8/26/2008

I believe I'm sinking down

And then there are those deep dark secrets.
Everyones got those right?

I doubt anyone ever notices, but I never capitalize the word god. I've recently started following the rest of the formal case rules for the english language (that I am aware of), which, until recently, I had ignored as well. This is because I want to be more serious in my online writings. In case anyone wants to look. But I've decided to continue refraining from capitalizing deities, and my reasoning is as follows: god doesnt deserve to have a capitalized name. In the same way that peasants one day realized their king was just a man, and worthy of no more (or less) respect than any other man (or women), I do not see how a deity could be worth my praise. Assume it (the deity) is anywhere from a modicum to infinitely more intelligent/powerful/knowing/handsome/whatever than I am, why is it that I should go out of my way for his benefit? I am quite privileged on this earth, I was born in a place where government not only left me alone (mostly), it was also willing to step in if people near me tried to not leave me alone. I was born into certain freedoms and rights and protection, that most of humanity, both historically and presently, has not had the benefit of. I was also born into a family with enough money and wisdom to help me become educated. I was born in a time when I could benefit from grand achievements of science and medicine, like sanitation, and a rudimentary understanding of dental hygiene. What is obvious, from this position, (above overwhelming portions of humankind), is that I do not need any more praise or help. Might I get stuck in a rut, and need some rocking to push out? Maybe. And might I lose sight of greater purpose and goals, during times of strained relation and stressed emotion? Of course. But to look at someone less privileged than myself, and ask, or worse, demand their help/support/dedication, would be as selfish as I can imagine being. So I guess I've drifted off topic; to conclude, a god that demands these things of us, less privileged beings, would be far from worthy of worship, and would even earn my contempt.

Beyond the fact that I have good justification for my moral beliefs, why is it assumed that good independent sources are needed? What is wrong with allowing people to decide their own morals? The people who argue with this seem to have an inherent fear of the better nature of humankind.

All of these days where I don't go to work, they feel like weekends.

"The expression “Pour encourager les autres' is a well known quote from Voltaire’s Candide. The full quote is "dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres" - in this country (England), it is good, to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others'). It refers to the fate of Admiral John Byng who was executed in 1757."
To encourage the others.


8·21·08
"Does that help? –Like a big hug with words."
"I'd give my body to be back again, in the rest of the room."


8·25·08
I guess it's just that the things I do aren't that conducive to meeting new people, and so I attach to the people I know fairly strongly, not knowing how to find new people. I've been socializing more though, so maybe that is changing a little bit.

People should put the FBI copyright warning on bootlegs.
Dangerous concentration of Pu?
Volume of atmosphere?
"All this prolonged exposure to radiation is making me thirsty."


8·26·08
"But it's just the way you are,
you don't have to be afraid.
The way you look at the stars,
and how you think that they were made,
The motion will never stop,
turning the night into the day.
You've gone away enough,
when will you decide to stay?
My trouble with everything always is nothing's just right.
Just to figure out nothing could keep you awake half the night.
Not to know what you want is a terrible thing you should fight.
You just suffer for the face of the dark while you wait for the light."

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
~ Marcus Aurelius

"What are you saying, that, you want to be like me? Understand that, I just barely want to be like me."

We sabotage relationships by not talking things out.
The point is to do it again.

Hypothesis: every rule has an exception.
The hypothesis implies that it itself has an exception, and is therefore false.






I believe im sinking down.
I just dont like it when you leave.
Let yourself feel overwhelmed.
When will you decide to stay?

8/20/2008

Heartless Romantic

8·9·08
You don't even have to wait.
If you look closely enough, everything is beautiful.

"Like a balloon and, something bad happens."
"god needs booze."


8·10·08
this is stupid

"Since energy bears the same relation to time as momentum does to space in special relativity, it was clear to many early founders, Niels Bohr among them, that the following relation holds:"
Wait what? Am I stupid?
energy : time :: momentum : space
E : t :: p : x
E : t :: p : v
E : t :: p : ∫ v dt
E : t :: p : s (s being the spacetime interval)

get fabulous.

