"The Beluga shipping company that owns the 460-foot Beluga said it expects the kites to decrease fuel consumption by up to 50% in optimal cases as well as a cutback of the emission of greenhouse gases on sea by 10 to 20%. Interestingly, the ship will be hauling windmills from Esbjerg, Denmark to Houston, Texas."...which is, why the fuck is Houston stockpiling windmills?
Monday, November 26, 2007
Parasailing freighters
Very cool, but there's an important, unaddressed question:
Color me dubious
A portable nuclear reactor, huh? Safe, you say?
“In fact, we prefer to call it a ‘drive’ or a ‘battery’ or a ‘module’ in that it’s so safe,” Hyperion spokeswoman Deborah Blackwell says. “Like you don’t open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don’t ever open it or mess with it."Hey! Wait a minute! What you're describing is...is...Happy Fun Ball!
Sunday, November 25, 2007
If There Were a God... (11/25/07)
...he would have struck this man down with a bolt of lightening long, long ago. *shudder* (nsfw)
Whatever you do, _don't_ watch the video clips. I didn't. And I know if I did, my brain would break. The pictures were bad enough.
As the article says:
Whatever you do, _don't_ watch the video clips. I didn't. And I know if I did, my brain would break. The pictures were bad enough.
As the article says:
Not to be all “Think of the children!” — but seriously, think of the children.
Communication whine
If I'm not careful this might turn into an _actual_ blog if keep up this existential musing crap...
I've had a lot of academic frustration lately. Some of it is purely logistical and political; this is not unexpected, and it will pass. But I've also had a log of...hmm...let's say "pedagogical" frustration. No, this isn't a coded way of saying I hate my teacher(s). More, I don't understand things, and when I search out resources to help me understand them, those resources are more likely to infuriate me than enlighten me. Notable exceptions to this are the professors in my department; indeed, that's one of the reasons I (heart) my department: it's full of insanely smart people who are remarkably eloquent and lucid in their explanations of things. Unfortunately, I can't go bug them for every little question that pops into my head.
My frustration revolves much more around written pedagogy in my field. It drives me absolutely batty how profoundly incapable most people seem to be when it comes to verbally communicating an idea. I think I've mentioned at some point previously how dismal Wikipedia is in this regard. On most normal, run-of-the-mill topics, Wikipedia does an admirable job of giving a coherent overview of a given topic. When it comes to highly technical topics, however, it seems to go off the deep end. Technical articles are so inscrutably technical that you basically need to understand the topic before you look it up.
Let me give you an example that made me want to bang my head against a wall today. I wanted to learn about support vector machines (SVM's). Here's Wikipedia's first paragraph in the support vector machine article:
Then look at the fourth sentence: "A special property of SVMs is that they simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin..." Great. The third sentence told me about some weird formalism, and now you've used two terms ("empirical classification error" and "geometric margin") that you haven't defined, nor have you provided a link for. Meanwhile, you still haven't told me any of:
This has become a pet peeve of mine in no small part because stuff like this used to make me feel stupid. I thought I was an idiot because I found it really hard to understand. I am now of the belief that I find it really hard to understand because it's really fucking hard to understand. And, it doesn't need to be. Most people, including a lot of computer scientists and people who might be interested in a topic like this, *gasp* don't think in math. Like most people, a huge amount of their brain is dedicated to visual processing, so give me something to visualize. Also, like most people, it helps them to have a concrete example to frame what you're talking about before you go into the gory details of the theory. If someone would just take the time to write these things in an accessible manner, a lot more people would discover, "Oh, _that's_ what you're talking about! That's much simpler than I thought it was."
Here's what the article on SVMs roughly should have said:
"Support vector machines are a mechanism by which a program can learn to classify data. Imagine, for instance, your data lies on a 2D coordinate plane. Each data point is a dot on that plane, and the data falls roughly into two groups, which translates into two distinct clumps of dots on your 2D plane (perhaps one grouped somewhere around the y-axis and one around the x-axis, for instance). Support vector machines are a learning mechanism that allows an automated agent to segregate the data into the two groups (and, implicitly, to figure out which "clump" a new piece of data should belong to). It does this, roughly, by figuring out what line most cleanly divides one clump from the other."
See? Was that so fucking hard? That's the basic gist of support vector machines, and any schmuck with a basic college education can probably understand it. I'm not that smart. Other people just seem to have the communicative abilities of an orangutan. Grr.
Anyway, it's really really really really frustrating, and I hate it. I don't care how smart you are if you can't communicate your ideas effectively. Part of the reason I am not that interested in areas like security and things like puzzle-solving is that I hate having to figure out things that somebody else already knows but won't/can't/is too incompetent to explain to me. It feels like a profound waste of my time. There are too many problems out there that are hard to solve when we're _cooperating_ without introducing ones that arise just because we're incompetent dicks and can't or won't talk to each other.
I've had a lot of academic frustration lately. Some of it is purely logistical and political; this is not unexpected, and it will pass. But I've also had a log of...hmm...let's say "pedagogical" frustration. No, this isn't a coded way of saying I hate my teacher(s). More, I don't understand things, and when I search out resources to help me understand them, those resources are more likely to infuriate me than enlighten me. Notable exceptions to this are the professors in my department; indeed, that's one of the reasons I (heart) my department: it's full of insanely smart people who are remarkably eloquent and lucid in their explanations of things. Unfortunately, I can't go bug them for every little question that pops into my head.
My frustration revolves much more around written pedagogy in my field. It drives me absolutely batty how profoundly incapable most people seem to be when it comes to verbally communicating an idea. I think I've mentioned at some point previously how dismal Wikipedia is in this regard. On most normal, run-of-the-mill topics, Wikipedia does an admirable job of giving a coherent overview of a given topic. When it comes to highly technical topics, however, it seems to go off the deep end. Technical articles are so inscrutably technical that you basically need to understand the topic before you look it up.
Let me give you an example that made me want to bang my head against a wall today. I wanted to learn about support vector machines (SVM's). Here's Wikipedia's first paragraph in the support vector machine article:
Support vector machines (SVMs) are a set of related supervised learning methods used for classification and regression. They belong to a family of generalized linear classifiers. They can also be considered a special case of Tikhonov regularization. A special property of SVMs is that they simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin; hence they are also known as maximum margin classifiers.To understand my frustration, look no farther than the 3rd sentence: "They can also be considered a special case of Tikhonov regularization." What?! Why? Why the fuck is that the third sentence in the article?? If I'm looking this up in Wikipedia, chances are I want to understand what the fuck an SVM is from a high level. Why is the third thing you tell me related to an obscure formalism that I, and probably most people who look at the article, don't care about?
Then look at the fourth sentence: "A special property of SVMs is that they simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin..." Great. The third sentence told me about some weird formalism, and now you've used two terms ("empirical classification error" and "geometric margin") that you haven't defined, nor have you provided a link for. Meanwhile, you still haven't told me any of:
- What an SVM is in terms a lay-person (or at least a lay-person with a computer science degree) can understand
- What it's used for (in similar terms)
- Why it's called an SVM
There is a remarkable family of bounds governing the relation between the capacity of a learning machine and its performance. The theory grew out of considerations of under what circumstances, and how quickly, the mean of some empirical quantity converges uniformly, as the number of data points increases, to the true mean (that which would be calculated from an infinite amount of data) (Vapnik, 1979). Let us start with one of these bounds.What?! How is something that talks about a "fixed distribution, conditional on xi" an "excellent introduction"? Here's a general rule to go by, as far as I'm concerned: math is not ever an excellent introduction to other math. And indeed, this is the source of my frustration: people who have incredibly analytically adept minds (unlike mine) seem terminally incapable of explaining concepts in anything other than excessively, anally precise mathematical terms that obscure what the fuck they are talking about.
The notation here will largely follow that of (Vapnik, 1995). Suppose we are given l observations. Each observation consists of a pair: a vector xi ∈ Rn, i = 1, . . . , l and the associated “truth” yi, given to us by a trusted source. In the tree recognition problem, xi might be a vector of pixel values (e.g. n = 256 for a 16x16 image), and yi would be 1 if the image contains a tree, and -1 otherwise (we use -1 here rather than 0 to simplify subsequent formulae). Now it is assumed that there exists some unknown probability distribution P(x, y) from which these data are drawn, i.e., the data are assumed “iid” (independently drawn and identically distributed). (We will use P for cumulative probability distributions, and p for their densities). Note that this assumption is more general than associating a fixed y with every x: it allows there to be a distribution of y for a given x. In that case, the trusted source would assign labels yi according to a fixed distribution, conditional on xi. However, after this Section, we will be assuming fixed y for given x.
