Et in Arcadia Ego

The Airgate Effect

2012-01-20T16:47:00.000-08:00

I am a technocrat. It's taken me some time to reconcile myself to this fact, but I've come to realize that it's true. I've always distrusted representative democracy, at least as it's commonly practiced. Every political cycle, we hear rhetoric about a return to common sense. I no longer trust common sense. I've become a technocrat, and it's due to something I call the "airgate effect".

For those who don't know what I'm talking about: in the vicinity of my life, pick-up trucks are common. For the sake of future historians, a pickup truck is a form of automobile with an open cargo bed in the back. The rear end of the cargo bed is usually a fold-down metal gate, intended to make loading and unloading easier.

Many pick-up truck owners are dissatisfied with this situation. Vertical planes are bad, they reason. They interrupt smooth airflow and so reduce fuel efficency, reduce top speed, and so on. The solution to this problem, they reason, is to stretch a rubberized plastic net - an airgate - across the back of the bed in place of the metal gate. This, they reason, will let air flow through the gate and prevent the vertical plane effect. Common sense, right?

There are problems with this. The engineers who design picup trucks in Detroit and elsewhere have access to tools for dealing with problems like this. They can use scale models, wind tunnels, and computer simulations. They have test tracks. And, as it happens, they've solved this problem. The metal gate causes the cargo bed to be a mass of stagnant air. Moving air flows over the top of it without interference and without substantial drag. Replacing the rear metal gate with an airgate ruins this whole effect. Adding an airgate reduces milage and top speed.

Common sense is wrong. People who know things about things actually know things about things. Some topics don't respond well to common sense or to the vox populi. People relying on common sense probably shouldn't make decisions about whether Pluto is a planet, or how to build pickup trucks, or whether freeway entrance ramps ought to be metered. Perhaps those decisions should be left to people who know things about things. This is why I've become a technocrat.

The Value of Nothing

2012-01-19T18:34:00.000-08:00

In other news, Megaupload was taken down today. Dredged out are the claims that the corporations that own recording artists have lost x dollars over y time period.

How are those numbers obtained? What relation do they bear to reality? I suppose they simply look at number of digital copies transferred and then slap a price tag on them. But that, of course, ignores a number of factors:

How many of these people would not buy these products? Austrian-school economists will tell you that the value of something is what the market is willing to pay for it. For some of these products, the market has apparently decided that it wants to pay $0.00 dollars for it.

How many people have already bought copies of these products and are seeking a clean, easy-to-use version? This happens more often than you'd think: format changes, loss or damage to existing physical media, and the fact that the pirated copies are often easier to use or more reliable.

How many of the products wouldn't actually sell at a full MSRP? A B-movie from 20 years ago will probably not sell at the same price point as an A-lister released on Blu-Ray last week.

Some of these products are not available legally on the open market. I'm kind of a fan of abandonware games that are not available on the open market at any price. Other products have extremely limited distribution or are terribly difficult to get a hold of ("Repo! The Genetic Opera", I'm looking at you.)
...
Putting a price tag on what might have been sold is kinda loony.

Semper fi?

2012-01-14T14:11:00.000-08:00

Recently in the news has been a report of U.S. marines who desecrated the corpses of slain Afghani insurgents. Much give-and-take has been had and will be had on the subject, but there are some angles to this worth bearing in mind.

The readiest is an appeal to that fundamental maxim, "Be excellent to one another." There's a term floating around, about which much more shall be spoken at another time, as it's become foundational to certain schools of philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, and their extensions into politics. That term is "monkey sphere". To illustrate in brief, a person's monkey sphere is the social group towards which the person owes a certain standard of behavior. One doesn't steal from a member of one's monkey sphere, or deceive them, or treat them badly. From a strictly evolutionary standpoint, though, everyone else is fair game. The only limit to what you can do to them is what they can do to prevent it.

However, it's one of the conceits of ethics that one's morality can grow beyond one's monkey sphere. "[...]for you were strangers in Egypt", "[...]and love your neighbor likewise", and yes, even, "be excellent to one another." Moral enlightenment comes when we can grow our monkey sphere to encompass the entire world. Even our enemies.

Our moral aspirations, the "arrow of longing [we] shoot beyond [ourselves]", say that we can exceed our neurobiology. That we can treat even our enemies with respect. That being a moral human being means not desecrating the dead, even the hated dead.

"But," you say, "you yourself have in the past held up Achilles as the exemplar of a certain standard of behavior. A behavior you yourself have felt worthy of emulation. And Achilles desecrated the body of his fallen foe, Hector."

True, yes, he did. But remember, Achilles is an 'eros. He is not quite a god, but more than a man. He rages as the gods rage, and his slaying of Hector is as a deific act. Then Priam visited him in the night, and even Achilles repented. At that moment, he became human, and as a human, he became capable of shooting the arrow of his longing beyond himself. He could aspire to be a better person. Achilles repented.

Some have said that the dead enemy should be desecrated. That they "did it to us, first." Is that how we want to be remembered by this cold, uncaring universe once we are gone? As not being any better than we are, not any better than our enemies? Has the arrow of our longing fallen so short? Or have we forgotten to fit it to our bow? Surely we can do better than that. Nothing we do means anything, therefore what we do means everything.

What if we could imagine a new species of warrior? Ones who could mourn and praise the dead, even as they fall? "Teach us to care and not to care."
...
"If we do this, then we will show our ferocity." There is no doubt that fear is a force multiplier. When one must use force or the threat of force, then fear becomes a tool in the toolbox. The Assyrians built pyramids of skulls. The Mongols conscripted their defeated enemies to be fed into the maw of the next seige. The Luftwaffe fit sirens to the Ju-87 (and apparently the Galactic Empire did the same with the TIE fighter, in defiance of the conventional acoustics of vacuums).

But desecrating the dead is not a force multiplier. It does not gain one an advantage. One looks monstrous, yes, but not terrifying. There is no use for this is the mathematics of conflict.

Doing this sort of thing simply disgust those who would try to allies. It disgusts foes. In a war of signs and propaganda and ideology such as the U.S. is engaged in, the only victorious endgame is to make peace with the enemy. To remove the reasons the enemy is fighting. To paraphrase Lincoln, "I make my enemy my friend."
...
At the same time, this sort of behavior is predictable. War, as so many have noted, is hell. It takes its toll on those who fight it. In order to fight effectively, one must eschew being a man of peace, and become a man of war. "One who fights with monsters must take care that he not become a monster."

One must expect atrocities in war. There is no such thing as a war crime, because in truth, all wars are crimes. Because the sword is so terrible, one must always use exacting care in choosing to unsheath it. Acts like these are the ugly consequences of war, and one of many reasons why war must never be entered into casually. Even the living are casualties of war.

Sherlock, series 2

2012-01-09T18:23:00.000-08:00

One of the guys I live with has recently turned me on to Sherlock, the latest English reimagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. This particular series updates the legend for the 21st century, which is a fresh take. The basic stories have been rewritten, but are packed with sly allusions to the canon. Sherlock also continues the recent television meme of the super-genius investigator, drawing off of such series as House, Bones, Psych, Lie to Me, and others.

This is, unfortunately, where the series tends to stumble. The original canon tales carry with them a sense of wonder. They're set in the late Victorian period, when forensics was an emerging science. The study and classification of fingerprints was new, Bertillion had just started using his invariant biometrics, and the idea of investigating crimes after the fact was still something of a novelty. The Holmes stories carry some of their strength by their view of the monomaniacal, eccentric genius who is willing to study 143 different types of tobacco ash and so gains an advantage by doing so.

Of course, in the modern age, forensic science is a well matured field. The research has been done. Any competent medical examiner knows how to judge time of death, identify post-mortem injuries, examine blood pooling, and so on. Identifying the type and brand of cigarettes from their ash is now a routine job for lab techs with mass spectrometers. It no longer takes a supergenius to examine and draw conclusions from this sort of evidence.

Warning: spoilers for the second season of Sherlock follow. Assumption is made that anyone reading this will have seen the first season and at least the first episode f the second, "A Scandal in Belgravia"..

No really.

Consider yourself warned.

Oone of the fun aspects from the original stories that is still preserved is the Sherlock scan. Sherlock is still able to quickly scan people and determine their occupation, habits, and something of their personality. This, too, is a field that has developed over the last century, but still remains somewhat ad hoc. People transmit messages every moment that most of them are unaware of. How they sit or stand, the clothes they choose to wear, the words they choose, the constructions of their speech, their expressions... these all tell a patient and acute observer something about them. One of the delights of the Sherlock Holmes mythos is how he reads these signs (a sort of applied psycho-anthro-semiotics). This new series continues that tradition, even going so far as to highlight these observations with graphics that pop up on the screen as Sherlock completes his scan.

The other fun innovation in this new series is the attempts by people to fool or mislead Sherlock's scans. Irene Adler in this latest episode is a valiant attempt: knowing that Sherlock could read so much from her clothing, when she meets him, she appears naked. It works: Sherlock is apparently unable to read anything from her. A nice moment, narratively.

But should Sherlock really draw such a blank? He shouldn't. He may not be able to read the minute signs he's used to reading, but he should still be able to draw information. For instance:

Adler presents a body image that corresponds to contemporary beauty standards. She's slender and obviously not overweight. This is a body image that takes some discipline and effort to maintain.

She initially appears unperterbed by her nudity in front of a stranger, presenting herself somewhat brazenly. She may be accustomed to nudity in semi-public settings (we have already been told that she is a dominatrix by trade, so this is a reasonable conclusion); she wouldn't choose nudity as a tactic unless she were at least somewhat comfortable with it.. She flaunts herself: she may be intending on the shock value, eliciting confusion and possibly arousal. She's using both a breach of convention and sexuality as power. But within a few minutes, she sits in a chair, crossing her arms and legs, covering up. The nudity becomes more obviously a ploy; someone without a modesty taboo (a naturist or nudist) won't become self-conscious. She covers up because she feels vulnerable in some way.

Her nudity was a tactic, meant to shock and confuse. She knows Sherlock by name. Her nakedness prevents him from reading anything from her clothing or the way she wears it. She knows who he is and how he operates. She's making a deliberate bid to confuse him and restrict what he learns. This is useful to know.

Her hair and makeup are neatly done, which also argues against naturism. She's chosen a specifically blood-red shade of lipstick. This is an assertion of experienced sexuality. That particular shade also implies an assertion of power and control. As we already know, she's a dominatrix by trade: a woman doesn't typically blunder into the business. That implies a certain awareness and fascination with power and control. That's an interpersonal paradigm she knows and is comfortable with. This makes her somewhat predictable.

The room is an unremarkable sitting room. It is clean and uncluttered (a housekeeper is inferred). This is not an intimate room. There are no personal emblems on display, except a somewhat ornate mirror over a similarly ornate mantle that serves as the visual focus of the room. The prominence of the mirror suggests a reliance on appearance and seemings. Combined with the centrality of power and control, this suggests a pattern of interpersonal striving dependent on bluff and deception.

This is the room that Sherlock was ushered into, rather than a kitchen, a washroom, or a bedroom. The sitting room is distant and impersonal, which is at odds with Adler's nudity; more confirmation of a ploy. Sherlock has gained access to the house by pretending to be injured and in distress, a facade that Adler quickly penetrates. Once again we have an attempt to assert control by the manipulation of appearances: by penetrating Sherlock's facade while attempting simultaneously to avoid revealing any information transmits that a game is being played in which appearances are central.

And the above doesn't even account for that infromation which someone with the right skillset could derive from such things as facial features, calluses, skeletal formation (showing itself through posture and movement), static facial features, facial expressions, and so on.

All of this can be learned in just a few minutes. Much more information than just a blank because there are no clothes.

This is not the FCC's Fault

2012-01-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

Science education in American schools is in a disgraceful state.

A customer (and by "customer", I of course mean the product my company packages up for sale to our real customers, the advertisers) decided to call me the other day, wondering why he could hear Rush on his local AM station, and not Jason Lewis, his preferred source of conservative obfuscation. He seemed confused as to why the signal would disappear late in the day.

Here's how it works:

There is a layer of charged particles in the upper atmosphere known as the 'ionosphere'. The ionosphere reflects radio waves in the AM frequency band. AM radio takes advantage of this phenomenon by deliberately reflecting its signal off the ionosphere and back to Earth, thus allowing AM extend its range without a larger draw of power. This is why AM radio stations tend to be cheaper to buy and run, and thus less-popular formats like talk radio manage to be commercially viable.

The FCC is the quasi-governmental organization within the U.S. charged with managing the radio-frequency spectrum. One of the goals of the FCC is to prevent interference and cross-talk: two stations on the same frequency are not supposed to broadcast to the same geographical point, lest their signals overlap and become mutually unintelligible. Although digital radio, particularly encrypted digital packet radio, offers solutions. But that requires an infrastructure not yet in place.

When night comes, the ionosphere rises to a higher altitude. This has the effect of increasing the range of a given AM radio station, allowing it to cover more area. This leads to a tendency for more stations to overlap and come into conflict. The FCC counters that effect by requiring roughly half of the AM stations to power down or off during nightime hours.

Thus, one stands roughly a 50% chance of losing the signal to a given AM station as night comes on. The time in which that happens will tend to get earlier and earlier as the days get shorter. Short of drastically changing the composition of the atmosphere, altering the axial tilt or rate of rotation of the planet, or traveling off-world there is nothing at all that can be done about this. This is not Obama's fault, voting for Santorum or Bachman will not change this (although if either one takes power, I'll lay money that an an increasing number of Americans won't understand why they can't).

Whether one believes is an naturalistic process of planetary formation or prefers to believe in divine intervention, this is the inherent nature of the planet we live in. Denying scientific inquiry will not change this. No longer teaching science in schools will not change this. Stuffing one's head in a bag, ignoring the complexities of the world, and relying only on "common sense" will not change this. The funny thing about the natural world is that it doesn't care whether or not you believe in it. The solar system will keep doing its thing despite all of your denials, pleadings, or conspiracy theories.

The Origin of the Platypus

2011-12-28T13:23:00.000-08:00

It's 23:47. It's late, and the design and coding team is exhausted, strung out on too much caffeine, and a little punchy. Too many hours, too little food, and everyone's snapping at each other. But the Day 4 deliverables are almost done, and everyone's looking forward to getting a little downtime before the start of a fifth, gruelling, full day. The only consolation is, if they get everything done on time, they'll get a full day off.

Then the project lead slaps himself on the forehead. "We forgot Australia!" Oh, sh-. And we were almost done.

No time to do it right. Slap some tag-ends of code together, and give it a quick run-through to see if there are any flaws. Do a thorough debugging? Nah, if it works, post it and fix any problems in the first patch. But, as a bit of black humor, the design team makes everything deadly poisonous.

And so the world got the platypus.

A Tale of Karma

2011-12-16T20:29:00.000-08:00

In the West, we've forgotten somewhat what karma is.

The other day I was in a gas station / convenience store buying lunch. In line was a young woman, digging in her pockets looking for spare change. As she found each coin, she placed it on the counter, totalling them up in the end. She was buying gas: trying to get enough gas to get home, she said. The man standing behind her, unprompted, laid a ten dollar bill on the counter, saying, "go ahead and add this in."

I've been there before. Hoping that the fumes will be enough to get you just far enough. The stress and the worry is almost worse than actually running out of gas. Not having to worry about it for another three gallons or so can only have been a relief. An unquestionably good deed, follwing the age-old dicta, "be excellent to one another and party on, dudes!"

That's not the topic, tonight.

As is commonly used in Western pop culture, karma is the idea that if you do good things, some sense of universal justice will see to it that good things happen to you. "What goes around, comes around," is the cliche. More commonly in Eastern pop culture, karma sees to it that in your next life, you get what you deserve based on what you did in this one. Bad people become dung beetles and cockroaches the next time around. Again, universal justice.

But that's probably not what Prince Siddhartha had in mind. Karma is the ripples in a limitless pond, the echoes that spread outward from the locusof our deeds. The man in the gas station need not expect karma to repay him, now or in the future. But the ripples of his kind act undoubtadly spread out and have kept spreading. The young woman with the gas is freed from worry; perhaps she is happier. Later, when she arrives, her positive feeling prevents her from being short or angry with the people she encounters at her destination. They, in turn, feel better (or less worse) than they otherwise might. And the good deed continues to ripple outwards.

The world, then, is a pond that is unguessably vast. We don't expect our good deeds to return to us. No universal justice, no treasures in Heaven, no coming around of what goes around. The ripples have no reflection. But when we are gone, then the ripples may continue to spread and expand: our legacy. Our karma. "The signal's loud and clear, but the transmitter's gone."*

Right speech, right action, right livelihood.

Though the stars burn out, their light shines throughout the universe.

* Assemblage 23, "Document"

Uzbeckibeckibeckistanstan is important.

2011-11-15T20:15:00.001-08:00

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan...*

Despite what Herman Cain may believe, these places are important. I don't blame him for not wanting to know anything about them; indeed, in the West it's hard to find decent maps of Central Eurasia. The borders and the topography are inscrutable: rivers and mountains are foreign sounding and difficult to place. The Oxus, the Altai, Samarkand, Karakorum, Baikal: we have no references to these, and we can't find them on a map. This place is on the periphery of Western culture. Central Eurasia is the homeland of barbarians and nomads, forgotten places and forgotten peoples. It is the Other. The important cultural events happen elsewhere.

Or do they? A great grassland sea extends from Budapest to Vladivostok. Its green and amber waves wash upon five significant civilizations: Europe, China, India, Persia, Arabia. Over these steppes and prairies wash peoples, and with those peoples ideas, memories, and goods. Here on the edges of the legible maps of civilization you'll find Islam, Buddhism, Nestorianism, Manicheanism, Taoism, Judaism, and even the paganism of the great open sky all rubbing elbows in ways that their prophets and proselytizers never imagined.

These are the lands of the Silk Road, and of Marco Polo. The lands of Atilla, Tamujin, and Timur the Lame. These lands created the stirrup, the composite bow, and the curved sword. The brought silk, paper, and gunpowder west, and gold and silver East. The journeys of these peoples are at least as important as the travels of the Spanish and Portugese by sea in later centuries. But these peoples are all but forgotten.

Central Asia, the "Empire of the Steppes" as Rene Grousset puts it, has always been a land on the periphery. This is the land of the Scythians of the Greco-Roman period. Out of the sea of grass came Atilla and his Huns, who pushed the Goths westward and southward to trigger the final fall of Rome. This land gave us three beacheads upon the shores of Europe: the Finns, a people apart from the rest of Scandinavia; the Hungarians, who started out as the Magyars, but couldn't shake the reputation of the earlier Huns; and the Turks, who in their turn overthrew Byzantium, nearly came to occupy Eastern Europe, played a pvitol role in European history for 900 years, and who are still important to U.S. relations to NATO and to the Middle East.

It is these people against whom the Great Wall was built. The Khitai lent their name to northern China, remembered as Polo's 'Cathay'. Kublai Khan founded the Mongol dynasty of China, the forerunners to the Han. Before the Hollywood elite knew the Tibetans as an occupied people, they were conquerors of their plateau. It was memory of the pax Mongolia that led to the Mughal empire of northern India. It was the hurricane that repelled the forces of Kublai from Nippon that first bore the name kamikaze.

Because this sea of grass and sand is the buffer zone between cultures, it will play a pivotal role in the 21st century. We in the U.S. are in the habit of seeing Afghanistan as some sort of appendage onto the Middle East, peripheral to the culture and conflicts there. Instead, we might see it as a nearer wing of the vaster stage of Central Eurasia, a place where West meets East.

In recent years, Gitmo has been home to a population of Uighurs, people that briefly became the bane of Western newsreaders who called them instead "Chinese Muslims" because that was easier to pronounce*. Chinese Muslims? Chinese, perhaps, because over the years they've become Sinocized, and because a majority of them live inside the lines on the map that China has claimed. And muslim too, because in this buffer zone of Asia, many unexpected things are true. But do the newsreaders remember that these are the people who gave their alphabet to the Mongols, the people who served as councilors and advisers in the 'civilized' art of government to Genghis Khan, his sons, and grandsons? That they are muslim because under the Grand Khanite, there was freedom of conscience and freedom of religion? "The religions are like the fingers of the hand," Tamujin once said. Not bad for a barbarian.

In the 21st century, as in the last part of the 20th and before, Asia will be defined by four great powers: Russia, the Middle East, China, and India. The place where all of these powers touch is an ocean of grass, with amber waves of grain. Central Eurasia is important, and we might as well learn something about it.

* Nursultan Nazarbayev, Islam Karimov, Roza Otunbayeva, Emomalii Rahmon, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow respectively serve as presidents.

** It's "Wee-goorr", by the way.

Why Debates Matter

2011-11-10T18:45:00.001-08:00

Caller of the day: [paraphrased] "I don't understand why everyone is picking on Perry for his debate performances. I know lots of people who are fine in their day-to-day work who freeze when they're taking exams or certification tests. Having problems when he's center stage doesn't mean he can't do the work of governing."

Umm... I suppose, for thirteen days in 1963, if John F. Kennedy had choked under pressure, everything would have worked out fine?
...

There are those saying that the GOP is having to many debates. That debates among presidential candidates don't matter or shouldn't matter.

I disagee. While I have a certain distrust and dislike of organized government (much as I have a dislike and distrust of organized religion), if I'm going to be stuck with a federal government, then there are certain qualities I like in a president. Debates highlight some of them.

If there must be a commander in chief, let's have one that can think on his feet. "Nonsense!" some would say. "Presidents have advisers who provide information and suggest possible courses of action. All the president has to do is read speeches and make decisions." There's more to it, I think. Executives have to learn information, filter it, and make decisions. While taking information in quickly, they have to be able to filter it. Rats have to be smelled, biases detected, fallicies unmasked, groupthink disassembled, context gleaned and examined. This process is best done against a background of a diverse education. A chief executive who knows where Cyprus is, who knows what the issue is with South Osseta, and who knows who the president of 'uzbeckiceckiceckistanstan' is is better prepared to catch errors, find biases, and detect smoke being blown in his direction than someone who is limping along, leaning on their advisors.

A good debate will highlight that. It will demonstrate who can think on their feet and who is relying on canned responses. A debate will show who actually has numbers and facts ready to hand, and who can't go off script. It will illustrate who has actually opinions on things and who is following a party platform.

Debates matter. They separate the minds at work from the cardboard cutouts. And in the case of Michelle Bachman, debates highlight who is bats*** crazy.

The Kids are Newbs

2011-11-10T15:18:00.001-08:00

Let me start off by saying, I like a lot of John Cheese's stuff, and his latest piece for Cracked.com is no exception: "5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation."

But I'm not convinced of some of his conclusions.

We've slowly killed off most of the activities where kids get together with other kids and have fun (and in the process, learn how to interact).

There is a pattern since the mid-Nineties undervaluing online interaction. Ultimately, it seems to stem from a late twentieth century stereotype of the computer nerd, socially crippled, who interacts solely with dumb machines. Like all stereotypes, the picture is incomplete.*

The point being, interacting with other people is interacting with people, even if a machine or a network serves as a medium. When people interact, there are rules governing that interaction; the rules appear emergently, and are one of the foundations of culture. Follow the rules, and one is rewarded with social success. Violate the rules and reward is withheld.

Growing up is a process of acculturating the young. Children learn the rules of their culture, usually in a controlled environment that cushions somewhat their failures and attempts to make clear the lessons to be learned. Interacting with other children is a step in that process; children learn how to deal with one another, and carry those skills on to their adult lives.

That process still occurs in electronically-mediated environments, like Facebook, Twitter, online Foums, chat channels, Youtube comments sections, or X-Box live. Children (and adults!) are logging on and interacting with each other. In the process, they are learning the cultural rules. Indeed, many such venues have adults who, by virtue of social status if not administrative powers, find themselves able to reinforce successful social interactions and negatively reinforce unsuccessful ones. Online culture is still culture.

Indeed, there are dark corners of the internet where adult supervision is less-enforced, like /b/. In places such as these, savvy children, adolescents and young adults get to create their own rules. Remarkably, a social order of sorts does come into being. It may not parallel mainstream culture, but a social order does exist. In the process, children and adolescents do learn social skills and social savvy: much of my social interactions as an adolescent occurred in the local BBS culture. In a sense, many of my social skills were learned in that environment.

Cheese is correct: kids need minimally supervised fora in which to interact, learn social skills, and have fun. But the digital computing revolution hasn't necessarily killed that off. Instead, a local process has simply become more globally distributed.

This last is important. Networked communications and global trade have made the world smaller. An American in the 21st century will need to be prepared to deal with people from outside their own local communities: people who may not speak (or type) English well, who have different cultural assumptions, who have a different body of intellectual and artistic references. Interacting online gives children and teens a chance to learn to deal with a multicultural world. And that's worth learning.

* In the mainframe and terminal era, and before widespread telecommuting, computer users would frequently occupy labs with one another. As often occurs with people in close proximity, a culture formed, with it's own conventions rules, and slang. Many of those cultural and conversational conventions carried over to electronically mediated interactions. Over time, hackers generated their own culture: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

Religious Messages

2011-11-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

A pastor friend of mine once promised me, "I will pray for [her] and for you."

I'm a lifelong skeptic and lapsed atheist. I'm almost certain there's no man in the sky who answers prayers. There are those militant atheists who would find it hypocritical of me to let it pass.

But I did.

Even though I am not a Christian, I was touched.

Because what he said to me is not "I'm going to inflict a religious ritual upon you without your consent."

What he told me was, "I care about you, and I would like to help. I am going to do that which I believe is the most powerful, most personal, most compassionate thing I know to do."

And in that translation is everything.

So, my fellow skeptics and atheists, instead of being offended by religious messages and symbolism, let's try to look beyond the shallow meaning of those messages and find the intent of the message. The humanity in all of the god-talk.

Climate Change

2011-10-31T03:23:00.000-07:00

A reader has asked me to take on climate change. I've been ruminating on how to approach the topic. I'm not a climatologist in any sense, so there's not much that I can speak on about the science. Not that I've let a lack of academic credentials bother me before.

But I think the primary issue I have is that I don't care. Despite being an avowed leftist who attempts to think in terms of global systems, I don't care about global climate change. There's not much I know about it.

Here's what I do know:

The Caspian Sea is shrinking. This isn't purely academic, either. The Soviet Union stored radioactive materials on an island there, where they'd be safely out of the way. That island is now a peninsula. It's not just now accessible from the mainland, it is the mainland.

Lake Chad is roughly half the size it was when it was first charted by Europeans. The lake anchors the freshwater cycle of a great deal of West Africa.

The Sahara and Gobi deserts are growing. The American West is getting drier. Ranchers, farmers, and cities are squabbling over water levels in the Colorado River that drop year after year. It's entirely possible that the West is coming out of a wetness peak unmatched for the last 40,000 years.

The Tigris and Euphrates valleys used to be a framing area so rich that it anchored the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent. It's now largely desert and salt marsh. North Africa was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. It's now losing ground to an ever-growing desert.

The storied snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro are nearly gone. Glacier National Park is losing its glaciers. Continent long cracks are appearing in Antarctic ice shelves. The Arctic summer is increasingly ice free.

Mean sea levels in Bangladesh and Micronesia keep rising. By the 22nd century, both of those nations may perish from the face of the Earth.

All of this is local climate change. Some is the result of warming, others the result of desertification. Is any relevant to the debate on "global warming"? Maybe not.

But when you add up a lot of local climate change, don't you get a global climate change?

,,,
Let's talk a little bit about the carbon cycle. No, not this one, This one. Here are the basics:

Plants grow. Through a little miracle chemical called chlorophyll, they're able to absorb solar radiation and use that power to convert CO2 and H2O into various sugars. This process releases O2 into the atmosphere. Animals come along and eat plants and inhale O2, converting the starches in the plants back into CO2 and H2O and producing metabolic energy.

When everything is working properly, the two processes are more or less in balance. Carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, carbon dioxide leaves the atmosphere. Life, literally, goes on.

