7/23/2008

all the best dreams.

7·12·08
so i found 14 different orderings.
now i need to do five items. shit.
1 test, 6 tests, __?__ tests
pretty face flight of stairs.

try not to wonder where you are.
its always gonna be you.
could you be my calling?

no one has any sort of idea how much effort it takes me to do these things.

i heard about this in passing a few times, but this was the first time i have read about it directly. and it pisses me off... why do we refer to 'him' as a 'man'? 'he' has female genitals. on the other hand, i do respect 'his' preference to be thought of as a guy, i prefer to call people whatever theyd prefer to be called, but still, as far as science is concerned, this is not a male having a child. its an enormously misleading headline.

why is such an abomination of human sexuality accepted? by anyone!? how the hell did such a stupid fucking belief become so widely adopted? who, in their right mind, male or female, would want women to cover up so much? im a boring guy, i never rebelled to anyone, but id like to think, had i been raised in this sort of environment, i would have raised hell.

we have the words true and false
we have the word truth, whats the 'false' equivalent?

what is the difference between reflection and absorption/reemission of photons? is it a time scale thing? i should probably know this already.

filling in the origin of life gaps:
life-like structures in space?
in comets?
tiny bacteria
maybe much more tiny bacteria?
still more tiny bacteria
and the things that eat them
tiny viruses
and really huge ones
excellent ideas
vast armies
the smallest known bacterium
laboratory life
nanoarchaeum
nanobes
viroids
virusoids
anything else? should i add this to my wikipedia page?

"Because once you familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Fuckin' Abraham Lincoln said it, and I fuckin' believe it, so you have got to get me the fuck out! Now!" -Rudy Timmons

its like youre strapped to a bomb.

when people talk about 'needing' something that they dont really need, or when they console one another with phrases like 'itll be okay', when both parties should be fully aware that no one can really say, are those truths understood? and just ignored? or completely unseen? cause if they are just ignored, i could improve my social skills simply by latching on to that idea.


7·13·08
you think you could end me?

i am as perverted as you can imagine me being. or at least, if you imagine me that way, you cannot possibly be unpleasantly surprised.


7·14·08
avulsion

i dont mind you coming here, and wasting all my time. i dont mind you hanging out, and talking in your sleep. i guess youre just what i needed.

"so our new energy policy is, 'i have a cocaine problem, im out of cocaine. what say we turn the kids rooms into cocaineries'."

greenman

i just need someone to ask me the right questions.
youre so number one that its a shame, a shame
that i let other numbers in the game

i love nectarines, they must be my favorite fruit. i like their taste, their feel, their colors. their size, their mass. the way they break apart as you eat them. i really love when the fruit part comes off of the pit part really well.

damned if i know what will happen; i dont understand people, i certainly dont understand the average american, i can barely even understand all but a handful of scientists. so what hope do i have understanding the average human? the average voter? the average christian? the average muslim? ill bet all of them like sex... and if they dont, somewhere in their life, things got completely fucked up.

your skins so fair. your skins so fair its not fair.

Bernard Chezelle: If the question is more complex, like say "Should subprime lending affect leveraged Forex positions in non-dollar-denominated durable goods?" then answer: "Americans want change in their pockets and in their hearts: It is time to change hope for change into change for hope so that hoping change will change how hope for change changes change."

to be alone with you.

i guess im just looking for someone with whom i agree usually. who i can rest on and rest with when i become exhausted by the rest of the universe. ive seen a lot of the universe (at least relative to what the average person and the most experienced astronomer could have seen), and im looking for that part of the universe that i havent gotten a great glimpse of.

listless. ennui.
there is no antidote.

42 seconds


7·15·08
how long do you think she can be out of the water?

will you let me take off your training wheels?
she'll think about it.
take off my training wheels.

i know where im going, i just dont know how to get there.
ive grown soft, some might even say pliable over the years.

its a contradiction.


