cocaine and nicotine addict, deeply melancholic, prone to extended periods of ennui elleviated only by brooding German violin concertos and diverted only by singularly unique or morbidly spectacular criminal cases, meets his end under dubious circumstances, with only the rather daft Watson to give an account of how the fateful events unfolded.
Professor Moriarty, an academic known to none of the Yard's finest, finding renown only within academic circles for his dissertation on "binomial functions". When it becomes clear that there is a criminal mastermind working behind the scenes, responsible for at least half the iniquity in London, Holmes points his unimpeachable finger at the Professor. The fact that nobody else has ever heard his name connected with crime only makes him that much more diabolical.
He forces Holmes and Watson to flee to Europe. While in Switzerland, Holmes inexplicably takes the advice of the maitre d'hotel, hiking out to an unfathomable abyss with only one way in or out without being subjected to high negative acceleration. Here the wispy Professor Moriarty allegedly tracks him down and on a clearly manufactured pretext has Watson called away just in time for the aforementioned pair to tumble off the precipice. But not before Holmes has a chance to leave a written account of the events for Watson to discover and relate to the world, in order to refute certain other Moriarty's who protest their brother's innocence. Watson himself never actually sees Moriarty except at a distance in a busy London terminal, as recognized by Holmes, nor has any other individual besides Holmes ever actually witnessed Moriarty commit any compromising acts.
The denouement writes itself.

IS my bitch=logic

2009-06-09T13:29:00.004-04:00

Morality is an inherently illogical concept. But let us back peddle just a few steps first.

It started with the chess analogy, are the rules the is's or the ought's? Is it a closed system, or within a larger system? Is the implied goal of checkmating an ought or an ought, or is it just an is?

Let me introduce my own chess analogy, after that we might perhaps find some assonance amidst the ethereal cognitive dissonance we seem to have quagmired ourselves in. Suppose the chess game is a closed system. The whole universe is the board, the rules, and two computers that play by the rules. Now, the rules of the game are the "institutional oughts", our universe functions based on. If I drop this apple it ought to hit the ground, if the apple doesn't hit the ground, we aren't playing chess. It is not within these computers' capacity to break the rules because it is outside their realm of commprehension. Like if I say I don't want to paint using those old colors, I'll invent a new one. I call it blellow! Uhh, Arthur, green's been done before. Crap I thought it looked familiar. You get the idea? Now, let us imagine that I am the transcendent being who can break the rules, imaginate new colors, bend spoons with my mind, castle across check, etc. I give the computers different choices based on whatever seems the most existentially satisfying to them. They can tip the king whenever, they can go for a draw so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, they can run a cheap gambit so as to humiliate the opponent. But of course I say, "Since this is chess and I have created you as chess players, you ought to try to win". You see the problem.

God created us
God is transcendent
God says we have purpose
Therefore we ought

This is a clearly fallacious syllogism. Throwing in a transcendent creator does not in any way avoid the is-ought problem. I could program these computers to fear retribution and add the rule, "you go to hell if you don't win". But throughout the struggle Hume's guillotine keeps its death grip on us.

And more than God failing to account for the ought, there is not ought. The computers play, win lose or draw occurs. Judgment is dealt. Ought never made contact, there is just is.

If oughts are anything more than eddies within the swirling currents of is, logic and a creator hypothesis aren't of much help.

The Is-Ought Problem: Thoughts on the ought

2009-06-07T21:05:00.008-04:00

All of mankind is to be loving.
Socrates ought to be a man.
Therefore.......

David Hume posed the is-ought problem to a world of intellectuals whom he thought had gotten too cozy with fallacious logic. Is is not to be derived from ought; ought ought not be derived from is, in the same way that you cannot use premises containing unicorns to prove things about horses; it is the classic category mistake. Let us consider the following:

All men OUGHT to be loving
Socrates OUGHT to be a man
Therefore Socrates IS loving

This syllogism fails miserably; you may as well try to prove that Socrates is a good lover from the same premises. Just because something ought to be, doesn't mean that it is; no one would claim that the world is perfect. Now let us consider:

All men ARE mortal
Socrates IS a man
Therefore Socrates OUGHT to be mortal

Just because something is doesn't mean it should be; suppose Socrates was a very good person who deserved immortality; no one would claim that the world has perfect justice.

So far so good. But was Hume entirely correct?, ought we to consider it a problem?, and can we even ask meaningful questions about oughts? The answers to the last two are unforthcoming unless we can find a bridge over the waters that rage through the is-ought chasm. Ironically our search starts with is, and I'll explain why. Certain facts are purely statements about reality and no more. However, as John Searle observes, some facts entail oughts by their very make up, and hence he calls them "institutional facts."

Suppose I point to two men sitting at a board and tell you: "That is a game of chess." Chess cannot be chess without rules and certain implications: "Once a player moves a piece and takes his hand off, that player ought not take his move back," "you ought to try to put the other player in checkmate." The description of any game is a social construct, but that does not mean that it is any less valid. Our scientific knowledge is based on the way we observe phenomena, the way we can construct theories to explain the world; so are games the same in that respect. Just like our scientific knowledge is merely the way we see observe and think, we sometimes think about chess, what else could we do? As in Le Petit Prince: "If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists."

Is the is-ought solved? Ought we to go out for tea and biscuits? The answers are no and yes respectively. The attentive will note that the aforementioned oughts
in chess are ideal and oversimplified. Suppose your three year old son is trying to learn chess: "Ought you make him stick to a move he has taken his hand off of?" "Ought you try to put him in checkmate?" Probably not. So one must add the following premise to the ought statements: "with all other things being equal." Now we ought to be getting somewhere. Let us apply that reasoning to all of morality, and we will have a universal ethical theory!

Not so slow, when you go faster and get beyond trivial things, like chess and games, stuff starts getting hairy, and people start having different definitions for certain "institutional facts." Take the institutional fact that somebody is a man, and lets say that this man is injured or made to feel ashamed in some way by another party. The fact that he is a man entails certain manly behavior of him. For some, this behavior is to "take it like a man" (not to take revenge on the injurious party) and for others, who are agents of a certain kind, in the area of Sicily: "take it to the mattresses like a man." (take revenge) And for some, there is no required behavior of a man, a man is purely a physically mature boy, and no institutional fact is entailed.

