Only Revolutions:part 1

Today, I got "Only Revolutions" I started reading Hailey until page 48 then began Sam up to same point. Will put it down till tomorrow and perhaps I will read smaller chunks before switching narratives (if thats what I'm doing?)

So far: It is difficult, cloudy impressions are beginning to form, halfway through my read I began to read it faster and found it more somethingorother.

I suspect some have read it at least once by now though Im not sure Im ready to hear anyone's thoughts just yet. Even though I am.

Only Revolutions

MPAA winning the hearts & minds of youth

Well, my sworn enemy for 2006, the Motion Picture Association of America, provides me with yet more fodder. I wish I could be making this up but no, they have helped the boy scouts concoct a "respect for copyright" merit badge! I stole a page from their press release which contains the usual selfless sob story about how copyright violators are stealing jobs from set electricians making double what they'd make in the private sector. Its hard to be sympathetic. Paying lead actors tens of millions of dollars is hardly an economical business model. While its always been a core value that everyone is entitled to get what they can for their services, its hard to believe that anyone pays this. It seems that declining ticket sales is a sign that star salaries are overdue for a correction. But instead, the MPAA continues with its campaign against copyright infringement to stem the tide of market dissatisfaction, rather than change their product or business model. I wouldn't need to be so cynical if they didn't centre their campaign away from their own declining profits and on to the sob story behind the scenes joe lighting guy. I think I'll order one of the merit badges so if I ever happen to swallow some liquid plumber, I can induce vomiting.

Nobel Prize Grameen Bank

I rather liked the 2006 Nobel Prize selection, Mohammad Yunus. His Grameen Bank micro-loan project seems to be a ringing success. I did find it interesting in last weekends Globe and Mail that the econ PHDs they talked with admitted that it was only a limited benefit since the average standard of living increase for participants was only 5 percent. Surely these guys must understand that five percent higher than just barely getting by is a pretty big difference in quality of life? Another economist warned that since all of these micro-loans were secured without credit, there is a risk that they wouldn't be paid back. In fact, the Grameen bank has a 98.8% repayment ration. Pretty good for a system that runs in complete opposition to the industrial worlds banking!

I also thought that the Nobel committee's' politics (there's always politics) were curiously in line with Bill Clinton's current philosophical drive. He's been criss-crossing the lecture circuit reminding people that security is best achieved buy buying someone a sewing machine and increasing their standard of living rather than waiting till a society has broken down and then spending a thousand times more with military pressure. To me it seems no accident that Yunus was given the Peace Prize rather than the Economics Prize. It is a pretty big advertisement for the Clinton school of security.

For the other 2006 Nobel winners, go here.

Ironic signposts, the pope: bedfellows

The Holy See screwed up my change of address form I sent so Im responding rather late to the pope's latest offering to his children. The meat or actually, the gristle of the speech was that faith must be tempered by reason. Without reason, faith turns to fundamentalism. Pretty enough words I suppose for the leader of an organization that once burned the Library of Alexandria to ashes. But I suppose I can hardly disagree that its better to be a little bit irrational than completely irrational. Which leads me to the Christian right in America.

Once upon a time third year stats students could predict republican/democrat voter tendencies by education/income data. Now, the best indicator of whether one voted republican is the frequency of church attendance. And so I wonder if the republican party needs to heed the words of the pope and inject some reason to its faith. I ask this in the context of recent events in North Korea. Forgetting the potential threat that a nuclear Korea presents, its a curious embarrassment to US foreign policy. Lets remember that the US went to war in Iraq ostensibly to secure the US (and the world) from WDMs. As Americans apathetically digest the fact that there weren't any, Korea goes nuclear. Indeed, the pope couldn't find a better time to urge that faith be tempered with reason.

As far as the war in Iraq goes, despite the fact that I consume news fairly voraciously, I did not notice anyone noticing an ironic signpost pointing to the preposterosity that is US policy: Sometime in the last month, more Americans have been killed in Iraq than were killed in 9/11. The Afghan mission was apparently about justice while the Iraq mission was about saving American lives from danger. While 2700 Americans were killed in 9/11 (plus others non-Americans who inccidently are become a fast growing nation. All non-Americans need is a catchy tune and some postage stamps to be the largest nation on Earth!) where was I? Right 2700 killed in 9//11 and now 2756 (as of Oct 11 2006) Americans have been killed. All I can say to this curious milestone is to quote David Byrne and the Talking Heads: "Letting the days go by, water flowing under ground, letting the days go by, same as it ever was, same as it ever was..."

For the stat curious, the US casualties in Iraq are officially listed at 20, 468 while Iraqi civilian losses are pegged at between 400, 000 and 600, 000 depending on what data you believe. Staggering folly on par with some other numbers I dug up for contrast.

In the five years since 9/11, there have been approximately 150,000 gun deaths in America. Wow. Half of those are suicides leaving 75,000 gun deaths costing the health care system 4 billion dollars a year. That's ten 9/11s every single God Bless America's War On Terror Years!!!

And while Americans are dying by the thousands in Iraq in the name of American security, and by the tens of thousands at home in the name of the 2nd amendment, Korea apparently casually builds nuclear weapons. Indeed, will the republicans please add some reason to their faith.

You'll never hear me say it again:" Will they please listen to the pope!"

Petty Irritants

And now the airing of petty irritants:

1) Its curious that the current Foley scandal is really going to hurt the republicans in the upcoming midterm US elections. Its a picture perfect encapsulation of the bizarre tango with Americas number one dance duo: Sex and Violence. The war in Iraq hardly dampens the spirits of American voters as much as a sex scandal. A nod to America's lingering Puritanical roots and violent origins. CNN enjoys a feeding frenzy over this issue while the War in Iraq was initiated under false pretense and has cost the US over 300 billion dollars (see ticker under the archives) Add this scandal to the 20 billion dollars of missing reconstruction contract money that barely makes the papers. Add this scandal to virtually all American intelligence reports explaining how the current foreign policy has made the US less safe while the administration claims the exact opposite. Add this scandal to the colossal ineptness dealing with hurricane Katrina. Add this to the unconscionable practice of characterizing all objections to public policy as being a boon to terrorism or soft on terror and the like. This is a grotesque insult to dialogue and certainly a slap in the face of the very freedom that so far 2700 Americans have gave their lives supposedly defending. And Yet: It will likely be a bland sexual advance that will tip the scales at the polls this November. Yes, it is tempting to connect the Republican's twisted, repressed sexuality in all this, their medieval attitude towards gays and lesbians and their unwavering, self-imposed responsibility of being America's moral compass. But alas, young boys have their admirers going all the way back to the toga-clad Academy and so I can only blame the Republicans for their cowardly cover up.
Among many other sins.

2) The guy who does the voice over work for CTV. I really loathe affectation. There's also something rather distasteful about using the same faux drama affectation for doing a plot summary of Grey's Anatomy and then using the same voice for the news lead in. Its as though CTV has just given up trying to pretend they separate entertainment from news. On second thought, maybe I prefer that kind of honesty.

3) 20% of drivers on 11th and 12th Aves SW in Calgary. They're both 2-lane and every time I want to cross (its always very busy) some chowderhead who clearly never walks anywhere, slows down and stops then looks at me with consternation wondering why I don't cross blindly into the next lane only to be struck by the other lane of traffic that hasn't stopped. For the love of god, just drive past, I may be crippled but I'm not retarded!

4) And speaking of cars, the Harper government is contemplating the very strict California emissions for Canadian cars which I naturally applaud. Buzz Hargrove (isn't he dead yet) was seen in many a media scrum this week in tears crying that the industry couldn't possibly meet this new demand. So did I just dream that in the mid seventies there was a realization the oil was a scarces resource and that pollution was choking our cities? It must have been a dream since that would mean the auto industry would have had 30 years to realize that the way they make cars was as dead as the V8. Surely that last 10 years of talking about Kyoto wasn't translated into the language of slumbering oligiopic-ese.

5) The Liberal party of Canada. What are you guys thinking anyway. Lets be honest, the only thing that is of concern in the next election is ensuring that that Liberal party at least appears to be moving slightly to the right so that it can steal votes away from the conservatives. Clearly Bob Rae doesn't fit the bill for this reason. I may like him more but lets not be trapped by the personality myth here. It is rare leaders that swing voters to them. Rather you must place yourself where the voters are. Mike Ignatief is better ideologically placed.
I guess though at the end of the day I couldn't really care who they pick because it makes no difference anyway. Frankly unless I read the paper, I can't tell by any of my five senses who runs this country.