7·16·08
im not so much intolerant of people as i am intolerant of unproven claims to authority

face obliteration.

mathematics could be described as a search for pure knowledge.
science could be described as a search for technical knowledge, or tentative knowledge.
religion can only be described as a naïve attempt to impostor knowledge; the truths put forward by religion become laughable as scientific progress rapidly evolves our understanding of the universe, and the older the claimed truth, the less acceptable it is. the only way religion has continued to flourish is through the ignorance of the majority (largely due to preoccupation with survival), and through the continued supreme power and control of the authority. or maybe i am wrong, and maybe it is simply human nature that the vast majority fail to take interest in critical thought. as scientists, we should perhaps study this formally.

farewell to the master
whoa... what if we created ai, with that specific intent? to police us? in that case, it wouldnt require evolution to 'maliciousness' (it blurs that idea). it could be claimed that the creator was motivated by righteousness.

know that i am proud of you.

im looking for the edge.
im living.
im risking.
and im having a blast.
im becoming audacious.

i figured this would be more familiar to you.
everybody knows that
softly softly wins the game


7·21·08
we'll have a big parade for every day you stay clean.
why when you know you should go, is it so hard to leave?
is solitude indeed the cure, for loneliness? oh i dont think so, i miss you too much.

i become what i believe those i concern myself with want me to become.

beliefs are not all equal. there is a very enormous difference between uninformed and informed beliefs, and the level of information involved with a belief. faith is uninformed belief, or maybe pseudo-informed, or falsely informed; faith is belief that is ultimately justified by hope or ignorance: hope that what you want is true, or ignorance of the alternative possibilities. in either case, there the only space for such belief in science is in the completely foreign, completely un-probed and perhaps un-probe-able matters. this excludes the vast majority of all phenomena.

in anticipation of incarceration


7·22·08
is it bright where you are? have the people changed?

this is not
the end of the world,
this is only a test.

why is it that if i were to beat you up, claiming that it was self defense, and that if i didnt do it you would have assuredly attack me, why is it that i will get in trouble?
when the US can attack another country, without any real reason, with no real threat.

wait, wait wait. the whole idea of torture for information gathering is incredibly ignorant. you can imagine that the desire to torture might be inversely proportional to the amount of information you already know from them, that is, the less your captured, supposed enemy has revealed, the more pertinent it is to find out what he/she is hiding. however, your confidence in the idea that they know something would be directly proportional to what they have told you. obviously, the more theyve said, the more you trust they know. in other words, it is easier to trust that they know something if they have said something, and it is more difficult to believe they know something if they have not. what i think all this implies is that you are more likely to torture someone the less they have said, but they are also less likely to know anything the less they have said. in the end, the only principle that could ever allow me to sleep at night would be to treat others as i would want to be treated: with a fair trial; i agree some rules could be changed, such as the evidence in the trial being in public domain (as it is with the trials of actual citizens), but the idea of innocence until proven guilty is absolutely essential to the concept of being on the 'good' side. how many people could we torture before the harm we have done is inarguably greater than the harm they wished to do?

needs must

theres real poetry in the real world
science is the poetry of reality
-Richard Dawkins

Dawkins mentions his surprise at Darwin sitting on his theory for so long, without the fear of being 'scooped', which he eventually was, by Alfred Russel Wallace. in my opinion, Darwin appears to have been a true man of science, and wholly concerned with truth long before credit. perhaps his concern for the implications of his theory contributed to his willingness to forgo credit. i know he was willing to do so, if i remember correctly after Wallace published his ideas, Darwin sent him a letter of encouragement, without much of a claim for credit, and it was Wallace who insisted Darwin receive such enormous credit (which was well deserved).

MAKE NO MISTAKE: nearly every aspect of modern life has been heavily, and directly influenced by science; the same process that implies evolutionary theory and refutes nearly every claim of religious dogma.

confirm or confute

7/12/2008

in-fatuous

7·3·08
oh yeah, well fuck you humpty dumpty!
and your little dog too.

"war is gods way of teaching the americans geography"

6h minutes?

to captain bender, hes the best... at being a big jerk whos stupid and his big ugly face is as dumb as a butt.

this is awesome:
Shortly after its release, PGP encryption found its way outside the United States, and in February 1993 Zimmermann became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for "munitions export without a license". Cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were then considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits so it qualified at that time. Penalties for violation, if found guilty, were substantial. After several years, the investigation of Zimmermann was closed without filing criminal charges against him or anyone else.
Zimmermann challenged these regulations in a curious way. He published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book[6], via MIT Press, which was distributed and sold widely. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could buy the $60 book, cut off the covers, separate the pages, and scan them using an OCR program, creating a set of source code text files. One could then build the application using the freely available GNU C Compiler. PGP would thus be available anywhere in the world. The claimed principle was simple: export of munitions—guns, bombs, planes, and software—was (and remains) restricted; but the export of books is protected by the First Amendment. The question was never tested in court in respect to PGP, but had been established by the Supreme Court in the Bernstein case.