So far is's and ought's are still separated by a wide chasm when it comes to more complex issues of morality. Who's to say one's idea of a man is correct and another's isn't? Which of the many oughts ascribed to any morally related institutional fact is correct? And why should we believe any one person has any more right to ascribe oughts to those facts? In some philosophies this degenerates into the worship of force; since arguments cannot be resolved the wielder of the most power wins by causing the other side of the particular argument (and sometimes it's arguer) to be nullified.

That anyone holds to this form of ethics is a scary thought; so you might want to hold tightly onto my hand...... ok fine, but don't blame me if you fall into the chasm. I'll show you how to jump it (actually more like a way to get around it). Empiricists hold (not my hand) that in some areas (maybe this one) the only way to obtain knowledge is by observation and inferences from observation guided by logical reasoning; they discount that humans can obtain knowledge (in some areas) through innate ideas and deductive reasoning alone. However, rationalists argue for the alternative which is that we can know certain things by reasoning from innate ideas alone (I'll call this reasoning "direct reason"); if we can provide warrant for deductive reasoning by using innate ideas (intuition) about the world then why not other things? Maybe even to spite the empiricists lets say that we use intuition to "observe" certain aspects of morality. Hence, we don't need to base our morality on statements about reality (is statements). (thumbs nose at Hume while Hume promptly forgets that he is not a turtle and--mistaking my fingers for worms--gives chase)
(see Rationalism vs. Empiricism for a more specific and lengthy overview)

However, if everyone has this direct reason then why don't people agree more on things? Why do some feel strongly that alcohol and polygamy are evil while others think nothing of the sort? The fact is that even if we are capable of reasoning about morality from innate ideas, it is no where near becoming a science (at least that the majority of people can practice). So while you may freely believe that you have figured morality out, no one else is likely to listen to you. Nevertheless, few people listening hardly implies that an idea is false, and there are some interesting implications of direct reason that are worth making note of:

If we can directly reason about morality it implies a universal standard of it, like the reason math works is because there are patterns built into the universe (a universal standard of physical order). If reasoning about morality works then there must be patterns that go beyond physical organization in the universe (a universal standard of order regarding how things should be). Since we know of no unintelligent agent that has coherent and organized moral opinions then the default would be to assume that the creator of the universe must have been intelligent.

This brings me to my last ought thought: By what may be coincidence, adding an intelligent creator also provides a universal solution to the is-ought problem, this time, without having to rely on direct reason. Anyone can say “this ought to be a certain way” but if we are concerned with the way things actually ought to be from their beginning, then there is only one possible being who could say “I created this to have a certain way it should be."

Likewise you would not have much respect for someone who came in during the middle of the interpretation of a legal contract, and without providing evidence said “it actually doesn't mean that because I don't think it should mean that." You would want to know what it actually meant from the writer of the contract (if you wanted to interpret it correctly). So if there was a creator, and it had intentions for the universe, the fact that it created the is's should imply the creator's oughts (which are entailed in those is's). This happily lets us escape from the relativism and worship of force which have menaced us up to this point in our investigation. I also think this does much to illuminate God's seemingly fallacious is-ought answer to Job. It is on this answer that Russell observers, "the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint." However, the power and understanding to create the world and our perceptions of it implies the ability to create the associated oughts. Nevertheless this doesn't answer the question of what we ought to do; for that we must know the mind of God. And there are indeterminately many more objections and questions this solution raises; the most prominent of which is the inquest: "but is this being doing what it ought?" That I do have time to answer, but the rest I must pass over in silence (for now).

If the creator created everything then it is meaningless to ask "but is this being doing what it ought?" because everything, including the person who asked the question, is encompassed by the creator's institutional fact of the universe, and there are no institutional facts outside the being itself and its designated oughts that we can compare them to. Hence, it ought what it ought, and is what it is. There is nothing more to say.

UPDATE:
See my friend's refutation and my refutation refutation... of that

Newtonian Ethics

2009-06-03T15:49:00.000-04:00

I find it amusing when a person tells me he bases his ethics on Darwin's theories. I think I will start going around pushing these people off cliffs to more thoroughly affirm Newton's. Darwin's theories are no more germane to the question of life than Newton's, and I even believe the latter would be the lesser of the two logical unscruples, as some people would certainly be improved by rapid negative acceleration, but none have ever been improved by emulating a machine.

Email (screw the hyphen)

2009-05-14T02:41:00.000-04:00

Dwielz Camauf Descartes has decided that he will now check his email, and his facebook, only once a week. He takes this inspiration from similar thoughts on email by Donald Knuth: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

If there is an emergency you can always call him (send him an email to ask for his phone number). He believes that talking is a more efficient communication method than writing is, though less eloquent.

This will probably not affect his contributions to "The Meatyard." If anything it will give him more time to write.

NOTE: Since this post Dwielz Camauf Descartes has gotten a job, and now realizes that this is impossible.

Arthur's Craziness Recipe

2009-05-12T06:42:00.000-04:00

Learn French and Spanish (optional)
Use hallucinogens (also optional)
Take Borges' collected fiction and Le Petit Prince, or translations if necessary, to a remote Moroccan oasis village (Algeria or Libya will also do).
Read the Borges in total seclusion.
Take date syrup and water into the desert, and read Le Petit Prince over the course of three days.
You have now realized that you probably don't really exist, consider this your subconscious' first hint.

A Free and Completely Online University

2009-05-07T16:38:00.001-04:00

For the short version go here. Similar thoughts have, no doubt, been thought before or if not thought have at least been put on the Internet. However, I personally have yet to see or hear of anything that is exactly like what I am about to describe.

Before I start I want to note that it is certainly not my intention to complain about our educational system (it certainly could, and has been worse), but only to suggest and argue for a better alternative. I don't mind those who do complain, but I want to focus more on the solution, not the problem.

Implementation: Students who are accepted to this university would be required to install a cloud computing program on their personal computer and to sign an agreement obligating them to be online a certain number of hours (maybe even at certain times) during the day. The program would use part of the bandwidth and processing power of all the students to run a virtual machine and a website that would perform all the functions of a university computer lab. It would run message boards, educational software, and maybe even super computing experiments and research. The reason for all this is to cut overhead by means of eliminating the need for a huge central server and bandwidth, although one would still need a small server to run it. For examples of cloud computing check out SETI @home and BitTorrent.

