wake up venus

id bet that the stability between 'good' and 'evil' is a force feedback system that naturally evolves and shifts slightly but has a pretty constant middle ground.

i dont hate people, i hate the religions they belong to. okay, so thats pretty strong. talk to me! we can find common ground!

fine, you want to forgo evolution and teach intelligent design? do it. youll raise swaths of adults who will have no ability to comprehend the world they live in, and they will not be successful. in the modern world, ancient beliefs will continue to become more and more obtrusive to an individual's success.

i like this photo.

warm me up. and breathe me.
can anyone think of a way to make computers create jokes?
eat soup.

there really seems to be some concept between possible rates of organization and human/life driven rates. there has to be some critical concept relating the entropy in an on open system to chance, right? is there a name for a machine that drives entropy in reverse locally? is that a computer? could i define a computer as a device which drives entropy in reverse with great probability for some finite subsection of a larger system?

remember the story about stone soup?
from when you were a child. i liked that story.

absolutely thrilled about the time i live in.

anonymous, here, said,
"Isn’t what you are really saying just that genius is an emergent phenomenon? 
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence)
Then is it not the case that whether one worships it or finds it romantic
is a simple matter of theology?"
and it struck me that the difference between worship and romance is so enormous. i suppose ive noticed my own obsessions with mathematical problems distracts me from the problems themselves. seems to amplify my emotions. sounds strange, but i think that is an accurate description probably. if anyone can comprehend/interpret that. im assuming its confusing.
assuming its confusing.

dear person un-behalf of governor lynch
are you really saying that because it is illegal, it should remain just as illegal? are you even aware of why and when it was made illegal to begin with? have you ever considered that perhaps it is not truly a nefarious activity beyond our relatively uninformed and poorly conceived laws? i am going to have to write another letter.

the courtesy of a reply is requested.

4·2·08
today, while at work, i was reading about Boltzmann brains, and, like many of the people ive read it from, i think it is dumb. but im very excited, because there is something in the idea that excites me very much, because it is an aspect of the universe that i have been trying to quantify for some time now. it first started when i tried to explain to a friend my (unfounded) views of omnipotence and human ingenuity. basically, i argued to him that, since humans should be able to do anything that is physically possible, given enough time and space, we should be considered omnipotent, as a species. though, since most people think of omnipotence as only being limited by the imagination, (yes, even 'god' would have to have some limited imagination), i would encourage the splitting into 'strong' and 'weak' forms. so humans would be weakly omnipotent, while our silly concepts of all powerful supernatural forces, whether gods or otherwise, might be considered strongly omnipotent. okay, so his response was the age old, 'given infinite time, anything is possible'. and then i believe he mentioned the old 'an finite number of monkeys would eventually type all of Shakespeares plays', also. but there is some difference, that i cannot quite isolate yet between humans and nature. it is an intention, a design, a plan... more than just trial and error, brute force, luck – as seen in nature.
so, getting to the Boltzmann brains topic, the argument is that, since we currently find ourselves conscious, well, here, let wikipedia explain it:
"If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. This refutes the observer argument above: the organization I see is vastly more than what is required to explain my consciousness, and therefore it is highly unlikely that I am the result of a stochastic fluctuation."
now, this whole idea is very obviously stupid, since the level of organization in a self aware entity is so great you would never expect it to arise from random fluctuations, and it is rather the result of LIFE itself, paradoxical, problematic, poorly understood, painfully incomprehensible (and comprehensible). too many p's. the only surprising part of the random fluctuations really is the origin of life, which we still dont really know enough to be surprised about. as with most things in science, it will probably only remain awesome so long as it remains glaringly mysterious. im pretty confident that every step from the most basic organism to the modern human can be explained to most peoples satisfaction, by me. a typical evolutionary biologist, geneticist, probably most biologists, can do most of that far better than i ever will, with details most people wont even want to know. but its all rather acceptable from my point of view. except the origin, which as i already said, still lacks too much evidence for us to grasp the normalcy of it yet.
so, beginning by setting aside the mysteries pertaining to the origin of life, lets skip to the argument.
once we had a 'creature' in the universe, with the motives of self reproduction and survival (pretty much all that life apparently began as), the random fluctuations that would ultimately evolve these many 'self-aware entities' could remain small, minimal, obtainable. the combination of the simple goals of life, and the law of large numbers, makes the odds of developing 'self awareness' in creatures much more reasonable. in fact, its obvious that since we only know of one universe (no matter what our math or mythology tell us), and we seem to be aware of our presence in it, then the likelihood of developing consciousness is 1! (at least according to our limited sample size. unless this is the only universe, in which case, the entire population).
i read a while back that some researchers had done experiments to see how much far entropy could be violated (that is, on very small time-space scales, entropy could decrease for short time periods). so what i am trying to say is something related to that. i think ive lost it. crap.
so i would say, that the only way to make a complex brain in this universe requires the creation of many many incremental steps, and would make it much more likely to create many self aware entities than the likelihood of creating a single one.
what i was trying to express to my friend was that humans have some sort of power to change entropy, to relocate it. yeah, it keeps increasing on the whole, but we can take it and make it decrease significantly in local areas. i suppose any arbitrary amount.
and actually, i have yet to recount, or even mention the true significance of this experience, today at work.
following these thoughts, this mental flare of criticism, in which my mind very rapidly attacked the 'Boltzmann brains paradox', an overwhelming sense of cosmic injustice tore through me. ive seen it repeated in books and movies and the general public sentiment, from time to time; at the moment, the most righteous thing to do in the universe was to go inform my superiors' that i would be leaving, and not returning. at that moment, the only explanation i might have been able to offer was, "i just had a life altering revelation". im not sure what else might have been there for that moment, maybe some abnormally high confidence, or ego, or even maybe nothing so low. its possible that for that moment i just felt that life is so interesting, and unique, and enjoyable, any moment spent in an office, or more so, a wacky business show, any time spent miserable, doing things that you can only imagine cause misery for someone else, is just disturbingly wasteful. silly, illogical(?). incomprehensible. inexcusable. so i wrote this letter.