this is a funny name for a special purpose cryptography attack machine
Deep Crack was designed by Cryptography Research, Inc.; Advanced Wireless Technologies and the EFF. The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom ASIC DES chips (called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each. The boards are then fitted in six cabinets. The search is coordinated by a single PC which assigns ranges of keys to the chips. The entire machine was capable of testing over 90 billion keys per second. It would take about 9 days to test every possible key at that rate. On average, the correct key would be found in half that time.

the angels in our palms
sing gentle worried songs
and the sweetness of our dreams
like mountains made of steam

i dont need anything to remind me
i need the opposite

"Pronouncements of lynch mobsters notwithstanding, I wouldn't have wanted my rapist put out of his own misery and into mine. I started life without blood on my hands and I aim to keep it that way. Had the man who raped me on numerous occasions not died in prison while serving his third term for sexually abusing very young boys, I might have gone to see him. My personal revenge would have been to show him that I did not become what I resisted, that I hadn't grown into a cruel and heartless man. I would have told him that he inflicted a burden upon me that almost killed me, and not just when I was nearly asphyxiated during his savage assaults. I'd have told him of the encumbrance I dragged along with me for decades that, through hard work, I had managed to lighten. In short, I would tell him that although he inflicted a lot of pain upon me, he had not succeeded in ruining me. Then I would tell him that I was sorry that he had such a miserable and wasted life. Finally, I would ask him why he thought he had ended up doing the things he did. Maybe I would have discovered some context for the man, even if I had to sort it out of the manipulative lies for which pedophiles are deservedly notorious.
I couldn't do any of this because by the time I figured out who had raped me, he was dead. The news of his demise did not cheer me. I just thought of the end of his awful life in a cruddy jail cell and wondered what led to such a waste. At least I didn't miss my chance to confront him because he had been killed in my name."
'call me lucky'

7·4·08
sweet surrender be true.

7·5·08
little holes in the floor of heaven.

7·6·08
deal me in.

i disagree. i think there is something greater. and i found it through you.

7·7·08
i really like the flags of hong kong and greenland

in-fatuous

its all i think about.
doesnt know what to do.

reading the wikipedia article 'criticism of walmart', i get the impression that it is far less critical than i would have expected. maybe this is due to previous embellishment of the direness of the situation, or maybe it is due to something more insidious. in either case, without examining walmart specifically, there is a more general trend often stated concerning the direction of our wages; that upper management wages have increased phenomenally, while positions such as retail have experienced little, (or possibly even none, or negative) growth, over the last three decades. if this statement can be confirmed it should be taken as quite damning for the retailer, as walmart is practically the largest employer in the country, 2nd only to the united states government.

and what happens next?

will i remember this? no.

look, the general rule is this: innovation, and creativity will always emerge from the youth of any generation. the youth simply have more free time, less bias, less responsibility, and more willingness to break the rules. likewise, they are much less likely to desire any compatibility with the status quo, and so they tend to fight it, and even destroy it. which is good. thats what we want. the status quo is the result of a series of old ideas.

nevertheless

what sets me apart
is lonely heart.

pure legend

if i ever get married, i dont want there to be a priest, or a justice of the peace, or anything. i just want it to be me and her, and maybe our close friends or something. we can exchange vows maybe, or whatever. and explain that we love each other, and want everyone weve invited to give us shit. or maybe instead that we want everyone we invited to share our celebration of commitment, or some crap like that. depends on what she thinks of these ideas.

the time it takes to get from here to there.

from what i understand, most people harbor regrets for things they have done. typically this is portrayed as some inebriated sexual or intoxicating choice (is there really a difference?), i.e., i shouldnt have done [blank] drug/person (in whatever way you might mean by 'done'). in any case, it seems to remain unfamiliar to me, the concept of doing something you regret; the only regrets i readily recall (which are arguably the only ones that matter), all pertain to inaction, rather than misappropriated action. i think this still vastly separates me from the average human, and its a sizable barrier, maybe. or maybe i just let it be.