This has become a pet peeve of mine in no small part because stuff like this used to make me feel stupid. I thought I was an idiot because I found it really hard to understand. I am now of the belief that I find it really hard to understand because it's really fucking hard to understand. And, it doesn't need to be. Most people, including a lot of computer scientists and people who might be interested in a topic like this, *gasp* don't think in math. Like most people, a huge amount of their brain is dedicated to visual processing, so give me something to visualize. Also, like most people, it helps them to have a concrete example to frame what you're talking about before you go into the gory details of the theory. If someone would just take the time to write these things in an accessible manner, a lot more people would discover, "Oh, _that's_ what you're talking about! That's much simpler than I thought it was."
Here's what the article on SVMs roughly should have said:
"Support vector machines are a mechanism by which a program can learn to classify data. Imagine, for instance, your data lies on a 2D coordinate plane. Each data point is a dot on that plane, and the data falls roughly into two groups, which translates into two distinct clumps of dots on your 2D plane (perhaps one grouped somewhere around the y-axis and one around the x-axis, for instance). Support vector machines are a learning mechanism that allows an automated agent to segregate the data into the two groups (and, implicitly, to figure out which "clump" a new piece of data should belong to). It does this, roughly, by figuring out what line most cleanly divides one clump from the other."
See? Was that so fucking hard? That's the basic gist of support vector machines, and any schmuck with a basic college education can probably understand it. I'm not that smart. Other people just seem to have the communicative abilities of an orangutan. Grr.
Anyway, it's really really really really frustrating, and I hate it. I don't care how smart you are if you can't communicate your ideas effectively. Part of the reason I am not that interested in areas like security and things like puzzle-solving is that I hate having to figure out things that somebody else already knows but won't/can't/is too incompetent to explain to me. It feels like a profound waste of my time. There are too many problems out there that are hard to solve when we're _cooperating_ without introducing ones that arise just because we're incompetent dicks and can't or won't talk to each other.
The Discovery Institute can't even get copyright correct
Okay, that's it. The gloves are off now. It's one thing to spout anti-evolutionary pseudo-science. It's another to pirate the stuff biologists produce without attribution (especially when it's Harvard biologists who made it).
I hope Harvard Law has a field day with this one and sues those idiots out of house and home. Especially since they seem to have made their home in my backyard. I think the term "infested" might actually be more appropriate...
I hope Harvard Law has a field day with this one and sues those idiots out of house and home. Especially since they seem to have made their home in my backyard. I think the term "infested" might actually be more appropriate...
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Kasparov arrested
Predictable but sad. Things seemed like they were looking up for Russia under Gorbachev, but it looks like they are descending back into the old ways. Sigh.
"Taking Science on Faith" - find the logical fallacy, kids!
This kind of horse shit apologetics (small 'a', not big 'A') just irritates the fuck out of me, even more so given that the author is a physics professor and should know better. Here's the op-ed, and here's the problem with it:
First of all (and this is mostly just kind of an annoyed aside), the observation isn't even remotely novel. It's been around for quite a while, and anyone who took even the most basic course in philosophy will recognize we've slammed head-first, yet again, into Hume's problem of induction. You just rediscovered it, Mr. Davies. Congratulations. You want a cookie for that brilliant insight?
Okay, so if we start worrying on a philosophical level about the methodologies of science, then yes, Hume threw us a hell of a curve ball, one that is basically unresolvable. We only expect the future to resemble the past because, in the past, the future has typically resembled the past, etc. etc., blah blah blah. It is entirely possible that we could wake up tomorrow, the sky would be green, everything would be floating, the sun would have exploded, and time would be going backwards. Nothing in science can guarantee that won't happen.
So? Why is that an indictment of science? If you read Feynman's stuff (as I was trying to get a certain crackpot, who understands science even _less_ than Davies does, to do) he'll tell you that doubt and uncertainty are quintessential to science. Let's remember what the scientific method is:
So, where Davies claims that, "Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith," I claim that Davies needs to go the fuck back to school because he doesn't understand the philosophical underpinnings of science, and he should keep his damn yap shut (or at least refrain from publishing idiotic op-eds in the New York Times) until he does.
(yes, I know I'm taking on a cranky tone...I'm just tired of seeing this kind of shoddy thinking over and over again, and if a damn academic can't get it right, we have no hope of the voting populace differentiating between pseudoscience like creationism/ID and _actual_ science)
Now, an entirely separate issue Davies brings up is the origin of the set of laws that (seem to, so far) govern the universe. Davies off-handedly dismisses his colleagues who claim, "that’s not a scientific question," but in fact (again if Davies understood science at all), that's the right answer. Why? Because we have absolutely no way of testing any hypothesis we come up with. Any explanation you could come up with as to why the set of laws are the way they are is almost by definition untestable. Think about it: how the hell would you test any explanation you came up with? What experiment could you do that would invalidate your hypothesis?
Here's another way to look at it: our only experience is with the particular universe we live in. Religious philosophers always like to posit things like, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and then use that to justify a belief in god, but if we're being intellectually honest here, we have no justification for believing nothing is any more or less reasonable than something. We have no frame of reference, no way to control for variables. It's not like we have been in 99 other universes where there was nothing and then we happened upon this one where there finally was something. Nope. Just this one.
Similarly, we have no justification to believing this particular something is more or less reasonable a universe than some other, less life-friendly something. We have no framework in which to evaluate such reasonableness. We're kind of SOL on the scientific front in this regard. These are questions more suitable for philosophers and religions, although I of course feel the need to point out that any ideas they come up with are merely finely crafted bull-shittery since such ideas would be, say it with me now, untestable and unverifiable.
Sigh. The only thing worse than dumb people is dumb people who should be, and think they are, smart.
First of all (and this is mostly just kind of an annoyed aside), the observation isn't even remotely novel. It's been around for quite a while, and anyone who took even the most basic course in philosophy will recognize we've slammed head-first, yet again, into Hume's problem of induction. You just rediscovered it, Mr. Davies. Congratulations. You want a cookie for that brilliant insight?
Okay, so if we start worrying on a philosophical level about the methodologies of science, then yes, Hume threw us a hell of a curve ball, one that is basically unresolvable. We only expect the future to resemble the past because, in the past, the future has typically resembled the past, etc. etc., blah blah blah. It is entirely possible that we could wake up tomorrow, the sky would be green, everything would be floating, the sun would have exploded, and time would be going backwards. Nothing in science can guarantee that won't happen.
So? Why is that an indictment of science? If you read Feynman's stuff (as I was trying to get a certain crackpot, who understands science even _less_ than Davies does, to do) he'll tell you that doubt and uncertainty are quintessential to science. Let's remember what the scientific method is:
- observe
- theorize
- test
So, where Davies claims that, "Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith," I claim that Davies needs to go the fuck back to school because he doesn't understand the philosophical underpinnings of science, and he should keep his damn yap shut (or at least refrain from publishing idiotic op-eds in the New York Times) until he does.
(yes, I know I'm taking on a cranky tone...I'm just tired of seeing this kind of shoddy thinking over and over again, and if a damn academic can't get it right, we have no hope of the voting populace differentiating between pseudoscience like creationism/ID and _actual_ science)
Now, an entirely separate issue Davies brings up is the origin of the set of laws that (seem to, so far) govern the universe. Davies off-handedly dismisses his colleagues who claim, "that’s not a scientific question," but in fact (again if Davies understood science at all), that's the right answer. Why? Because we have absolutely no way of testing any hypothesis we come up with. Any explanation you could come up with as to why the set of laws are the way they are is almost by definition untestable. Think about it: how the hell would you test any explanation you came up with? What experiment could you do that would invalidate your hypothesis?