I can assure you that my petty irritants are a resource, that while governed by thermodynamics, are nearly inexhaustible. If anyone can figure out how to harness this energy, I will gladly sell it back to the grid and split the profits. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of patience, and so I shall close.

The Trouble with Physics

I've been reading Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics this week.So far it has borne much fruit. His background is in quantum gravity so Van Flandern fans will find his thoughts illuminating. In addition, his disection of the many iterations of string theory is very reassuring to those who find string theory as ridiculous as it is elegant.

Been out to the mountains a few times for distracting walks. Last Sunday we went out


to Yoho at the height of the autumn colors. We were transfixed at Takakaw falls watching several climbers scale the cliff face beside the waterfall.

Daviditron: Apply directly to the forehead

As Thanksgiving approaches, I find myself getting in the spirit by awaiting a similar carving. The results of my tests revealed a myriad of undisplaced tears and a paralabral cyst encrusting the shoulder joint. So like many Tom turkeys I will be sitting on a white table while a man holds a sharp knife with a serious look on his face.

Speaking of bone cracking and carving, went to The Protector this eve, a pretty fun Thai martial arts explosion. Some nice camerawork and over the top choreography with complimentary ludacris dialogue

A movie really worth talking about is Brick. Essential a Dasheill Hammet script manifesting itself in teen suburbia. The dialogue is hyper-fast with an amusing mixture of noir 40's slang and teen pop-unacular. And while Im making up words, Im excising the word "business" and replacing it with the more apt "busy". So now more descriptively, I live a ten minute walk from the busy-district. I read the busy-news and don't own a very nice looking busy-suit.

Speaking of life in the busy district, Calgary certainly isn't living up to my prejudices. Upon retuning here last week, I thought I would count the number of strangers that said "hello" to me. From Monday to Friday I got exactly 5 hellos which is pretty good considering I was only mixing in the public realm for the 8 blocks to the coffeeshop and newsstand and back home. That's pretty good for soul-less ol Busytown. Its true, there are heaps of people busy making money and perhaps less interested in the good. But as a borderline misanthrope, I'm indifferent to most everyone anyway. The small percentile of people I resonate with remains the same wherever I am so the mode personality type isn't something that really affects me.

That being said, you definitely know your in Busytown (if you feel like punishing yourself) if you read the editorial page. Free enterprise and individual rights trump every consideration. They are the twin pillars that prevent serious consideration of all ideas. There are few nuanced versions of the good when monolithic principles dominate discourse as it does here. Luckily, ideas hardly matter anymore as pundits and scholars fight battles that take up less room in the collective unconscious as a headache commercial.

Paris Hilton

So Im listening to CBC the other day and they were sending up Paris Hilton's new CD. They all put their not so talented claws into her though, for myself, I found it no worse than anything else on the pop charts. I would normally find Hilton-Hate'n incredibly boring and tune out, but on this day I began to postulate: just why does everyone love to pick on her?
Is it because the media is abominably lazy and can't find some other rich, young, weathy people with little or no talent? Im sure there are dozens of richer, younger, less deserving people out there that are ripe for holier than thou treatment by smug and smarmy media commentarians. But then I remembered my Nietche.
Paris is the end of Modernity. There are no ethics for Paris to violate. No systems of rules or conventions for her to follow or not follow at her peril. Paris just does whatever she wants. Paris represents not just the death of God, but the death of the Protestant Work Ethic, the death of Meritocracy, the death of Consequences. Curiously, I think people people recognize this in her and resent the fact that they themselves are still (philosophically) Nietche's antiquaited whipping boy. They see themselves clinging to Modernity's dried teat and resent her for it. For better or for worse, Paris Hilton is the only true Post Modern woman.

Post Script: Couldn't people lay off Britney as well!?

capsulitis kickmyassis

my apologies to those I did not see in Saskatoon during my brief stay. After getting my arthrogram/mri , I returned to saskatoon for a wedding and then up to the lake and then Suzanne packed my things and brought them to Calgary where I am writing from now.
It seems from the results now that I have adhesive capsulitis in the shoulder joint which is basically extraneous tissue growing around the ball and socket causing imobility. Im just waiting now for a specialist to determine whether the joint needs to be surgically reorganized and mod'ed

Profiteering off necessities

The apartment in Calgary Im staying in has issued notice to renters that the rent will be increased by $200/month. There are 30 units which adds up to $6000/mth or $72,000/year. Considering that the apartments expenses haven't gone up (no mill rate hike) and natural gas prices are actually falling, one is left understanding that the increase is a function of demand. They get $72,000 extra a year because there's no other place to stay, so people will be forced to pay.
While I'm generally a supporter as well as a beneficiary of our supply and demand system, our society has deemed that certain goods and services be tempered from raw market forces. Education, health etc. are subsidized because we believe it is in the public good for them to be affordable. In a solemn moment of reflection, it seems really absurd how acceptable and commonplace it is too make whatever profit one can from other people's necessity to have a roof over their head. Its true, owning an apartment over the long term has risks of vacancy and risk should be rewarded, but I really resent such grotesque gauging on such a basic need. Calgary is suffering for skilled labour because there is no place to live and hence people can't move here or afford to move here causing cyclical dilemmas.
I hope these landlords die early and in painful ways. Its a fate better than they deserve.

world trade center barf-o-rama

Its a big enough world that I'm sure many others share my constant desire to kick nick cage in the teeth. I take solace in this. So when the inevitable cultural hedge fund that is hollywood finally got around to 9/11, they really stuck it to me by placing mr Cage at the helm. A Hedge on wall street usually involves ""selling short" in stock that is a competitor to one you already own. This means that when the stock goes down, you still make money. Its sort of like betting on both teams in the Stanley Cup. I'm sure we can look forward to Cage et al converting sensless and meaningless death into the exact opposite. As Humphrey Bogart said "They got lucky, yesterday they were just two German clerks. Today, they're the honoured dead." Indeed, the Hollywood hedge fund will always salvage cultural profit, even in a bear market.

the power of nightmares

just watched the first part of the 3-part bbc documentary "the power of nightmares" described as:

"This film explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today.

From the introduction to Part 1 (Baby It's Cold Outside): "Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today's nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful."

This doc so far has been an excellant investigation into the morphing ideologies that have shaped much of the current geopolitics. To my reckoning it is devoid of emotional appeals and conspiracy theory- esque speculation. I saw it on cbc newsworld but also found a downloadable copy online. Anyone with 3 hours and an interest will certainly be rewarded with fresh insights and knowledge.

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD

Washington crosses the Delaware

A slice of life from the summer

the acute stage

bust -v.- perform, do. (EX: "Bust a rhyme" = "Rapping a rhyme", while "Bust a move" = "Make a move/perform a move")
busted -adj.- ugly, caught doing a crime. {EX: "Yo' girl is BUSTED!")
cap - n.- bullet (EX: "I'ma bust a cap in yo' ass." = "I will shoot you.")
capped -v.- shot.

kananaskis

I did some touring around on google maps looking for shots of where I'll be this summer. If you're looking for me, I'll be somewhere in this patchwork of clearcuts. On the extreme right edge in the center is an elongated patch of light green where the river valley widens. My tent will be there.

from Hell's heart I stab at thee!

I think we've all done our share of this

thanks to Blair for uncovering a gem:

http://www.xkcd.com/c85.html

A lovely day for topography

Calgary and back (Now with 80% less Mind & Spirit!)

Went to Calgary to help Suzanne find an apartment in the tightest rental market in Canada. Most every viewing we went to was peopled with other stressed out potential renters. Though I must admit, much like how bears co-operate when feeding on salmon, it was fairly civilized when it could have been much more cut-throat.

This is a bookstore in Calgary, I know it looks like some weird advertisement for ING Direct.

Enjoyed some fine sushi at the Sumo Lounge, watched the excitement level build on the so called "red mile" for the Flames game that evening, and even found some time to do some breakdancing in the country as the picture will attest to.

some punk painted this on my van

ski trip

Just returned from a week of skiing in the Kootenays. The snow was quite relentless and the terrain was unbelievable! Red Mountain has very few actual runs, instead, the trees have been thinned a little allowing one to ski pretty much anywhere. Having some local guides was quite crucial as rockfaces abound. Without judicious route planing one can easily find themselves peering over the edge of 20-foot cliffs or 70 degree slope faces! The lack of resort facilities and extremely difficult terrain has nearly eliminated tourists which allows one fresh powder almost constantly, truly the shangri-la of skiing! Went to Nelson and managed with some local connections to get tickets to the long sold out Kid Koala concert! This Nija Tunes artist put on a turntable clinic and left all exhausted and utterly satiated. A few more days of skiing and some high-stress table hockey at night capped off a trip that my legs will be sore over for another week at least! I'm hobbling around like a ninety-year old arthritis victim!