i keep forgetting how smart i appear to be, that is, how smart i am relative to the people i meet. in general, nearly everyone i get to know well thinks i am top notch, and so i suppose that is the sort of confidence i should take in myself. on the contrary, i tend to default to a somewhat 'undeserving' position, probably because of my extremely laziness, my reluctance to categorize people in such a decisive way, and maybe even as a result of the leniency i receive in most every area of life, most likely due to the aforementioned widespread belief of exceptional intelligence.
do i sound conceded yet?
im not holding back so much.
yet it still feels guilt ridden.
is this some sort of cocoon phase?
will i emerge a butterfly?
doubtful.
why i cannot simply abandon; cut and run; move on: remains to be seen.
and it drives me bonkers.
my spell checker doesnt like bonkers.
nor does it like contractions without apostrophes, which i forcefully submit with reckless abandon.

even now, to this moment, im not sure anyone, including me, fully understands the extent of my internalization. when people disagree with me about symptoms of autism, they fail to realize how severe this really is. how many people have seen me express emotions over what they might have suspected would be emotional events? how many people have specifically observed my interactions with new individuals? how many people have been inside my head, ever? a lot fewer than i previously suspected; most likely zero; most likely none of those who might argue the point.

there is a drug that lets me dream in my sleep. strange isnt it? i dont even believe dreams carry significance. i place no more value in dreams than i do in ancient mythology. and yet the process, or more specifically, the memory of the process (no matter how vague), is most enjoyable, relative to the complete absence of recollection.

he breaks the cardinal rule of science (in my opinion): never say you know, what you know you dont. he also breaks the cardinal rule of engineering: never make it more complicated than you understand it has to be. notice, you might not understand it could be simpler, but it should be as simple as you think it can be.

7·10·08
life happens in spite of you. its a marvelous thing.
would you stay with me?

im was supposed to call this girl lai-yan who stopped corey and i several weeks ago to ask if we wanted to go to a bible discussion group that meets at MIT on thursdays at 7, and i was supposed to ask her how to meet her there. but its not so much so i can discuss the bible as it is so that i can unconvince the believers. i hope to save all those people who the saved are bound to harm. plus ill get to hang out at MIT. im hoping ill find a young impressionable girl whom i find very attractive and is not yet chronically infected with religion. if even one person just lessens their belief, maybe if i can raise enough doubt to change one die-hard jesus nut into someone who will less forcefully shove that shit into their offsprings head, then my time will have been well spent.

wont you, pick me up?

i wait, in 4-4 time.

its so weird that people can take the eucharist so seriously... if you were to ask them why it is so special, they would be forced to admit it is church doctrine, or the priest, that makes the cracker special. obviously the cracker has no indisputably special qualities; it wont cure illness or let you levitate or whatever, so theyd have to say it was the priest who blessed it (or whatever), or the church doctrine that declares it to be the body of christ. then id have to ask, why believe what they say about this cracker? you dont believe the homeless guy who talks to god, why some guy in a fancy church in europe?
i wonder if i could just show up at catholic mass and get a cracker to steal myself. if i can, i would love to desecrate it on videotape, hold it hostage and see if they would pay me for its safe return!
maybe i could starve myself for days, then consume the cracker (christ!) and poop it out, and explain that i turned christ into poop!

the rest belongs to you.
why, when you know you should go, is it so hard to leave?

i am excited
how awesome would that be if we could scientifically classify religion as a neurological/psychiatric disorder!

id like to fall asleep, to the beat of you breathing.

i gotta get out of this place

because the lesser of two evils is still evil.
i flipped a coin yesterday. if it was heads, i flipped it again today. if it was tails, i didnt. what do you think the last coin i saw was (heads or tails)?

ha ha ha ha ha!
oh.


i have no whim.

'women are like parking spots. theyre whores and liars.'

mouthfuls.

its too bad, i cant have you.


