The Expanding Introverse

Universal Comment Acceptor Mk4

2011-08-27T02:58:00.000-07:00

I am creating this post solely for people who get linked here from profiles I have elsewhere on the web. You are undoubtedly peeved at me about something (or, perhaps, in rare instances, chuckling). Go ahead; let it out. You won't feel better but I know you need to do it anyhow. Flame on.

If you want to dig back into the dark ages of this blog for ammunition or further entertainment, that's your prerogative, I suppose, but it's not going to do you much good; I've been away for quite some time and I'm pretty thoroughly divorced from all prior material posted here.

Comment thread: go!

A Behavioral Koan

2010-01-07T18:39:00.000-08:00

On her way off the bus, a girl pays her fare and takes a transfer. As she exits, she hands the transfer, unprompted, to a stranger waiting to board. Both of them leave smiling. Both of them ride a bus system supported by fares. A small and beautiful act of personal kindness; a small act of anarchy, of rebellion; a small act of indirect selfishness?

Low Man of Dubai

2009-08-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

In the years after the brief, bright, sooty grease fire that was Dubai burned itself out, its status as a byword for conspicuous over over-engineering gradually transformed into something else; while most of the world forgot the decaying city of megaprojects, the would-be modern Valley of Kings, those who lived in and around it could not forget, and simply did not have the money to flee. The wealth had fled years ago, at the first sign of trouble. Only the mad and poor had remained. There were plenty of both.

Willie Taylor had been sent to Dubai on long-term assignment in the summer of 2006 by an American engineering firm which had gone insolvent and evaporated in the recession of 2009. When his paychecks stopped appearing, he sent a series of increasingly distressed emails to his supervisor and H.R. department; they bounced. His calls were not answered. His ex-wife blocked his number after his first attempt to talk to her. His brother was in prison for dealing meth.

Despondent, Willie had gradually drunk away his savings. One day, early in 2011, he spent two hours at the docks screaming up at a container ship registered out of Cyprus, then collapsed in a nearby alley; when he awoke, he no longer had a passport or any sort of funds or identification.

He took the first job that would have him; a failing megahotel saw the potential merits of a literate English-speaking employee, and hired him on as a janitor and part-time marketing consultant. After extensive consultation, the management took Willie's suggestions for a new ad in Conde Nast Traveler; they were so pleased with his pitch that they gave him an immediate promotion to resident worker in a closet-sized room with running water.

The next week, Willie's ad was seen by the rich, powerful, and merely wistful throughout the English-speaking world.

Flash Fiction Intro

2009-08-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

I used to be a writer.

Oh! the freight contained in that one short, inelegant sentence.

In any case, yes; once upon a time, I wrote significantly more than I was required to by employment or academics. I'm not claiming what I wrote was all that good, or that it ever went anywhere, but I did it.

With that in mind, I'm going to try to publish occasional short fiction pieces here, just to flex my brain-muscles a bit. I promise nothing, but I can say that fiction is likely to be more interesting than anything I might say from life right now.

My brain and I haven't been getting along

2009-07-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

I came to the rather embarrassing realization today that I have apparently dug myself so deep into my introverted hole that the very thought of being social, in the most general sense of "What plans might I make in service of getting out more and interacting with people?" is now sufficient to drive me into fits of social anxiety. Wonderful. Actual people are no longer necessary, allowing me to cut out the middleman and process anxiety at least 30% more efficiently, possibly even more during off-peak hours when demand for interaction is less.

The contentment of my long relationship - or comfort, at least - appears to have largely kept a lid on the viscous, simmering muck I've allowed to build up in the interstices of my brain not devoted to putting words together in unnecessarily long compound sentences, resenting authority, or memorizing and applying a vast catalogue of facts about beer. With that restraint now removed, I find myself at loose ends much of the time, with very little idea what to do with myself and a great deal of angst about that fact.

I realize this is nothing unusual, mind you; it seems like the majority of people I know profess to being socially stunted in some way or another, and certainly our popular media portray a plenitude of individuals with social neuroses. Nevertheless, it comes as something of a rude shock, and so stands out as an exception in my individual experience. I have always considered myself a bit shy, introverted, eccentric, and intellectual, but basically functional. To suddenly find that, on my own, I possess only a few ragged tatters of a social life and a massive mental block regarding the skills I need to repair or rebuild it has hit me pretty hard.

There are reasons, of course; there are always reasons. In some ways I am typical of my generation, or at least the stereotypes of my generation: broken home, poor relationship with step-parent, raised in ways that were well-meaning but often inconsistent and occasionally neglectful, hereditary disposition toward depression. I was the fat kid in middle school and the awkward loner in high school. I rather expect that if I had lived a few years later, I'd have been on some sort of school-shooting watch list, but Columbine was slightly after my public school tenure. In any case, there were factors in my development that left me feeling both powerless and unwanted, and, behaviorist that I am, I can't discount those as formative influences even though there is a substantial emotional component to my makeup that wants to self-blame for every problem I've ever had.

The fact is, though, that that's all in the past, and I have to live in the present. (I've heard some very interesting discussions on that sort of topic recently, incidentally, not least an interview with Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism, on Point of Inquiry in which is discussed the illusion of the self, free will, and scientific naturalism.) Yes, I'm temporarily on antidepressants, and yes, I have seen a behavioral therapist in the past and will probably again. I don't like to be one of those people with Issues, and I don't intend to be one of those people with Issues for long, but I'm also not the sort to just ignore real issues - especially not issues that affect those around me. I may procrastinate and I may fail to look out for my own best interest sometimes, but I still know the right thing to do when I see it.

I also, apparently, know how to digress. If ever there was an e/n post on this blog, I guess this is it.

I intend to make myself get out and hang out with people who have fun, even if the things they do don't sound like fun to me. I figure there is certainly room for me to learn.

This is a dark time

2009-07-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

My friends, I am just now pulling back a bloody stump from the painful end of an eight-year relationship. This is not a good time for me. I consider it a success to get through each day without giving up and losing the will to live. Yes, I am aware that in time, it will suck less. For now, it sucks.

The difference should be virtually unnoticeable to you. I will still not be blogging often. I just wanted you to know why.

Lies, Damned Lies, and "Statements"

2009-06-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

It might just be observer bias, but it seems like food recalls have become much more frequent over the course of my adult life.

Superficially, this might initially seem like a good thing: finding and pulling contaminated food is better for everyone, right? Well... yes and no, but mostly no.

It is true that it's better to have the stuff that's definitely connected with food-borne illness off of store shelves. It is not true that this is a good sign. It is, instead, a sign that our problems with food contamination are becoming worse and worse.

Recalls, you see, in a manner unsettlingly similar to that described in Fight Club, don't happen as a result of regulation or inspection. They happen after consumer complaints reach a certain critical mass. Recalls are initiated when the number of poisoned customers begins to approach the minimum threshold for the FDA or USDA to take notice.

Today's recall - cookie dough contaminated with a particularly virulent feedlot-bred fecal bacterium* - highlights another facet of this increasingly common phenomenon: blatant, outright, baldfaced lying by the perpetrators.

Nestle's statement said : "While the E. coli strain implicated in this investigation has not been detected in our product, the health and safety of our consumers is paramount, so we are initiating this voluntary recall." A spokesperson for Nestle, one Laurie MacDonald, apparently added to Nestle's release, claiming that "The health and safety of our consumers is our No. 1 priority."

Without going into deeper detail regarding the manifold ways in which a corporate industrial food system is inherently bad for the health and safety of consumers**, I'd just like to point out that if health and safety were indeed a number one priority, or even particularly high on the list of priorities, it is easily, even trivially within the capability of an entity as large as Nestle to:

Test each outgoing batch of "food products" before sending them to market,
Enact stricter sanitation measures to prevent contamination in the first place, and
Use ingredient sources which don't include quantities of shit sufficient to contaminate entire batches of cookie dough with fecal bacteria.

The moral of this story is the same old tune that all of us food-conscious bloggers have been singing for several years now, or at least since Eric Schlosser made it visible and Michael Pollan made it hip: don't eat food that's manufactured instead of cooked, and don't believe any claims about food that are made by plastic packaging or plastic people.

* - E. coli 0157:H7, a nasty little bug that has received no little attention in recent years thanks in part to its appearance in Fast Food Nation
** - I refer you not only to Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma here, which are obvious, but also to... well, honestly, I don't know how to hyperlink an entire social movement, for those who aren't already in it. Start with some good news and tips - The Ethicurean - and some good science - look for food-related items at ScienceBlogs (you might consult posts like this or these).

Credit Experiment: Update 1

2009-06-04T18:25:00.001-07:00

Bills and rent have consumed the entirety of May's pay. Courtney is also out of money. The situation is... well, "dire" would be a melodramatic overstatement, but "inconvenient" fails to capture the uncomfortable feeling of alarm I experience at being unable to buy food. It is true that food supplies here at home are adequate for the time being, but payday is a week away and I am unsure if we will be eating in a manner one could reasonably describe as "well" by the time we can afford another trip to the grocery store.

On the upside, I just came in from the garden, and there are cornstalks popping up in the garden in a great big hurry. The ones that got a little out of line during planting were lifting up the landscaping cloth*! The potatoes are coming along as well, and there is a lot of promise in broccoli, kale, zucchini, onions, and if I'm lucky, a few more crops of leaves in some chard plants that bolted and overwintered but nonetheless continue to survive. Insofar as greater self-sufficiency is helpful in spending less, all this is excellent news - though probably not immediately useful for at least a month in most cases, two or three in some.

* - While generally entirely organic, hand-made, recycled, etc., our garden suffers from a severe pest problem in the form of the neighbors' cats, who really seem to enjoy digging up seedlings and shitting on them, thus killing our plants, creating a very serious health hazard, and generally adding insult to injury. Please, please, please, friends, keep your cats indoors or at least confined by an electronic "fence" system. When outdoors, they're extremely destructive to wildlife, they're a major nuisance to your neighbors, and they're in constant danger from dogs and cars and who knows what else. If you think they suffer from being confined to the house, you should see what they do to the small animals they catch, and what will happen to them if and when they finally get run over. Or shot. They're a harmful invasive species in the truest sense. Keep them inside.

Making Human Enhancement Available is a Moral Imperative

2009-05-20T13:49:00.000-07:00

I believe the title of this post adequately conveys my thesis herein, but allow me to restate it a bit more completely:

When and where it becomes technologically feasible and acceptably safe according to the same standards used to judge similar technologies, it is morally necessary for a society which desires to respect human rights and human equality to allow and make available the means for human physical and mental enhancement; drawing an entirely artificial and inconsistent line between "treatment" and enhancement is not ethical, as it is claimed to be, but instead serves only to damn those who were less fortunate in the lottery of genetics and rearing to being forever trapped in their native and functionally inferior states.

I realize that this may not sound like something particularly controversial, especially not phrased in such an overblown, highfalutin manner, and I think that the only person who might take issue at this stage is a sort of conservative-minded medical professional or medical researcher. Medical ethics seems to be the primary vector for discussion of this matter so far, but I assure you that it's much further-reaching and much less abstract than that makes it appear.

I'd also like to admit up front that I have been beaten to the punch on addressing this issue by the preeminent journal Science, which ran an editorial several weeks ago recognizing the increasing demand for enhancement and recommending that the scientific and medical communities take up the issue realistically. It was not an endorsement, but it was an admission of, ultimately, the inevitability of human demand for enhancement and the need to understand it and perform it as reliably and ethically as possible. I take the matter in a different direction, though I agree with the editorial's thrust.

What am I talking about? Well, for starters, I'm talking about athletes using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. I'm talking about students and researchers using Adderall and similar stimulants to improve academic performance. I'm even talking about recreational use of Viagra and related sexually active pharmaceuticals. I'm also talking about technologies that haven't arrived yet but promise to in the near or not-so-near future: prosthetic body parts with electronic components whose functionality exceeds baseline organic analogs; implanted computing; real mental enhancement by drugs or surgery, as contrasted to today's attention-enhancing stimulants; and who knows what else, since the progress of future technology always contains unexpected developments.

Many of these familiar examples highlight the complexity contained within the qualifier "acceptably safe according to the same standards used to judge similar technologies." Athletic performance-enhancing drugs can have catastrophic consequences if misused, leading to heart failure, higher incidences of cancer, or other unfortunate medical outcomes. The mental enhancement drugs available today often suffer from similarly grim side-effects; abuse of Adderall, now widespread and deeply entrenched on university campuses, can have a variety of attached problems including psychosis, immune degredation due to sleep deprivation, and even death in extreme cases. By and large these drugs are the extent of enhancement available to most of us today; the more "cybernetic" methods that might come to mind like robotic limbs are prohibitively expensive, too primitive to be beneficial, or illegal - sometimes all three.

You'll note, however, that those list of horrible harms were attached to the word "abuse." This was part of the thrust of the Science editorial and it's part of my point as well (though it's not a point that I think is likely to strike home in a nation which hosts a continuing and deeply nonsensical War on Drugs) - that if these things are going to exist and be widespread anyway, it is then our duty to make them as safe and as fair as possible.

Frankly, though, what we have now is only the barest, primitive leading edge of what may come as we continue to advance our technology. The tradeoff of side effects versus benefits of the drugs many people use makes it entirely debatable whether they're enhancement at all for any but a few in special situations; a major-league baseball player may benefit from steroid use, but anyone else would likely suffer more harm than the positive returns would rationally justify. Adderall may help desperate students study for an exam, but its tendency to make users jittery and sometimes panicky makes its routine use unpleasant and potentially dangerous for most people. Other drugs used for similar purposes have similar problems. We don't yet seem to have anything that qualifies as a clear "upgrade."

But we will. We will, and under certain circumstances we already do.

Consider the case of a victim of a hereditary degenerative disease - Huntington's chorea, for no particular reason. This person will not live the fullest and best possible life for someone in his societal situation. This person will suffer, and die early. We consider this person deserving of any available medical means to treat this disorder. But Huntington's is not a disease, per se; it's a genetic condition. This person is only living out the life determined by his genes. He's not suffering from any external negative influence, nor is he responsible for his condition as a result of his own actions. We consider this unfortunate, and we deem this person worthy of elevation by any available means to a better life than that predetermined by genes and circumstance.

Consider the case of a perfectly ordinary young man of average abilities who finds himself unable to grasp the subtleties of quantum physics at university. It is his dream to understand and work with the fundamental forces of the universe, and to use his knowledge to find new energy sources and new technologies, but he simply can't make the math line up in his head. He is using the brain his genes created for him and the training his parents and other influences gave him. He is living out the life - and the inadequacy - predetermined by his genes and circumstances. He faces an uphill struggle to comprehend the difficult problems facing him and a hopeles academic and professional disadvantage if he pursues his dream. Does this young man deserve the opportunity to obtain and use whatever drugs are available to focus and sharpen his mind and aid him in his studies? His case is qualitatively analogous to the victim of a genetic disease, and yet by and large our society frowns on his availing himself of any means of self-improvement other than hard work, which we like to imagine is all that is necessary - a fairy-tale view of morality, reward, and punishment which reality often fails to bear out.

Think of all the other conditions of life which we, today, vacillate about whether to treat as disorders or unfortunate but unalterable qualities of an individual: depression, anxiety, irritability, addictiveness, lethargy, physical weakness, poor memory, chronic pain, and a host more. Do we deserve to be damned with these small failings just because we were born with them? It is not the sufferer's fault if he is clinically depressed. It is similarly not the sufferer's fault if he is unintelligent, or if he is intelligent but unable to focus. Free will - if you accept its reality, which I do only provisionally - extends to our decisions, but not our basic natures. If anyone is to blame for a tendency to alcoholism or a small frame or arthritis, it is one's parents, and yet assigning blame helps us not at all.

I say, therefore and finally, that as we have the means, we must, if we would claim to be just and moral as a society, allow all individuals the means to make themselves the best they may be, to succeed as greatly as they may succeed. To do any less is to chain them to a primitive genetic determinism, is to enslave them - us! - to a place in life determined not by individual rights, nor even by merit, but merely by birth. We had as well return to the days of feudal aristocracy. No, it will not do. Making human enhancement available is a moral imperative.

The Credit Experiment

2009-05-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

Since the current financial crisis began, I have been vocally skeptical about claims coming from academics, industry men, and government about the pressing need to restore financial stability in order to make easy credit available to Americans. Apparently we need easy credit to live. This has fallen very strangely on my ears; it's sounded a lot like more of the same bullshit rhetoric about how the American economy is the be-all end-all of human welfare and enterprise. It has sounded like the same kind of attitude that led Bush to ask us all to go shopping after the September 11 attacks. It sounded false and more than a little condescending.

Well, I will confess something: I was being somewhat hypocritical in my skepticism. I had three credit cards, only one of which was frozen and unused*. I made frequent and liberal use of easy credit. I always reconciled this by telling myself that it was convenient, but that I could live without it. As it happens, I'll now get the opportunity to try.

Recently one of my credit cards, an Amex which was branded by the credit union I'd been a member of in Austin and which had always treated me right, with a low rate, a relatively high limit, and no funny business, sent me a letter informing me that they were raising my previously low rate by more than a hundred percent, to almost 25%. I was having none of this. I immediately canceled the card, rejecting the change and locking in my existing balance at the existing rate. I wrote it off as an irritating but minimal hardship of the failing economy.

Today, I received a nearly identical letter from my other active card, a Capital One Visa I've had for around ten years. They told me they were effectively doubling my rate, again to almost 25%. Once again, I was having none of it. This time, since this was my last credit card*, I decided to try to talk some sense into them. I picked up the phone and called customer service.

After surprisingly little runaround, I wound up connected to an "account specialist." The long and the short of it - and mostly the short because, for supposedly being the problem-solver guy who had the flexibility to negotiate, he had surprisingly little to say to me - was that as far as reasonable negotiations went, it was simply not going to happen. He told me that they could not not raise my rate and that there was nothing he could do for me. I politely explained how it would be a win-win if I got to keep my card and they got to keep my business, but he insisted that he simply couldn't stop my rate from going through the roof. I thanked him and asked him to close the account, and that was that. The greed and inflexibility of the company has cost them whatever they might have made off of me in the future, and since I pretty consistently carried a balance, that's not nothing.

Anyway, we arrive thereby at my current situation: I am credit-cardless. Oh, it's true, I do have that frozen one that I might break out in a life-or-death emergency*, but that stays locked away and I don't intend to take it out. I am putting my money where my mouth is - and since I do still have to eat, that's true in an uncomfortably literal way. I will conduct an experiment to determine whether Americans really do need easily available credit to live. I predict that my hypothesis - that they don't - will be soundly confirmed.

Lest I be accused of being unrepresentative, of being a child of privilege who doesn't have the needs of real Americans, allow me to list my qualifications:

Public sector job paying a wage substantially below the regional median
More than three thousand dollars in existing debt and upwards of fifteen thousand in student loans
Minimal savings (currently only... let's see, $55 available)
No other income or assets which might offset my poverty (e.g. trust funds, investments, etc.)

As you can see, I have my financial ducks in only the loosest, vaguest row (I do pay all my bills on time). Nevertheless, I contend that I can make this work - can, and will.

Credit card issuers are and have been, in the words of The Stranger's Jonathan Golob, "vile pigs." They have used the perceived necessity of easy lines of credit to entangle millions of Americans in terms and agreements that are simply outrageous - I have never seen a credit card agreement that didn't allow the issuer to raise rates, lower limits, charge fees, or penalize credit scores at will and without notice or reason. This has never sat well with me, and I admit to a certain juvenile satisfaction in - twice now in recent weeks - telling them exactly where they can shove their arbitrary rate hikes.

So that's my story. That's the experiment. We'll see just how it goes!

* - I applied for and got a Visa some time back for the express purpose of abusing their offer of an introductory 0% rate on balance transfers by transferring a balance from a card I had to it and paying the minimum for a year, buying myself an interest-free year. This has worked well so far but I have never used that card and I never intend to. The purchase rate is an atrocious 16%, and the backer is Bank of America, who I don't trust as far as I can spit. As soon as the transfer APR ends and I pay off the balance, I'm closing the account for good.

The Ranch, part 1

2009-03-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

There is a place I know, a little farmstead, where a fellowship of remarkable young men and women - or maybe not so young, any more - have made a home and a life for themselves. They aren't farmers. They're what are classically considered "intelligentsia," holders of advanced degrees, specialists in information and complex theories and books and generally things which are not soil. They're the step-siblings of the World Wide Web, and yet they've made themselves self-sufficient in an agrarian model that's been very nearly lost in modern America, and all without cutting themselves off from the outside world or even from "real" jobs in "real" places.

By sharing between their several small households the duties and costs of subsistence agriculture, these happy visionaries are able to operate the intensively, intelligently managed acres of their shared property as only part-time farmers. In the rest of their time, they each have their own pursuits - some are parents, true, but there are also researchers, teachers, programmers, managers, authors, and artists. It's a small enclave, four or five families at most, but they're an eclectic lot. In their spare time - and yes, there is spare time - they're musicians, gamers, crafters, readers and writers, cooks and bakers, and upstanding members of online communities.

The farm doesn't run itself. Like the now-famous Salatin farm featured in Michael Pollan's remarkable The Omnivore's Dilemma, it's an intensively-managed sustainable outfit which strives to minimize external input and maximize the health and long-term output of the land it occupies. Of the hundreds of acres of land owned in common by the families of this enterprise, only a relatively small percentage are cultivated, the rest left as woodlands to collect sun, block wind, and preserve soil. The Ranch produces only what its occupants need, and is thus spared the complications of commercial agriculture. It's an idyllic place to the casual observer. It would undoubtedly be no more than it appears, were it not piped in at high speed to the whole world.

***

So you know, in case you haven't guessed, I know this place, this haven, so well because it exists, thus far, only in my imagination - and in the future.

The Ranch is my vision. I dream of a place and a day when I can live where I please, uncrowded, thanks to the beneficence of the Information Age. People say we live in that Age now, but they're wrong; it's coming, but still nascent at best. Between Moore's Law and the beginning of rural broadband - the modern rural electrification - we've only barely begun to see the potential of a truly connected society. With projects in the works as diverse and exciting as quantum computing and a semantic web, the world as we know it is destined to change at an ever-accelerating rate. It won't - shouldn't, at least - be long before physical localization is entirely irrelevant to information-based occupations. If my hopes, and not unreasonable ones, are borne out, the day when a teacher or a librarian can work from home - a home which can be anywhere in the world - and be every bit as effective as if they were working in person is not far off.

The revolution which will end the commute is the same one which will enable the revival of small-scale agriculture and the emergence of the part-time farmer. I am by no means heralding the death of cities; on the contrary, I expect future emergences to create ever-denser population centers. At the same time, however, there is a class which does not need to be physically present to contribute to society, and I count myself among them. The day is coming soon, with any luck, in which I will be able to abandon entirely the tiresome necessity of driving around a concrete wilderness, and return to the natural world by the grace of the virtual.

High Seas Foolery

2009-01-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

So, it's true: piracy really hasn't changed.

(Yes, I'm referring to the fact that very few old-time sailors could actually swim.)

Welcome to '09

2009-01-02T22:29:00.000-08:00

Lo, I have hibernated through the long Autumn, and have re-emerged, invigorated by the, uh, dark, chill... winter. Crap.

Anyhow, I'm back.

Much has happened, children! In the coming days I shall hold forth on topics as diverse as fancy beers, family holidays, the real war on Christmas, open relationships, important ways in which I disagree with Jared Diamond, and, of course, science and pseudoscience in the news. The world is interesting!

Today, however, I would like to talk to you about this new year in which we find ourselves.

The double meaning in that phrasing was not an accident. For me, personally, 2008 was something of a trial, and I feel like I'm coming out of it stronger and... purified. I'm sure I'm not alone in this; indeed, it seems like perhaps our whole nation feels somewhat similar. There are going to be a lot of hard lessons to come for idealistic people who worked very hard for very good reasons to elect Barack Obama and other good candidates. Politics isn't going to get any less ugly overnight. With any luck, most of us will learn some balance from the experience, rather than simply getting burned. Of course, there will be good to come, too, so don't think I'm prophesying doom; rather, while it won't all be sunshine and roses, I don't want the learning experience to be so bitter for some that they lose sight of the good.

That was all a very prolix way of segueing into simply saying that I'm feeling good about 2009. Implying that I'm going to "find myself" might have been employing a little poetic license, but there are a lot of things that I've just been putting off for a "better moment" for a while now that I feel like I could just maybe start to tackle soon. Some of them will be work, some will be pleasure, and some will probably just be strange, but it's about time I started moving forward again.

I hope you can too. Peace.

Dang

2009-01-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

I don't want to toot my own horn, here, but if you look back in this here blog's archive at June of 2008, I was already gettin' pretty steamed about market deregulation and our failing laissez-faire economy. I won't claim I predicted the current crash, because I clearly didn't, but all the same I feel like I have earned the right to say "I told you so" at least a little.

Bad Ideas: #16,478

2008-10-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

So it appears that one Selmer Bringsjord, a researcher at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has created "E," an electronic personality construct - sort of the primitive ancestor of an artificially intelligent entity - designed to represent the embodiment of evil. The idea, supposedly, is to study E in order to learn more about human evil.

There is no way this could possibly go wrong. Nope, no sir, no way at all.

Bonus: Bringsjord is using Asimov's Laws of Robotics to keep E on a tight leash. "'Because I have a lot of faith in this approach,' he says, 'E will be controlled.'"

Editor's Note: I am deeply enamored of the idea of artificial intelligence and it is only by a supreme effort of rational will that I keep myself from becoming a transhumanist and singularitarian (both of which positions are, given the current state of technology, narcotically appealing to those of a nerdy bent but logically indefensible); I simply think that perhaps it's not a good idea to let an electronic personality designed to be pure evil loose on the world.

Preliminary review: D&D4

2008-08-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

I'll keep this short, in order to prevent it becoming a rant.

First, the pros: what I like about the new edition.

I like the separation of spells into quick-casting combat stuff and longer, component-using rituals. I think the idea of rituals is great, and I completely approve of the concept.
In-play complexity has genuinely been reduced. What WotC began in 3E, they have culminated here in reducing virtually everything to a single mechanic. If that's your thing, this should be pretty good for it.
There are no bards.