Here's another way to look at it: our only experience is with the particular universe we live in. Religious philosophers always like to posit things like, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and then use that to justify a belief in god, but if we're being intellectually honest here, we have no justification for believing nothing is any more or less reasonable than something. We have no frame of reference, no way to control for variables. It's not like we have been in 99 other universes where there was nothing and then we happened upon this one where there finally was something. Nope. Just this one.
Similarly, we have no justification to believing this particular something is more or less reasonable a universe than some other, less life-friendly something. We have no framework in which to evaluate such reasonableness. We're kind of SOL on the scientific front in this regard. These are questions more suitable for philosophers and religions, although I of course feel the need to point out that any ideas they come up with are merely finely crafted bull-shittery since such ideas would be, say it with me now, untestable and unverifiable.
Sigh. The only thing worse than dumb people is dumb people who should be, and think they are, smart.
Friday, November 23, 2007
The Washlet
These people apparently have a way, way, way too intimate relationship with their toilet. (very mildly nsfw)
AdultSheepFinder.com
"I am a Man/Woman/Couple/Group looking for Anything/1-on-1 sheep/discreet sheep/multiple sheep/shaved sheep/sheep fetishists/black sheep/"dogging"/transgender sheep"...
It's the official dating site of New Zealand!
It's the official dating site of New Zealand!
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
A sentence summary of all the Star Trek films
Because I was accused of sending a nerdy email today, to which I indignantly respond, "I have no yet begun to nerd!" Also, primarily for the benefit of my girlfriend, who has, perhaps fortunately, never seen a single one.
Some of these aren't even full sentences!
God help you, J. J. Abrams, if you end up adding yet another shitty movie to the franchise.
Some of these aren't even full sentences!
- Take some acid, wig out on the trippiest special effects the late 70s had to offer, and be amused by the twist ending. (memorable quote: "V'Ger!")
- A battle of overacting between James T. Kirk and an over-the-top, Shakespeare-quoting villain. (memorable quote: "KKHHHHHHAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!")
- Steal a spaceship, battle some Klingons, and go revive an essential cast member. (memorable quote: "That green-blooded son of a bitch! It's his revenge for all the arguments he lost.")
- Whales and time travel...'nuff said. (memorable quote: "We are looking for da nuclear wessels.")
- The crew of the Enterprise join a cult and go looking for God in the center of the universe. (memorable quote: "Be one with the horse.")
- A moon blows up, Klingons realized they're fucked, peace talks begin, and certain parties are none to happy about it. (memorable quote: "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.")
- Malcolm McDowell zealously pursues the happiest, sparkliest zipper in the universe. (memorable quote: "Actually, Captain, I am familiar with history. And if I'm not mistaken, you're dead. ")
- Bill Gates...sorry, I mean a group of insect-like cyborgs...try to fuck up the drunk who built the first warp drive by traveling back in time. (memorable quote: "Definitely not Swedish...")
- Ugly people take out their frustrations on less ugly people. (memorable quote: "The Son'a wish to negotiate a cease-fire. It may have to do with the fact that we only have three minutes of air left.")
- The Enterprise fucks with a big fuck-all tank of a spaceship built by angry people in desperate need of a tan. (memorable quote: "Ladies and gentlemen and invited transgender species...")
- ???
God help you, J. J. Abrams, if you end up adding yet another shitty movie to the franchise.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Chuck Norris and Mike Huckabee
Mike Huckabee is a fringe looney, but nonetheless, this is really funny:
Monday, November 19, 2007
"Fiscal responsibility"
(part of) Why I never want to hear another Republican accuse another Democrat of fiscal irresponsibility:
(although, admittedly, only the last red box is really relevant...otherwise the first thing any decent Republican debater worth his or her salt would bring up is who controlled Congress in those various time periods...)
(although, admittedly, only the last red box is really relevant...otherwise the first thing any decent Republican debater worth his or her salt would bring up is who controlled Congress in those various time periods...)
Scientific basis for the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory!
From the annals of "Well, duh." scientific theory, we finally have independent, methodical verification for Jon Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Halfnium fairy tales
I found this article in the Washington Post on "Halfnium bombs" profoundly depressing. This is exactly the way science is _not_ supposed to work (and why am I not surprised the Rumsfeld DoD had a part in it?).
We're talking about the next cold fusion in the sense that cold fusion also turned out to be a pipe dream. This is supposed to be _science_, boys and girls; if it can't be independently verified, it's a fairy tale. In this case, they tried to verify it once, failed, got yelled at by the kook who made the original claims because they supposedly did it wrong, ran it _again_ to his new specifications, and it still failed. On top of that, a group of the best and brightest reviewed the concept and said it didn't work, hadn't worked, and fundamentally couldn't work. In other words, independent verification failed. Spectacularly. So why the fuck are we still spending money on this horse shit?
On top of it all, the episode has all the telltale signs of pseudo-science. When you start claiming that the reason your idea has not been accepted is because of a cabal of established scientists who are too closed-minded to accept a "revolutionary" idea, that's pretty much sign #1 in my mind that you're probably a crackpot. The number of Galileos and Einsteins in the world is greatly outnumbered by nutcases with genuinely stupid ideas. Moreover, you'll notice that Einstein's theories were quickly proven _correct_ once objective experiments were devised. Reproducible results: there's a novel idea!
But you're right...I'm sure Einstein had much less resistance to his idea that time slowed down the faster you traveled and that gravity wasn't so much a force as a curvature in the 4th dimension. Clearly your ideas are much more threatening to the scientific establishment, and they're all just too incompetent to reproduce your results correctly.
Sigh.
I can't help but think this kind of shit is kith and kin to other forms of magical thinking Americans seem to be especially prone to lately like homeopathy and naturopathy. The terms "alternative" and "complementary" medicine, which have been bandied about a lot lately, drive me insane. They are idiotic, meaningless terms meant to suggest that somehow, you know, the scientific method just isn't quite cutting it. This is exactly the same logic used by people who try to tell you that you're being closed-minded when you won't consider the Bible as "another source of knowledge," "different" from science. Not inferior, or the refuge of crackpots, no! It's just "different."
Horse. Shit. I am so incredibly tired of this line of reasoning. Let's dispell it right now, shall we?
Science _is_ knowledge. The two are synonymous. If your "knowledge" is not scientifically acquired, it isn't knowledge. That was the whole point of the scientific method. Namely, if an independent 3rd party can't verify something, it isn't true. Period. End of statement. You can believe that extract of whosiwhatsis improves your mental health all you want, but if a double-blind study shows no difference between your extract and placebo, you're full of shit.
And indeed, that's the crux of the whole issue: the revolution that was science was the ability to objectively show someone was full of shit. See, the human imagination is powerful. It's capable of coming up with lots and lots of weird ideas about the world. But...psst...most of them are _wrong_. Hate to break your bubble, but there are certain rules the universe operates by, and if your rules contradict the universe's, hey, guess what? You lose. You can believe that your crushed DirtyHippyBerries will inspire your aura to enhance your body's natural disease resistance all you want, but in the meantime that cancer is going to keep merrily metastasizing until you're dead. Universe: 1, stupid hippy: 0.
There's no truth in belief, sunshine.
(In fact, it's even worse than that: the moment there _is_ truth in belief, it's not belief any more. It's been objectively verified, which means it's *gasp* science! So _by the very definition of it_, belief is not truth!)
We're talking about the next cold fusion in the sense that cold fusion also turned out to be a pipe dream. This is supposed to be _science_, boys and girls; if it can't be independently verified, it's a fairy tale. In this case, they tried to verify it once, failed, got yelled at by the kook who made the original claims because they supposedly did it wrong, ran it _again_ to his new specifications, and it still failed. On top of that, a group of the best and brightest reviewed the concept and said it didn't work, hadn't worked, and fundamentally couldn't work. In other words, independent verification failed. Spectacularly. So why the fuck are we still spending money on this horse shit?
On top of it all, the episode has all the telltale signs of pseudo-science. When you start claiming that the reason your idea has not been accepted is because of a cabal of established scientists who are too closed-minded to accept a "revolutionary" idea, that's pretty much sign #1 in my mind that you're probably a crackpot. The number of Galileos and Einsteins in the world is greatly outnumbered by nutcases with genuinely stupid ideas. Moreover, you'll notice that Einstein's theories were quickly proven _correct_ once objective experiments were devised. Reproducible results: there's a novel idea!