7·11·08
id like to go to graduate schools to study phase transitions in a variety of systems including: fluid dynamic (laminar to turbulent), and computational complexity (such as the number partitioning problem, NPP, in average complexity).

i am a strict physicalist, so what do i think of conceptual existence, such as mathematical truths? i would have to say, they are purely conceptual, they exist in the symbols and patterns we use to record and convey them, but they do not exist beyond that. since they are derived directly from the physical existence we experience (and conceive and maybe imagine or fantasize about), they are in some sense independent of us. we can however conceive of a universe, in which, if we somehow found ourselves, we might imagine would lead to quite a different progression of mathematical study than we have experienced; if for instance large scale phenomena behaved probabilistically all the time, we probably would have developed statistical mathematics first, and only studied non-probabilisitic mathematics later on. (though, admittedly, it is hard to imagine the development of creatures complex enough to study mathematics in such a universe.) the laws of logic are very interesting, as they do often seem independent of the physical reality in which we are so comfortably accustomed. however, this is probably just a result of our comfort and less a true statement; for evidence of this, consider the 'square root not gate', one of the more comprehensible results of quantum theory. in binary logical operations we have the simple 'not gate', which takes a single input and 'inverts' it, (i.e., if the input reads true, the not gate outputs false, if the input reads the not gate outputs true). the square root not gate however takes an input value of true and outputs a true value with 50% probability, and a false value with 50% probability—for input false it does the same. what makes the square root not gate interesting is that if you link two in series, the system as a whole behaves as the traditional not gate. from the traditional logic point of view, we dont really know what to think (or at least i dont, and i have merely a cursory knowledge of any of this, so i might be the wrong guy to ask).

so STOP!

your voice makes me think of your mouth makes me think of your breath makes me think of your breasts.

7/02/2008

future questions

6·17·08
everything is beautiful, and i blame you.

make a list of neat biological phenomena; extremophiles, bacteriophages, viroids, those fish that have developed two sets of eyes separately, etc.

do you wonder why change is both so necessary, and so exciting, and yet so intimidating and difficult, all at the same time? do you wonder if change is the only way to really enjoy the world? do you wonder if routine is the antithesis of life? i mean, why else would prison be punishment.

are the navier stokes equations consistent with skipping stones off the surface of water?
why do stones skip on water?
and look at the focal plane for various wavelengths of light through the same lens. do shorter wavelengths lie in front of or behind the focal plane of longer wavelengths?

i need to study up or maybe i dont.

a further complication in the concept of an infinitely large/long universe producing all outcomes is that the idea of independent events is confounded by causality. i suppose relativity puts limits on the size (spatial and temporal) of causal events. i guess the question would be, as we expand the size of our volume of spacetime, how does the probability state space grow? in other words, if we limit ourselves to all possible events in a one cubic meter sphere of spacetime (and its corresponding time, which would be very brief), we get a finite number of possible events. we could imagine there exists a much larger volume of spacetime, that, given random events occurring as fast as they possibly can, would in some amount of time have an arbitrary chance of reproducing a given outcome. now if we were to grow our sphere of observation to include a much large spacetime interval, say, a light second, or everything in a 186,000 mile radius, then how much larger in space and or time must the second sphere be in order to again reproduce a given outcome with arbitrary probability?

furthermore, it seems even more difficult given that i am the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution, and so i am causally linked to virtually the entire universe in some sense, since any event within 3.5 billion light years could have had a causal effect on my existence here now, at least in principle.

shoot, spacetime intervals were the correct term... but i second guessed myself.

felony quantities.

on the other hand, global warming could turn out to be a 21st century CFCs, which it seems were indeed very important, and well understood by the scientific community, even if only after the fact.

a personal sense of spirituality or religiousness is certainly far more tolerable than the mainstream religions. and in fact the most popular religions are certainly the most dangerous as well, islam and christianity are both very large, with islam growing very rapidly, and possibly stands to be more dangerous.

as Schopenhauer's melancholy outlook expressed, one need only compare the emotional/mental state of an animal eating a meal, to the corresponding state of the animal being eaten to realize that some level of sadness has pervaded all time and space within which carnivorous animals have existed on this planet.
we might suppose that most suffering in the world is the product of such natural struggles, however we have conquered such struggles, and nearly any human who succumbs to another animal's lunch is overwhelmingly likely to have been taking a large risk, and so such sadness neednt be requisite in our culture any longer. life is, typically, a struggle for survival. but thanks to our big brains, humans have eliminated most of the struggle, very largely through the continuous and ever more rapid development of technology and science. the concerns of securing food, shelter, and competing with other organisms, (including combating the microscopic ones), have all largely been suppressed, possibly to the furthest extent that they can be.

disqualify yourself from responsibility.
say something perfect.