So heres how it happens, google wants to be the best search engine, so eventually we get artificial intelligence that can answer silly questions like, "what episodes of futurama have the 'scary door' scenes?" It will do so with a combination of being able to read fan pages, information pages (like wikipedia), and actually analyzing the content itself, to make informed decisions about what is and isn't true. There is nothing impossible about this, it merely involves a lot of effort on our part, though maybe less effort than we would currently suspect. After we have developed problem solving computer intelligence, the uses will be widespread and profitable, as well as in our best interest. Although it sounds pretty far fetched, (and ridiculous), why would we employ humans for decision making, when computer intelligence could overcome many of our inherent limitations (since they lack could easily lack susceptibility to emotionally influenced biased and temptation, as well as far exceed our spatially and temporally limited cognitive capacity). The way it will happen, is that it will become profitable to pass the decisions along to the machines. The machines will be more efficient at it, and the free market economy will drive their adoption.

This is kind of neat: luminol, a chemical used in chemiluminescence, and employed for forensic investigation of crime scenes, is activated by oxidation. Often times a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and a hydroxide salt is used, which liberates oxygen from the hydrogen peroxide, enabling the oxygen to further react with the luminol, resulting in luminescence. In forensic use, the hydroxide salt can be omitted, as the hydrogen peroxide reacts with blood (or more specifically, enzymes in blood), again, liberating the oxygen and allowing it to react with the luminol.

Can I interpret the derogatory, deceitful, insidious, insult to human nature, propagandist film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed as a positive turn of events? Yes. Conflict between religion and science can only end with the triumph of science.

I need to be more reassuring, for the sake of being reassuring. I forget that people need that.

fuckustan
ihateustan
upyourassustan

Corey, heres the lesson we need to take from the idea that stress can be physically harmful, even though it has to cross the mental gap: when some environmental factor in your life is causing harmful physical effects, medicinal remedy is not necessary the only solution, nor is it necessarily the most effective. In fact, there is every reason to believe in some instances it might not be any desirable solution at all. Probably all possible cases exist, and care should be taken to determine what solution is best. I suspect that modern medicine has focused almost entirely on the medicinal side, and nearly ignored the mental side entirely, probably because it is a more subtle phenomena, it applies to much more complicated situations (mental state, rather than physical state; mental states are so much harder to even determine, let alone treat, whereas biopsy is a much simpler physical procedure), and maybe, because it is far less profitable, though this is probably a minor influence if at all. The grand success of early modern medicine probably influenced the direction of medicine a lot (the eradication of small pox was a grand achievement), and in the earlier days of medicine, we had a much more ignorant view of the human mind, even now, the relationship between mental and physical health is fairly poorly understood.

To be alone,
with you.

Whisper please
"I'd like to take mother nature to a sleazy motel..."


8·12·08
If it is true that, "you fear what you dont understand", then the only thing i really fear is girls that i am attracted to.
Neutrino is a great pet name; it means, "little neutral one"
Ha ha, from Bernard Chazelle's third post about music: (Not every random asshole gets to be Satan!)
Necessary dissonances
Beethoven's amazing Waldstein sonata
The edge, there is no honest way to explain it, because the only people who really know where it is, are the ones who've gone over.

you're smile is beautiful and it makes me happy.

"He asked what business it was of mine, and conjectured that my mother was a prostitute."

Oo, be with us lord please.

Hey Bernard, we should build the first robot capable of qualifying for a boat loan.

Yeah, I know I'm smart; I've heard that from virtually everyone I know. It's funny to think that when people tell me that, they usually imply that I am somehow smart enough to warrant vocalization, but not enough to recognize it. Or maybe I'm just being an asshole. I'm certainly being conceited and arrogant.