But you're right...I'm sure Einstein had much less resistance to his idea that time slowed down the faster you traveled and that gravity wasn't so much a force as a curvature in the 4th dimension. Clearly your ideas are much more threatening to the scientific establishment, and they're all just too incompetent to reproduce your results correctly.
Sigh.
I can't help but think this kind of shit is kith and kin to other forms of magical thinking Americans seem to be especially prone to lately like homeopathy and naturopathy. The terms "alternative" and "complementary" medicine, which have been bandied about a lot lately, drive me insane. They are idiotic, meaningless terms meant to suggest that somehow, you know, the scientific method just isn't quite cutting it. This is exactly the same logic used by people who try to tell you that you're being closed-minded when you won't consider the Bible as "another source of knowledge," "different" from science. Not inferior, or the refuge of crackpots, no! It's just "different."
Horse. Shit. I am so incredibly tired of this line of reasoning. Let's dispell it right now, shall we?
Science _is_ knowledge. The two are synonymous. If your "knowledge" is not scientifically acquired, it isn't knowledge. That was the whole point of the scientific method. Namely, if an independent 3rd party can't verify something, it isn't true. Period. End of statement. You can believe that extract of whosiwhatsis improves your mental health all you want, but if a double-blind study shows no difference between your extract and placebo, you're full of shit.
And indeed, that's the crux of the whole issue: the revolution that was science was the ability to objectively show someone was full of shit. See, the human imagination is powerful. It's capable of coming up with lots and lots of weird ideas about the world. But...psst...most of them are _wrong_. Hate to break your bubble, but there are certain rules the universe operates by, and if your rules contradict the universe's, hey, guess what? You lose. You can believe that your crushed DirtyHippyBerries will inspire your aura to enhance your body's natural disease resistance all you want, but in the meantime that cancer is going to keep merrily metastasizing until you're dead. Universe: 1, stupid hippy: 0.
There's no truth in belief, sunshine.
(In fact, it's even worse than that: the moment there _is_ truth in belief, it's not belief any more. It's been objectively verified, which means it's *gasp* science! So _by the very definition of it_, belief is not truth!)
Sunday, November 18, 2007
The most important thing I learned from "Beowulf"
Don't, under any circumstances, bang a water demon, even if she looks like Angelina Jolie. Just...don't.
Giuliani
Fyi, Giuliani is a giant douchenozzle. Not as obviously a douchenozzle as GW, but a douchenozzle nonetheless. Besides, as Biden so eloquently pointed out, not being able to say anything that isn't of the form, "noun + verb + 9/11," he is nepotistic, short-sighted asshole. And apparently only European tv is willing to say so.
What depresses me most is that the following is going to happen: Hilary is going to win the Democratic nomination, and Giuliani is going to win the Republican nomination. A combination of a well-organized Republican attack machine and Hilary's simultaneous ability to shoot herself in the foot and alienate everybody is going to allow Giuliani to win. And once he gets in the White House, he'll be the same douchenozzle he is today, and the people who voted for him will act surprised. Just like they did when GW turned out to be such a monumentally incompetent asshole.
So...fuck Giuliani and fuck Hilary, in that order. I'll be over here trying to figure out a way to monetize the kind of stupidity that gets these people elected.
What depresses me most is that the following is going to happen: Hilary is going to win the Democratic nomination, and Giuliani is going to win the Republican nomination. A combination of a well-organized Republican attack machine and Hilary's simultaneous ability to shoot herself in the foot and alienate everybody is going to allow Giuliani to win. And once he gets in the White House, he'll be the same douchenozzle he is today, and the people who voted for him will act surprised. Just like they did when GW turned out to be such a monumentally incompetent asshole.
So...fuck Giuliani and fuck Hilary, in that order. I'll be over here trying to figure out a way to monetize the kind of stupidity that gets these people elected.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Hot, sweaty Fox News action (nsfw)
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Friday, November 16, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Minority Report-ish nerdery
How to make a Minority Report-like interface with a Wii remote, some reflective tape and some infrared LEDs.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Scenes from my whiteboard, part 2
"Guys-
Please hit me with some cash for the K. lunch. Guys without jobs only pay for the people they're nailing. So, that's a second option."
-- name withheld to protect the guilty
Monday, November 12, 2007
People I don't feel sorry for include
Hey, news flash: every employer checks Facebook. Guess your dumb ass just found that out the hard way, didn't you?
Top 10 lamest tattoos
College Call Girl (henceforth CCG) recently did a post on the lamest kinds of tattoos out there. Granted, I am not "inked," nor do I know pretty much anything about the culture, but I certainly sympathize with the sentiment that if you're going to permanently mark your body, it had better be unique and interesting. Is there anything sadder than permanently embedding something in your skin that says, "Look! I do whatever the latest trend tells me to do, and I can provide the forensic evidence to prove it!"
(Aside: one of the comments in that post read, "He is a total douchenozzle." That is _so_ my new favoritest word.)
(Aside: one of the comments in that post read, "He is a total douchenozzle." That is _so_ my new favoritest word.)
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Your daily douchebag (11/11/07)
Congratulations, House Democrats! You've just earned yourself a Daily Douchebag!
I don't even know where to start with this one. I know: let's start with the embarrassment of pork that was the Bush-veto-overridden Water Resources Development Act.
The WRDA proved once again that if there's anything that brings lawmakers together, it's a bill chock full of pet projects that are of dubious utility. I don't even know what things are in the bill; all I know is that if Trent Lott says the bill is filled with, “good, deserved, justified projects,” it's almost certainly a bad idea given Lott's history.
Point being, while Democrats are being spineless pussies about the important stuff...like, you know, _torture_...they crow about defying Bush in order to do important things like give additional money to the Bridges to Nowhere. And btw Democrats: I hate you perhaps most for inducing me to link to a Heritage Foundation page. I feel dirty in a way that a week's worth of showers is probably not going to fix. *shudder*
But, let's get to the crux of their current douchebaggery. After bitching (rightly) about Bush co. and the Republicans' completely fucked up priorities (Terry Shiavo, anyone?), they turn around and come up with this gem. Because really...what's the point in training the next medical researcher if he or she is going to have downloaded music illegally? Even if they come up with the next Polio vaccine, if an illegal copy of the latest Britney Spears album is festering on their computer, hasn't the moral battle already been lost?
The Republicans think the greatest threat to our country is gay people getting married. Democrats apparently insist that, no, really it's music piracy that will be the downfall of our civilization, and we must threaten the livelihood of our educational system in order to do the RIAA's work for them. And everybody is pandering to their fucking political and financial base as we bleed $200 million _per day_ on a war no one can come up with a coherent explanation why we're waging. Meanwhile, China (authoritarian regime though they may be) is actually teaching its students science, a fact that _might_ just have some long-term ramifications.
I hate everything.
I don't even know where to start with this one. I know: let's start with the embarrassment of pork that was the Bush-veto-overridden Water Resources Development Act.
The WRDA proved once again that if there's anything that brings lawmakers together, it's a bill chock full of pet projects that are of dubious utility. I don't even know what things are in the bill; all I know is that if Trent Lott says the bill is filled with, “good, deserved, justified projects,” it's almost certainly a bad idea given Lott's history.
Point being, while Democrats are being spineless pussies about the important stuff...like, you know, _torture_...they crow about defying Bush in order to do important things like give additional money to the Bridges to Nowhere. And btw Democrats: I hate you perhaps most for inducing me to link to a Heritage Foundation page. I feel dirty in a way that a week's worth of showers is probably not going to fix. *shudder*
But, let's get to the crux of their current douchebaggery. After bitching (rightly) about Bush co. and the Republicans' completely fucked up priorities (Terry Shiavo, anyone?), they turn around and come up with this gem. Because really...what's the point in training the next medical researcher if he or she is going to have downloaded music illegally? Even if they come up with the next Polio vaccine, if an illegal copy of the latest Britney Spears album is festering on their computer, hasn't the moral battle already been lost?
The Republicans think the greatest threat to our country is gay people getting married. Democrats apparently insist that, no, really it's music piracy that will be the downfall of our civilization, and we must threaten the livelihood of our educational system in order to do the RIAA's work for them. And everybody is pandering to their fucking political and financial base as we bleed $200 million _per day_ on a war no one can come up with a coherent explanation why we're waging. Meanwhile, China (authoritarian regime though they may be) is actually teaching its students science, a fact that _might_ just have some long-term ramifications.