Now, in as short a space as possible, the cons:

The whole damned thing is focused on, catering to, and obsessed with combat, and especially combat "balance." One of the ways complexity has been reduced is by removing essentially every single rule or mechanic for non-combat... anything. The skill set has been drastically curtailed, the skill rules have been neutered to refer only to "Trained: yes or no," virtually all genuine utility or out-of-combat spells have been removed or recast in combat roles.
Look, WotC, let me say this once, and say it clearly: you are NOT going to displace WoW or steal any of its success by trying to turn D&D into a succession of exclamation-point-bearing questgivers and dungeon crawls. It won't work. WoW does and always will do it better. Don't try to be WoW, because you aren't.
Each class has been stripped of its interesting and unique features, progressions, and abilities, and has instead been turned into just one more cosmetic applique on top of a bunch of damage-dealing. There is now no substantive difference whatsoever between a fighter and a wizard except in what the DM is supposed to describe when they kill a monster, and perhaps in the specific minutiae of how their damage is distributed.
In furtherance of the previous point, they've gone so far as to explicitly say that I am correct in my impressions of the feel, by stating outright that no experience is gained for anything except 1) killing, and 2) completing fetch-and-carry quests. This makes me very, very angry.
Also in furtherance, they've... oh, fuck it.
STOP TRYING TO BE WORLD OF WARCRAFT, YOU LOUSY GREEDY GRABBY UNIMAGINATIVE CORPORATE HACKS. YOU AREN'T, AND IT'S NOT EVEN A GOOD THING TO ASPIRE TO.
The new "healing surges" essentially kill any remaining verisimilitude (not realism, mind you; it's a fantasy game, so realism isn't the point) by allowing characters to almost constantly renew themselves to full health, and by allowing the healing of any and all wounds with a single good night's sleep. In fact, this is yet another example of... well, you know.

I guess the short version is this: Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition is Wizards of the Coast attempting to steal market share from Blizzard by shamelessly ripping off the feel and mechanics of World of Warcraft. It is a highly polished, highly balanced, and fairly streamlined product, so it's good in that regard; if what you really, really want is to get together with your friends and play WoW without computers, then I guess this is the game for you. Otherwise, steer clear. Way clear.

In a completely unrelated subject, anybody want to buy the 4E core rulebooks? I, uh, happen to have an extra set. They're in perfect shape. Never really been used.

I Am The Game

2008-07-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

I am considering creating a Game Blog.

It has been quite a long time since I ran or played in a tabletop RPG - that's those things like Dungeons and Dragons with funny dice to the layperson - and I'm getting the hankering. Sometime over the last year, I read Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East, and I really enjoyed a lot of the thematic elements and the setting. It's a mix of fantasy and sci-fi in a way that is completely unlike the one mix that most people have experienced of those two things - Star Wars. I am going to borrow some of his ideas.

I'll say right now: if you're thinking you might like to play in my game, think before you read the book. I won't be running a game that takes place anywhere near the events of the story, but it will spoil some of the mystery of the greater world for you.

The best description I can come up with for the setting is "post-post- apocalyptic fantasy western." I'm sure I'll draw inspiration from, and be criticized for allegedly plagiarizing, such diverse sources as Deadlands, Stephen King's Dark Tower books (his Midworld is a rich source of inspiration), Empire of the East obviously, and TSR's old Dark Sun world (indirectly... it's a bit of a jump from a harsh desert wasteland to a typical Spaghetti Western, but I'm such a big fan of Dark Sun it's hard not to let its influence creep in). I hope to create a setting that's all my own, however.

I've been hearing a lot of good things about the Savage Worlds rule system, and I might look into that. I have always harbored an ambition to repair Dungeons and Dragons, however, and with the recent release of D&D Fourth Edition, I think I'll probably run that way. I've been looking over the 4E core books, and I have to say that while I think they've lost something in verisimilitude and gained what I can only describe as WoWiness (a certain unreal, repetitive quality reminiscent of typical video game play), they have, in large part, smoothed out a whole lot of what used to make D&D suck: the unplayable frailty of new characters, the mismatched hodgepodge of different rules adjudications, and, most of all, the interminably long, boring combats that consume four-fifths of any play session. That's not to say that combats can't be interminable in the new rules - they can, as the playtests of the introductory adventure Keep on the Shadowfell painfully illustrate - but rather that I think the new rules provide DMs with tools for maintaining a good flow and possibly even making combat stay within it's appropriate sideline role in a role-playing game.

It will, of course, require some house rule "patches" to keep up a good flow and restore the verisimilitude. That's expected among experienced players. Restricting the new "healing surges"; stopping interplayer table talk during fights; and doing away with WotC's absurd (and cringingly WoWy) idea that you can only earn experience from 1) killing and 2) completing simple, generally "kill x and retrieve y" formulaic quests will make for a good start.

Oh, right. Where I was going with all this: I am considering starting up a new game blog on which I will chronicle the plot arc in an episodic story form (and perhaps occasionally gaming happenings as brief interludes). I think that this would be beneficial both to me and to the players. It will be something of an exercise in discretion to keep from including spoilers but still make a good story out of it. I will keep you posted.

Snowjob

2008-07-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

Another bad man dies, and again those in power crassly heap posthumous praise on one of their own in order to make themselves look better by association.

This is why we need something akin to Orson Scott Card's Speakers for the Dead. The only real memorial of an individual's life is the truth about that life. A full, unbiased, human portrait of Tony Snow might have earned him some understanding and dignity; as it is, he'll now go down in history as just one more Bush White House lie. No one deserves that.

Edit: Half of what I ask for is out there: personal accounts of the man. This is the good, but without the bad; if only she had elaborated on the phrase "Politics mattered to the professional Tony," maybe we could have seen the very human duality of a man who kindly helped friends in need even as he lied to the entire nation for the benefit of a few power-hungry crooks.

Why do we pity the dead?

2008-07-05T02:54:00.000-07:00

I'd like to challenge the notion that it's wrong to speak ill of the dead.

Jesse Helms died today, and, frankly, good riddance. I'm not one to celebrate the death or suffering of any man, but I am profoundly grateful that Helms' influence is no longer a direct part of the world. Personally, I did not know him. Politically, it's good to see him permanently out of the picture.

Helms is being lionized today by the modern conservative movement. President Bush has called him "a kind, decent, and humble man," and Pat Buchanan said he was second only to Ronald Reagan in his importance to the bastardization of the Republican party -- admittedly not in so many words.

The media seem to be striving for impartiality in presentations of the late Senator Helms. I am forced to question the acceptability of this seemingly proper act. To say that Helms was a divisive figure would be grotesquely to understate the case; he made a career of pitting racial factions in his state against one another. Helms was the last, longest-standing opponent of equal civil rights for all Americans. He endorsed discrimination against victims of HIV. He relentlessly assailed the separation of church and state. Helms proudly stood firm to his last day in office as a racist, a bigot, a reactionary anti-intellectual, and an elitist in the true negative sense of the word -- not one who endorses the commensurate rewarding of merit, but one who looks down contemptuously on the poor and unfortunate.

Asserting that "the negro" is inherently unstable and violent is not the act of a "kind" man. Attempting to bar HIV patients from employment in a wide variety of careers is not the act of a "decent" man. Advocating the imprisonment of the faculty and students of a major university to prevent the blight of their educated ideas from spreading, however facetiously, is not the act of a "humble" man. Jesse Helms was many things, but President Bush failed to accurately name any of them.

I never hated Jesse Helms the man. In his personal life, he seems to have tried to be a genuinely good person, adopting a disabled boy for no apparent reason other than simple altruism. Nevertheless, neither good intentions nor a long-awaited death change the ugly facts of a long life of evil. Jesse Helms the politician was a powerful and visible symbol of many of the worst facets of American society. I will not pretend to mourn the passing of villainy from the earth, and I do not believe that dying, something which anyone can accomplish with comparative ease, earns a man immunity from criticism.

Jesse Helms has been a blight on America for some sixty years. The fact that he is now no longer among the living does not remove the shame of our failure to rid our government of his taint during that unforgivably long career. Look with fairness on all he did in his life, yes, and praise the good - but do not fail also to condemn the evil.

To put a more positive spin on this, Helms is a useful example of how much positive change we've really made in the last several decades. Things may look pretty bleak to Americans of intellect and good conscience some days, but you just have to look around you to realize that we no longer have segregated schools, active laws about what sexual activities can go on between consenting adults in their own homes, or a government that looks the other way at everything from discriminatory hiring practices to lynchings. Helms was a relic of an era that is passing away, and as much as we may seem to be backsliding some days, his passing is a reminder that things do, in the long run, get better.

I have nothing to hide...

2008-06-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

...so mind your own goddamn business.

As an advocate of an open society, I feel strongly that anyone should be able to essentially come out of the closet about anything they care to make public, without fear of judgment or repercussion. This should, in fact, apply even to admissions of criminal behavior in a context which does not constitute a legal confession, unless there is a clear and imminent threat of harm to another in the admission. No one should have anything to hide.

However, I feel that it is critical to distinguish this position from the entirely spurious anti-privacy assertion that "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." For an astute and detailed refutation of this idea, see this paper; I particularly identify, however, with this excerpt: "[D]ata mining aims to be predictive of behavior, striving to prognosticate about our future actions. People who match certain profiles are deemed likely to engage in a similar pattern of behavior. It is quite difficult to refute actions that one has not yet done. Having nothing to hide will not always dispel predictions of future activity." Nothing grates against the sense of justice and the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" quite like the notion of future guilt. "[T]he problem with the 'nothing to hide' argument is that it focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems—the disclosure of personal information or surveillance—and not others."

For other readers, a different analogy might strike home: "In many instances, privacy is threatened not by singular egregious acts, but by a slow series of relatively minor acts which gradually begin to add up. In this way, privacy problems resemble certain environmental harms which occur over time through a series of small acts by different actors. [...] The law frequently struggles with recognizing harms that do not result in embarrassment, humiliation, or physical or psychological injury. [...] The problems caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is maintained in relationships between businesses and their customers."

Privacy is about the right to control how much or how little information about yourself becomes public. Too much privacy becomes de facto censorship; too little creates a paranoid police state. When I reveal personal information about myself, I am attempting to help create an environment in which anyone can be true to who they are in public without fear of censure, not to imply that we should have no secrets.

"[W]hen confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the nothing to hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say."

Seriously, I recommend this essay.

Living in bubbles

2008-06-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

I was listening on Thursday to a call-in show on our local NPR station, KUOW, called The Conversation. On this particular occasion, the show was not, in fact, call-in; instead, it featured an on-air debate between progressive and environmental activist David Sirota and well-known conservative mover and shaker Grover Norquist. It was an interesting listen, but ultimately I thought that neither of them presented himself or his "team" very well. Sirota was rather hand-waving and outraged, like a Socialist protester at a state university, and Norquist came off as greasily slick, smug, and lawlerly.

I didn't choose the comparison for Sirota arbitrarily. As the argument progressed over the economy, the elections, and oil prices, his rhetoric became more and more scornful and, frankly, Marxist, resorting to assertions of class war and responding to some of Norquist's dodgy statements by saying they were "a joke... what a joke." I found this somewhat dismaying on multiple levels, since not only am I no Marxist personally (I find Marxist ideology to be insultingly simplistic and naïve, rather like Randian Objectivism or Libertarianism), but indeed Marx's arguments about class as a driving force of social upheaval and revolution have been refuted to a substantial degree by historical analysis. It was also, I might add, just bad form.

The more I listened, however, the more I came to realize that what I was hearing wasn't just a naïve ideologue attacking a smug social Darwinist; it was, in fact, two naïve ideologues, whose ideologies, while theoretically opposite, were not in point of fact all that different. The sole distinguishing point was that one vested complete faith in fairness through social oversight, while the other worshiped at the altar of the infallible and beneficent Market. Indeed, come to that, Norquist was the greater cultist, since he admitted to no compromise whatsoever with Sirota's moderate - if still unrealistic - statist socialism, while Sirota at least did not attempt to entirely demolish the very idea of a capitalist market.

What I saw was that Norquist, emblematic of the deep conservative tradition that Reagan and his ilk brought to the fore in this country, was, in fact, a sort of anarcho-Communist himself. He and his movement endorse complete deregulation of all industries and services and essentially the elimination of taxation; they prefer to believe that private enterprise will naturally assume all the roles that the government now fills. They go so far as to say that oversight is completely unnecessary, since corporations will avoid harming or exploiting consumers so as to avoid losing business. This is so patently contrafactual that it is difficult to believe anyone could make the statement with a straight face, but there you have it.

Ultimately, Norquist's laissez-faire capitalism relies completely on exactly the same flawed axioms as Marxism: that humans are rational, enlightened, and in their self-interest, and that they are fundamentally and reliable moral. Indeed, the central theoretical works of Keynesian economics state openly and apparently without self-consciousness that individuals are "rational actors" who will take the best possible actions to advance their needs and desires. If there is only one insight that modern social science and psychology have granted us, it is that humans are not rational actors in any but the simplest and most unrealistically isolated and abstract circumstances. To claim that a theory based on the rational action of individuals is sound or useful in a reality where obesity and smoking-related deaths are commonplace and people prefer the incredibly dangerous transportation option of individual passenger automobiles to safe, cheap, and responsible mass transit is so absurd as to be insulting; and that doesn't even take into account individual contributions to global problems as in the case of climate change.

Communism, schmommunism. When you get right down to it, laissez-faire capitalism "works in theory" too. Just like Communism, it also results in social stagnation, environmental degradation, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few elites self-selected for amorality. Both systems suffer from the same failing of a fundamental lack of accountability of those at the top to the people who make up the system; and before you raise a fuss about the power of consumers to direct a capitalist society through purchasing choices, consider marketing. Marketing is the ability of those who control information networks - which have, not coincidentally, been privatized and deregulated - to manufacture both product and service demand, and public opinion, and the fact is that it works. Yes, even on you. You may consider yourself unusually immune to advertising, like many of us do; perhaps you only respond to one in a thousand ads, or you only buy something you saw advertised when it was something you wanted anyway? Well, one in a thousand seems insignificant... until you consider it on the scale of three hundred million Americans. And until you take into account studies that demonstrate that people are just as likely to be swayed by one opinion heard over and over again as they are by a very popular opinion. If you hear an ad for a product two or three times a day for months, chances are you'll start to think that everyone has one, and you need one too, and you won't even realize your mind has been changed.

There is a reason American citizens are always referred to by those in government and industry as "consumers" rather than "Americans" or "citizens" or "people."

In short, I suppose, the take-home message here is that the next time you say something derogatory about China or the Soviets, take a good, long look close to home, too. We had our own Cultural Revolution, and it's a damned wonder we don't all have little red books by Ronald Reagan. When you're going to vote or bitching about a tax hike, just remember that democracy and the free market, in spite of everything you've been told since 1980, are emphatically not the same thing. The American dream of self-improvement and a good life through fulfillment of all our needs has been stuck in a closet and buried under multiple strata of lava lamps, Walkmans, Betamax players, Power Rangers action figures, and more defunct automobiles than it's possible for the human brain to visualize: cheap consumer crap we didn't need that's now fallen out of fashion. That closet is getting full, and the first step we're going to have to take in the long-overdue spring cleaning is to stop piling more and more new junk on top of the mess we've already made. That, in turn, is going to require some reevaluation of a whole lot of people's assumptions about what it means to live in a free democracy. We deserve more than just the freedom to have our strings pulled by private interests who control our basic material needs and the flow of information to the public. We deserve, frankly, a new American dream.

Edit: I have changed the link to the voluntary simplicity page to a more general informational page on the concept, since it came to my attention that the site I originally linked to is, well, crap.

Clone wars

2008-06-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

You can have your Jurassic Park, sir, and may you take much joy from it.

I am going to fill my island with cloned Vikings.

Hooraaa-ay...

2008-06-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

Obama day.

2008-06-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

Do you see this?

Do you want to know where absolutism leads? Do you want to know what it looks like to have the mindset that anything is permissible so long as you believe your cause is just? Take a look. Look and see how we arrived at the current state of affairs, Abu Ghraib and waterboarding and the looming specter of war with Iran and all of the damned mess.

The only thing worse than the hopelessly naive "My country, right or wrong," is the blind and vicious "My country is always right."

Where's William H. Taft when you need him?

2008-06-03T12:20:00.001-07:00

It appears that the Communications Trust is preparing to strike again with another plan to screw consumers who simply don't have any other realistic options.

Time Warner has plans to being testing a new metered bandwidth plan in Texas. I can tell you firsthand that there really aren't any other good options for broadband connection in Texas, so it's not surprising they'd choose that location to roll out this latest outrage.

Initially, the plan might not seem like a bad idea on its face. Other utilities are metered, right? So why not bandwidth? Well, the weaker but still relevant objection is the philosophical: it's wrong force people to pay for information. There are a hundred ways around this objection, most of which involve charging for the medium on which the information is distributed or for the effort of the distribution. This is just the latest bite taken out of Net Neutrality and the egalitarianism of the internet.

But like I said, that's the weaker objection. The stronger is this: Time Warner (and Comcast, which is guilty of its own anti-consumer sins) constitutes a strong regional monopoly, and when they suddenly change not only their own service offerings in this way, but the entire paradigm of the service offered, they essentially blackmail customers into accepting it - customers who did not seek out or sign up for this type of limited service. In most parts of the nation, you will find one cable broadband provider - almost always Time Warner or Comcast - and, if you're lucky, one DSL provider, and that's it if you want more than dial-up. Since these communications giants, along with the few other holders of major network brands, effectively run the FCC with careful lobbying and lots of lawyers, no one can be bothered to rein them in.

I really don't know what to tell you to do about it, I'm afraid. Support the EFF, maybe, or write your legislators. It's hard to oppose these kinds of forces, but give it a try any way you can.

Update: Apparently, Comcast is getting in on the game as well, not by charging more for bandwidth, but by deliberately slowing connections. Comcast's fight with P2P networks is old news, but it's new to me that they're instituting such a general crackdown on bandwidth use. It seems to me to be even more egregious to deliberately deny your customers what they're paying for than to ask more for your service. Both of them taking these actions recently and fairly suddenly, however, cannot help but reinforce the impression of collusion and price-fixing. It is to be hoped that the next U.S. administration lives up to its promise to be the polar opposite of both W. Bush and John McCain, and thus approves of and engages in vigorous trust-busting. I see little hope otherwise given the general apathy of the American public (whom I adamantly refuse to refer to in the general as "consumers," as there is much, much more to life than consumption).

Thoughts on brewcraft

2008-06-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here at my "desk" - the end of the living room table, in point of fact, since we're having trouble procuring furniture that meets our standards of both green and responsible, and not an aesthetic disaster - sipping one of the last half-dozen bottles of an ale I brewed a couple months ago. It wasn't a successful batch, in some ways; for one thing, it's a dark brown, but I don't think I'd really call it a stout or a porter since it's not very dry or toasty, so it's a bit of a bastard beer when it comes to style. For another, I really underhopped it, since I was improvising on the recipe and I didn't have a good feel for the hops I used. To top it all off, I also used the irish moss - a flocculant - and priming sugar wrong, so it's cloudy and supercarbonated. When I opened the first bottle and tried it, it reminded me strongly of really crappy albeit unsweetened root beer: brown, explosively bubbly, and, well, crappy.

It's matured for a couple of months now, however, and I have to say that at this point in time, it's really... not bad. I don't know if I would buy more of it from the store, but I'm happy to drink what I have left. It developed real character, and as the maltiness came out, the insufficient hops really seemed to matter less. The excess carbonation also seemed to bleed off a bit over time, perhaps owing to the flip-top bottles I used, so right now it's a nice, balanced, malty brew, and I don't even think I can really call it a failure in any fairness.

So what's the moral of this story? Well, first off, it's that beer is pretty good, even when it's bad.

More importantly, though, the moral is this: if you use decent ingredients, it's hard to make bad beer, even if you don't really know what you're doing. Really hard. You practically have to try to fail, since yeast is a prolific little organism that really likes sugar, and it doesn't like to allow any other organisms to share, so bacterial infections in the wort rarely prosper. Understand, then, that when you experience bad beer, you are being subjected to direct malfeasance. Good beer is pretty easy, so you'd better believe that when a major brewery releases a bad beer, they know what they're doing. They are insulting your taste and judgment as a consumer in order to make more money by using inferior ingredients.

Are you just going to take that? Thank goodness for the microbrew revolution.

For additional relevance, the megabreweries also promote deeply unsound industrial practices. You'd better believe they don't care where their grain comes from so long as it's homogeneous, which feeds a lot of money into irresponsible, fertilizer-heavy agriculture. They also, as anyone who is over the age of three and not blind and deaf must be acutely aware, voraciously exploit the American schizophrenic relationship with sex for their own profit in their marketing. In addition to simply being a bad cultural influence, there is no way that this practice could fail to increase the incidence of poor judgment in relation to consumption of alcohol and sexual behavior.

Drink good beer.

Thumbing a ride

2008-06-01T21:48:00.000-07:00

Excuse me, but I'd like to get back on the writing wagon. Which way are you headed, driver? If you're not going all the way to Self-Realization City, that's okay; you can let me off at Maturityville or even Enjoyment Cove and I can find the rest of the way myself. Mind if I hop on?

I imagine it would be strange for him to hear it - in fact, having met him briefly and established that he's a nice, down-to-earth guy with a history of underestimating himself, I'm sure it would be - but I feel like I owe a lot to Wil Wheaton. I've been reading Just a Geek, and I don't think I've ever encountered a more excruciatingly sympathetic account of an internal struggle between real identity and expectation. Like Wil, I'm a writer by nature, and like Wil, I have spent years fruitlessly telling myself that I'm something else. In my case, the "something else" is a scientist, not an actor; all the same, I find the internal struggle deeply resonant. In the bargain, I've neglected my writing to the point where I've lost my edge, and I've spent many semesters kicking myself for fitting inadequately into a role I'm just not made to fill. There are differences, sure; I can probably continue to work in science since it's not as cutthroat as Hollywood, and I do love it. I'm a passionate generalist.

Those of you who only know Wil as Wesley Crusher need to give him another look. You might be surprised to know just how much you have in common - just like every other insecure teenage boy, Wil hated Wesley too. The grown man Wil tells a heck of a story, and the story he tells is personal, familiar, and pretty damn funny.

Anyway, thanks, Wil.

Finding a place

2008-05-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

I can't think of a way to say this that won't be at least a little trite, but I need to say it, so I'll just get it out of the way: I haven't been blogging because I haven't liked who I am and I haven't been able to figure out where I belong or where I'm going, so I've been trying to find myself.

Should I have put quotation marks around "find myself"? Would that have been suitably ironic? Does it count that I just did, albeit a sentence too late?

Anyway, yes. I found myself, not long ago, subject to more and more violent mood swings - admittedly most of them from "normal" into "crushing depression" - and I realized I had to, essentially, change or die. Reducing the amount of time each day I spent listening to the news helped immensely; I already know how the Presidential election is going to turn out, for example, so stressing out constantly about the petty details and Hillary's latest offense against basic integrity and decency was just causing my blood pressure to spike with unhealthy frequency. One news program per day is quite sufficient. I still enjoy the local features of our NPR station and the in-depth programs, but I had to relax and let the world take its course.

Once I stopped raging, though, I started to realize that a large part of the reason I was getting so pissed off about the ways the world needs to change is because I'm quite unhappy with my place in it. I don't really know who I am. Rather than ranting about this as I ordinarily would, however, I'll just say that I've been avoiding updating here because I just haven't known what to say. I don't know what direction I want to take. This is true both in life and in this blogspace.

Diverting all my energy away from pointless rage has allowed me to channel it into introspection and creativity, and I have realized that in the last six or eight years I really haven't made much progress on the "What do I want to do?" question. I'm currently working a more or less dead-end job, which I took only in order to lead to more jobs that actually involve bench science and might help me get into grad school. Unfortunately, I don't really know what grad school program I want to go into, or how to best go about it. I do, at least, know that I want to get into grad school in some sort of PhD program, because even if I don't stay in professional science, I want to experience it. I want that background, because a couple of the things I know I might do are science education and science journalism.

I can't help, sometimes, but to picture myself as a high school teacher. We'll see if that's how it ends up. I know that would be a good place to make a real difference, but it does have its obvious drawbacks as well.

Anyway, that's the story. Once I've got things figured out a little better, have no doubt I'll talk about it to no end; meantime, I'll try to find interesting things to talk about that are compelling in their own right and don't focus on me.

I want to know if people know who George is in "A Talk with George." (Yes, you can listen to it for free.) No fair just Wikiing the song.

The perilous path 'twixt Paris and Rome

2008-04-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

It seems like every day there's a new degree of shrillness in the global concern over the growing food crisis; and it's no wonder, when tens or hundreds of thousands simply can't afford to eat. Here in the states I don't think it's inhumane cruelty or bovine apathy that leaves the average American griping about a few extra dollars at the checkout instead of dropping everything to ease the suffering of the poorer rest of the world; rather, I think it's just that the majority of Americans simply have no concept of the idea of being unable to eat. Even if it's just Top Ramen or McDonalds or similar nutrient-void trash, very few of us entitled first-worlders have ever been unable to meet our caloric needs. Hunger is part of history class, not our conscious worldview.

That said, it's not as if today's "hunger crisis" is anything new. If I've heard correctly, the UN estimates that around 24,000 people have been starving to death every day for years. I suppose that many of the distracted modern populace have been pestered by the likes of Sally Struthers for so long now that they've essentially come to regard starvation as part of the background noise of the world at large rather than a sickening and entirely needless horror.

I don't mean to sound jaded or cynical. Until recently I've been one of the many who regarded world hunger as "a problem" but never really gave it a second thought. Now that I've given it a second thought, I'm horrified but entirely at a loss as to how to change it with the means available to myself and others who would address the problem. I've known for years - and I'm not that old - that when we eat the products of the modern food industry, we're essentially eating oil. From petrochemical fertilizers to machine labor to transport by truck, without the Carboniferous deposits there's no way we could be supporting so many with such a small agricultural workforce. It's no surprise, then, that a dramatic increase in oil prices should result in a dramatic decrease in the availability of food worldwide. For the life of me, though, I can't see a solution that doesn't involve shaking up some of the fundamental assumptions of the outgoing but depressingly tenacious latter-20th-Century world, and people seem quite reluctant to accept that shaking. It's really disheartening to me to know that with no more than a program of energy infrastructure renewal, we could easily provide affordable food in perpetuity to everyone in the world, and yet that fundamental change is held off indefinitely by the greed of a few powerful men and the childish fear of change of the automobile-infatuated American people.

The reason I mention the coverage in the news, however, is because I don't think it will be an option for the sated to ignore the hungry for much longer. Food riots can only go on for so long before they become something more; hungry men do desperate things. There were no shortage of people in the world who hated the United States for our foreign policy before now; imagine their bitterness, whether you think it's justified or not, as they watch their countrymen starve under corrupt governments we do nothing to rein in and in some instances even set up, while we hand out what's essentially a free television to every household in our nation and don't miss a single hypercaloric meal.

American civilians braved Redcoat bayonets and the wrath of a global empire for far less grievous wrongs. Today we are the empire, but without the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, it's not going to be another American republic that emerges from our shadow. What would we have been if Washington and Jefferson and Franklin had been jihadis, I wonder?

No, this time it won't be the oppressed who show the world a better way. There will no doubt be a bitter struggle, but any change for the better in the world is going to have to come from within the empire. It's going to be a narrow, dangerous line we must walk, between the Roman Republic and the French, but there are tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to eat, and we're the ones with the bread. I only hope it doesn't take us too long to see that you can't bomb away hunger, whether it's the primal, nutritional kind, or the deeper hunger for freedom that we seem to have forgotten.