Educational design: The final goal would be for interactive simulation to be the main instructional tool, i.e. you are doing practice problems in the program, and you can click on parts for hints and such; tests would remain the same as in a normal university but would have to be completed online. This is because the most effective teaching styles may be hard to emulate in the classroom, software can be much more flexible. There should also be more studies done on what teaching methods work, and less reliance on self evaluative student polls.

If there are lectures, online video lectures would be more efficient. One thing I have noticed in engineering school is that some courses, like Engr's, don't allow adequate time for questions, and most of the students are too confused to ask questions anyway. Everyone scribbles notes as fast as they can, and doesn't think about the material until they get home. Why try listening if something they're going over in 15 seconds takes an hour of study to fully comprehend anyway? The reason why I say "if there are lectures" is because people generally read many times faster than teachers can talk, so the question of whether or not to have all materials in just text and graphical form is legitimate.

Some of these problems can be solved by studying before each class, but no one, that I have asked, does that, and depending on the class it is not always effective. Video lectures and notes (that are already online) would allow students to pause, or rewind, and actually make good use of the lecture. Professors, rather than rushing through the same lecture every single semester could, lecture once, record it, and then post it online to be watched for the next say 10 years until the field significantly changes.

Students would also play a much larger role in teaching students (who are in lower courses than they). This is because with some professors their field has become so natural and habitual for them that they do not remember the process by which they learned it, or what confused them during that time, and hence are not very effective when teaching it. It is better to have something explained to you by someone closer to your level for this reason. The professors would be there, mostly, to answer questions that graduate students and others cannot, and to teach the highest level (graduate) courses, and make sure course material is accurate.

There would be special wiki pages set up for courses written by graduate students, or just undergrads that have done very well in the course. Graduate students, and undergrads in good standing, would be required to spend a certain amount of time answering questions from students about courses, on message boards.

Students would also have to go to the message boards to see course schedule changes, updates, and to get new assignments. I thought of message boards because whenever I have a problem with a computer and I look online, the best answer, almost always, is on a message board. It's not surprising since someone out there likely has had the same problem, and message boards are a good way of storing discussions in a searchable format. Whenever students in a normal university go home and discuss coursework, their discussions are lost to the rest of the university. This also leaves more social students with an unfair advantage. However, if everyone had to go to a message board to have any discussion whatsoever about courses, then we would have a much richer environment in which to search for answers. (Also every message board would be open to anyone in the university)

All this would not only save time for the professors, but I believe would improve the efficiency of the education process. Help would be easier to find, less time would be wasted flipping through books that lack sufficient examples, and more time could be spent comprehending the subject and practicing problems. Also, this type of education could be worked around any schedule since it is totally online.

Sustainability: Since there would be no buildings, no salaries, and no prettifying marble monuments, the only cost would be in maintaining the software and server used to run it. If the main discipline taught in this school was computing then this could be accomplished by requiring the graduate computer science students to not only maintain the software, but to write new software, or make improvements on it for the university.

Professors for this university would have to be persuaded that the amount of time they save by working at a more efficient university translates into more time for research and consulting (which translates into more money for them); hence, they get the benefits of having graduate students as helpers and other professors as associates for brain picking without the time wasted lecturing and such every semester.

Closing thoughts: I think all this would solve the two most egregious errors with most education:
1, It costs money.
2, It is inefficient, at least for those who think differently.

1: Normally trade in our capitalist society happens because people possess commodities of relatively the same value (for the quantity in which they are being exchanged), but of different uses. (I use the word commodity differently and loosely: work, money, knowledge etc.) When you go to school you put massive effort into what you are doing, and yet have to pay monetary costs for it as well; so I think you must concede that it is at least an unbalanced exchange in terms of work. However, the question of whether it is unbalanced in terms of value is harder to establish. You may argue: "In school I gain valuable knowledge, but the work I do there has no real use in the economy, therefore it makes sense that school costs money."

However, the school work you do does have value because education can be two sided. Two sided because the best way to retain information is to actually do something related to it, teaching is just one of those things, if not more rigorous: "The best way to learn is to teach." (Frank Oppenheimer) Professors who have decades of experience in their field probably don't benefit as much from teaching undergrads as say grad students or other higher level undergrads would. However, if we distributed the teaching responsibility more, the work of students would indeed have more value because then the teachers would be able to learn as well. Right now I believe valuable teaching experience is being wasted on those are over qualified to teach a certain level of student. The fact that there is such unbalance and inefficiency during exchanges between students and schools may, in itself, have a deleterious effect on the quality of education, since this is after all a capitalistic society.

2: I have integrated all I wanted to say on this topic in with the university's description.

Seriously?: I do seriously plan on trying it with whatever resources I have (or with whatever anyone else is willing to donate). This summer I will be programming at a software engineering company in Virginia, and I hope the experience I gain from that job will bring me a step closer to being able to design the cloud computing, and educational software. I would appreciate any help I could get; I am especially interested in you if you are getting a PhD anytime soon. Also, feel free to leave questions, comments, and criticisms on here; I will certainly be interested in hearing your feedback.

The Callous Conservators: Does the greatest disappointment in our search for extraterrestrial life come when we actually find it?

2009-05-02T22:00:00.004-04:00

It was the mother of all longings for aliens... Freud would be proud. And as Mephistopheles glowered (he's always telling the most depressing stories) to Dr. Faustus in his study, this time over tea, the tale was unfolded.

The world was striving, yet the world was dying, as the 10¹²th century rolled by. The earth had been pulled out of orbit to timidly bask in the sickly light of another dying star, but now star formation was ceasing, and the humans did not possess the energy to perform a similar operation. The screeching wails of the underground gods--the machines that had been set up to extract precious resources from the inner depths of our planet--were still audible from the surface of the barren landscape. It was the distant thunder in what would be the rainstorm of humanity's passing. If the universe had a funeral dirge, they would be drums that drove it, like a group of grumpy wotans, with their hammers, they pounded away unrelentingly filling the void with cacophony. It was a constant reminder to the sorry creatures that time still moved on, even though business had stopped.