Explain versus describe, big fucking difference.
Explanation: magician gives away his secret.
Describe: audience member describes audience view of the trick.
Notice however, that from the magician, describing the trick, and explaining it, are identical.

Any link between the way you think about the past, and the way you imagine the future.
Whoa, okay... apparently when you recall a memory, it requires it to be stored again afterwards. So they found a drug that seems to inhibit our ability to store emotional memories, and what they are trying to do is have people who have stressful memories, have the take the drug, then recall their stressful memories. over time they seem to lessen their stress induced by these emotional memories.

Bach is often accused of having forced equal temperament down our throats. That is a lie! He wrote pieces for well-temperament, which is not the same. In equal temperament, all consecutive keys are equidistant. But piano tuners, especially before electronics, used their ears and their ears were still accurate so that they tweaked the tuning to "fix" the thirds and fifths, etc. In fact, Bach wrote his famous "Well-Tempered Clavier" as a set of pieces in all 12 keys, major and minor. Why did Bach bother with all these different keys? Because when you don't do equal temperament different keys will sound different. That too is lost in post-Bach music (OK, not quite true, because pianos get tuned in certain ways sometimes for certain pieces, like Beethoven's amazing Waldstein sonata being a good example). In equal temperament you get the famous joke:


8·14·08
The basic idea, which goes back to David Ricardo in 1817, is to concentrate on areas where we have a comparative advantage, and to avoid areas where we have a comparative disadvantage.


8·15·08
If I had gotten down on my knees and done the apology dance, would it have been okay?
Girls like swarms of lizards, right?
I want to be gunned down by santa claus.

The phrase "should be" has a very limited place in science, and should be uttered with extreme caution and care.


Probability of:
grocery receipt reading $23.82
phone call length reading 8.23 (eight minutes 23 seconds)

How long would it really take people to figure out who batman was? Seriously, who would have the money for all that crap?

If you're good at something never do it for free.
When your job is getting in the way of your studying, you should probably go back to school.


8·16·08
Darwinian evolution applied to the history of knowledge.


8·17·08
This is neat.

this is fucking amazing
It appears that we are on the verge of a theory that plausibly describes the origin of life.
What does it mean to understand something?

You know, it is no wonder that people who do not understand evolutionary theory do not understand science, because science is largely an evolutionary-driven endeavor.

Maybe a website to propose/promote experimentation that is difficult/unfeasible otherwise? Promote questioning status quo and testing in large scale ways the alternative approaches? Promote experimental design & critical thinking?
I say we try paying them off.

Why is it not acceptable for me to invade my neighbor's house, destroy his house's infrastructure, and kill the head of the household's children, after finding out that my neighbor has attempted to obtain a handgun or other weapon, but it's okay when my government does the same to one of it's neighbors?

Why haven't we yet learned the lesson: the potency of economic relationships overwhelm the potency of military conflict.
Is conscription a socialist sort of program?

There is a strange tradeoff, between memorizing the solution to a given puzzle, and spending time figuring out how to solve it. the tradeoff is interesting because it is analogous to a tradeoff between knowing how something works, and furthering your knowledge of how something works. i seem to be approaching a mindset where i will abandon the concept of knowing completely—replacing it instead with the concept of furthering ones current hypothesis as to how something works.

this is pretty awesome.

I do not really know about this, so I cannot comment with confidence: was the transformation from a communist to democratic regime of the Soviet Union one of the grandest, least violent governmental evolutionary periods in human history? How did that happen? It is an enormous regime, and yet it had no violent coup d'etat.

Okay, Russia is so much cooler than we are, this is about their president, Dmitry Medvedev:
"Medvedev is a devoted fan of hard rock, listing Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin as his favorite bands. He is a collector of their original vinyl records and has previously said that he has collected all of the recordings of Deep Purple. As a youth, he was making copies of their records, although these bands were then on the official state-issued blacklist. In February 2008, Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov attended a Deep Purple concert in Moscow together.
Medvedev's reported 2007 annual income is $80,000, and he reported approximately the same amount as bank savings. Medvedev's wife reported no savings or income. They live in an upscale apartment house "Zolotie Klyuchi" in Moscow."