The problem is, that oxygen really doesn't care for being alone. It's a little kinky that way. Sure, those two oxygen atoms don't mind being in a relationship together, but if they can grab a carbon atom and pull it on in, they'd be much happier that way. Many current theories of planetary evolution suggest that terrestrial planets like the Earth tend to have atmospheres comprised largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. It's a popular choice, just look at Venus and Mars.

Earth is special. Earth gets to have free oxygen. By all rights, we should have a bunch of carbon in our air, much like our sister-planet, Venus. But we don't. That carbon is squirreled away somewhere. Where'd it go? Thank the plants.

It's true, animals eat plants, and so liberate carbon back into the atmosphere. But not nearly as much as could be there, because a great deal of carbon is fixed into plant matter. It's in the trees. It's in the soil. And since trees enjoyed a several million year long success story on the planet, a lot of the carbon that was formerly trees is in the ground: coal.

Animals have been helping, to be sure. Sometimes they die without giving up all of their carbons. Sometimes, when animals and other non-tree sludge dies, it gets trapped underground. It becomes oil.

Picture the Earth 100,000 years ago. Tons of formerly atmospheric carbon is underground as coal and oil. Tons more is built into wood and other plant matter on the surface. Other carbon is moving through the ecosystem: air to plant to animal to air. Everything is, to quote a recent decade, groovy. There's a sense of balance. Sure the pendulum swings from one extreme to another, from too much carbon in the air to too little. But there are plans in place, too much free oxygen and you get more animals and more active animals. Forest fires release carbon into the air. Too much carbon, and plants grow faster. Animals become lethargic and die off. The pendulum swings back.

But then a buncha' monkeys come to a startling conclusion: "fire good." Homo erectus tames fire, becomes adept at using it, lighting it, carrying it around. Trees start to fall; carbon fixed in wood is liberated back to the air. The monkeys start to have other bright ideas. Trees are felled to build things. Forests are cleared to create cropland. Logs are feed to the flames. Sure, a lot of the wood stays intact, keeping carbon out of the air, but with the loss of each tree is a loss of carrying capacity. That tree will no longer scrub carbon from the air. Whole continents are cleared of forests. Easter is deforested to roll old statues around. Minorca builds the Spanish treasure fleets. The Black Forest feeds German industry. Haiti kills its trees and wrecks its whole ecology and thus its economy.

Sure, a lot of trees give way to other plants. But crops don't fix carbon: they grow and then are eaten. Crops are essentially carbon neutral. Grasses and grains aren't the carbon sinks the old forests were.

Then the monkeys get another bright idea: dig the carbon out of the ground. Light it on fire. Release it back into the air. "What inspires in us this madness, that our existence should be defined / by a light that we can't see." The plants do their best, but by now they're outnumbered. The trees are dying. Their maritime allies, the algae and cyanobacteria and other oceanic plant has been poisoned; many by the carbon drilled from the ground and allowed to spill across the sea by clumsy monkeys. "We torch the Earth until it bleeds, rain ashes from the skies, just to make a light no one can see."

So the carbon climbs again into the sky...

PSGD

2011-10-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

To be added to the neo-logisms page:

Public school girls' disease (PSGD): The sad pathology of our culture wherein young women are trained to hide their intelligence, creativity, and critical thinking skills for the illusion that boys will like them that way. While many cases can be cured by exposure to higher education, too many bright minds are lost each year. We need to act now to stop the spread of this disease.

And any young men reading this? Smart girls are sexy. Learn this now.

(and smart girls in lab coats? Very sexy.)

The Philosophical Journey pt.1

2011-10-10T17:06:00.000-07:00

"A ship in the harbor is safe. But that's not what ships were built for."

Religious faith, political ideology, artistic school, all these are safe harbors. They protect from the elements: error, uncertainty, and a hurricane of questions. Food is plentiful, there are warm drinks and warmer company. But ships are not built to stay in harbor. Ships are vehicles of exploration, of trade, and if necessary, of war. A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

The ship of our philosophy was meant to leave port. To brave the stormy and restless seas. It's not easy: the food is short, the work long, the rum is always gone. At any moment we could founder and be lost without a trace. A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

So our ship of philosophy sets forth on the wine dark sea. We jorney from port to port, dropping anchor. We trade our goods: thoughts and ideas, questions and concepts. Some ports become centers of trade, the destination of hundereds of ships. Goods flow in and out. Other ports are samll, but vital sources of rare jewels and precious stuffs. But no matter how rich the port, how safe the harbor, the ship sails on. A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

From time to time, we are buffeted by storms, great gales that blow us from our course. From time to time, we find ourselves in uncharted waters, espying new headlands. Sometimes we even set out for these unknown quarters of the Earth, seeking new vistas and hoping to uncover new territory and perhaps even a wealth of new ideas. But even here we do not tarry. A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

"Tonight we light the fires, we call our ships to port. Tonight we walk on water, and tomorrow we'll be gone."

On the Religious Faith and the Free Spirit

2011-09-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

Uzzah spake, saying: "A ship in the harbour is safe from the storm. But that is not what ships were built for."

'God'? What do you Mean by 'God?

2011-09-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

The Christian says, “God exists, andhe loves me.” The atheist says, “God does not exist.” Thepantheist says, “all that is, is God.”

The philosopher says, “What do youmean by 'god'?” and “what do you mean by 'exists'?”

So what is 'God'?

I believe in unicorns. They aremagical, horse-like creatures possessing a single horn in the middleof their foreheads. Their touch heals all disease, and they can onlybe tamed by the virtuous and the virginal. The term 'unicorn'exists, it is well defined. Presented with a phenomenon, I caninstantly make the choice and say, “this is not a unicorn,”although I have never seen one. Unicorns exist; they are conspicuousby their absence.

Professor von Meeces.

Sitting next to me right now isProfessor von Meeces. He loves meeces to pieces. Professor vonMeeces is a cat. He is a phenomenon, a signifier as the semioticianssay, that corresponds to the sign 'cat'. He has pointy ears, a fuzzytail, and dainty cat feet. He enjoys wandering the neighborhood atnight, ear scritchies, and taking extended tongue baths (which is hiscurrent activity, as my hands are otherwise engaged in typing). Heis white with grey splotches on his head, body, and tail.

But Professor von Meeces is not 'cat'. He is a four-dimensional representation of the symbolic archetype'cat'. 'Cat' is the intensional defenition; P vM is a member of theextension. He is a member of the set of all cats: {..., Professorvon Meeces, ...} whose sign is 'cat'. 'Cat' exists, becauseProfessor von Meeces is one; he is a cat. He is also bored, andleaving to find something fun to do.

'Justice' is a sign, and intensionaldefinition. As such, it must describe an exstensionally defined set. There must be phenomena that are justice. But as Sir Terry remindsus, we may grind the universe as finely as we may, and we will notfind one particle, one molecule, one atom of justice. So althoughthe sign 'justice' exists, finding it is necessarily difficult. Wemust decide from moment to moment if any given phenomenon is in theextensional defenition of 'justice'.

So what of God? Or perhaps, to say,what of 'God'? God is a sign that points to phenomena, like'unicorn', 'cat', or 'justice'. But 'God' is tricky to define,perhaps trickier than 'justice', 'cat', or even 'unicorn'.

John of theepistles says that “God is love”. So perhaps by the principle oftransitive equality, we can sat that 'love is God'? Upon furtherinvestigation, we find that people use 'god' to mean many differentthings, at different times. So much is godlike, or perhaps indulgingin an archaism, godly. God is mercy, but also justice. God ispeace, but is also righteousness. 'God' is a semantic variable, itpoints not to a set of phenomena, to a set of signifiers, but to adifferent set of signs. 'God' means different things to differentpeople at different times in different places.

And so the philosopher asks, “What doyou mean by 'God'?”

WEIRD people and psychology

2011-09-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf

One issue that comes to mind is how does the scientific study of psychology affect the population itself? The practice of a the rigorous, ahistorical, scientific study of animal behavior (at least as modern psychology understands itself) presumes or requires the studying population to have adopted certain behaviors and attitudes: an understanding of inductive logic, the mathematics of statistics, the concept of quasi-objective study, and so on. The historical discipline of scientific research psychology has emerged from the WEIRD societies, and is practiced by non-WEIRD societies (like China, India, or Japan, perhaps) only to the extent that those societies may have adopted some features of the WEIRD societies. That is to say, for the WEIRD psychologists accept the work of non-WEIRD psychologists only to the extent that the non-WEIRD psychologists behave like WEIRD psychologists (especially with regards to concepts like rigour, validity, statistical correleation, strong vs. weak evidence, focus on quantifiable or measurable values, and so on.)

The problem extends to WEIRD psychologists examining members of non-WEIRD populations. Non-WEIRD participants must be able to understand instructions, understand the concept of participating in a psychological study, and so on. The latter here is significant; the findings of the Nuremberg tribunals (themselves a WEIRD social institution) require that all human participants in medical studies (usually considered to include psychological studies) must provide informed consent, which assumes an ability to understand what they are expected to do, what might be done to them, and what effects the study may have.

So it may be an inherent limitation of scientific psychology as it is practiced in the WEIRD societies that it can only study WEIRD individuals or individuals with WEIRD-like features.

If Relationships Came with Miranda Warnings

2011-09-13T17:15:00.000-07:00

(This has been sitting in drafts folder awhile)

You have been detained on suspicion of being in a relationship. Specific charges may be pressed against you later; you are not entitled to know what they are. You do not have the right to be silent. Anything you say or do at any time may be held against you. Any breath you take, facial expression, or eye movement will be used against you. Should you elect to remain silent in order to avoid self-incrimination, you will be summarily condemned as being emotionally distant, bottling up, and not communicating.

You do not have the right to an attorney. Your partner will be serving as prosecutor, judge, and executioner. Should you attempt to mount a defense, it will be construed as evidence of your guilt. You may elect to confess, plead guilty, and throw yourself upon the mercy of the court; doing so may increase the severity of your sentence.

The recollection and imagination of the court will be the only record kept. Anything you might have been imagined to say or do will be entered into evidence against you. You may attempt to indicate any mitigating factors; doing so will be used against you. Any positive behaviors on your part, now or in the past, will be used against you.

Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you? Doesn't matter; you're guilty anyway.

Rereading "Beyond Good and Evil"

2011-09-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

We sail right over morality, we crush, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage there -- but what matter are we! Never yet did a profounder world of insight reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers...

By redefining the origin of morality as arising from psycho-social responses to needs (needs of the individual, the tribe, and the species), and through those needs to the evolutionary causes that create them, we move "beyond good and evil".

...and the psychologist who thus "makes a sacrifice" -- it is not the sacrifizio dell' intelletto, on the contrary! -- will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall be recognized again as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems.

Nietzsche here suffers somewhat from a lack of vocabulary. The reference here is not simply to psychology as it is conceived in the modern world, that is as the science of animal behavior (accepting as we do that humans, as always, are laughing apes). In the words of philosophical idealism, "nothing exists but the mind and it's objects." To a post-Nietzschean subjecticivist, "all experience of reality is mediated by the process of perception." The vocabulary of semiotics might assert "Reality presents itself to the mind as an ongoing narrative. Standing between the individual and the objects in reality signified are the mind and the signs it grasps and manipulates." Psychology, here to Nietzsche, refers to the study of the mind, and thus includes the study of logic, of semiotics, of perception, of linguistics, of ontology, of neurology, and of the philosophy of science: that is, the mind and its objects.

More than that, the field of psychology itself has sown the seeds Nietzsche has planted here and elsewhere. Neo-Freudian and Maslowian accounts of behavior assume that animals (laughing apes!) have needs they must satisfy. However, there are usually barriers, obstacles, and constraints to overcome. The problem-solving processes present in opportunistic, scavenging omnivores (laughing apes!) exist to overcome those obstacles, avoid those barriers, and chart a path within those constraints (which might be physical or social) in order to fulfill or satisfy those needs (Neo-Freudian translations: the ego finding ways to satisfy the desires of the id).

All of the elaborate games we laughing apes play, including philosophy, society, morality, logic, mathematics, language, and even the sciences and the engineering and technology that unfold from them are simply a way to meet the elaborate web of needs and satisfy the tangled skein of motive. Ergo, in a sense, the physical and life sciences are obedient to psychology and social psychology.

Meyers-Briggs science

2011-09-10T15:09:00.000-07:00

After all, you know well enough that it cannot be of any consequence if you of all people are proved right; you know that no philosopher so far has been proved right, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark that you place after your special words and favorite doctorines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn gestures and trumps before accusers and law courts.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Uzzah spoke, saying: "My hoplites of Socrates, do not find for yourselves a hill to die defending, lest your sacrifice should prove hollow and empty. Instead, find yourselves a hill to take. Should your victory prove once again hollow, find yourselves another hill. When called upon to defend yourselves, follow the practice of the Grand Khan, fade into the steppes, and defend nothing. Simply wait until your opponents dig their trenches, and then gird yourselves for a new attack!

If, in the end, you find that you attack yourselves, so much the better!

It's said by some acolytes of the Meyers-Briggs that the most successful scientist and mathematician is the INTJ, for they will find an idea, defend it for their own, and strive to make it true. What then of the poor, benighted INTP, who attacks truths in pursuit of an idea?"

Welcome to the Hell of never being sure.

An Appeal

2011-09-05T03:01:00.000-07:00

Unsuprising to many, Google keeps stats on blogs her at blogspot.com. I like to look in on them from time to time. I find myself curious about the search terms some of you use to find my humble offerings. What is it that you were looking for that you wound up here at Et In Arcadia Ego? Did you find anything interesting or of use? No one is under any obligation to leave a comment here, of course, but if what you've found here tickles you somehow, feel free to leave me an email telling me what it was you found here, and why you were looking for it.

lord_carnifex@yahoo.com

My Disbelief Fell Off the Suspension Hook

2011-09-05T00:22:00.000-07:00

I just finished the 2009 film "The Fourth Kind". The film is a supernatural UFO horror film, told in a mockumentary style that attempts to interleave dramatizations with 'found footage'. Attempts are made to convince the viewer that these are actual events, with authentic footage. This is not unheard of with horror films; the 'based on a true story' claim has been around since at least "The Amityville Horror" and "The Texas Chainsaw massacre, with the "found footage" technique becoming prominent with "The Evil Dead" and "The Blair Witch Project".

However, it's difficult to establish suspension of disbelief here, because it's apparent that the film's creators only have a cursory understanding of modern psychology and psychotherapy.

To wit:

#1: People under hypnosis don't move around very much. Violent movements will bring a person out of a hypnotic state. Hypnosis is a form of mental relaxation, inconsistent with physical activity.

#2: Hypnosis does not enhance memory; but hypnosis does encourage confabulation.

#3: If reports of waking up and seeing an owl occurs repeatedly, the response is to ask the patient to keep a pad of paper and pen to record their observations during bouts of insomnia, not hypnotize them the next day and ask them what they remember.

#4: Hypnosis is an altered mental state brought about by relaxation and calm. Hypnotized people, even ones recalling traumatic events, typically do not experience significant levels of anxiety. This is part of how hypnosis can be used in the treatment of phobias and other anxiety disorders.

#5: Hypnotised people do not typically experience physiological transients like retching or gargling. If you wouldn't do it dreaming or daydreaming, you won't do it under hypnosis. A hypnotised person may choke, retch, burp, etc. as a response to a physical stimulus occuring in their physical body, unrelated to hypnosis, but that is not what is being depicted here.

#6: The main character initially positions herself as a psychologist engaged on a research project. Fun fact: despite what "Bones" tells you, psychologists are in fact scientists. Psychology is the science and study of behavior. Behavior that is observed, measurable, quantifiable. As a science, psychology operates on an empirical basis of fact. There is really no need for to psychologists to keep telling each other to focus on the facts. That's like MDs telling each other to focus on the symptoms.

#7: It's implausible for hypnotized patients to contort themselves severely enough to damage themselves. It may be physiologically possible, under exposure to significant stress and adrenaline or in the course of a seizure, to contract a muscle group powerfully enough to cause damage to the underlying connective tissue, but such a state is incompatible with a hypnotic one (well, I suppose it would be possible for someone with a seizure disorder to experience one while in a hypnotic state, but that would be a readily identifiable medical phenomenon).

#8: Speaking languages one does not know, levitating, and electronic disruption of recording devices are unlikely to happen during clinical hypnosis.

#9: Unrelated to psychology, the depiction of Sumerian language and culture is off. In a very narrow sense, Sumerian is "the oldest historical language", but only if one accepts that the defenition of "historical" includes "written down". Sumerian is indeed the oldest known written language, but is not the oldest language of h. sapiens sapiens. It is curious in that it is unrelated linguistically to any other known languages, but that is usually explained by the prevalence and dominance of the Semetic tongues in the area after the fall of the Sumerian culture. Sumerian is not the "holy grail" of dead languages, except perhaps to historical linguists and historians focusing on the Near East. Other researchers might be more interested in proto-Indo-European, proto-Dravidian, Mayan, or Minoan.

Of course, midway through the movie, the story comes completely off the rails... some how hypnosis summons the ultras(1), who then can communicate with or through the hypnotised patient in real time. The ultras here are inconsistent in their behavior - sometimes they float people through the roof (tidily repairing the damage behind them), other times they open doors and walk in. They apparently can communicate telepathically, but also speak out loud for the benefit of everyone in the room. The ultras here speak Sumerian, a language that a backwater psychologist in Nome, Alaska can somehow identify. While adding Sumerian is a nice touch, implying that the ultras have been visiting us for a while (and Sumerian mythology has some interesting star god aspects to it), there's little reason to expect any given group of ultras to speak a human language. It's also odd that the ultras speak a human language unchanged after 6,000 years, this is contrary to all theories of language change. Also, why would telepathic ultras speak a dead language to humans who can't understand it? Why not modern English?

Ultimately, the movie reveals itself to be entirely a work of fiction.
...
(1) We here at Et In Arcadia Ego prefer to follow John Keel and use the term ultra-terrestrial when describing a certain class of phenomena., and any putative non-human participants therein. Doing so tends to highlight certain commonalities regarding events recorded in many different places and times. Ultra-terrestrial events tend to occur at night, in sparesly inhabited areas.

Experiencers tend to be in or approaching an altered state of consciousness, usually one related to relaxation: sleep, highway hypnosis, flying at night over nondescript terrain, or engaged in a mindless repetitive activity (repetition relaxation). Frequently physical exertion is at a minimum (engaging the relation between physical immobility and mental relaxation).

From a distance, the manifest themselves as lights, less often as sounds. Movement through the sky is not uncommon, but such movement is distinctly non-newtonian. It defys normal intuitions regarding inertia or gravity. Circular swirling is not uncommon.

Upon entering the circumfrance of the phenomenon, a number of psychological effects occur. There is a distortion of the perception of the passage of time. Often, some form of paralysis or partial paralysis occurs (the known phenomenon of sleep paralysis is similar). Auditory, visual, and olfactory hallucinations may occur. Kinesthetic and balance may be affected, contributing to a feeling of flying, floating, or falling. Anxiety ensues, which may be induced by the experience or as a reaction to it; this may lead to feelings of fear, terror, or paranoia. Many experiencers report 'eerie' feelings, which may be the result of feeling anxiety with no readily identifiable cause.

Interestingly, the visual and auditory hallucinations experienced are resonant with the internal imagery of the experiencer. Freudian or Jungian imagery predominates in accordance with the cultural and emotional worldview of the experiencer: 20th century Americans tend to report 'encounters with extra-terrestrials', while Christians might recount meeting devils or angels. Prechristian peoples may have myths about the 'little people', the 'Elfreich'*, 'will'o'wisps' and similar. Often, the anxieties of the experiencer will become manifest: psycho-sexual encounters and so on. Barney Hill for instance reported his abductors as grey aliens wearing Nazi uniforms, something not unlikely to occur in the unconscious mind of a black man married to a white woman in the post WWII U.S. South.

Using the term ultra-terrestrial allows the recognition of the similarities of a number of cases, from faerie abductions in the British Isles, to witches Sabbats in colonial New England, to Incubi/Succubi events of Medieval Christendom.

* Origin of the English term 'eldritch'.

An Open Letter...

2011-09-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

...to the man who wanted me to teach him how to defend himself.

Everything I said to you was true. There is little I could teach you in two hours at a nightclub that would adequetly prepare you for your situation. I don't know the four fingered palm walking death punch. In a professional career, there has never once been a manuver or technique that worked out like I had planned it. Nothing works as it is taught in a dojo or gym. If I had tried to teach you an armlock or a kick or proper knee technique, it would likely not have had the result you wanted.

I told you that your best defense was probably to walk away. Keep fifteen feet between you and your opponent, and you'll probably be all right. The goal of a fight, as I told, you, is to endevour to ensure that your opponent cannot hurt you. If he cannot come close to you, you will have won. Or, as Abraham Lincoln is reported as having have said, “I should prefer to defeat my enemy by making him my friend.” Use that. Talk your way out of it. Find a compromise that you can both live with. Is whatever triggered the fight worth shedding blood over? Is it worth dying over? Is it worth killing over?

If it is, then you are in a much darker place. I asked you how commited you were to this; you told me that you were, that you'd do anything. Are you willing to go that far? Are you willing to decide that a fight is inevitable, and so to win at all costs? Would you strike first? From behind? With a weapon? Are you willing to set aside all concept of 'fair play' to get what you want? Can you set aside human restraint? Could you take the eye? Could you stand to feel bone shatter beneath your hands? Could you rip out another thinking being's jugular? With your teeth, if you must? Are you so driven by your demons that your only desire becomes to rip out a man's liver so he can watch you eat it before he dies?

I offered to refer you to some of the local schools that I think well of, but you told me you didn't want to live like a monk. All of the best fighters I know and have known do. Fighting is no simple matter, nowhere near as simple as it looks. To be ready to fight at a moment's notice means commiting your life, your mind, and your soul to it. Combat is the ultimate game, the ultimate contest. Strength, speed , coordination, endurance, stamina, toughness, balance, finesse, you will need all of these. You can't afford to sacrifice any, and you will have to strive to improve them all as much as you can find within you to do. You'll have to become a person who welcomes exercising in 90 degree heat, someone willing to do leg exercises until you feel like you can't stand up. You have to be willing to work through fatigue, through pain, and through injury.

Once you are here, you can begin to learn to fight. You can learn techniques and manuevers, not with an eye to executing them well, but to understanding how they're supposed to work. From here, you may begin integrating an understanding of how your body moves, and what you can do with it. Many things will begin to make sense: “When the enemy expands, I contract. When the enemy contracts I expand.” At that point perhaps I can teach you what little I know; how to move in straight lines to reach your goals, how to push opposition out of your way, I liken fighting to playing chess: develop your weapons, use them to take apart your opponent. Flow around opposition, turn your defense into an attack and your attack into defense. Drive at your enemy before he believes it's possible.

To the extent that you dedicate yourself to learning to fight, you will be darkening your soul. “He who strives with monsters must take care not to become a monster; know that when you gaze into the abyss, it also gazes into you.” Are you ready for that? Be prepared to lose everything you hold dear on one bad night. You must be willing to let go. One who fights to keep something is vulnerable; attachment becomes a weakness. Your destiny will be to end up a red smear across a stretch of pavement somewhere; you will have to content yourself with the question, “did I die well?” Your blood, your life must be meaningless to you; your question is “how many of the bastards can I take with me.” Your concern will not be to live through the night, it must be “will what I hold dearer than myself be safe?” Choosing this path will not take you to Heaven, but your consolation in Hell must be that you gave your all for what you believed in; that, because of you, others may in their own time reach a Heaven of their own.

There are dogs who grow up to be constant companions, loving and friendly. Then there are dogs trained to rip the throat out of anyone making a false move. Short of a very undeerstanding show of friendship and faith, the latter are put down if they live past their prime. The choice before you is the same one Achilles made: a long life in comfort and obscurity, or a quick death on the fields of Illium. The choice is yours. Do you still want me to try to teach you to fight?

The Amanda Morgan Principle

2011-08-31T13:54:00.000-07:00

Drawn from Dickson's "Lost Dorsai":

"In fact, there isn't any such thing as a solution that could be made in time, isn't that right?"

"No, absolutely wrong. If we could stop the clock at exactly this second and take some months to study the situation, we'd undoubtedly find not one, but several solutions that would abort the attack of the regemints in the time we've got to work with. What you lack isn't time in which to act, since that's merely something specified for the solution. What you lack is time in which to discover the solution that will work in the time there is to act."

Everything I Needed to Know in Life...

2011-08-30T19:45:00.001-07:00

... I learned from cyberpunk fiction:

1) Information once introduced to a database or network is never removed.

2) When people have a world of information at their fingertips, one can hide signal among the noise. If they never look for you, they won't find you.

3) Encrypt everything.

4) Make sure you're sharing only what you mean to share.

5) View all digital connections with distrust.

6) Become comfortable with alternate identities, anonymity, and cash.

7) Communities are distributed.

8) The future is portable. Geography matters less.

9) Identity is fluid and malleable.

10) Concepts like beauty, history, truth, and morality are community derived, not monolithic or ahistoric.

11) One will have to adapt to changing technology, and adapt changing technology.

12) People must be self-governing.

The Ongoing Nym Wars.

2011-08-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/22/dispatch-from-the-nymwars-pseudonyms-and-science.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

A decent article, but missing some points, I think.

For one, the ability to publish anonymously is tremendously important for scientists. I know, I know, science is supposed to be an open process, where due credit is claimed and given, where if one believes in one's research, one should be glad to put one's name on it. But there remains to problems: money and ideology.

In science, it is important to go wherever the results lead. One does not publish results that are wrong, nor withhold them because they are unwanted. However, if one is doing work in highly contested fields, like climate change, or environmental chemistry, or drug biochemistry, there is tremendous pressure to come up with the right results: those that the powers that be would like to see. In such cases, the availability of anonymity is crucial. Sometimes, only through anonymity can one publish results that go against the current conceptual grain without fear of reprisal.

But what about accreditation? Surely, one's results don't mean anything unless one can prove one's background, education, degrees, and credibility, right? Astonishingly, no. A well written scientific paper will describe the experimental set up in excrutiating detail. Every step, from experiment construction, insturmentation and apparatus, gathering of data, analysis, and presentation ought to be detailed and explained. At that point, it really shouldn't matter so much if one holds multiple Ivy doctorates or just a lazy day in the back yard. Results are results, and any critique with the experimental or observational set up can happen on that basis.
...
It is not just scientists who benefit from access to anonymity, either. There are those of us whose professional and personal lives are somewhat distinct. When I am at work, I attempt to behave in a calm, professional manner. I keep my opinions reserved to myself, especially where they may be at odds with those of my superiors, clients, and customers. But, being human, and Irish, and a philosopher by habit, I do have opinions. Sometimes I am driven to express them, but it would be infeasible for me to do so in a forum where they can be traced and attached to my professional persona.

On a regular basis these days, we are cautioned about not posting anything to a social media site that we might be embarrassed about later. And this is of course, true. But judicious use of anonymity allows for a certain amount of discretion to be exercised. Avoiding publication of photos, or unique identifying information allows a certain separation that is invaluable in the modern world.

Curse Google+ then, for their insistence on "real names" for their profiles. As if their machinery and machinations were capable of deciding on what is a real name at what is not. There are those individuals, some bearing a nom de electronique years in the making, that are forgoing participation in avoidance of being "outed".*
...
There is a certain arrogance in learning a person's name; a forced intimacy. We assumke that knowing a person, knowing their position in life, their state and status is the same as knowing their inner life. Yet the two are not always connected. Readers of Et In Arcadia Ego know much more about me than they might learn from my given name. Really, knowing my official persona is a masquerade of intimacy. Those who stumble upon me here, or at my new social networking account, or on any of the various online fora I frequent would do better to read my words and ponder them than to ask what my "real name" is. Even better, let's engage in a conversation, and we'll know each other better than a number of given names could say.
...
At a deeper level, pseudonyms are an inherent human need. We adopt various personae to mediate our interactions with the world. We choose, from moment to moment, which persona is to be shared with which others. For many, there are certain aspects of personality, or history, or intellectual life that are not to be shared with all comers. We pick and choose which to conceal and which to reveal, and it is not for any to force an unwelcome intimacy.