QE 16

Tom: There's talk goin round town that you quit your blog
Dave: Is that the hot tip that brought you boys up here at this ungodly hour?
Tom: If you say it aint so then you're a liar and I'm callin you one
Dave: You aint tryin to strong-arm me are ya Tom?
Tom: Don't be a sap Dave, make an entry. Play ball or shine my shoes. If you're in, then you're in, if you're out, you're all the way out. Hey McGrady, see that no unfortunate accident befalls our dear friend here.

QE 16
It was an enjoyable QNY though perhaps a little muted this year I thought. Upon digging into the archives though, I discovered that back on QNY 2 we chose a common enemy. I rather fancied this notion even if I don't recall that outcome. In the sprit of this I decided that for this year I would chose an enemy and an ally. Without thinking about it too much, I chose as an ally Perserverence. The benefits of this are many, but not the least is that I no longer must parcel out a finite reserve of perserverence, but instead, because it is my Ally, I can rely upon it as I would an undefeatable associate. As far as my enemy for the year, after reading Captain Orange's pick Free Culture, I have chosen the RIAA and the MPAA. Their sins are ruthlessness and greed beyond the pale of acceptable conduct even by the low standard of business ethics. It will be a while I'm sure before they realize that they have aquired a new enemy, so I must use this time wisely.

happy birthday Jerry Springer

Its funny, Jerry and I don't often get together for our birthdays anymore, but I thought I'd surprise him with a phonecall and gift basket today. It really seemed to touch him so I think perhaps he was feeling a little lonely today. Anyway it was good to touch base and have a few laughs and if anyone has a bit of time today, I think he'd really appreciate a call. For your edification, some interesting events and other notable birthdays from this day in history:

1542 - Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII of England, is executed for adultery.
1633 - Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition.
1935 - A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.
1955 - Israel obtains 4 of the 7 Dead Sea scrolls.
1960 - Nuclear testing: France tests its first atomic bomb.

1944 - Jerry Springer, American television host
1950 - Peter Gabriel, English musician
1961 - Henry Rollins, American musician
1974 - Gus Hansen, Danish professional poker player

lady luck smiles on retail

So the other night I'm satiating the part of my toungue that detects the presence of salt by making a trip to sev for a bag of chips. The bill came to $3.41 which as I began to dole out some loose change I realize consists of a toonie, loonie, quarter, dime, nickle and penny. Indeed, $3.41 is the "royal flush" of all retail transactions.

Strange Notions of Representation

"The chief victims of the January 23 federal election were:
Western Liberals: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives got three times as many votes as Liberals did, but won nearly ten times as many seats. In Alberta, the Conservative Party won 100% of the seats with 65% of the votes. The 500,000 Albertans who voted otherwise elected no one.

Urban Conservatives: The 400,000-plus Conservative voters in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver should have been able to elect about nine MPs, but instead elected no one. The three cities together will not have a single MP in the governing caucus, let alone the cabinet.

New Democrats: The NDP attracted a million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 51 seats, the NDP 29. Nearly 18% of Canadians voted NDP, but the party won less than 10% of the seats and does not hold the balance of power, unlike the Liberals and the Bloc.

Green Party: More than 650,000 Green Party voters across the country elected no one, while 475,000 Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada elected 20 MPs. "

-taken from Fair Vote Canada

"Don't these people ever give up?" -Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now

Boy, I'm apparently not so sick of this argument as to prevent me from discussing it. Lets start at the beginning. Since we are picking a government, at some scale, a majority is desired otherwise no bill would pass in the house. It becomes a question of scale then where this majority should be located. Across the country? Just in Parliament? As an aggregate of ridings? Obviously, the current system is one where the base unit is the riding and the party with the most base units forms government. This 'first past the post' system does create some mathematical curiosities as noted by the authors above. They present several of these but for example I will talk about the 1/2 million Green party votes but no Green party seats example. The authors interpret this discrepancy as an absence of representation, but there is a slight of hand here when dealing with Green Party votes in the aggregate. In any given riding, it does not follow that the hundreds of people who voted for the Green party are not represented. By the same logic, if you don't vote for the winner, you are not represented. As a matter of fact, you are represented by the winner whether you voted for them or not. In fact even if you didn't vote at all you are still represented by them! The slight of hand in their argument is really ridiculous: "Urban Conservatives should have been able to elect..." They speak of this group as though it were a riding, as though by virtue of being able to speak of them as an aggregate it ought to have a representative. But the aggregate boundaries have been already established. Urban Conservatives come and go but Calgary Centre is a real thing with a real representative who was most people from Calgary Centre first choice!
By inspection, the fact that a single issue (and frankly utterly myopic to the complexities of real governance) party does not easily win seats tells me that the system works quite well! It would be stereotypically Canadian somehow to actually have a party holding seats in parliament that was virtually every riding's last choice!
The current system picks people to represent small groups of people. The authors above want the system to pick small groups of ideas. This is supposed to be miraculously better. Accountability is hard enough in an apathetic culture, but at least a person from the community is accountable to their community and is seen as the best candidate by the most people possible in that community. A system that picks ideas and platforms and then somehow attaches a person to it (the proportional representation advocated by the authors) seems like one that is not in our best interest.

Fun Quiz!! What's wrong with this?

Conditional probabilities
To illustrate, suppose there are two bowls full of cookies. Bowl #1 has 10 chocolate chip cookies and 30 plain cookies, while bowl #2 has 20 of each. Our friend Fred picks a bowl at random, and then picks a cookie at random. We may assume there is no reason to believe Fred treats one bowl differently from another, likewise for the cookies. The cookie turns out to be a plain one. How probable is it that Fred picked it out of bowl #1?

Intuitively, it seems clear that the answer should be more than a half, since there are more plain cookies in bowl #1. The precise answer is given by Bayes' theorem. But first, we can clarify the situation by rephrasing the question to "what’s the probability that Fred picked bowl #1, given that he has a plain cookie?” Thus, to relate to our previous explanation, the event A is that Fred picked bowl #1, and the event B is that Fred picked a plain cookie. To compute Pr(A|B), we first need to know:

Pr(A), or the probability that Fred picked bowl #1 regardless of any other information. Since Fred is treating both bowls equally, it is 0.5.

Pr(B), or the probability of getting a plain cookie regardless of any information on the bowls. In other words, this is the probability of getting a plain cookie from each of the bowls. It is computed as the sum of the probability of getting a plain cookie from a bowl multiplied by the probability of selecting this bowl. We know from the problem statement that the probability of getting a plain cookie from bowl #1 is 0.75, and the probability of getting one from bowl #2 is 0.5, and since Fred is treating both bowls equally the probability of selecting any one of them is 0.5. Thus, the probability of getting a plain cookie overall is 0.75×0.5 + 0.5×0.5 = 0.625.

Pr(B|A), or the probability of getting a plain cookie given that Fred has selected bowl #1. From the problem statement, we know this is 0.75, since 30 out of 40 cookies in bowl #1 are plain.

Given all this information, we can compute the probability of Fred having selected bowl #1 given that he got a plain cookie, as such: (see calculation above)

As we expected, it is more than half.

This type of calculation is routinely employed in statistical evaluation of data particularly in the medical field. To win the Big Prize, explain if you think it is valid or invalid.

some punk wrote this on my van

...the Sartrian existentialist, for whom the discovery of no ultimate intrinsic purpose makes the universe "absurd." The absurdist interpretation mistakes the absence of meaning for meaninglessness, failing to see that the universe necessarily transcends the meaningful/meaningless distinction. (This is why Stephen Weinberg was mistaken to say "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.") Instead of sliding into existential angst or ennui, we can savor the surprise and excitement of participating in an unscripted drama, one in which meaning is created locally against an inscrutable cosmic backdrop. This, I submit, is a far more interesting fate than the boring security of being a bit player in an end game scripted by God. (Some might say all too interesting, as in that understated Chinese curse, "May you have an interesting life".)

taken from http://www.naturalism.org/spiritua1.htm with thanks to rainswept

Artificial Intelligence: the great leap backwards

I've been inspired by Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett) this week. It occurs to me that there will eventually exist a division in the history of man's technology. The first (which we are still in) is one characterized by intentionally designed technologies. Within this category, there is still room for accident and mistake and the hazy intentionality of inspiration, but essentially there is intention at the various stages of design. Reason and its constituent helpers are guiding the process of problem solving. The next phase of design is one of detached intentionality. Let me explain. The most breathtaking and elegant designs on earth are all natural products of evolution. The designs are so perfect, efficient and elegant that we have difficulty in understanding how they work let alone replicate them. These designs were not intentionally created, but rather were algorithmically produced by a wonderful system of constraints, mutations and inheritance. It seems plausible that when we learn to harness this kind of computational power, our problem solving ability will grow exponentially. I can envision some kind of computer simulation that produces outcomes that transcend intention and hence avoid the natural impedance of typical design thinking. Much like observing many biological entities, the design path will be obscure but the design process will be understood, at least abstractly. Curiously, tools of this sort will actually be (philosophically) Darwinian inversions since nature has no real goals whereas man certainly does. Nature doesn't desire to have a pretty flying thing and the butterfly is the design result. An evolutionary computer would be doing just that. Our current design constraints dictate certain kinds of results that are difficult to undo or even unthink when attempting to take greater leaps in design efficiency or simplicity or utility. Its a great disservice to call this kind of computing artificial intelligence when non-artificial intelligence seems like such a dullard when compared with the brilliance of nature's unintentional algorithms.