Interesting things I have learned lately:

2008-04-24T20:33:00.001-07:00

- There are more than one thousand species of bananas. Of all these, you have only ever seen one in your whole life, or maybe two or three if you shop upscale markets. This is because this is the only strain of banana that growers deem both amenable to shipping and resistant to Panama disease, a fungus which wiped out the strain of banana that our grandparents used to eat. Apparently bananas really were better back in the old days.

- Also in banana-related news, researchers claim that a genetically-modified banana is the ideal delivery system for a Hepatitis B vaccine. Seriously.

- A meta-analysis of studies of multivitamin use has shown that not only do vitamins generally have no health benefits, they actually correlate with a small but significant increase in mortality. They also, as media outlets across the country have been happy to share, give us the most expensive urine in the world; given the known effects of prescription drugs on environments into which human wastewater flows, I think it's logical to say that it's also likely that all these vitamins could be having significant effects on ecosystems. This is actually not really new news, but I read it again lately and I thought I'd share.

- Recent discoveries about regolith composition on Mars were the result of a broken wheel on the Spirit rover, which dragged behind - actually in front of, since because of the wheel they had to drive it in reverse - and gouged a shallow trench in the Martian surface, revealing bright white and yellow layers under the red surface which contain, respectively, lots of silicon, and lots of sulfur compounds.

- Hillary Clinton has no integrity or respect whatsoever.

That's all for today.

The world IS just awesome

2008-04-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

I tend to be pretty current on most of the crud that floats around in the interwebs, but YouTube is my big, glaring blind spot - I hate the inevitably mind-bogglingly stupid comments there so much that I have an aversion to the whole site. The result is that I am usually days or weeks behind when it comes to popular videos. All that was a lead up to the fact that you may have seen the following already or you may not. Frankly, though, I don't care, because it needs to be seen again. And again, and again, and again.

Edit: I have now watched this no less than six times tonight, and each time it makes me happy, and I am not anywhere near tired of it. Thank you, Discovery. Thank you so much. I want to find whoever was responsible for that commercial and give them a great big hug.

2008-04-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

I am sorry, in a general sense, to have been so absent lately. I doubt many folks on the nets will have known the difference, since I don't think many of my local friends and acquaintances read this, but the fact is that both Courtney and myself have been depressed, enervated, and completely withdrawn for a couple weeks now. Apart from a brief excursion to the Green Festival, neither one of us has done much of anything outside home and work this month.

I know that's not good for anyone; all introspection and no life makes John a pain in the ass. I can't speak for Courtney, but for me, well, I don't really know the name of this new breed of noonday demon.

Anyway, that's it. I wanted to let anyone who had wondered know that, yes, I do still like you, and no, I'm not upset or just being a dick. Well, not intentionally, anyway. See you soon, hopefully?

On work and satisfaction

2008-04-16T18:56:00.000-07:00

Today on our local NPR station's afternoon call-in show The Conversation, there was a featured discussion on some new sociological results which indicate that money does, in fact, make people happier - not just relative wealth, i.e. being the richest guy in town, but absolute wealth, your overall buying power. I had my own comments, though as always, being at work, I was unable to call in; I think that anyone who is really made happy by money is probably not all the way up Maslow's hierarchy, for one, and I also think that, humans being social creatures, people are likely to be made happy by money when they are told, point-blank, that money is a measure of success, as most people in our modern consumerist world are. That, however interesting it may be, is not what I'm writing about today.

No, what I'm writing about is a thought which came tangentially off of that topic: the intersection of work and satisfaction. What constitutes satisfying work? Sure, for some people, it might just be decent coworkers and the thought that the job is raking in the bucks... but not everyone feels the same. For some of us, I don't think money can buy happiness, or at least not in the kind of quantity that most people can realistically expect to see. With Bill Gates' money, I could probably effect some significant positive changes on the world - not that Bill isn't (I really like that man, believe it or not) - and I expect that would make me happy. Failing that, however, I just don't really see an ordinary occupation ever leaving me satisfied. I am both too radical and too cerebral. I feel quite strongly about certain ethical considerations, and I think about these feelings too much, to live day-to-day without these sorts of concerns affecting my mentality.

The conclusion that I have arrived at is that I will never be able to live as one of the many who work so that they can do something else. I don't think I can be content doing a job that I don't love or at least think is useful and productive. I suppose this may come off as elitist, and if it does, well, so what? "Elitist" has become a fashionable slur lately, but I don't necessarily think that meritocracy is a bad thing. I think that anyone who attained any real consciousness of the world and their role in it would be hard pressed to live their life day in and day out unconcerned about what they were doing.

Now, I do suffer from the infamous - or at least infamous in some circles - "upper-middle class white kid messiah complex." The name of this issue is a mouthful, but it's also fairly self-explanatory: upper-middle class white kids raised by fairly successful parents are taught that they have essentially infinite potential and are going to change the world, and as a result spend their young adulthood neurotic and depressed about how they are failing utterly to either be superheroes or win a Nobel Prize. Essentially, the syndrome is a failure of statistical understanding - not everyone can win a Nobel. Knowing that, however, doesn't make the damaging effects of normality on the sufferer's self-esteem any easier to bear, nor does it cure us of the drive to "make a real change" or - modestly enough - save mankind. It's a sort of involuntary hubris, and it's hard to know if it's even a bad thing, since it gives its albeit unhappy victims all the reason in the world to be good people.

In short, I think that there is a substantial segment of the population in the more recent generations - what is it that they're calling us now, the "millennials"? - who will never be content working ordinary jobs, and I think that I am among them. We few, we unhappy few, we band of saviors... we will always be seeking that research grant, or that term with Greenpeace, or that place in the State Legislature, because we can never be content with just being someone. We may never have any more positive effect on the world than your typical janitor, car salesman, or teacher (indeed, we're unlikely to have anywhere near the positive effect of a good teacher), but it won't be for lack of drive.

I encourage more people to take on at least part of this condition for themselves, however. I admonish you all to reevaluate the work you're doing. Are you just working for the money? Is that really worth it? Isn't there a cause you could be working for? Some part of society that you feel really needs your help? It may be something mundane or something minor - all it needs to be is something that you think is important, something that you think is more important than whatever comforts and widgets your current paycheck will buy. I'm sure you can think of something. If you're like me, there are altogether too many things you can think of.

So why not consider a career change? Why not put the skills you have to good use? Lawyers, look into EarthJustice. Code monkeys, look into having some of your time go to the Gates Foundation, or into getting into the Google Future project, wherein the world's most ambitious tech company will work to ensure the coming of the technological singularity under the benevolent eye of a loving strong AI. People like me, who have intellect but no drive or direction, well... hell, does anyone have any suggestions?

Stealing peace of mind

2008-04-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

Courtney has just written about people's tendency to do nothing and feel okay about it by "borrowing" or just plain tearing down others' efforts, and I wanted to expand on that a little. Firstly, I wanted to voice my agreement: anyone who thinks that it's a good thing that I live responsibly because it helps to make up for your shortcomings, well... don't you ever fucking dare to tell me so to my face or I will wipe the floor with your smug, condescending little smirk. I live my own life, and I take responsibility for my own actions, and if you try to lay the burden of your sins and your dirty conscience on me, well, whatever god you believe in help you. You are, and always will be, responsible for every single repercussion of every action you ever take. You, and you alone.

Let me explain something to you: the history you learned in high school gave you a very misleading impression of how the world works. When you think about history, you probably think about Big Names, leaders, heroes and anti-heroes like Napoleon, Gandhi, Churchill, and Stalin. You probably think of World War II in terms of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia and Roosevelt's America and Truman's atomic bombs. You probably think about Caesar crossing the Rubicon, not about Caesar's legions, and you probably think about Genghis Khan laying waste to Asia, not about the Mongol nation.

This approach is wrong. The way you think is wrong.

Do you think these "great men" would have accomplished one damn thing by themselves? Do you think that Caesar could have forged the Roman Empire without generals and lieutenants and adjutants and cronies and friends and, most of all, lots of soldiers? Do you think that all these people were slaves or automatons? That they had no wills of their own? Do you think Hitler that killed six million Jews, or that, perhaps, "his" ruthless and highly organized forces played a role? The history you know paints pictures of eras filled with kings and generals and "their" armies, of presidents and "their" nations. It gives the impression that the great bulk of humanity are faceless, nameless, and empty of thought or will, slavishly devoted only to the trends of the time and the plans of their leaders.

This is a fact, but it is not truth.

As a human being, you always have a choice. I am not here to make an argument about the nature of what we call "free will," but I will assert that whatever free will is, we have it, or at least something like it. We do make choices, and at the most basic, physical level, the universe is far too complex for anyone to realistically claim that those choices are deterministic. We have no usefully complete grasp of either the basic nature of the universe - of why quantum phenomena happen the way they do, and of what and why subatomic particles are - or of the function of our own brains and minds - emergent phenomena of breathtaking complexity. Suffice, for now, to say that we all have some sort of will. People behave in statistically predictable ways, but the derivation of those statistics is purely observational. We know what people are likely to do, but not why. Sociologists may argue with that statement, but not with any real conviction.

Anyway, we've arrived, via that somewhat grandiose and circuitous digression, back at the point I was trying to make: you have a choice in everything you do, and your choices do matter. Great men are only great because you allow them to influence the choices you make, and they do not allow you to influence theirs.

Putting it that way takes some of the magic out of it, doesn't it?

So here's what I'm getting at: you, and only you, are responsible for the effect you have on the world. If you think there are things wrong with the world - and if you don't you must be either comatose or evil - then you have an obligation to do what you can to mitigate those wrongs. You do yourself a disservice, and you morally betray yourself and everyone around you, when you shirk that responsibility, or, worse yet, when you attempt to assuage your own guilt by dismissing or denigrating the efforts of others.

The bottom line is this: "great" men - in the sense of "great" that simply means large or powerful - are just men (yes, yes, or women, it's a linguistic issue, not sexism, so get over it). You, the individual, are there the power lies, albeit only en masse. You make things happen. Your actions are part of the trends and movements that shape the world. When you act, every time you act, you are changing the world for everyone; and when you fail to act, or act in ways other than those you know you ought to, you change the world in ways that you do not want.

There are "great" men in the world today who spend their lives starting wars, stealing from the poor, and encouraging those from whom their derive their authority never to think about what's happening. You know the ones I'm talking about, and you also know that you, and everyone around you, have the power to make things right. I'm not just talking about voting, either; I'm talking about the things you don't say to your friends and neighbors, and the calls you don't make to your representatives, and the political rallies you don't attend, and the causes you don't donate to, and the volunteering you don't do. I'm talking about the ugly truths you choose not to think about because it doesn't feel as nice as thinking about the luxurious dinner you're going to have, or the new car you want to buy, or the trivial problems you're facing at work.

And I know what you're thinking now, too: you're thinking that you just have to live your life, not worry about everyone else's. Well, guess what? Foul. I cry foul. I call shenanigans. I call bullshit. I call you out.

Creating a false dichotomy - "either I live my own life and don't worry about the big things I can't change alone, or I sacrifice my own life to try to change things I can't change alone" - traps you in a presumption of defeat. These are things you can change. You need to be part of the larger movement to create the changes you know need to be made; you cannot accept defeat when defeat is not inevitable, nor can you shirk your responsibility by lying to yourself and thinking that someone else will do it. Someone else will not, cannot, do your share. They can only do their own.

Do your share. No one else can, not your leaders and not your neighbors. You know what do to; you don't need me to tell you. Do all the things you've lazily assumed don't make a difference, because they do. Being a part of mass action doesn't feel like an adventure; you won't feel like Caesar. You will make change.

Outing

2008-04-10T19:18:00.001-07:00

I have written an important post. I have written it at my alternate, personal blog, thejohnallele at LiveJournal, because it allowed me to make use of a feature which can hide part of the entry until folks click on it.

This post concerns many issues which are generally considered private and personal, and there is a reason for that: I am attempting to dispel the notion of "too much information." I believe that information cannot hurt you, and in an effort to back that idea up, I am placing at least some of the information that people might consider "too much information" about me online. I want people to know these things, for the purpose of making it easier on others about whom these things may become known. I would, eventually, like to see a world in which information about your personal life, so long as it's not criminal, cannot hurt you. I would like for anyone to be able to know anything about anyone else without anyone being harmed. I would like for hangups to disappear.

I will warn you that if you don't want to know personal stuff about me - including sex, religion, and other miscellany - you can opt out.

If you're curious, you can read it here.

I'm back, y'all

2008-04-04T08:19:00.001-07:00

I am here again, and I greet you loyal few who will read these words. My life has been a bit of a melee of late, but I'm resolved to carry on with my writing again after too long a hiatus.

Sad news and glad news - we've lost some good friends to California, which is good for them (family and a better job) and we are happy for them, but it leaves us substantially more alone up here. At the same time, we might be gaining the company of an old and wonderful friend from Austin who's considering graduate school at the UW.

I also injured myself, resulting in chest pain, shooting pains down my left arm, and stabbing abdominal pain. More on that later.

To come in this space: a review of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, one of the most poetic, complex, and fearsomely violent volumes I've ever perused. And peruse it I did - while I took it in on audiobook, working as I do on my feet with my ears free to absorb, there were a number of segments I was obliged to play two, three, sometimes even four times just to be certain I had extracted the full meaning. Even after such a thorough read, I'm sure I'll try it again soon. Blood Meridian has been passingly praised as one of the greatest works of 20th-century American literature - to say nothing of its being hailed as the paramount masterpiece of enigmatic and brilliant McCarthy - and I'm struggling to feel up to the task of analyzing it.

Electability Independence

2008-02-24T00:47:00.001-08:00

It's good to know that I'm not the only one listening to what isn't being said in the Presidential campaign... but it's damned depressing to be reminded of exactly what it is that's being avoided. The one single most important issue not only of the election, but of the modern world, and nobody's saying word one of any real substance.

Fuel economy standards? Really? Offering a few more models of slightly less awful internal combustion automobiles is going to tip the balance in our favor? How about we talk about turning the American economy on its head by removing the automakers and oil producers from the throne, hmm?

Oh? What's that?

You don't want to talk about that right now? You'd rather discuss health care?

You're afraid that important "constituencies" might think that discussing such things could have negative effects on the economy? Well, that's interesting. What if we added something about public works programs and energy research funding incentives that would drive the development of a new, stable, responsible economy? That sounds pretty good, right? Well, here's the catch: people are actually going to have to want to make some change, not just have you fix it for them. Yeah, you're looking a little green in the face there, Candidate. Oh, did I forget to mention that you'd probably really piss off a lot of very powerful, deeply entrenched industrial-complex interest groups who have large financial stakes in the old, consumption-driven, unsustainable economy?

Oh, you don't want to talk about this any more? You'd like to talk about Hope and Change and Security and what George W. Bush has done wrong instead?

Yeah, I thought so.

1 part announcement, 1 part rant, shake well, serve over ice

2008-02-20T18:38:00.000-08:00

First, the announcement: last night, on the seventh anniversary of our first date (I know, saccharine indeed), I proposed marriage to Courtney, and, perhaps not unexpectedly after seven years together, she accepted. I am, in spite of my typical phlegmatic and sardonic manner, quite pleased about this. To say the least.

She, on the other hand, is positively giddy. I am glad that such a small gesture (which will, I am fully aware, blossom into a monstrosity of spectacle and lack of privacy for me given what large and loving families we both have) could make her so happy! I will not say that it has been a long time coming, because that would be frankly untrue; there have been a great deal of times in our relationship, times of all sorts. Many of them were bad, or at least not very good. It has taken me this long to figure myself out, and similarly, she is just getting around to figuring herself out as well. We began dating when we were only nineteen, so this slow and measured approach has been invaluable in letting us get to know ourselves even more than each other. Waiting until now has allowed us to grow up and then take this step, rather than utilizing this step as a surrogate for actually maturing. I regret some elements, but not the greater picture.

All relationships have cycles. Sometimes they run hot, and sometimes cold; sometimes they are good, and sometimes very bad. I was not able to feel secure about making a relationship permanent until I had fully internalized this seemingly rather simple truth. Moreover, after some of the things we've gone through together, I was definitely not able to feel secure about a decision like this until I felt secure in myself, and in my convictions, hard-won indeed after being raised by parents who loved me but had very real relationship issues of their own, that it is possible and virtuous to make things work, that good relationships are a matter of putting forth the effort, not just of dumping one person after another until you stumble into perfection. This is an ethic that my grandparents had, but many in my parents' generation did not, and while I knew it at some level all along, it took a lot of effort to really feel okay about it - to feel that it was neither silly juvenile justification, nor drawn-out teenage rebellion.

Anyway, enough with the philosophizing: Courtney and I have always had a simple, happy compatibility that extended far beyond whatever temporal events were affecting us. We, as one friend noted way back when we had only been dating a short time, work. After seven years, that working is no longer a simple, natural near-fit, but a polished and lovingly crafted artifact, and one that I'm proud and happy to be making official.

Science Debate 2008

2008-02-17T00:14:00.000-08:00

I think I mentioned SD08 once before here. If not, you should check it out here! It's a pretty exciting idea with a large and increasing proportion of the entire scientific community behind it, including the AAAS and the NAS. The "debate" in question is a Presidential one, in which the candidates will, if all goes well, expose before the whole world their sad ignorance of scientific and technological issues or possibly vindicate themselves if they are not, in fact, sadly ignorant. I'm looking at YOU when I say "sadly ignorant," Mr. Huckabee.

Anyway! There was a debate between members of the campaign staffs at this year's AAAS meeting in Boston on Saturday, which in itself is unremarkable; it's not like the candidates themselves attended. It is certainly a step in the right direction, no doubt, but what got me excited was the response from the staffers when they were asked during the debate if the candidates would be attending the real deal SciDeb2008. Clinton's guy was quite noncommittal and you could tell he was trying to find a way to say "In your dreams, nerds" without losing any votes; I am unsurprised. Obama's rep, however, was quite stoked about the prospect and said that they were seriously considering it. I mean, that's hardly a pledge, but surely it's a good sign.

I guess the Clinton camp's response shouldn't really come as a surprise. Highly educated people - and scientists by definition fall under that descriptor - have never really been one of her strong demographics during this campaign, so there's no reason to think that she'd waste effort trying to please them this late in the game. I suppose the fact that educated folks don't like her much says something in itself, though, doesn't it?

Monkey busi... aw, hell, I just can't do it.

2008-02-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

Holy crap!

Apes got foreplay!

Discussion: Darwin Day

2008-02-14T20:53:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting if unintended conversation night before last with two gentlemen from the Discovery Institute.

For those who aren't aware, the DI is a Seattle-based conservative "think tank" (I really hate that term) primarily dedicated to sponsoring "research" by "scientists" which they think might be friendly to creationism. (I won't call it "intelligent design" until they start saying "evolutionary biology" or "the modern synthesis" instead of "Darwinism." Call me petty, but I think it's only fair.) They tend to utilize more or less the same arguments every other creationist group in history has used, namely: 1) Some aspects of life are too complicated to have evolved, so they must have been created by some intelligence which may or may not be God but which is, purely coincidentally, almost certainly quite God-shaped; 2) "Macroevolution," an essentially arbitrary distinction from "microevolution" based on the amount of change, hasn't been directly observed - which they're quite sure has nothing to do with the millions-of-years time frame involved; 3) Darwin was a bad, bad man.

I showed up at the Blue Star Pub on Tuesday night - Darwin Day, as it happened - for my first Seattle Skeptics Meetup, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Blue Star was a pretty decent little place that had given us a back room, and that there were a fair number of people there - and some of them were even in my age range! I arrived before Courtney, so I had the opportunity to meet a few folks before she did.

I was surprised to learn about the guests from the DI, however. I was expecting a fairly quiet, fun night of getting to know some Seattle skeptics, not a vigorous argument; I'm not at my arguing peak at the moment. As it wound up working out, I was, out of perhaps 25 or 30 people, seated directly across from the creationists. When I learned this, I immediately ordered an imperial pint of Arrogant Bastard Ale; it seemed both fitting and necessary. When the waitress returned with my beer, she remarked, "You had the Arrogant Bastard, right? Yeah, I thought so. You kinda seemed like one." I considered this a good omen.

I won't waste your time, readers, with details of the ensuing debate; it was exactly what you would expect. I am an evolutionary biologist; they are... well, they are people who abuse science and promote bad scientists for a living. It wasn't pretty, although it was, to everyone's credit, always polite and in good humor. I feel like I carried at least a third of the non-creationist side of the argument, no small feat given that there were at least twenty people participating and only two of them were DIers; Courtney, for her part, jumped in now and then with biting remarks from the perspective of a religious studies major, and spent the rest of the time biting back less polite remarks.

For the most part, we talked in circles; I asked what mechanism they proposed this hypothetical intelligence used to create life, and Casey, the talkative one, replied, "Intelligence." I looked at him like he was an idiot, and attempted to explain what exactly a mechanism is, and he avoided the question entirely. I asked why the fact that intelligences create information today implied for any reason that all information was created by intelligence, and he replied, "Because today we see intelligence creating information." When I attempted to point out that this was roughly analogous to saying that since some round stones were smoothed in the gizzards of dinosaurs, there must be dinosaurs around to account for all round stones - though not, I regret, with that elegant analogy, which I hadn't thought of yet - he... well, he dodged the question entirely. Repeat ad nauseam.

All in all, though, it wasn't a bad night at all. We met some cool folks, and while I don't like to enjoy beating up on the deluded in debate, I did, in spite of myself, enjoy it. I had some good beer and a very tasty buffalo burger (which I regrettably really didn't really notice myself eating, since I was quite busy arguing). For anyone of an even slightly skeptical bent, I would recommend these meetups. There's a wide range of ages and professions, pretty cool people, and a good venue.

Caucusoid

2008-02-10T18:57:00.001-08:00

Residing now for the first time in my life in a state where my vote might actually count for something, I caucused with the Democrats this Saturday, throwing in my lot with Barack Obama. As chance would have it - and not unpredictably since I live in perhaps the most educated and second-most liberal neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest - I chose the winning side by a wide margin, sparing me the chagrin of defeat or the necessity of standing up to a large opposition to speak my mind. I wouldn't have minded the latter, really, because although like many folks I'd have been scared witless at the prospect of public speaking, I think that if and when I can compose myself I can be a damn fine speaker.

Our precinct ended up falling about 4:1 for Obama; we could probably have claimed all five delegates if we'd had a bit more time for debate and horse-trading, but I'm satisfied with 70 out of 82 voters. I was a bit worried at first; we showed up to find a house so packed there was hardly room to get in the door, and a lot of them were middle-aged women, whom it's easy to consider the natural constituency of Hillary. As often happens, however, the stereotype didn't really hold up. One older fellow - yes, a man, but still a Boomer - even stood up and spoke for the Obama side, mentioning in his speech that it was, in fact, time for his generation to cede some of their unprecedented stranglehold on political will to the younger generations. The whole of his address really wasn't spectacular, but I really appreciated hearing him make that point. I can honestly say I was not expecting to hear anyone in his generation say anything like that in the foreseeable future.

Anyway, it feels really good to be making a difference for once. I've been politically active since the age of 17, and this is the first time I've ever cast a vote that wasn't overwhelmed by an avalanche of apathy and conservatism. Pitfalls of being a liberal Texan, I know; but was defeating Kay Bailey Hutchison really that much to ask? I've never hated any public figure like I hate that smug vipress, not even George Dubya.

In another first, I also donated to the Obama campaign today. A month ago I still supported Hillary as the more effective politician with the better advisors, but at some point - I'm not sure exactly when - I came around and began to see that we really needed not just a new and different (and post-boomer) candidate, but the symbolism of what electing such a person would mean. I couldn't tell you what won me over; perhaps it was just the ever-growing weariness of Hillary's back-room dealings, power brokering, and negative campaign, or perhaps I was genuinely inspired, not only by Mr. Obama himself, but by the giddy passion he inspired in many of my friends, acquaintances, and peers.

I'm worn out on politics; I really am. I wish I could quit, but I can't. This is simply too important. All in all, though, that being the case, things really could be going much worse!

Generation Depression

2008-02-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to wonder if my entire generation might not be fundamentally, existentially depressed.

It expresses itself quite often as anger and detachment. I know I myself experience those feelings far too much of the time. From behavioral problems in school to employment issues to a now nose-diving economy - the result of materialistic young professionals living beyond their means, not improbably in a futile search for fulfillment through property - it seems like the entire post-Boomer population of the United States is lost and disgruntled. For myself, I see it not only in me but in more and more of my friends and acquaintances; they'll overreact to slights and mistakes, real or imagined, or they'll simply lose interest in living their lives. It's becoming such a common experience that I'm starting to wonder if perhaps it's not just a growing frequency of depression and dissatisfaction among the introverts with whom I tend to associate, but a genuine societal psychiatric disorder.

As a hypothesis, it's not unreasonable. Much of my generation certainly suffers from a strong sense of sociopolitical impotence and a not entirely unjustified feeling that the government and the majority of business and community leaders don't give a single goddamn about us. Many of us cast our first vote in an election in which misinformation and media irresponsibility made it impossible to tell exactly what we were voting for, and then watched on live TV as our sincere efforts to carry out our "civic duty" were annulled completely by dirty tricks and Floridian incompetence. For many of us, it was just the latest and greatest indignity in a lifetime of being overshadowed, ignored, and dominated by the incredibly egocentric Baby Boomers and their smugly self-(en)titled "Greatest Generation" parents. For a great many of my generation, the encouragement of genuinely loving and well-meaning but piteously self-absorbed parents took the form of pressure to perform and ridiculously inflated expectations designed to "boost self-esteem." This created, in many cases, young men and women who felt like pathetic failures because they were ordinary people instead of the Presidents, astronauts, battlefield doctors, theoretical physicists, and millionaire investment bankers they'd been led to believe they would naturally become.

I don't mean to press for censure of our predecessor generations. They were who they were. I don't say all of this to blame them for my own dissatisfaction or suggest that my peers and I are not responsible for sorting out our own lives. What I am attempting to do is to paint a picture of the unintentionally repressive climate in which we were raised in order to make a case for the recognition and ideally amelioration of a very widespread and pernicious syndrome.

The National Institute of Mental Health, a branch of the NIH, shows depression rates at almost 10% in the United States. A more striking but perhaps misleadingly vague figure is the rate of increase in depression in young people - a remarkable 23%. Most tellingly, I think, well over half of those surveyed believe that depression is a personal weakness.

That's most telling because that attitude is both symptomatic of and causative of deep depression. Dissatisfied and mildly depressed individuals who believe that their unhappiness is their own fault are far more likely to sink into a deeper funk and potentially into major depression. It would be far too simplistic to blame the "Greatest" generation's bluff, insensitive insistence on self-reliance for this pernicious attitude, since the American propensity for self-reliance goes much further back; nevertheless, my generation's parents in particular were told altogether too frequently what was wrong with them and how they ought to fix it their damn selves, and it seems that some of it was passed right on down to us.