Imagine a world, where every human being learned the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, genetics, mathematics, astronomy, and other major scientific principles, at a young age. That is, no indigenous people confined to tiny islands believing the ancient nonsense of our ancestors. Is there anything far fetched about this idea? Doesn't it seem that in a thousand years, or ten thousand years, every human born on earth could and should be privileged to science, medicine, technology and ideas that exceed even the most privileged individuals of today?

Are you ready for love?
Oh baby im ready for love.


8·19·08
The silence knows what you're silence means.
You've been like a father to me.
One way or another, everyone stops bleeding.

A speculative wiki?

Ha ha ha - trickle down economics used to be called 'horse and sparrow theory'; "if you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows." In retrospect, 'trickle down' isn't really much more appetizing—not only does it conjure imagery of the rich urinating on the poor, all we need remember is those rivers (the colorado river?) that are so severely depleted by rich communities (las vegas) that they are a mere trickle when they finally make it to the sea. the concept of grand benefits imposed by the government, being a mere trickle by the time it reaches the less fortunate.

REBEL against authority. Against your parents. Against your church. Against your government. The police. Against everything you've been told to listen to. And especially against me. Because without conflict, it is difficult to see the problems. Progress is the result of abandoning our biases.

I hear people say that Jesus says do this and that and those things, and that those things are good, as evidence that Jesus was a divine whatever. Notice though that we perceive those as good things, and take them (or give them) as evidence that Jesus is also good. I don't care if Jesus was a petty thief or a child rapist, or whether he did or said the good things people claim he did, none of that matters. Without him, or anyone else for that matter, I can declare I believe certain things are good, and other things are bad, and I don't need anyone else's opinion about whether it is or not, for me to feel justified in claiming my moral geography.


8·20·08
I cannot even conceive of my morals being dictated by anything other than my own opinions. if a book told me that something i believe to be right, was actually wrong, or vice versa; or for that matter, a person, a government, a relative, a friend, or any other possible place i could be given moral advice, should not be able to overcome my personal values of right and wrong. That does not imply that my personal sense of right and wrong is comprehensive and clear on every issue, quite the opposite is true, and the uncertainty in my morals is proportional to my ignorance of a subject.

Show me that you know me.



I'm pretty sure that if practiced a bunch more, I'd be really good.
As good as anyone can hope to get.
Because that is how I am about my passions.
I'll be the indiscriminate romantic.

8/09/2008

a rage to master

so that whole, 'statistically, its likely youve drank at least one molecule of water that passed through [insert long-since-dead guys name here] bladder', does that take into consideration transport phenomena? cause that seems like a very difficult phenomena to accurately model on such scales, and also the most important of any phenomena in this question. i suppose that the upper end of the velocities of such particles is pretty high, though theyre doing random walks through space, so they dont necessarily diffuse so extremely.

the idea of spacetime, though it seems radical, is really more sensical than the ideas of absolute space or absolute time.

hmmm, ultimately, ill bet that mass equals time. which means energy, mass, and spacetime are all intimately linked.

shit, 5 years in operation, and LIGO hasnt seen anything? thats a bad sign, from one perspective, and a good sign from other perspectives.

is there a way to modify G so that it explains E&M on that scale, gravity on the large scale, and strong/weak on atomic scale?

i think i heard you singing: 'oh poor sky, dont cry on me, did someone break your heart again?'
oh poor sky dont cry on me, are you gonna fall apart again?

heavenly.