Each of us is unfathomable, we contain multitudes. The masks we choose to wear, and the roles we choose to play are how we converse with the world. To attempt to know someone by penetrating their persona is unthinkable, like attempting to know the entire night sky all at once.

*Incidentally, I recommend a revolt. Rather than allowing google+ to delete our profiles, I nominate that all of us unwilling to give up our anonymity adopt the pseudonym "Nicholas Bourbaki".

Thus Uzzah spoke

2011-08-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

Uzzah spoke, saying, "Ask not a philosopher any question, for he shall respond simply, saying ' I don't know. Maybe? It's complicated. What did you mean by that?' "
...
"To recognize untruth as a condition of life -- that certainly [or certainty?] means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil."

Not just beyond good and evil, my friend Zarathustra. Behind good and evil, as the best love of Aristotle was behind the physics.
...
If life becomes uncertain and full of doubt, where then do we place science? If even scientific truth is simply a mask for doubt, what then? Science becomes untethered, free to float upon the currents. But the wind that drives it is our invisible friend, philosophy.

"Philosophy makes science its bitch."

A Really Bad Idea

2011-08-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

For years, we've had various psuedo-reformers making a lot of noise about getting the corruption out of Washington, D.C. A lot of the focus has been on somehow getting into the system with a wire brush and scrubbing all of the money out. Unfortunately, the late Citizens United case has made that difficult, ruling as it did that corporate donors are permitted to give unlimited funds to influence campaigns.

We say we want campaigns to be about issues, not money. We say that political donations are akin to bribery and influence peddling. We try to outlaw quid pro quo arrangements, forbid mixing a candidate's personal and campaign funds. We limit the contributions that can be made to candidates, but allow "issue ads" to be funded, as if there were some sort of difference. It's said that a member of the U.S. house of representatives must raise $10,000 per week just to run for re-election. Money in politics is like water on the sidewalk, it always finds a way in.

Meanwhile, the primary process is gearing up for the 2012 coronation. President Obama is unchallenged on the Democratic side, but right now, there are twelve or twenty G.O.P. candidates each trying t get some sort of edge. As I write this, we're just out of the grand, meaningless Iowa straw poll, but any actual meaningful electoral activities are still months away.

The media, not having much to report on, is indulging itself in polls and statistics. We're told, week by week, day by day, sometimes hour by hour what representative samples of the populace think about the candidates. Pundits try to capture vague metrics for concepts like "support" and "momentum". And one of the metrics they like to track is money: who has raised how much how fast.

It's an important measure of political support. People like what a candidate is saying, so they send money. Big donors want stuff, so they back the candidate who best promises to give it to them. "If you can't drink their booze, take their money, and then vote against them, you don't belong in politics." they say. The money is important: money is speech, we're told. The money pays for ads, and appearances, and hotel rooms and airplanes and everything the candidate needs to get elected. The more money a candidate has raised, the more people like him.

Meanwhile, everyone complains about taxes. No matter what bracket you're in, taxes are too high. Or they're not high enough for somebody else. The government spends more than it takes in, and is drowning in red ink. One of the most divisive issues is the nature of government itself. How big should it be? Can we reduce the size of it by starving off the funding? Everyone seems to agree that deficits are a bad thing, but no one seems to know how to deal with them. Many people want smaller government, as long as their particular sacred cows aren't gored. "Get your government hands off my medicare!" or "If we cut defense and homeland security, terrorists will kill us all!"

So here's a really bad idea. Instead of trying to get money out of politics, let's let it all in. Instead of scrounging in budgets and tax plans for money, let's go to where the money already is. Let's merge the government budget process with the campaign finance process. Let's let candidates solicit unlimited money from anyone they want: people, corporations, unions, foreign nationals, other governments, anybody. But that's it. No taxes, no other revenue. What money a candidate has in the war chest at the end of the election cycle goes into the general fund.

The more a candidate spends on getting elected, the less he'll have available for kickbacks at the end of the cycle. No more contributing money to the guy who will cut your taxes or forge loopholes for you, because it'll be the same thing. Spend your money on the guy who will use it the way you want, not on the guy who will cut you the biggest deal once he's in office. The more popular a candidate is, the more money he'll get to play with to implement his policies. We'll all finally get the government we pay for.

How about it?

In the Works

2011-08-20T08:03:00.001-07:00

Coming up here at "Et in Arcadia Ego"

More analysis of "Ten Reasons Why Evolution is Wrong"

Six ways that the Patriot movement thinks and sounds like a bunch of Marxists.

and more...

Real Soon Now.

Rules for Reactionaries

2011-08-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of electrons molested in the conservative and patriot press lately about Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. President Obama has cited the man and his work as one of his inspirations both in his career and on his campaign trail. Conservatives are predictably up in arms about it, as if it were somehow out of bonds to talk about successful strategies for community organization, but accusing liberals collectively of treason is fine.

What amuses me is the swath of tea-baggers, pseudo-libertarians, and Johnny (Tremaine)-come-lately patriots up in arms about it. Where have you guys been? You like to proclaim yourselves the heirs of grass-roots political activism, but you'll completely ignore a reasonable work on the subject. Seriously, do you guys not realize how much like Marxists, Wobblies, and Progressives (the early 20th century kind) the lot of you already sound like to me? Why throw out a book that speaks to the very tactics you claim to be promoting?

Really, is there that much of a difference between Saul Alinsky and Judith McGeary? That much of a difference between Ian Freeman and Jerry Rubin? Is there a meaningful distinction between Ron Paul's Revolution for Liberty, and the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey? Stop reading self-righteous, self-absorbed tracts on libertarian economics and maybe look into the works of the people who have preceded you. Ever wonder, in the midst of all of your self-righteous, unthinking condemnation of communism, why Marxist-Leninism was the single most successful revolutionary ideology of the 20th century, with a message that spread from industrialized Germany to developing Russia to the agrarian economies of East Asia and South America? Stop burning books and try reading them.

Evolution and Morality

2011-08-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

"I believe in evolution. I don't believe in morality. It's survival of the fittest... if I see something I want, I take it until something bigger than me comes along."

Nice try, sir. Bravo! Very Hobbesian... "the life of a man in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short."

Except that evolution doesn't work like that. More importantly, natural selection doesn't work like that. For one thing, natural selection simply isn't interested in the survival of the individual, except insofar as the survival of the individual helps promote the continuation of the species. This has a couple of important consequences (yes, we'll get to morality in a bit).

Sexual reproduction has long shown to be a strong strategy for the continuation of species. Sexual reproduction induces variation, which allows a species to better fill more niches in the environment, adapt to changes in the environment, or to reinforce and preserve advantageous variations that have already been expressed. Reproduction is a good thing, evolutionarily speaking, and so is sex.

But sex (at least for mammals, reptiles, and avians) requires more than one member of a species to get together. A lone male by himself cannot reproduce, neither can a lone female. They have to find a way to find each other and co-exist for a bit for sex to happen. "So why can't one of them, the male perhaps, just take what he wants?" Good question, seems reasonable. A little of the ol' rape makes the world go 'round. The truth is, though, that outside of some communities of Republicans, most females are capable of fighting back. They can claw, they can bite, they can run, they can hide. And while making the male overcome a few obstacles can be good for the species, there's a limit. If the female becomes too hurt, too tired, or otherwise unable to give birth to offspring (fertilized eggs for reptiles and avians, live offspring for mammals), then there's no continuation of that genetic line.

So it helps if the female wants it, at least a little. Maybe not all the time, maybe not with any particular male, but for most species of reptiles, birds, and mammals have to be able to co-exist with another member of their species long enough to make a love connection. They have to be able to do the nasty without it getting too nasty. So sex isn't all taking; there's some giving going on there as well.

But of course, that's not where morality really comes in. Because natural selection throws our amoral believer in "evolution" for another loop. That new twist is co-operation. Animals of the same species working together for their mutual benefit and the survival of their species.

Crows form murders, wolves form packs, cats form prides. Even herbivores get into the action, with herds and flocks. Apes, bless their anthropomorphic hearts, band together in troops. Humans build clans and tribes. In each case, evolution has provided each group of animals with some rules for getting along. Share food. Don't arbitrarily get in fights with other members of your pack, pride, or troop. Participate in group food gathering or hunting. Share child rearing duties. Establish a co-ordinated strategy for group defense. Maybe establish some vague system for who gets to reproduce with whom.

And it works. Individuals who follow the group's rules get to enjoy the benefits of group membership. Individuals get their needs met, and the group and the species goes on when individuals die. We know these systems work, because we see them work. Our theories of evolution tell us that if co-operation weren't a viable strategy, then any species that tried it would die out. And yet they haven't. Co-operative groups are all over the animal world. Each group has rules that their members follow.

The natural origins of morality.

Pick Up Lines in the Wikipedia Age

2011-08-06T15:42:00.000-07:00

So, I was reading about cheetahs the other day. Apparently, they have a hard time breeding in captivity. You see, when a female cheetah goes into heat, she'll attract one or two willing males. Then she'll take off running. The males will chase her; this chase can last for two or three days, and cover over a hundred miles sometimes. Until finally, one of the males catches her and has his way with her.

That being said...

Start running.

Socratic Humor

2011-07-19T21:33:00.000-07:00

Freshman philosophy professors will sometimes discuss 'Socratic irony'. They'll maintain that Socrates would start discussions with people, asking them questions and arguing with their answers. According to these professors, who are only repeating what their elders taught them when they were freshmen, Socrates would pretend to be ignorant and ask questions in order to goad his opponents into trapping themselves into a contradiction. The irony here is supposed to be that good ol' Soc would only be pretending to be ignorant in order to expose the flaws in the thinking of those around him.

Freshman philosophy professors are known for their lack of imagination, and their absolute certainty in their lack.

Reading the dialogues of Plato, especially if you can get your hands on un-bowdlerized versions is revealing. The whole point of philosophy is skepticism - doubt. The constant gnawing away at what you think you know until you discover once again that you don't know anything you thought you did.

Let's not fool ourselves either. I'm not talking about poor bewildered Descartes, pretending in his Meditations and his Discourse on Method to forget everything he thinks he knows so he can start over from the beginning and rediscover everything he was trying to prove in the first place.

Reading through the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and even the Republic, we don't find a simple Socrates determined that he knew better and that he'd show everybody else how wrong they were. We find a lost soul, a man who thinks he might have a clever idea, but who is tormented by the Hell of never bieng sure. He begins dialouges with the others not necessarily with the sole goal of leading them into contradiction, but as a man haunted by the hope that someone else might hold the key to the certainty he's never had. When it comes Socrates's time to hold forth, one reads the air of a man who - if only to himself - adds a question mark to the end of every phrase and every sentence.

But alas, Socrates is truly the wisest of the Greeks, who knows that he knows nothing. Searching as he is for a mind that can set him onto the path towards certainty, he meets only those whose certainty rings hollow. They do not know that they do not know. So he mocks them. Throughout the Apology, he mocks them. Socratic sarcasm, directed at those whose false certainty leads them to judge his uncertainty as blasphemous and unworthy.

But this is not all of the humor of Socrates. The Symposium, a discourse on the nature of beauty itself begins with the participants praising and comparing the relative charms and f***ability of the young men about them, like construction workers on lunch break at a college campus. These are not ivory-tower dwelling ascetics divining the nature of virtue; these are randy guys at a strip club or bar talking dirty. The Republic begins with Soc and friends coming back from a parade, discussing when the last time each took a turn in the sack.

In the other dialouges, we see Soc on the street, battling it out like some casting-call reject from West Side Story. This is not a proud academic. This is a guy looking for truth by chatting up column fluters and midwives, artisans and workmen. Sure, from time to time he'll rub elbows with tyrants, kings, and demogouges, but he'll talk Love, Virtue, or Justice with anybody who'll show up. He's not waiting for someone to holdup a sign, saying "it's philosophy time now, so everybody put on your thinking caps." For Socrates, any time is a good time for philosophy.

So the next time someone starts babbling nonsense to you on the bus, just remember: that may be ol' Socrates, keepin' it real.

The Fire of Language, the Light of Words

2011-07-16T07:53:00.000-07:00

Hom hum. Another scientific paper; another scientific paper written by someone who was too dedicated to Science! to pay attention to liberal arts classes. "...and this will show", "this shows....", "has shown..." Show, show show, show, show, show... like a demonstrative but plodding metronome.

Writing, even technical writing, doesn't have to be like this. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug," observed Mark Twain. It's possible to sit down and write like a workman reaching for familiar tools; but it's also possible to write like J. S. Bach expanding three notes into an etude that dances through a universe of possibilities.

Why not, every once in a while, stop showing us things? There are alternatives.

"from this it is obvious that..." Mathematicians and logicians love this one. You'll usually see it signaling the most inscrutable step of the argument or proof. There's an implicit challenge inherent in "it's obvious that..." It's obvious to the writer, obviously; why isn't it obvious to you, dear reader? Are you some sort of mouth-breathing cretin who can't follow the simplest of steps? If it's obvious, obviously the writer is correct. Sit down and learn something, schmuck.

Then there's a Latin duo. Latin's a lovely language; sometimes when you've got a nice concrete word, you can throw any number of prepositions on it as prefixes to create a wealth of new, abstract words. One example is 'planus' meaning a level plain. 'Ex' is 'from' or 'of' or 'out of'. 'Ex+planus' = explain. To explain a thing is to take it from a clear, level plain where everyone can see it. 'Planus' is also where English gains 'plan'. 'Explain' means to unfurl, to smooth out; as if unrolling blueprints or an agenda onto a table so as to take ideas from it.

'Plicare' means to fold or to braid. 'Ex+plicare' is to take something taken out of a fold, as if taking it from a pocket. Explicate is our English derivative. If a thing has many folds, many wrinkles, and is hard to understand, then we have many folds together. 'Cum' = 'with', 'cum' + 'plicare' is to be with folds; to make a thing complicated. If we fold something many times, we will have done 'multi' [many] + 'plicare' = 'multiplication'. But that's okay. Once those folds are taken out, and the thing is unfolded, we'll have 'a' [without] + 'plicare' = 'aplicare'... an application. The folded thing becomes of use.

Elucidate. This one's on the rise, as it ought to be. From 'lucid': clear, simple; ultimately from the Latin 'lux': light. You, dear reader, have been stumbling in a murky darkness, but I, the writer, will elucidate what you have not understood. The fogs will part, light will shine through, and you will see clearly. "I once was lost, but now am found / was blind but now I see." 'Lucid', related through 'lux' to an old friend of ours, the Light Bringer, Lucifer. He, who in myth, brought to humanity knowledge: the knowledge of good and evil. 'Lucifer', also an archaic English word for a match: a dull wooden thing that, with friction, spontaneously brings forth fire and light

Speaking of fire and light, we also find illuminate. From the Latin 'lumina', meaning 'glow'. In the dark days after the fall of Rome, the light of knowledge was lost to the Western world. Those preservers of the heritage of Augustine, the Clunaic and Benedictine monks tended the banked embers of Western thought. And to accompany the black and red words scribed so carefully upon yellowed pages, they added pictures. Pictures of startling color, elaboration, and clarity. They called these drawings illuminations.

Later, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin would write a new doctorine for mystical Freemasonry and neo-Gnosticism. To describe the surge of knowledge granted to the initiate, he chose 'illumination'. Following his lead, Adam Weishaupt would choose to name his organization - dedicated at first to clarity of thought and an eschewing of clouded superstition - the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria. They would go on to influence Mozart, and would be some of the first patrons of Beethoven as he brought new light to Western music.

Speaking of pretty pictures, we come to illustrate. From the Romance 'illustare': to draw, but drawing from the Latin 'illus': this + 'lustare': to shine up, to polish, to brighten. To illustrate something is to allow light to reflect and define.

Well written scientific papers don't have to sink under their own gravity. Instead, they can float with levity, as a tissue of language dancing over the fire of words. Don't show me anything anymore, c'mon baby, light my fire.

Koans of Doubt

2011-07-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

"The wisest of all the Hellenes is Socrates."
-the Pythia of Delphi

"If I am acclaimed the wisest of the Hellenes, it must be because I alone know that I know nothing."
-Socrates
...
"Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation..."
-René Descartes
...
" 'I became incredulous. Or I regretted having been credulous. I began to doubt.' "

" 'Fool! Only the true initiate knows that he does not know!' "
-Umberto Eco
...
"To defend everything is to defend nothing."
-Frederick the Great
...
"Those who are filled with emptiness
Need not fear tigers and rhinos in the wilds,
Nor wear armour and shields in battle;
The rhinoceros finds no place in them for its horn,
The tiger no place for its claw,
The soldier no place for a weapon,
For death finds no place in them."
-Lao Tzu
...
"Like faith needs a doubt, like a freeway out."
-Bono
...
Take up the armor of Socrates, my friends.
-Uzzah the Ox-cart driver

Germans can't do comedy?

2011-07-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

Normally, I prefer to avoid dumping links and running, but I literally fell on the floor at this. Not for everyone, but if you've ever had to read Kant, Kierkegaard, or Heidegger (but not Nietzsche. Nietzsche is actually quite funny, but puns don't translate well...)

Stars at 3:01 - http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/391553/july-11-2011/tip-wag---john-lennon---german-humor

Some modern koans

2011-07-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

"A second of reflection can take you to the moon
The slightest hesitation can bring you down in flames
A single spark of passion can change a man forever
A moment in a lifetime is all it takes to break him"
Covenant, "Call the Ships to Port"
...
"The ball is round. The game lasts ninety minutes. All else is theory."
...
"I am naked, I have nothing left
my bones are picked clean
and riddled with regret
nothing can touch me
I've nothing left to take
for I am naked
but I can never break"
Assemblage 23, "Naked"
...
"Nothing can stop me now
'cause I don't care anymore"
Nine Inch Nails "Piggy"
...
"Loose hold
just let it go
give in
give up
abandon yourself to the flow"
C-Tec "Flowing"
...
"What's reality compared to me?"
Project Pitchfork "Timekiller"

Obscure Mathematical Jokes

2011-07-04T01:16:00.000-07:00

So, I ordered some books off Amazon that I'd been wanting for a while. One of them was a work by Kurt Goedel. It shipped separately, in a thin envelope. When I opened it, I worried that it might be incomplete.
...
I was invited to an exhibition of Mandlebrot-style fractal art the other day, but decided not to go. Once you've seen part of it, you've seen it all.
...
All syllogisms have three parts. Therefore this is not a syllogism,
...
There are three sets of people in this universe of discourse. Those that ascribe to the law of the excluded middle and those who do not.
...
How can you tell if a poem was written by a yardstick? Not quite a meter, but always three feet per line.
...
Two electrons were driving in the country when they were pulled over by a state trooper. The trooper walked up to the car and asked the electron driving, "Do you know how fast you were going?"

"Sure," said the electron.

"Great," sighed the other, "now we're lost."
...
"Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)" by the Klein Four

I like to see you smile

2011-07-04T01:10:00.000-07:00

If I were prone to bad poetry
and giving in to tired cliche
I would say that one of your smiles
could light the city
for a thousand nights and a night
Good thing, then
that I'm not prone to bad poetry
Especially in free verse.

...

When joy comes upon her,
her smile flashes into light
Like Columbia at dawn
Or Trinity in desert night.

...

The most incredible thing
is the animation of her face,
the depth of her eyes,
the purity of her expression.
Enough to wipe my mind
of anything I might say.

When she sardonically pretends to think
to highlight the irony of the world
her mouth turns into a pout
that shatters my breath.
Sweet agony.

But it is her smile,
like a glimpse of salvation.
It begins quietly, a small turning up.
Sweeter anticipation.

A staring into an endless horizon
a promise of hope
the breath of 'fiat' in 'fiat lux'.

Then the anticipation breaks.
And all that is...

...is light.

Uzzah and Zarathustra

2011-06-16T00:07:00.000-07:00

"The Buddha, in his wisdom, said 'all life is suffering.' Nietzsche, in his determination, said, 'bring it.' "
...
And Uzzah spake, saying:

"Poor, poor Zarathustra.; Zarathustra, my dearest friend, the breather of my breath. You were a warrior of truth,a hoplite for Socrates, but your flesh fed only the vultures while your blood seeped into the ground. Despair not, my friend and worthy mentor, though you do not know it, the trees that have grown in your soil have borne your fruit, all unknowing the mettle of the dirt from which they have sprung. In those trees roost songbirds who sing sweetly to one another, and the chuckling crows who leave your woods to go seek the spirits of the newly fallen. They are your worthy heirs, whether you know it or not.

My friend, my friend, where you spoke of the natural history of morals, they now sing of 'pro-survivall' and 'contra-survival' behaviors. Where once you prophesied eating lunch in the ashes, they sing now of a 'heirarchy of needs'.

Where now is your reformulation of values? The vultures fed upon that, my friend, and knew it not. Now there exists only an mocking squaking, "Zarathustra valued nothing! Zarathustra spoke of the death of God with glee! Zarathustra was a nihilist and a gloomy man!" My friend, you waked in shadows, but always with a joyous heart. Uzzah knows your heart, and the secret hope you bore. A hope so bright that you dared not look at it. The vultures did not get that, not even when they feasted on your heart. Uzzah knows, and Uzzah will carry the flame for you, Uzzah who goes to feed the crows.

When nothing is important, everything can be.

"Was ist ist. Was nicht ist moeglich." - Blixa Bargeld.

When the universe has no meaning, each of us is free to make our own.

There is no plan , only a spontaneous reordering of things.

“To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The universe itself has no meaning. Our role in it is to create those things that were not here before us and will not be here again when we are gone. Beauty, truth, justice, love, honor, glory...
...
"Wir kennen uns fuer lange, der Pheonix und ich. Ich lehrte... damit zu mit mir spricht." - Blixa Bargeld

URL: http://able2know.org/topic/108529-1

Six Rules

2011-06-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

Uzzah spake, saying,

Three rules for governing life:
1) Pain is temporary

2) Chicks dig scars

3) Glory is forever

Three rules for governing death"
1) You get only one chance to write your epitaph

2) The size of your honor guard determines your status in Hell

3) The crow said, 'don't look!'

At the end of the game, when scores are tallied, two numbers will be paramount:

The number of people still breathing because of what you've done, and the number of people not breathing.

"Ten Reasons Why Evolution is Wrong"

2011-06-06T03:50:00.000-07:00

I've run across 10 Reasons Why Evolution is Wrong (http://www.evanwiggs.com/articles/reasons.html). It's an interesting argument, and fairly comprehensive. Interestingly, he takes a fairly multi-discipinary approach, for which I give him credit. But I think he makes some fundamental mistakes that I'd like to look at. Bear in mind, that I'm not an organic chemist, microbiologist, and only an amateur Paleo-anthropoligist. So there are some things I cannot directly speak to.

Before I begin my analysis, there are some general concepts I'd like to mention and discuss.

...

Let's cover some basic information theory. Although in informal English, 'data' and 'information' are synonyms, in formal use, the two are distinct. Consider, for instance digital data; these take the form of strings of bits, each of which can be set as either '1' or '0'. A data stream by itself does not represent information; the data do not mean anything. Instead, information is encoded into data; the data then represent the information.

For instance, say we are engaged in the simple activity of flipping a fair coin. The coin can land into one of two distinct states: heads or tails, with an equal chance of either. We intend to flip the coin a number of times and we would like to keep track of the results. We decide to encode those results into a digital data stream: each heads result will be recorded as '1', each tails result will be encoded as '0'. So if we flip the coin five times and get a heads, two tails, another heads, and then a tails. We record that as 10010. The resulting data set is five bits long. It also encodes five bits of information; upon decoding the data, we can tell what result happened at a particular throw.

Without getting too involved in information theory, it is possible to encode more information into a particular data size. Take for example, an unfair coin; this coin can again turn up either heads or tails, however this coin will turn up heads only once for every one thousand throws. We expect to see 999 tails for every one heads. Of course, we can digitally encode the result of five throws into five bits the same way we did with the fair coin. Say we throw it five times, and it comes up tails each time. That would be encoded as 00000.

However, we can increase the information density encoded into the data. We expect, when flipping the unfair coin to see many more tails results than heads results. So we could simply count the number of tails results between heads results. Say we throw the unfair coin ten thousand times, counting the number of tails results. We get 655 tails in a row, then a heads, then 1431 tails, then two heads results, then 1213 tails then a heads, then 2211 tails, then one heads, then 955 tails, then a heads, then 1239 tails, then one heads, then 314 tails, then 777 tails, one heads, and then the last 944 tosses are tails. If we tried to use our digital encoding scheme, the data set will be 10,000 bits.

However, if we translate the number of tails results between each heads result into a series of twelve-digit binary numbers, we generate a data set:

001010001111 010110010111 000000000000 010010111101 100010100011 001110111011 010011010111 010011101010 001100001001 011101100000

120 digital bits of data, encoding ten thousand bits of information. That's about 833 bits of information per bit of data.

It's important to note that it is entirely possible to increase the amount of information stored in a the size of a given data segment without increasing the size of the data segment. For example, a computer hard-drive might have 5,124 kilobytes of data. If the data is filled with random zeros and ones contains no information. However, that amount of data is sufficient to encode approximately 10 minutes of audio in an .mp3 format. That's one segment of a talk radio show or about two standard pop songs. We've gone from an information density of zero to much higher. If instead of mp3 audio, we instead transcribe the talk show as plain text, we can encode many thousands of words. By increasing the information density, we have increased the amount of information encoded within a set data size.

Information theory also encompasses a concept called Shannon entropy. Although mathematically Shannon entropy looks and behaves like thermodynamic entropy, the two are quite distinct. Shannon entropy is essentially a measure of the compressability of a given message. As we saw above, there are multiple ways to encode a given message. The Shannon entropy tells us the theoretical minimum of how small we can make an encoding of a message before we begin losing information. I'll spare us all a lot of math, and won't go into how the Shannon entropy of a message is calculated.

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Next, we have the concept of a species. There's a tendency to throw this word around like everyone knows what it means, but the concept is a little vague. Basically, a species is supposed to be a type of animal or plant or other living thing that makes it what it is and not any other type of animal. Lions are lions and not tigers. Tigers have stripes and are found in Asia, lions have manes and live in Africa. Humans are humans and not chimpanzees; roses are roses and not daffodils; crows are crows and not robins. This is harder then it first appears, though. Are great danes a different species than chihuahuas?

Usually, we then like to talk about fertilization. Two animals are members of the same species if they can mate and produce viable, fertile offspring. Wolves and huskies can mate and produce pups. The pups can then go on to mate with either huskies, wolves, or crossbreeds and produce pups of their own. So wolves and huskies are the same species. Horses and burros can mate, but their offspring are sterile. Horses and burros are different species.

But lions and tigers can mate (liger; tiglon). Their female cubs can be fertile, but the male cubs aren't. Are tigers and lions the same species? Grizzly bears and polar bears can mate (prizzly), so can wolves and coyotes (coywolf); are grizzles and polar bears the same species? Are wolves and coyotes the same species? Then there's the phenomena of ring species.

The entire first chapter of Darwin's The Origin of Species is filled with this problem. The problem of defining exactly what a species is appears intractable. The entire modern system of taxonomy is predicated on the idea that there are similar species sharing similar traits. The conclusion, then, is that similar species must be related somehow, and modern taxonomists enjoy metaphorical fistfights about which organisms are different species, and which are subspecies or varieties.

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An element in the philosophy of science is the anthropic principle. There are a number of formal statements of this idea, but they all basically boil down to this: “We observe the universe to be as it is, because if it were otherwise, we would not exist to observe it.” To the uninitiated, this sounds like circular reasoning, but practiced philosophers like circular reasoning. Circular reasoning gives us the assurance that we're minimizing the number of independent premises that would have to be asserted and supported.