Depression is a very complicated issue. There's a lot more to it than being ignored parentally or politically, of course. For some sufferers, it really is a neurochemical disorder, although trying to figure out whether a mood disorder is caused by external events which create self-sustaining chemical changes or whether the chemical changes dictate destructive and self-sustaining behaviors in response to external stimuli is rather like arguing about a proverbial avian and ovum. For many, medications can help to shake them out of a bad episode, although these medications are certainly not without their side-effects, some of which will almost certainly become known only in the long term.

I am coming to believe, however, that a societal remedy is needed, not just quick fixes for broken individuals. It's not unreasonable to look back into recent history and see major events that gave previous generations their places in the world: the Depression, the World Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the Cold War - positive and negative events, some of which happened to the generations shaped by them and some of which were done by them. One does not have to dig deep, however, to see that in each of these cases the really formative events were the ones, whether by initiative or in response, which were actively performed in a constructive manner by young people - the works initiatives of the New Deal or the Eisenhower era; the American war effort; the protests and massive societal shifts of the 1960s. These things united each generation, if not in purpose or opinion, then at least temporally. They gained focus, even if they focused from entirely different directions at times.

It may seem a bit ghoulish to say that it's unfortunate that the generations of the 20th century are living much longer than their predecessors, but for me and my peers, it is unfortunate. It's unfortunate because those older generations are staying active longer and growing ever more self-righteous, refusing to move over enough to share fair and equal space in society with a younger generation that's feeling ever more cramped, oppressed, and dissatisfied. We are, frankly, voiceless and bored. We don't have the will or strength to forcibly supplant our elders because we're still young, still figuring out exactly how the world is run, still far too fractious in our views, still idealistic enough to back any of a hundred thousand causes instead of just one out of two.

Our time may be coming. The crisis of climate change and the necessity of converting to a world that's not only climatologically sustainable but economically sustainable in a post-fossil-fuel world may galvanize us and become our generation's New Deal or Civil Rights. It's hard to say. I think an awful lot hangs in the balance right now, in the current election cycle; there are forces - primarily Hillary Clinton and, well, everyone among the Republicans - who want to drag us, consequences be damned, back into what they perceive as the better world of the 1990s - back into the century in which they were born and raised and out of this brave new world that they simply don't quite fit into. I don't want to turn this into a smarmy endorsement of Barack Obama, but he is the only post-Boomer on the field, and he is the only one that I see as capable of taking us forward instead of back, more because of how his campaign is structured and what he represents than because of anything actually intrinsic in him.

Obama's election, if we're lucky enough to see it happen, may well shake us up enough to cure the social depression that's afflicting us. I don't know. Personally, I think it's a good first step, but certainly not an adequate cure. There are elements missing, primarily those which would allow large numbers of people to actually get hands-on with elements of the new society we could create. My suggestion, then? Off the cuff, I'd say we're damned well overdue for a vast program of infrastructure renewal and New Economy (e.g. Green) retrofitting of existing infrastructure and industry. Not only would it potentially cure this social malaise, its other benefits would be legion; by repairing our infrastructure, we'd improve efficiency and safety greatly; by such a large expenditure of labor and capital, we'd give an enormous boost to our economy; by taking real, meaningful steps toward a Green economy, we'd restore our standing in the world community substantially; by giving people meaningful, productive work, we'd provide purpose and fulfillment to a lot of Americans, and maybe give a lot of them a hand up out of poverty as well.

Of course, political action alone won't change culture, at least not overnight. It may be a bit too late to alter some of the fundamental aspects of personality that have been ingrained into the newest generation of engaged adults, or it may not. Time will tell. For now, there remain the traditional remedies of medication, escapism, and denial; or, just perhaps, if we seek hard enough, maybe we'll find fulfillment and meaning even in a world where those commodities simply aren't for sale.

2008-02-06T19:31:00.000-08:00

Tradition: the cultural application of the clear and universal historical principle that older ways are always better, as demonstrated by the superior alchemical databases and widespread horse-related education of the middle ages versus today's sadly alchemy-ignorant and widely unhorsed society.

One more step down the road to vegetarianism

2008-02-03T22:58:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already stopped eating slaughterhouse meat, well, there's no better time. For a full-scale primer, I recommend picking up Eric Schlosser's eponymous Fast Food Nation, which, working backward from an in-depth, scathing, and deeply poetic investigation of the fast food industry, spends multiple chapters detailing the ills of our modern meat industry. Suffice to say for now that he chronicles - and amply documents - horrifying failings in sanitation, safety, oversight, and, of course, animal welfare. The meat our nation's industry produces is not biologically or ethically safe to eat, and while you don't just have to take Eric Schlosser's word for that, he's a good place to start. The book, a few years old now but hardly out of date, is a modern homage to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and should be every bit as much a call to action.

For now, though, what got me thinking about this stuff was one more nail in the coffin of my tolerance for this appalling industry: this fascinating piece on an autoimmune disorder developed by slaughterhouse workers exposed to aerosolized pig brains.

That's right: they accidentally snorted pig brains. And it's eating their brains.

If you're like me, your first thought upon seeing the headline was probably of vCJD - variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, the human version of BSE ("Mad Cow") - and how vCJD prions must have been transmitted through the airborne brain tissue. It's a good guess, but in this case the answer is both simpler and more insidious.

You see, in many ways, pigs are very similar to humans. This is why diabetics for many, many years have used pig insulin in their treatment, and why pigs were chosen to be the transgenic hosts for human insulin genes later on down the line. It's also why pig organs are occasionally considered when a human needs a transplant. (It is also, I feel obligated to note, why human flesh is reputably said to taste like pork.) Relevant to this case, many of the proteins in pig neural tissue are very closely related to proteins in human neural tissue.

When foreign biological matter is introduced into our bodies, our immune systems mobilize a response against it intended to neutralize any threat and then coat and destroy the antigen. This is the basis for all immune response, be it to viral or bacterial invaders, a splinter, or as the case may be, inhaled pig brains. Antibodies, the primary component of the secondary (big) immune response, are specifically created and targeted by a really incredibly cool but complicated process (that I won't get into here) to bind to and thus mark for deletion very specific pieces of macromolecules in biological tissue that the body recognizes as "other." These specific pieces are usually oligopeptides, small pieces of foreign protein that have been broken down by one of a few types of big mean phagocytic white blood cell.

There's a whole lot more to the immune response than that - even the basics. Indeed, I took more than a year of advanced coursework on the subject and I'm still a relative novice. The important point here, though, is that the body produces massive numbers of specifically targeted antibodies in response to foreign biomatter.

The hitch comes when parts of that biomatter are marked as foreign but closely resemble the body's own tissue. In this case, apparently pig brain tissue had certain protein sequences that were close enough to sequences in the human brain tissue of the victims that the antibodies and other immune response molecules which were supposed to be targeted at the pig brains began binding to and attacking the victims' own brains instead. This generated a chronic inflammatory neural disorder. What that means in layman's terms is that these slaughterhouse workers, many of whom were immigrants who didn't speak much English and didn't know their rights, were struck with long-term, debilitating pain, weakness, burning sensations, and even paralysis.

From snorting pig brains.

I rate this particular horror as follows (out of a possible 10 on each count):

Ick factor: 8.8 (they fucking inhaled aerosolized pig brains)
Awfulness: 7.1 (most of the victims are making partial recoveries, but inflammatory brain diseases are ugly)
Prevalence: 1.8 (it affected only a dozen people, though the possibility that something like this might be happening elsewhere in other slaughterhouses is not low)
Inexorability: 3.0 (it's unlikely to be an unstoppable problem)
Piteousness: 7.8 (it was totally avoidable by very simple measures, and happened to people who almost certainly had no better prospects and no way to know what was happening to them)

On the whole, I suggest that U.S. pork producers adopt the following as an internal safety-focused counterpoint to their venerable marketing slogan:

PORK: THE OTHER GRAY MATTER

Adaptability

2008-02-03T13:54:00.000-08:00

I've always talked big about being a dynamic individual in a dynamic generation, but I have a terrible secret: I'm afraid of new technology. Well, specifically, I'm afraid of prosaic new technology. I'm as excited as any futurist about AI and nanotech and bioinformatics, but social networking sites and the iPhone make me very uncomfortable.

Here's the reason: I don't find them appealing. I find them frivolous, full of obnoxious kids and nattering technophiles, and of dubious utility. In short, I am old and stodgy with regard to the current tech level of communication. I am conservative.

Eeeugh.

It's not a decision, mind you. Indeed, I'm glad that all those blabbering teens and constantly-connected tech professionals are around with their text messaging and Blackberries to make sure that technology gets used, because use drives the market to improve it, and that creates more innovation. I just don't like what it says about me that, because I was born a few years too early, I look at MySpace and Facebook and shudder with distaste.

Some futurist I am.

I suppose the "moral" here is that remaining open-minded and flexible is hard work. People tend to stultify and petrify if they don't actively exercise dynamism. That sounds so dry and smugly didactic, though...

Hell, I don't know. Just go buy yourself a new tech toy that you're totally uncomfortable with, or set up a website in a format you don't know. I don't know. Learn to use something, and see what happens. That's what I'm going to try, anyhow.

On vitriol

2008-02-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

I am in a peculiar dilemma: I have, upon reflection, become an angry, bitter, hateful man... and that really pisses me off.

The blame - or the cause, I suppose, to look at it in a more analytic and less resentful manner - lies in at least two places: depression and politics. The former is more or less self-explanatory, I think, and I've discussed it before, but I'll give it a sentence or two here. The gist of it is that, whether the ultimate causes are inherently biological or environmental, I suffer from what's known as dysthymic depression or simply dysthymia. It's a form of depression that's classified technically as minor, but has, in the long run, some of the most destructive effects of any form, because it's low-grade but very pervasive and long-term. Just like a chronic inflammatory infection can be minor in the immediate term but far more destructive than serious trauma in the long run (it's true), dysthymia often goes untreated (treatment is controversial and not always effective) and, frequently not even knowing why, sufferers may wind up alcoholics, career or academic failures, or even suicides (often subsequent to alcoholism and failure). It's a devastating condition, because what it does, in my case at least, is to eat away at motivation. At the most basic level, this is probably just an expression of the fact that it causes dysphoria - dissatisfaction and the inability to be content; this leads to a reduced reward mechanism for success in any arena. Personally, I find that it leaves me a terrible procrastinator and socially a deeply avoidant pushover. I know that these are problems, but, since I'm so incredibly demotivated, I feel like there's nothing I can do about them. I am now, of course, with the support of a number of people, fighting this, and I think in the long term I may succeed, but it's hard.

Anyway, enough about that for now; that's not really what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to discuss was investment, outrage, and just plain rage. Primarily, I want to know if the three can really be separated without sacrificing commitment and integrity.

There are several designs of bumper stickers that read one variation or another of the phrase, "If you aren't outraged, you haven't been paying attention." I am sure you have seen them. While "bumper sticker wisdom" is generally a shallow, lukewarm sea of useless platitude, there is almost always a kernel of some deeper sentiment, and this one speaks to something to which I feel very deeply connected. I think that people are simply not adequately invested in the human enterprise. I am very deeply invested in it; maybe that comes from too much exposure to the grand dreams of future societies in science fiction, maybe it's the result of upper-middle-class-white-kid syndrome (in which the well-meaning parents of an average but well-off child fill that child's head with assurances that he has so much potential and innate brilliance that one day he will grow up to be a great man who will change the world) or maybe it's just youthful liberal idealism, but whatever the origin, I care with an almost megalomaniacal fervor about the improvement of society and the human condition and my role in that improvement. I care deeply about the flaws in our collective endeavor that allow discoveries from the curiosity-satiating to the fundament-shaking to go unmade and hundreds of millions to go unfed.

It is for this reason that I get really fired up about politics. When things go as deeply wrong as they have in the twenty-six years of my life, and especially in the last eight years, in the governance and leadership of the nation that is supposed to set a shining example of innovation, brotherhood, and liberty for the world, I feel it in the pit of my stomach. It's a gnawing, sick feeling, like a cancer that's growing, not inside myself, but in the greater extension of myself in the world as a whole. That's why I feel such ecstatic highs when it seems like something might go right for a change, when Barack Obama gives a speech, and why I crash to such tooth-grinding, sickening, wrathful lows when I think about what Dick Cheney has gotten away with or the absurdity of the idea of a goddamned young earth creationist being President of the United States.

In short, I am paying attention, and "outraged" doesn't really begin to cover it. "Enraged" is closer, and that's a problem - rage is not healthy. It makes blood pressure spike; stress hormones are dumped in the system; in general it cuts years off your life expectancy. And yet what else am I supposed to feel? I've been completely disenfranchised my entire life, not just by Bush and Co., but by a pervasive culture of shallow and dishonest politics. There has not, for example, been a single non-Christian candidate that I have ever had the opportunity to cast a vote for, because Christianity has become an important selling point to the disinterested, attention-deprived people of this nation. Christianity is used as a simple, easy-to-grasp package of perceived values and qualities that obviates the necessity to actually look at a candidate. So that disenfranchises the supposedly Constitutionally protected religious (and nonreligious) minorities in the US? So what? It's easy.

It goes on. Science is, by its very nature, complex and uncertain, and both of those words are almost literally poison in popular media today - the popular media through which the vast, vast majority of Americans and global citizens get their information. Attempting to introduce ideas which are too complex or too uncertain in Hollywood, the major TV networks, or any other mass media outlet will get you not just fired, but blacklisted, because that stuff is harder to sell to people who don't want to put in the effort to think about it. Not surprisingly, the end result of this is that the popular understanding and treatment of science in this nation whose prosperity has always rested on innovation is appallingly bad. This condition cannot persist, and already, in the current recession, we're feeling the first shocks of the coming bad times as our own sad, stubborn ignorance erodes away the underpinnings of our way of life, ironically enough in a way that is far too complex for most people to bother to understand.

I don't really know if there's a way to face these issues without being negative, angry, and very bitter. I try. I am not, deep down, a pessimist; I'm an idealist and a shining, hopeful optimist, who believes in the world promised by generations of practical philosophers and sagacious futurists. I believe we can realize human potential. I just don't know if we will, and most frustratingly, I don't know how I can help make it happen. All the tools are already here for us; I feel like I have a part to play, but no greater whole in which to play it. I want to make things better. I want the best world we can have for everyone, not just because I want my own jetpack and implanted wetware computer.

It's damnably frustrating to want to make the world a better place, only to be rebuffed by reality and told that your type ain't wanted around here. I struggle every day to find a way to stay involved and invested without succumbing to numbing, bittering anger. I know that for some people it seems to be possible, but I always have to question whether those people are really fully aware or whether they're accepting a certain amount of ignorance or denial in order to remain optimistic and functional. Take, if you will, Barack Obama; I have a great deal of hope for the man, but I know, I know that as a politician he is and must be a consummate liar, not only to others, but to himself. He is a contradiction, to me: a man who strives to be an agent of positive change and integrity who must submerge himself deeply in a politics of regressiveness and dishonesty in order to get where he needs to be. Can he make it through intact? I wish I knew the answer.

For myself, I must keep listening to the news and maintain my emotional investment. It's just a part of who I am. I hope that I can find a way to come out of it intact; more importantly, I hope that when the end of my life is near I can look back and actually see a positive, forward trend in human society over the span I lived. I'm no great leader, no Augustus, no Bismarck, no Franklin Roosevelt, so I can't singlehandedly make that happen; and it's hard to rely on a world that seems so stubbornly resistant to becoming better with any sort of efficiency. It's hard to want to do a good job in your role as a tiny cog in a great machine when you care deeply about what that machine does but aren't anywhere in its control apparatus.

But we'll see, I guess. Maybe if I tackle that depression things will look brighter. Maybe if Barack Obama comes through this election in good shape I can start thinking about the next century without going apoplectic. Maybe if I stick with it and do damned good science I really will be able to make a difference of some significant sort. I really don't know. But that's life, right? You don't know.

Boy, for someone who touts the virtue of uncertainty, it certainly took me a long time to arrive at that.

Modern Medieval-Age Philosophy

2008-01-25T20:45:00.000-08:00

Item: The Flintstones was clever creationist propaganda. Devious!

Think about it. "Oh, yeah, well of course people lived with dinosaurs. I've known that since I was a kid!"

No answers as yet as to the agenda of The Jetsons.

EDIT: This might conceivably qualify as using nostalgia as a substitute for wit. I don't think so, but if you find it to be so, I deeply apologize. Sort of.

Oh, Obama...

2008-01-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

And to think I was starting to like the guy.

Take a look at the mailer his people sent out all over South Carolina (I have that saved; in case the link is pulled, let me know and I'll rehost it). I've seldom seen a more pandering, manipulative, pathetic gesture. Bad show, Barack. Very bad show. At least we believe Mike Huckabee when he says he's a loony fundie. You're just trawling for votes.

It's really, really disappointing to see the Democratic candidates playing the Republican party's faith-based voting game like this, for a number of reasons. The most practical reason, of course, is that they're not very good at it, and when they try, they tend to get beaten by the Republicans, who are very good at it. More than that, though, it demonstrates badly misplaced priorities and a complete lack of integrity.

Appealing to religion to get votes in a secular nation is just bad form. It's not illegal, of course, and perhaps in the case of openly religious candidates like Mike Huckabee it's not even inconsistent - although I'd still slit my wrists before I'd cast a vote for the man. It is, however, deeply at odds with the job these presidential candidates are supposed to be doing, e.g. enforcing the laws and safeguarding the Constitution. You cannot be "guided by faith," as Obama's flier declares him to be, and still do an adequate job of policing the faith-based influence groups who constantly seek to undermine the wall of separation.

I'm not suggesting that Christians can't be President, of course; that would be just as egregious an assault on the religious freedom of the, well, religious, as any of the faith-based programs the Bush administration has tried to enact have been on the rights of the nonreligious. I am suggesting that to admit that your faith will guide you in office should be a strong mark against you in a Presidential election, not a selling point. The President's first and only loyalty should be to the United States, and proclaiming a strong religious affiliation like that clearly demonstrates a loyalty that is by definition prioritized above everything, including nation and duty. This should be a concern to all voters, religious or not; even if you feel that you and your President share the deepest of faith, what happens when you disagree on what God wants? Do you think that someone who has proclaimed that he is going to be guided by faith, and not by the will of the people, is going to listen to your dissent? George W. Bush's sub-thirty-percent approval rating following his own faith-based platform is a pretty strong indication that they will not.

And on top of all that, of course, there is the matter that a field of Presidential candidates who all proclaim noisy faith utterly disenfranchises nonreligious voters. Coming from a candidate who was supposed to represent progressives, intellectuals, and the movement for change, this is really a bitter pill. But, you know, don't worry about us, Mr. Obama; we're used to this sort of disappointment by now.

Further ab/evo-lutions

2008-01-17T19:13:00.000-08:00

Can we just let go of the Great Chain of Being already?

If you don't know what I mean, you can always go and Google or Wiki it. Basically, the GCoB is an old medieval concept about life in the universe (then thought to be Earth only), in which everything has its place on a sort of ladder from the lowest, most unworthy lifeforms to the highest and greatest (inevitably Man) according to Nature or God, take your pick. It was really just an exercise in vanity that went unchallenged during the entire length of the Dark Ages and indeed up until Darwin's time (though not entirely Darwin himself) because everybody liked to think that we're the best.

Here's the thing, though: humans are not the pinnacle of evolution. (If you're a creationist, well, then you have bigger problems in your thinking than whether or not humans are on top, and I'm not really talking to you here.) Indeed, we are exactly as evolved as everything else on earth. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have been evolving just as much as we have in the millions of years since we both diverged from our closest relatives. Also importantly, we are still evolving; we're not the end product or acme of anything, even if there were an end product entailed in the process - which there is not.

Evolution is the change of gene frequencies over time in response to environmental factors. That is it. That's what it is, nothing more. There are a number of factors which will work; it's not limited to natural selection. We can go over the evolutionary forces later, but for now, the point is this: there's no goal, nor even a direction in which it works. It does appear to work in the direction of greater complexity, but that is, in this case, probably just because it takes time to develop complexity. You know what the most successful organisms on the planet are? Bacteria. Not particularly complex, in relative terms. (...Though exceedingly so in more absolute terms. Just ask a molecular biologist.)

Anyway, you remember how your high school textbook in Biology went "up" through the ranks of life from the Monerans and Protists through Fungi, Plants, Animals, and finally Homo sapiens sapiens? Yeah, that was intentional. It's because your textbook publisher was one of the four or five big publishing houses, and frankly, they don't understand a single goddamned thing about biological science. You can, in fact, safely disregard most of what you learned in high school biology; most of it is bullshit.

So that's your lesson for today: relativism and disrespect for authority.

(R)evolution

2008-01-16T20:26:00.000-08:00

Hey, that was a pretty clever title, wasn't it? I bet I'm only the twenty-four thousand, two hundred and sixty-eighth person to come up with it and use it to title a blog post.

Anyway: let's talk about evolution, okay? We need to have a chat.

I've been noticing a few things in common parlance which, as an ad hoc evolutionary biologist, make me cringe. The first is group selection, which was supposed to have been done away with by no less than Darwin himself, not to mention countless successors, but still somehow persists in the popular lexicon. What am I talking about? Well, let me explain it with a little bit more clarity. I don't ever want to hear any one of you say again, ever, any of the following things:

"For the good of the species"
"Survival of the species"
"Groups that had [trait] survived better"

...unless you're being very specific and advancing some fairly complex evolutionary biological ideas. Let's just go ahead and get this straight, on the (surely small!) chance that you haven't followed that link to my senior thesis and committed it all to memory: the unit of natural selection is the individual; more specifically, the benefit is always, always to the ability of the individual to pass on its genes. It is not, now or ever, under any circumstances, the group. (There are apparent exceptions to this rule, such as eusocial insects [Hymenopterans, e.g. ants, and bees] and certain populations of things such as elephants which appear to be group selected, but it just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. We can discuss this more later.) When a trait is beneficial, it is beneficial to the individual and makes the individual more likely to survive. When it is also beneficial to a larger group, it is, without fail, because that is beneficial to the individual. Monkeys groom one another because it allows them to get themselves groomed. Bees sacrifice their own reproduction because it furthers the reproduction of the queen, with whom they share on average 75% of their genes. (For this last, it is important to note that genes are just information, which makes no distinction between which copy of a gene is passed on. Effectively, all copies of a gene are the same.)

The short of it is, natural selection always selects on the individual, because it is the individual who lives or dies. Kin groups have closely allied genomes, which means that it benefits an individuals genes, in certain cases, to care for kin, and even the whole species. See Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for an excellent work on this topic, perhaps even the pre-eminent work. Don't worry; it's good science, from before he turned into an evangelical atheist. I don't have time or space to explain the whole concept here, but suffice it to say that genes are, in fact, selfish, and always act to benefit their own continuation and that of the individual who carries them.

Okay, next!

Not everything is selected. By this I mean the following: life is a complicated thing, and many epiphenomena emerge from the crucible of natural selection which are not, themselves, directly selected for. Everything is evolved, but not everything has a direct purpose.

This one comes into play a lot in behavior. People see an animal (yes, often humans) act a certain way, and so they create a weird hypothesis about why that behavior evolved. Sometimes, they're right; sometimes, they're wrong, and it evolved for a different reason. Sometimes, though, it just happened as an accidental side-effect of other behaviors which were beneficial. This seems to be the case, for example, for many of people's learned behaviors which don't provide any apparent survival benefit. The ability to learn complex things was greatly beneficial; what we learn seems to just happen.

The message here is this, I guess: if you see a trait of life, feel free to create hypotheses about why it is how it is, but include among those hypotheses the idea that maybe it arose as a side-effect of something else, perhaps something entirely unrelated to your previous line of thinking.

Brewsplosion

2008-01-13T22:30:00.000-08:00

One more batch in the fermenter tonight. This one's a medium-high gravity dark English ale. Since I didn't add a whole lot of body malt, it'll probably be closer to a porter than a stout, which is in fact what the recipe for it originally intended, based on the pound of alderwood smoked two-row malt that went in at the beginning along with the half-pound of chocolate malt. I think that, so long as the dry yeast doesn't let me down, this batch should be quite delicious - a little toasty and smoky.

I also have a couple of beers to review.

The first is Great Divide's Wild Raspberry Ale. Now, I respect Great Divide; their Yeti imperial stout, especially the oak-aged variety, is amazing stuff, and their Hibernation winter ale is pretty tasty. This beer, though, was quite disappointing. It was a medium-bodied plain brown American ale turned to a rather artificial-looking reddish hue by the raspberries and blackberries used in the brewing. Unfortunately, the raspberry flavor and the flavor of the base ale just didn't complement one another.

There are good fruit beers; in fact, there are some damned good fruit beers in this very family. New Belgium's Frambozen is quite similar superficially; it's a brown ale brewed with raspberries. Unlike Great Divide's, it's only slightly pinkish, not deeply magenta hued. The key difference, though, is that New Belgium uses a slightly sour brown with a sort of Belgian lambic character. This works fabulously well with the raspberry's natural tartness and creates a beer that actually tastes like raspberries without giving up being beer.

Sadly, Great Divide's Wild Raspberry just tastes like soap. They did not use a sour brown ale, but rather a plain brown, and it really doesn't work. There are overly fruity hints of raspberry that actually might be good if they were developed further, but they're lost in a beer that really, honestly comes off as soapy. The mouthfeel is mediocre, because like the flavor, you don't really know what to expect. With a tart flavor like raspberry, you want a dry, crisp mouthfeel, but Wild Raspberry is actually somewhat full and heavy, and again, it's reminiscent of soap. Bleagh. I certainly won't tell you not to try this beer, because it might end up being more to your taste than mine, but I did not care for it. Unless you like chewing on the brightly-colored bars of hand soap in the guest bathroom at your grandmother's house, get some Frambozen instead.

The second I sampled was Widmer's Brewer's Reserve 2008 Crimson Wheat. It's a wheat ale with, they claim, three different wheat malts: hard red, dark brown, and caramelized. I guess that sounds okay. I've been quite pleased with Widmer's Brewer's Reserve beers in the past.

My first impression was this: I don't think I've ever had a smoother beer. There is a flavor there, certainly, and it's a pretty tasty one, but the first pint of this stuff slid down my throat practically before I even noticed any flavor. It's damned smooth. Widmer's normal Hefeweizen is delicious; in fact, I'm a fan of the Widmer Bros. brewery in general, and most of their beers are notable for smoothness (their Drop Top Amber is more or less everything I think an amber ale ought to be). This beer was... different. I honestly think that the normal hefe might have a better flavor - a little more robust. This brew is clearer, redder, and impossibly supple. I'm honestly still not quite sure what I think of it, though I definitely like it. I think I'm going to have to have another one tomorrow and finish up the review then.