With all but stubborn depression it moved, ground forwards by the pitiless beast of the second law; it scoffed at the dejected scientists that had studied its progress as "thermodynamic." It was neither warm nor dynamic; it was the supreme eviscerating frost and it grated and scraped and scratched until no heat, no life, no feeling, no beauty, could sustain its self. Even the machines retreated farther and farther into the depths and their numbers dwindled as they wore away and broke, causing the thunder to become more distant and faint. And as this erosion of timeless eternity progressed, the landscape became more barren. Thinking this providence, the ignorant surface creatures--brutish slimy and stupid--posed a relation between the fading thunder and the bareness, and so, set up shrines to the underground gods, the numens of their netherworld.

The surface slime were only alone in their superstitions in the strict sense of being physically different and separated by distance, and by earth, and rock walls, from the underground. It was in the underground where humanity plumbed the depths in quiet desperation; at a loss as to how to fix the collapsed ecosystem on the planet's surface and at a near impass when it came to their own sustenance, as they hobbled through the underground fields of mushrooms and algae baths. Having long rejected the religious traditions of their heritage as primitive and outdated they had no solace in prayer, or in divine love, or providence. It was because of this that they turned their minds to the surface and upwards, to the stars, where they imagined all sorts of deity like aliens and creatures with whom one day they might commune.

Through all this, they were locked in a struggle of torturous dejection with a stubbornness so self intoxicating that is was almost deadly; an instinct descended from the most primitive of sci-fi novels, a longing not just for another world, but for another intellect and for hope. A hope that one day that intellect would rescue them and reveal the vast secrets of the universe, allowing them to escape across the landscape; this time referring not to the barren surface, but to the vast, unendingly vast, multi-verse.

At this point Mephistopheles stops and mentions that the rest of this story was told to him by a brain implant, which had recorded all the thoughts of a certain government official (by the name of Johnathan) up to his death. (These brain implants were issued secretly to all officials after the water gate scandal to prevent disloyalty.)

Anyways, one day, it looked like this hope would be fulfilled, as a small alien ship came plummeting to the ocean. The sensors of humanity detected it and there was great celebration, but it was only months later that the humans found it, and a conversation with the occupants ensued. The conversation took place on the planet's surface between a group of government officials who were wearing the latest "protective suites," and the aliens, who were in the even later "even more protective suites".

A group of my colleagues and I (Johnathan) approached the ship noticing with some interest, that from it, echoed some of the same noises as from earth's depths. The ship's booming disquietude was quite a good imitation of our underground machines. We also noticed with slight suspicion that some odd looking mounds (possibly religious in nature) built by the slimy surface creatures had sprung up around that sight, and we readied our weapons for we knew a little of the dangerous brutes.

However, the shock of seeing the unusual visitors for the first time quickly placed our minds on other things. Also, it was after all a glorious day; these beings must have wondrous technology, judging by the array of exotic particles we had detected before the ship came to rest. I too had become very found of the dream that was shared by many of us, and was recited over and over again on the relay system (like a radio station) that we listened to every night. If this went well I might be able to tell my wife that there was a future for our children, maybe, just maybe, we would be able to jump through this vast paralyzing abyss to an exotic universe not in the clutches of heat death, a universe bright and beautiful. They just might be our wondrous Conservators. We tried for hours to greet the aliens before efficient communication could commence, which engendered a great deal of tinkering with the computerized translation system and a number of amusing interactions that resembled charades. It was hilarious, for instance, one of the aliens.....

I (Mephistopheles) will leave out these details to keep the already mortally wounded brevity healthy enough to utter her last words before I drive a stake through her heart.

The snout nosed squid built aliens informed me (Johnathan) and the other officials that it was their custom to mate with any new intelligent creatures they found before conversation ensued. We responded that although we appreciated the efficiency and wished that there was a similar custom on our own planet, we regretted that it would be impossible, since we all had a rare disease called "extreme revulsion" which took away our ability to mate with other creatures. The representatives of both our parties now stepped forwards and the following dialogue was recorded:

Official: Greetings!
Conservator: Take me to your leader *beep*.... hahaha!

Official: Ahem.... Would you tell us of your home world?
Conservator: Our world is dead, like yours.

Official: Oh, have you not found another?
Conservator: We do not have the impetus to look for a new one.

Official: So are you in the same predicament as we are? (he does not understand the meaning behind the alien's response)
Conservator: Some have escaped across the landscape, but no longer are the same in their minds; it is nearly certain that they are the lucky ones and have chosen rightly.

Official: Who do you speak of? And what happened to make them different in their minds?
Conservator: Ages ago there was a split between the philosophers and the futurists on our planet. The philosophers wanted to follow knowledge and wisdom wherever it might lead; the futurists wanted to have long life, and to follow pleasure wherever it might lead. During this time, there was rapid evolution in our brain complexity because of the rigorous capitalistic standards our government had implemented for schooling and research. Those who could not make it through school, and those who were not both creative enough and independent enough to make and sell art, or other inventions, in order to provide for themselves, committed suicide. Not only because they were either destined for experimental drug practice by large companies, or for prison, but because there was a lot of honor and duty ingrained in our culture, and those who could not succeed at being above average were considered to have failed, and hence were considered worthless.

As our sapience increased our depression and suicide rates grew worse, until even those who were successful frequently succumbed, or started to take illegal drugs. (Similar but less severe things have happened in your civilization's history as well.) The futurists stepped in politically and argued that something should be done to allow access to technology that would prevent the user's brain from experiencing too much depression. (There were previously laws against such things for many different philosophical reasons) The philosophers responded that depression was not necessarily a bad thing, and that the question of whether there is a meaning to life was a legitimate one and those who came up with negative answers should have the freedom to live (or not live) up to their conclusions. The futurists denounced the former as burlesque, and since they did not have political power of the philosophers with which to make their beloved technology legal, they announced a succession.

And after much strain in relations between the two sides there was a war which the philosophers were too depressed to win. They surrendered, and after a time were repudiated as dangerous and suppressive persons (i.e. aliens) and were exiled. We are descended from the latter. All we have heard of the futurists after that was that their.... formerly our... planet died, and they rode the stars, (alien idiom for orbiting a star and absorbing its energy in preparation for space travel) caught a worm hole, and were gone across the landscape.