I hate everything.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Your daily douchebag (10/10/07)
A Daily Douchebag to a head of state: Hugo Chavez.
It's hard to be critical of such an outspoken critic of Bush, but it not the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Which is to say, Chavez is an asshole. I mean, after all, part of the reason Bush co. are assholes is that they are arrogant pricks who don't want to even listen to alternative viewpoints. That defines Chavez to a T. What kind of asshole interrupts another head of state at a summit? I don't give a shit if he's being critical of you. You're the president of a sovereign nation, not in fucking middle school. Grow the fuck up.
Oh, and stop trying to be a dictator, asshole. Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro are not models to emulate any more than Bush is.
It's hard to be critical of such an outspoken critic of Bush, but it not the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Which is to say, Chavez is an asshole. I mean, after all, part of the reason Bush co. are assholes is that they are arrogant pricks who don't want to even listen to alternative viewpoints. That defines Chavez to a T. What kind of asshole interrupts another head of state at a summit? I don't give a shit if he's being critical of you. You're the president of a sovereign nation, not in fucking middle school. Grow the fuck up.
Oh, and stop trying to be a dictator, asshole. Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro are not models to emulate any more than Bush is.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Revisiting old school Simpsons genius
Way too much of my life plays out like this. Whether I'm Flanders or Homer I'll leave up to you to figure out...
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Public Dick
Don't worry...safe for work. Sort of.
I'm pretty sure this guy is following in the distinguished trail blazed by the likes of Ann Coulter, who by comparison is downright eloquent. I think it's even clearer for Dick, but I still firmly believe that both of them just want attention and decided long ago that pissing off as many people as they could would be a good way to get it.
I mean, really...doesn't this clip run like a badly staged Jerry Springer episode to you? He's totally a heel! They guy isn't even a good actor!
I'm pretty sure this guy is following in the distinguished trail blazed by the likes of Ann Coulter, who by comparison is downright eloquent. I think it's even clearer for Dick, but I still firmly believe that both of them just want attention and decided long ago that pissing off as many people as they could would be a good way to get it.
I mean, really...doesn't this clip run like a badly staged Jerry Springer episode to you? He's totally a heel! They guy isn't even a good actor!
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Ron Paul
Having seen another car with "Ron Paul in '08!" written on the back, I feel the need to point out that just because Dr. Paul, unlike his Republican colleagues,
- is not an utter moron,
- holds a deeper understanding of and opinion about foreign policy than, "terrorists...bad!", and
- is honest,
Seattle light rail - it lives!!!
Egads! Looky what I saw on the bus today!
They wuz testing it 'n stuff. Are they really going to be orange?
Also, I was on a 2 Express bus tonight and it passed another 2 Express. I felt a slight tear in the fabric of space time as it happened.
They wuz testing it 'n stuff. Are they really going to be orange?
Also, I was on a 2 Express bus tonight and it passed another 2 Express. I felt a slight tear in the fabric of space time as it happened.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Soul-killing sexual positions for the lonely and loveless
That...that ain't right. (more conceptually NSFW than anything else)
Google releases Android
No, this is not the beginning of some bizarre science fiction movie. "Android" is their attempt to create an open source OS for future phone platform development. (aside: you expecting an ad supported free phone? What are you, retarded?)
What I actually hope comes out of this is for Apple (and AT&T, I guess) to stop being greedy whores and open up their fucking platform. Much as I like the idea of an open development environment, I have no faith that anyone at Google or anyone that uses their platform can design a UI any better than the idiots at Microsoft, whereas if Apple's proved anything it's that they are masters of the user interface.
What I actually hope comes out of this is for Apple (and AT&T, I guess) to stop being greedy whores and open up their fucking platform. Much as I like the idea of an open development environment, I have no faith that anyone at Google or anyone that uses their platform can design a UI any better than the idiots at Microsoft, whereas if Apple's proved anything it's that they are masters of the user interface.
NYT atheism blog post
I happened to notice there was a New York Times blog post on, not actually atheism, per se, but on the question of an omnipotent god allowing evil in the world and its effect on various religious and areligious philosophers. Or the ye olde "Why do bad things happen to good people?" question (isn't the reverse question just as interesting?).
It's an amusing exercise, but if you're arguing about atheism, it's absolutely the wrong issue to be hung up on. Sure, it's one nail in the coffin of theistic reasoning, but it's only one nail, and frankly, I don't even think it's that compelling. As several of the authors on both sides of the argument eventually, circuitously realize, "good" and "bad" are subjective words that depend on some kind of moral framework that just ends up begging the question. Where do our morals come from? How do we judge that which is good or bad?
The kook Flew decides that this question is the damning indictment of atheism and, apparently, has based his "magical transformation" from an atheist philosopher into some kind of born-again weirdo on it. Frankly, I think if you spend your life trying to make obsessively clean logical arguments on either side of the issue, there is probably something basically wrong with you from the get-go (and no, I don't think the occasional blog post qualifies). But, that's beside the point.
Anyway, the argument that Flew brings up is basically, "Where do you get your morals from? Doesn't the fact that you have some moral compass at all suggest something transcendental about the notion of morals in the first place? More generally, how can notions of truth, justice, morality, etc. arise from a purely materialistic world? What is the thing (i.e., you) that's making moral judgments anyway? Aren't you just a collection of chemicals?"
...which brings us to the _actual_ question we're apparently talking about, which has very little to do with morality. It is the venerable mind-body problem, and it has a long and distinguished history. It amounts, basically, to, "How do minds arise out of bodies?" Which is to say, where does the "you" that's sitting behind your eyes, perceiving the world and making judgments, come from?
And, you know, it _is_ a problem. At some fundamental level, I don't really have an answer for it. I think it's telling that you can get very compelling materialistic explanations out of brain research. How can you maintain the notion of a soul when damaging various parts of people's brains (don't do that purposefully, incidentally) can result in drastic personality differences? Look at the case of Phineas Gage, whose personality became _drastically_ different when a pole went through part of his brain. Doesn't that suggest, at the very least, that some piece of what we consider the "mind" does indeed arise out of the material, physical structure of the brain? And doesn't that drive a similar pole through the idea of an eternal soul? What are you if I can, in some fundamental way, change that you by changing your brain?
At the same time, I don't think even those experiments can explain you to _yourself_. Maybe it can tell you about other people, but on some level, it can't tel you about you. In other words, I perceive myself: there's some kind of personality behind these eyes looking at the world, making judgments, etc. Where does that come from? Objective observation fails here, because in this case the observer and the observed are inseparable. I can't objectively observe myself. It's quintessentially and philosophically impossible. There's always going to be some piece of me that is playing the part of "observer," and fundamentally that observer cannot observe itself. Sure, you can be introspective about your emotions, your thoughts, wonder to yourself, "Why do I keep thinking about pop tarts?", etc., but the point is, there's some part of you observing those thoughts, and it's that part...whatever it is...that cannot be observed by itself.
So, the scientific method reaches its limits here. Just because that's true, however, doesn't mean that materialistic philosophy is damned. It just means that there's something it has trouble answering. Note that it doesn't give a _wrong_ answer (as theists have so often historically done...irrefutably proved wrong, incidentally, not by their own reasoning processes but by scientists)...it just has a hard time coming up with one. I'm okay with that. Maybe it's a fundamentally impossible problem. There are lots of things that are impossible in the world. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle comes to mind: you can't, no matter how hard you try, figure out both the position and the momentum of a quantum particle no matter how what. Maybe the same is true of you figuring out yourself.
I still think that it's better framework to reason about the world than magical, unjustifiable thinking. Sure, religious people have an answer to this question ("well it's your _soul_, silly!"), but, let's be honest, that's retarded. Or, less inflammatorily, it's unjustified. It's an explanation pulled out of a hat that's true because someone, probably in Rome, wearing that silly hat, said it's true.
And that's a ridiculous and stupid basis for any kind of understanding of the world.