7·25·08
ask more questions. but wait, asking questions is what got me into this mess in the first place.

i guess you are afraid of what everyone is made of.
your lips are red. my face is red from reading your red lips.

can anyone think of a mechanism in which the properties of a particle directly lead to its behavior through time? like radioactive decay... actually, is it possible to formulate the phases of matter in terms of scaling of time? how much do we understand the behavior of time on the atomic/subatomic scales? a liquid would appear solid over a small enough time frame, right? no. thats wrong.


7·27·08
is it fixed?


7·29·08
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!

be critical. that is addressed to you and to me.
i dont even want to write anything intelligent. how terrible is that.
why? to be an adventurous spirit.
"no creature would ever willingly make an idiot out of itself! -obviously youve never been in love!"
"my two favorite things are commitment, and changing myself."
"this concept of WUV confuses and infuriates us!"

could nuclear explosions be used to relieve tectonic stresses in a less violent manner? it might be hard to have certainty that you were averting a larger earth quake, while simultaneously having certainty that your solution would work as expected––both questions seem unreasonably difficult to answer with serious confidence, not to mention the plethora of concerns that would be raised by such large explosions. probably a terrible idea really.

would there be a way to extract electrical energy from the plasma of fusing deuterium or tritium atoms? seems like no. maybe if it were pulsing back and forth between two extreme states? seems unlikely.


7·30·08
still, wed rather shoot the message author than the messenger.

shoot the messenger
shattered by drink

tell you im sorry that i made you a witness to my moral decay.

he mentions people saying, 'tv but better'
makes me think that my 'printing press for everybody', is also inadequate.

this year, instead of paying my taxes, im going to spend a day with the pain monster.

"how about a kiss for good luck. i meant tongue luck."

Hans Rosling is a pretty entertaining, intelligent man. with excellent intentions.
David Deutsch says some interesting things
and so does Daniel Denett
Denett's talk shows this quote, by Lee Siegel - metamagic, professor of religion:
"I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer: "Conjuring tricks, not real magic."
Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.

oh, i didnt realize most people would prefer not to understand the magic trick. i would. i want to know how everything works. i happen to fail to enjoy trying to unravel magic tricks, but its not because i dont enjoy it, not because i dont enjoy the answer.

sugar the pill

"lets all stop being so damned respectful."
-Richard Dawkins

cool like the ocean.
fooled by the ocean.


7·31·08
despite all i know i cant contain, i'll gather all the parts I need and hope that we remain. white wash over me until, pure varathane runs through my veins, and I'll at last be still. right when the arrow leaves the bow, it erases all uncertainty, and love i'll never know.

i think, it would have been better, smarter, if instead of those stupid facts we always learned in american history classes, social studies, whatever. that if instead we mostly read the work of the early pioneers of our culture. thomas paine's common sense, the federalist papers, the constitution (which im sure we read some of), the bill of rights, which im also sure we read, and so on.

is the cold war evidence of superrational thought? the typical game-theoretic rational player would have launched a preeminent nuclear attack on its opponent, but neither the ussr, nor the usa did that. a superrational player on the other hand might understand that their opponent could come to all the same conclusions that they could, and could therefore reason that both players may choose keeping it cold, over virtual annihilation. at the very least i would argue that the cold war represents superrational thinking more closely than the typical game-theoretic rational thinking.

"results like that are so elegant, they must be right"
-Stephen Hawking
i disagree Stephen, elegance has nothing to do with it. furthermore, the existence of a seemingly elegant explanation does not rule out currently unknown alternate elegant explanations.

this stuff is neat

they would make youre name sing, and bend through alleys and bounce off all of the buildings.

hey, god made me an atheist. who are you to question His judgement?
maybe god sent me here to test your faith... how well do you think youre doing on this test?

until theres nothing left to hold. until theres nothing left to hate. i appreciate your help.
my head plays it over and over.
i want you to know, i think the way you move those stars around was really wonderful.
i lost the woman of my dreams, but i still have zoidberg. we all still have zoidberg!