Panglossian Lament

I slogged my way through a newspaper today, though not much gets past my filter. I find by ignoring everything that's not actually news (crime, calamity and anything else whose template doesn't change-just names and places) I can read the paper in about two and a half minutes.
I did notice that it seems like we're headed for a conservative majority. While I'm slightly concerned about re-opening many debates that I'd prefer to lay rest, I'm confident that the courts will keep a firm stranglehold of the status quo. If I look ahead with Panglossian glasses to see a bright side of this, I wonder if we won't see a more muted regional 'alienation.' I use quotations because I am of the opinion that regional gripes are really just national gripes that have been harnessed by political opportunists. Its easier to mobilize people by awakening their latent clan based thinking by telling them that Their problems are unique. I think there are certainly urban and rural needs within confederation but these really don't change from one end of the country to the other. I wonder if a conservative majority won't evaporate some of this rural angst by at least creating the illusion of representation in the minds of rural conservative voters.
I know its an infrequent forrray into politics for me these days but I'm going to vote in the advanced poll tomorrow. Let me do this thing while the fit is on me!

ps with apologies to Leibniz but imitation is the highest form of flattery.

all over the web

Tokyo (AP) Inter-tron CEO, Tekada Komayashi, confirmed what New Yorker 'around the web" columnist Gilbert Weinstein called "the webs most persistent rumor." Chat rooms were abuzz today over the announcement, though many internet snobs (snobbits as coined by Rutgers University English Department grad student Maria Fung) insisted that as chatroom moderator Chass "bigbyte" Weston posted, "we knew it was true all along." Said Komayashi, "Based on a regressive evaluation of previous simulation models, combined with some peer-moderated synthesis and extrapolation, Intertron (Pte.) confirms that Quest Tuesday not only already occurred, but was enjoyed by all in attendance." Early trading this morning on the Nikkei and NYSE indicated not only investor relief, but even showed signs that investor capital was rather bullish on the news, lifting Intertron's market capitalization up significantly. When asked for comment at a campaign stop, Finance Minisier Ralph Goodale seemed unprepared for the news but offered his opinion that news demonstrated "the strength of Canadian economy and its ability to compete on the world stage."

C8H11NO2: another mystery solved?

Upon discovering the other day that I was discussing both religion and politics, and realizing how I'd rather not, I found myself being challenged to explain the difference. Upon reflection though, I found it more interesting to think about their similarities- that being that most participants are engaged in each with little or no examination. Its true that most participants would disagree with that statement but from a phenomenological perspective, the mere observation of the state of each reveals my statement to be true. Each manifests itself as a series of assumptions that inform a specific set of prescriptive behaviors, but its the unexamined participation that is most curious to me. It reminded me of a previous conversation in which someone was recounting how they had no evidence for a specific belief- they just wanted to believe it. How nice I thought to myself. If only intention and belief were so fluidly connected I would have fewer mental dilemmas! And yet, despite the fact that 3 out of every four earthlings have learned to read and write, I feel generally to be in the smallest minority of people who require reasons for believing things. Its true, I'm usually harping on distinguishing between the set of things that has no justification from things that require justification. But now I really challenge myself to answer a very simple question: Why must my knowledge set be entirely coherent? Of course I can set aside some obvious things like a coherent knowledge set makes good predictions such that I don't walk into moving propellers or fall into deep wells like an Edward Gorey unfortunate. But from an epistemological rather than evolutionary perspective does it really matter if I believe in unicorns for example? Why is it apparently important for me to not believe in unicorns because there is no evidence for their existence? Suggesting that I prefer truth to false seems not only glib but really just shunts the problem to a different set of terms without actually explaining anything. But perhaps it is that simple. Maybe being right about something triggers a tiny dopamine release in my brain. Perhaps I've quietly adapted to this Pavlovian, neurochemical epistemology. Truth is not philosophical but chemical. Leaving out some beliefs because they are unsupported allows one to be not wrong which is slightly different from being right about something, but at least the dopamine feedback loop is preserved even if the set of possible beliefs is smaller. And so while I still feel like a reef in a sea of unsubstantiated believers, I should try to enjoy my diet of dopamine in return for my troubles. Its exhausting being a reef, incidentally, being ever crashed upon by the ship of fools. Don't forget to vote.

touring through the commonweath of letters

picked out some christmas books for myself today. Now all I need is a week of minus thirty to enjoy reading them.

What the bleep do we know: the fallacy of exclusive premises

For my sins, I watched "What the -bleep- do we know?" It really was the most reeking piece of drek I've seen in quite some time. It fails for so many reasons however I will somehow excise this garbage from my thoughts by explaining a couple powerful errors.
1) As an introduction to thinking about things that one might have previously ignored, it fails since the movie is a relentless string of sciencey sound bites. Its a litany of conclusions without exposition, a run-on of unsupported statements that don't invite the audience to think but rather to accept. It forms a kind of faith-based science lingo that is really no different from any other kind of belief without contemplation. Whatever work they may have accomplished will be undone by some other idea that comes along in the viewers mind later on because the movie gives no credence to Why any of these ideas should be considered. In this sense they perpetuate a faulty way of thinking. The movie mistakes content of thought for mechanism of thought. Until the later is addressed, the content is irrelevant.
2)The Content or A Wizard ought to know better. It has ceased to amaze me the liberties that people take with the world of physics. The necessity for quantum physics is that the rules that govern the Newtonian realm break down at the quantum level. And yet how quickly people want to take behaviors at the quantum level and apply them to the classical realm. There is a tiresome transference going on here that I forgive from laypeople but when it comes from PHDs, I cannot forgive. Their rational is so transparent as to be almost unworthy of comment but today I will bother. The physicists being interviewed clearly have preferences regarding how they prefer to behave and how they prefer the world to behave. They have preferences of what "the good" is. Unfortunately, as specialists conditioned to rationalize and justify belief, they are blindsided into rationalizing a domain of thinking that contains no rational justification. But lo and behold, here are all sorts of metaphorical niceties at the quantum level. The oft misunderstood Uncertainty Principle, the ephemeral nature of existence, wave-particle duality and the rest of the quantum dramatis personae make easy metaphors for social preferences. This appeal to the objectivity of science serves to both impress and make truths out preferences. Most often the audience has no idea that these appeals are committing the fallacy of exclusive premises. The mathematical relationships at the quantum level Do Not Say Anything about human interaction! It is a set of relationships that apply at its own scale, just as the Newtonian relationships are only valid at the classical scale ( I am of course excluded unified field theory which is a childish fantasy that I cannot deal with here as my "Fermatian margin" is too small!) Its unfortunate how conceivable it is to me that all the academics that lined up for this movie forget this salient feature. Indeed, specialization seems to be the death of critical thinking and academic credentials become its epitaph.

To quote Shakespeare: "It may not be true, but its what we wish were true" I just wish we'd understand the difference and not influence people with jargon, influence them with credentials, and sway them with emotion. If you want to learn to think read DeBono instead, if you want an escapist kind of awe, watch Baraca.

life goes on

Yes friends, life goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began, and I must follow if I can, pursuing it with eager feet, where many paths and errands meet, until it joins some larger way, and whither then I cannot say...

