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.