It's an amusing exercise, but if you're arguing about atheism, it's absolutely the wrong issue to be hung up on. Sure, it's one nail in the coffin of theistic reasoning, but it's only one nail, and frankly, I don't even think it's that compelling. As several of the authors on both sides of the argument eventually, circuitously realize, "good" and "bad" are subjective words that depend on some kind of moral framework that just ends up begging the question. Where do our morals come from? How do we judge that which is good or bad?
The kook Flew decides that this question is the damning indictment of atheism and, apparently, has based his "magical transformation" from an atheist philosopher into some kind of born-again weirdo on it. Frankly, I think if you spend your life trying to make obsessively clean logical arguments on either side of the issue, there is probably something basically wrong with you from the get-go (and no, I don't think the occasional blog post qualifies). But, that's beside the point.
Anyway, the argument that Flew brings up is basically, "Where do you get your morals from? Doesn't the fact that you have some moral compass at all suggest something transcendental about the notion of morals in the first place? More generally, how can notions of truth, justice, morality, etc. arise from a purely materialistic world? What is the thing (i.e., you) that's making moral judgments anyway? Aren't you just a collection of chemicals?"
...which brings us to the _actual_ question we're apparently talking about, which has very little to do with morality. It is the venerable mind-body problem, and it has a long and distinguished history. It amounts, basically, to, "How do minds arise out of bodies?" Which is to say, where does the "you" that's sitting behind your eyes, perceiving the world and making judgments, come from?
And, you know, it _is_ a problem. At some fundamental level, I don't really have an answer for it. I think it's telling that you can get very compelling materialistic explanations out of brain research. How can you maintain the notion of a soul when damaging various parts of people's brains (don't do that purposefully, incidentally) can result in drastic personality differences? Look at the case of Phineas Gage, whose personality became _drastically_ different when a pole went through part of his brain. Doesn't that suggest, at the very least, that some piece of what we consider the "mind" does indeed arise out of the material, physical structure of the brain? And doesn't that drive a similar pole through the idea of an eternal soul? What are you if I can, in some fundamental way, change that you by changing your brain?
At the same time, I don't think even those experiments can explain you to _yourself_. Maybe it can tell you about other people, but on some level, it can't tel you about you. In other words, I perceive myself: there's some kind of personality behind these eyes looking at the world, making judgments, etc. Where does that come from? Objective observation fails here, because in this case the observer and the observed are inseparable. I can't objectively observe myself. It's quintessentially and philosophically impossible. There's always going to be some piece of me that is playing the part of "observer," and fundamentally that observer cannot observe itself. Sure, you can be introspective about your emotions, your thoughts, wonder to yourself, "Why do I keep thinking about pop tarts?", etc., but the point is, there's some part of you observing those thoughts, and it's that part...whatever it is...that cannot be observed by itself.
So, the scientific method reaches its limits here. Just because that's true, however, doesn't mean that materialistic philosophy is damned. It just means that there's something it has trouble answering. Note that it doesn't give a _wrong_ answer (as theists have so often historically done...irrefutably proved wrong, incidentally, not by their own reasoning processes but by scientists)...it just has a hard time coming up with one. I'm okay with that. Maybe it's a fundamentally impossible problem. There are lots of things that are impossible in the world. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle comes to mind: you can't, no matter how hard you try, figure out both the position and the momentum of a quantum particle no matter how what. Maybe the same is true of you figuring out yourself.
I still think that it's better framework to reason about the world than magical, unjustifiable thinking. Sure, religious people have an answer to this question ("well it's your _soul_, silly!"), but, let's be honest, that's retarded. Or, less inflammatorily, it's unjustified. It's an explanation pulled out of a hat that's true because someone, probably in Rome, wearing that silly hat, said it's true.
And that's a ridiculous and stupid basis for any kind of understanding of the world.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Written on the whiteboard on my fridge this morning
"I was more surprised to learn that Shirley MacLaine had a house here than that Dennis Kucinich thought he saw a UFO here." -- author unknown
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Benny Lava redux
Okay, so the Benny Lava _actual_ lyrics are almost as weird as the transliterated ones.
Also, I think this is a far better sound track for the original video.
Also, I think this is a far better sound track for the original video.
How the fed works
I was googling around for information on how the fed and inflation work, and after wading through a lot of crap, this howstuffworks link was pretty much the best resource I found. It's fairly simple yet thorough.
Just thought I'd share.
Just thought I'd share.
Our gigantic asses are sinking the boats at DisneyLand
We, as a country, should be fucking mortified by this. We're sinking the "It's a Small World" boats, people! SINKING THEM! BECAUSE OUR ASSES ARE TOO BIG!
Jesus. Fucking. Tapdancing. Christ. If there is a more appropriate metaphor for the modern American mentality, I certainly can't think of it.
Jesus. Fucking. Tapdancing. Christ. If there is a more appropriate metaphor for the modern American mentality, I certainly can't think of it.
Your daily douchebag (11/03/07)
A Daily Douchebag to Pervez Musharraf for being a typical douchebag dictator and declaring marshal law when the few checks and balances left in his country weren't being nice to him.
It makes me profoundly sad to see these cases where a country boots out an imperial power (England) only to descend into their own home-brewed authoritarian regime. Having watched V for Vendetta recently doesn't help matters.
Update: Musharraf: still a douchebag. Also, I can't help but see parallels here between Musharraf's rationale for declaring martial law and the Bush v. Gore decision. Both amount to saying, "we don't have time to actually sort out the legalities because not having a President _right now_ is just too dangerous!" Which is, of course, horse shit.
It makes me profoundly sad to see these cases where a country boots out an imperial power (England) only to descend into their own home-brewed authoritarian regime. Having watched V for Vendetta recently doesn't help matters.
Update: Musharraf: still a douchebag. Also, I can't help but see parallels here between Musharraf's rationale for declaring martial law and the Bush v. Gore decision. Both amount to saying, "we don't have time to actually sort out the legalities because not having a President _right now_ is just too dangerous!" Which is, of course, horse shit.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Benny Lava
Another amusing purposeful mistranslation of an Indian music video.
I'm pretty sure the guy stole some moves from Michael Jackson. Back when MJ had, you know, organic parts.
I'm pretty sure the guy stole some moves from Michael Jackson. Back when MJ had, you know, organic parts.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
If There Were a God... (10/29/07)
An "If There Were a God" that needs no explanation. Or more accurately, there is no explanation on earth that can justify it.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
The "prematurely rich" ain't sasified...
I don't really find this at all surprising. The eMillionaires quite often aren't in it for the money, per se, at least in the sense that they aren't after money just to engage in conspicuous consumption. Money is just a way to keep score. The fact that you can use it to buy jets, mansions, etc. is somewhat irrelevant. They do it because the business itself is interesting.
Now, of course, you can ask: okay, but would they still be interested if there _weren't_ a huge amount of money at stake? No, probably not. The money is part of it. But what I think makes this interesting to these guys are the dynamics the money makes, not the payoff. In other words, because consumers and potential clients value money so much, they choose (relatively) carefully what they want to buy with it, and it's the challenge of getting the money out of those consumers and clients that appeals to these guys much more than the fact that you get that money and the ability to spend it in the end (if your business is successful).
Point being, we always assume money is the prime motivator of people. Or, at least, it is a universal currency that allows you to get the (presumed material) things you want. I think that's an oversimplification. People want things out of their lifestyle that you can't really buy, or at least it doesn't really make sense to think of in monetary terms. Does it really make sense to think of "buying" your way into working into a startup that excites and challenges you? Not really...not in the traditional sense. Therefore, I don't think it makes sense to talk about maximizing people's income as a proxy for maximizing their happiness. (and it makes even less sense to talk about a stock market index as a proxy for the well-being of a country, but that's beyond my scope for the moment)
So here's the question: can you make an economic model out of that? Interestingly, it's not even "money + leisure," although I think leisure time is another important factor that should be considered when measuring a society's well-being. It's much more a question of, to use an overloaded term, freedom. To what degree to people have the freedom to pursue the things that make them happy? To what degree can they pursue their happiness, you might say...
Now, of course, you can ask: okay, but would they still be interested if there _weren't_ a huge amount of money at stake? No, probably not. The money is part of it. But what I think makes this interesting to these guys are the dynamics the money makes, not the payoff. In other words, because consumers and potential clients value money so much, they choose (relatively) carefully what they want to buy with it, and it's the challenge of getting the money out of those consumers and clients that appeals to these guys much more than the fact that you get that money and the ability to spend it in the end (if your business is successful).