Official: In what way did this technology make them different other than eliminating their depression?
Conservator: It is precisely the way in which they eliminated it that made them different, less sapient, and less knowledgeable. It is the only way to eliminate it though...... the only way by which beings with brain complexity of our order can hope to feel joyful. There are some truths about the very essence of existence and meaning that are too terrible to think on. Some of your philosophers have touched on it, brushed against it, maybe even run straight into it; Bertrand Russell may have been one of them. I think he put it quite well, although it would take much longer to explain why it is this way:

(The Conservator at this point lifted up its eyes to the sky, and as a dash of blue penetrated and reflected in its already radiant whitely opaque sockets, a look of revitalization overcame it, though only shortly, like a virtuoso musician formerly imprisoned in a coma, finally coming to, and about to pick up his instrument... before he realizes the paralysis in his fingers. It recited in a melodious and wrenching sad voice an excerpt from "A Free Man's Worship," and recursively defined Mephistopheleses and Faustuses stared at each other from infinitely regressive abysses of impossibility)

"To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:

"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshiped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.

"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge germ springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away.

And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.

"Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed again.'"

"Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

"How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother."

At the end of the recitation my colleagues and I stood dumbfounded. In those words there was a bold prying that stirred something painful and sore we had managed to keep in the back of our brains, like a dentists deftly scratching for a cavity. A cry of pain ensued:

Official: What does this have to do with anything!? We are running out of time! Let us examine your technology and you may examine ours, let us trade, tell us how your brethren escaped and let us all be gone from this stolid cosmos!
(The alien nodded understandingly)
Conservator: The last of the sentences in Russell's quotation lead us towards implications and hence conclusions that neither you nor Russell could accept; we have not and cannot accept them either.

Official: Goodness gracious let's get to the point; who are you and why are you here?
Conservator: I am the last of the sane and non-depressed philosophers. I was their former leader. However, I have now decided that I cannot go on living in torturous gnosis. I have abandoned my post and my already demoralized citizens have abandoned theirs. All have either scattered or committed suicide. I have come to your planet to become intoxicated. I have read of it in your books, and I am amused by how rich a history you have of it.

Official: Well we have banned those things, and it is now nearly impossible to grow it except in the underground. We have stashes of it there that are privy only to our government, but we will not share it with you unless you tell us how to get out of this universe!
Conservator: (Laughing) I do not wish to give you this knowledge. Why prolong your suffering? And even if I did, you would be able to do nothing with it. It takes massive effort, skill, materials, and energy to build "Cosmic Reavers," (a class of spaceship capable of breaking through the cosmic fabric and escaping the universe) and you do not have enough of any. You would see this instantly if you saw the plans for one. So, I have decided not to waste time bargaining with you, but instead to enjoy your pitiful demise!

At this instant a massive ball of slime, muscle, and spikes, erupted from a nearby swamp. With the slyness and ferocity of a frenzied crocodile it pounced on us. "For the Numens of the Netherworld!" croaked a brutish voice in its own disgusting language. I, Johnathan, was shot through the lunges with a spike of poisoned slime. And as I riled in pain, and as my throat was gorged with my own blood, I realized with some relief that I was joyful. It was a feeling I had not felt in so long, for now I realized that I had fulfilled the mission that we had approached the ship for. I would be gone from this stolid cosmos! As the void wrapped its arms around me, and the abyss opened its mouth to reclaim me, and as my senses reeled in poisoned disarray, I found new hope. Maybe, just maybe, I will be able to jump through this vast paralyzing abyss to an exotic universe not in the clutches of heat death, a universe bright and beautiful.

"What happened to the humans?" Inquired Dr. Faustus.
"The aliens blew open the underground hatches, and they used the surface slime to penetrate the depths and kill off all the government officials. It was far better for them in the end anyway," glowered Mephistopheles. He continued: "The aliens recruited all the civilians who were not loyal to the officials (many weren't, since they had been forced to work long hours in conditions fit for moles), and together they raided the government stashes of drugs, and got so high that they made Cosmic Reavers look like an outdated form of universe travel. They all overdosed, and both species are now extinct."

(I apologize for the depressing story, the ideas for this happened to be bouncing around in my head at the time, (but thankfully no longer are) that is all I can say)

Turd Ferguson: A Retrospective

2009-04-27T06:24:00.000-04:00

Retrieved from the NPR Radio Archives, March 15, 2009-

Turd Ferguson, artist, author, inventor, theologian, and mythologist, popularly hailed "the last great polymath", died of complications from "too much genius" at ten o'clock last night in his Michigan cottage. He is survived by his wife and four children, as well as his spinster sister, Myrtle, all of whom were present at his death bed. Spending the majority of his life abroad, he took up residence in his American abode when the symptoms of the chronic ailment became acute. There he resided for the remaining years of his long and illustrious life.

Today, NPR hopes to in some part give back to the man who gave so much to us, in so many fields.

Born Robert Bruce Chmielewski, Ferguson first achieved international notoriety in '65 when the then 26 year old Turd published his "Anthologicus Multifaricus", a portfolio consisting of a graphic novel, a translation of Marrouf Roussafi's complete works, a patent, and a lengthy treatise nominally pertaining to mythology, but that has since been considered a ground breaking literary, theological, anthropological, philogocial, and philosophical text.

Like Athena, his Anthologicus saw the first light of public awareness fully formed and divine, which the college dropout Ferguson later explained he labored over for 3 years of relative isolation in a number of ignominious African and Near Eastern villages. Though probably most famous for his treatisicus and respected for his definitive mutarjamicus, the other elements of the portfolio show mastery of disciplines outside letters, perhaps most astoundingly his dymaxion home, closely followed by his novel "The Lost Years" which the Chicago Art Institute is currently featuring. By the end of the year, he was being placed between Da Vinci and Goethe. By 30 he was an honorary doctor many times over, as well as an honorary Swede, Nigerian and Jew. And, to the lasting chagrin of many, a millionaire.