6·19·08
theres no such thing as hearts.
the knife thrower. holy shit, Mirah is fucking AWESOME.

i guess the problem im having is why does water resist when you first press on it? viscosity? hydrodynamic pressure?


6·20·08
while everyone else was learning how to deal with their broken hearts, i was trying to figure out what a quantum state was. so i am some what inexperienced in the more human areas. my emotions are somewhat childish, and underdeveloped. i will catch up some day, i believe. it will just take some time, because my experiences with such situations remains sparse.

OH THE IRONY! so youre not angry about being unworthy of showing your body in public, but you are angry about being unworthy of sitting behind a presidential candidate?

you are magnificient. never accept the opinion of anyone claiming anything less.


6·25·08
genocidal stupidity.

thats a question for the future, not the present.

6·26·08
in my interpretation, moral relativism does not imply that all beliefs are equally 'good', but rather that none of them make any sense without axiom-like definitions of what you are applying your ethical system to. it feels similar to Bertrand Russell's "am i an atheist or agnostic?" essay, in which his opinions as a philosopher misrepresent what a layman's analysis of his opinions would produce. in other words, im a moral relativist, but i do hold moral opinions that i would defend vehemently. but i would tend to fight for acceptance of my axioms, rather than the moral beliefs themselves, which are merely consequences of the axioms.

as scientists, our candor is giving the crazies too much room to argue.

disassociate — space out
spaced out


6·28·08
cognitive dissonance…


6·29·08
okay, collin, ive got it: the reason that walmart and costco are more threatening than apple and google. because apple and google are luxury items, and walmart and costco are basic-needs items. many walmart employees are basically indentured servants, since their wages are so low they can only afford to buy shitty walmart products, and walmart is viable place to purchase such low-cost necessities. if the economy tanks, so does apple, and possibly eventually google. at least, they certainly dont own people the way walmart does.

outline for using GP to verify existence & smoothness of Navier-Stokes equations: step one, generate data; input all necessary parameters into equations, evaluate numerically, store outputs. apply GP to inputs & outputs using general set of operators (this is very analogous to John Koza's 1980s application of GP to orbital data. we have the additional information of seeing if the current solutions are similar to the provided Navier-Stokes equations as well, an advantage! though it seems the nature of the problem is far more complicated than the nature of gravity.




when i get hurt, i dont really know what the appropriate reaction is. im not sure what would be over reacting, and so i just dont react at all. it is surprising how the very lack of a reaction in return can hurt others, antagonistic to my intention.


let those whose every cent of non-necessity material wealth is spent on the needy, cast the first stone.


ha ha ha: cheap. abundant. clean.

i am a dark matter skeptic.
and a big bang skeptic.
and those two beliefs might force me into fringe, which makes me uncomfortable.
i guess the root of my skepticism lies in our absurdly brief and insanely limited spatial resolution of observation. imagine looking at a water bugs entire life, swimming around in the water, and trying to infer the nature of fluid dynamics and turbulence and all of the demons that come along with it. the bug is limited, it cant travel very quickly. it cant occupy a very large volume of water, nor can it apply great forces to the water. likewise, galaxies themselves occupy a relatively small amount of space. we have no empirical connection between our understanding of human scale phenomena to galaxy scale phenomena; the only link we have is an assumption that the rules we can measure directly apply to the phenomena we observe (and hence measure indirectly).

between inflationary theory, dark matter, and dark energy, big bang theory appears less well confirmed than it is typically presented.


a kiss for you.


this ought to disqualify us from calling ourselves 'civilized'. or at least make us queasy about it. great britain, france, spain, mexico, china, wait, CHINA? and mexico? we are less civilized that china??? is this a marking point for 'the tables turning'? is it time to cut and run?