Perspective is a sweetening thing even if it cannot last. One can revel in the tiniest of pleasures and shirk the meddlesome irritants of the day. The trivial becomes profound, and things that seemed so important melt like an autumn frost in morning sunshine. And yet I will complain again, perhaps even today as perspective slowly is worn away by the violence of dying memory and the abrasiveness of adaptaion. Life goes on and we must make of it what we can.

in loving memory of my dearest fiona

through some of the best and worst of times, you got me through with a smile and a laugh and showed me what triumphs the human spirit is capable of.

fishing, Naomi Klein, diagnostics

I know listening to other people's dreams can be sometimes tedious. With notable exceptions though, I recall explaining to someone in the bush about how I had dreamed that I was an old man in a seniors golf tournament when they looked at me without pause and said: big deal last night I dreamed I was a giant lobster-man. There's always a bigger fish or booleanly expressed: if n then n+1. With the preceding caveat then, last night I dreamed that Naomi Klein and I were wining and dining (there's a joke in there about me dining and she whining) Anyway, after a lovely romantic evening I looked her full in the eyes and meant to say something forward and romantic but what came out was: I hate your books. The dream evaporated. Those who can't resist the merry-go-round of analysis will I'm sure dizzy themselves over the interpretive possibilities. And speaking of psychology, I'm becoming convinced that I've accidentally discovered a crucial variable in the diagnosis of schizophrenia. My radiators make the most peculiar noise that sounds like people whispering and mumbling. When I have my headphones on quietly, I periodically freeze and tilt my head (you know like how cats do when they're on a mission and then suddenly stop) to listen to what sounds like someone talking in the next room, only to re-realize that its the radiator. How many lithium-pumped souls could have been saved with forced-air heating I guess we'll never know. Perhaps the New England Journal of Medicine will finally be ready to discuss my honorarium. Until then may the fog be with you.

robot ponies

Christmas Eve, 2053
Underneath every little girl's tree:
A robot pony.
Comb their soft and luscious nylon fur.
Listen close, hear their clockwork hearts whir.
Robot ponies.
They feed on plastic bags cut up like lettuce
Right out of your hand. Things get out of hand
Unless you use one of 20 pre-set functions
To make them understand, make them understand:
You know best. You know best ...

Wheels,reinventing. See also: shag carpet

In 1974, the basement of our house was called the rumpus room, an architectural term I have not heard since. The foundation of the rumpus room was a cobalt blue shag carpet that was so thick, that there was a plastic shag rake to smooth it out with before company came over. I remember that it had no windows in it and was always dark. On Saturday mornings I could be found engaged with lego watching the cartoon spiderman. You know the psychedelic one that prunes young synapses into attenuating for the absurd. I recall thinking that it would be nice to have daylight somehow brought into that room. I imagined how simple it would be to have some kind of mirrored tube that would carry the light into the rumpus room. Two years later fiber optic transmission was a reality and another potential patent died amongst a pile of half-chewed lego bricks. As trite as this memory is there is a lesson here. As I scan ahead over the next week at my impending decision over whether to go out for another contract, I am reminded about my lost opportunity of patenting fiber optics. It is reassuring that the most profound lost opportunities are outside the domain of our mental calculus and therefore I am beyond weighing them. And hence, I am free to consider only whether I want to go or not. The myriad of semi tangible and ephemeral considerations of the 'what if' variety can be plucked from their thistled garden and flung directly to the compost heap. The illusion that I can predict the consequences that I am weighing has turned to into a wisp of smoke that quickly exits through a crack in the sash. Rational criteria for choice is but the last desperate gasp of a consciousness drowning in its own necessity for rationality within choice. And so we construct elaborate mechanisms for making discriminations, we construct schema for differentiating. These elegant semantic obelisks pay tribute to the triumph of the rational mind and yet that rational mind is as absent as any other god. We consider all sides with our sophisticated logic and fuzzy intuition in a frantic quest for clarity and as we regurgitate this litany of variables onto the balance scales and watch one side tip down, we are no longer capable of recognizing the entire exercise as the great work of fiction that it is. It is too demanding of our humility to imagine that there is very often no rational criteria for choice. Yes we may have preferences so elaborately defined that we mistake them for truths, but truth and preference are the great trickster twins that have vexed thought since thought began. And so, what of the future? What of my future? I'll tell you tomorrow.

back from the land

Well, after spending a month doing oil and gas exploration, I can't believe that gas only costs 90 cents a litre! I'm very exhausted, 16 hour days and no days off for 24 days has left me rather heaped. Heavy deadlines, demanding production schedules mean that work is pretty much all encompassing. I'm part of a two man team that takes a line on a map from some geologists office and puts it on the ground. We survey out down to the inch where the blasting points and geophone positions will be. This involves bypassing power lines, gaslines, oil pipelines, wells, allowances for foundations and a million other details which must be sorted out on the ground. So I've been doing everything from phoning landowners and getting permission to access their land, gps places to avoid, using metal detectors to locate pipelines, using a laser transit and prism mirror to locate blasting points, producing maps of seismic lines, hacking through bush with an axe to make sight lines for survey equipment, and drinking coffee all evening sorting and producing the tonnes of red tape that our job demands. Our team is about the sixth iteration of subcontractor so everything I do has to go be recorded and sent to a million different places. Fastidious accuracy is a satan to me since if I place a blasting point next to a fiber optic trunk line and blow it to smitherenes, claiming I didn't know it was there wouldn't save me from being lible for the millions of dollars in damages. Trying to keep your wits about you on little sleep in the cold can sometimes be a challenge, as is dealing with the contractors that are impatiently waiting for me to finish the line.
But, on the plus side, it pays quite a bit of money and I did add two sights to my Extraordinary Nature Moments catalogue. I was quading through a frozen, sparsely treed black spruce bog about 30 minutes after sunset and I came up a small knoll about 6 feet above the surrounding plain. When I allowed my eyes to glance away from the trail I was following, I discovered that there was an impenetrable layer of dense fog about two feet above the ground and perfectly flat. Every twenty meters or so a 5 foot tree poked through it. A vision of Elysium with a boreal flavour perhaps but really breath taking. The other sight was a sundog that was so bright it was almost as powerfull as the sun itself. It was so bright it was as painful to look at as mean ol mister yellow face himself. It really felt like I was on Tatooine or some other planet with a binary star system. Incredibly off putting actually to have what relly seemed like two suns! It lasted with that intesity for about 2 minutes before fading into a regular faintish sundog. I must have been in some climatic super-alignment or something.
So home for the holidays for at least a week. The next contract starts at the end of december somewhere on the NWT/BC/AB border and will be at least 60 days straight. I'm not sure if I'm up for it or not but I'm going to just enjoy some rest before I consider the future. And to be honest, I won't actually consider the future, I will appear (to myself) to be weighing the facts and performing somekind of mental calculus but actually these machinations are a facade for what will likely be a snap decision.

flux part II

well, I'm off this thursday into the great unknown. I'm doing seismic exploration in the Canadian Wilderlands. I think first stop is some Uranium exploration in Southern Alberta. I will be gone till about the end of December, then home for a short spell. I'm looking forward to it as its new and different, and setting my will against the onslught of a Canadian winter will be a new experience. I'm unsure of the internet situation wherever I get to but hopefully I can provide some updates of my experience. Once again, I leave on short notice so goodbye to all, see you in '06!

pop culture and other unmentionables

Well, everyone's doing it so I thought I'd weigh in on this one. While I find it difficult to disentangle qualitative merit from sentiment, there is a distinct difference in the time periods we are discussing. The difference is the mode of cultural dissemination. Its tempting for me to notice that recent pop music has a more visual quality to it. Of course the early eighties had a visual component with the advent of the music video, but one only needs to look at how much money was spent on videos to realize how much more important it has become. It is not at all uncommon to spends millions attaching an image to a song/band. Couple this with the importance (from the industry's perspective) of getting music on a movie soundtrack, with the emergence of commercial advertising as a new medium for emerging music and other new outlets for image, and one realizes that image is undeniably become more important.
Captain Orange notes the importance of music in identity formation. If we then note that recent music has a more visual component to it, and the power of images in identity formation is strong, then its a small jump to support Swept's argument that recent pop music can generate a similar appetite among youth as earlier pop music, without relying strictly on its musical component.
I think this argument is important because it shows that in the abstract, declining musical merit could be cruched by its image facet and that this was more difficult to do once upon a time (though it would be foolish to think that image was never important). This allows us to avoid disentangling ephemeral aesthetic issues from sentiment.
If I were pushed into making an objective assay of pop through the decades, I would suggest that any song that allows itself to be hummed with ease will linger on and meme itself into an extended cultural shelf-life that transcends its role as an accompaniment to self-customization.

silverlock

I just finished Silverlock by John Myers Myers. This book is really wonderfull and surely I will make it my QE 16 pick. I just finished tracking down the near thousands of literary references contained in the book. My thoughts of Myers's literary knowledge approaches awe.