Famous Hurl

2008-01-12T02:32:00.000-08:00

I've never really been a fan of comedian Patton Oswalt - until now. The man was asked by the Onion's AV Club to sample the infamous KFC "Famous Bowl" that he had been joking about in one of his routines, and the subsequent write-up he produced for them was a brilliant, poetic exercise in gustatory disappointment. Now, I know the "I ate gross food and then blogged about it!" thing has been done to death, but I really think that this one is worth checking out. You may read it here.

A couple of favorite bits: describing the Famous Bowl, a plastic tub full of mashed-together potatoes, corn, gravy, fried chicken bits, and cheese, as "a failure pile in a sadness bowl," and a description of the KFC "restaurant" at which he purchased his very own infamous bowl: "The franchise I visited, on Hollywood Boulevard near my old apartment, looked like it had withstood assault by bullets, flamethrowers, Baseball Furies, and a hundred hook-handed whores. Everything inside the store—including the employees and customers—looked like it had been rubbed with sad ham."

Further beering

2008-01-06T23:25:00.000-08:00

I brewed today, for the first time since I relocated to Seattle. It felt good.

This brew (and another that will take place in a week, once the primary fermenter is free) is possible in large part due to the generosity of various folks over the holidays last year. Without generous gifts of most of the ingredients I used, as well as the big ol' propane fryer/boiler I cooked them on, it might have been some time yet until I scraped up both the money and the will to get started again. Not wanting to call anyone out here, I'll just say: thank you.

Today's beer is going to be a Belgian pale ale with just a hint of sweet orange and a fairly light hopping with American Centennial hops. It should have the mellow fruitiness typical of Belgian ales, with a bit more sweet citrus than usual thanks to the fairly citrusy hops and the orange zest. I'm starting with a slightly high original specific gravity of 1.050, and Belgian Abbey yeasts tend to be high-gravity tolerant, so I expect the final alcohol content to be anywhere from 6-8%. That depends, of course, on what the final gravity turns out to be after fermentation. In a bit of an oversight, I didn't add much dextrin or other complex sugar-rich malt, so most of the sugar profile in this batch should be fermentable. The final product may not have quite the body I'd like, but it will probably be a little more alcoholic than average. We'll see.

I've brewed one Belgian pale before, with a significantly different recipe, and it was not only a success, it was a smashing one. Indeed, it was the first beer I ever brewed, and to this day, I think still the best. It matured exquisitely, from being something of a disappointment when I first sampled it to being a sought-after commodity by my family once it was a few months old. I'm hoping for similarly good results this time around.

Beer Review: Duchesse de Bourgogne

2008-01-03T19:48:00.001-08:00

Well, I don't really know where to start on this one, so I'll quote the commercial description first:

"[This] is the traditional Flemish red ale. This refreshing ale is matured in oak casks; smooth with a rich texture and interplay of passion fruit, and chocolate, and a long, dry and acidic finish."

That's accurate, I guess, as far as it goes, but it's also terrifically inadequate. This might well be the best beer I've ever had. It's certainly in the top three.

Flemish ales (from Flan-diddly-anders!) are fermented with a (sometimes wild-inoculated, by leaving the mash or wort open to the air) mix of microorganisms, not just the usual brewer's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisae. The mix includes wild yeasts like Brettanomyces, as well as lactobacilli and maybe a few other things; I'm sure it varies from brewer to brewer and is probably usually a craft secret. Belgian sour ales are also fermented this way. For those not familiar, lactobacilli (lactose-fermenting bacteria), along with Candida yeasts, are responsible for the sour in sourdough as well.

Now, "sour" is a relative term. I've had some Belgian- and Flemish-style sours that made me pucker like sucking on a lemon (La Folie), and some that were just a bit tart (Rodenbach), and now this one, in which the mild tartness is just one factor in a veritable symphony of flavor. If I'd tasted this beer without knowing the style, I'm not even sure that "sour" is one of the characteristics I'd have noted as being dominant.

The best thing I can liken the flavor to is mincemeat pie. Now, hold on there! I know a lot of people don't like mincemeat pie; that's okay. Courtney doesn't like mincemeat pie either, and she loved this beer. A lot of the flavors combined in a way that really reminded me of mincemeat pie, with all sorts of subtleties like orange, chocolate, oak, anise, allspice, cloves, cherries, and a number of other things that I'd have to have another to pick out. This was almost certainly the most complex beer I've ever had, if nothing else. It was also moderately sweet: definitely not a quaffing sort of ale. The finish was long and dry, like the description says; it allowed the flavors to linger without becoming astringent or bitter in the least. Speaking of bitterness, there was virtually none; hops were definitely not emphasized in this beer.

The mouthfeel was fabulous, smooth and full and even a little rich without distracting from the flavors; there was only a little head on the pour, but I didn't miss it. I can't honestly remember the nose, because I'm just too overwhelmed by the taste.

In short, I can imagine there being people who don't like Duchesse, especially frugal people (it was $5.99 for small bottle, less than 12 ounces), and I can even imagine people who are largely neutral, if they don't have trained palates, but I can't really imagine anyone who does like it not being absolutely stunned.

Definitely an A+ beer. No question at all. Try it if you get the chance. Whole Foods carries it, at least in stores with a big beer selection; other than that, I don't know, but I'm sure you could find it if you were determined. It is apparently available in kegs, but the kegs cost around $180, so don't get your hopes up about finding it on draft at your local pub. The extremely nice and knowledgeable beer maven at our local Whole Foods, Stauss, tells me that it's better bottled anyway. Strange but true!

And as an addendum, I'm going to be trying to brew a Flemish red ale. I don't expect it to be in the same class as Duchesse de Bourgogne, obviously, but it's got me inspired.

Fuckabee

2008-01-03T19:38:00.000-08:00

Looks like everyone's favorite second choice, Barack Obama, swept Iowa. Whee. And on the other side, Huckabee manipulated a bunch of working-class evangelical sods. Great. I suppose it could be worse; Giuliani could have won the Repubs. He's such an unimaginably huge asshole I have little doubt we'd have been launching an unprovoked invasion of one nation or another within weeks of his inauguration. Man. Huckabee would be a disaster for our country - indeed, might yet be - but Giuliani would be a disaster for the whole world.

The more I listened today, the more I thought, the more my mind changed about the presidential race. I have come to two conclusions:

1) The presidential race will be Obama/Edwards against Huckabee/McCain or maybe McCain/Huckabee.
2) I no longer care. I have run dry of outrage. I still think the Democrats will win this one, though not by as large a margin as everyone else seems to think, but I can't really tell any substantial difference between any of the Dems who have more than a hopeless sliver of a chance. Edwards is a little different from Hillary and Obama, but he also has no real hope of getting the nomination. Kucinich is a lot different, in some ways that are very good and some that are very bad, but he has significantly less chance of winning the presidency than Dolly the (deceased) clone sheep. He'll just have to content himself with his gorgeous redhead trophy wife. And any one of the Republicans would be the absolute, bitter end of my hope for the future of this country, or at least for the realization of any hope within my lifetime.

So, perhaps - perhaps - I'll get back to writing more about beer and science. I don't know. I listen to an NPR station most of the day at work, and it's good to stay informed but when you're saturated with news like that, it's hard to distance yourself from it.

EDIT: I guess I had enough outrage left in me to be pissed off about one more thing. I just ran across this article, in which Barack Obama, winner of the Iowa caucus and possible next POTUS, is referred to as "the only African-American in the Senate." Now, if this were an article about race, I might forgive that. But it's not. It's a story about the primaries. WHAT THE FUCK, USA TODAY? Why is the fact that he's black the most relevant thing about him? Why is that the one fact your stupid, shallow asses picked out for the first sentence of the story? Racist dickheads.

Fuck Iowa

2008-01-02T22:00:00.000-08:00

No, seriously. Fuck all that noise, and fuck their pasty-white corn-fed self-important asses. What, I don't live in a flat, empty, midwestern state in the goddamn Corn Belt, so I don't get a meaningful say in the nation's government?

Fuck that. Fuck Iowa. And Fuck New Hampshire, too, while we're at it. Overprivileged, self-important prigs. Yeah, you hear that, Iowa and New Hampshire? THANKS A WHOLE FUCKING LOT FOR JOHN "COULDN'T GET ELECTED OUT OF A PAPER BAG BECAUSE HE HAS A WAX FACE" KERRY, YOU ASSHOLES, AND THE FOUR YEARS OF BUSH WE'VE HAD TO SUFFER BECAUSE OF HIM. AND THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR THE WAY YOU ARE INEVITABLY GOING TO FUCK THIS PRIMARY UP TOO.

Sorry, I'm just a little disenfranchised today.

No, you know what? I'm not fucking sorry. Our democracy is broken. I'm tired of living in a "democratic" nation where my vote has never counted for a single fucking thing in a single election, ever. I might as well live in China as be a liberal in Texas, for fuck's sake, and living up here in Washington doesn't seem any better, just opposite in direction. The state already falls liberal. Why do they need me?

Yeah, I don't live in a "swing state" or an early primary state. Apparently that means I'm not good enough to have a vote. Hell, I don't even think any of the candidates are bothering to campaign here. Why should they? The rest of the nation more or less always meekly lines up and does what Iowa and New Hampshire tell them to do anyway.

So, yes, we come back to my original point:

FUCK IOWA.

Goodbye, you steaming turd

2007-12-31T00:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I went and did it. I never wanted Vista, but I had it all the same (Thanks for the warning, Dell!), and now I finally got so fed up that I traded it in for Linux. I'm running Ubuntu, and you know what? For my laptop, I think it's gonna work just fine.

I didn't even bother to keep Vista or any of the old data on the hard drive. I just wiped it clean. Vista is just that bad. Sorry, Microsoft, but it's true. I'm not really one of Microsoft's many enemies, even! I had a pretty good experience with WinXP, all told!

So, yeah. Rot in unwanted technology hell, Vista, along with BetaMax, Laserdisks, WebTV, and - we can only hope - BluRay and HD-DVD alike.

Press A to not die

2007-12-30T17:08:00.000-08:00

I feel somewhat out of touch with video games lately. This is strange for me, as I consider myself not only a gamer, but a member of the gamer subculture, who follows gamer comics, reads reviews, and gets (and makes) game-based jokes. Actually, I suppose this extends to non-video games as well; from boardgames like Settlers of Catan to old-school pencil and paper RPGs, I've enjoyed all of them. Not so much, though, in recent months. It's unsettling, actually.

There are exceptions, of course. The originality and rock 'n roll of the Guitar Hero games had me hooked for a while, and I did play and thoroughly enjoy the paradigm-creating Portal. By and large, though, I've been put off of games. There's the money factor, of course - not much of it, that is; certainly I've not enough to buy any of the next-generation gaming consoles, nor replace my aging PC. It's more than that, though. It's a growing sense of enmity toward most of the gaming industry, becoming, as it has been, just one more creativity-challenged corporate-owned money black hole, where all your cash is sucked in though little or nothing of any value can escape.

Part of it, too, was a horrified epiphany some months back about all the time I'd spent in my life playing JRPGs like the Final Fantasy series, in which I was essentially engaged in nothing more than manipulation of two sets of buttons for the purpose of moving around a set of avatars and murdering lots and lots and lots of imaginary animals, soldiers, and magical... things. Sure, sure, it's all very pretty to look at, and sometimes it's even accompanied by snippets of intriguing storyline, but at the core level, every single RPG-type game is essentially a very boring murder simulator, wherein "your" characters kill most everything in their path in essentially the same way for nebulous gains in money and "experience."

For some reason it took me 25 years to realize this, years in which I'd poured more than a hundred hours per playthrough, sometimes multiple times, into many of these games.

Anyway, I think I've already discussed this part of the topic. Back to the subject: this isn't meant to be a "video games these days sure do suck!" rant. I don't know if they do or not. God knows they certainly sucked back when I was younger (You ever heard of a "spoony bard"?) but we played them anyway, and we loved it. There's a lot of talk these days about video games turning into more and more of an "art form," so perhaps they really are improving. Maybe the "problem" is just one of perception, since any game that falls into a pre-existing category is labeled unoriginal, but as time goes on, more and more categories are filled, sometimes even categories we didn't know existed.

(You see why I hate nostalgia? My fellow short-changed children of the 1980s will, in the same breath, moan about how much better video games and cartoons were "when we were kids," and crack jokes about spoony bards and samoflanges and princesses in other castles. Ugh. Look, people: those games and cartoons were awful. They were generally very badly translated, and made little or no sense even when they were made in or made it into good English. We were just young and didn't know any better. You disagree? Okay. Come on. You just try and defend the merits of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I dare you. You have your choice of the comic books, the cartoons, the video games, or even the movies.)

The long and the short of it is that I haven't been buying or playing many new games lately, but, honestly, having kept an eye on the reviews and seen the publicity, I don't really feel like I'm missing out. (Thanks, Yahtzee.) I don't expect I'll ever play another JRPG, at least not seriously. Half-Life 2, Ep. 3? Yeah, definitely. God of War 3? Maybe. I am getting a little tired of sequels, I have to say.

I am, however, still supremely stoked about Starcraft 2, so I guess there's that. And you know what? Modern video game culture has introduced us all to Jonathan Coulton, so I guess, all in all, it's a win after all.

Creased Foreheads

2007-12-30T00:27:00.001-08:00

Have I ever mentioned what a bizarre genius my fellow UT alum Brad Neely is? He was responsible for that "Wizard People, Dear Readers" dub thing for the first Harry Potter movie, though that is not my favorite Neely product (although I did see him perform it live at the Alamo Drafthouse a few years back when it was new and that was pretty great!).

No, I much prefer video Neely: he makes great short animated films about strange people living in a strange world, including two middle-aged dudes who teach at a strange-world University much like one in Austin, and a huge man-child who freestyles phatly and is possibly the wisest being of all. The animation is... well, just don't be picky about it. The visual style takes some getting used to. But go! If you're at all like me about weird, dark, sometimes very dry and sometimes very, um, "wet" humor, you'll love it.

Check out Prisoner Christmas! It's seasonal. Or go back a ways to Baby Cakes in The Role-Play Tournament, my all-time favorite.

I don't know, maybe I've posted about this before. I don't care. Every time he releases something I am overwhelmed all over again with the urge to make everyone I know watch these videos until they get them.

Open letters to presidential candidates

2007-12-28T20:45:00.001-08:00

Dear Mike Huckabee:

You don't understand the first damn thing about science, your ideas are empirically insane, and you don't deserve to be trusted with being manager of a Taco Bell, much less President of the United States. Really? Abortion is the cause of our "problems" with immigration? Do you even hear what is coming out of your mouth, you fucking nut?

And are you really dropping the 1930s "science says bees can't fly" thing? Honestly? Even though no one has bought into that since before World War II? Innovation and hard work are the core founding values of American society, and also, not coincidentally, the core values of scientific endeavor. We need yet another president hostile to science almost as much as we need an apocalyptic nuclear war.

Sincerely,
Everyone who isn't a blindered, card-carrying "Moral Values" Republican

-----

Dear Mitt Romney:

You're a lying sleazeball, and we all know it. You are willing to sell yourself to the highest political bidder. This is obvious. Pledging your support to that bidder does not disguise this truth. You disgust me. Your willingness to sell out your own faith to a powerful electoral base revolts even those of us who detest faith.

Sincerely,
Every American who heard your "Religion in America" speech

-----

Dear Rudy Giuliani:

You are the biggest asshole the world has ever seen. Why must everything link back to 9/11, Rudy? Do you really expect us to buy it when you tell us that our generation reminds you of "the Greatest Generation" because of "what they've been through"? How simpleminded do you take us to be? Do you really expect us to buy into your notion that Iran is the root of all evil, and was responsible for the attack on "your" city? Every campaign ad you publish makes us hate you more and more.

And please, please, stop using the phrase "the Greatest Generation." They were no greater than the rest of us. It's really not my fault that I don't have a Hitler to fight, okay?

Sincerely,
Everyone under the age of 80

-----

Dear Hillary Clinton:

I don't trust you. You're cold and conniving and entirely too willing to jump on any old bandwagon, who it harms be damned, for a particular block of votes. You espouse many things this country needs, but I don't like you. I'm going to vote for you anyway, because you listen to Jay Inslee, and because there aren't any better alternatives.

Don't fuck this up.

Sincerely,
John Marshall and the rest of the state of Washington

-----

Dear Barack Obama:

I can't get a read on you, because you never actually make any statements about what your core values are. You promise money to this thing or that, but you never actually let us know who you are. You also make clumsy attempts to engage the old, busted 1960s Civil Rights mentality that has long since served its purpose and should be allowed to die out. That bothers and alienates me.

For these reasons, and because I don't think you can win because, sorry, not your fault or mine, but our country is still too racist, I am not wasting my vote on you.

Sincerely,
Young voters of America, the very people you're trying to engage

-----

Dear Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, John Edwards, and other presidential candidates who have no hope of winning:

You all know you have no chance. Seriously. What the hell? Why are you wasting money on your joke of a campaign? You have millions of dollars in your war chest, and there are people all over the world who could desperately use that money. Why do you insist on continuing with your stupid, doomed, pointless candidacy? There is no goddamned point to you running more TV spots or posting more fliers; you will not win, ever.

I would be more likely to vote for you if you gave all your money to a good charity than if you advertised one more time in my state, and for that matter, you'd get a lot of free publicity for doing something like that. Think it over. Or don't, and continue to be selfish pricks. See if I care.

Sincerely,
Everyone who isn't going to vote for you, a.k.a. the vast majority of Americans

Christmas: winner

2007-12-26T17:09:00.000-08:00

If you've wondered why I haven't delivered the promised update schedule yet, it is, as you might subsequently have decided, because hey, it's Christmas! Or, you know, was Christmas.

Anyway, Christmas has defeated me. The trip to North Carolina to see the not-quite-in-laws was nice enough, but there was some bickering, and ye gods was the food rich, constant, and unhealthy. Add that to a flight on the return that seemed to go on longer than every Iron Butterfly song ever written, and you have me, sick. I guess it's either a traveling flu, or a relapse of the sinus infection I had almost conquered when we left, either way having snuck in due to stress. I don't think I ever want to fly anywhere ever again. It was cramped, turbulent, thirsty misery.

So anyway, there you have it: I am recuperating, trying to clean up around here, and was traveling, dangit.

HA HA HA

2007-12-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

HAHAHAHAhahahahaha

Ahhhhahahahahahahahaha!

Haha!

One-a-day wrap-up

2007-12-16T20:52:00.000-08:00

Well, an entry every day worked out pretty well, in the end, up until the weekend. Oddly enough.

Anyway, I think I'm going to continue to try to write something in this semi-public space maybe every other day for a while. It seems to be good for me. Gotta keep those neurons firing!

No, seriously, keeping your brain active is critical. I'm thinking about learning German and Latin again (I knew and have largely forgotten both) just to make sure I keep making and maintaining connections up in the ol' cranium. I have to survive in both body and mind until we reach a point where significant life extension is practical!

I don't intend to die any earlier than absolutely necessary.

Anyway, right now, I recommend that you go check out Who Goes There, the 1938 novella upon which the eponymous Carpenter film The Thing was based. It's awesome! Maybe. I'm not done with it yet. The movie was awesome, though, so maybe?

Fry Day

2007-12-15T00:41:00.000-08:00

My brain is in turmoil and I am very tired. Fortunately it is widely held in popular mythology that on the fifth day He rested, and that is what I am doing. Also, grilled cheese sandwiches.

In other news, Guantanamo detainees (I loathe that word. Why can't we just call them prisoners? That's what they are, and using new vocabulary doesn't soften that fact one bit.) have all universal human rights, no matter what a bunch of Reagan-fellating quasi-Libertarian lawyers say to the contrary. Fuck those guys.

75% Pornularity

2007-12-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

Those familiar with Ray Kurzweil will know the concept of the technological singularity; many who aren't familiar with him will also know it via other nerd channels. Certainly he is not its only theoretician/proponent.

I won't spend much time here talking about the singularity itself, partly out of laziness and partly out of an utter lack of desire to produce an inadequate summary of something discussed elsewhere (like in that link) in so much detail. I was, however, thinking about it earlier today, and I suddenly found myself in a relativist mood. I know, I know: distasteful and intellectually reprehensible. I'm sorry. I couldn't help it.

At any rate, what I considered was this: the notion of the technological singularity is all well and good, but why must it be attached to a specific point in technological progress? Why can't it be ratcheted forward or back? I answered these questions for myself with a little more thought, as you may answer them with a little more research into the concept, but it still led to interesting conceptual locales.

Primarily, I wondered why it shouldn't be that the singularity is already happening. Consider, if you will, the transformative effect the internet has had and is still having on modern culture. It's phenomenal! Titanic! Incomprehensible! Well, incomprehensible if you lived prior to the 20th century, anyway. The way in which digital data transmission between computers open to the public has revolutionized information exchange has, at least in some ways, rendered modern society almost entirely alien to the perspective of someone from the pre-internet age. Oh, certainly there are still plenty of offline individuals in the world, but I, at least, have also heard on many occasions someone remark upon how they don't know how they lived before the internet, or can't even remember communicating before the internet. The sort of sea change in our societal paradigm that leaves an event horizon within living memory seems pretty fairly singularity-ish to me.

I know it doesn't really meet all the criteria for the technological singularity, though I'd be prepared to argue that it might well be the beginning of one. Honestly, this entry was really just yet another one of those ubiquitous "Wow, isn't the internet awesome?" articles that crop up online from time to time. It's the cyber-citizen version of stopping and smelling the roses, I imagine.

And really, isn't the internet awesome?

Obamerica

2007-12-12T21:52:00.000-08:00

I heard a rather disappointing episode of To The Point today on KUOW featuring several apparently relevant individuals discussing Barack Obama's campaign and his relevance to "blacks." Now, I don't put quotes around "blacks" because I'm not with the times and I think it's offensive; rather, I wish to indicate that I think it's ri-fucking-diculous that these people came on this radio show to discuss what an entire population of people differentiated by skin tone all apparently think. On the face of it, that's damned silly, but even so, that's not what I found myself thinking throughout the feature.

No, what I was thinking was, "Man, they really just don't get it!"

Continually, throughout the show, there was reference after reference to the old, busted '60s Civil Rights paradigm. It was like the guests were absolutely incapable of thinking of a black man in politics in any other terms. Honestly, it was bizarre! Not only did they keep talking about "blacks" or "black Americans" as though there were some sort of unified Black Hive-Mind, they could tap into, they kept sorting blacks and black responses into strange and arbitrary categories. There was some talk about "bargainers," apparently a type of black person who "bargains" with whites not to lay on the racism guilt-trip if they'll just like him (Obama and Oprah were both cited as being bargainers, as opposed to, say, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton).

Now, I think there is something to that point. Americans do like black people - and I think it's important to emphasize that that's cultural blackness, not skin color - who don't harp on the white guilt issue. Maybe twenty years ago, that was because a whole lot of Americans had lived through the Civil Rights years and had some lingering guilt over being on the wrong side or not doing enough. Today, though, it's a different story. Today's young people have never lived in a segregated society, have never heard racist rhetoric in politics, and have been taught since entering schooling that it is not only wrong but unthinkable to judge people based on skin color. I really think we've succeeded, with my generation and later ones, in creating a mostly colorblind society! And, you see, that's why it's so damned weird to hear so much about white guilt and all this Civil Rights-era thinking in relation to Barack Obama's campaign.

Obama isn't succeeding because he's an Uncle Tom. He's succeeding because he's young(ish), vital, and hip. He is not only appealing to younger people, he is actually reaching out to them in their own terms and their own media. He's the most internet-savvy of the candidates, at least reputedly. He's actively recruiting from the segment of the population, from Gen X onward, who are of age but not really engaged yet, and people are really getting excited about him. But here's the thing: to those people, he's not black. To me, he's not black.

He's not falling back on the same tired rhetoric of the '60s like Sharpton did when he utterly failed to win the nomination and the Presidency. He's moved on. Barack Obama is recruiting somewhat from the black community, it's true, but he's actually not even very good at it! He is ignoring his race, and it's working, because young voters are too. The panelists on today's To The Point just couldn't seem to see that, but I think a lot of Americans do, and I think we'll see, soon enough, that it's a real paradigm shift. My parents' generation became race-aware, for the first time, in a positive way. My generation is losing racial awareness, also for the first time in a positive way, and the Boomers are falling behind the curve.

I don't speak for black voters. I know that. I wouldn't even think of trying. But I can speak for young, white, liberal voters, and here's what I have to say: we don't care that Barack Obama is black. We do care about the struggles of the '60s, but in an academic way, the same way that our parents care about the Second World War. It's history, and if you try to make it the center of a modern political issue, you're going to come up far short of really understanding what's going on. Barack Obama is not Martin Luther King, Jr.; he has a lot more in common with John F. Kennedy, Jr., and trying to force him into the sort of charismatic Civil Rights activist role that he really isn't will work no better than it did when Sharpton tried it and meant it.

Notice?

2007-12-11T23:33:00.000-08:00

Well, apparently I've garnered the notice of one or two small meta-blogs for that last Romney-related rant. I don't expect a massive influx of readers, but I'm still a little concerned; I'm not entirely proud of how completely I blew my top in writing that piece. I don't at all disagree with anything I said, but I was a little... heated.

When you take a position, you become, to some degree, that position. In the eyes of anyone to whom you represent something, you literally represent it, standing in for whatever it is, abstract or material. In that sense, I let down the causes of liberty and reason whenever I make a bad impression in their names. This isn't some sort of grave conceit over being published on the internet; it's a personal concern, no matter at all whether I'm talking with a friend or addressing a potentially large audience.

There's a fine line that must be walked between becoming too disengaged and losing your passion, and appearing too partial and too amateurish. We've seen American politicians, more and more throughout recent history, attempt to avoid this particular dilemma by skilled deceit, particularly self-deceit, but it never really quite works; no one trusts a politician entirely. Even if you think they're on your side, you know that they're using you and your vote for their own political ends. Others, private citizens, may fall a little too far in favor of authenticity, as I did, and come off as unbalanced or hand-wavingly over-excited. Howard Dean showed a little of this through the tiniest crack in his facade, and the American media tore him to shreds.

The particular point to this isn't at all to issue a retraction; I'm not retracting a damned thing. I suppose that it's really just to ask, in case anyone is listening, for a little slack. I stand behind the substance of my words, but, yes, I was, and remain, pissed off.

Know-how

2007-12-10T22:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I forget that I'm an expert.

Seriously! I know more about evolutionary biology and ecology than a good, solid 99.9% of the population (notice that that number still leaves room for at least 300,000 people above me in America, or 6,000,000 worldwide, so I feel pretty safe in making the assertion). I can explain not only the basic concepts like selective pressure and genetic drift - "basic" being relative since I imagine no more than one person in ten would even recognize those to me commonplace phrases - but figure out carrying capacities and projected growth rates, hypothesize about the evolutionary pressures driving speciation of creatures I've never seen before, and discuss at length the life and works of Thomas Hunt Morgan and Rosalind Franklin. I can understand articles in professional medical journals and peer-reviewed genetics journals by building on basic principles. I can understand the risks of the various carcinogens we hear warnings about every day because I know the mechanisms by which they damage DNA and the effects different types of mutation can have on genes.