Point being, we always assume money is the prime motivator of people. Or, at least, it is a universal currency that allows you to get the (presumed material) things you want. I think that's an oversimplification. People want things out of their lifestyle that you can't really buy, or at least it doesn't really make sense to think of in monetary terms. Does it really make sense to think of "buying" your way into working into a startup that excites and challenges you? Not really...not in the traditional sense. Therefore, I don't think it makes sense to talk about maximizing people's income as a proxy for maximizing their happiness. (and it makes even less sense to talk about a stock market index as a proxy for the well-being of a country, but that's beyond my scope for the moment)
So here's the question: can you make an economic model out of that? Interestingly, it's not even "money + leisure," although I think leisure time is another important factor that should be considered when measuring a society's well-being. It's much more a question of, to use an overloaded term, freedom. To what degree to people have the freedom to pursue the things that make them happy? To what degree can they pursue their happiness, you might say...
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Cheney and Obama related?!
No, apparently this isn't a joke. Go back far enough, and Obama and Cheney are related.
Isn't this a sign of the apocalypse?
Isn't this a sign of the apocalypse?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Girl eye chart
This has to be the most frustrating eye chart ever. If you're a heterosexual guy, at least...
Monday, October 22, 2007
Menacing plastic garbage island
Were you aware there's an island made completely out of garbage that's twice the size of Texas floating around the Pacific? This is a problem. Literally, a big problem. It's not like there's "some" garbage floating around out there. TWO TEXASES. Think about how much shit you don't like comes from or exists in Texas. Now double that. And imagine it getting an order of magnitude bigger every year.
You may now begin screaming.
You may now begin screaming.
Why gay marriage is wrong and evil
The most concise listing of the arguments against gay marriage I've ever seen. Well, I'm convinced!
Friday, October 19, 2007
Chris Matthews on Kasparov
A great quote by Chris Matthews right after Bill Maher interviews Gary Kasparov:
"Do you ever get the feeling that the Russians are playing chess, and we're playing checkers?"
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Polizia's Gumball run
Wow. Just...wow. "Batshit insane" doesn't even begin to cover this attempt to drive cross-country in 30 hours.
Boy with the Incredible Brain
I hope I haven't linked to this before, but a very cool BBC(?) documentary on a savant with the ability to "see" numbers and perform incredible feats of math and memory.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Lessig on corruption
A presentation by Lawrence Lessig on "corruption," which the observant among you may remember is the topic Lessig abandoned copyright reform for. Very, very much worth watching (although it will, of course, depress you).
Lessig is a very smart man. What I'm not sure I get is why it took him this long to realize that the influence of money on politics was always going to render copyright reform (and, indeed, most types of reform) basically moot? Isn't that fairly obvious to anyone that pays attention to these issues? Is it simply that you can't spend your life thinking about, studying, and putting your faith into the law if you're as cynical as I am?
I think that last point may be it. I've always thought that the idea of the "rule of law" was a comforting illusion. Lessig has, I think, touched on the _real_ lynch pin of our democratic institutions at the end of his talk, which is the concept of "norms." The rule of law itself is irrelevant; ironically, it's the belief in the rule of law that drives our society.
What's the difference? Well, think about it...in a world where everyone really is self-interested, our institutions fall apart, rule of law be damned. You need only look at what Bush has done to government to see that. The "impartiality" of governmental structures like the EPA, the FDA, hell even the federal attorneys, turned instantly to dust when infected with political figures. Point being, there weren't any objective procedures, rules, or regulations that protected those institutions. Hell, Bush has proved even the Constitution itself is malleable. Can't torture prisoners? Call them enemy combatants. Annoyed by habeas corpus? Move them outside the country. It's all fluid. The law can't save you. All those institutions work (i.e., maintain independence) solely..._solely_...because there are enough people who think that they (the institutions) _should_ work that the institutions do. The _instant_ that's no longer the case, or when political operatives infiltrate those institutions, they collapse.
How to you dedicate your life to something that is, at core, wishful thinking? Or, slightly less dramatically (and more confusingly), how do you dedicate your life to what amounts to a fundamentally _subjective_ political opinion when the crux of that political opinion is that it regards itself as being an _objective_ fact?!
If I'm being unclear, consider this: think of the society most plagued by institutionalized corruption, and try to figure out what differentiates them from us. Think about China, for instance, where bribery is a cost of doing business in government. The point I'm trying to make is that the answer is: very little. We'd like to believe we have a set of impartial institutions, rules, and regulations that support us, allowing us to float serenely above their plagued little fray. But we don't. Those rules could be changed or circumvented at the drop of the hat. The only difference is that, as yet, we don't tolerate that level of corruption. We have a collective, social belief that government officials should not be bribed. Period. End of story. We're acclimated to an environment where it doesn't happen. Grow up in a world where corruption is a part of life, and government will be corrupt. Doesn't matter what's on the books. That's what will happen.
Anyway, I digressed. I just wonder to what degree law is self-perpetuating. Almost like a cult is. What isn't important is the result of arguing about how laws should and should not be structured. It's utterly irrelevant who has the most well-reasoned, logical argument about the penal code. It's simply the underlying belief that law is important that makes it important. My point, I guess, is that it's a wikiality. Nothing grander or more substantial than that. The belief simply propagates itself.
(Maybe that's the strange loop that underpins all of civilization.)
I guess that just annoys me because science quintessentially _isn't_ wikiality. There is a ground truth in there. When you do a physics experiment, either you emitted a photon or you didn't. There's no arguing about it. It didn't emit a photon just because enough people decide that it should. It did. Or it didn't. (or it's in some weird quantum state, but let's not get into that). The only part us idiot members of humanity can play is observing which one it was and telling each other about it. The laws of physics don't collapse if we decide we don't like them, and yet, that's _exactly_ how the law works.
Lessig is a very smart man. What I'm not sure I get is why it took him this long to realize that the influence of money on politics was always going to render copyright reform (and, indeed, most types of reform) basically moot? Isn't that fairly obvious to anyone that pays attention to these issues? Is it simply that you can't spend your life thinking about, studying, and putting your faith into the law if you're as cynical as I am?
I think that last point may be it. I've always thought that the idea of the "rule of law" was a comforting illusion. Lessig has, I think, touched on the _real_ lynch pin of our democratic institutions at the end of his talk, which is the concept of "norms." The rule of law itself is irrelevant; ironically, it's the belief in the rule of law that drives our society.
What's the difference? Well, think about it...in a world where everyone really is self-interested, our institutions fall apart, rule of law be damned. You need only look at what Bush has done to government to see that. The "impartiality" of governmental structures like the EPA, the FDA, hell even the federal attorneys, turned instantly to dust when infected with political figures. Point being, there weren't any objective procedures, rules, or regulations that protected those institutions. Hell, Bush has proved even the Constitution itself is malleable. Can't torture prisoners? Call them enemy combatants. Annoyed by habeas corpus? Move them outside the country. It's all fluid. The law can't save you. All those institutions work (i.e., maintain independence) solely..._solely_...because there are enough people who think that they (the institutions) _should_ work that the institutions do. The _instant_ that's no longer the case, or when political operatives infiltrate those institutions, they collapse.
How to you dedicate your life to something that is, at core, wishful thinking? Or, slightly less dramatically (and more confusingly), how do you dedicate your life to what amounts to a fundamentally _subjective_ political opinion when the crux of that political opinion is that it regards itself as being an _objective_ fact?!
If I'm being unclear, consider this: think of the society most plagued by institutionalized corruption, and try to figure out what differentiates them from us. Think about China, for instance, where bribery is a cost of doing business in government. The point I'm trying to make is that the answer is: very little. We'd like to believe we have a set of impartial institutions, rules, and regulations that support us, allowing us to float serenely above their plagued little fray. But we don't. Those rules could be changed or circumvented at the drop of the hat. The only difference is that, as yet, we don't tolerate that level of corruption. We have a collective, social belief that government officials should not be bribed. Period. End of story. We're acclimated to an environment where it doesn't happen. Grow up in a world where corruption is a part of life, and government will be corrupt. Doesn't matter what's on the books. That's what will happen.