Fallacious derivation of self worth

All too often in this culture, and perhaps others, self worth is defined and derived from externally donated sources. It seems to be defined in terms of skills, position and status, personal characteristics and social roles. This strategy is immediately effective until circumstances change that alter those skills, status, or perceived characteristics. For example, changing jobs that make ones skills obsolete, changing friends that see one in a different way. Under these circumstances, the source of self worth evaporates setting in motion a cyclical problem where one is having to replace these previously prided characteristics with new ones at a time when they are most difficult to appreciate. This process is a fool's errand. Self worth, if the term is to mean anything, is derived from being. One has value because one is. This forms a foundation that is impervious to the ephemeral tide of circumstance.
And yet, in the often tempestuous din of identity formation, the bulk of identity is derived externally for us guided by accident and flimsy intention. Throughout this process, the currency of fallacious value is the validation we receive externally. Yet validation, though apparently necessary, does not fully penetrate the mire of character, achievement, skill, and all the other imagined extensions of being. Because it never fully penetrates to the core of being, no amount of validation ever seems to be enough and thus a never ending pursuit of validation serves only to stymie. Effort, futility, false presentation and other chasing of the wind thus dominate the human pathology.
Worth derived from being rather than the effects of being, is one the penetrates from the inside out. It is stormproof, it is not bound to changing circumstances and fickle external reflections. It forms the foundation from which positive and fruitful evaluation can take place. It forms a sanctum of peace and stability in which one can recharge for a minute before returning once more to the brink. When worth is derrived from being, it is divorced from individuality and the ego that often tempts false worth. But the effects of being are flashy and easily seen while being itself is so omnipresent it is practically hidden from one's attenuation. To hack through the lianas of the obvious attributes of self to finally arrive at the unadulterated self is the path towards freedom from doubt.

stoonbound

I will be returning to Saskatoon on wed oct 19. And so I am searching for a place to live again (I renew my objections to this loathesome task!) Alas, the price one pays for being adventurous! Oh well, it has been a lovely couple of months here but the end has amicably come. "Not too soon for me to see the stars of home " said a Romulan Captain once. You all shall see me when you least suspect, I expect.

see two posts ago for explanation

OK I'm getting too carried away with this but I'm tired and laughing myself into hysterics. From the tangled mind of google, prognosticator and greatest life consellor among the wise, here is what Tracy needs:

Tracy needs to withdraw VA bid
Tracy needs wins to get back in title battle
Tracy needs to make the most of these cycles
Tracy needs to step off the soapbox and tell stories
Tracy needs the Dodgers
Tracy needs to be gently coaxed through the process
Tracy needs affordable housing
Tracy needs an additional water supply to meet water demand
Tracy needs to be taken to task a little
Tracy needs to testify against Big Boy.

There you have it miss Thompson. Its a big list but I'm confidant you can handle it. I would talk to a lawyer before you testify against "Big Boy" though.

oh, blessed google! How I cut & paste you with joy

well, I just had to find out what Aja needs, so here it is curtesy google:

AJA needs to be forced by ProIO Control Panel
Aja needs to go to town on your nerves.
AJA needs educational policies.
Aja needs to stop whining about being stronger and writing songs
Aja needs a serious reality check
Aja needs to start school somewhere
Aja needs you

dave needs

I was reading a blog (smutzie or something(linked from starcat)) and they encouraged me to google my name needs and then cut and paste all the matching results, so here it is. Life has direction! As it turns out, I need:

Dave needs plywood
Dave needs some advice
Dave needs a vacation
Dave needs a kidney
Dave needs to work one of these into his live appearances
Dave needs to get back into form and get his hair cut
Dave needs to understand the seriousness of his position

Not sure what to do with the plywood.

scarce resources

I've been reading LOTR to Aja at night. We're almost finished book one and its been very enjoyable although it is surprisingly exhausting. Its difficult for me to actually force myself to pronounce all the proper nouns that when I'm reading in my head, I just look at as a block or symbol more than I actually sound out the name and "say" it in my head. I guess I discovered that I'm a lazy reader, or perhaps this is normal, I'm not sure. Anyway, I've also noticed that some of the good dialogue is ten times better when spoken aloud with the gusto it deserves. I'm not really doing seperate voices but I'm trying to say the dialogue with the correct emotion which takes some doing on the fly. If I recall, a few regular readers have also read the trilogy aloud. I would be interested in their recollections of the process.
Fantastic turn of fate: one of Aja's friends has to get ride of her roomate or her cat (one is allergic to the other) and based on contribution towards rent, the cat is now installed in our home until the end of the school year. Its really wonderfull as I absolutly adore cats. He's quite pretty, older and docile and has already quared off with me in a battle for my computer chair. Indeed life is a continuous struggle for scarce resources.

semantic imortality

(I) was thinking that nobody dies anymore. They die of something. Over the last hundred years or so, we have catelogued most every kind of death into a nomenclature of problems and diseases. So what? Well, I wonder what this has done to the way we think about death. Of course we hardly do that anyway but listen: Once upon a time people died of old age (and probably a colourful variety of fancifully named maladies) which perhaps has an air of naturalness to it (whatever that means and feel free to remove the value from this valur-laden term.) Because we generally know why people die, death is transforming from a vague naturalness to a problem-which as we know, problems can be fixed, or by extension problems should be fixed. I'm not advocating anything here I'm just observing. Of course most everyone would chose to be cured of what ails them if they can, I just think there may be an emerging cultural meme that is subtly altering our most abstract thoughts about the endtime. Which led me to wonder that if someday cancer, heart disease, and say a couple other biggies are no longer a problem, will we still without question throw the vast resources of heath care research and spending at whatever kills us now that cancer and heart disease are not dropping us? Also I wonder if we have somehow vaguely substituted the inevitability of death with the glimmering hope that a 'problem' offers. In other words, the mighty sword of modernity may not stave off death but its chances are better against a disease. Are we substituting the inevitable for something less inevitable? Okay, I'm rambling around something here and as always, I'm not sure what it is yet because I don't feel particularly eloquent at the moment. Anyway, another not-really thought out idea, but its what I'm thinking about at the moment.

complexity & non-synthetic models Part II:peculiarities

(I) couldn't sleep last night. I was tossing and turning as I considered my answer of 200Gb/cm3. Its a real curiosity that the scale of the units actually determines the answer sort of. This is kind of unique. If one is determining a density, the mass per volume ratio will always be the same regardless if one uses say cm3 or m3 because the mass will change accordingly. However in this calcaulation, this is not the case. This is owing to the peculiar fact that reality has different ratios of surface area to volume. The larger the volume, the smaller the ratio of surface area to volume. This ratio follows a parabolic curve where at say km3 its a small ratio getting larger and then smaller again at the mm3 scale. This is due of course to the more non-stuff that a large(km3) volume contains. The question that arises is: does the non-stuff in reality contain information?
For example, let us suppose that we hold a coffee cup at a distance D such that it occupies 10 degrees of vision. We can calculate the information that is contained by the cup but if we stray to say 11 degrees, we are looking through nothing but eventually our eye falls on something behind the nothing, say like the wall in front of me. In this sense, there is no such thing as nothing as far as the visual field is concerned. Does this mean that one no longer need concern themselves with scale issues of surface area to volume ratios? I think the answer is yes because what emerges here is the peculiar notion that the information in the visual field is actually a 2 dimensional field that is wrapped around a 3 dimensional matrix. Put another way, it is a 2 dimensional construct that folds in upon itself. But says the mathematician, you still have the same problem, clearly cm3 of a flat table top folds less than say a m3 of say jungle where the surface area to volume is much higher.
This problem can be encapsulated by T (time.) At any discrete value of T, the visual field can be considered entirely 2 dimensional like a picture. Remembering the coffee cup where essentially there was no discrimination between stuff and non stuff. At discrete values of T, the visual field's unfolded componants contribute no information. Our brain interprets this data into a 3d representation. During interaction (interaction implies T1,T2,Tn) with stuff, we experience the 2d visual field folded in on itself but that is while T= T1+Tn. The value of 200 GB/cm3 then is only valid at the cm3 scale. If we wish to make a calculation that is valid at any scale, we must change cm3 to cm2 and then multiply by T. In this way one is capturing the 2d world streatched over the 3d matrix. Additionaly, T respresents minimum disernable quanta of time which is problematic if not outright existentially impossible. However, its also a potential since visual data at T1 may in fact be the same as T2 so we need not tie ourselves in a knot about time but instead use as a value the saccade rate. Putting all this together, we have now closely translated how the 2d visual field unfolds itself from its pan dimensional state without the problem of a high variance in surface to volume ratios. I was thinking of this in bed so I havn't done the math yet to see what this new answer is. I hope this silly thought experiment and this silly update is good for a laugh if not a strange idea or two.