So why did I feel the need to brag about myself today? Well, the thing is, I don't think it's just me. I think there are an awful lot of potential experts out there who, for reasons of self esteem, caution, or distraction, simply don't share what they know, and that's a damn shame.

I thought about this while I was listening to the Skeptics' Guide, which I've mentioned a few times lately. Every show, Steve Novella, the host and a practicing and teaching neurologist, gives his friends and panelists three science news articles to choose from, one of which is a fake he invented before the show, and they have to try to figure out which is the sham. They also go over real science news in every podcast. My own unusual talent came to mind while I was listening to them discuss evolutionary principles in relation to some rather dubiously legitimate theory advanced by a British "scientist," and mentally adding to and expanding upon virtually everything they said. I suddenly realized that it wasn't fair of me to be disappointed in these people and their coverage of the story; after all, they're not trained in this kind of theory like I am, and even Steve's education in evolution was probably both cursory and quite some time ago, before medical school. That's not to say they don't keep up with science news, because they do, but that's not the same as the rigorous, formal training you get in a genuine course of study. I had had that, and they hadn't, and for once in my life - and it's a rarity for me, because, falsely or not, I tend to be pretty humble about the validity and authority of what I know if it's ever questioned - I felt like I knew a lot about something. It was pretty nice! I actually felt like sharing what I know, instead of just worrying that, well, obviously someone will know more than me.

I think more people need to have that experience. We all know things, and generally there are at least one or two things that any given person knows well. Certainly, yes, a lot of what we know will be wrong, especially about things that are outside our area of expertise, and maybe even to a surprising degree within it. But who cares? How will you ever know unless you share?

It's funny that if you frequent discussion boards, social gatherings, and anywhere else where folks talk, especially if they're really getting into it, you'll generally find people willing to get upset over and try to sound authoritative about just about anything except what they do. Sure that's not always the case; there are no doubt plenty of people willing to just beat you down with whatever perceived authority they have. And, of course, there is the infamous "PhD effect," whereby those who are bestowed with that title seem to relinquish their ability to ever admit fault or ignorance. But by and large, people really like to argue about politics, religion, sports, and any of countless other things on which very few of us are actually expert.

So I'm going to go out of my way tomorrow to get into a situation in which I can really make a contribution. I'm going to join a discussion or find some questions I can answer where I can, for once, actually talk about evolutionary biology, and do it in a way that's actually constructive. If it works out, maybe I'll make a habit of it. Collaborative knowledge is the foundation of human society, and I figure maybe it's time I joined in.

After all, I know things.

What are you an expert in?

Hey, Mitt "Religion in America" Romney

2007-12-09T02:59:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you something, you pompous double-dealing cult-addled bigot: I don't need faith to be an American, to be moral, or to be damned well free, and that means I don't need you. You will never be my president, that I guarantee. I heard everything you said, especially the parts that were unspoken, and you damned well will not get away with it, you son of a bitch.

Let's go over a few key points of Mr. Romney's fine address, shall we?

"Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America's greatness: our religious liberty."

You'll come to see, soon enough, that by "religious liberty," Mitt doesn't mean "freedom of religion." He means "our liberty, which is religious in nature." It sounds like semantics, but it's a damned important distinction, and one that I don't think he made accidentally.

"There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us."

Romney makes frequent use of this device in his speech; he refers repeatedly to an unspecified "some" or "people" who, it seems, are naysayers. He never clarifies who these people supposedly are, nor why they take such conveniently pessimistic viewpoints. It's almost as if he's - *gasp* - setting up a series of straw men to attack in order to make himself look proactive and strong.

"In John Adams' words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. ... Our Constitution,' he said, 'was made for a moral and religious people.'"

This is, I'll admit, a clever non sequitur. Like Einstein's famous and oft-misquoted lines about "the mind of God" or how God does or does not gamble, Adams' reference to "religion" is significantly more complex than its literal meaning. Einstein was partial to using "God" as a poetic means of referring to the workings of the universe, an interpretation verified quite clearly by his open and quite plain disavowal of any actual belief in a "personal God." In a similar manner, I think that Adams' association with the other Founders, and his participation in the founding of the American republic - a secular republic inspired by the thinkers of the Enlightenment - demonstrates quite clearly that when he refers here to "religion" he's using it in the parlance of his time to indicate ethics, decency, and civilization. It's disingenuous to assume that because of this casual statement, Adams would agree with Romney's implicit assertion that without religion, one can be neither American or moral.

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

This follows on the heels of Romney's Adams quote, and continues to draw on that as a referent. Regarding that: it's particularly reprehensible to cast backwards to long-outdated modes of speech and thought and then use them out of context to frame modern debate. In the first half of the 20th century, "white" was a complimentary adjective indicating decency, generosity, and thoughtfulness. I would not, however, expect to hear Mr. Romney say that "morality requires whiteness just as whiteness requires morality," as racism is rather less popular in today's political discourse than is crass manipulation of voters' religious belief.

"Given our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty, some wonder whether there are any questions regarding an aspiring candidate's religion that are appropriate."

There's that mysterious and pinch-mouthed "some" again. Where do they get off being so negative, anyway?

"Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions."

Okay, this one's just an out-and-out lie. Romney gave this speech to and for the benefit of conservative Christians, for the express purpose of letting them know that he's their man. Pundits know this. His political advisers admit this. That is the known context of this speech. Romney's entire purpose in this address was to let the conservative Christian lobby know in no uncertain terms that they would, in fact, "exert influence on presidential decisions." This is the subtext of the entire address, and to say it's not is just sickeningly dishonest.

"When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause and no one interest."

This is really the one bright spot in the speech. I'll be the first to say that if Romney were elected, and he did keep this promise, he'd be entirely worthy of praise for it and probably a fine President. Unfortunately, the context leaves me rather pessimistic about that coming to pass. He says here that he won't serve interest groups, and yet he's running on a Republican ticket, which is at this point no more than a forced welding together of five different powerful coalitions of interest groups. Forgive me if I remain skeptical.

"There are some for whom these commitments are not enough. They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it's more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. ... Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy."

Boy, those "some" just won't leave this guy alone, huh? Wait... who were "some" again? Oh, that's right. Some straw men.

"Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world."

Then why have they elected them over and over again for the last forty or fifty years at least? Ba-dum tsch!

"What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of mankind. ... There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution."

So, let me see if I'm straight on what just happened here: first, he described and explained his church's distinctive doctrine on Jesus. Then, he insisted that in spite of what "some" straw men wanted, he would not describe and explain his distinctive doctrines.

Right. And let's not forget that in spite of his protestations against a "religious test," he's giving a speech for the sole purpose of reassuring voters about his religion.

"...No movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people."

Indeed, Mr. Romney. Indeed. And this is why our nation is pitiably backwards in "movements of conscience" regarding things like sex education, stem cell research, gay marriage, and the right to die. These movements of conscience, movements intended to better the world for everyone, do not in fact speak to religious conviction, and religious conviction would rather have a backwards, suffering world in line with its own dogma than give one inch of ground to humanism and conscience. So, in fact, you are correct in this, but not, I do not think, in the way you meant.

"...[I]n recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It's as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong."

Hoo boy. This one's a doozy.

Okay. First off, we have those ubiquitous secular straw men, here seen attacking the very right to virtuous faith of the simple, forthright American people. "Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life"? Well, actually... yes. That's exactly correct, Mr. Romney. That's what the separation of church and state means, so long as you're using "public" to mean "governmental." Wait, what's that? You're deliberately confusing two meanings of "public," pulling a bait-and-switch between "in sight of or in community with other people" and "affecting the affairs of all the people"? Oh. I see. That's not very honest of you, Mr. Romney.

And come on. Intent on establishing a religion of secularism? What does that even mean? Might as well accuse "some" of being intent on establishing "the government of anarchy" or "the education of ignorance" or "the up of down."

Let go of the bogeyman of the secular "war on faith," Mr. Romney. It's simply not there. Those of us in this nation who aren't religious want people's personal beliefs to stay personal, yes, but that's a damned far cry from illegalizing God or establishing a "religion of secularism."

"The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'under God' and in God, we do indeed trust."

Note carefully the non sequitur in the middle of this quip. Romney goes from the assertion that religion can't be "eliminated" from American life - which is true, and which is yet another straw man, since I doubt you'll find many Americans who want to forbid the public practice of religion, and since that's most definitely not the stance of any of Romney's immediate opponents - to the idea that we are a nation under God. He jumps from one idea to the other as if they were logically connected, but they are, in fact, nothing of the sort. It's a false equivalence: the logical structure of this statement implies that to disagree that we are "under God" - a Christian nation - is to attempt to ban religion.

"Non sequitur" means "does not follow." I think that adequately covers it.

"We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places."

I don't know about you, but to me, what he just said was, "The Judeo-Christian God should be established in all facets of American public life." I'm fairly sure that violates the... what was it? Oh, yes: the ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE.

No one really wants to remove creches and menorahs from public places, Mitt. From courthouses, sure; religious paraphernalia have no place in the law. But from "public places"? Like, what, streetcorners? Yards? Who is it, exactly, that wants that, Mitt? Is it your straw men?

"No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty."

I'm thinking Mitt failed History class in high school; or maybe he's just using a bit of hyperbole because he doesn't really care what, say, colonialized Africa and India, or the people of China, have suffered? Surely he wouldn't be saying something this offensively false and jingoistic for cynical political gain, would he?

"America took nothing from that century's terrible wars - no land from Germany or Japan or Korea, no treasure, no oath of fealty."

He's referring here to the 20th century, and I just have to ask: America may not have been in the Triple Entente, but do you really think that we had nothing to do with the crippling reparations that were forced on Germany and, in fact, drove them into the economic desperation that led to World War II? I know that's a nitpicky point, but once again I'm just pointing out that I think he may be engaging in a bit of liberty with the truth for his own gain, and I can't really stomach that.

"Because of their diverse beliefs, Ann Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay, Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, and two centuries later, Brigham Young set out for the West. Americans were unable to accommodate their commitment to their own faith with an appreciation for the convictions of others to different faiths. In this, they were very much like those of the European nations they had left.
It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about the equality of all, and the inalienable rights with which each is endowed by his Creator."

Pardon me, Mitt, but I think you may have your timeline a little off-kilter there. I'm pretty sure the Bill of Rights predated Brigham Young.

"You can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me."

Once again, a false equivalence, this time an implication that a "believer in religious freedom" is equivalent to a "person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty." That's not just a false equivalence, it's actually pretty close to the opposite of the truth. Why are you so damn dishonest, Romney?

"We do not insist on a single strain of religion - rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith."

Just so long as you have it. And it involves praying to a single god. And its morals align with ours. And you believe in small government with a powerful executive, outlawing abortion, and a young earth created by divine intervention.

Gag.

"And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation."

...So that they, wealthy white elitist landowners, might lower their tax burden. Amen.

Now, don't get me wrong: I respect the Founders. They really were brilliant men, blessed with both insight and foresight. They just weren't who Romney is implying they were.

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

So that's it. That's the "Symphony of Religion" speech of 2007. That's the address where Mitt Romney made it quite clear that he is, in fact, a party-line conservative Christian, who's willing to distort facts and prey on the faith of Americans to win office; where he made it clear that anyone not of the Judeo-Christian tradition is not American and not entitled to liberty; where he employed more logical fallacies than I could conveniently count, including a veritable army of straw men.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I feel sick.

Beer Review: World Wide Stout

2007-12-08T15:52:00.000-08:00

Last night, I finally got my hands on a bottle of Dogfish Head's World Wide Stout. Now, this has been a long-awaited event for me, since I'm a huge fan of that Delaware craft brewery and a huge fan of big, bold stouts, but the World Wide was never distributed anywhere I could get it before now. When I saw it in the cooler down at Bottleworks, I very nearly squealed with glee. I restrained myself only upon realizing that squealing with glee would probably result in the revocation of my license to drink stouts on grounds of weenieness.

Anyway, I picked up two bottles, and the ultimate verdict is that I will be picking up as many more as I can carry and cellaring them for a good year or three. World Wide, like everything else Dogfish has ever done as far as I can tell, is amazing.

First off, let's just go with the information on the bottle: it says that it's a very dark beer, and it is, though it's not as pitch-black as some toastier stouts, and that it's brewed with a ridiculous amount of barley. As to that, the stuff is a positively astonishing 20% alcohol by volume, so they are not kidding. One 12-ounce bottle of World Wide is enough to knock you for a loop if you're not careful. This is definitely a brandy snifter or tulip glass beer, by the way, not a pint glass.

I'll need to try another bottle to really reinforce my impression of the flavors, but there is a veritable symphony of them. I caught a strong mix of toffee and maybe raisin or currant (not surprising since raisins are one of Dogfish Head's favorite flavoring ingredients, although I don't know if there were actually any in this brew), but very little of the astringency and toastiness you usually expect in a really dark beer. As I mentioned, it wasn't pitch black, so I expect that lack of burnt character is due to relatively less black patent malt or whatever equivalent they might have used. A smaller amount of bittering hops, as well, compared to many other big stouts; it was definitely bittered, but not bitter. Surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of alcoholic bite to it, though the kick was evident in other ways - there was very little head on the pour, but there was a definite headiness to the mouthfeel.

This stuff is big, by the way. It is not for folks who think that Guinness is a stiff drink.

Anyway, while World Wide Stout was quite an experience straight off the shelf, I think with some time to age, mellow, and blend, it will be a positively sublime draught. An A- beer now, but with an anticipated appreciation to an A+ with cellaring.

The Golden Double Standard

2007-12-08T12:57:00.001-08:00

Have you been hearing as much as I have about how upset various churches are about the cinema release of The Golden Compass? There's quite a hubbub surrounding it. It seems, you see, that the movie - I guess they're not so worried about the books the movie is based on, because, really, who reads any more, anyway? - "promotes atheism" and is thus a "direct attack on organized religion." Unlike the case of Harry Potter, in which they were in fact concerned about the books for some reason I don't quite follow, there does actually seem to be something to this particular accusation. Author Philip Pullman identifies himself as an atheist and no fan of religion, and having read the books, I can say two things quite definitely:

1) They're phenomenal, and everyone should pick them up. This is entirely independent of any religious issues surrounding them; they're just a really fun read. They're nominally children's books, but that only makes me wish I had kids to whom I could read them. Don't see the movie, either; from what I understand, the studio neutered some of the most integral plot ideas and made a disappointing hash of the entire thing. I particularly recommend the audiobook, for anyone interested in that format, because it's narrated by the author and a full cast of characters and for obvious reasons therefore does a superb job of capturing the spirit of the books.

2) There is definitely an anti-religious bias to the events in the story, but since this all takes place in a fantasy universe I really fail to see how that can be viewed as any sort of proselytizing. If anything, I think these books are more likely than almost any others I've encountered to lend to young readers a sense of wonder and curiosity that might lead them in virtually any direction, including to religion. Being rather unfavorably inclined toward religion myself, I actually rather hope that these books lead kids away from faith and dogma, but I just don't think it's the necessary case.

There's a larger issue here, though, that's being rather completely lost in the controversy: if the books are atheistic, so what? I didn't see worldwide outrage over the release of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, which is decidedly Christian. It's okay for children's movies to try to convert kids, but not to dissuade them?

Why?

Oh, I know why, trust me. That was a rhetorical question. I know that the Church and various Christian groups worldwide are quite fervently trumping up a "war on faith" to get upset about these days. Pope Ratzinger recently gave an address in which he said quite openly that atheism is directly responsible for most of the heinous evil in the world, even including the old nonsense about Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. (Let's just take a moment to address that, shall we, Joe? In the first part, all of the monsters you mention were motivated by essentially religious ideologies, and not some sort of evangelical atheism; and in the second part, you're quite conveniently forgetting some powerful counter-examples like the Inquisition and the Crusades. Or had those simply slipped your mind?) The release of a supposedly atheist movie at this time plays right into their hands, one more piece of evidence that the "godless secularists" are on the offensive, and this time, by God, they're attacking our children!

I hardly need say that this is utter hogwash. The issue is that it's beside the point even if it were true.

Obviously the Vatican is not a nation founded on religious freedom, and so the Pope can of course say whatever he likes. I really couldn't care a bit less what goes on over there. The issue is the effect it has over here. It's the American media that's propagating this nonsense about a "controversy," and it's American Christians who are up in arms about the movie's release and the Church's view on it, and this most certainly is a nation founded on religious freedom.

Let's say that the books do, as some claim, not only "promote atheism," but in fact "denigrate faith." Do you expect me to care? Did you see me rioting in the streets upon the release of The Polar Express, a film whose entire message was "Just believe!"? Do you see me boycotting the Narnia books or films, which are openly and unabashedly Christian apologism? As hard as it may be for these folks to understand, there are in fact any number of people who want nothing to do with religion and, indeed, don't view faith, much less a particular religion, as a virtue at all. This is allowed. That's what religious freedom means.

In short, my message for those offended by this film is this: GROW UP.

Yes, a story was released in popular media which disagrees with you philosophically. I know that's an unprecedented experience, but you're just going to have to deal with it. Adults do that, rather than throwing a fit about it. If you'd try being nonreligious for a month, you'd find that you have to get pretty good at dealing with it or simply spontaneously combust. So yes, Offended America, it's time to grow up and handle disagreement like functioning adults, instead of throwing a tantrum like spoiled children when someone, at long fucking last, violates your ridiculous double standard. If you don't like the film's perspective, here's an idea, free of charge: don't watch it.

And when it comes to that, I certainly won't. I've heard it's a cinematic mess, and I detest Hollywood in the first place. I'd much rather own the books.

ADDENDUM: The lovely and sagacious Rebecca Watson of Skepchick has tackled this issue as well, and provided a link to a Landover Baptist treatment of it. If you're not familiar with Landover Baptist, well... 1) You've probably been in cryonic stasis since the invention of the internet, and 2) I'll let you discover it for yourself. If nothing else, it's significantly more lighthearted (though even more caustically sarcastic) than my ill-tempered hand-waving.

I have added many links!

2007-12-08T03:28:00.000-08:00

I have added them to the humorously-titled links section on the right. Visit them.

Mighty suns

2007-12-07T23:17:00.000-08:00

To the great surprise of absolutely no one, I have decided to apply to the University of Washington School of Oceanography. This will not be happening immediately, but it is nevertheless a decision, and one I'm fairly excited about. It's not a nebulous thing, either; I'd like to become involved in Project NEPTUNE, and to specialize in extremophile ecology. A chance to ship out on the R/V Thomas G. Thompson wouldn't be unwelcome, either. The Tommy, you might (or might not) be interested to know, is the identical twin - one of a set of quadruplets, actually - of the R/V Atlantis, out of Woods Hole, famed as the operating craft of DSV Alvin, the cute little submersible that's starred in so many marine exploration documentaries on the Discovery channel.

It's a tenuous connection about which to be so excited: the remote possibility of shipping out on a craft that was built identical to another famous ship that carries the vehicle that first discovered hydrothermal vent ecosystems. But goddammit, I am so excited.

Oh, and I've also, in an effort to improve my productivity and organize my thoughts, decided to write seven blog entries in the next seven days, not counting this one. If the daily thing works out well, I may just keep it up! I may also compromise on a bi-daily or MWF schedule, depending.

And in case anyone didn't catch it last time, allow me one more time to plug The Skeptics Guide To The Universe (and the James Randi Education Foundation, hosts and sponsors of The Amazing Meeting! Be there!) Further, in that vein, allow me to say that anyone who has not read Carl Sagan's eponymous The Demon-Haunted World is not really living. It's hard not to get shivers down your spine when, following an anecdote about Sagan's own childhood, you look up at the stars and realize that they are all, indeed, mighty suns in their own right, some orders of magnitude larger than the one that is the source of essentially everything we know.

Mighty suns.

Dyspeptic's guide to disgruntlement

2007-12-01T01:11:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard something silly and thought, "Man, I dunno, that sounds kind of silly"? Well, then you need to get on board with the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe!*

Okay, I know that the name sounds a little pretentious, and, more importantly, I know you're thinking, "Skeptics? Well, shit, I know what to expect from them. Bunch of stuffy know-it-alls sitting around choking up the room with smugness and intellectual pretense." And I know that right now you're expecting me to make some sort of 'funny' comment like "And you'd be right!" or "Maybe that's true of me, but not everyone!" but I'm going to have to disappoint you. The SGU is really the kind of thing that podcasting - a technology I've been regrettably slow to adopt - was invented for.

Sure, they're a little heavy on repetition of the word "skeptical," but balanced against a weekly show that's charming, intelligent, thought-provoking, and entertaining, that's hardly a critical flaw. And you know what? I like "skeptical" (or "sceptical," if you prefer, you Anglophones). It's hard to talk about things like skepticism, empiricism, or, heaven forfend, materialism or atheism in American culture. To one degree or another, all of those words have been demonized, sometimes literally, to the point where you're as like as not to be viewed as a dangerous lunatic upon identifying yourself as any of them (outside of academia). Indeed, there are few accusations more poisonous to a public figure in American political rhetoric than "atheist," free religion guaranteed in our Constitution notwithstanding.

Try to set that aside, though. Recognize the visceral reaction you may have to these terms, examine it, and set it aside. Consider the word "skeptical" on its own merits, and not on whatever impression you may have of it from pervasive cultural media.

What's so bad about asking why?

Give it a try.

Those of you who know me (and I have a hard time imagining that any of you reading this don't) surely know by now that I've been skeptical of a lot of things for a long, long time. I won't claim that I've been an atheist skeptic since birth, because, well, I frankly didn't even think about that kind of thing until I was at least 8 or 9, apart from knowing, in a part of my mind, that Santa Claus was some kind of consensus joke that everyone surely knew wasn't real, but no one ever openly denied. I will say that as soon as relevant issues began coming to my nascent attention, I started questioning them, in a sort of childish, undeveloped way, and I never really stopped. Is it an intrinsic personality trait, then? Or did I just learn it early? I don't know. I do believe, now, that children can be taught critical thinking almost as soon as they can be taught language, and I think that I got a lot of that from my father. On some level, I think that gratitude for teaching me how to question things and how to start thinking is one major reason I always looked up to him despite rarely seeing him and despite all the many issues he's had in his own life.

There's a lesson there, I'm sure, about how children really do want to learn to be nerds if only you catch them early, but I'll save elaborating on it for another day.

* - for the less internet-comfortable (anyone who doesn't know what RSS is, this means you), you can also find and instantly subscribe to or download the podcast via iTunes with no more than a click or two

Putin to Queen's Knight Three

2007-11-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

Well, there are better ways to make dangerous and implacable enemies, I'm sure, but not very many. I don't think Garry Kasparov is the kind of guy you really want to be escalating a conflict against, you damn thug Putin.

Then again, all the strategy and forethought in the world won't stop a billy club coming at your face. Think more, Kasparov.

Black smack

2007-11-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

I wonder exactly what it's going to take for any of our "leaders" to come right out and tell the American people that gasoline fuels terror?

Sure, sure, there's been a little noise made about Americans' "addiction" to foreign oil, but you'll notice that absolutely no action has been taken, and indeed that that noise was only made when oil lobbyists were pushing the "ANWR" button on the RNC control panel. No one significant has dared to really push the fact that since the United States has fairly small reserves of oil, bought-and-paid-for "scientific" reimaginings of ANWR notwithstanding, our continuing out-of-control use of petroleum puts us at the mercy of the likes of Hugo Chavez and the Saudi royal family, both of whom are known to generously support anti-American interests; and that says nothing of oil demand's role in Iran's nuclear program!

It's no wonder, of course, that none of our prominent Congressional leaders or presidential candidates want to tackle the issue. It's hard to imagine a pair of hot-button topics that would create more conflict in the average U.S. household than "terror" vs. "gas prices," say what you like about whether or not that would have been true seven or eight years ago.

But it's funny that the Republicans are silent on this issue. They are, after all, devotees of Ronald "Greatest Generation" Reagan, and the Greatest Generation tackled this very issue with unhesitating gusto:

Yes, that's a joke of sorts. Relax. The point is that people and nations can in fact have the courage to tackle issues like this.

Please pardon my digressions

2007-11-17T16:26:00.000-08:00

Now, I'm as great a fan of vocabulary expansion as anyone, and indeed I've been known to lionize and panegyrize the rather prolix works of literature of prior days, but...

Well, the GRE.

It doesn't really seem right that admission to graduate school is so largely based on an extensive knowledge of unusual and often archaic words. There's more to life. Honest.

BEERS

2007-11-10T21:01:00.001-08:00

I have just returned from the Phinney Beer Taste, courtesy of $30 and the Phinney Neighborhood Association. It was awesome! Phinney is the greatest neighborhood there is, honestly. The Phinney Neighborhood Association is more active and progressive than many national political organizations, and not only has great social and gastronomical events like the Summer and Winter Beer Tastes, but also Contra Dancing, classes on everything from home buying to garden composting, and political action campaigns which include official motions to impeach George W. Bush and ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Now that's a cool neighborhood.

It's also a liberal neighborhood, I know. I don't approve of slavish devotion to the platform of the Democratic party either, but I'm willing to give a little on things like gun control and affirmative action in exchange for knowing that all of my neighbors are actively fighting war crimes and torture, fiscal irresponsibility, and global corporate-commercial irresponsibility. And there's a damn cool farmers' market right next door, too, during the summer months.

3.14 etc

2007-11-10T15:11:00.000-08:00

Lo, I have become as a god, for I have the power of pie.

I made a pumpkin pie with no pumpkins. Okay, actually, it was a winter Delicata squash pie. It is also the first pie I have ever successfully made, completely from scratch (all local, etc ingredients, too). It is delicious. Really delicious.

You may call me the piemaster, for I am the master of pie.

Voting

2007-11-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

Local elections up here Seattle way are next Tuesday, should anyone local read this and not be aware. Vote!

No, wait: educate yourselves well, and then vote.

What's that, you say? You want to hear my opinions? Surely not! I am but a... oh, fine. You were gonna hear 'em anyway. Might as well.

Proposition 1 (Sound Transit & RTID)
This one was a tough call. In the end I had to swallow my pride and beat down some old, stupid prejudices I had left over from my days as a teenage environmentalist misanthrope. Look, here's the deal: we're not going to get rid of cars. It doesn't matter how much some people might want to. We're just not. We can however, get some cars off the road, and light rail will help with that quite a bit. No, this isn't the perfect light rail setup, but it's a start!
And yes, this allocates money to road repair and even roadbuilding, but if we're going to have roads, and have cars on them, they ought to be safe and efficient, right? Even if you just want to look at it from an emissions standpoint, the faster cars get to their destination, the less time they spend idling in traffic, right?
So: Prop 1? Yes.