ha, my computer just gave me the advice to, "take something without error and humanize it". and i realized, i dont know what 'error' means. i know what it means in terms of one or another's personal preferences, beliefs, goals, whatever. but i dont know how to talk about 'something without error'. im guessing, though ive only thought for a moment here, that since i believe right/wrong-good/evil is purely subjective, i cannot, in good faith, think of something as 'free from error', nor can i think about humans as 'inherently error-prone'.

on the drive home, after work, i realized that the last three or even 6 months have been tolerable or even enjoyable, at work. and yet the torment i was first introduced to was so scaring that i now resent the entire situation, an atmosphere of loathing has built around me, and no work-instigated environmental program could rescue planet cody. point of no return comes to mind. i suppose this could be an example of being aware of your own irrational behavior, yet still unable to alter it. i suppose that happens to me a lot though. and of course it will fade.

you and i, we burn bridges because we never retreat.

is there something romantic about the point of no return? or are my wires crossed.

oh man oh man i love victory at sea:
"thanks for leaving the light on, so i can find my way home.
thanks for leading me half way, from the curb to the door way"

so low is my number one band on last.fm, but i think godspeed should be a lot higher than it is.
so the average length of each band's songs are:
low: 82 songs, 6 hours 45 minutes 15 seconds = 0.0823 hrs = 4.94 minutes/song * 1088 = 5374
godspeed: 25 songs, 6 hours 27 minutes 07 seconds = 0.258 hrs = 15.48 minutes/song * 210 = 3250
though 60% does look much better than 19%.
actually, low (first was ipod): 233 songs, 18 hrs, 3 minutes 43 seconds = 0.07725 = 4.6 = 5004 ––– 65%
damn, that was a huge waste of my time. ive got a weird itch to calculate today. earlier i learned a whole bunch of chemistry and relearned some thermodynamics to try and estimate the boiling point of an azeotrope, but it turns out that wasnt possible. it should have some first principles approach i think though. maybe if i could find more information on cohesion and adhesion rates and their relationship to partial pressures or boiling points. but thats besides the point, i was doing actual calculations, and getting excited. it was awkward. maybe school just gave me a weird neediness for that or something.

none of this matters even a little.

doesnt a single omniscient entity imply a complete lack of free will and remove any personal responsibility from our actions? (as well as removing responsibility from the judge jurors and executioner(s)?). as well as that crap about good and evil blah blah blah. i think i need to get out.

discovering this, right now, might be called serendipitous.
howd i get there? from credit score which i only had open because a friend asked me about it, renewing my interest in the unanswered questions i have regarding personal finance (har har har).

here might be a novel concept: could we define life as a 'local entropy ratchet'? ive thought about it for a few more seconds and decided that yes, i wish to define life as a local entropy ratchet, by which i mean: choose an object arbitrarily as a candidate for life, if locally (within the space defined by its 'body'), it decreases entropy over time, then its life. though that doesnt rule out crystals. i could try adding a clause for carbon based, or some minimum on the complexity of the organism. or how about this, the object must contain information representative of its greater structure. that rules out crystals, but is ill-defined enough to continue a debate over prions, viruses, those nanotubules things...

wake up venus.