Anyway, I digressed. I just wonder to what degree law is self-perpetuating. Almost like a cult is. What isn't important is the result of arguing about how laws should and should not be structured. It's utterly irrelevant who has the most well-reasoned, logical argument about the penal code. It's simply the underlying belief that law is important that makes it important. My point, I guess, is that it's a wikiality. Nothing grander or more substantial than that. The belief simply propagates itself.
(Maybe that's the strange loop that underpins all of civilization.)
I guess that just annoys me because science quintessentially _isn't_ wikiality. There is a ground truth in there. When you do a physics experiment, either you emitted a photon or you didn't. There's no arguing about it. It didn't emit a photon just because enough people decide that it should. It did. Or it didn't. (or it's in some weird quantum state, but let's not get into that). The only part us idiot members of humanity can play is observing which one it was and telling each other about it. The laws of physics don't collapse if we decide we don't like them, and yet, that's _exactly_ how the law works.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The life and death of Jesse James
An absolutely crazy but fascinating story of the kinds of deception you can perpetrate using modern telecommunications technology.
Concept cars for 2057
This is so utterly nerdy, but these concept cars are awesome. And, I think, far more creative than anything that's been in any of the sci fi movies lately.
Lawyer representing embryos in California
Oh for fuck's sake...what is wrong with people in this country?
Friday, October 12, 2007
Props to Lynne Cheney
Yes, she's evil and married to the devil, but props to ol' Lynne for having a sense of humor. She brought Jon a little Darth Vader doll, and she said one of the things that Cheney does at home is bite the head off a live chicken.
Go Lynne!
On the other hand, he does claim that she isn't her husband and shouldn't be challenged...BUT, let's remember she is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. It ain't like she's not a political figure here, folks.
Go Lynne!
On the other hand, he does claim that she isn't her husband and shouldn't be challenged...BUT, let's remember she is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. It ain't like she's not a political figure here, folks.
Gore's Nobel
I'm sure you've heard about Gore's Nobel Peace Prize by now (note that he shares it with the UN climate panel). I feel a little weird about it, to be honest.
It's not that Gore isn't a good guy who has done great stuff. I just think the precedent is a little odd. I was reading...somewhere, and I'm too lazy to try to dig up the reference...about some of the political dynamics of the economics Nobel work. The Nobel in economics tends to be given to someone for work they did 15 to 20 years ago, the reason being that it's only with that much historical perspective can you tell if the work was accurate and if it had an effect.
I feel like the same standard should apply here. It may well be that Al Gore's efforts have catalyzed global action on climate change, but I don't think we have the perspective yet to be able to assert that. Maybe he will have turned out to be the one to lead the sea change in policy opinion and priority that ultimately leads to the aversion of a climate crisis. But what if we've already fucked ourselves? What if anything we do now is too late and has essentially no effect? What if the momentum of the past few years fizzles and amounts to nothing? Has he really done the most to promote global peace in those contexts?
And, frankly, what has he done other than utilize his celebrity to highlight the issue and educate? Not that that isn't useful, but is it really the stuff of a Nobel award? Will this be forever known as the Apple Keynote presentation that won a Nobel Peace Prize?
It's not that Gore isn't a good guy who has done great stuff. I just think the precedent is a little odd. I was reading...somewhere, and I'm too lazy to try to dig up the reference...about some of the political dynamics of the economics Nobel work. The Nobel in economics tends to be given to someone for work they did 15 to 20 years ago, the reason being that it's only with that much historical perspective can you tell if the work was accurate and if it had an effect.
I feel like the same standard should apply here. It may well be that Al Gore's efforts have catalyzed global action on climate change, but I don't think we have the perspective yet to be able to assert that. Maybe he will have turned out to be the one to lead the sea change in policy opinion and priority that ultimately leads to the aversion of a climate crisis. But what if we've already fucked ourselves? What if anything we do now is too late and has essentially no effect? What if the momentum of the past few years fizzles and amounts to nothing? Has he really done the most to promote global peace in those contexts?
And, frankly, what has he done other than utilize his celebrity to highlight the issue and educate? Not that that isn't useful, but is it really the stuff of a Nobel award? Will this be forever known as the Apple Keynote presentation that won a Nobel Peace Prize?
Thursday, October 11, 2007
My hero
This guy is my hero. If my dream were to personify a character that Dave Chapelle would dream up, or, like, a walking MadTV sketch, I would _totally_ want to be this guy.
(also, nice boxers, asshole.)
(also, nice boxers, asshole.)
Tips for improving wireless reception from Microsoft
Something useful from Microsoft? Surely you jest!
(though it might actually be useful, hence the post)
(though it might actually be useful, hence the post)
Goddamn rapist ducks redux
The man makes very compelling points on those goddamn lowlife rapist ducks:
"Someone needs to do something! Think about all the innocent children feeding ducks in the park right now. They're feeding rapists! Have you heard of a character called Donald Duck? RAPIST! Daisy Duck? GETTING IT EVERY NIGHT!"
Your depressing post of the day
Well, so much for any hope that call girls didn't have a history of sexual abuse...
*sigh*.
Let us not forget that people are, at core, animals. Plain and simple.
*sigh*.
Let us not forget that people are, at core, animals. Plain and simple.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
WetRiffs (nsfw)
I'm really kind of disturbed that not only did this happen, but very shortly after that, this happened.
Also, from the pics:
Also, from the pics:
- Brenda's nipples could kill someone!
- If you go to Demele's webcomic site and read the FAQ, she's _17_. I feel...dirty. Having seen this pic yesterday of what I can only assume is a _very_ young Jodie Foster doesn't help things much.
SITE intelligence leak: a non-obvious question
Okay, yes, the Bush administration is inept and hypocritical with regard to terrorism surveillance, yada yada yada. At this point, if you haven't figured this out, you're retarded and/or not paying attention.
Here's what I want to know, though: why the fuck is a private company (SITE) engaging in its own foreign surveillance ops? Shouldn't this, you know, _not happen_? Be illegal? Something? The CIA is scary enough...do we really need private companies doing the same shit with no visible accountability?
Here's what I want to know, though: why the fuck is a private company (SITE) engaging in its own foreign surveillance ops? Shouldn't this, you know, _not happen_? Be illegal? Something? The CIA is scary enough...do we really need private companies doing the same shit with no visible accountability?
Fucking ostriches
Goddamn uppity flightless birds...always trying to humiliate you when you're on a date...
Monday, October 08, 2007
I'm really glad I'm not an insect
*whimper*
On the other hand, it could be worse...you could be a female African Bat Bug:
On the other hand, it could be worse...you could be a female African Bat Bug:
"Instead of copulating via the female’s sex organs, he will stab her abdomen to release sperm directly into her bloodstream."
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Severed corpus collosum
A crazy video of what happens to someone who has had their corpus collosum (a part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres) severed. The right brain can see the word "saw" in the left visual field, cause the left hand to draw a picture of a saw, and yet if you ask the guy why he drew a saw, he'll have no idea.
Really makes you wonder about our perception of consciousness...
Really makes you wonder about our perception of consciousness...
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Arse Elektronika (nsfw)
*twitch*...
"The latest adult industry "'pr0nnovations" will be on display in San Francisco this weekend at Arse Elektronika, a three-day expo featuring sex machines, brainy talks and weird performances (including the Electric Orifice Orchestra, in which "extravagantly dressed performers use live biofeedback from muscular interior walls of their bodies to create a multimedia interactive show")."
Giraffe fight!
Good lord...have you ever seen two giraffes fight? Did you know they fight by whipping their heads at each other? Don't they get whiplash?
Thursday, October 04, 2007
If There Were a God... (10/4/07)
If there were a God, he would not allow pictures of dragons having sex with cars to exist anywhere. Ever. (nsfw)
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Depressing Iraq link of the day
I think it's fairly clear that the major problem these women had was the feeling that the Democrats back home were not supporting them.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Million dollar audiophile challenge
Ha! I love it. James Randi, who gets his jollies by proving paranormal claims to be bullshit, is now offering $1 million for scientific proof that $7250 audio cables actually sound better than the (already overpriced) Monster cables that you can get for $50 at Radio Shack.
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