City Council
Having listened to the candidates talk in pretty reasonable depth about their pet issues, I came away from the election coverage of a couple city council races with pretty strong impressions. Here's the deal:
Venus Velasquez and Bruce Harrell: Harrell, hands down. He isn't the ideal candidate in my book, but Velasquez is a weasel at best. After her recent DUI she claimed frequently and extravagantly that she was "regretful" and that she was accepting "full responsibility," but she pled not guilty. When asked why she admitted guilt and then pled not guilty, she responded that she thought that responsibility and guilt under the law were two different things. While I might agree with you if the law were coming down on your for your race, miss Velasquez, in this case you committed a crime and endangered others, and now you're trying to weasel out of the consequences. I do not want a policy-making elected official to say that she thinks that responsibility and the law are different things. That is not appropriate. Fuck you, Venus Velasquez. I hope you lose the race and your trial.
Sally Clark and Judy Fenton: I don't think there's much danger of a naive little prairie muffin like Fenton winning this race, but just in case, I thought I'd chime in. Here's my impression: Sally Clark, the incumbent, is a competent official, and I rather like her. Judy Fenton has no experience in any office, has no positions on any important issues, and is only running because she wants to have a naked statue at the art museum covered out of a misguided sense of conservative middle-America morality that I - and, unless I have a badly mistaken impression, the rest of Seattle - do not want.

That's it for today. Check out those voting guides, and get your butts to the polls on Tuesday. Local elections are where your vote can actually make a significant difference.

Brewin' green beer, if you will

2007-11-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

Well, beer's gone into crisis mode, apparently. I suppose I should have known, but had never really considered, that the agricultural market operates like any other market. Decreased demand for barley and hops a couple years ago resulted in less planting of both last year, and a couple unlucky weather events sealed the deal. The result? Much higher prices on barley and hops, and uncomfortable times for American craft brewers and craft beer lovers. Obviously, it's also a bad time to be a homebrewer.

Unless!

Now, this is probably a crazy idea, but in keeping with my recent resolutions to live in a manner consistent with my best understanding of the world - i.e. as locally and really green* as possible - why can't I grow some barley and hops myself? Well, no reason at all, actually. That's exactly what I'm going to do. I have a little space and some nice compost rotting happily away, and I intend to use them.

The barley, of course, will likely be a novelty if I can even manage to grow it. I have only a tiny plot in our back yard, and I don't anticipate I'll be able to grow enough back there for more than the most meager microbatch of scratch-made beer. Even if I can eke out a significant harvest, there's still the matter of malting and roasting it, neither of which are reputed to be easy to get right. All told, it will be an experiment, more for fun than for profit, and even more for practice than for fun. One day I will have more than a tiny backyard plot, and I will be ready!

The hops, on the other hand, might not only save me money, but might even be a viable business venture. They're a climbing vine, so they shouldn't need all that much space, and unlike barley, which has increased in price only some 80%, hops have become an astonishing 700% pricier this year. They also rather like the Northwest climate; so even if I end up having to buy barley, I can still grow my own bitter and save a bundle doing it!

Since I've arrived in Seattle and seen the number of food gardens even in our dense, relatively urban neighborhood - admittedly a few miles away from downtown and made up mostly of single-family homes with a few condos, not the large apartment blocks the real urban center - I've been wondering why more people nationwide don't grow more of their own food. Sure, gardening is a fairly popular hobby, but not nearly popular enough to be called common. I suppose, like many things American, it's a matter of patience vs. convenience. It takes a long time to grow tomatoes instead of buying them at the store!

As much as America has changed, though, since gardening started to become less popular decades ago, today would be a fine time for a resurgence in its popularity. We're not talking about landscaping with petunias here, either; even a man's man should be able to get behind the idea of feeding his family with his own By-God sweat and blood.

Hell, if American families grew a few vegetables, maybe it would even help reduce obesity and improve general health. I can't picture many parents allowing their families to get away without eating their greens if it were a matter of pride and not just prudence, nor can I see the blue-collar man settling for Bud Light any longer if the missus brewed up a fine, nutty Pilsner instead. I don't expect it to happen, mind you, but the idea has its merits.

* - Genuinely green is different from the dogmatic Green, you understand; they have in common certain things, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs (which save you money, incidentally) and a strong support for public transit as opposed to driving (which gives me some time to relax and read before and after work, instead of swearing at traffic); but a free-thinking individual concerned with genuinely improving his life and minimizing his negative impact on the rest of the world's population, rather than making an absurd and ineffective political point, does not knee-jerk oppose genetically modified crops, nor think that the Toyota Prius is anything more than a small, ugly economy car.

Yuppies, you are not saving the world by giving up your Beemer and buying a Prius; you are marking yourselves as ill-informed and smug. You undoubtedly mean well, and you might, admittedly, be contributing to a movement which will encourage research into carbon-free automobiles, but not in an effective way, and I sincerely doubt you thought it through that far anyway. And, incidentally, "organic" is often nothing more than a corporately co-opted marketing tool! Buy local from independent businesses instead, and in so doing support your regional economy.

Yeah, that's right. I said economy, bitches. There's no point to trying to live a conscientious life if you don't do it in a way that makes things better for everyone, and that means human prosperity. Prosperous, content humans are also generous, educated, concerned, responsible humans. (Yeah, credit to Shellenberger and Nordhaus again)

"Bad Boys"? Whatever, nerds.

2007-10-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

I don't normally like posts that consist of nothing but a plug, but in this case I'll make an exception to my general aversion. Break Through is a really important book, and everyone even remotely political or environmental needs to read it.

The short version of Shellenberger and Nordhaus' idea, first set forth in their essay "The Death of Environmentalism," is that the environmental movement, whatever its original intent and founding efficacy, has become a culture of complaints and ineffective restriction. The subtitle of the book is "From the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility," and that's definitely the spirit in which they write. Environmental protection requires the luxury of critical thinking, no matter whether it's inspired by aesthetic virtue or enlightened self-interest, and critical thinking doesn't occur much in people who are hungry, terrified, or even existentially insecure; therefore to go forward, environmental protection and sustainability must go hand-in-hand with improved standards of living, growth, and progress.

Essentially - and I know this seems like an obvious idea to many of us, but you'll note that it hasn't been done yet and that modern environmentalists and especially politicians still speak in terms of "limits" and "protections" and "repair" - in order to get the world to embrace the idea of protecting the world and thinking in the long term, we'll have to offer them something that will look appealing, and very few long-term benefits are going to look appealing so long as their lower-order needs are unfulfilled.

This is why technologies like photovoltaics are so vitally important, and why it's equally important that we get both people and leaders of people to realize that a massive investment in those technologies is necessary, not only to jump-start clean energy, but to create accompanying economic growth through diversification and, yes, to ease security concerns by reducing dependence on foreign energy sources.

This isn't an unconditional endorsement of Break Through or of Shellenberger and Nordhaus' ideas. I have my issues with them, and especially with their attitude that everything and everyone that's antedated them in environmentalism is rather petty and backwards. I dislike the way they dismiss luminaries like E.O. Wilson and Al Gore without so much as a word of recognition of the many good things they've done. All in all, though, I do agree with them, and I do think that even if it's sometimes aggravating and maybe even offensive, their book is a very important one.

I rather want to buy a copy and go hit Hillary Clinton upside the head with it. "Here, Madame President-to-be. You'll need this."

I'm sorry

2007-10-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

...about the long silence. I didn't forget.

It's really astonishing to me the difference that dysthymic depression makes in my life. It's not what usually termed "clinical depression"; it's something different and wholly more insidious. Rather than a crushing, smothering coat of wet concrete that leadens and suffocates, it's more like... well, like ADD with a dash of bitters. Dysthymic depression, for me at least, tends to take the form of lethargy and demotivation. It's not exactly an inability to focus, just... disinterest. I still have my passions, my pet causes and my hobbies, but when it comes to actually applying myself, to stirring myself from comfortably, numb routine, I'd rather go play video games. I'd rather not deal with it.

I have this percolating stew of ideas in my head, perhaps more vigorous and sharply focused now than they've ever been. I want to, I need to get them out. The energy is there and the purpose is defined, but somewhere in between the mechanism is disconnected. The pistons are pumping and the wheels are free, but the driveshaft is broken and the steering is locked up.

The clarity with which I can perceive this condition now is astonishing to me. For years I had no idea if I was ADD, stupid, or just lazy. My high school and undergraduate GPAs both wound up, if not in the tank precisely, then certainly well below what they ought to have been, and I came away from the University of Texas with a single BA instead of the BA and two BSes I really wanted. (Now, I'm not trying to excuse my dilatory negligence by any means; I am who I am, and any conditions I have are simply a part of me. If I fail, I fail; there is no "I failed but...")

Anyway, I suppose that all that is a roundabout way of explaining that I haven't been updating because I haven't cared enough to update, and that, ultimately, I haven't cared enough to update because my motivation is broken and I was allergic to the medication that came close to fixing it. Hopefully, I'll soon have an opportunity to try out another class of medication that will help even more and, ideally, not make me break out in hives and suffocate.

Incidentally, I hate being an "allergic person." I never had any allergies whatsoever before I came to this city, you know, and now that I have at least one, I feel frail and vulnerable, like at any moment someone is going to shoot me in the heel with an arrow smeared with crab and cochineal. I do not enjoy having a weak point in which I can be shot for massive damage.

More on my own personal Green Revolution coming soon.

Do You Want To Know Why I Blog?

2007-09-09T19:24:00.001-07:00

Because talking to people is so much harder.

That's why.

I communicate better in writing. Take it or leave it.

House of Cards

2007-09-08T15:36:00.000-07:00

Nothing makes my stomach churn quite like spiteful ignorance.

In particular, I'm talking about the sorts of individuals who, out of ignorance (be it unwitting or willful), malice, or denial, will attempt unceasingly to poke holes in all of humanity's greatest scientific achievements because they don't like the implications of one theory or another. I'm talking about the sorts of folks who will reject out of hand entire disciplines of thought because they can imagine a question that can't be answered in that school. There are others in virtually every arena of science, but by far the most prominent are religious creationists, especially the "stealth" creationists of the Intelligent Design movement.

I'm talking about assholes like this or this, who pretend at science while twisting every fact they encounter to conform with their preconceptions. These are the types from whom you'll hear big talk about how "many scientists" are "increasingly questioning" evolutionary biology. They're the type who will proudly parade before the world an apparent gap in the fossil record, or a biogenesis question that science "can't" answer, as if a single unknown detail will bring the whole institution crashing down - as if each and every question that can be asked, each detail throughout all of the history of the universe, is a card in a towering but delicate house of cards where every single precariously balanced fact is a necessary support for all the others.

I have a little news for you, though, folks: that's not how it works.

Science - the sum over history of human evidentiary thought - is not dependent on any single fact or theory. It is a collection, not a construction.

Let's go over that again, because I'm so fucking sick of hearing argument after argument that essentially simplify down to "science can't answer this question I came up with to my satisfaction, so everything it concludes must be wrong and therefore my theory must be right." We'll get to the fallacy in the latter half of that in a little while, but for now we're discussing the former. So: science is a process which allows humans to use material evidence to find reproducible information which can allow us to form predictive theories about the real world. It is designed to be self-correcting, and is strengthened, not destroyed, whenever a gap is discovered or an error is deleted, because rather than being depending on every single facet, it is cumulative. There is no "god of the gaps" waiting to provide a divine explanation for any questions science hasn't answered, because anything we don't know is simply a question we haven't answered yet.

There is no unilateral community. The "Scientists" that you hear about so often in the news, in advertisements, and in criticisms simply don't exist. Science is a cutthroat community; it is positively Darwinian, in fact. Why? Well, simple: scientists make a name for themselves by demolishing older theories and replacing them with newer, better ones. It is in any individual scientist's best interests to formulate newer, more accurate theories to supplant the old.

And the only reason people can't accept this is religious bias. Witness the divergent worlds of mathematics & physics, and biological science... in particular, the cultural treatment of each. You will find no widespread criticism of astronomical physics because "Newton was wrong" or "Newtonian physics can't explain" this or that. We've accepted, happily and without cultural upheaval, the idea that Einstein's relativity supplanted classical Newtonian physics, and that relativity was thereafter modified by quantum physics. People accept the idea that modern discoveries in physics can necessitate new mathematical models. Why, then, is it so difficult for so many of us to accept that new discoveries in areas like biology or geology may require revision or wholesale replacement of classical theory? Why do people still believe that attacking Darwin's original ideas or even his personal life is somehow a telling blow against evolutionary biology? Why is "Darwin recanted on his deathbed" still advanced as "proof" that evolutionary theory is all some sort of hoax? Why is a single small gap in the fossil record assumed to be "proof" that the world was supernaturally created, rather than evidence of a world that is chaotic, destructive, and wholly unreliable as a historical recorder?

Why is it unacceptable to refine and revise some theories? Well, here's the thing: it isn't. Not only is it acceptable, it's required.

Science is not a house of cards. It does not collapse in upon itself if you remove on small piece, or if you add on one piece too many. Bad theories can be excised and replaced as a matter of course - indeed, doing so is the matter of course in many branches of science!

To extend the metaphor, science has much more in common with a notebook, its sheets laid flat and orderly - picture it as a big, fat three-ring binder, tabbed, annotated, scribbled on, noted, de-noted, constantly re-ordered and reviewed. Every page is in a different hand. Some sheets - Euclidean geometry, Cartesian coordinates - are staid, solid, uniform and yellowed with age, and on others - superstring theory - a hundred different pens have scribbled and more aren't yet dry. In the section simply labeled "biology," perhaps one page in twenty of Darwin's original enormous contribution remains. Given that only footnotes remain of the work of ancient luminaries like Aristotle, Darwin's contribution is notably substantial, but even so it can hardly be said to be the greater part of evolutionary science. The science binder is infinitely expandable and infinitely divisible, and anyone can insert, mark, or remove a page so long as their contribution withstands the harsh scrutiny of their peers.

In the front of this binder, there is a page of rules. It is titled simply "The Scientific Method," and it reads, in large, plain font:

BEFORE ADDING CONTENT

I. OBSERVE
II. HYPOTHESIZE
III. PREDICT
IV. TEST

REPEAT AS NECESSARY

You'll notice, with a simple experiment, that large binders of information do not crumble to ruin if you remove and replace a page, or if you find that a certain piece of information has yet to be added. Science is not an iterative, stochastic process, but rather a cumulative one. Pull out a page, and you'll still have a big, thick binder with a space awaiting new pages.

And that's quite enough of that metaphor.

Now, as to the second half of the usual false dichotomy. "Evolution has problems, so everything must have been created."

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you could demonstrate conclusively that biological evolution was impossible. I'm not going to worry about how you might demonstrate this; that's not the point here. Just assume that, for whatever reason, you could prove that things didn't evolve.

Where do you go from there?

If you've shown that evolution is incorrect, you must have done so with data that conflicts with the predictions of an evolutionary universe. So what might the data indicate? To make a positive assertion, you must have evidence for your assertion, not simply evidence against some conflicting notion.

Imagine that I have a box. I present you with the box, and tell you that inside, there's a gift for you. Now, you've been wanting a new car, and a new watch. Everyone wants a new car and a new watch, right? But you can see plainly that there's no room in the box for a car. (We'll set aside for the moment the possibility that I was clever and only put the car keys in the box.) You conclude that the box must contain a shiny new Rolex, because I am a generous fellow. "Thank you," you say. "This is a princely gift." Upon opening the box, you are surprised to find a cubic zirconia tie pin in the shape of a yorkshire terrier.

The box represents the universe, of course, and opening the act of finding out how it works, so opening the box is stretching the metaphor more than a little. All the same, the rhetorical error so often seen is the same as the thought error in the example - a false dichotomy. You erroneously reduced the realm of possibility from virtually infinite to a mere two, a mistake which seems impossibly stupid in this context, but which happens all the time in the real world. Listen closely to political debate, personal argument, or particularly religious dispute, and you will quite often hear what amounts to "If not A, then B!" The problem is, "not A" is not the same as B, because lurking out there waiting to be addressed is the entirety of the rest of the alphabet and more.

So in short: no, a single missing data point does not break the statistical curve, and no, breaking the curve would not even in fact prove anything; and that doesn't even address the fact that most of the objections that inconsistent shills like Michael Behe raise are out-and-out lies. No, Mr. Behe, the bacterial flagellum is not "irreducibly complex"; genetic sequencing of flagellate bacteria have provided several solid possible histories for the development of the flagellum from simpler units which coincide quite nicely with theoretical predictions of said development. No, we will not "teach the controversy," because the only "controversy" is between meticulously obtained and organized knowledge and ignorance, and ignorance is not a valid "alternative world view." No, creationism is not "just as valid a scientific theory," because there is nothing remotely scientific about claiming, "Well, if you can't explain every single detail of the universe on the spot, my god must have done it."

So can we quit rehashing these arguments now? I know I've wandered from the topic a bit, but I swear I hear this same worn-out bullshit every day, and it's past time it was put to rest. I'm past tired of popular opinion and policy in what damned well ought to be a great nation being shaped by misinformation, misconception, and ignorance.

Stop trying to pull down my binder. It's not a house of cards.

And no, it's not a series of tubes, either, smartass.

Punk bloggin': hiatus

2007-09-06T19:50:00.000-07:00

Hey, you know what the definition of a sellout is?

A punk who bathes.

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

I think I'm done writing stuff about punk for a while. There's no easy answer. It is what it is to any number of very different people. There are teenagers who listen to Avril and wear skinny jeans and spiked bracelets who call themselves punks, and there are brilliant, dedicated artists in their forties with spouses and kids and even PhDs, who dress neatly and are generally in a natural shape and color who define punk. There are punks who would sooner slit their own throats than wear a shirt that isn't secondhand, and punks who'll sign to a major record label and endure the shitstorm of scorn that that entails because they think it's just that important to get their message to a wider audience... or because they love money. There are destructive punks, apathetic punks, poser punks, good punks, bad punks, sellout punks, and whatever other kinds you'll find down in the crowds at your local dive venue.

So let it be what it is. It's not one particular lifestyle, or one attitude, or one key philosophy, I don't think. About the only thing the far reaches of punk have in common is some sort of dissatisfaction, but that in itself isn't very satisfying, so let it be. Keep on resisting whatever you're resisting. And don't confuse growing up with giving up.

More to come shortly. On different topics. I may revisit this one eventually, but I think I've done all I can with my current limited store of experience.

Been too busy

2007-08-21T06:07:00.001-07:00

And not feeling all that well. Sorry. Still thinking; will write it out soon.

Possible topics!

Punk culture relies on powerlessness. It's self-defeating. What happens when punks can actually accomplish something or manage to build real lives? Suddenly they're not punk any more? But my values haven't changed; what gives? I know it's cliche to say that punk requires you to be young, poor, and angry, but is that really true? I think about these things.
Medication and culture. People talk about a nation of Prozac zombies, and insist that "for thousands of years we got by without brain meds. Why is everyone depressed now?" Well, you know what? For thousands of years we got by without antibiotics and contraceptives, too.
Anyone with the least real grounding in evolutionary biology will tell you that evolved organisms are designed imperfectly; "suboptimal design" is one of the key supporting arguments in favor of biological evolution, in fact. We are emphatically not perfectly suited to our environment. We are a makeshift job, adapting old parts to new tasks as well as can be managed by random repurposing until something works.
And on top of that, we're not even in our environment any more! Our environment is an African savannah with low, broad-branched trees! We have created an artificial world that suits some of our needs, mostly the physical ones, without anywhere near the time needed to biologically adapt to it.
Is it any wonder it helps a lot of us out to tweak old, outdated brain chemistry a little? Consider it a software patch to allow an old, old program to run in a new operating system. We're not tinkering with a system that's perfect if left alone and kept from getting unbalanced; we're simply trying to keep a hodgepodge assemblage of random parts working smoothly. We're not deviating from the "correct" blueprint of human design and operations because there isn't one.

Science: it works, bitches!
Apparently Rick Steves, the travel guy from the long-running European travel show on PBS, was the keynote speaker at Hempfest up here, and is a chair member of NORML. Who knew? He's a really cool, really, well, normal guy. He says he's seen what good marijuana laws can do for a country. I believe him.
I'm not a user myself, but you know what? It's about time we pulled out heads out of our asses about cannabis here in the United States. It's a gateway drug, sure, but you know why? Because we tell people that they might as well be smoking crack. If our government assures them of that, well, why wouldn't they?

The Easy Way

2007-08-11T01:13:00.000-07:00

I took a pretty hefty Modern Physics course back at the University. It was designed to be an overview of all the stuff you don't learn in early physics courses; essentially, it was about everything since Newton. All that stuff that doesn't make one damn bit of intuitive sense.

Now, I liked Dr. Gleeson. He was fun, and he was obviously a pretty smart dude, if a little weird... but I was willing to let weird slide, because physicists are always weird. It's just part of the job description. Anyway, he was pretty cool.

But I don't know why he was so resistant to explaining things the easy way. Don't get me wrong: I want to know the hard stuff too. I want to know all the math. I want to know the nitty-gritty.

But it really helps to learn all that if you understand what you're learning first, dammit! When we started learning Maxwell's equations, I didn't even understand what the hell a field was! Last I had heard, we were being told that you couldn't have action at a distance, and that there emphatically was not any sort of aether. Now, to jump from that to the electromagnetic field...? How was I supposed to take that? All of a sudden we can have action at a distance, and there is something light propagates through? What? But...

Anyway: the easy way.

There really is a way to explain most difficult concepts without getting into the technical stuff. For the dilettante, that's usually enough; if you're just curious, well, the casual explanation will probably sate you. But for the serious student - whether he intends to learn just the basics, or whether he intends to go on to a career in the stuff - it makes an excellent start.

Example: relativity.

Relativity is weird at first glance. I had the fact, but not the reason or the mechanism, explained to me many times over the years, and it's so counterintuitive that most often I just assumed that the person explaining it to me - and generally doing a bad job of it, I might add - had misunderstood it. It just didn't make sense that speed through space could have anything to do with time! And I wasn't alone in that fallacy, either; in fact, I was in company with the exalted likes of Sir Isaac Newton, who asserted quite matter-of-factly that time and space were absolute! It's simply borne out by human experience!

Human experience is limited.

Relativity is a brilliant, simple concept, and it's very, very true (except in quantum situations, but we won't get into those for now). Experiments bear it out. As you go faster in space, you go slower in time... sort of. Relative to a stationary observer. Or him to you. It's... well, it's relative. It has to do with frames of reference.

Anyway, here's the thing: due to conditions at the beginning of the universe that I'm really not qualified to enumerate, we are all hurtling through spacetime - the four dimensions in which we exist - at the speed of light, which is, as we know, the ultimate speed limit. It's as fast as things go. (Note that I didn't say it's the fastest things can go, but rather that it's as fast as things do go. That's important.)

We are going the speed of light, in four dimensions. How? Easy: if you're not moving in space, the three dimensions we're used to, then you're moving in time. If you start to move through space, you divert some of your total velocity from moving through time, and lo and behold... you slow down in time.

It's that simple! It's as if you were driving at 65 mph northward, and then turned to the northeast. You'd still be going 65 mph, but not moving northward at 65 mph - some of your velocity would now be moving eastward. When you move through space, you're not moving as much through time.

Okay, it's not really that simple. That's actually kind of a gross, oversimplified, slightly inaccurate summation. But it nonetheless conveys a good sense of the idea! It's the easy way to get a handle on what relativity means! As a starting point, it's absolutely invaluable!

So why did it take this damn long for me to learn it?!?

Allergy

2007-08-07T19:57:00.000-07:00

What the hell is your problem, body?

No allergies at all for a young lifetime, and now, within the space of a year or two, suddenly I have deathly allergic reactions to multiple, unrelated items?

Being allergic to crab was bad enough, but I could handle it. But now I'm allergic to an entire group of common medications, as well? Criminy.

And this is the scary kind of allergy, too. Internal allergy. The kind that doesn't get less severe with each exposure, but in fact more and more dangerous. You get sensitized. Anaphylaxis.

Now, anaphylaxis doesn't necessarily mean anaphylactic shock; it means a particular type of misdirected immune response, which, in serious cases, can lead to shock and rapid death. It doesn't take much to put the human body into shock, however, and severe allergies can happen quickly and without warning.

Anyway, yuck.

Blobal Garming

2007-08-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

You know, for all the uproar over global climate change you hear these days, you hear very little about what it actually is or what its real ramifications might be. Ask anyone on the street what the story is, and you'll be lucky if whoever you ask has seen "An Inconvenient Truth," much less studied any actual climate science on even a casual basis. Many people know - or think they know - that it's caused by pollution, and it involves gases keeping heat in the atmosphere. That's about all most people know.

Well, I'm not here to give lectures. I recommend you read up on the topic elsewhere, preferably in papers by reputable climatologists, geologists, ecologists, and atmospheric chemists. Suffice to say here that I was thinking a bit about global warming today.

Now, I'm an evolutionary biologist, and an ecologist. I think about biospheres and ecosystems. I was thinking today, partly because I'm in the middle of an excellent popular science book by Bill Bryson called A Short History of Nearly Everything. I don't necessarily agree with the way he states everything in the book, and I don't like the emphasis he gives some coincidences while barely mentioning other relevant factors, but all in all it is a highly readable and even entertaining book that teaches a broad overview of natural history from which more or less every single person on earth could benefit. I recommend it.

But back to the point: I was thinking.

This isn't a novel idea, I'm sure, though as yet I haven't had time to look around and see which greater minds have already propounded it, but here it is: we're headed for an ice age that will be orders of magnitude worse than any scenarios we have previously envisioned as consequences of global warming. The only question is whether it's sooner or later... but not that much later. Sounds counterintuitive, right? Well, it's complicated.

The short version is this: we don't understand the global climate very well, but we can observe certain patterns. One is that phenomena that disrupt oceanic currents, especially the big, deep ones, disrupt the global climate in destabilizing ways. Another, with more certain outcomes, is that plants create atmosphere and plants like carbon dioxide, so when there's lots of carbon dioxide (and lots of water), plants grow and change atmospheric composition.

Put the two together, and, excepting the unpredictable and certainly not probable intervention of other factors like geothermal heat or extraterrestrial impact, you have a climate destabilized by melting ice caps and glaciers, diluting and raising the oceans and changing ocean currents and unpredictably altering weather patterns. Simultaneously, you have extremely rapidly increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from our own combustion output. Plants love extra water and extra carbon dioxide, so we can expect enormous plant growth, even if we cut down all the rain forests and it comes in the form of algal blooms or grasses.

Plants eat carbon dioxide. Lots of plants eat lots of carbon dioxide. Now, sooner or later, our excessive output of that gas is going to end. Either we'll run out of fuel, or we'll decide it's time we stop wrecking everything. Either way, what we'll be left with is more plants than the resulting lower output can sustain. They'll suck up a whole lot of carbon dioxide from the destabilized atmosphere, for a while, at least, and levels will not only go back down, but will go down even lower than they were at preindustrial levels.

As you probably know, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas - it allows the atmosphere to retain heat. Now, what do you think will happen when it's all sucked out of the atmosphere? Cooler temperatures. Crashingly cooler. Disastrously cooler. Cool summers don't melt all the snowfall of the winter. Unmelted snow reflects incident sunlight, which causes less heat to be absorbed, resulting in further cooling. A positive feedback loop leads to an ice age. This is established climatological theory, established by geological record.