complexity & non-synthetic modeling

(I've) been thinking much about eukaryotic evolution lately. Discovered that I left among the many important titles, Dan Dennett and so I shelled out for another copy and re-read it. This time around I found myself nearly paralyzed with the awe of representation. A common sight around the house was me in a rocking chair, book in lap staring out into space trying to come to terms with my own representation of the world. It looks so real and its hard not to think that your looking through the 'thickness of reality' as opposed to an elaborate and mysterious series of internal? representations of near perfect correspondence (from a subjective, utility perspective). Anyway, this attempt of internal phenomenology produced an overload of awe which at least has born some interesting thought fruit.
For example: I naturally began to be awed at the evolution of our brain and I got thinking that (a la Braitenberg) determining operations from behaviors is really hard and I wondered what kind of computing power would be required to make a synthetic evolutionary model? I knew that it would require a computing scale far beyond that which is attainable for decades. I wondered though how much information would have to be available to make such a model work? Which led me to the most curious question:
How much information does reality contain? in say GB/cm3 (on average)
I worked on this problem for the better part of a week and wrote about 15 pages of thought-clarifying drivel in attempting to solve the problem. Just sorting out the assumptions is quite trying. Of the many interesting sub-problems that emerged from this was the following. Lets say that we're using par example: a cup of coffee. If we try to describe the visual information and reduce it to bits we discover that volume is irrelevant since we don't experience the inside of anything (except if we pick it up in which case its density contributes to the possible experiences we can have but that forms part of the interactive data) As far as the visual world goes, all the information is a summation of surface areas. How curious that reality is 3D, we represent it 3D, and yet the information that describes it is 2D! I don't know why this intrigues me so much but it does. Anyway, after calculating the info inherent to any object plus the object -generated info (ex in different light the object appears different and therefore has info generating capacity), also considering the resolution of the eye(.12mm/.10 degree) determines the scale surface area resolution, plus the colour and hue maximum discriminations, also considering contributing information in tactile interaction both directly (temperature conductivity, texture) and indirectly, plus a bunch of other stuff, I have arrived at the following:

Reality contains on average, 200 GB/cm3 of information(as it pertains to potential human interaction, excluding man-made artifacts, at a given time T)

(what a truly absurd but cool statement!!)

Those wishing to challenge this figure are most welcome to present their own calculations and/or inquire about the methodology not included for brevity.

So the upshot of this was that if we take this number and multiply it by the size of the habitable environment and times the population of eukaryotic life over the 50 million iterations of its evolutionary history, and you've got a number that is bigger than the number of particles in the known universe. Which means that as a computational science problem, an accurate and complete model of eukaryotic evolution is impossible (of course.) Which made me appreciate the 'computing power of nature.' If we imagine evolutionary history as a design solution to a massive computational science problem, we see that problems with information scale impossibilities can be solved by using the massive information contained in things rather than the paltry information generated by virtual things. Very Douglas Adam-sish. I was then just beginning to imagine how one could take advantage of the information and complexity scale advantages of having a computer interact with hunks of stuff when the limit of the thinkable had been breached and my head shut off.

Well, that's what I was thinking about in the Penny last week. Hope anyone who waded through this will have an interesting thought or two about something or other.

colonizing

well, my colonization period is in full swing. I had a short interview at the Canadian Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. They're looking for someone to manage and implement their experiments. It would involve "running the rats" and some histology. He seemed less concerned than me that I have no formal training in immunal histology. I supposed they want someone who is fastidious and used to a research environment which I do have. In any case, It doesn't start till the end of the month so I will know in a couple of weeks.
I've mapped out my immediate surroundings now. The downtown streets are perilously wide, giving the downtown a lonely and slightly lifeless feel to them, Jane Jacobs would certainly be at odds with the designers. I've been cooking well since arriving. Aja's typical table-d'hote is commensurate with my usual apathetic culinary efforts and so I've been putting extra effort into the evening repast. Curiously, I've rather enjoyed the pursuit, a surprising discovery.
I found my new coffee shop/thinking place. Its called "the penny" and contains all social classes, sensational blends, a giant 4mX4m map of the earth, and the best damn ginger snap for a hundered miles. The Penny will likely be the epicenter of my new writing project: Design a religion/way/system of practice/etc for a godless meaningless world. Why design this? Because I am a being whose brain has evolved to seek patterns and order. It therefore becomes necessary to carefully circumsribe that which can be ordered from that which contains no order whatsoever.
I've been playing a curious game today. Its called: "sneak-will". Stare at two objects on the table and then try to observe yourself deciding to choose one to pick up. As you engage in continued repetitions, attempt to experience the present with more temporal width as you observe your decision. Winning conditions are realized when you stop playing.
bye for now

all things in flux

greetings and apologies one and all. Apologies to those I did not see during my brief stay in saskatoon. I returned to town and had my usual hibernation/ sleep recovery/ cultural assimilation time which was followed by a flurry of activity orbiting the gas giant that is living in town (getting an apartment, securing employment, etc.) It would seem though that these preparations were premature. I've said it before that if I ever learn to smell the unexpected, I'd really have an ace up my sleeve. Well the unexpected snuck up on me, odour-free as usual. I found myself enamoured with one miss Aja Mason. She's a neuroscience major, hellcat, and all-around force to be reckoned with. And so it seemed to both of us that being together was the will of the force, (damn mitaclorians!) So without caring much for the absurdity of it all, I've packed up the universe and injected it in Lethbridge. My haste in this process driven partially by the fact that any time to think rationally about the choice would lead me to Newton's second law of motion. Doing what you want sometimes requires you not not think at all.

And so, here I am in a beautiful loft suite with arched ceilings, a vast kitchen and quite honestly the most wonderful space I've ever lived in. I would post some pictures but I seem to have left my camera behind somewhere. I'm going to the university this week to apply for a position in one of the labs so hopefully I will have good news for my next entry.

The city is quite dramatic, the Oldman river slices through town leaving a wake of semi-arid badlands carved on each side with the university on the opposite side that I'm on. The valley in town is a minerologists dream- ammonites litter the ground for those with patience to hunt for them. Also, the mountains are viewable on a fine day. I hope to do some mountain biking which the terrain supports in spades. I think I may also turn in my no automobile paradigm so that we can spend weekends in the mountains climbing and skiing. My excitment here is brimming and all the more so when there's someone I adore to share it with.

I hope all are well, next update in a couple of days...


ps I spent Saskatchewan's 100th birthday by moving to Alberta, I feel so mainstream!

ownership is fleeting

well Todat I bought my own copy of house of leaves. I had it in my possesion for about 15 seconds before I lent it out. I can only wonder where the book may travel in my absence. I leave town tuesday morning early so best wishes to all for the summer. I may get a chance to update this blog over the summer so try it once a month or so until August. Farwell...

q tuesday

well, A pleasant QT hosted at chez Vin & Chantelle. Wee January is a delight toddling about unnerving Chantelle by insisting that a pentagon has only two sides. And of course by being a very cute little two-year-old. A hearty repast followed a brief exchange of rapsheets on house of leaves. I certainly walked away from the book with a more broad message than Vin, who's take on the book is more focused than mine. I hope I can squeeze in one more QT to hear what Mike and James have to say about it. Oh ya, and we watched a couple episodes of Frazier on DVD (holy crap that show is well written.)

Wow, I can't seem to sleep at all of late! No amount of good fresh spring air and exercise and coffee can seem to put me to sleep. Its almost as if the coffee is keeping me awake! I think I must do some research on coffee and see if my crackpot theory holds any water. I suspect I'm unharnessing some nervousness about the summer. I've been getting pretty substantial electrical shocks off everything for the last three days. Really quite peculiar. Today I had the brief sensation that I'd woken up in an X-files episode. After shocking myself on a banana I thought I could here the morose monologue of Fox Moulder behind me. Then I got a shock off the doorknob, my apartment railing, my bikelock, the door to the lab and finally the stray cat that hangs out in the seed cleaning room. Feeling perplexed, I excused myself to the lavatory and got shocked on my sheepish exit. Must get to the bottom of this.

advantages

I guess there are advantages to sleeplessness. A snowstorm fit for a Norse myth is exploding outside right now. Bleery eyesight and a thimble of sherry I'm wrapped in a blanket, admiring the tempest. A drowsy waypoint on my way to sleep.

simple things

I enjoyed my last day off today. I played golf today with a couple friends. What simple creatures we are sometimes to marvel at a little white ball struck high into the air seeking its target. A beautiful saskatchewan spring day, sandhill cranes, canada geese, leaves in various degrees of green, peace and quiet, truly a swell day. It seemed a shame that we needed the excuse of a game to go for an all day walk in the country.