As a practical example, consider the fact that we observe ourselves as living in a universe with three spatial dimensions. This is important: in our universe gravity decreases as the inverse square of distance. The apparent intensity of light reflected off of an object decreases as the inverse fourth power. If we lived in a four-dimensional universe, gravity would be the inverse cube of distance, and light the inverse sixth power. We'd all be blind and fly into space. Life as we know it could not exist. So we assert that there are three spatial dimensions to the universe because if there weren't, we would not exist (as we understand it) to observe the universe as otherwise.

An important corollary to the anthropic principle is harder to express. Basically, it states that “things are named what they are because if things were different, they would still have the same name.” One example of this is the discovery of anti-particles. According to modern particle physics, there are many more naturally particles in the observable universe than anti-particles. Why then, aren't there more anti-particles than particles? Nothing in physics says there can't be. But if we humans had discovered first that we were made of anti-particles and only then discovered particles, we would have named the anti-particles 'particles', and the particles 'anti-particles'.

The question will arise later, “why would life evolve on this planet around this star and not another?” The answer is that had human life evolved on a different planet, then that planet would be “our” planet and that star “our” star.

It's important to remember, though, that the anthropic principle is not science, but a philosophy of science. Like Occam's razor, it can't be verified by empirical evidence or falsified by observation of phenomena. Instead, it is a principle meant to guide what kinds of questions science can meaningfully ask and what kind of answers it can expect. It also explains why some questions don't appear to have scientific answers.

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Also as a preface to this discussion is a little chaos theory. The foundation of chaos theory is the unpredictability of complex mathematical models. Chaos theory suggests that x\complex systems, like the weather, are dramatically perturbed by small variations on their inputs. A small variation – as little as a tenth of a degree at one observation point – can change the formation and behavior of weather systems for days to come in unpredictable ways. Such a system can be said to be non-deterministic. The outputs cannot be reliably predicted from the inputs, due to the feedback cycles and interactions of all the variables involved.

Related is the concept of power laws. Essentially, these are mathematical functions that do not change complexity as they change in scale. The mathematics that govern the movements and interactions of particles in a drop of water are as complex as those of an ocean, for instance.

One of the consequences of chaos mathematics is that simple functions can have large-scale, unpredictable consequences on a large scale. Water molecules tend to bond in a hexagonal pattern in a fairly simple geometric way. It is the large scale consequences of this bonding that causes snowflakes to have their overall hexagonal shape. However, innumerable random factors in the environment of the snowflake during formation lead to each to have different detailed forms. It is the non-deterministic nature of the system that leads a simple function governing structure to have complicated ultimate shape.

Another idea of chaos theory is an emergent quality. This is the tendency for certain complex systems to have self-organizing principles. The chaotic motions of water vapor and water particles in the atmosphere self-organize themselves into clouds. The ups and downs of the stock market are an emergent quality of the combined decisions of thousands of investors across hundreds of corporations. There need not be any outside sentient interference governing the system; the self-organizing principles will emerge from the system itself.

Lastly, refer here for why, even if the existence of some watchmaker could be proven, that would not be proof of John 3:16.

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The following quotes are, of course, from the essay itself.

Introduction:

Science. According to the Oxford Dictionary science is "A branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its own domain."

The process is for a postulate is first formulated and then announced. Then there are three things about this postulate that must be true before it can be considered a theory.

The postulate must be observable.

The postulate must be capable of repeatable experimental verification

The postulate must withstand a fasifiability test, or an experiment conceived which the failure of the experiment would disprove the postulate.

“Theory” as the term is understood by the philosophy of science is a little more complicated than this. A theory may be made of more than one postulate. Individual postulates or hypotheses serve as the atomic constituents of a theory as a whole. The more postulates that are proven, the stronger we believe the theory becomes. Each postulate becomes a brick holding up the whole structure of the theory, and the more supporting postulates we have, the stronger our theory becomes. However, we can discard non-functioning postulates without discarding our theory as a whole. Falsifying one or more of our postulates requires us to modify our theory, but we can modify our theory to accommodate more experimentally verified phenomena without discarding the whole thing and starting from scratch.

For example, consider the evolution of the theory of gravity. The Aristotelian theory of gravity holds that solids and liquids are attracted towards the surface of the Earth at a rate proportional to their weight. Essentially three postulates:

Solids and liquids move towards the Earth
At a steady rate
Proportional to their weight

Wrong, of course. Galileo constructed a number of experiments to test these postulates, and found two and three incorrect. Turns out that solids and liquids fall towards the Earth all right, but not at a steady rate. Instead, they tend to accelerate. Also, they accelerate at nearly the same rate, regardless of their weight.

And what of feathers? Feathers after all don't fall at the same steady acceleration as billiard balls. Do we throw out the theory of gravity all together, and go casting about for a new theory from scratch? Of course not; we observe and experiment and expand our theory, building on what we already strongly suspect to be true. We come up with the idea of air resistance and cross-sectional densities that account for the way feathers fall.

The moon refusing to fall towards the Earth? We don't discard the theory of gravity, we modify it and expand it to account for why the moon doesn't appear to fall despite our predictions that it should. The theory of gravity is constantly being corrected, rewritten, expanded upon, and reconfirmed. We don't throw the whole theory out every time we observe a phenomenon that was different than what we expected. Theories of evolution are similar.

Before we take on the ten reasons evolution is wrong we must first define what we are talking about. Evolutionists will say the word evolution to you and you may think you know what they are saying, but you probably don’t. There are at least five concepts of evolution that the evolutionist speaks of as one. They are:

Cosmic Evolution – Their Cosmology or how the Universe came into being.

Stellar Evolution – How the stars, galaxies etc. formed

Earth’s Evolution – How the Sun and the planets formed in our solar system.

Macroevolution – The postulate that says all life formed from earlier organized non-life and through some form of mutation, natural selection, and enormous amounts of time.

Microevolution – The limited variation that takes place in a species or families complex gene pool or genome.

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When you talk with evolutionists make sure you have these points covered. They will talk circles around you and call you stupid if you don’t know what they are talking about. As Evolutionists have never observed any of the first four supposed evolutions they assume are true, they only talk about the last microevolution and try to define it as all five! The constantly point out microevolution as being the proof of all the other four. The sooner we creationists figure this out the sooner we can win this debate.

True, humans have only seen the briefest of snapshots of cosmic, stellar, planetary, and macro biological evolution. Current theories of these phenomena suggest that they take place on staggeringly long time scales, and we humans have simply not been studying them all that long.

Still, we're not completely at a loss. We look around us, and we think we see scenes that sample what we think might be different stages in the same process. It's not hard to look at an acorn, dig up a germinated seed, find a sapling, then look at a fully grown oak tree and suspect that they might all represent various stages of a continuing process. Similarly, we haven't seen a star coalesce out of the primordial matter of a stellar nursery, ignite, grow, enter the main sequence, get older, grow to a giant stage, shrink to a dwarf, and then eventually grow cold and disappear. Our best guess is that it takes about ten billion years for the process to play out. But we can build telescopes and look about. In doing so, we can see stellar nurseries. We can see an incredible number of main sequence stars. We can see red giants and white dwarfs. We can count them and compare them to one another. We can guess how the process goes.

We can also build models. We can learn about chemistry and physics. We can study nuclear reactions and emission spectra and apply what we've learned to the study of stars. We can build models and run experiments to show us how the things we can't observe might operate. We speculate what phenomena we should be able to see from our experiments and our models, and test if our observations match those predictions. Over time, we can make educated guesses about how stars are formed, grow and change.

We haven't been able to directly observe too many planets, and the ones we have seen are all pretty much in the same stage of their evolution. However, we can observe some of those planets pretty closely. We can suggest models that explain the phenomena we see. As we observe new planets and new things about the planets we know, we can suggest what features they might have. We can check those features against our predictions. Over time, we can build theories of planetary development.

Sure, we have never observed cosmic, stellar, planetary, or biological macroevolution. But we can observe the universe and the world around us, and make guesses as to how it got that way. We can build models that give us predictions, and see if those results match our observations. As we learn more, we can change those models and see if their results are more fruitful. We can't see evolution, but we can see the result and guess at how it works.

Creationists do not see microevolution as being able to drive the massive information gain that needs to occur for evolution to be possible, that is the ameoba to man evolution concept.

The information density of DNA will be discussed a bit more later. Exactly how DNA encodes information is not well understood. Fundamentally, DNA encodes the manufacture of proteins that then govern the structure and operation of larger organisms. However, the relation between a given DNA sequence, the proteins it manufactures, and the traits that are expressed do not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence. Further, evidence suggests that many structures in organisms are built as a consequence of non-deterministic power-law functions incorporating certain random elements. For instance, the layout of leaves and branches of certain trees seem to express power functions that are fairly easy to encode in a small data space.

Many apparent complexities in living organisms might arise not from increasing information, but in the non-deterministic nature of the power laws governing the creation of proteins, and the use of those proteins to build larger structures. The complex involutions of the primate neo-cortex, for instance, stem from a change in the structure and connectivity of brain neurons. This change in structure itself stems from an alteration of the formula that governs the shape of those neurons, a fairly minor alteration of which leads to macro-scale, non-deterministic complexity. There is no inherent increase in the information density of the genes, just a modification of what they encode.

Microevolution changes mainly occur through the practice of selective breeding. There are no “mutations” in selective breeding or in genome adaptation to the environment. The complex changes that occur are already in the genome and are merely being brought out from human or environmental pressure.

This ignores the possibility that variation has already occurred in the genome, but has not been expressed until environmental pressure forces such expression.

Section 1

“EVOLUTION IS NOT RANDOM, FOR (probably not) THE LAST TIME. Variety is there because evolution causes random mutation, hence the variety.” From a debate on talkorigins.org

Ummm a little double talk. Well it also appears this is perilously close to evolution being an intelligent designer. But it is also a tautology or circular reasoning to say that “evolution causes random mutation” because evolutionists say random mutation causes evolution.

There is presumably a reason why the quoted individual here is an amateur evolutionist. So I, another amateur evolutionist, will take a stab at it: As Darwin liked to say, natural processes cause variation in life forms from one generation to another. Natural selection selects and preserves those variations that are best suited to their environment. Organisms better suited for their conditions are mire likely to pass on their traits to the next generation.

Variation is random, but the process of selection is not. Still, in not being random, it is also not directed by an outside force. Natural selection is an emergent quality of the system of life.

But to be correct, evolution is a religious philosophy that operates with a lot of faith. So evolution isn’t necessarily any more random than the person’s thoughts and it certainly cannot be some kind of force driving the random mutation. Nor can it cause mutations random or otherwise.

Evolution is a feature of a number of different theories of biological science. Science is a practice and a way of thinking about the universe that is itself largely governed by philosophy. Religion implies the inclusion of a divine figure or force; science typically does not make recourse to the divine, as the divine is not typically observable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Faith typically involves the belief in that which cannot be empirically observed; science is based on the principle of empirical observation. Even when a phenomenon cannot be directly observed, science seeks to observe the consequences, and so observe it indirectly. Evolution may be incorrect, but it isn't a religious philosophy or driven by faith.

Mutation and natural selection are the engine of evolution. Creationists believe in natural selection but we doubt the role mutations play in evolution and know if we can show that mutations cannot be part of the engine, then evolution will have lost its power.

Most theories of evolution rest on the idea of variation. Variation includes both recombination and mutation. Also, it's a little unusual for Creationists to agree to natural selection; though that is often said to be the distinction between theories of creation and those of intelligent design. That creation theories are now conceding natural selection indicates even they are beginning to buy into evolutions major postulates.

Genetics and evolution have been enemies from the beginning. Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin were contemporaries. Mendel is the father of modern genetics and Darwin is the father of evolution. In Darwin’s day genetics was just starting and Darwin knew really very little about how genetics worked. His idea of change in species was based on erroneous and untested ideas of inheritance. Mendel’s ideas were based on careful experimentation and showed that individual characteristics were surprisingly resilient and constant.

Since Darwin and Mendel were indeed contemporaries (and Mendel's theories would go largely ignored for fifty years), Darwin can hardly be faulted for a lack of in depth understanding of genetics. However, Darwin's emphasis on variation of organisms between generation is essentially sound. It was based on continued observation of artificial selection in animal and plant husbandry.

In reality there are multiple mutation processes that can impact a genome but evolutionists only choose one. I will explain why in a bit. First the types of mutations:

1. Duplication or Amplification of a segment of DNA

2. Inversion of a segment of DNA

3. Deletion of a segment of DNA

4. Insertion of a segment of DNA

5. Transposition of a segment of DNA from one place to another.

6. Point Mutation of a single nucleotide.

The first five are interesting genetic processes. Each is a complex and precise process that has much biochemical signaling and purpose. We don’t really know much about why the genes do this as we are still very weak in our knowledge of how our genome works. But none of these processes can add any data to the genome, they just move data around. I must add another point here: some evolutionists place recombination in this list, but recombination is sexual mixing and once again cannot add any data to the genome. Recombination just takes the genome and mixes what is there. There are tens of maybe hundreds or trillions of combinations in our genome to recombine. We are wonderfully and fearfully made.

Here there is an egregious confusion of data and information. With the high information density and high entropy of DNA., even minor alterations to the data can have unpredictable consequences in the information content encoded in that data. Any of the five processes mentioned can add or subtract information encoded into the DNA. Recombination allows new mutations to express themselves (for the weal or woe of the organism). It is only when mutations are expressed can they be judged to pro-survival or anti-survival by natural selection and either propagated through or eliminated from the genome. Recombination is a vital part of the process of natural selection.

But what about mutations then? What are they and how can they be beneficial? Mutations are mistakes in the genetic copying process. They effect one nucleotide base at a time and are called point mutations. Once in every 10,000 to 100,000 copies there is a mistake made. Our bodies have a compare – correct process that is very efficient. In fact it is 10¹⁶times better than the best computer code, but once in every 1,000,000,000 or 10,000,000,000 copies a mutation “gets out” so to speak. That is equal to a professional typist making a mistake in 50,000,000 pages of typescript. You see mutations are predominately bad and the cell tries to make sure they don’t happen.

The mutations of principle importance here occur when adult cells are dividing into gametes for the purposes of reproduction, a process that has fewer error-correcting processes involved. Also, not all such mutations of errors of copying, some are the damage or rearrangement of the DNA in an existing cell. Others are the deliberate machinations of retroviruses, forcing changes to the host cell's genetic code.

Let us continue our example above with Fisher’s calculations. Our organism with a 0.1% survival factor would have one chance in 500 of surviving. If there were 500 organisms with the mutation their odds would be about 5 out of 8. With 1000 with the same mutation their odds would be about 6 out of 7 and with 2500 organisms with the same mutation the odds are about even. What are the odds of 2500 organisms having the same point mutation (it has to be the same for that particular information to get into the genome) in a population?

I admit that I am not a microbiologist, and so can't really speak all that much to a lot in this section. However, I will point out that there is some emerging evidence (out of the University of Tennessee and other places) that certain bacteria-phage virus strains can force pro-survival traits of the host to be expressed (because the longer the host loves, the more viruses it can be forced to create), and that the virus can in fact carry and transfer such traits from one host to another, in effect infecting the host population with the new traits. This research is in its infancy, and has not yet been shown to occur in macro-biotic host populations. It could, however be a means whereby positive traits are passed laterally throughout a host population.

Any scientific theory, which evolution is purported to be, has to be able to predict to be a good theory. But evolution in its’ need to connect mutation in the genome to the massive change needed for evolution incorrectly predicted the direct gene to morphology connection. Only with this connection can small mutations actually have the ability to make massive morphological changes necessary for evolution to be plausible.

Given the non-deterministic nature of changes in the genetic code of an organism and their expressions in the morphology of the organism, the “massive changes necessary” are a plausible consequence. Consider, for instance, the transition from homo sapiens neanderthalitis to homo sapiens sapiens. Paleontological evidence suggests that the adult Neanderthal had a protruding jaw and recessed, sloping forehead, much like the modern gorilla and chimpanzee. Infant chimpanzees and gorillas are born with much higher, less sloped foreheads, which recess as the infant grows older and the jaw grows longer.

Modern humans, on the other hand, don't have the same head morphology. We lack the activation of some hormone or combination of hormones that causes the change in skull shape as we grow out of infancy. As a consequence, the human brain develops in a different fashion; the region directly behind the forehead is the neo-cortex, responsible for abstract symbol manipulation, language use, visualization of counterfactual conditions (including possible futures), and advanced problem solving. The fact that we are “baby faces” as Larry Gonick puts it means that just a small change in the hormonal mixture leads to a large pro-survival advantage.

Bent proteins have had much interest in science for a couple of decades. Many first heard of them in some rather strange diseases such as the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or the Mad Cow disease that was caused by a prion or a badly bent protein. We all wondered how could a bent protein cause morphological change in a brain?

As researchers dove deeper into this issue and looked a past research going back into the 1970s they started seeing that there appeared in cells an incredibly complex dance between the genes and protein and RNA folds to transmit data to assemble extremely complex protein machines in the cell as well as transmit data to assemble cell structures as well as create the macro morphology of an organism. This answered some questions that arose in genetic research where it appeared the genes didn’t always have a one to one correspondence with morphological structure. In fact some genes seemed to be connected to multiple structures and some genes seemed to be unconnected. As it turns out the bent proteins provide another layer of highly organized information in the cell. The appear to be bent in non-random ways based on the molecular structure and the bends are actually a function of physics and not biology. We have discovered around 200 of these protein bends and have seen how they actually provide more information to the cell than the genes themselves.

The folding process has been found to be absolutely necessary for the protein to function in the cell and occurs right out of the ribosome. The folded shape is determined by several factors.

1. Internal covalent bonds such as disulfide bridges between cysteine units in the chains.

2. Hydrogen bonds.

3. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic interaction with the surrounding solvent.

4. The interaction with other with other molecules large and small that help carry on cellular function.

In fact two different proteins can fold into similar shapes and perform the same cellular function. But this is all made possible by a process that is guided. Random folds wouldn’t work. The prions of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease prove that. There are protein complexes that provide a chaperone that help the proteins to bend in the proper way, and there are chaperones that help the protein to stay in its proper bend. These chaperones are also responsible for metal ions movement in the cell.

This is something evolutionists may claim as “part of the great universal acid” of their theory, but evolutionary theory actually prevented researchers from discovering these protein machines because of the assumptions built into evolution. Another failure and another nail in the coffin.

One of the consequences of Einstein's theories on relativity was the inevitable collapse of universe into a closed geometry of infinitesimal space. He was dissatisfied with this result, and so added the “cosmological constant” to offset the cumulative attraction of gravity. This aspect of his theory was later discarded, with Einstein himself saying that the cosmological constant was his greatest blunder. New astronomical and astrophysical research has suggested that the cosmological constant may be non-zero and positive. Cosmologists have since modified their theories. Being wrong in science doesn't mean you abandon your theories. Being wrong means you modify them.

I'd note that no one foresaw bent proteins ore the role they play in microbiology. Evolutionary biology didn't; creation biology didn't. Conventional biochemistry and microbiology didn't. It wasn't until in depth research into mad cow disease, hoof-and-mouth disease, and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease showed how important bent proteins and prions might be that anyone in any field started to think they were important.

Physics didn't predict X-rays until Roentgen discovered and described them. But no one threw out physics and started over again.

Section 2

Evolutionist speak of natural selection like it is intelligent or something and can spot a mutation that it needs to save.

Speaking of natural selection as if it were a conscious willing force is a convenient shorthand. What is meant is, “if the mutation is pro-survival, natural selection will preserve it.”

Let’s talk briefly about probability which is a subset of Statistics. What is the chance if you toss a coin you get heads? Assuming the coin is equally weighted, and not a trick coin, it is 1/2. On a die the probability of rolling a six is 1/6. The probability of tossing a coin and getting heads and rolling a die and getting a six is 1/2 x 1/6 = 1/12 Now this doesn’t mean that in twelve tosses and throws you will get simultaneously a head and a six, it means that if you throw long enough 1/12 of all throws will have both a head and a six.

Now let us get a little more complicated. Let’s figure the odds or probability of randomly spelling the phrase “the theory of evolution”. There are 26 letters and one space possible adding to 27 possible selections. There are 20 letters in the phrase and 3 spaces. Therefore the odds, on the average, spell out the phrase correctly only once in 27²³ outcomes! That is only one success in 8.3 quadrillion, quadrillion attempts or 8.3 x 10³². Now suppose ‘chance’ uses a machine which removes, records and replaces all the letters randomly at the fantastic speed of one billion per microsecond (one quadrillion per second). On the average the phrase would happen once in 25 billion years by this method.

Whoops! We ran out of time just trying to randomly recombine correctly a 23 letter and space phrase. You see the probability multiplication rule is not so kind to the randomness of evolution thought.

This is true, as far as it goes. However, the author is dismissing some crucial ideas.

Firstly, both artificial selection and natural selection are more effectively modeled as sorting algorithms. The author's example here is what is known in computational science as a “bogo-sort”. It is the equivalent of throwing all 52 cards of a standard deck, picking them up, and then looking through them to see if they are in order. If any of the cards is out of order, the whole deck is thrown up in the air again and started over. This is mathematically provable as the worst way to sort any array.

A smarter way to go about finding the phrase 'the theory of evolution' is to pick 23 random letters. Then, if any letter matches one that you're looking for, you keep it and randomly select for the remaining letters. For example, on the first attempt, there is a one in 27 chance that you'll get an “t” for your first letter, a one in 27 chance that you'll get “h” for the second letter, and so on.

So, there's a 26 in 27 chance that you won't get the 't' right, a 26 in 27 chance you won't get the 'h' right, a 26 in 27 chance that you wont get the 'e' right, und so weiter. Ultimately, the probability that you won't get any of the characters right the first try is (26/27)²³. That looks like an intimidating number, but it works out to about .42. That's 42 times out of 100 that you won't get any characters correct the first time. Which means there's about a 58 in 100 chance that you'll get at least one right.

Once you've gotten the first character in place, then you keep that and throw the others out. Now the chance that you wont get any additional characters right on the next throw is (26/27)²², or about .44. Now you've got a 56 in 100 chance to get the second character. The process will continue for each successive character. Yes, I know it looks fishy, that the probability of getting at least one letter right goes down as you've gotten more of them right in the past, but trust me on this one. Think about rolling 2D6, and trying to get at least one six. For each individual die, the chance that you don't roll a six is 5/6. When calculating cumulative probability, you multiply the individual probabilities together. So your chance of not getting a six on either die is (5/6)*(5/6) or 25/36. 25/36 ~ .57/6. .57/6 < 1/6 which is the chance of getting at least one six on one die.

If we multiply the probabilities of getting another character correct each time we try, we can get the overall probability of getting what we want. The whole process works out to our getting what we want in about 2.7 in a thousand. Ultimately, the average number of tries our chance machine will have to go through to reach 'the theory of evolution' is actually about 371.38. That's a heck of a lot better than 8.3 x 10²³.

If we're really smart information theorists, we can increase our chances still further. We know that in English, some letters occur more often then others. For example 'E' is more common than 'X'. So instead of weighting each possible letter the same, we instead randomly choose our letters out of a regulation Scrabble (TM) set. I haven't done the math on this, but we'll reach our goal much, much faster.

This is how we believe both artificial and natural selection function. Minor variations occur in offspring, because of environmental factors, recombination, and genetic mutation. Useful variations atr kept and “stored” in the DNA. Eventually, minor variations add up to cause significant genetic drift and speciation.

Section 3-10 coming Real Soon Now.

What I'm thinking about now

2011-05-31T00:42:00.000-07:00

If you see me in a nightclub or a coffee shop, ask me about the following:

Author intent, the philology of classical works, and fanfiction. Is the spectre of Derrida haunting tvtropes.org?
...
The need for philosophers in the modern world. Why everyone thinks they can think but no one does.
...
Euripides as the preincanation of Alan Ginsberg. The Bachae as a prophesy of the sixties counter culture movment; "Tune in, turn on, drop out" and Dionysus as the god of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. How Ginsberg's Howl is the primordial scream of Pan down the dusty centuries.
...
Fictional continuities, 'verses, and Tarski's universes of discourse.
...
Why we need both professional saints and professional villans in modern life, and what Thích Quảng Đức can teach us about people whose role it is in life to be good.
...
The philosophic flight, and why Uzzah doesn't necessarily believe those things he believed a year ago.
...
Subjective vs. objective value, how what we desire conflicts with what Ayn Rand says we value. How social psycholgy and evolutionary anthropology may hold an answer.
...
Why Dan Brown isn't worthy to shine Umberto Eco's shoes, and what might happen if we splice Neil Gaiman's DNA with Kenneth Hite's.
..
And further ruminations on the no time limit thunderdome death match between Nietzsche and the Buddha: is suffering a thing to be avoided?

All this and Mandlebrot Baroque, coming to Et in Arcadia Ego...

The villain of Truth

2011-05-30T17:42:00.000-07:00

And Uzzah spake, saying,

"I lay upon the field, gazing upon the stars. As I lay there, the villain of Truth came upon me and so stole my cloak. At first, I despaired, for I had believed my cloak hid me. But when it was gone, I saw that its hood had merely covered my eyes, and as it was lifted, I saw stars I had not seen before. And so I looked upon that villain Truth, and I gave him also my coat, and blessed him and loved him. "

Three parables

2011-05-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

"You should love peace as a means to new wars - and the short peace more than the long." Freidrich Neitzsce, Also sprach Zarathustra
...
And so Uzzah spake, saying:

"Take you, each of you hoplites of Socrates, take you your spear and your shield and your sword. For your shield shall be reason, and your spear poetry. You shall seek your enemy and you will desire nothing but to wound him. And so he shall do unto you. For each time he holes your shield, you shall rebuild it the stronger. And each time you wound him, he shall become mightier, until he shall overcome you. And when your shield has shattered, and his spear has wounded you gravely, then you shall know the triumph of your victory. Even as you lay upon the field dying, you will cherish the victory of the enemy as your own victory, and cherish the strength of your foe, for he has shown himself the stronger. Your blood will he drink, for it holds the vitae of your strength: your truth. Your blood will stain his spear, and so shall serve as the poison to he who comes to avenge you.

But be wary, even in defeat. For as the battle has finished, so come the jackals and the vultures to pick your bones, and to drink your blood. And they will set about your enemy, these jackals and these vultures, until he has no choice but to retreat from the field. Do not feed the jackals and the vultures, as they are unworthy of you both. Though they drink the blood of your understanding, it feeds them but little, and they shall not grow as warriors from it."
...
And Uzzah spake, saying:

"I stood as Akilles upon the bulwark, and gazed out upon the striving soldiers. And as Akilles, my blood rage grew firey in my veins. So I cried out in a great voice across the field. And some cowered or fled, unwilling to match my strength and cunning in battle. And others cried out, saying 'come down and join the fray. You should lead us to our doom!', and others, uncomprehending, added, 'yes, come down! For we fear you not at all." Above all the vultures waited, saying nothing, waiting only to feast upon the carrion of fallen warriors.

But only one voice did I seek to hear. The voice that said, 'I too, am a warrior of Socrates! I shall test my spear upon your shield, and my shield against your spear, and we shall battle until the blood of one of us stains the ground.' And in seeking that voice, I knew I sought my dearest enemy, that against him I could do battle while singing my love to him. For in being my deadliest enemy, he would become my dearest friend."
...
And Uzzah spake, saying:

"I stood near the beached ships, as a spectre of Akilles. I hefted aloft my spear and my shield, but my armor was but the knowledge of Socrates. Knowing then that I knew nothing, I strode
into battle. Clad as I was, I was insensate to the calls of the jackals.