8·6·08

placebo = (ignorance = bliss)

"i say the whole world must learn of our peaceful ways. by force."
"what!?"
"just walk around not wearing a helmet."

it sort of seems as if fluid flow should be harder than FNP-complete, and that we should be able to encode NP/FNP problems in simple fluid flow problems.

gather all the parts we need, and hope that we remain.


8·8·08
Ultimately, science is optimism, and paranormal/supernatural/religious explanations of nature are really all pessimism. The limitations of science are all temporal, rather than universal; questions that previously seemed unanswerable are often answered, through the emergence of new technology, based on more well established science, through new ideas, through better comprehension of the problems, or more comprehensive understanding of the old knowledge. To declare something unanswerable by science is profoundly naïve, and is often ridiculed by those quotes about ill fated predictions of future technology (an early president of IBM allegedly estimating there is only a market for 4 or 5 computers world wide, or intelligent scientists declaring that heavier than air flight was impossible).


8·3·08
why is suicide bombing so clearly crazy, while the process of war so acceptable? does the probabilistic nature of a typical soldier's sacrifice make it more acceptable somehow?

8·4·08
my advice is seldom for a friend.
impartial hearts, are not good for relationships.
secondary placebo effects? do medical studies ever try to compensate for the fact that any drug with any physical effects should have a more effective placebo influence than a completely inert pill? i would call it a secondary placebo effect. if you imagine that everyone in the drug study is trying to determine if they are taking the placebo or not, that those experiencing notable side effects would be more easily convinced that it was not a placebo, and consequently more likely to experience positive results. a simple, though tedious, method of removing this problem would be to, after the initial study, perform a second study with a placebo that gives the same (or as close as possible), side effects as the actual drug, so that both the experimental and control groups have identical starting points.

follow the child; if the child is into something, thats probably something they're ready to learn.
solid proof that early stimulation really matters.
"and the ones that my teacher says no"
a rage to master
dolphins capable of altruism? according to mythbusters and their research, yes. that would be interesting.

in light of the "next 5000 days of the internet" talk, shouldn't we be suspicious of our notions of socio-political and economic culture, both because the world now changes too quickly & drastically for us to rely on cases of precedent, and because even if we could rely on such cases, no such cases would exist!

it appears, in retrospect, that we have been naïve/arrogant in our assertions of what will, and what will not work. i have been guilty of this as much as any unheard of nobody-layman could be, subjecting my friends to unsolicited rants and debating opposing, equally unfounded views vehemently.
now that i understand the one thing anyone can know with any real certainty, the solutions Seems obvious! in the immortal words of Bill Nye: ITS SCIENCE!
the same process that helped us discard our petty, unfounded beliefs about health & nature can be used to eliminate our superstitions about foreign policy, political systems, and the various strains of superstitious infectious agents.
obviously, i would indict superstitious agents for counfounding the issue, but that is incidental, and blame not need be assigned to any institution in order to take the scientific approach of testing our policies in a rigorous manner.
and while we are at it, lets test our politicians in the same way: peer review, combined with checks & balances, we might get some where for once.

when fighting for one's life, there will always be a point at which drwoning is easier than overcoming fatigue; giving up being easier than pressing on.
in the ignorance pandemic, education equals immunization

until the hammer comes down.

why do we constrain ourselves to 'americans' rather than 'humans' or 'animals' or 'organisms'? why is humanity not an adequate group to satisfy that need filled by patriotism, religion, politics, race, or whatever else has historically filled that need?

i read the news today oh boy.

the key issue with QM seems to be complex amplitudes. just interference is not so big a deal, but complex valued waves seem to lead to less intuitive behavior. though maybe im wrong. i wish i could study this all the time.

tipping point.
point of no return.




identify the good choice; do the opposite.
you say that, but somehow i don't feel any better.
crazy turns me on.
if you change your mind, you know where to find me.



i'm sorry if i fucked up your life.