wow, awesome. a mormon woman, who believes that gay/lesbian couples should not be parents is going to live with a gay couple who has 4 adopted kids. this is awesome. actually, it was an utter disappointment. when faced with believing her gut feeling and all the good she saw before her, or her nonsensical unfounded and utterly ridiculous beliefs, she very painfully chose her faith. repeatedly people gave her the same good argument for promoting gay couple adoption—because the fewer children who have to live in foster homes, the better—and yet her belief that homosexual love is somehow forbidden by either a book or a deity (whom is no less plausible than Zeus himself) overtook her gut feeling of fairness. people talk about all the good religion has done for the world; please stop believing such nonsense. if you find that difficult, ask yourself how you can know for certain, that whatever good religion brought to someone's life could not have existed without it, and also question whether whatever terrible aspect of their lives may have been related to religion.

upon closer inspection, we begin to see that 'us' and 'them' are one and the same. that we ourselves are the 'they'.

i was thinking today, i tend to fail to appreciate that what i know is somehow special, or unique, or important. i think it is seen quite often in mathematics, the joke that everything that we understand is merely trivial, has some truth to it. its as if the more you learn, the less you appreciate what you know. the more you learn, the more addicted you become to just wanting to learn more. its like any other addiction, the substance and individual experiences of consuming the substance becomes mundane and it is the need for more consumption that drives you. i need a knowledge intervention. i need a girl to come and interrupt thought, which for me, is easiest when a girl is around. certain experiences completely blank my mind from thought, and there is something exciting about that in itself.

where, in the 'good book' does it explain how to sun-dry mud to make bricks to construct your rudimentary home? or how to fertilize your crops best to feed your whole village reliably? or what the optimal mixture of aggregate and cement is to make the best concrete for a certain application? or any other of the uncountable technological advancements we have made since the dawn of civilization that have benefited us and every ancestor before us? religion has given us NONE of these advancements, AT MOST it can be claimed to have provided a moral guidance, which when judged by modern standards of decency should be valued as nothing more than a complete and utter failure. even wild animals often treat one another with far more compassion than humans often do. nature provided us with all the morals we needed in our early stages, and religion fucked that up. we have reached a point with technology where only our brains can provide the moral guidance now demanded by our technology. and religion, as always, continues to only inhibit progress.

why dont you finish what you start?
i wish youd tell me what to think.

a lot of default positions that humans take are unreasonable. the first that came to my attention where people asking me why i grew a beard. i had to explain that shaving takes effort, while growing a beard takes nothing. the default position, from a natural point of view, is growing a beard, not shaving. similarly ive found myself in the past, asking, why do i sunburn now when i didnt as a child? other common questions: why do i tire so much more easily, why do i have allergies now, and so on. it is odd, because we always raise these questions in reference to previous states of our lives, but an enormous, obvious, difference between those previous states and our current ones, is that those previous states did not have previous states! we were kids! this all fits well with the questions raised previously about why we should even expect one moment to the next to be similar, let alone predictable. yes, the weather, the stock market, the climate, and our bodies, would all experience marked improvement if a magic key to predictability were uncovered, but why we should expect the existence of such a key in the first place remains the product of wishful thinking solely.


7·2·08
wouldnt macgyver be even cooler if every now and then, one of his attempts had failed?
or maybe that did happen. i dont remember at all.

shit, maybe its cause im a little inebriated, im too dumb to know; it seems like one way functions should relate to entropy. or maybe i should say, entropy appears to be a physical instance of a one-way-function. intuitively, i would suspect that mathematical one way functions dont exist, but physically, it seems quite apparent. this is good. maybe i can use my physical intuition to align my mathematical intuition ore with the main stream, become less crankish. and succeed some day.

spurred by WIMPs and MACHO
why are we more comfortable postulating the existence of large quantities of matter which do not interact with the electromagnetic force in any way weve ever seen, rather than postulating that gravity is not quite as simple as we first believed it to be? really, even general relativity is not a far departure from newtonian gravity, in the sense that they were both based on observations of relatively small objects (even the sun is small in comparison to the galaxy, or the local group, or the virgo supercluster, or the general large scale structure of the cosmos. furthermore, the postulate that dark matter (and for that matter, dark energy, and inflationary theory as well) fail to explain many more phenomena! such as peculiar velocity, structure of galaxies (versus motion, the two problems require different amounts and distributions of dark matter). it seems much more likely that we are simply missing something fundamental about the law of gravity at large scales. MOND might be sufficient, it should be looked into carefully.


i only wish the feeling didnt seem mutual.