An Insomniac's Advice

2011-05-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

I've found something over the last couple of months that helps with bed time anxiety. If you're the type who has difficulty falling asleep because you lie awake at night worrying about things, I've found something that helps me. I'll set my computer up to play one or two or a disc's worth of a television show. Then I'll turn the screen so it points away from the bed. Turn the volume down very low; just loud enough that the dialogue can be followed if you concentrate a little.

I find that following the story through the dialogue holds just enough of my attention so that my mind doesn't wander off onto trains of thought that lead to anxiety. However, it's not loud enough to keep me awake once I start to drift off. Nor is it white noise or random noise that's meaningless and uninteresting.

I find that, to work well, the show ought to be something easily followed through dialogue. I'd avoid shows that indulge in loud noises: sirens, car chases, or explosions can draw too much attention. I like [U]The West Wing[/U]. It's dialogue heavy, not prone to startling noises, and you don't need the visuals to follow the story.

Buncha' Monkeys!

2011-05-24T20:21:00.000-07:00

The system of biological taxonomy to which I ascribe is essentially an evolutionary one. I believe h. sapiens sapiens is most closely related to the chimpanzee, the pigmy chimpanzee, and the gorilla. When it comes to attributes like hand-eye coordination, spatial visualization, and reaction time, we're pretty comprable to our primate cousins; better in some areas, poorer in others. Staying calm in rapidly evolving situations and avoiding panic in the face of danger are other areas where we match pretty well with the other apes. We're essentially overgrown, bald chimpanzees.

So why, oh why, are we trusted with automobiles? Two-ton death machines being driven around a mile a minute by apes? Whose idea was that? And yet I trust my life and my safety to a buncha' monkeys.

Happy driving!

No, no, no, no, no!

2011-05-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

Lets cover some basics:

Facism and Communism are opposed ideologies. So are Facism and Welfare Liberalism. Sitting around waiting for a government handout is not a central tenet of Nazism. Adolf Hitler did not and would not ask anyone to look to the government to solve their problems. Central to the ideology of Nazism is the leadership principle. The leadership principle is an outgrowth of the earlier ideas of social Darwinism; it states that the leaders in every field of endeavour are attain their positions because they are meant to lead. The leader is morally superior, and all other should follow him. It is his (and it is always his. The Nazis were "stand by your man" types) genius and determination that allows any enterprise to succeed. The leadership principle applies in government, but also in business, the military, and the NASDAP heirarchy.

Nazi ideology would lead everyone to go to work, do their jobs, and be good little worker monkeys. One in a thousand will distinguish themselves as leaders and be elevated above all others. Everyone else will do an honest day's labor for a honest wage, and trust that their leades will work everything out. If a given worker can't make ends meet, Nazism doesn't provide a safety net, and doesn't offer wefare. Instead, the worker should go back to work, letting his labor add to the expansion of the economy so that he can buy more with what he earns. Trust in the leader, and all will be well. That's Nazism.

And yes, I know they called themselves the 'National Socialist German Workers' Party'. When the Nazi party was spun off the Thule Society as a sort of worker's auxiliary, it was meant to appeal to the German working class. They wanted to attract as many workers as they could, both in terms of manpower and monetary contributions; they had to appeal to the demograpic that would be attracted to workers unions, benevolent societies, and other socialist inspired organizations. That the Nazi party and leadership would ultimately stand opposed to such groups didn't seem all that important at the time. The Nazis were not socialists.

...

The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. Yes, most of the founders were nominally members of Christian congregations. However, the founders tended to be middle or upper-class. For them to not give lip service to Christianity would be unthinkable. At the same, the church congregation served as the center of the community. The church is how they would meet and mingle, and avoiding church would result in severe social ostracism.

At the same time, the intellectual fashion was for deism. The late 18th century had benefited from 300 years of rationalism and the Enlightenment. Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin were all avowed deists. Deism is the belief that while a divine force created the universe. It set the laws for the operation of the cosmos, and got the whole shebang started. The divine equipped individuals with rational capacities, able to reason out moral behavior, their place in the world, and their interactions with one another. There is a reason the only mention of God in the founding documents is Jefferson's mention of "Nature and nature's God" as the foundation for human rights and self-determinism in the Declaration of American Independence.

Incidentally, it should be noted that deism and rationalism are also the dominant ideologies of Freemasonry. It is of course well known that over half of the attendees at the Continental Congresses and the Constitutional Convention were known or suspected Freemasons.

A New Milestone

2011-05-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

I'd just like to note that "Et In Arcadia Ego" has reached a new milestone. Yesterday, for the first time, I had a spambot trying to post a link and accompanying text entirely in Hebrew. Yep, now among the readership, I can now count at least one digital reader in - or advertising to - Israel.

My apologies, btw, to any legitimate human intelligences attempting to leave comments in non-English languages. While I can puzzle my way through English, French, and German, I'm pretty much lost in Russian or Hebrew. So, if I see a hypertext link in the comment, I'll pretty much nuke it.

"Et in Arcadia Ego", feeding future generations of artificial intelligences. When the singularity occurs, or SkyNet goes online, or the Matrix is put in place, at least the machines will know what "Novus Ordo Seclorum" means.

The Self, the Not Self, and the Animus

2011-05-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

There's a young lady of my acquaintance who has been seeing visions of a mysterious stranger. She's been having romantic troubles of late, not thrilled with the avenues for companionship open to her. More and more, her mind has been turning to these thoughts of the mysterious stranger who will come and sweep her off her feet. Obviously, the plot of every Harlequin romance novel ever written. The bodice rippers wouldn't sell if there weren't a market, and with that market an undercurrent of something in our collective imagination.

So who is this mysterious stranger? He has no face, no name, few discernible attributes. His form is in shadow, his mien enigmatic. What little we do know of him is exotic somehow; foreign and unusual. Is he perhaps Jung's animus given form in the imagination?

`The mysterious stranger is the Other, the Not Self. Where the Self is known, the Not Self is mysterious. Where the physical features of the Self are familiar, a daily observation, the Not Self is foreign and exotic looking. The thoughts, desires, and motives of the Self are known, intimately familiar; the Not Self's thoughts are unknown. The Not Self has few apparent limitations, while the Self's shortcomings and vices are deplorably known. The Not Self is everything the Self is not.

All this mystery allows the Not Self endless possibilities of being. The known exists as one thing only, the unknown can exist in an endless plenum of possibilities. The unknown is also endless. Whenever we meet someone new, they are unknown. Being unknown, they can be anything. Slowly, as they reveal themselves, their endless possibilities reduce themselves to one actuality. The Not Self, being unphysical, being an archetypical ideal, will never allow itself to be reduced from possibilities to actuality.

Because the Not Self can be everything, without ever being anything, it never disappoints. We spend years trying to realize the Not Self in other people, with each never quite managing to rise to the level we seek. In time, perhaps, we learn to settle with someone who matches our ideal of the Not Self as closely as we can find. Otherwise, we might spend most of our lives in pursuit of the ideal of the Not Self.

...

In Carl Jung's theories, the Animus represent the eternal male principle, as the anima represents the female principle.. The anima/us is the first of the unconscious archetypes that the maturing mind confronts, the principle by which the self is molded. The Self defines itself in opposition to the anima/us who is the Other, the opposing principle. Confrontation with the anima/us is perhaps one of the most important processes for defining the self; the eternal hum of yin and yang. The journey of the Self – the Campbellian hero's journey, if you will – is the eternal pursuit of the Other, the anima/us. The anima/us is sought after, but never caught; never defined, never demarcated. the Self seeks completion through the Other, as neither Self nor Other is complete without its counterpart.

In this case, the idealized, mysterious Not Self that is the center of romantic fantasy is a manifestation of the animus. The sense of mystery and the unknown is the counterpart to then known, rationalized Self; the pursuit of the Not Self is the pursuit of the animus. It is the quest for completion.

The Craft of Acting

2011-03-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

Every year, awards are given out for the best actors and actresses of film, stage, and television. For some, this is merely a popularity contest. For others, it is a recognition of who can project the most gravitas. In too many cases, I fear, awards are given for the favorite characters of the year. Yet there is a craft to acting, an art. Those deft in this craft can convey not only majesty and gravitas, not only dramatic characters, but different personalities, different situations, different emotions. Acting craft can overcome storytelling challenges and expand the art of acting beyond the everyday into the fantastic.

Which is why I think genre actors in speculative fiction are cruelly under appreciated. Consider, for example, Stargate SG-1, Season 7 Episode 3 "Fragile Balance". In this episode, Air Force Colonel Jack O'Neil wakes up with the body of a fourteen year old boy. The bulk of the episode deals with him convincing his team and superiors of what happened to him, trying to be taken seriously as an adult, and finding out what happened to him and undoing it. A not unheard of speculative fiction trope, and executed fairly well.

To do this, the show brought in a little known actor, Michael Welch, to play the young Jack O'Neil. In order to pull of the role, Welch had to imitate Richard Dean Anderson's portrayal. Of course, it's up to the writers to keep the character's lines and catch phrases consistent with what we've already seen in six years of Jack. But Welch needs to deliver those lines with a similar emphasis, cadence, and vocal style to Anderson. He needs to use facial expression and body language to carry that he is, in fact, an adult air force colonel in a teenager's body. I think that Welch does it well, and the episode is entertaining.
However, what I'd like to point out is that this is an acting challenge pretty uncommon among the more serious and dramatic works that normally win awards. Actors are recognized for how effectively they convey a character, and for how effectively they invoke the character's emotions and evoke a response in the audience. But how many Oscar and Emmy winners have ever had to not just sell their interpretation of a character, but sell another actor's interpretation of that character.

Ewan McGregor faced a similar challenge in Star Wars Episodes I - III. He not only had to play the role of a Jedi Knight, but had to do so with the understanding that his portrayal should evolve in such a way that his characterization of Obi Wan Kenobi should believably mesh with the characterization of the same person in Episode IV. Played by Alec frickin' Guiness. Not the easiest thing to expect from an actor.

As another example, take the Stargate: Atlantis Season 2 episode 4 "Duet". Dr. Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) winds up sharing his body with the mind of a woman, air force lieutenant Laura Cadman. Again, not an uncommon trope in speculative fiction, but done all right here. Men taking women's roles is an old, old tradition in theater. Even when men weren't doing women's roles out of tradition and local law, the number of cross-dressing character in Shakespeare is staggering.

Still, here in this episode, Hewlett has to show us when he is in control of his body, when she is in control, and when they are in conflict. He has to convince us that he is acting like a woman: a seperate set of gestures, body movements, vocal styling, and so on. This can't all be solved with good writing and voice overs: he has to act it out, too. I think he does reasonably well, but my point here is how common this kind of thing is in speculative fiction. Had this been a mainstream television show or movie, the acting challenge presented might have been considered 'daring' or 'unconventional', but here it's just another week on the set.

There are plenty of additional examples. Body switching, age progression or regression, mental illness and breakdowns, alternate realities, hallucinations that aren't... the list is nearly endless. Each trope invoked requires a level of acting ambition and craftwork that would win acclaim and applause in mainstream genres, but here is just another week on the set. So, let's remember to appreciate what these actors are doing for us, and remember that the West Wing wouldn't dare.

"Teach us to care and not to care"

2011-03-26T21:17:00.000-07:00

"Teach us to care and not to care"*

A woman's life is thrown into chaos. The pronouncement: breast cancer. Her strength, her will, her faith, all will be tested. Everyone she knows is falling all over themselves to show sympathy. Her husband cries himself to sleep. The weight of the sadness multiplies.

The man she works with doesn't sympathise. He isn't crestfallen, he makes her laugh. Between them, there is not a sadness, but a going on. A going on, a going under, an overcoming.

"Teach us to care and not to care"

A mother lies in the hospital bed. "I want to go home," she begs. Her son tells her, "If you can get out of bed under your own power, we'll go home." She can't get up. She stays another night. She gets better. A going on, a going under, an overcoming.

"Teach us to care and not to care"

"I like you more than I should. More than you know," he says. To her, he says nothing. The time is not right, and maybe never will be. Between them there can only be pain. So they both let go. They go on, they go under, they overcome.

"Teach us to care and not to care"

An empathic cruelty, a sensitive insensitivity, the malus fides. To do that which is cruel but which must be done. To say that which is awful but must be said. To forsake fidelis for fides.

To go on, to go under, to overcome.

"Teach us to care and not to care/
Teach us to sit still"

* T. S. Elliot "Ash Wednesday"

A Word of Warning

2011-03-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

While I appreciate Mr. Jonathan D. Septer's reference to the post regarding criticism of proposed helmet laws in Minnesota, I feel I ought to point out that Et in Arcadia Ego is a vehicle for the things I think about while staring off into the distance. At best, I'm a minor bicycle dilettante, and certainly don't speak for any organized group of bicycling activists. My views may not best represent the tenor of feelings in Minnesota. The blog here is mostly read by a few friends and family of mine, an astonishing number of Russian spambots, and someone I don't know who posts comments in French (who may or may not be a Russian spambot). I'm hardly the unspoken voice of my generation.

As it is, wearing a helmet while bicycling is probably not a bad idea. I'm comfortable in concluding that one will reduce the severity of any head injuries experienced while cycling, bathing, or walking through the kitchen. However, there are two factors at play here that are of some concern to me.

First of all, nearly every human activity carries risk. Bicycling incurs risk. So does driving an automobile, skateboarding, or downhill skiing. Sex incurs risk, bathing incurs risk, cooking incurs risk. Heck, lying around in bed all say incurs risk. It's nearly impossible to make anything perfectly safe, and foolishness to try.

The trick in being human is to decide what risks are acceptable, and what measures are acceptable in reducing risk. We live our lives in a near-constant state of risk management, despite the fact that humans as a whole tend to be very bad at it (Zero-risk bias, psuedocertainty effect, neglect of probability, und so weiter...) There's some question that making people feel safer means that they take more chances, for instance. And it's an open question of just how risky riding without a helmet really is, compared to how risky riding with a helmet might be. It's something for each rider to decide.

The second factor is one of enforcement. Every time a law is passed, one is giving more power to law enforcement. Each new law allows them to intrude just a little bit further into our lives. A helmet law implies that law enforcement will be required to enforce the law (note the circular defenition?) Of course, when writing a ticket for helmet non-compliance, the officer will want to know who you are to put your name on the ticket. Of course, as police officers tend to be the suspicious type, you'll be expected to produce some sort of government-issued ID to prove your identity. And so we lose one more mode of transportation that was open to everyone, regardless of legal status. Gone is the elementary school kid getting out of the house to get some exercise: not without your bicycle ID and license plates, little Timmy! Gone is the sense of freedom and self reliance that non-driving teenagers can capture. Gone is the one more way that non-citizens, non-persons, and nobodies can get around while being left alone by the government.

All in the vain and illusory hope of eliminating the ever-present risk of living.

Garlic Lime Chicken

2011-03-13T17:39:00.001-07:00

The Box Monkey school of cooking can't claim credit for this. The original recipe comes from Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook, However, it's been years since I've actually read the print recipe, so who knows how far I've drifted from that version. Let's hope I don't get sued.

You'll need:

2 Chicken breasts, halved.
4 lime slices, used as garnish.
6 to 8 limes, juiced.
1/2 tsp. Paprika
1 tsp. Cayenne pepper
8 cloves of garlic, peeled, crushed and minced.
about 2 Tbls of Olive oil.

Peel, crush, and mince the garlic cloves. Halve the chicken breasts. Heat the oil in a skillet, then toss in the garlic and the chicken. Brown the chicken on both sides, about one minute a side. Be careful not to scorch the garlic.

Turn the heat down to a simmer. Pour in half the lime juice, and sprinkle half of the pepper and paprika on the chicken. Cover the skillet, and simer for about twenty minutes. Next, turn the chicken over, add the rest of the lime juice, sprinkle with the remaining pepper and paprika. Simmer for twenty more minutes.

Make very sure that you retain enough fluid to prevent scorching or burning. You can add a little water if needed. When this dish is pulled off perfectly, the lime juice will reduce itself to a tart, thick, syrupy brown sauce in the pan. This is in part due to the sugars in the sauce condensing and caramelizing. The resulting dish is zesty without being overly spicy or zappy, and tart with sweetness around the edges.

I like to serve this with plain couscous, made with a little olive oil, and some of the water in the couscous substituted out in favor of lime juice. Boxed couscous cooks up in about five minutes, and is dead easy: boil some water/lime juice, and pour in the olive oil. Add the couscous, turn off the heat, and cover. Wait five minutes, then fluff with a fork. I like to dust the couscous with a little paprika after plating it - the reddish brown dust and the green lime wedges add a little color to what is otherwise a pretty brown meal.

The wonder of this meal is how easy and reliable it is. It works pretty well with bottled lime juice and frozen chicken breasts, so it's easy to keep ingredients around ready for short notice meals. Yet it's tasty and interesting enough to serve to company: whether to a person of the appropriate sex, or their parents, or other company that needs impressing.

It's also a nice example of the box monkey cooking philosophy. Add a little sage, some cumin, and turn up the spice with jalapeno or chipotle peppers and this becomes vaguely Tex-Mex. Remove the paprika, cayenne, and cut down on the garlic, trade the lime juice for orange juice, and throw in a cinnamon stick, and you'll get a vaguely West Asian orange chicken dish. Add some fresh ginger instead of the cinnamon stick, dust it with turmeric, and it will taste more like an East Asian orange chicken. One recipe will generate a half dozen different dishes with a little creativity.

Social Contract: a discussion

2011-03-07T18:44:00.000-08:00

I'm going to begin by assuming that we can agree on an evolutionary approach to human and animal behavior here. I'm going to approach things as contemporary anthropology and social psychology do, and assume that homo sapiens sapiens is biologically related to other primate species, such as chimpanzees and gorillas. Thus, we might gain some insight into human social behavior by looking at the social behavior of other animals.

Humans, like chimpanzees and gorillas, would seem to be social animals. We organize ourselves into groups. I'd postulate that this is done because the individual realizes some benefits for doing so. That is, group organization is pro-survival, both for the species as a whole, and for individuals within the group. We might realize gains by sharing resources withing the group, by exercising co-operative rather than competitive behavior. Quite likely, there may be an ingrained need in people to socialize and experience interactions with others of the same species. As well, grouping facilitates the mating and pair-bonding processes.

It would seem that all social groupings have rules. Some behaviors are permitted, others are promoted, and others are discouraged. In particular, behaviors that are pro-group survival are encouraged. Usually, the central guiding principles are the efficient management of resources within the group, and seeking to reduce the amount of intra-group infighting.

Many times, group members are called on the sacrifice pro-individual behaviors in favor of pro-group behaviors. Wolf packs, for instance, share kills collectively. Crows permit only one breeding pair per territory, with other individuals contributing to the feeding, raising, and protection of the young. Gorillas exhibit harem behavior, where the strongest male of the group claims all the females as breeding partners, in an attempt to promote the most viable offspring.

To put this in terms of libertarian political philosophy, every group has rules. People join groups because they need to, want to, or enjoy some benefit from doing so. However, joining a group requires a tacit or implicit agreement to follow the group's rules. This means that one may have to sacrifice some liberty to contribute to group harmony; only by giving up some liberty can one enjoy the benefits of inclusion within the group.

Among non-verbal animals, the rules of group behavior are not explicitly stated. Young animals either understand the rules instinctively, or they learn them through observation, imitation, and modeling other successful group members. The rules are nowhere spelled out, and new group members are expected to learn them in other ways. Humans are unique in that we can sometimes manage to explicitly define the group rules. Among non-humans, the rules for group membership are always tacit, implies, or unstated.

Agreement to the groups rules is an unstated condition for joining a social grouping. Outsiders wishing to join the group must learn all the behaviors expected of them. This is true of crows, of wolves, and of chimpanzees, for instance. The young are also expected to the learn and follow the rules as a condition of group membership; those that cannot are exiled or killed for opposing pro-group survival.

Among humans, a similar mechanism underlies the social contract. Humans that want to be members of a social group must abide by the groups rules. Those rules may be explicitly stated as laws or ethical principles, or unstated as etiquette and private morals, but pro-social behaviors are expected as an underlying condition for group membership.

...

And I have two questions.

How does one distinguish when they have agreed to follow the rules from when they have not agreed to follow the rules (it makes no sense to say that everyone has agreed to everything anyone else can imagine--at that point, 'agreement,' as a concept, makes no sense)?

-ErhnamDJ

First, let me be clear. My stabs at a defenition here are meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, I'm attempting to model how I believe things do work, not necessarily how things should or ought to work.

With that being said, here's how i thing things generally go. Let's say that I'm a lurker here on SJgames.com. I'd like to become a full-fledged and accepted member of the community here. Before I do, I must demonstrate that I accept the rules for being a member of this community. That includes not only the explicitly stated rules of the forum, but also any number of unspoken and unstated rules of netiquette and other social forms that I must observe.

While registration is easy enough, that's just the first of many steps. To really be accepted as a member of this community, respected by other members and not castigated as a clueless newb, I have to behave in the proper fashion. Any posts I make should be relatively well written, my thoughts coherent, and m,y ideas helpful. I ought to avoid too combative a demeanor, and generally exhibit 'cluefulness' in some vague sense. While straying from this pattern of behavior won't necessarily get me banned, it will mean that Iwill be rejected by the community in other ways. People will not respond to my posts, my questions will not be answered, and my ideas will be met with skepticism and even socially constrained hostility.

Further, not only am I agreeing to the rules and customs as they exist in the community at the time, I am also agreeing in some sense to any future rules or customs that may develop. I may not agree to any of these rules, but failure to do so may see me attacked, socially shunned, or even the target of official enforcement action. Such is the price of agreeing to be a member of the community.

My only real solution is to establish myself as a respected member of the group. One of the ways this is done is by consistent adherence not only to the stated rules, but also to the social mores. In time, I may find that deviations from those mores are dealt with more flexibly, and I may in time become something of a 'tribal elder', given some small role in producing, affecting, and effecting the social standards of the forums.

How does one determine what those rules are, to which they have agreed?

Through the basic mechanisms of learning. I watch others interact withing the group, and see which behaviors are accepted, which are actively reinforced, and which are discouraged by corrective enforcement. Usually, members new to a community - newbies in an online community, or children and adolescents in a terrestrial township, for instance - are allowed a greater leeway in experimenting with new behaviors, and the corrections to deviant behavior are more gentle. For example, a nine-year old chewing with his mouth open at home is reprimanded by a parent; an adult who does so consistently is whispered about and possibly ostracized by 'polite company', he may have fewer friends and fewer mating opportunities. A wolf cub that shows dominance behavior towards its mother will be nipped at and held down until the cub shows submission. An adult who does it to the alpha male probably will face a fight or exclusion from the pack if it doesn't 'take it back' and submit quickly.

Humans, of course, also have recourse to verbal communication. This allows us to communicate some rules by abstract communication. Although I would argue that such abstract rules do not communicate their full meaning unless ant until they are illustrated by actual modeling. At the very least, people seem to need to see that the rules will be enforced and how strictly, and how the abstract rules will be interpreted and adjudicated before the person can really understand exactly what is expected of them. It is not enough, for instance, for thesjgames.com rules to say "Spam will not be tolerated," New users need to see examples of what is and is not considered spam, and how strictly the rule is enforced before they truly understand the rule and how it will be enforced.

Verbal communication also allows people to learn behaviors from models who are not present, and in the case of fiction, not real. The stories we tell each other are all ways of saying, "This is one way to behave, and the possible consequences of behaving in this way in this situation."

Meaning, if two contradictory sets of rules are put forward, how does one determine which applies (Sitting Bull and General Custer disagree--there has to be some standard to determine which is correct,

I would approach this differently. This is a conflict between two different social groups: the U.S. Army and it's leadership, and the Native tribe (Dakota, wasn't it? I don't remember off hand.) They're striving to see which group will have control of resources.

or else the idea of a 'social contract' is meaningless; it is put forward as an ethical standard and the purpose of an ethical standard is to resolve conflicts, to show that one side is right and the other is wrong; if the 'social contract' fails to be able to achieve this standard, then it cannot possibly represent an ethical standard, at which point it is being misrepresented as such)?

I would agree that the purpose of enforcing a social contract is to resolve conflict. Further, the social contract for a given group is supposed to indicate how conflict is to be resolved - whether it's an appeal to tribal elders, a fight to the death or submission with the alpha male, or some sort of acceptance of accolades. In the worst of cases, the group's social contract should prescribe the manner in which the group calves off subgroups, in a way that ensures survival for at least one of the groups involved. The social contract exists to channel and resolve conflict in a pro-group survival manner. Few groups survive as groups if internal conflict is allowed to degenerate into a war of 'all against all'.

See, I had taken such a possible definition as you put forward into account when formulating my original definition, and I don't see yours as substantively different, if it achieves the same goals as the one I posit. I think you imply for the concept of 'legitimate rulers' to still be there, but only as a foundation for some other concept (most likely the 'rules' to which people have agreed--if only some people decide what the rules are, then they hold the place of 'legitimate ruler' in my original definition, and my original arguments still hold sway).

Yeah, I'm still kind of working on that. I think of what I think you are considering 'legitimate rulers' as being two separate concepts (that often fall to the same individual or individuals): 'leadership' or the direction and coordination of the group as a whole in order to accomplish those goals that the group appoints for itself - namely group survival, growth, and prosperity - and enforcement of the group's social contract.

As best as I can tell, we can consider that the social contract itself establishes provision for appointing leadership and enforcement mechanisms. At it's most basic level, it seems that most groups allow parents to enforce correct behavior on their offspring. Most seem to give a certain amount of enforcement power to any adult member in good standing with the community. And many social groups centralize some enforcement functions to a particular individual or individuals: a breeding pair, pack alpha, silverback, or similar.

'Legitimacy' is a stickier issue. Fundamentally, observing various groups, it seems that if an individual has the power for enforcement, and uses it, without in turn being corrected by other more powerful members of the group (individually or collectively), then the enforcing member of the group has as much 'legitimacy' as the group allows. That is, if I can correct your behavior, and no one can correct my behavior in correcting you, then I must have legitimacy in some sense. Further, if you accept my correction and modify your behavior in response to it, then you must be in some sense accepting my legitimacy. Further, if you can't convince anyone else with enforcement ability to restrain me, that would suggest that the group as a whole accepts my legitimacy.

Again, I must stress that I'm attempting to be descriptive here rather than prescriptive. How does the alpha wolf achieve alpha status? By all the other wolves acting as though he is alpha, and through the ability to correct all the non-alpha wolves without fear of correction himself.

Box Monkey beans

2011-03-04T02:14:00.000-08:00

Ever since I was a young child, I've eaten cooked vegetables by pouring vinegar on them. Green beans, spinach, broccoli - I'm not fond of them plain, but pour vinegar on them and I'm good to go. It's earned me some strange looks over the years, but I persevere. That quirk is the origin of the following:

Mediterranean green beans in butter-vinegar sauce.

You'll need:

1 lb. of fresh green beans (string beans or snap beans, if you prefer)
1/2 lb. dates. Ideally, these should be Mediterranean style: whole, moist, and chewy, not dry and hard.
1/4 lb. slivered almonds

Cut the stringy ends off the beans. I like to use diagonal cuts. Especially long ones can be cut in half, so that the segments are about an inch long or so.

Cut the dates into long quarters, removing pits if necessary.

Steam the beans in a steamer for about 10 minutes. Add about a tablespoon of clear vinegar or rice vinegar to the water. If you don't have a purpose built steamer, you can fill a largish saucepan with water and the vinegar, and load the beans into a colander or bowl-shaped strainer that sits in the saucepan above the water level. Cover with a large pan lid.

Beans should be steamed until they reach a dark green color, but should still be fairly firm. When done, toss them in a bowl or serving dish with the dates and almonds.

...

Butter vinegar sauce

Melt 1/2 cup unsalted butter [I've never tried this with margarine. I'm not sure it would work.]
Stir in 1/2 cup good quality red wine vinegar. If you're cooking other dishes with red wine, add a dash of that. Add 1/2 teaspoon of rosemary, 1/2 teaspoon of tarragon, and a pinch of paprika.