Currently reading D. Dennett's collection of essays Brainstorms. Many of the ideas ended up in Consciousness Explained but its a good read anyway.

the end

Well, I just finished house of leaves. Now what?

a thousand terrible things coming this way

Well this marks my last real weekend in town for a while. Next weekend will be moving & cleaning (I renew my objection to this loathsome pair!) I'm nearing the (end) of house of leaves and will no doubt finish my first of many readings this weekend. I'm thankful to leave behind a few things in town here. Jackasses playing crap music out the windows of their cars, engines revving at red lights, the roar of an engine to fill an otherwise blank soul. I will miss lazy saturday coffee and good conversation though. And so I'm off to enjoy what can be enjoyed in our fair city.

from a certain perspective, life is kinda sappy

well, It was a foul weekend. I found myself late in the week in a mood that did not allow me to cut my fellow man some slack (although I did play some fun hackey-sack with good company). Every overheard tidbit of conversation seemed to be accompanied by the foul reek of ignorance, tepid self-absorbed small little worlds, where nothing of consequence matters. Where the mindless banality of unexamined lives dotted on the dribble that made up the day. Where the majesty and mystery of the world around them was heeded and understood no more than the white noise between incoherent radio personalities. I could have gone on in this vein for hours a couple of days ago but I have spun myself out (but I foreshadow). Anyway, my consuming thought for this period was a remembered exasperated comment from faded on QNY15 who lamented "?what the hell to do people think about all day!" I revisit this theme periodically. When I get like this I feel cursed to be wondrous of the world. I feel condemned to wonder about things. To lie awake at night and ponder why things are not like something else. And it seems (when I'm in this mood) that the further down the path of enquiry one travels, the more you have less in common with everyone else. This is a tired theme, I know. I for one am tired of it. However: On saturday night I went to an oboe recital. The oboe being one of my favorite instruments, I suspected that I would gain some temporary relief from my malaise. I sat in a menonite church waiting for the concert to begin. I noticed the stained glass windows. One panel had a grape motif and I commented to a friend that it was an ironic image. It was a reference to the Dionysian mysteries that christianity literalized. To the christian, the window was a symbol. Of course to the historian, it was a symbol of a literal version of a symbol. Those who have read my QNY pick will unpack my meaning here. Anyway, this pane of glass reinforced my cynicism. Until the music started. The sound of the oboe erased all my petty, inward dialogue and returned my to some baseline, default level of contentment. Until I casually glanced across the pews where my eye caught the sight of a beautiful little chinese girl. She must have been three or so. She I caught her in the act of straining her head to get a better look at what was happening. The expression on her face was pure wonder and total appreciation. As though she were a glass vase with liquid music being poured in. Her whole body was perfectly still. I don't know if anyone in the audience absorbed the music the way she did, but the sight of it coupled with the music made my throat choke up. For the first time in quite a few days, I felt like I do fit in with this world after all. Perhaps this story is a little sappy but its what happened to me over the last few days and I am endeavouring to free my thoughts from the prison of what I think others will think. So sappy or not, there it is.

symphony book sale

went to symphony book sale in confed mall and made off with a number of swell books. Brainstorming by Denett, a wonderful edition of Candide, some chinese lit, some Edward DeBono, Jane Austin and a lushly illustrated book of ancient maps. In other book news I'm on chapter 3 of House of Leaves. So far I've laughed a bit and got pretty scared once. I suspect that soon enough I won't be able to "shut up about it" as cap'n orange would say.
Spent my day at work building a house on a piece of property I've seen for sale on the riverbank. Unfortunately, even in my head I went over budget and had no money left to furnish the inside. I've begun to think recently that I could make good use of a bit more money. My recent endeavors to own a home have led me to this conclusion. It strikes me as a terribly askew that one has to devote so much energy just to have a place to lay your head down somewhere. Housing is certainly one instance where our capitalist economy leaves much to be desired. It seems like a colossal waste of the inestimable gift of time to devote to procuring funds to own a home. Its a comment on our level of prosperity that people apparently get used to spending half there life's fortune on a home. In light of these ill dealt cards, today is day one of thinking about ways I might make a little more money in order to not spend years paying a bank double the asking price of a modest house.

also just came back from a walk in the snowstorm that's currently swallowing the city. I think I prefer a world with weather.

what I thought about at work today

Today I was imagining that for some reason, everywhere on earth and for the last 100,00 years, it was warm and sunny during the day and rain at 8pm every night- without exception. The daily warming and nightly shower were exactly the same every day. I was wondering how that would have changed the way we think? Would we think differently without a constant change in weather? How would that have altered the undulations of culture over the teeming centuries? I thought that it would have a tremendous effect on the development of our culture and enjoyed passing the day away concocting new cultural variants based on this. Comments and scenarios are most welcome.

tell me something good

scene 1: a sparsely furnished, poorly painted living room. All colours in bad taste and generally uncomfortably warm. Wind howls. The sound of a thousand terrible things looms in the distance. I sit in my red chair, my only piece of furniture, and stare at a pile of books on the floor. A reminder that I used to know things. And I sat there thinking of the profound. Curious how I recognize something as profound or as an epiphany. Its a distinct sensation. It almost has a feeling, although its like trying to think of a taste. Its interesting I thought, that somehow, something triggers this sensation. Its as though we're wired to recognize profound things. What's going on here? I can figure out lots of different things, but only specific figuring outs trigger this sensation. I wonder if the recognition of something profound involves tying together a whole bunch of ideas and linking them together with a common thread? Or when I get that sensation, am I really thinking of anything at all? Is it just when one thinks kind of abstractly one can capture an idea better because one is not being specific. Is the sensation of the profound just a slight of hand that my brain is playing with me?
Perhaps there's some meta purpose at work here. Perhaps in a futile attempt to detach myself from my own mortality and the inherent meaninglessness that mortality generates, my brain is predisposed to thinking of "larger than life" ideas, concepts and patterns in the world, such that I can free ride on the immortality of the universe around me. (awkward run-on sentence -1) So in fact, the recognition of the profound is actually the brief denial of mortality by recognizing the immortality of other things and attaching oneself to them. Of course on the surface the content of a profound thing resembles nothing that I've just spoken of.

scene 2: a cluttered bedroom, booster juice cups arranged carelessly at the foot of a stylish office chair, wires, boxes with buttons and sliders adorn the table like the cockpit of the space shuttle. They are reminders that I have hobbies. I'm sipping a glass of Corban's select medium sherry, listening to ltj bukem, and typing at my computer, defiant of my lack of any good reason for doing so. There is a strange noise behind me. I turn to discover that the narration of the past is quickly emerging towards the present as I find myself typing out exactly what's

Finery! Silks! and the Ephemeral Corpse

After having an argument for several hours over Straw Dogs, Geof concludes that Gray doesn't prove his thesis. Geof contends that I prefer the thesis rather than defer to it on logical grounds. After having a few hours to consider it, I think that Gray's argument is one based on a prima facie premise. Either that principle resonates with the reader or no evidence in the world will convince you. The value in the book for me is that Gray gives a lucid voice to the notions that percolate in my head.
For me, the search for meaning became a lamentation before the crucified body of created necessity. When the body is laid to rest, it resurrects and we follow like disciples, till finally necessity of meaning becomes a monolithic leviathan that we can doubt no less easy than doubt our very being. In the absence of a Cartesian doubt, we dissect the rotting corpse only to discover not that the emperor has no clothes, but that he has no body! Clothes-yes. Finery! Silks! Purple and pearls but a body of not even ephemeral quality. It is this revelation that mutes the witness and melts the gospel. And the necessity of miracles disappear like a limp on the stage of a faith healer.
What then of meaning? Well. It is easier to want there to be a blue key, than to search for a blue key that was never forged. Action becomes clarified and what meaning I parcel out to myself becomes true.

another one bites the dust

Well, as much as I loathe commenting on current "events" I really must express my deep sadness over the death of the pope. I'm joking of course, what saddens me is that he will be replaced by another pope. I tell ya, these popes are like cockroaches for trying to get rid of them. Perhaps both cockroaches and popes came on the same ship to italy so many years ago. Thank goodness for the cleanliness of our modern exchange of goods. I doubt with the strict rules of hygiene, Canada could ever see a papal infestation like that which has taken up its foul and filthy roost in italy. And yet life goes on. The church plays its games and we play ours. The battle does not go to the strong nor bread to the wise or speed to the diligent but time and fate happen to peon and pious alike. Nothing more to see here folks. Move along.

one of these things is not like the other

most music isn't very good
most pants do not fit me
most numbers are not 8



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