This is Turd when he came on Talk of the Nation six years back:

"The Anthologicus nearly killed me. My bouts of genius would sometimes be so severe that I could do nothing but create amazingness for a week straight; only by the grace of God did I make it through. I used the various grants to, among other things, rehabilitate myself and try to avoid relapses. Many of my friends didn't make it out of those years, for me it was just a daze."

The newly financially independent and intentionally sterile Turd moved with his money, a few friends and family members, and new bride to the west coast of Ireland, where he and his father opened the "Caféicus", a ''restaurant devoted to art in all its roundness", specializing in frothed cream, crépes, and olive oil. It became the epicenter for a group of odd characters, a kind of democratic nether Gertrude Stein-esque salon. For Picasso's he had split pea soup and childhood friends for Hemingways. Amongst this motley millieu, the odd name popped up here and there throughout the years, perhaps most notably the polish mythologist, Lezzi, and the Zen Buddhist, Eugene Meatyard, but otherwise no person of note entered or exited the café from its inception. Little did we know that the Anthologicus would be Ferguson's first and last creative output. Some say he threw the rest of his life away. He was always dismissive of the critics.

"Up to '65, I knew what I could do. I did it. To me it still seems, my following years were much more productive. I still can't decide if the Anthologicus was in the end worth the effort. And no Emerson is going to affect my meditations on the matter. Listen, since the Anthologicus, I've made love to a beautiful woman, I've helped give life to four human beings, and I've fed thousands of people. People tend to believe that if something doesn't fit into an University curriculum, it isn't art, or it isn't great, or beautiful, but today, with God's help, I cooked a crépe that my sister Myrtle said was the most beautiful crépe I had ever made. And did she say, Turd, you should frame your crépe and send it to MOMA? No, she said, 'Turd, that crépe you made is almost as beautiful as your father's crépes were, and it looks just as delicious.' And then I fed my next customer with my crépe, with hershey syrup on top."

At this point, he explodes with laughter, and it takes us all a second to grasp his vulgarity.

That was quintessential Turd Ferguson, the ever inscrutable, often absurd, certainly genius enigma, who traveled from utter ignominy to instant fame, and back almost as quickly, occupying the rest of his life with coffee and poop jokes. Perhaps he will be missed. Perhaps future generations will doubt his existence. Perhaps the joke is on us.

- Anderson Cooper
(Anderson Cooper is an award winning journalist and author, best known for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

What do you think about communist goats?

2009-04-08T23:00:00.008-04:00

I will provide evidence here (rather than there) as to why communist goats are the greatest threat to society ever foisted upon this God given green earth.

The reasons are as follows:
1 They are communist
2 They are goats
3 They eat everything! (derived from 2)
4 They are anti-American (deductively proved by categorical and disjunctive syllogisms from the previous axioms)

Yes communist goats are a bane to the essence of America, and of freedom and of all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, and all things wise and wonderful: if you want to help come to this meeting:

"The IMMEDIATE PERIL of BOLSHEVIK GOATS to this country and the plot to destroy the American Federation of Labor and Overthrow the Government of the United States will be disclosed at this meeting by our distinguished guest, who has had access to secret sources of information and possesses positive evidence. (as opposed to depressing evidence) This mass meeting will undoubtedly be the most important, sensational and Dramatic meeting held anywhere since the Civil War (today's jerks don't mind their manners when fighting them). The Bolshevik League of Goats is of even greater importance to the American people today than the unimpending presidential election. This Meeting has No Political Aspect... No, Really! It is purely patriotic, given under the sole auspices of the Press Club of Chicago as the starter of a counter propaganda to kill of the scarlet Goat agitation in this country and its consequent evils. Someone other than me is not a candidate for anything, nor does this organization participate in politics. This is purely a Patriotic Meeting for every red-blooded citizen of America, particularly the working men and women. If a man were about to touch a bomb off under your home, you would be interested to prevent it. The most Dastardly Conspiracy in the History of the World is on foot to touch off a bomb under the United States of America and throw it into the vortex of a Revolution. If you think this is an exaggerated, hysterical statement, attend this meeting, learn the faces, and take a hand in this fight that is of interest to every patriotic citizen under the Stars and Stripes. You will hear one of the greatest Orations ever delivered; you will hear a recital of the most cold-blooded, terrible conspiracy ever perpetrated against any government. Fellow Workers--and this includes us--help save the Nation! Attend this Meeting! Advertise it! Make it the greatest movement yet started to thwart the Crimson Goats. Everything FREE! Come, and bring your fellow workers." (see original document)
(copied almost exacerbatim from anti-communist rhetoric during the war that never reached boiling point)

An Affable Alien's Allocution: PART 3 of 3 (Far out encounters of the curd kind)

2009-03-18T19:16:00.000-04:00

The aliens looked sloppy and sluggish as they awoke from their deep sleeps. Some had crashed on my couch, some on my floor, others noticing that they could make a particular cranny warm with a turn of a dial decided to sleep in my oven. Some were even hanging by their feet from main lines of the sails. It looked ravishingly ghoulish with their jagged bodies, green eyes and flipper like appendages sluggishly moving over the floor. It was as if they were dying... in reverse, since their movements grew less slothful with the passing of time. As one particularly droopy one slid out of my bathtub I thought that it was as if death itself had staggered to the gates of hell after a hefty meal; loosing his desire to ride his horse he instead resolved that today he would crawl on his mission to conquer the world of the living (he had been crippled in his childhood as he did not listen to his mother when she told him not to run with scythes). Not uncoincidentally my ex-wife was on my yatch too, for reasons I will elucidate shortly. Her mere presence poisoned the already deadly atmosphere engendering a respirability fit for the likes of Shiva, the destroyer of worlds.

The night before the aliens did not ask if they could sleep on my yatch, they merely gave me a queer sensation (through my hippo-campus neural pathways) that they would, and marched on board. They demanded a bed time story (or rather made me feel that they did) and I obliged them. I had a wide selection of 4 out of 5 popishly erudite books at my disposal; I thought that that would be able to please even their staggering intellect, but oddly they would have none of any of the classics. Apparently humans are so badly and haphazardly evolved that the only decent novel we have been able to write is the "Twilight" series which is disliked by almost all human critics. (The world of literature has really been turned upside down) I also soon found out that instead of them wanting to be read to, they wanted to "read" the book directly out of my mind. I told them I didn't have it in there, (as I had never read "Twilight") but that my ex-wife had. "Why don't you go and abduct her!" I told them, which they gladly did. So yes, now she is on my yacht and rather disorientated, which doesn't bother me in the least, her disorientation that is.