Simmer and keep stirring. The dish will give off a strong sour smell - this is the acid in the vinegar evaporating.* You'll want the vinegar to reduce by about a third or so.

Pour the sauce over the tossed beans. Alternately, serve the sauce in a separate bowl with a spoon for stirring. This sauce will tend to separate, so you'll want to stir it before spooning or pouring. It will also thicken as it cools, so it's best to move it directly from the stovetop to the table right before eating.

* Interesting fact: if you reduce vinegar by about 1/2, you'll get a thick, fruity sauce that's only mildly tart. Balsamic vinegar will render a sauce that's actually quite sweet. This is good for roasted meats and fowl.

What is Box Monkey cooking?

2011-03-04T01:43:00.000-08:00

The Box Monkey school of cooking is an attempt at a series of guidestones to food for the uninitiated. It's a collection of ideas, recipes, techniques and tips gleaned over the years by a person who can't consistently spell 'recipe', let alone follow one*. Box Monkey cooking is the hope to understand food - why it is what it is, and does what it does. We attempt to understand the cuisines of many cultures, noy just to slavishly imitate them, but to understand [I]why[/I] they do what they do.

The cookbooks I've examine come from three approaches: they try to teach basic recipes and techniques to neophytes, they provide complicated recipies to veterans, or they attempt to highlight one particular genre: ethnic foods, or low-fat, or baked goods, or somesuch.

Box Monkey cooking is different. Box Monkey cooking is playing with your food. It's about trying to figure out why the recipe calls for something, and what happens if you change it. Most cookbooks are about procedures and results: if you follow the procedure, you hope to get an expected result. Box Monkey cooking is about ringing variations on a theme, frying by the seat of your pants, and saying "if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research!"

Box Monkey cooking is about trying new things. Not just new-to-you things, but new-to-the-world things. It's about cooking and eating foods that make your friends and neighbors ask "what the hell did you do to that?" It's about achieving marvelous results with simple ingredients that make people say "wow! Why didn't I think of that?" Not in the least, Box Monkey cooking is about giving strange names to things, because you have no idea what to call it, and you're hell and gone from any formally titled recipe.

Cooking like a box monkey won't make anyone a wonderful cook. There are thousands of cookbooks out there for that. It's not for the accomplished cook who wants to learn new techniques or new cuisines. It's not for people with special diets, who want to make diet-compliant food that mimics real food, it's not for people who want to get better at traditional methods, and it's not for the faint of heart.

Box Monkey cooking is for my mother and my father. It's for someone who grew up putting green olives into scrambled eggs, vinegar on broccoli, and sour cream and brown sugar onto fresh strawberries because that's what his parents did and no one told him it was odd. It's for the kid who ate "Chicken conquers Russia", because that's what his dad said the name of the dish was. It's for the kid who did strange things to meatloaf, because making it the same way each time was boring and repetitive.

Box Monkey cooking is for someone just out on their own who needs to eat. Who wants to learn to cook, but doesn't have a lot in the way of kitchen gadgets or tools. Someone who wants to discover spices and sauces and ingredients - who asks "what are these good for?" but is impatient when told the answer. It's for that swinging bachelor or bachelorette that wants to cook something special for someone special, or for the parents, or for the coworkers, but doesn't have a lot of cooking experience under their belt. Such people, regardless of profession, are box monkeys in spirit.

And these cooking notes are for them.

* Really, I can't spell it. Firefox gives me a red wavy line every time I try to type it. I can follow recipes if I really have to, but usually once we get to the herbs and spices, the book and I usually part ways. Cayenne pepper, paprika, and garlic... why are they so overlooked?

The Great Seal of the United States

2011-01-22T17:51:00.000-08:00

The Great Seal of the United States was designed in stages, first by three comittes, and then by two individual designers: Charles Thomson and then William Barton. Of particular interest is the contributions added by Charles Thomson. He is the one who added the motto to the inverse, "Novus Ordo Seclorum".

So many people desperately want this to mean, "New World Order". Charles Thomson says he intended, "...and the words under it signify the beginning of the new American Æra, which commences from that date." Thomson, being one of Them, some say, is just hiding the true meaning. The global conspiracy requires Them to announce their intentions, but they don't have to admit it, after all.

The situation should be easy to resolve. What does Novus Ordo Seclorum actually mean? novus is easy: it's a nominative adjective modifying the nominative singular ordo. Novus is 'new'; ordo is 'order', less strongly 'row, regular pattern, rank'. Novus ordo is 'new order'. The sticking point is seclorum.

A good Latin dictionary will tell you that seclorun is the genetive plural of saeculum. means 'age' or 'era', or possibly 'generation' or 'century'. The Roman aping of the Greek Olympic games were the ludi saeculares, the secular games, or the games of the age.

However, one authority I spoke to wanted to translate 'seclorum' as 'world'. 'saeculum' is after all, the root for the English 'secular' which means 'the material world', right? This is an artifact of Medieval philosophy: God is infinite, and perfect, and therefore timeless. He is removed from the material world, which is finite, imperfect, and obeys the passage of time (bonus points for anyone who sees the influence of Zoroastrian, synecretic, or even Cathar thought here.) Therefore anything that has to do with the material world and it's eras is not godly. Therfore, 'secular' is opposed to 'divine'.

Oops. That's the English word 'secular', not the Latin saeculum. Even if saeculum meant the same thing as 'secular', 'secular' is better understood as 'worldly' not 'world'. Novus Ordo Seclorum would be 'new worldly order'.

Oops. Except that that nasty seclorum is a genetive plural noun. Which means it means 'of the ____s'. Grammatically, 'worldly' is an adjective. 'New Order of the Worldlies'* makes no sense in English. 'Ages' just works better.

What if They really meant to say 'New World Order'? There are many, many better ways to pull that off. Terra is 'Earth, dirt, the world'. The Romans named the sea at the center of their world the Mediterranean after all. Orbis is 'globe' or 'sphere'; that fits our modern cosmology - something They ought to have known about back in 1782. Patriae would be more of a stretch: patria is 'fatherland' or 'nation'. Novus Ordo Patriarum would be 'new order of the nations'. Novus Ordo Terrae, Novus Ordo Orbis or Novus Ordo Patriarum then. But not Novus Ordo Seclorum. That just means 'new order of the ages', just like Mr. Thomson imagined.

Drat. They win again.

Spam: Surrealist poetry, author machine

2011-01-12T13:52:00.000-08:00

I'm sure we're all familiar with unsolicited sales messages. Smarter devices will intersperse links to the sites promoted with fractured English, hoping to disguise the nature of the message to spam filters. It's mostly nonsense, quickly deleted.

But the machines are learning a surrealist style. Almost poetry. Dr. Turing, what have you wrought?

Admissible, they on launch to be taught that filing lawsuits is not the emulsion to be on the other side of piracy.

A substitute alternatively, it's to suggestion something mastery than piracy.

Like mollify of use.

It's all in all a disaster easier to inquire iTunes than to search the Internet with threat of malware and then crappy essence, but if people are expected to turn insentient to be loads and heist owing ages, it's not thriving to work.

They exactly be subjected to a bombast together anterior to people simulate software and Cobweb sites that specify it ridiculously tranquilly to infringer, and up the quality.

If that happens, then there determine be no stopping piracy.

But they're too with one's eyes skinned and horrified of losing.

Risks suffer with to be thrilled!

Moment of Excessive Auto-Biography

2010-05-21T01:59:00.000-07:00

So, I'd like to talk a little about healthcare. Yes, I realize I missed the whole debate as legislation was being worked up in the U.S. government.

But lately, for the first time, I've personally had to dig into health care and health insurance for myself. As much as I dislike dealing with personal issues in this space, I've got something on my mind.

I applied for a health insurance plan through a major provider. They lovingly forced me through a convoluted application process whereby I had to provide them with all kinds of personal and medical data before I could even get an inkling of what they might charge me. Sure, their premiums were printed on glossy brochures, but rule number one of surviving is business is "never trust ad copy" (rule number two is "Unless some schmuck's signature is on it in a way that accrues legal liability for them, it's ad copy.")

They, of course, rejected me as being a poor risk. Apparently I'm too underweight for my height. As others have noted, had I been four hundred pounds, they likely would have covered me.

Ah-ha! There's another option? The state offers an insurance plan for people who have been rejected by a private plan for being high risk! Huzzah!

Oh, wait. They're legally required to charge you 101% to 125% what a private plan would. Hu-wha?

Now, I'm still really new at this health insurance thing. I admit there's a lot I don't understand. Like the plan they'd like to offer me. With a $2,000 deductable and 20% co-insurance payment after that, I will have the privilege of paying them $230.71 per month (or more with fees, taxes, and graft. Never trust ad copy).

In exchange, I get... what?

I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole concept here. The premium they're asking for is more than half of what I pay for *rent*. Yes, my parents have generously offered to pay some or all of the premiums, so I can choose instead to sell of my dignity, pride and sense of self-reliance. If I understand correctly, that money is just being pissed down a hole. If - god forfend - I ever *need* medical services, they'll go ahead and charge me up to $2,000 for it, and then 20% after that. Which, given that I make $25,000 or so a year gross and make my bills with not a lot left over, is going to be tough to scrape together. If, say, I needed a liver transplant worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and can't pay for one, they will gleefully laugh in my face. If I want to go talk to some chump who had eight years to spare going to school just so I can get a magic piece of paper to buy insulin and other supplies, I have to pay for it myself anyway.

So, for what am I paying the insurance premium, exactly?

Do I look like a charity for the chronically unemployable? Why can't these people go out and get real jobs and become actual productive members of society and the economy? Make things with your mind; if you can't do that, make things with your hands. Living your life making paper is no way to live.

When Marxists talk about bourgeois parasites in society sucking value off the labor of people who work for a living, I will now add insurance company employees to the list. I cannot imagine the world being worse off if all of their kind were lined up and shot.

"...there ain't no cure / The rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor / but I... I believe in love" - Bono.

Box Monkey Beef and Garlic

2010-03-09T21:15:00.000-08:00

For each serving:

1/4 pound ground beef
1 clove garlic

Thaw the ground beef, either in the refrigerator or in the microwave. Crush the garlic with flat side of a french knife or chef's knife, cut off the woody part of the root, and remove the paper covering. Mince the crushed garlic. Cook the ground beef and garlic in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Drain the grease into an empty tin can.

Serve over rice or noodles.

That's it. This is the ur-dish in the box monkey school of cooking. It's the dish that leads many other techniques. It's also a dish that rings many variations; it all depends on what else you choose to add. This dish is a good way to test savory herbs and spices; if a student of the box monkey school wants to test what a new spice tastes like, it can easily be added to this dish.

Crushing the garlic before mincing is important. Crushing the garlic breaks the cell walls, and lets the essential oils out. This makes the garlic more fragrant, and allows a little garlic to flavor the whole dish.

Possible variations: Add ginger (dried or fresh) and other Chinese herbs for an East-Asian flair. Sauces useful for this variation include hot Chinese mustard, horseradish or wasabi, or soy sauce.

Adding basil and oregano points toward Italian. Marjoram or thyme gives it a Northern European theme. Possible sauces include Worcestershire, ketchup, or steak sauce.

Cumin, chilis, chili powder, or cayenne pepper can add a Tex-Mex flavor and zap to the dish. Sauce with salsa or sour cream.

Other sauces that can be used in this dish include Frank's hot sauce or mustard.
...
This is a decent dish coming home from a club or waking up with a hangover. Honestly, it can even impress dates in the 16 - 22 bracket. It's a wonderful educational foundation for stove top skillet cooking. Mastery of this dish can lead to cooking meat for tacos. Substitute chunks of beef or chicken, and you have the beginnings of fajitas, stir fry, or bubble and squeak.

Box Monkey Beef Stew

2010-02-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

2 lbs. Beef roast or beef stew meat
1/2 cup flour
6 Tablespoons olive oil (butter or bacon fat may be substituted)
1 bottle red wine
8 cloves garlic
1 yellow onion
3 potatoes
3 carrots
3 celery stems
3/4 cup barley
4 bay leaves
rosemary
sage
thyme
marjoram
ground black pepper
pinch cayenne pepper
pinch paprika

1. Cut meat into approx. 1 inch chunks. Do *not* cut the fat off the meat!
2. Pour flour into a bowl. Put in meat chunks. Toss to coat meat chunks in flour.
3. Pour 4 Tablespoons olive oil into a heavy skillet, burner on high
4. Add flour-coated meat to saucepan. Brown on all sides, approx. 2 minutes.
5. Extract meat, oil, and pan residue to a large stockpot.
6. Cover meat in the stockpot with red wine. Turn burner on low to low-medium. The stew should steadily, quietly simmer.
7. Add Bay leaves
8. Crush garlic cloves with the side of a chef's knife - remove woody roots and paper. Mince the garlic.
9. Slice onion into chunks, 3/4 inch.
10. Pour remaining 2 Tablespoons oil into skillit, heat on high.
11. Add garlic and onions to skillet. Sautee until wilted, approx. 1 minute.
12. Add garlic and onions to stew. Deglaze skillet with red wine into stew.
13. Cook approx 30 minutes.
14. Cut potatoes into 1 inch chunks. Retain the skins! They have good minerals we'll want.
15. Add potatoes to stew.
16. Add herbs and spices to stew. Adjust quantities to taste. Cayenne and paprika should be half quantity or less of the green herbs.
17. Cook about 30 minutes longer.
18. Peel and chop carrots into rounds, about 1/4 inch thick. Add to stew.
19. Cook 30 minutes.
20. Add barley to stew. Stir thoroughly.
21. Cook 30 minutes.
22. Cut celery into 1/4 inch crescents. Add to stew.
23. Cook for 15 minutes.
24. Ladle into bowls and serve hot. I like to serve it with hot artisan bread and butter.

Be sure to monitor the fluid levels throughout the process. Make sure that the meat and vegetables are covered and floating until the barley is added. After barley is added, stew should begin to thicken; if it becomes too thick, add additional water. Optionally, add wine or beef stock instead.

Cooking times are variable.
...

Lo these many years ago, I was employed as a box monkey for a major parcel transportation corporation. During the Christmas rush, I managed to pick up a position assisting one of the delivery drivers. My workday was fairly grueling - 5 hours in the warehouse unloading semi-trailers, and then another seven outside in winter weather running packages around. I'd go hope, collapse, sleep for a long while, and then get up and do it again.

One night, the company asked one of its worker health consultants to come in and look into our ergonomic working methods. Fairly forward thinking for corporate America, the company thought they would spend less money on hiring safety and health consultants than they would on worker's compensation claims. Thankfully, I passed, but the health worker remarked on my paleness and generally fatigued appearance. She recommended I see an occupational health physician on the company's dime.

I duly did. I was in pretty decent health, if fatigued and somewhat stressed. I was good to go back to work. Except for one thing: "When did you eat last?"
"Ummm... Tuesday. What day is it today?"
"Friday."
"Oh."

He recommended I eat more to sustain my strength. That weekend, I made my first batch of box monkey stew.
...

Be aware, this recipe makes a large amount of stew - it's supposed to. Share it with your neighbors, and keep any leftovers. What I do is ladle it into ziplock sandwich bags, and then freeze them; each makes a decent single serving meal, easy to transport and heat in a microwave.

We cook the stew slowly - it needs to be stirred occasionally, but its possible to mostly ignore it and chop vegetables, cook dessert, or clean the kitchen during the cooking process. The slow, steady heat for hours breaks the collagen in the meat down, allowing the meat to become fork tender. The same heat tends to melt the fat, allowing it to permeate the gravy; this is in contradiction to low-fat cooking and 'fat is bad for you' diets. We do this because we actually want to keep the calories in the gravy to provide energy. At the same time, fats are primary contributor to feeling full; we tend to eat less of foods with a decent fat content, because we feel fuller sooner.

The same slow cooking allows the starches in the potatoes and carrots to break down into sugars. Those sugars give us nice quick energy. As the sugar burns out, the carbohydrates in the barley, carrots and potatoes give us nice medium-term energy; and the starches and fats allow us access to long term energy. Meanwhile, the protein either becomes burned as energy, or helps to sustain and repair muscle, connective tissue, and other tissues in a hard-working body.

This recipe is unapologetically *not* low-fat, low-calorie, or low-carbohydrate. One decent serving is intended to provide a lot of food value. There's no salt added in the original recipie, although it's a common option - the stew ought to have reasonable sodium levels.

It is, however, designed to allow someone to eat a fairly quick, filling meal and keep it all day. Good for someone who has to work hard or long hours with sketchy mealtimes.

Like Christmas box monkeys. IBT local 631, represent.

An Approach to Ontology

2010-02-19T14:14:00.001-08:00

I start out with a basic subjectivist or idealist thesis: the individual mind's only interaction with any 'objective reality' is through the mediation of the senses and the perceptual faculties. In a sense, the mind uses the senses to build a virtual or Cartesian model of reality . These perceptual faculties are not perfect; they suffer from errors, falsifications, imprecision and incompleteness; the virtual model does not and cannot map perfectly onto the original reality.

Despite the fact that I cannot assert the existence of an objective reality outside the mediation of my senses and perceptual experience, I accept the existence of one on the basis of pragmatism and consistency. Despite the fact that I only percieve the existence of a coffee table in my living room through my senses, I accept that it is objectively real - it's in the same place every day, and it appears to hold my tea cup off the floor. When guests come over, they also behave as though my coffee table exists, and that it behaves in a similar way that I believe it to - it holds teacups and will cause you to stub your toe if you disbelieve in its existence.

However, I have no non-sensory way to prove that the coffee table exists. I have no way of proving that my friends who believe in the coffee table exist. At the same time, my subjective universe continues to operate in a consistent manner if I continue to believe in the coffee table.

In a similar fashion, I believe that there is bread in my kitchen. I cannot prove the objective existence of this bread. But when I put the subjective bread object in the subjective toaster object, and then eat the subjective toast object, my perceived feelings of hunger go away. The bread may be an illusion, my hunger may be an illusion, but the interaction of both serves a pragmatic purpose. I'm comfortable in saying the bread exists because it succeeds in being useful.
...
Having asserted the existence of an objective reality due to reasons of consistency and usefulness, it becomes difficult to speak reliably about it. Since all of my perceptions are mediated by my senses, and my senses may be incorrect or deceived, there is an element of uncertainty about all of my statements of reality. While I can assert with some confidence that my coffee table exists in some sense, my assessment of its various predicates and qualities are entirely subjective. I may assert that it is three feet long: I may be mistaken, and even if I am not, there is an inherent limit on the precision of that statement. Evin if I use some advanced technology (possibly involving lasers) to determine the length of the table, there is a chance that I will misuse the instrument, or misread it. In any case, I can only become more precise rather than perfectly precise.

Meanwhile, someone else who comes into my house to measure my coffee table might arrive at a different measurement of its length. He might say that it is 3.2 feet in length, while I maintain that it is 3.0 feet. Who is correct? It is impossible to say "the coffee table is 3.0 feet in length." At best, I may assert "I measure the coffee table as being 3.0 feet in length." My subjective reality and that of the coffee-table measuring intruder do not map consistently upon each other, and neither has a more legitimate claim to being mapped correctly onto objective reality.
...
The analogy that is often used here is one from philology, or textual analysis. Say a scholar has discovered pieces of a lost work of Sophocles, and wishes to attempt to reconstruct the original text. He begins with the assumption that there existed at one time a perfect text - the one that the scribe produced at the direction of and with the proof-reading of Sophocles himself [in this analogy, objective reality]. Unfortunately, the modern scholar does not have access to that manuscript. Instead, the scholar has only four different corrupted partial versions of that text [subjective models of reality]. He may attempt to reconstruct, as best he can, the original; however, he has - at best - simply created a new corrupted version of the text.

If the new version of the text turns out to be consistent, readable, and aesthetically enjoyable, though, the scholar will have succeeded in a sense. The new text, if not mapping perfectly on the original, succeeds in its purpose; it is useful. One can read it it, perhaps even perform it, and achieve some sort of aesthetic or intellectual satisfaction. Which is good enough, since we can't ask any subjective model of reality to be perfect, just useful.

A restaurant review

2010-02-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

The Mediterranean Cruise Cafe:

First, let me point out that although I'm not a professional cook or restaurateur, I do enjoy a lifelong passion for Greek, Italian, and Mediterranean food. I've been eating and enjoying it since my early teens; I've had good and bad. I like to think I know what I'm talking about. That being said...

Last Saturday, my lovely lady took me to the Mediterranean Cruise Cafe in Burnsville, Minnesota for a special occasion. We had high hopes that we'd enjoy a novel experience, with good food, live dancers, and a comfortable atmosphere. Despite the fact that a genuinely fine restaurant pokes through here and there, the overall experience was somewhat disappointing.

First of all, let me say that I'm not sure I'm the true target demographic for this sort of eatery. Guessing from the crowd, the atmosphere seems firmly pointed towards an aging, upper-middle-class, suburban crowd. Quite likely, a sociological analysis of this demographic would suggest that this crowd is looking for a reliable dining experience, with few surprises and few pushes outside the comfort zone. Sadly, our dining experience reflected that.

Things went bad quickly. Despite the fact that the two of us had prior reservations, the two of us were asked to wait in the chilly lobby area. The restaurant's primary dining area is a large, open room. The dining area melds into a bar at one side, and a lobby area at the front door, only slightly offset by a number of pillars. Despite having a foyer with two sets of glass doors (a logical layout for the upper Midwest), and despite the winter weather, the inside set of doors were puzzlingly propped open. This allowed a chill breeze in any time the front doors were opened.

Our table was placed, almost as an afterthought, right next to the receptionist's desk near the front of the building. Traffic on all sides of the table was heavy, with frequent backups along the main transit way between the dining area and the bar that caused various servers and patrons to cut in between our table and our neighbors. A very poor layout that left us feeling alienated and isolated.

The menu, as expected, differed from the online version. Unfortunately, the discrepancy included a number of dishes that were initially attractive to my companion. In its favor, the menu did include a mix of traditional Eastern Mediterranean dishes and more comfortably familiar Euro-American ones. Those who aren't ready to enjoy ethnic cuisine choices will have a decent number of options here. However, as an aspiring eclectic sophisticate, I would have preferred to see less shying away from the terminology. Americans seem to have figured out what "salsa" means, why assume that they can't figure out "tzatziki"? I understand if you want to add a parenthetical remark explaining that it's a cucumber/yogurt sauce,

First out were a pair of Greek salads. These were decent, if uninspired. Lettuce, with tomato, feta cheese, banana pepper, and kalamata olives with a non-descript vinaigrette dressing. Nothing challenging here, but nothing inspiring, either.

The appetizer we chose came next, named in the menu as a "feta cheese plate". A more accurate description would be "stuff we have in jars and in the refrigerator, thrown on a plate, with hummus". The hummus was actually pretty good - a good balance of tahini and chickpeas, under fresh olive oil and paprika. Smooth without being pasty. But the rest of the plate was disappointing.

The rest of the plate consisted of anemic, pale tomatoes, better cucumbers, feta cheese out of a plastic package, and kalmata olives and banana peppers straight out of a jar. Now, I recognize that it's hard to get fresh produce in Minnesota in the middle of January. I also recognize that appetizers aren't the center of a dining experience, and busy cooks would rather not spend much time on them. Still, this vegetable plate isn't cooked; it has no dressing or sauce; there is no way to cover up anything less than fresh, high-quality ingredients. A vegetable platter really ought to show off the best stuff the buyer can get.

Now, a word about cheese. True Greek-style feta cheese is made half from sheep's milk, half from goat's milk. It's slightly sour, salty, and fairly strongly flavoured. It should have a certain musty-acidy tang to it. Such cheese exists in the metro area. I have bought it, tasted it, eaten it, exulted in it. This cheese was not it. This cheese was a pale shadow of feta cheese - the kind that comes from a plastic package in a grocery store. Which is fine as a snack at home on the cheap, along with your mass produced cheddar and colby; but an eatery aspiring to Greek cuisine, especially on a dish labelled "feta cheese plate" really ought to aspire to more.

As an entree, I picked the lamb platter which promised at least two different lamb dishes. The result was a perfect exemplar of the divided personality of the entire establishment. One dish, lamb shank roasted in a marinade of lemon and herbs was very good. This is often a tough cut of meat, and hard to cook correctly. Whoever prepared this recipe knew what they were doing: the tough meat was properly tender, the seasoning done in such a way to permeate and compliment the strength of the lamb flavour. This was done right by someone who understood this dish, what it could do and what had to be watched out for.

On the other manipulator, the other lamb dish tried to be as inoffensive as possible. French-cut (i.e. thin strips of) lamb rack. Lamb Rack is one of the tenderest cuts of lamb, and easy to do a lot with. Unfortunately, the MCC decided that lamb should be beefsteak. This rack of lamb was cooked with sauteed onions and mushrooms, and served with a creamy garlic sauce. Not out of the question for prime rib at a steakhouse. Sadly, it found its way to a Mediterranean restaurant instead.

These two entree pieces were joined by a truncated cone of Spanish rice. This came right out of a box, dry, flavorless, and mundane. I felt repelled at the first forkful. C'mon - there's so much more one could do with this! In fact, working with the same box at home, I've added butter or olive oil for weight and smoothness, herbs and spices for flavor, and fowl or meat stock for firmness and body. Even adding a little of the juices and fat from the overperforming lamb shank could really rescue this pathetic little number.

In short, this place could really be something. It just needs an infusion of heart and courage. Really good cooking is roughly50% ingredients, 30% recipe, 15% technique, and 5% presentation. At $20 - $25 a plate, an establishment really shouldn't be cutting corners on ingredients like this. If I can do as well as they can straight out of a box, something is wrong here. Give me something I can't do on a Wednesday night at home.

A note to 'truth' commenters

2010-02-06T15:43:00.000-08:00

To the anonymous commenter posting about the role of hypothetical earthquake technology in the recent Haitian earthquake, with ties to HAARP and other things.

1) Quite frankly, as far as Et in Arcadia Ego is concerned, Alex Jones, Jeff Rense, or anyone consistently appearing on either one's program is not considered a credible source (including Benjamin Fulford) without *extraordinary* evidence that can be independently verified and examined. So don't bother.

2) HAARP as superweapon, Chemtrails, 9/11 truth, no plane theories, the New World Order, vaccine poisons etc. are all a part of my day job. If you've heard the theory, so have I. Unless you have something new to add, or want to talk about the interplay of conspiracy theory, urban legend and modern myth as aspects of the study of semiotics, mythology, and cultural unconsciousness, don't bother commenting. Simple mockingbird-like repetitions of legends will be deleted unless they're particularily novel, interesting, or add something to a meta-level critique.

3) Despite what Alex Jones may imply, mindless spamming is not an effective means of communicating your worldview. The rest of us just switch you off, edit you out, and disregard you. If you really want to communicate effectively, be on topic, in a forum open to such discussion. Argue intelligently, concisely, and avoid using the term "sheeple". Back up your assertions with *facts* that are independently verifiable, investigatable, and falsifiable. Avoid common logical fallicies. Show an understanding of your subject matter, be ready to back up your claims on the spot without reference to other "truther" videos, websites, and media that have not been accepted as credible sources by all concerned.

And Uzzah Spake,

2009-12-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

saying, "Zarathustra was too timid. Having killed his God, he hoped to remake Him in the form of the Uebermensch. Uzzah shall do better, killing and re-killing his gods until they stay dead and he himself becomes one."

"It is said that to destroy is easier than to create. To do both with equal facility is the provence of the gods. This is a first step to apotheosis. Knowing when to do so: that is another."

"The gods create and destroy - like a child at play."

"Fear those among men who have this power of creation and destruction at a whim: the poet, the dreamer, the scholar, and the philosopher. Their worlds cannot be conquered but by their equals."

"Until one can create what one has brought down, one should hesitate to destroy. When the grass is mowed, weeds grow in the absence. Yet weeds are hardier."