No, I'm not claiming I know exactly what's going to happen. Obviously no one does. I certainly don't know as well as the people who study this stuff for a living. But it's an entirely logical, predictable sequence of events, and it's more or less a certainty in the long run. It's not so much a certainty, however, exactly how long a run, or whether people will be around to see it.

Still, based on what research I've had time to do so far, including remaining fuel reserves and histories of previous climate changes, I wouldn't be too surprised if my generation's great-grandchildren ended up being well-served by stocking up on winter clothing.

Exhaustion

2007-07-29T20:55:00.001-07:00

Apologies to my readers - all possibly as many as four of them - for the long silence. Between a new job that requires me to be up before the sun, and a visit from my family, which was tiring no matter how much I love them, I have been busy and wiped clean out.

I will return soon, with tales of, erm, introspection, and possibly filing. Because that is what I do.

I file.

That Wizard Book, Viruses, and Maybe Iraq

2007-07-23T03:04:00.000-07:00

I wonder what it feels like to have your book burned?

Does J.K. Rowling feel offended or hurt? Liberated? Does she laugh all the way to the bank? I can't really imagine how I would feel about it, much less someone I've never met. I don't really know quite what to think about it.

The idea of burning books is just... repugnant. It's something you don't do in the modern world. The immediate mental associations with book burnings are witch burnings and Nazi cultural cleansing, neither of which are things that most people are eager to claim as their inspiration. The modern, enlightened individual just doesn't destroy information; it's why the fall of the Library of Alexandria is counted as one of the most devastating destructive acts in human history.

What drives these people? What could make a functional, thinking adult afraid of a collection of words on paper? Books don't possess any motive force. They can't do or harm anything. Platitudes to the contrary, words and information are neither powerful or dangerous; it is and always has been people who are dangerous, whether the tool they use is a rumor or a gun. It is when ideas reach people that there is danger. History has shown us that the struggle to prevent ideas from reaching people, to suppress information, is an ugly, destructive, and ultimately futile exercise generally undertaken only by dangerous people.

And it seems to me that the type of people who feel that certain thoughts - certain words that contain information that doesn't seem to accommodate their own favorite words - must be purged from the world by flame or by force are very, very dangerous people indeed.

WARNING: The following paragraphs will involve some speculation and possibly certain liberties with the hard and fast boundaries of current knowledge for the sake of ease of explanation. Nevertheless, I will represent everything as correctly as I can.

Ideas can, in some regards, take on a life of their own, and I don't speak metaphorically when I say that. Those who are familiar with meme theory may already have some inkling of what I mean, but for those who don't: a meme is a single piece of information or idea, of variable complexity but generally at least a complete thought, which acts in certain regards very much like the information encoded biologically in a gene. Like genes, memes influence the "host" organism that carries them in order to ensure their own replication; in the case of genes, this replication involves the reproduction of the host. In the case of memes, it simply involves communicating ideas. In a way, then, ideas can be viewed as a form of near-life on par with, and indeed virtually identical in principle to, viruses.

Unfortunately, unlike the body, the human mind does not seem to have been evolved with a robust immune system. Indeed, it seems as if humans will take in and support almost any idea, and it is only other, pre-existing ideas which prevent the uptake and acceptance of new ones. Since humans are almost never raised in a complete cultural vacuum, it is difficult to separate what is genetic instinct from what is learned unconsciously or at a very early age, but it does seem fairly certain that while some faculties, at least, are "hardwired" in, most behaviors that we undertake are learned either through experience or through communication with other individuals; and what we learn is definitely a mixed bag. Humans are very susceptible to infection by information.

There is genetic evidence, and a body of theory, which suggests that during human evolutionary history, certain viruses became virtually endemic to human populations, and were eventually, over the course of many generations and through a process of pathogenic attenuation, incorporated into human DNA as nonfunctional pseudogenes or other segments of DNA of varying levels of expression. I use "pathogenic attenuation" to refer to the process by which communicable diseases tend to become less deadly to their hosts over successive generations and during transmission to new hosts, since the organisms which kill their hosts less quickly generally have more chance to spread themselves.

In other words, the body of human information - the human genome - adapted to and overcame these viral threats not by the war undoubtedly waged on them by countless immune systems, but by assimilating them and rendering them harmless. A virus is nothing more than a length of genetic material with a delivery system - a biological data packet. Instead of continuing to wage an endless, impossible war against information, our ancestors eventually won by accepting it.

If this strategy was the ultimate answer for our bodies, which already possess a powerful, diverse immune system for the explicit purpose of fighting off or destroying invaders, how much more important must it be for our minds, relatively undefended as they are? Ideas are powerful influences on humans, and humans are powerful. As I mentioned earlier, attempting to stop the spread of ideas is a futile and destructive pursuit, as governments and churches throughout the ages have discovered; and that, ultimately, is what makes the assimilative strategy so very vital.

The fool who takes arms against an idea - be it Hogwarts Academy or the Heliocentric Model or Terror - inevitably misses his target. He damages his intended intangible not even a little, but seldom fails to do grievous harm to his fellow man. Concepts cannot be killed, but human beings certainly can.

Take information into yourselves. Use your faculties for critical thought to evaluate it, and place it in the hierarchy of information where it belongs. Let it strengthen you. Never fight and never flee from learning; only fools, frauds, and cowards try, and their efforts are ever wasted. There is never anything to fear from information. If something you learn conflicts with something you know, you can lash out and try to destroy the new data, or you can figure out the truth, act accordingly, and grow stronger for it. Information is what it is; you may like it or you may not, but you can't fight it and win.

And burning every book in the world won't change that.

The Writing Bug

2007-07-20T01:33:00.000-07:00

I need to adjust myself somehow so that when I get the urge to write, it's daytime and I'm awake. Instead, it always seems to come on me late at night, when I'm sitting up and spacing out, insomniac but hardly at my most mentally acute. The result is... voluminous, but unfocused. Rambling.

Suggestions?

Last thought for tonight

2007-07-19T02:08:00.000-07:00

I've got the writin' bug tonight, but I do need to close it down and hit the sack sometime soon. I'll have to make this a short one, or maybe just a teaser.

Tell you what: in lieu of a full entry, I'll leave you with the beginnings of my next one in the form of a thought exercise I'd like you to do with me. Here's how it goes:

I want you to think of something you feel like you understand. Be a little careful and don't choose something you're an expert on, because that will defeat the purpose. Choose something that's not related to your job or your daily life, maybe something you studied in school some time ago.

The one that gave me the idea, being the man I am, is the basic concept of evolution by natural selection. I feel very strongly that the major part of the reason America rejects basic biological science in so much greater a proportion than the rest of the world - at least the parts of the world that don't live in theocracies or grinding poverty, or otherwise have no access to education - is because so many people have a shallow, simplistic definition attached to the word and no idea what it really entails. If all you're told is that evolution is the idea that "people came from monkeys," of course you're going to be inclined to reject it. It sounds silly!

There's more to it than that, of course; kids who sit through an entire high school biology curriculum have quite a bit more information available to them, but they'll only take away from it what they want to. As for adults, no one is trying particularly hard to teach them anything, so it's even easier for them to hang on to biased, inconsistent notions about this or that by the simple expedient of not thinking about it.

There's a very simple, logical progression from basic mathematics to simple statistics to the
essentials of the theory of evolution by natural selection. It's not hard to explain, and it really takes no more than a primary school mathematical education to grasp. Once you know how it works, it's so incredibly intuitive that it no longer seems like a discrete theory; it's just the way things are. There is no separate force of evolution. It's just the inevitable, mathematical expression of the way things work.

And yet people don't get it. Ask an American what evolution is, and if you're lucky you'll hear something that's vaguely related, like "The strong survive and reproduce," or the oft-misquoted "Survival of the fittest." If you have the misfortune to ask one of our nation's many religious fundamentalists, you'll probably hear something more along the lines of, "It's the idea that we came from monkeys, and I'm no monkey" or "It's some kind of attempt to disprove God and it's a lie."

How can you in good conscience reject what you don't understand? I really, sincerely believe that if many of these people had been shown, step by step, what evolution is and how it works, they would have no trouble reconciling what goes on right before their eyes in the natural world with their faith like so many more reasonable religious folks do. Lacking that understanding, though, they turn to the only explanation they've ever actually had laid out for them: "God is great, and he made it this way."

No, I'm not saying, "Oh, those poor, benighted savages and their silly beliefs." I'm not saying that every single one of them, or even many of them, would reject their superstitious ways if only they could be taught. Evolution and religion aren't even the topic here.

I have digressed a bit, but now I'll return to the exercise: choose a topic. It doesn't have to be something you disagree with, just something you think you understand at least a little, but don't think about much. It can be something big or small. Doesn't matter. If you like evolution as a topic, you have my wholehearted approval, but go ahead and pick whatever you like.

Now: ask yourself what you really know. If your topic was, say, computers, do you know what the major components of a computer are? Do you know what their functions are? Do you know what they're made of? Do you have even the faintest idea what goes on inside a microprocessor? I think that I understand computers pretty well on a functional level, but I couldn't even begin to explain how a silicon chip works.

Once you have established, as you inevitably will, that you don't know much at all (If you can answer authoritatively and in detail every question you can ask yourself, you have probably picked a topic you're an expert on, and I told you not to do that. Shame on you!), start hypothesizing. Make some guesses. Build alternate explanations that fill in those gaps in as many ways as you can think of. Take what you know and use it as a framework to develop as complete a picture as you can. Deduce from what you know whatever you can about what must happen in the parts you don't know.

Now that you've done that, do a little homework. It doesn't have to be much; a quick Google search and a casual reading of the Wikipedia article for your topic would be a good start. See if your ideas are borne out. Chances are if you actually tried hard at the last phase of the exercise, you'll be surprised at how accurate parts of your guesswork are, and you'll see places where your guesses work out, but not in the way you expected.

If you found this to be a stimulating exercise, then my work here is done. You've just done some critical thinking. Try it again sometime! It's good for you.

If you didn't find it at all stimulating, then why did you pick a topic you weren't interested in, knucklehead? Try it again, with feeling this time.

Anyway, I'll be doing this, too. I'll get back to you with my findings.

Eh? What's my topic?

I don't know yet.

-jm

Saving the World

2007-07-19T01:17:00.000-07:00

Where did I get this sense of... obligation?

I have a confession to make: I have a superhero complex. I have an overwhelming, burning need to Save The World. It's silly, self-important, and impossible, and I still have it. There are times when I cannot sleep at night because I simply can't see how I am going to achieve, in my limited lifetime, something that will truly Change The World For The Better.

As for the idea of simply relaxing and following my bliss, doing my own part by being happy and productive, well, that's a paradox, you see. There are times when I would like nothing better than to bail out on my faltering career track toward a mediocre future in the sciences. Sometimes I think that I could be very happy being a schlock sci-fi writer, or designing role-playing games, or running my own brewery, or spending my days in the mountains as a national park ranger. But those don't Make A Difference, you see? They're too small for that ridiculous Napoleonic part of me that wants to singlehandedly improve the human condition forevermore. And so I know that if I dropped it all now and went to a community college for a degree in Fermentation Science to spend my days making and bottling Huntington's, the finest goddamned craft ales on the West Coast, I'd be nagged all my days by a guilty voice inside that told me I was shirking. Beer? What kind of occupation is that for a Hero?

How dare I deprive the human race of my genius, my greatness?

And simultaneously I know that I'm just one man, and not, come to that, a Newton or a Franklin or a Darwin. I have the superego of a Great Man, and rather less ambition than Ben & Jerry, who, it is worth noting, originally intended to make bagels and only settled on ice cream because the initial outlay was cheaper and simpler. It seems rather conceited to determinedly martyr myself in a life path at which I stand every chance of failing utterly because I have to Save The World.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'd love to succeed in the sciences. I'd love to go back to school and, one day, discover something, some unexplored realm, that really sets me aflame with passionate interest. I'd love to be the guy who maps out the metabolic processes of the first extraterrestrial life we find, or the guy who writes the book or the script that finally makes evolution accessible to Americans, or the guy who unlocks a pattern in human DNA that allows us to double our effective lifespans or magnify our intellects with simple, safe modifications. The chances of that are... slim, it's true, but they're a lot worse than slim if I don't try.

We'd all love to be heroes, I know. I just wish I knew how to stop feeling like my only choices are "Champion Of Mankind" or "ignominious failure." I'd like to add "happy, successful ordinary guy" to the list.

I wonder if I'll be able to die contented once I get my Nobel Pri-- dammit!

A Note on Originality

2007-07-19T00:37:00.000-07:00

It's a hard life being a writer, these days. Ditto for an actor, an instigator, or even a simple salesman. It's all been done, you see. It's hard to be innovative when even the quirkiest, most cockeyed inspiration was already patented by Thomas Engleberry of Bend, Oregon six years ago.

No, there is, to the best of my knowledge, no Thomas Engleberry in Bend, Oregon. If there is, I don't know him or know if he holds any patents, but I'm sure he's a very nice man.

You see? You probably gave a small, fleeting smile to that joke, passingly amused by it without conscious thought because it's a formula you've heard before. I can't name a particular instance of its use, and you probably can't either, but you have heard it, haven't you? Somewhere, you read something where someone made up a false name for a frivolous example, and then said that whatever real person bore that false name was certainly "very nice." It's been done. Many times.

It's not a rip-off, though. I'm not plagiarizing it. It came unbidden to me. I didn't write it thinking that, oh, hey, I read a good joke the other day! I think I'll put it in my blog! On the contrary, it just seemed like the most natural place to go for the next paragraph.

In the sciences, it's not really possible to just be a scholar or a researcher any more. You must be a specialist, and if you want to make a career of it, you have to be pretty damned good. The closest anyone can come to being an old-fashioned, well-rounded generalist in scientific fields in the modern world is to be a professor, to teach; and even then you'd better have either a prodigious output of publications or an ambitious and successful laboratory with your name on it, or you'll find yourself with no funding, out in the cold and obsolete even if you do have tenure. You can't simply be a biologist, or, god forbid, a naturalist any more; you have to be the foremost authority on something, perhaps the mating habits of African birds of prey, or the ecology of Florida mangroves and the impact of pollution on their growth.

For those of us with a scientific bent and broad interest, with an insatiable intellectual wanderlust as opposed to hawk-eyed, single-minded focus, this is a difficult situation. It's virtually impossible to make a career in the field we love in any way that's even remotely fulfilling to our desire to continue learning about more than the current micro-interest project that directly in front of us, and yet it's equally painful to sacrifice any sort of career in the sciences at all. For myself, my best hope is, I think, to become a science journalist or popular science writer; frankly, my writing and critical thinking have always been sharper than my ability to pay meticulous attention to detail and ferret out important data points. I'm a better inductive thinker than deductive, a better intuitor of patterns than aggregator of data, and there's no room left in the sciences for those who can't bear to focus down. The broad niches were filled by the scientific giants of yesteryear, the Newtons and Darwins, who had excellent attention to detail and the freedom to make broad, far-reaching new discoveries based on the simplest data that just hadn't been examined before.

The reason I've made this seemingly random digression into professional angst should be coming into focus now: it's hard to be original. It's not hard in the sense that it's a taxing effort to write without ripping someone off; rather, it's just a pretty fair chance that whatever you have to say will have been said before, and quite possibly said a lot better than you would say it.

There are two ways out of this, it seems to me.

The first, as in the sciences, is hyperspecialization. If you cater to such a narrow niche - temporally or numerically - that you're the only game in town, you stand a fair chance of being the first to say whatever it is you want to say. The downside, though, is the same as the upside: you're the only game in town because it's a very small town. Low general interest and a limited number of topics are sure to be problems.

The second is simply to offer yourself as the commodity, and this is what I've opted to do. The one thing any writer has that is unequivocally his own is his style. It may borrow parts of itself from any number of influences, but the final, synthetic result is, like a person's unique genetic code, simply the result of too many factors to be likely to be duplicated. Unlike in the sciences, there is an element of art to writing, and flexibility and unorthodoxy can get results because there's no objectively correct way to express something.

So this is my take on the issue of whether or not what I write has been said before: I know it has. If you're here, you're here to read me writing about it. I thank you for that, because I know that if you just wanted to read the facts about it - whatever "it" is - there are a thousand other places you could go. What I can offer is not something that's never been said before, but a new and, just maybe, better way of saying it.

In return for your loyal interest my hackneyed ramblings, I can hope that, one day, when I have a truly unique thought, you'll be the first to know.

Punk ain't dead

2007-07-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

In spite of everything I said in our last installment, I left a few things out.

And, honestly, I've had my mind changed for me... just a bit.*

The most important thing I left out is the one thing that reconciles the fact that punk is about not fitting in with the requirement that punks have unity and purpose. That one thing is simple: humanity. Punk is about rage, rejection, and destruction, but not indiscriminately; it's about smashing everything that tries to make us other than human. It's about smashing everything that keeps some people down and artificially raises other up. It's about doing violence to any and every system, every status quo, that tries to deny that we are all human, by resorting to the one resource, the one means, that we all have. It's about not just removing, but throwing down and tearing apart artifice and dishonesty.

It's about reaching the greatest common denominator, whether society damn well likes it or not.

Good punk rock is like a drug -- not just a drug, but an amphetamine. It puts a hard, brilliant razor edge on one's world and perceptions. It fills you with pumping, angry energy, but also expands your perceptions, stretching them out so you can see patterns, structures within the world and the dynamics of humanity. It highlights in a cold blaze the faults and knots and dead-ends of what is, and makes you feel both overwhelmed and godlike at once, like you're dwarfed to insignificance by all the world -as you are - but, joined in incandescent fury with all your fellows, could topple empires with a mere touch in the right spot.

There is good punk rock out there. Submerged and subverted as it may be, punk isn't dead. Not dead; but smothering. Choked and weighted and clumsy under a heavy blanket of monoculture.

Don't just dress it, or listen to it, or wear it on your shirt. Think it. Feel it. Do it. Fight, before real punk goes under forever. Whether your taste is Anti-Flag or Bad Religion or NOFX or the Ramones, set aside tastes and styles and goddamn well smash some shit up.

And start the smashing with complacency.

* - Bad Religion's new album New Maps of Hell is nothing short of transcendent, no less than you'd expect from the champions of intellectual punk.

Punk is dead

2007-07-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

I know it's been said before, but punk is dead.

Okay, not quite. It's still alive, but it's hobbled. Defeated. Its fangs have been pulled and its claws blunted. There are still real punks, and you can pick them out because they're the ones that don't have liberty spikes, shredded black leather jackets, and an entire catalog of obscure band patches and tattoos. They're the ones that dress comfortably, put on killer shows, and never, ever, ever quit. The rest? It's just fashion.

Punk, you see, is emphatically not a subculture; or, at least, the real spirit of punk isn't. Certainly there is a subculture - an entire fashion trend - that is called punk, but artfully torn clothing and dyed mohawks have as much to do with what punk is really about as Avril Lavigne does.

Punk is about one thing, and one thing only. It has a mission statement, and this is it:

"Things ain't right; they're unfair. We don't like it, and we're not going to fucking take it. We may not have power or influence, but we're going to smash shit up until you listen to us and starting making things right."

That's punk. It's about purpose, unity, and, yes, violence. Violence, though, doesn't just mean random physical destruction; indeed, many punks lose sight of the real meaning of violence when they become too engrossed in brawling and vandalism. Violence can be done with a fist or a brick or a spray can, but it can also be done with words, appearances, and decisions. Violence can be done to ideas. It can be done to social norms. The very idea of tattered leathers and mohawks was not, at first, to be identifiable as a punk, but to stand out and be identifiable not at all, to do violence to people's everyday routine by shocking their standards of dress and decency.

Punk music, too, is about violence. Some of it is obvious, direct. Some of it is nothing but calls for smashing the state, or simply vaguely-directed fury at a broken system. Some of it is not so obvious: songs about despair, or about strange, seemingly inconsequential topics that don't seem to jibe. The driving, double-time rock backbeat is energizing and angry, and the often distorted or discordant guitar is meant to jar the listener out of the comfortable fugue of music appreciation, especially the happy-go-lucky shallowness of most rock and roll.

There is real punk left; indeed, it's not even particularly uncommon, although it's in the minority. The problem is that real punk, sincere and powerful as it may be, is no longer a viable tool for social change, because it is inextricably stylistically bound with genre of music and visual style that's been re-branded as modern "punk."

There have always been what the epochal SLC Punk would term "posers," but the presence of young punklings who just don't get it is no longer the real issue. The system - and by that I mean society, supply and demand and not some paranoid complex - has taken punk style and sold it back to us. The drones who sport faux-spray-painted band t-shirts and green hair these days aren't even posers; they're just teenagers fitting in.

And there's the heart of the matter: today, punk is about fitting in to a subculture. When you do certain things, dress a certain way, listen to certain songs, you label yourself "punk." In so doing, rather than deliberately excluding yourself, rather than doing violence to a broken system, you join the system. The system has swallowed punk whole and digested it. And it's not easy to fix, either; you can't simply refuse to call yourself "punk," because the entire category of behaviors punks are supposed to perform are identified with what is now just another tame social clique, and if you don't call yourself punk, someone else will.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to pin the blame for this on Good Charlotte, or saying that this is a new thing. I know I'm not the first to discuss this issue. Punk has never been an effective tool for change in the US; it hasn't accomplished anything since its beginnings in the UK, and even then, on both sides of the Atlantic, it had its share of fakers; the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were in it for money and fame, right from the beginning, and they never denied it.

But there are still real punks out there. Serious ones. Angry. Young, old, educated, blue-collar, across all segments of the population, there are people who are filled with angry energy, and having no political voice, they're prepared to smash shit up until someone listens.

But no one's listening any more. Dressing ragged and smashing shit up has become as everyday American and as hollow as did long hair on men and short hair on women before it. Punk has become a fashion statement instead of just a statement.

Where do we go from here, then? We few, who have had even this final outlet plugged firmly by public indifference? Well, I can see only one way out: new ways of smashing.

How is up to you. Maybe it's time for nudist punks. Maybe it's time to take to the streets and do some real property damage. All I know is that is must be united, it must be purposeful, and it must be new violence. And in a world as fast-changing and blasé as today's, it must be smart.

Get to it, all ye punks. Put down the Elmer's glue and the Pabst, and get out there and smash some shit up. Use your fists or use your brains, but find something we haven't lost to normalcy yet, and use it for all it's worth.

Molecular civil war

2007-07-13T22:40:00.001-07:00

There are three drives at war within modern man: the drive to reproduce, the need to hold adequate territory and resources, and the social instinct which leads us to abhor intraspecies violence.

Before you pooh-pooh me on the last one, consider that wars almost always happen when each side is convinced that the other is "the bad guys," and, though they'll rarely admit it, considers them less virtuous, even less than human. It's easy to doublethink your way into believing that no one who serves a bad cause - or what you consider a bad cause - could possibly be a good, competent, or even potentially valid person. Ask yourself what you'd think of a man who fought for Nazi Germany. Okay? Good. Now: did you even stop to consider whether it was possible he might not have known what he was fighting for? Or that he might have had little or no choice, and never seen any actual action, much less atrocity? Probably not. I'm not saying any of those things are likely, or making any kind of judgment; the point is whether or not you thought of those things before you judged. When someone is in an outgroup, they just don't bear consideration. It's instinct, so don't beat yourself up over it; just watch out for it.

Anyway: humans are creatures of instinct, just like any other animal. Don't believe me? Take a look at your nearest suburb or trailer park, at the family with eight kids and no reason other than "we always wanted lots of children." Children are a drain. They suck up resources and dominate the parents' lives. Why have them? Because we want to, obviously. Because we're built to want to. Take a look at third-world nations where couples who can't even feed themselves bear child after child. Why? They don't even think about it. There is no why. They just do. Why are snakes or spiders distasteful? Why does fast-moving water or heights give you the shivers? They simply do. Instinct. It's built into you at a preconscious level, written in your genes. It's left-over survival traits for early humans who were little more than eccentric apes.

Breed more, leave more offspring, pass on more copies of your genes. That's the currency of evolution. Genes good at getting their bearer to copy them are passed on more, and so cause more copies of themselves to be created. The most straightforward expression of this concept is the drive of every creature to mate at all costs. But parents and offspring alike must also live to reproduce, and so adequate territory and resources are also required. And, of course, there's no point to reproducing if your closest genetic relatives just kill one another off.

Breed, survive, and get along with your kin.

Each of the three warring traits exists for a good reason, a valid evolutionary purpose, but, for humans, the three are no longer entirely compatible. Humankind has changed the environment in which it lives so extensively - and by "environment" I mean not just the natural world in the sense that the American media usually uses the term, but the entirety of the conditions which surround us at all times, the milieu in which we live -that we are no longer perfectly biologically suited to it. Biologically speaking we are apes; instinctively we prefer tree-height. We prefer grasslands and expansive views. We're made for a diet rich in gathering and not so heavy on hunting. But how do we live? In closed in, ground-level caves, densely packed together, eating meat and junk and very little plant matter.

It's not a bad thing. I'm not pushing for a return to nature; it's far too late for that now, and no reasonable individual wants to give up all we've gained and accomplished. My point is that biologically we simply aren't written for the world we live in!

We have too many people for the resources and land available, and yet still we want to reproduce. We have enormous drive to acquire new resources, and yet the only want to do so is to wrest them from the hands of our fellow men. We'd like to get along with each other, but every day we bump elbows and clash personalities with far too many people in unnatural, stressful environments. These drives are all there, and no matter how consciously we recognize that, they don't go away. They can't. They're hardwired in, like a computer's BIOS; they're what initializes us when our conscious mind can't keep up; they're what tells us, at levels where our minds can't or won't go, what's good and what's not... for an ape.

But we do hold a trump card: we have, far and away, the most powerful adaptive tool any terrestrial species has ever developed, powerful enough to overcome any instinctive drive and any physical hardship if the need is great enough and the will is there. We have intelligence and we have communication, traits unique to us not in their inherent natures, but in the degree to which we possess them. Dogs are intelligent, and they communicate; the same can be said of dolphins, fish, birds, insects, worms, anything with a complex nervous system, but none to anywhere near the degree of which humans are capable. We can observe, analyze, and choose, and no other species has demonstrated that ability in a capacity even approaching our own.

It's not easy, though. Every time a man takes an action that doesn't directly promote his welfare or that of his kin, he has to fight instinct to some degree. We have developed powerful tools over the course of our history to aid us in this; we have memetic devices, from religious faiths to the cold, hard power of logic, which let us overcome instinctual reluctance to do whatever we think is good and right, and we've even figured out ways to, in some degree, program people to believe that certain things are good and right. We've set down moral precepts and laws, though often for reasons themselves largely instinctual.

At any rate, I think I'll continue this another time. It's getting rather late, and I've digressed from my original purpose somewhat. In fact, I've quite forgotten precisely what my original point was.