However, we are forgetting the substance of the story, which is: what exactly are these silly aliens going to tell me about how to solve the world's problems? Well, for that you will have to wait for the fourth post in the trilogy. Apparently when it comes to everything that humans have evolved awry, counting is just another one of those things.
TO BE CONTINUED..........

Painfully Bad Jokes

2009-03-11T11:22:00.000-04:00

I have not posted in a while, mainly because of frustration with school. This post unfortunately contains lower amounts of awesomeness than my other posts (less than lethal this time) but I hope to get back to writing about philosophy and science shortly, so don't expect to have a long life. Now I am here in the university computer lab hunched over my keyboard, the lights are casting a dull iridescence on the window, clashing against the epitomic ebon barrier of the night outside. However, lets not finish that thought..... I have a rational desire to recount my rampage of ridiculously bad jokes. All of the following are summaries of actual jokes, I and a few others have told, directed towards my room mate and his friends. (some retroactively (as opposed to proactively) edited to improve their badness) (I know that was a double parenthesis)

The school "Berria" sounds like a cheese, (kind of like Brie) It might be a guda idea to go there, although I am worried about swissing my major and making myself blue. Whatever happens I should remember that there are mozzarella colleges out there.

Room mate's little sister: "who are you?"
Me: "I am death, the destroyer of worlds!"

Room mate: *kills a creature made of rocks in world of warcraft
Me: "you rocked it!"

Room mate: *complains about anti polish jokes* (he's Polish)

Me: "Polish people? Oh, yeah those people who dance around poles."

Room mate: *playing medieval total war* "I'm playing Wales"
Me: "You are a whale."
Room mate: "Why is England attacking me?"
Me: "Maybe it's because they're going whaling."

Me: "I wouldn't want to use an axe against a pike."
Room mate: "Of course not, because they can swim faster than you."

Roommate: "I'm going to give you a steak for your birthday." (I'm a vegetarian)
Me: "Yay! now I can pitch my tent."

Roommate: "They are battering down my gates."
Me: "I bet that means they are going to deep fry them."

someone: "Do you have cable?"
someonelse: "no"
Me: "but do you have rope?"

professor: "....that's what algebra means, it actually comes from arabic."
me: "I thought algebra is what mermaids wear."

Programming jokes:

Vishnu::~Vishnu(){ cout << "And now I am become death the destroyer of worlds" endl;}

The following is an email I sent my friend after I got one of my programs to work
most of it does not even make perfect sense in that context:

/*
Unfortunately the proper namespace gave all the files std's.
After all the files were all infected they ran perfectly without any errors........very quickly as certain officials had initialized laws against that sort of behavior. However, they eventually came to their senses and realized that they could not escape.... characters who seeing them in their scopes declared that they would double their efforts to string them up. At first they braced themselves for a fight, but after being threatened with an array of weapons, agreed to compile and were executed without any warnings. Unfortunately I did miss the program, it really threw me for a loop and I had trouble functioning for a while not being able to think of what to do. It almost got to the point where I could not cout of my depression. However I finally consoled myself, after all I could not have considered all the variables in that situation, I was simply out classed. I eventually recovered when my psychologist gave me some pointers about getting more structure in my life, that's when I started to rebuild some things by taking a more constructor attitude and realized that it was not the endl;.
*/

Abdul Raheem

2009-02-28T05:10:00.000-05:00

well i keep meaning to post to this blog, but you know, some stages of your life you feel like gathering information, and at other stages you feel more like debriefing the information. recently I've been in the swallow a waterfall mode, but I think things have settled down enough for me to come up with something brilliantly enlightening, and one step closer to our stated goal.

all right, here goes. no more beating around the bush. this is it. on three.

Abdul Raheem is one of my roommates back in Agadir. I first met him when I returned from a weekend in Tamri, barging into the flat I interrupted his afternoon nap. He twisted around and blinked at me in confusion, then recognition (he knew I was coming soon) and went back to sleep while I plunked down to my two baguettes with jam and oil feast.

He isn't a fast walker per se, but he can practically run laps around the rest of the guys I know in Agadir, who plod along at a frustratingly slow pace. For this reason, and his frankness in discussion, I am fond of taking my evening stroll with him. I have heard his opinions on a wide variety of topics, and observed his reactions to a number of different situations, a few of which I have since found particularly striking.

One day, as Raheem and Hafedh and I sat at a cafe around a pot of tea, a Frenchman approached us, asking for directions to a certain landmark. Hafedh offered him a glass of tea, and a seat. After about ten minutes of friendly conversation, the Frenchman mentioned that he was going to Marrakech. Raheem asked if he could get a ride to the city in exchange for showing him around. The fellow seemed receptive enough, and we agreed to meet back at the same place in a couple hours. We never saw the man again.
As we finally decided to make the long walk back to the apartment, we passed a Moroccan girl, dressed in very western fashion. Raheem clicked his tongue and said something to her in Darija.
"what was that?"
"i think that girl is looking for a man"
"but what did you say to her?"
"lwahda sayeeb, it means being lonely is hard."
"i can't believe you said that!" - incredulous.
"why not?" - laughing.
"because, I mean, isn't that rude?"
"Girls like that, they like to hear these things. But if she stops to talk to you, she might be one who asks for money."
Then we both laughed. And I practiced the phrase.

I can't remember the context at the moment, but Raheem once told me a story about a time he approached some Americans who were visiting his village, hoping to practice his English with them. Before he could say anything the couple immediately snapped, "We don't have any money for you, we don't want anything and we don't have any money for you." I do remember that I had brought up the topic of the uglier side of tourism, he only offered the information as a case to a point I was making.

I find these situations more interesting in retrospect, as I have since had my first thoroughly negative experience with a Moroccan "vulture" as Habib calls them, and I recently read a series of articles discussing sexual harassment of female PCV's in Morocco.