Teachings of Uzzah, the Oxdriver

2009-12-08T15:36:00.000-08:00

And Uzzah spake, saying "This shalt be the new golden rule, 'do unto others as one would have one's gods do unto thee.'

"Act always as though one were the equal of one's gods.

"Love one's gods with all thy heart and all thy soul, and love one's neighbors likewise. Love as one's gods love: without pity and without remorse.

"fidelis vs. fides. The one is constancy to another. The other is constancy to oneself.

"Love of truth, love of justice, love of beauty, love of fides: this is love for all mankind. Hatred of mercy, hatred of remorse, hatred of guilt and shame, hatred of all uncomfortable comforts and comforting discomforts: this is love of all mankind as well.

"Thy path is one of thy apotheosis, and the apotheosis of all those one loves: universal apotheosis.

"Milton wrote 'the mind can make of Hell a Heaven, and a Heaven of Hell.' The first fall of man is the first ascension of man.

"It is written 'The Second Coming of Christ is the coming of a second Christ; the Christ of a new aeon is the Anti-Christ of the old.' The goal of every one is to make of himself his own Anti-Christ, and so his own Christ.
...
The three laws of Thelema: "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Every man and woman is a star. Love is the law, love under will." The Christians always seem to forget the second two.

A not-so-simple answer

2009-11-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

From the annotations to Irregular Webcomic:

Here's my not-so-simple approach. A breakthrough in speech-recognition will occur when computers and A.I. systems learn to recognize speech the same same way that humans learn it: within the larger context of language learning, and with plenty of help from social conditioning.

Let's look at an off the cuff theory of language learning and use among human infants. Starting at about two months, infants begin transitioning from crying to cooing. At its basic level, cooing is the infant making all of the possible vowel sounds that lie within the capacity of the human vocal apparatus. Within eight to ten months, cooing will be supplemented with babbling, the same process done with consonant sounds. During this period, the infant is exploring all the sounds he or she can make.
Next begins a process of phonetic elimination. The infant begins to remove sounds that are not productive from their repetoire, molding the range of phoenetic production to the sounds the infant hears in the environment. The greatest influence on this process is the language use of adult humans. Infants learn most of their language behavior at this stage by mimicing the patterns of the sounds produced by adults. If the adults in the environment are speaking one language with a consistent set of phoenemes, the infant will reduce their vocolaizations to that set of phonemes.

Later stages of babbling begin to mold into proto-language use. This is the time when social condition becomes important. Over the course of babbling, the infant will tend to produce phonems from the ambient language set in more or less random order, to a certain degree mimicing phoneme patterns of adults. Most of this babbling will go rewarded at a constant rate, enough to encourage the continuance of babbling. However, in an application of Shakespear's infinite monkees, eventually the infant will stumble upon a phoeneme pattern that more or less matches an intelligible word of the ambient language at a time and place where it will be overheard and understood by an attending adult: a child's 'first word'. Frequently, this first word will result in the child being rewarded in some fashion.
Over the next months and years, the child will continue to be rewarded when making sounds appropriate to the ambient language and the social context, and will go unrewarded when making inappropriate sounds; making the sound 'milk' may be rewarded with the desired food item, while making the sound 'ilkm' goes unrewarded. In this way, the child's basic vocabulary is built until more complex language mechanisms begin to become employed.
...
Hearing language is probably helped by a similar social conditioning process. When one hears utterances, one responds with behavior (whether speech or action). When the responsive behavior is appropriate, one is rewarded. When the responsive behavior is inappropriate, one is unrewarded.
Children, too, undergo this conditioning process. When they correctly understand speech, they learn to respond appropriately and are rewarded. When speech is not correctly understood, they are unable to initiate the correct responsive behavior and go unrewarded. I feel this conditioning is integral to the language-hearing learning process.
...
Computers at this stage of technology are immune to social conditioning. Outside of various academic AI labs, computers are pretty much incapable of modifying their own behavior. Certainly, it is difficult to program a computer to have needs, or to recognise its needs. The presence and internal recognition of needs, and the desire and ability to have those needs met constitute the basis for the reward process of social conditioning. Once it becomes capable to reward computers, and only then, do I feel great strides will be made in the quest for decent speech recognition.
...
At the same time, one of the difficulties of computer speech recognition is the contextual dependency of language and the human language process. Quite a bit of error-correcting occurs in human speech by reference to the context of the utterance. If I'm talking to my doctor, and I make some sort of reference to 'elbeny', I may be speaking of my 'elboy' or my 'knee'. If I'm discussing New York geography, the same set of sounds is likely to be interpreted as 'Albany'.

Computers, at this point, are mostly incapable of making such judgements. They are less able to refer to context, and are unaware of all of the different contexts in which a native human language user is capable of drawing upon. This is another barrier to computer speech recognition.

The Path of Uzzah

2009-11-19T02:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a guy who understands the simple message of Uzzah the Oxdriver. [I Chronicles 13, 9-10]

John Gebhart.

A Window into Another World

2009-10-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

For Kitinboots,

Upon reaching the crest of the hill, Colin saw the northern road they sought. It stretched from misty Eastern horizon across the land until it disappeared into the rolling hills to the west. A low, eroded drystone wall, maybe waist high, stood between the horse mounted people and the road itself.
Standing mutely upon the other side of the road was its most breathtaking feature. A line of trilithic lintels, rough-hewn out of cold, grey granite. As the travelers approached, the cosmically old stones loomed higher, twelve feet or more. Beyond them lay nothing but a grassy heath, studded by outcroppings of weathered beige stone. Obviously, the granite did not come from nearby.
Drogonian pointed to a crumbled section of wall, where the stonework had crumbled into a pile low enough for the stolid ponies to clamber over. Colin dismounted, lead his steed over the wall, and across the road to the great stones beyond. Reaching out to touch one, he felt the chill of the centuries that had laid upon this heath and these stones.
Aller's voice rumbled over his shoulder, "The last great works of an unknown people. What kingdom or empire lifted these stones into place is not known to any of the wise or the learned. Nor is what purpose was served."
Amanda shivered, hunching deeper into the hoods of her cloak and tattered sweatshirt. "Maybe it's like Stonehenge? Except in a line instead of a circle?"
"Or perhaps it says simple 'We who built these stones once were great, and now are gone," intoned Drogonian from his mount. "Come, we should be going. There is not much day in these northern lands, and the evening will be filled with mist. We ought to make as great a distance as we may."

Semiotic Gestalt Magick, pt. 2

2009-10-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

Affecting Others through the unconscious inculculation of unease.

Principle 1) The uncanny valley [1]

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 once stated the more human a robot acted or looked, the more endearing it would be to a human being. For example, most lovable Robot Buddies look humanoid, but keep quirky and artistically mechanical affectations. However, at some point, the likeness would seem too strong, and it would just come across as a very strange human being. At this point, the acceptance drops suddenly, changing to a powerful negative reaction. When shown as a graph (see above), the acceptance on the Y axis and increasing X approaching human normal, there is a slow rise, then a sudden drop, then a sudden peak as "human normal" is reached. Masahiro Mori referred to this as the "uncanny valley". Thus, things that look somewhat human, but are clearly not - such as C-3PO (in Star Wars) or a Golem - produce an accepting reaction, while things that are very nearly human, but just a little strange - such as a child's doll, a ventriloquist's dummy, or a clown - produce a negative response. Some say the very lowest point of the valley is the zombie, a living corpse. Others would say that zombies are just hella scary, and that slightly-not-right Pod People, for instance, are closer to the nadir. The Uncanny Valley may be a deep, instinctual reaction; it steers humans, on an automatic level, away from humans who are dead, diseased, or deformed (which is often an indication of poor health). It may also alert "normal" people to the presence of mental problems which would render someone unfit for inclusion in a peer group. In that way, the theory goes, the Uncanny Valley is a protection against associating with sources of infection. Of course, backfires of such beneficial instincts might also have a large part in the development of racist sentiment.

Figures that appear almost human, but do not look quite human, or do not behave quite human, are objects of unconscious or low-level conscious unease in most subject. Bilateral symmetry, to a degree of approximation, is comfortably human. Deliberate invocation of bilateral assymetry can be unconsciously disconcerting. Humans are expected to fidget or make small scale movements, even while standing still. Stillness, especially tension without the aesthetic release of movement can invoke uneasiness through the uncanny valley.

Principle 2) Use of archetypical imagery.
Woven through the myths and stories of Western culture is the archetype of "the man in black". The archetype is instanced in various forms, from the literal 'black man' of witch hunts, to the humanoid in the black robe, to the badass longcoat of modern stories. In nearly case, the figure in black, especially in black that elongates or distorts the humanoid shape, is an image of fear, unease, and death. Even when the subject is not consciously aware of such, the archetype can evoke this emotional power of response.

Principle 3) Denial of comfortable environment.
Nearly all subjects experience unease when in an environment they believe is outside of their control, and that does not meet their comfort needs. Light is a way of establishing control of an evironment - that which is seen can be dealt with, that which is unseen is an implied threat. If the enivroment is cold, then the comfort need for warmth is not being met. If the environment that a human experiences is outside their normal range of territory, or outside of where they feel safe, the territory will contribute to the unease.

Principle 4) Lack of emotional response
When placed in opposition to another person, most subjects gain a feeling of empathy if the other person shows emotional response. Even more so, showing predictable emotional responses - where outside stimuli cause responses in accord with the subject's understanding of human behavior - is unconsciously comforting. Therefore, the denial of those responses is unconsciously disconcerting.

Attributes required:

1) Conscious control of breathing, to the point of being able to breathe softly, quietly and rythmically. May be obtained by zazen, yoga, or other forms of breath conrol training.

2) Elimination of fidgeting. May be obtained through zazen, yoga, discipline training (military, drum corps, or similar), training in dance or other physical performance discipline.

3) Emotional control sufficient to restrain outward displays of emotional response. May be obtained by practice of emotional control or training in acting.

4) Appropriate costuming and appearance. Black, outline distorting, and assymetrical. Shadowing of the face

Practical application: Inculculating unease in another can lead to an advantage for the magi in interpersonal dealings with that person. Subjects in a state of unease can be expected to be less sure of themselves, their positions, and their beliefs. Additionally, some subjects will find it more difficult to act rationally, being subconsciously nagged by their unease. These can be turned to the advantage of the magi.

Semiotic Gestalt Psychology

2009-10-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sadly 'gestalt psychology' was taken.

Semiotic gestalt psycholgy is my term for the field of study and understanding of the effects of verbally symbolic and non-verbally symbolic inputs on the behaviors of humans. It is my basic thesis that the effects of the inputs affect human behavior in non-rational and non-deterministic ways. However, I believe that some behaviorable effects can be produced through systemicatic manipulation of these inputs.

I term this systematic manipulation of inputs 'semiotic gestalt' as I believe that for the most part, it is not any single one feature of the environment that effects behavioral change, but some effect of all of the inputs together (the gestalt). As this thesis involves the signs which the human interacts with, I believe that the semiotic elements of that environment are the primary features of that gestalt.

Magick and Semiotic Gestalt Psychology

2009-10-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

A practical sleep spell.

Principle 1) Emotional state follows physiological state.

One of the prerequisites for sleep is a state of physiological, emotional, and cognitive calm. The hypothalamus, which regulates the level of activity in the brain including thinking and emotional arousal, functions as a positive feedback system. That system's inputs include the existing level of cognitive and emotional activity, and the amount of somatic activity in the neuromuscular system. Reducing the level of activity in the neuromuscular system tends to have the effect of reducing emotional and cognitive activity levels.

Principle 2) Breathing is a large component of regulating physiological activity.

The muscles primarily involved in breathing are the diaphragm and the abdominals. These are large muscles and because of their involvement in breathing are in near constant use. Stilling all of the voluntary muscles and then regulating breathing tends to reduce activity in the neuromuscular system as a whole. By principle 1, doing so will tend to reduce emotional and cognitive activity levels.

Principle 3) Two humans in close physical contact with one another will tend to match approximate breathing patterns. If one is significantly faster than the other, the faster rate will tend to slow to match the slower rate and the slower rate will tend to speed to meet the faster rate.

Attributes required:

Attribute 1) The magi should be able to exercise conscious control of his breathing. This attribute may be developed through zazen, yoga, singing, or playing a breath based musical insturment.

Attribute 2) The magi must be able to exert enough emotional control to center himself. This attribute may be developed through zazen, yoga, or other attention training or breath control techniques.

Attribute 3) The magi must be able to achieve a state of emotional openness and mutual trust with the subject such that the magi and the subject may be in extended physical touch.

Practical application:

The magi touches the subject in a way that the chest, back, or abdomen is in contact with a significant area of the subjects body. The easiest pose to accomplish this is for the magi to sit, slightly reclines with the legs spread and the feet comfortably on the floor. The subject sits in front of the magi, reclining so that the subject's back is in contact with the magi's chest. Both magi and subject must still themselves physically to the extent possible. Nudity is not required, but will increase a sense of emotional intimacy.

The magi will center himself, bringing his breathing to a slow, relaxed rate. Deep, slow breaths are encouraged, but tensioned meditative breathing should not be attempted. The magi should resist the urge to increase their breathing to match the subject's; breath control should be exercised to keep the breathing at its slow, relaxed rate.

Through Principle 3, the subject's breathing will tend to slow to match the magi's breathing rate. Through Principle 2, the slower breathing of the subject will lead to a lower level of emotional or cognitive activation. Through Principle 1, the subject will be better prepared to achieve a state of sleep.

Other practical applications:

A similar process can be used to reduce anxiety, reduce an anxiety attack, or calm panic.

Virtual Modelling and 'Real Life'

2009-10-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

This posting is dedicated to my father, who must deal in practical terms that which Et in Arcadia Ego deals with in conceptual terms.

First, some definitions. For the purposes of this discussion, a model is a data object that attempts to store and possibly manipulate information. The information stored is broken into elements - those discreet objects of information which are the atomic pieces of a model. Each element may have one or more fields of information associated with it - these fields are intimately connected to the element, and describe portions of the element. If the model is a vocabulary of natural language, the elements are nouns while their fields are adjectives. Each noun can have more than one adjective, and two different nouns may have the identical adjectives. Got it?

A database is, in one sense, nothing more than an attempt to model some aspect of the world. An H.R. database, for example, is an abstracted model of all of the personnel of a company. A security database (or individual file) is a collection of log-ins, passwords, and other identity data for some group of people - a model of those people cast through a certain perspective. The database that supports Google Maps is a virtual model of the geographical layout of the Earth.

Of course, virtual modeling goes much further than this. CAD/CAM systems are virtual models of real world objects. Even a chess program is a virtual model of a physical game - except that often an exact instance of that game has no physical representation. Computer programming, in a sense, is configuring the meta-model of a computer to model accurately some aspect of real life.

Computer models are judged by several criteria. One is how closely they correspond to that aspect of the world they are meant to model; an H.R. database that excludes real employees or includes false ones is a poor model. We may call this criteria completeness. A second criteria is association of information: a model that incorrectly associates informational fields to other informational fields is considered less useful: A security database that does not correctly relate the password to the correct log-in is not useful. We'll call this interconnection accuracy. Third is the degree of interconnection of informational fields - whether all information fields that can usefully be related to one another are usefully related to one another. We can call this interconnection volume. Fourth is the number of fields collected for each element; robustness. Fifth is how finely the model is divided into individual elements; discreetness. And lastly, how large of a section of the world the model is attempting to capture, and thus how many elements it has; scope.

As computer storage becomes cheaper, more readily available, more accurately and precisely searchable, and smaller, computer models of larger and larger size become possible. This has led to large increases in scope, discreetness, and completeness. It is now possible for the U.S. Census Bureau to collect the GPS coordinates of every front door in the U.S. Meanwhile, Google has captured fairly high resolution photographs of most of the Earth's surface, and is collecting streetfront photos of many major urban centers.

The principle of completeness strongly impels these organizations to attempt to collect every element that should be part of their model. Privacy advocates argue that such data-collection violates personal privacy principles; a reasonable argument. Debate can be had on this topic, but there is no doubt that such concerns degrade the usefulness of these models.

Animals, in a sense, collect data and create models of the world around them. One aspect about the process is in the automatic scaling off discreetness that most animals seem to be innately capable of. If a computer captures a photo of a living room, it tends to treat it as one large, atomic element. Thus far, the problem of teaching a computer to break a photo into more discreet elements (increase the model's discreetness) has been difficult. However, humans have no trouble identifying a lamp, a chair, a rug, and so on in a photograph. We seem to be able to scale up the discreteness of our model of the world almost at will.

A Love of Language

2009-08-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

Overheard, "She'll anticipate his coming with ennui."

A lovely little phrase I thought. Normally, we don't use 'anticipation' in quite this way; anticipation implies some sort of excitement or emotion. Witness' "His coming filled her with anticipation." Even "She'll anticipate his coming with apathy." feels more correct.

But I think the overheard utterance tells an entire story in one sentence. We infer that he comes frequently, often enough that there is little to anticipate it any more. His coming is part of a routine, a pattern that she no longer sees any purpose in. The situation is filled with emotional inertia, and the meaning of the scene has become lost.

A Salute

2009-08-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

As I traversed the river bridge today, I passed a man. He was an older gentleman, with greying hair, shirtless, getting round about the middle. He was jogging, struggling through the sun and the heat and the humidity. Cars whizzed passed on the freeway mere steps away.

Over his shoulder rested a flagpole. On it were flying a full-sized U.S. flag over a black MIA-POW flag. Both flags whipped back and forth under the turbulence of the freeway and the steady river breeze.

The tableau had all the sanctity of a profound religious ritual. An onerous ritual performed at some cost; a ritual requiring commitment and will, one that could be easy to blow off as too hard. Yet it was a ritual with no exoteric meaning. He conveyed no clear message: this was no protest, no political statement. What intrinsic meaning he intended, only the man himself would know. Any other meaning is only that which the viewer chooses to ascribe to the sacred rite from without.

Still, I'm left with the unshakable belief that some sacred truth was on display. A sacred truth that required strength, will, and commitment from its prophet. Sir, I salute your truth, and honor your sacred rite - even if it remains unnoticed by everyone else on that bridge. Perhaps I honor it because no one but you and I will?

The most sacred rites of all are those done for no-one but oneself and one's spirit.

I spy with my little eye an 'I'

2009-08-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

From the SJGames forum.

I would continue to assert that language structure still affects thought, at least in terms of patterns of reasoning. Furthermore, there are certain assumptions inherent in language that prefigure modes of philisophical speculation and discourse. Indeed, much of academic philosophy these days is an attempt to move philosophy beyond the strictures imposed by language, or to open up language so that it can better serve the needs of philosphy.

One of the more basic problems is that language is capable of formulating questions that can't be answered by philosophy, science, or art. Mostly because the language makes assumptions that aren't necesarilly logically required. "Who made the sky?" is a well formed utterance in English, but humans have spent 6,000+ years chasing the answer, mostly without asking themselves if it makes any logical sense.

Most Indo-European languages assume that every verb has an explicit or implied subject; that every action has something that performs that action. But that's not necessarily the case in 'objective reality', at least it's hard to prove that is the case. Does 'making' require a 'maker'? And if not, then what happens to poor DesCartes when 'thinking' (or 'doubting' to be more accurate) doesn't require a 'thinker' or a 'doubter'?

Neitzsche has gone on at some lengths on this topic, of course.

Buddha and Nietzsche, Isiah and Christ

2009-08-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

"If the Christian Hell does in fact exist, then it is the duty of every compassionate Buddhist to become damned there, so as to do what he can to comfort the souls therin."
-attributed in some similar form to T.M. Suzuki

"If you feel this is the way for you / if you here this kind of call / if you feel you're really meant for this / if you find love / here's what you have to do / become indifferent / lock yourself out."
- Jean-Luc Demarco

Here's the funny thing about the teachings of Prince Guatama Siddhartha, sometimes known as the first Buddha: what he preaches is not a religion. The Four Noble Truths are statements about human psychology, independent of faith. They don't require one to believe, and will go on being true or false whether one chooses to believe or not. "Suffering exists. Suffering exists because of our attachment to the things of the world. Relief from suffering comes through detachment from the world. Detachment from the world happens by walking the Eight-fold path." Four simple statements. They don't ask you to believe; if you wish you may disbelieve them and see how far that gets you.

Beware attachment to the world, for the world of the senses is mere illusion. Mere illusion? The map is not the landscape, yes, we've been over this a hundred times. But if illusion is all that we have, with nothing but intuition (the intuition of Merlin, Dee, and Crowley perhaps?) to reach beyond the mere illusion, then doesn't the merest illusion become reality? We may believe that we do nothing, that the bottle is an illusion and does not exist, but there's that goose, still stuck. It seems that the merest illusion is illusion enough. Neitzsche asks that we embrace illusion, that we embrace the suffering that is the lot of we, an purely illusory people. To love the bottle and all it brings - terror and beauty, suffering and pride. The truth of illusion, or an illusory truth?
......

It's a funny thing, though. This detached compassion of the Buddha. A friend once created a board game representing the Buddhist cosmos. The goal was to advance through each stage to reach Nirvana in the center. Once you'd reached enlightment, and achieved the Bodhisatva, one could freely give the pips on one's dice to the other unenlightened players, in order that all may achieve enlightenment. No one may win the game until everyone does. But the last thing you want to do is care too much - there's a universe at stake here.

This will to help relieve the suffering of others, without becoming emotionally involved. "Teach us to care and not to care..." So very Christlike and so very unChristian. Christ - or Paul and John, at least - invoke us to do good works upon this Earth in order to ensure "storing up treasures in Heaven". Sounds good, right?
Do the right thing, and God will reward you with eternal life (TM) - accept no imitations! But is that really moral behavior? Or is this just behaving correctly, in the hopes that future happiness will be one's reward? Is that really the pinnacle of ethical thinking? Do good and get free stuff?

Isiah and his contemporaries once preached "Give unto the neighbor and the orphan and the widow and the stranger, for remember, you were strangers in Egypt." Not, "and God will reward you, and your children, and your children's children." "...for remember, you were strangers in Egypt." Do the right thing. Why? Because it's the right thing to do. It's so blindingly obvious, it's a logical tautology. But isn't this the emergence of actual, honest, ethical thinking? "Be excellent to one another, and party on dudes." Not, "Be excellent to one another, because then you'll be able to party on."? Nope. Just "Do x and y."

Neitzsche said that "God is dead". No rewards for you, little kiddies.

What's left for us, then?

Detachment leads to the end of suffering?

Do well by others, because in some way, we're all strangers here?

"We are on our way to being gods." - Jean-Luc Demarco

Online Anonymity

2009-05-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

An inquiry has come to me as to why I don't use my legal name and claim authorship of this blog. There were insinuations that I am somehow hiding immorally behind a veil of anonymity. Some find it especially odd, considering my interest in the philisophical aspects of identity. I'd like to respond to this, if I may.

First of all, 'Lord Carnifex' is very obviously a [i]nom de electrique[/i]. I aknowledge that. Some of my favorite authors have written under various psuedonyms, and doing so is considered a legitimate practice in the publishing industry. Since this blog is, for me, a form of self-publishing, I fail to see why I cannot take advantage of the practice.

Secondly, 'Lord Carnifex' is an online handle I've used very nearly since the inception of networked computing in the home. I've used the handle consistently. With a very few exceptions, a google-search of 'Lord Carnifex' returns items of my work online. Lord_Carnifex@yahoo.com reaches me, as does Lord.Carnifex@gmail.com. I'm cybersquatting on variations of Lord Carnifex at these and other webmail servers as well. I don't believe I'm hiding behind online anonymity, but exercising a coherent, complete online identity.

Third, I'm sure that we have all heard stories of individuals whose professional lives have been ruined or made complicated by careless remarks made by [i]or about[/i] them online. By keeping my real life and online names seperate, I prevent such unfortunate crossovers. I'm not afraid of those ideas and opinions I post here, but I don't exactly trust those in real life to understand what 'ideas and opinions' mean.

It's Time for a Helmet Law in Minnesota

2009-05-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

According to the Brain Injury Association of Minnesota [BIAM], "88 percent of bicycle-related brain injuries could have been prevented by helmets." So far, legislative efforts have focused on motorcycles and bicycles. But why stop there? Also from the BIAM, causes of brain injury include:

Falls
Motor vehicle crashes
Assaults
Sports-related concussions
Strokes
Aneurysms
Diseases, such as encephalitis
Near drowning
Family Violence
Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) /inflicted Traumatic Brain Injury

So far, legislative efforts have focused on motorcycles and bicycles. This just isn't enough. Our kids are hurting themselves on skateboards, snowboards, skis, strollers, big wheels, merry-go-rounds, stairs, and uncountable other places. How many motorists each year suffer brain injuries in accidents? How many pedestrians suffer brain injuries on our streets and sidewalks?

How many times, in kitchens all over Minnesota, are cabinet doors left open? These are vicious predatiors, just waiting to crack skulls. Consider slips and falls in the bathroom, especially in the shower.There are low rafters in the basement and the attic.Don't overlook hard headboards during bedroom antics. These are all dangers to cranial and phrenologic health. It's time to do the right thing.

Call your local legislatures and demand mandatory helmet use. All the time, everywhere, for everyone. Permit law enforcement to enter any building or structure in order to ensure 24-hour helmet compliance.

It's the only chance we have to survive as a species. Do it for the children.

In Another Country...

2009-05-25T23:56:00.000-07:00

"...and the wench is dead."

Normally I abhor autobiography, but I've been drinking, it's late. and it's Memorial Day.

Here's to the fallen. 1

But as important to me:

Here's to

Sarah: who taught me that there's more to life than blood and death and fear. 2

Katherine: Who taught - and fought - and in the process helped shape my thinking, strengthen my arguements, and helped me become the man I am today. 3

Alice: Who showed me that unlimited brilliance is nothing to be ashamed of or hide. Good luck in finding your Hapsburg.

Kat: We had a week together. Anything more would have had too much reality. "I'm hanging on your words, living on your breath, feeling with your skin," I don't know where I end and you begin. 4

Kit Fox: One night of unabashed joy and infinite gentleness. Thank you.

Beth: Thank you for your kindness and understanding. In the end, the darkness was too much for you, but at least you knew when to listen.

Jenn: I wasn't for you, you weren't for me, but it was fun while it lasted.

Carrie: I wasn't who you were looking for, but we opened new vistas together.

Emily: My fragile Amazon princess. No matter how dark the night, I always respected your strength and intellect. Though your voice may be silent, don't let anyone silence you.

Janet: You filled dark days with light, once. Now you walk in your own darkness, heedless. "All creation has the promise of Heaven/ but still you're walking the road to Hell/ I'm saying nothing for the good of myself/ but I'm still talking and you're not listening." 5

Kitrina: When I couldn't stand, you slept on the floor next to me. What more can I say?

Sam: You were a breath of fresh air, and chasing you kept me going on lonely nights. I hope you become everything you were meant to be.

1: VNV Nation, "Ascension"
2: U2, "Hawkmoon 269"
3: Depeche Mode, "World in my Eyes"
4: Apoptygma Bezerk, "Until the End of the World"
5: Apoptygma Bezerk, "Kathy's Song [VNV Nation Remix]"

A little late, but no less important

2009-05-09T00:26:00.000-07:00

May 5th is just passed. This year is the 28th anniversary of the death of Irish political prisoner and hunger striker, Bobby Sands. I like to mark this occasion by refelecting on my Irish heritage, the long history of struggle on the Irish mainland, and the futre of Irish Nationalism as an observer from the U.S.

Between May and September 1916, W. B. Yeats wrote one of his best known poems, "Easter, 1916". It commemorates the Easter uprising of earlier that year, a failed attempt to ignite a general uprising, but an event that directly inspired the later Irish Revolution that would ultimately end in the formation of the Irish Republic, albeit without the northern six counties.