When truth is stranger than fiction, and I have to use other writers' famous quotes because I admit that I can't think of anything better

2009-02-01T03:38:00.000-05:00

The purpose of my posts on this blog has been to elucidate the absurd, and by bringing it out in the open make it all the more absurd. However, sometimes you don't have to work to get it in the open, sometimes it is already sitting there on a laptop with two pieces of pizza next to it.

A few days ago one of my friends was a little careless before leaving my apartment. I came home and found the oven was still on at 300 something degrees, the freezer was ajar, his laptop was plugged into the outlet with bad wiring (the one I had oh so carefully labeled with a sign posted right over it) and two of my pizzas were missing. (he had cooked and eaten them with several of his friends)

Thankfully my apartment had not caught fire, in fact the only ill effects of his rampage were that I had two less pizzas and that the food I had remaining in the freezer was all thawed out. At first I was going to yell at him, however, I caught myself remembering the time he had lost his phone, a date which will live in infamy:

We were sitting there quietly when he burst in the door swearing. "Give me your fucking phone!" he says. My room mate's brother (I'll call him Joe) calmly asks "What do you need it for?". "Just fucking give it to me!" is the reply. (Finally our adult content warning is partially justified) Joe obliges and after a short dialing of numbers the room is again filled with expletives. The next coherent thing he described is what he would do to the people who stole his phone and the next coherent action he executed was to grab my room mate's battle axe and stomp out of our apartment. I ran out the door after him, thankfully he stopped and turned back at the bottom of the stairs. (maybe realizing that he wouldn't know who to axe, and that taking on the whole world might be a little much for him)

I exaggerate the factor this played in my decision to be calm when confronting him. I probably would have talked to him calmly anyway if this hadn't happened; however the virtues of not getting axed were certainly in the back of my mind. I also did not mean to sound like I was angry at him for eating my pizzas. I consider our fridge communal, (it is such a great fan of Mao that if you stabbed it's coolant pipes it would probably bleed red) but seriously I do, it is no problem.
However, the pizzas are relevant to the next part of the story, and this is why I have included them.

So next time I saw him, I calmly confronted him about his rampage and inquired about where my pizzas had gone. I asked about the pizzas not not to scold him but only to make sure a thief hadn't stolen them; since a thief that stole only pizza from an apartment would be a thief in need of psychotherapy, which I would feel very guilty for if I didn't attempt to help.

Anyways, later that same day, I came back to my apartment (I had just left for an hour or so to do some errands). I see this person sitting on my room mate's couch on his laptop, with two uneaten (as opposed to eaten) pieces of pizza next to him.
I say: "Hey, could I have the rest of your pizza?"
The response is prompt and totally serious: "If you give me a dollar"........
me: *bewildered stare*.
He continues: "Hey, nothing's free"............

In Defense of Censorship

2009-01-25T11:45:00.000-05:00

"There are moments when people love crime," said Alyosha thoughtfully.
"Yes, yes! You have uttered my thought; they love crime,everyone loves crime, they love it always, not at some 'moments.' You know, it's as though people have made an agreement to lie about it and have lied about it ever since. They all declare that they hate evil, but secretly they all love it."
"And are you still reading nasty books?"
"Yes, I am. Mamma reads them and hides them under her pillow and I steal them."

Sometimes people dont enjoy hearing blindingly obvious truth. Statements such as, "men and women are different", "some people do bad things", "humans are more important than cholera", "ideas are important", and so on and so forth, seem to get their hackles raised. They argue against self evidence from so many viewpoints of modernism and postmordernism, poststructuralism, existentialism, eastern mysticism, words that have been squeezed and stretched and aesthetically mutilated until they are completely worn out and don't even resemble what they were supposed to resemble, kind of like Michael Jackson's nose. And then they all bemoan how confusing everything is, and lapse into a comfortable solipsism and forget it all watching Seinfeld.

One of these truths that I have started to realize, in spite of the plastic surgeons, is that books can matter. Books don't exist in a vacuum, independent of author or the environment in which they were created, and books can change people. Now if books are indeed important, and have the power to change people, why is it not a logical second step to say some books can change people for the better and some books change people for the worse? At this point we adopt a patronizing tone, start rambling about the Bill of Rights and having discernment and whatnot and then circle back to our great country's inherent libertarian principles, and maybe throw something in about how much better written pornography is than television, and then waxing eloquent about how great an exception public broadcasting and al-jazeera are.

I can't help but feel like we are all Lise' mother from the above quotation, (And if you have read Brothers Karamazov, you would understand this imputation better) saying, "Well, there might be impressionable minds out there who were going to come unhinged or imbalanced or whathaveyou on their own, but that isn't the book's fault, and at any rate, we are mature enough to deal with the subject matter," when really we are just silly old fools who are at our best left completely unaffected by really dangerous works thanks to our own dullness, and at our worst we find them under the pillows of other old fools and find ourselves clever enough to be susceptible.

I don't have a good solution, I just thought I'd point out a problem.

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Polyphasic Sleep Day 4 (2nd attempt)

Polyphasic Sleep Day 3 (2nd attempt)

Polyphasic Sleep Day 2 (2nd attempt)

Polyphasic Sleep Day 1 (2nd attempt)

Polyphasic Sleep Day 3

Polyphasic Sleep Day 1-2

My Reasons for Retreat

Killing An Hour (time, like a life, will never be renewed)

On Intelligence

A Free Man's Worship (a beautiful essay by Bertrand Russell)

A Free Man's Worship

by Bertrand Russell

My Errors

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The Belief in "Progress", and How It Relates to The Second Law of Thermodynamics

"Starts with a Bang" on the Boltzmann Brain Problem

Indian Music Videos

A Short Summary of My University Idea

An Ode to Cheese

Don't Wear Your Seat Belt, You'll Get Hit By A Moose

Searching A String For A Date with Java

A Brush with Fate

People Who Disagree with Me Have Fettered Minds

I blame the color scheme

The Is-Ought Problem: Contra Kalganov, and whoever else disagrees with me

The Final Problem

IS my bitch=logic

The Is-Ought Problem: Thoughts on the ought

Newtonian Ethics

Email (screw the hyphen)

Arthur's Craziness Recipe

A Free and Completely Online University

The Callous Conservators: Does the greatest disappointment in our search for extraterrestrial life come when we actually find it?