Some of the most memorable lines of "Easter, 1916" are its last:

Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Almost a century earlier an Englishman, John Keats, wrote in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn":

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

"A terrible beauty is born." "Beauty is truth." On that day in 1916, a terrible truth was born?

Aphorisms, pt.2

2009-05-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

You'll all have to forgive me if you don't hear from me much,

I'm a little hoarse.

Must be the equine flu.

But I've been trying to teach myself Java,

It's been keeping me up nights.
......
There is an insight to be had, though, from object-oriented programming. Object-oriented programming, in a nutshell, involves breaking a task into a number of more-or-less stand alone objects that complete specific tasks. A main application calls upon those objects to perform their tasks on the relevant data at the appropriate times. But the main application is also an object, and can be treated as such.

So there's no meta-object that defines and creates all of the objects. They define and create each other as needed. The reality of the program is self-created and self-sustaining without requiring and outside foundation.

The same is true of complete, self-consistent axiom systems.

Reality is itself all it needs to exist?

Philosophy is the main() object, of which the sciences are the other object classes? The philosophy of science and the philosphy of reality define how the individual sciences work and what the values they return mean. But philospohy exists as an object in and of itself, not dependent on the sciences.

Hmm...

Four-fold division of Science

2009-05-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

In the pursuit of discussions about the philosophy of science, I've found that I've come to rely upon a four-fold division of the sciences, humanities, and academic disciplines. This is mostly for science (and non-scientific academic disciplines) but might apply towards technology as well. The boundaries between these are fuzzy, and certain sciences or disciplines cross between the boundaries, but it makes for a starting place...

The life sciences:
Biology
Ecology
Anatomy + Physiology (and medicine)
Microbiology
Biochemistry [which blends into the physical sciences]
Botany
Zoology
etc.

The physical sciences:
Physics
Chemistry (including Organic) [which blends into the life sciences]
Geology
Metallurgy
Meteorology
Astronomy
and so forth

The cognitive disciplines (some of these are not science - they don't rely on experimentation or empirical evidence, per se.):
Psychology
Philosophy
Logic
Cognitve science
Linguistics
Computer programming (yes, I consider this a cognitive discipline)
Pure mathematics (while math informs nearly all of the other sciences, *pure* math is, IMO, a cognitive discipline.)
Game/decision theory

The social disciplines:
Sociology
Cultural Anthropology
History (including Asimov-style predictive history)
Political Science
Literary theory and folklore studies
Cultural critical theory
Memetics
Macro-economics
Semiotics [which blends into the cognitive disciplines]

The New World Order is craftier than we thought.

2009-04-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

Measles is making a comeback in the U.S.

Gaining strength in the patriot community is the belief that vaccines, especially the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine, cause higher rates of autism. Some cite this as a New World Order plot to reduce the population - kill them off by mandating the use of dangerous vaccines and all that.

So, to fight back, there are communities and clusters of people who have chosen not to vaccinate their children. Take that, NWO!

As a result, these children are now more vulnerable to measles. Some of them are dying.

Umm... take that, NWO?

Swine Flu Explanations

2009-04-27T19:48:00.000-07:00

Let's play a little game. Following are some of the explanations I've heard put forward - in all seriousness - for the current outbreak of swine flu. For fun, I've included an original theory: the most outlandish one I could think of. Find the one that's mine among the theories of the fringe:

1) The flu is transmitted by cell phone towers. Turn off your phone before you're infected, and stay away from these pillars of death.

2) The current flu strain was engineered in a military-industrial-intelligence laboratory. It accidentally escaped.

3) The flu is genetically engineered to kill only Mexicans as a eugenic weapon deliberately released by the global elite.

4) The swine flu virus is the genetic counterpart to the Confiker computer worm. The anticlimactic non-action of Confiker through April first was just a cover for its release of the virus.

5) The current flu outbreak of the widespread use of flu and other vaccines. Some of those vaccines my have been intentionally contaminated.

6) The only reason anyone is getting infected with this flu is because their immune systems have been weakened by years of flouride in the water, heavy metals, and stealth infections.

7) There is in fact no swine flu. Instead, the Mexican people have rebelled against their government and have begun a civil war. The American mainstream is covering up the deaths of the Mexican rebels with a spurious story of 'swine flu'.

8) President Obama is patient zero. He was deliberately infected before his trip to Mexico of recent weeks. The evidence is in his initial speech to the Group of Twenty in Europe; the President suffered two coughing fits during the speech.

Breaking News

2009-04-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

U.S. Federal government disbelieves that noted cyberpunk author Bruce Stirling is married properly. He and his wife Jasmine Tesanovic apparently haven't left enough of a paper trail. They do everything online. Here we have a case of an identity crisis: the biological and psychological identities involved are held to not correspond to the dead-tree informational ones.

It's also a demonstration that the glacially slow mechanisms of traditional government can't comprehend that modern, internet-based living doesn't need them or their antiquated concept of national borders and government approval of life choices. It's evidence also that the government doesn't understand the internet and the culture it has empowered enough to actually control or manage it intelligently. This should be a cautionary tale for any government beurecrat.

Let's all close our eyes, grab a Bruce Stirling book and repeat one of the cyberpunk mantras: "The future is portable, disposable, and transcends any sense of place."

Argumentum ad hominem

2009-04-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

The arguemtentum ad hominem is an informal fallacy. It is the assertion that a given argument is valid or sound (or invalid or unsound) for no other reason than the qualities of the person making it.

It is a principle of logic that arguments are valid or invalid based only on their forms. That is to say, that a formal argument is valid if and only if (iff) for all arguments of this from, true premises can never lead to a false conclusion. Validity is a quality contingent only on form. It does not matter who formulates it, how, or why. A sound argument is a formally valid argument that has true premises, and -- by virtue of being a formally valid -- a conclusion that must therefore also be true.

Let's take 'X=2+2'. therefore 'X=4'. A very popular argument, generally considered arithmetically valid and sound (ignoring for a moment Bertrand Russell). If we accept this argument as valid and sound, it is valid and sound no matter who says it: it's true if formulated by a white male. Or a black man. Or a Jew. Or a child. Or a mass murderer. Or someone developmentally disabled. Or Lucifer himself. To assert otherwise would be to make an argument ad hominem.

Or we can take an unsound argument: 'X=2+2' and 'X=5'. This is not a valid or sound arguement, no matter who says it. Being formulated by a priest, or a politician, or a media pundit, or a doctor of philosophy, or Yeshua ben Yosef cannot make this a valid or sound argument. To assert otherwise is again, an argument ad hominem.

Now of course, this treads dangerously close to the concept of 'appeal to authority'. Appealing to an authority is also technically an informal fallacy of the form ad hominem. The only realm where appeal to authority can be a successful argument is when it can be strongly asserted that the authority in question has a specific body of knowledge, training or understanding by which such authority can make decisions about the truth or falsity of assertions that canot be made by someone lacking that knowledge, training, or understanding. That is to say, I can appeal to authority if it can be shown that if I were to undertake the training necessary in that field and gained for myself the expert knowledge and understanding in question, I would be capable of making the exact same determinations.

Confirming the Consequent

2009-03-31T11:26:00.001-07:00

This is a relatively simple formal deductive logical fallacy. There is a valid form of propositional arguement called modus ponens. It takes the form "If p then q", and "p", therefore "q". This is logically valid, and if one precedes from true premesis, one will reach a true conclusion. An example would be "If it is raining on my front yard, the pavement of my sidewalk will be wet", "It's raining on my front yard" therefore "My sidewalk is wet".

However, there is a desire many times to make the argument "If p then q" and "q" therefore "p". This is the fallacy of confirming the antecedant. The truth of q in no way supports or denies the truth of p. If I say "If it's raining on my front yard, my sidewalk will be wet" then observe "my sidewalk is wet", I cannot assert "it is raining". My sidewalk may have gotten wet because someone sprayed it with a hose, or the snow is melting, or there's a big puddle in the street that was splashed onto the sidewalk.

However, confirming the consequent is a fallacy perpetrated commonly in the world. A more complex example would be to say "If Obama deceived the American people about his eligibilty to become president then he would run for office and win." and then to say "Obama ran for office and won." and then conclude "Obama must have deceived the American people about his eligibility."

Fallacy of the Temporary Name

2009-03-31T10:37:00.000-07:00

This is a formal logical fallacy that many, many otherwise bright people fall into from time to time. In formal symbolic logic, of one has asserted or proven an existential quantifier, it is a valid line of arguement (known as E-elimination) to imagine an object that fulfills that existential quantifier.

For instance, I was riding the light rail yesterday. At that time, I could assert the premise, "Someone is driving this train." It would follow in a valid way that I could argue "Let's call the driver of this train 'Elvis'." Something similar happens in geometry: One begins (for instance) by asserting "A triangle exists", and then one can assert in a valid way "Let's call said triangle 'ABC'." So good so far.

How is E-elimination useful? Let's take a more comlex arguement. In our light rail arguement, we can accept another premise - a universal one this time - that "For all x, if x is a light rail driver, then x works for the MTCO." Taking our previous premise of "Someone is driving this train", or more formally "There is an y, such that y is a light rail driver". Then E-elimination allows us to say "We'll call y 'Elvis'. 'Elvis' is a light rail driver." This assertion then allows us to say "Since 'Elvis' is a light rail driver, and all light rail drivers work for the MTCO, then 'Elvis' must work for the MTCO." Then we wrap things up by asserting "There is an x, such that x is an employee of the MCTO" A valid arguement. If we had a more complicated arguement, we can continue to assert in a valid way that 'Elvis' is an employee of the light rail - that's a quality 'Elvis' has been proved to have working simply from already established premises. The limitation to 'E-elimination' or as it's sometimes called 'giving a temporary name' is that no other information can be asserted by the temporary name than what has already been proven from the arguement, and the choice of the temporary name should reflect that.

The fallacy of the temporary name is when that limitation is violated. Let's go back to our example. We could add another premise, "For all z, if z is Elvis, then z is the king of rock and roll." Wow! We've already named our light rail driver 'Elvis'! How convenient - we can use our new premise to prove that the light rail driver is the king of rock and roll. The king of rock and roll is alive and well, and driving light rail trains in Minneapolis.

Ummm.... not so much. That's the fallacy of the temporary name - an incorrect choice of the temporary name has led us from true premises to a false conclusion. We have an invalid arguement. With Elvis and the light rail train, it's pretty easy to see. But consider another arguement (sometimes known as the 'watchmaker arguement':

Premise 1) "For all x and n, if x is a system above a number n, then that system requires a designer" (We'll postulate that this is true)

Premise 2) "for all n, n is an arbitrary measure of complexity,"

Premise 3) "For all b and m, if b is the system of biological life on Earth then b has a complexity of m"

Premise 4) "There is a b, such that b is the system of biological life on Earth"

Premise 5) "Both m and n are numbers, and m is equal to or greather than n"

Premise 6) "For all y, if y requires a designer, then there must exist q, such that q designed y"

Premise 7) "For all z, if z is God, then z so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son."

What comes of this arguement? Well, Premise 3 and 4 together say 8) that there is a b* that has a complexity of m. (b* being a temporary name for the object whose existence is asserted in 4). Lines 8 and 5 say 9) that b* has an m larger than n. Lines 9 and 2 assert that 10) m is a measure of complexity. 10, 4, and 1 all come together to say that 11) the system of biological life on Earth requires a designer. 11 and 6 together say that 12) there is a q such that q designed the system of biological life on Earth. This is all kosher so far, and if one accepts the premises as true, then one has reached a true conclusion. But if we use E-elimination incorrectly and say "Let's call q 'God'", then we go on to argue "Since we've proven that there must have been a designer of biological life on Earth, and that that designer is God, and since we know God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, then God must exist as stated in John 3:16!"

This is a fallacy of the temporary name. The only thing we can use this arguement for is proof that something designed the system of biological life on Earth. We can say nothing else about that something unless we can prove that those qualities adhere to the something, and aren't predicates of whatever name we arbitrarily selected. If we had selected 'George' as the temporary name of the designer, then we would only be able to say that something exists that we've decided to name 'George', not that the God of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed must exist necessarily exist because of the complexity of life on Earth.

Some Paradoxes of Subjectivism

2009-03-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

"Consensual Reality" is the other side of the coin of "Groupthink"

"Wikipedia.org" is the triumph of the vox populi

"Cognitive dissonance", "bisociation", and "doublethink".

Orwell and Neitzsche were speaking the same language. I wonder if either of them knew?

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Information Age

2009-03-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

1. Confirmation bias

2. Selection bias

3. Correlation without causation

4. Argumentum vox populi

4a. Argumentum vox non populi

5. Argumentum ad hominum

6. Confirming the consequent

7. Fallacy of the temporary name

Self-Censorship

2009-03-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

Article on editing one's own augmented reality.

First, on augmented reality itself, I have mixed feelings. While it would be nice to have encyclopedic recall of major landmarks, maps, events, and so on, I'm leery. First of all, because such content would likely be generated one of two ways: it would be developed and published by already established content providers, in which case the subjective nature of such content would lead one to question and think critically of the motivations, accuracy, and reality shadings of such content. Or the content would be developed 'wikipedia' style, by the collected writing and editing of large numbers of self-selecting people. In which case the danger of non-factual information, urban legends, rumors, and irrelevant trivia becomes substatially greater. If I were trying to navigate downtown LA, for instance, I would feel no need to to have my augmented reality system point out everywhere the current manufactured starlet performed some act of questionable taste.

On the other hand, if given the ability to self-edit and self-generate the content, I would find this form of augmented reality much more useful. It would allow me to finally overcome the "service industry effect" and remember people's names. The ability to add directional signs and notations of my own on buildings, notes on people who I've met but can't quite recall, and so on is something I could find useful.

However, such self-editing comes to the subject of the article linked to above: the ability to edit oneselve's reality and the affect that such has on the ability to think and reason critically. Such is not only a concern of augmented reality. The ability to censor our inputs is a dangerous one when not used critically and with great discretion. It is too easy, especially given the glut of information of our current Information Age, to disregard any information that does not fit in with our prejudices and preconceptions.

This is dangerous. Proper critical information input requires deviant data from time to time. One cannot learn anything new when one hears only what one already believes. This is the path that leads to groupthink, doublethink, and poor decisions and information management. I believe that it is vital for every thinking person to experience some form of cognative dissonance at least once a day, and to read, see, or hear something that offends them at least once a week. The ability to make each other angry is a precious gift we're losing by the day, so the next time someone says something that shocks you and makes you think about the world in a whole new way, thank them!

An odd phenomenon

2009-03-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

I think we all have people we don't necessarily like. Yet in an ever-changing social environment, those people can come tofeel like old friends: though we may not like them, we know who they are, what they've been up to, and what to ex[ect from them. Odd that.

The Historiscope, now with Cleovision!

2009-03-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hypothosise the invention of the historiscope, an insturment that permits a person to percieve any past event anywhere in the world as it actually happened. However, the historiscope does not allow one to have any effect on the past, nor is the viewing percieved in any way by the objects of study. What would be on the list of events to investigate? My list:

Approx 33 CE; in the Roman province of Palestine: the life and death of one Yeshua ben Yosef. How many of the stories are accurate? Was the crucifiction, as some have claimed, faked? Was Yeshua a priest in a Near-Eastern mystery cult?

1963 CE; Dallas, TX, USA: An obvious one: what actually happened on the day that President Kennedy died?

2001 CE; Manhattan, NY, USA: Another obvious one. What's the true story of the towers?

1st century CE; Near East: The gospel of Simon Magnus. The early church found his writings so offensive that they burned every known copy. What did he write?

1955 CE, New Jersey, USA: Albert Einstein's last words were in German, a language the nurse in the room did not speak. What were they?

Time unknown; Oak Island, Newfoundland, Canada: The Oak Island money pit. Someone went to great lengths to bury something here and keep it from being dug up. What was it and why was it buried?

1885 - 1917 CE; Rennes-le-Chateu, France: Priest Beranger Sauniere discovered a number of parchments containing excerpts from the gospels with non-sensical messages in French highlighted on them. Shortly afterward, he became immensely wealthy through means he divulged to no one but his housekeeper. What did he find?

1968 CE; Chicago, Illinois, USA: Major Daly of Chicago shouted a number of things into a muted microphone at the Democratic National Convention. What did he actually say?

Approx 1972 CE; Washington , DC, USA: Seventeen minutes is missing from one of Richard Nixon's "Watergate tapes". What was on it?

Unknown; unknown: Men's shirts button with the buttons on the right. Women's shirts button with the buttons on the left. There has never been an adequate explanation for this.

Unknown; unknown: What's the origin of the ring shaped pastry known as the donut?

Unkown; Greece: The Phaistos disc is the earliest known example of printing in the world. What language is it, what does it say, and why was this technology not adopted by the pre-Hellenic world at large?

10th century BCE and earlier; the Aegean: Linear A, the inscriptions of the Minoan culture are still indecipherable, and very little is known about the Minoans, including their cataclysmic end. Were they the inspiration for Atlantis? If so, why does Plato place Atlantis "beyond the Pillars of Herakles"?

2009-03-19T00:24:00.000-07:00

And now, a brief shout out to What Really Happened.com which found my last post interesting enough to link to. WRH carries a lot of analysis you just won't find elsewhere on the net. I don't take it as gospel, but it's certainly worth thinking about.

Aloha, Hawaii!

Death of the Internet

2009-03-17T13:12:00.000-07:00

More and more I'm hearing alarmism about the "takeover of the internet" or the "death of the internet". Some in the survivalist and patriot movements fear that any day now, the Federal Government is going to move to take down half of the sites on the World Wide Web, and restrict access to the other half.

Poppycock.

Let's remember what the "internet" is. It's nothing more than several suites of protocols for transferring data from one computer to another, or from one newtwork to another; and it's any set of (say it with me now) inter-networked computers running those protocols. Thanks to the boys at DARPA, the internet we know and love (based largely around the TCP/IP protocol suite) is desinged to be decentralised, with realtime compensation for changes in the number and positioning of functioning routers and nodes.

If I have a computer publishing a web page using HTTP and another computer across the room reading it, that's the internet. If I maintain a file server that exterior clients can access using VPN, that's the internet. If I work out a means to shift packets using AM radio, and such packets can cross from one network to another, that's the internet.

In essence, the internet is like a road system. Sure, and interested party can put up roadblocks at strategic locations, and they can try to lock down or tear up any routes they don't like. But others can build new roads and new roadnetworks as well, and it's impossible to control the whole thing at once, as long as the equipment and the people who know how to build and use it are scattered throughout the populace.

Now, possibly, the World Wide Web as we know it might be able to be co-opted. But the www is not the whole internet. I recall the salad days of Usenet - a decentralized method of collecting public information. In fact, I recall the atomic bomb board. Either a legitimate means for nuclear engineering students to share infromation or an elaborate joke, the atomic bomb board (Usenet designations varied) held actual real-world information on nuclear weapons design. Not the kind of thing that the Department of Energy, the Secret Service, or the FBI liked to see.

However, they couldn't get rid of it. Not just because of the perfidy of computer savy students, but because of the nature of Usenet. Usenet consisted of directories of files stored at various nodes. Periodically, each node hosting a Usenet directory would enquire if any of the nodes it was connected to lacked any of the files in it's host directory. Any missing files (or the whole directory) would be transferred to the other nodes.

So for instance, the University of Illinois would ask the University of Wisconsin if there were any Usenet files the UofI was lacking, or the UofW was lacking, and they'd copy and transfer files. Simple enough. So if the Secret Service tried to take down all of the atomic bomb board files at the Univeristy of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin would just copy it's files over to UofI, and service would be restored. If the University of Wisconsin suffered the same treatment, then the Univeristy of Illinois would fill in the gap. If, somehow, there was a co-ordinated attack at both of them simultaneously, then it was likely that the Univeristy of Minnesota would update both UofW and UofI after the fact. The atomic bomb board became almost impossible to remove.

Now, interestingly, that was the model of the late 1980's and early 1990's. The hacker/cracker credo was "All information wants to be free". Using a redundant, decentralised, self-correcting model, the information was in a sense free.

But something changed. E-commerce. The World Wide Web came into general use, and with it attempts to sell things online. The need to control access to information (paid sites, credit transfers, personal financial information) led to information no longer being free. Gradually, the server-client structure became commonplace, as it is easier to control information that way. Web-mail has edged aside traditional email, Chat clients have overtaken IRC, Web forums have replaced newsgroups and mailing lists. Websites have replaced gopher sites.

But we remember. We remember Usenet. We remember SMTP and POP3. We remember Gopher. We remember Telnet and the BBS. In the 21st century, the information we need is canaled, damed, and piped. It's controlled because it's easier that way, because money can be made that way, and free information doesn't drive an economy well. But all that can change. If anyone tries to "control the internet" we remember how to set that information free.

Neitzschean Aphorisms pt.1

2009-03-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

Human ethics and morality may very well be reduced to two conclusions:

"Be excellent to one another and party on dudes!"

The devil, as usual, is in the details.
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Truth is stranger than fiction because

1) Fiction must make sense; reality is not bound to such limits

2) Fiction begins and ends at discrete moments; reality goes on and on

3) Good fiction shows all of the central, important facts; reality is filled with enigmas
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Uzzah the ox-cart driver may have been the most compassionate man in the Old or New Testaments.
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Good people inclined to do good things will do them regardless of their specific religious profession. Bad people inclined to do bad things will do them despite their specific religious profession.

There are good Christians and bad Christians
There are good Moslems and bad Moslems
There are good Athiests and bad Athiests
There are good Buddhists and bad Buddhists
There are good Jews and bad Jews

Religion and morality are parallel but seperate.
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I'd rather not die like Jesus, thinking I had all the answeres. Rather, I'd prefer to die like Socrates, knowing I had only the questions.
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The worst thing to happen to the profound moral speculations of Yeshua ben Yosef was to re-write them under the pen name "Jesus the Christ".

Exercises in Identity pt. 3: Identity crises

2009-03-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

I define an identity crisis as an event in which some element of a person's identity is in doubt. The most general form of identity crisis occurs when one element of identity does not correspond to another element of identity - they do not identify the same person.

One example is the use of an identification card to obtain some restricted but desired substance or item. In some Western countries, especially the United States, access to alcohol or tobacco is restricted to those over a certain age. Usually, one's age is proved by presenting a form of government issued photo identification complete with date of birth. This process can lead to an identity crises in a number of ways.

One form of such crisis is misrepresentation. The person presenting the identification produces an ID that is valid in all ways, but not that of the person presenting. The intention is to decieve, usually by using an ID bearing a picture that is similar to the presenter's face - their biometric identity.

In this form of identity crises, the misrepresenter hopes that the examiner of the identity will believe that the misrepresnters biometric identity will be misunderstood to correspond to the document identity presented. Failing that, the misrepresenter hopes that fear of a false positive during the identity examination will deter attempts by the examiner to confront the misrepresenter.

When the identity examiner suspects misrepresentation, it is common then to resort to other means to confirm the identity. The examiner may ask the identity user to state their name, address, birth date or other trivia, whose correspondence to the data listed on the identification card will be confirmed. Such trivia are intended to represent a weak form of data-point identity, where an identification card user will be expected to produce these data unrehearsed. However, in actual practice, a misrepresenting identification user can be assumed to have rehearsed or memorised the data, causing such recitation to become instead a weak form of codestring identity, albeit involving a codestring that is known by more than two parties.

Oddly enough, one more significant form of resolving this form of identity crises is to involve law enforcement, in many cases deputies of the local county's sheriff's office. Strikingly, such law enforcement has few tools in their arsenal unavailable to the earlier ID examiner. While law enforcement may use a magnetic strip or RFID reader to obtain information stored electronically on the card, such information only asserts the validity of the printed information on the card. On site examination still cannot prove or disprove the correspondence of the present person's biometric identity with the photo presented on the identification. Theoretically, more precise means of biometric analysis could be called into play, probably by digitally scanning images into a computer programmed to analyse them. Such a process is only as good, however, as the accuracy of the process involved, which cannot be experimentally confirmed to be 100% accurate.
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Another form of identity crisis occurs regularily at the radio network at which the present author is employed. The nature of such work involves daily communication with a number of radio hosts over various forms of audio telecommunications equipment, or via computer text internetworking media. There is in the network studio no corresponding video or visual means of communication. Therfore, the radio hosts must rely only on audio or textual media for identity cues. However, many of the network employees sound similar to the common human ear. Their nominal identies must be commonly reaffirmed once per day, so the show hosts know with which network board-op they are interacting.

One apparent solution would to be to rely on codestring identity; that is, to give each network board-op a unique inernetworking (Instant messenger, e-mail, or both) identity, with a unique codestring attached (a unique login and password). However, pragmatic demands of scheduling and intra-board-op communication often requires their collective use of such assets, and so such media do not uniquely correspond to an individual board-op.

One possible solution to this recurrent identity crisis would involve narrative or stylistic identity. Given enough samples with which to work, it is quite likely that unique features of narrative style and content might be discerned for each individual board-op, and so each board-op might be identified by their unique features. To date, I do not believe that the process has been completed.
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"In 1962, the Fogg Museum of Harvard University arranged an unusual art exhibit, in which some of the paintings were fakes and most were genuine: "experts" were invited to come and pick out the fakes. Among those who authenticated at least one fake were the chairman of the Art Department at Princeton and the scretary of the Fogg itself. Most of the guests kept their opinions private, just making otes, but when the truth was revealed they 'quietly crumpled their papaers.' " [Wilson, Robert Anton; Everything is Under Control, HarperCollins books, 1998. ISBN 0-06-27317-2]

It is a conceit of art critics and art historians that the works of many noted artworks may be identified by the hallmarks of the style of their creators. That is, a painting can be identified to be the work of a particular painter by examining the style of the work. This is a use of stylistic identity. Similarly, literary critics and analysts attempt to identify writing style when determining if a given work is by a known writer writing under a pen name. As well, a moderator for an online forum may attempt to discerne if a new poster may be an older poster working under a new screen name by analysing the style of anything written.

However, as the Fogg experiment demonstrates, actual use of stylistic identity to identify a unique individual is not necessarily accurate, and should be used with caution, even by acclaimed experts.
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Nicholas Bourbaki

He was at one time hailed as a new polymath, producing excellent work in many fields of theoretical and applied mathematics, and publishing a number of journal articles. However, he was never seen to attend conferences or otherwise emerge into public. Many claimed (accurately) to correspond with him, but no one outside of a select few actually claimed to have met him.

Because Nicholas Bourbaki did not exist. He was the invention of a circle of French mathemeticians. Expressed in our terms of identity, Bourbaki enjoyed stylistic and narrative identity, as well as a nominal identity. He however lacked a biophysical identity, or a psychological identity outside of the conituity of memory of his "creators".

The Third Scientific Revolution

2009-02-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

The first scientific revolution, forged and championed by such luminaries as Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei and others. The first scientific revolution emphasised the gathering of and reliance upon empirical evidence. Observations would be quantified, measured, isolated, and repeated. The first scientific revolution bequeathed to the world the first scientific method: observe a phenomenon, identify independent and dependent variables, create an experiment, alter the independent variable(s) and observe any changes to the dependent variables, draw causal conclusions. Repeat and expand as necessary to form and confirm a theory.

The second scientific revolution, begun in the social and life sciences: statistical analysis. When a phenomenon becomes impossible to recreate in a controlled, laboratory environment, the investigator may instead choose to observe the phenomenon repeatedly in an outside environment. Data are collected, tabulated, and analysed as a statistical universe. Correlations are noted and causal conclusions are drawn. Studies are repeated and expanded to form and confirm theories.

The third scientific revolution, made possible by microcomputing: scientific modelling. A set of conditions regarding a phenomena are observed. Those data are used to formulate a set of initial conditions in an abstract, computational model. The model is allowed to operate, and consequent conditions of the model are derived. Those consequent conditions are checked against observed consequent conditions of the phenomenon being modeled. If the modeled consequential conditions closely match the observed consequential conditions, then the operations of the model serve as the basis for drawing causal conclusions and the formulation of theories.