October 2005 - Posts
impressions...
ahh - so that was a wine tour, mostly. or so it seemed when they got back home. beer too. and i am a happy beneficiary of the fruits (and grains) of the tour ;-)
so i got to see a couple of good movies, and one of nick's hockey games, and one of allie's swim meets. fun stuff. it's nice to like one's family. even got treated to dinner with nick and his grandparents at an irish pub after the game, watching michigan football.
wireless broadband is wonderful. i have it here, and they recently got it there. makes life too easy. i kept thinking i should be sitting in the lazyboy chair to do my computing, where i could watch sunrises out the front window, but i was in back watching sunsets and the premium cable tv channels that came with their cable service on a promotional basis.
sat outside reading in the sun one afternoon, with a carafe of hot (fresh ground) coffee, watching the hayrides from the neighboring dairy farm go by. i kept thinking i should be doing something to entertain the unwitting passengers. or maybe just sit next to the field and wave.
a giant pumpkin followed me home from the hockey game, finding a nesting spot on the front lawn. it may get carved; if so, i'm supposed to get pictures. barely got that sucker to fit in the back of the jeep with the goalie gear.
their ten year old chocolate lab played shadow and nose all weekend, eating most of my pizza crusts and apple cores and other doggie things. he finally got away from me this morning, escaping for an hour of roaming the cowfields, accumulating the expected odors. big old lovable thing. kathy cleaned him up. my thought was just to hose him down. this is why i only have plants.
had a lot of grandfather clock assisted dreams (“...bong...bong...bong...”). most notable was when i accidentally invented (quantum) reality in magic lab. which was sort of like the egg laying itself.
and so here i sit, sipping on a rich stout from northern michigan, contemplating one navel or the other.
location note: north of detroit. the lord and lady of the manor (manner?) have departed for a biking related fall color tour in northern michigan. i got my tour on the way up here ;-)
just a short note, a bit pooped after wrestling with my yardwork, bills, isp's and dvd burning the last couple of days. everything wanted to quit on me in the middle of everything else. finally got most stuff settled, with the exception of the dvds. if it's not one thing, it's another. even spent some time looking for a usable utility to close the cd tray, since my arms aren't 300 miles long. everything has an “eject” option, nothing has “close”. weird. but even after getting the tray closed, the new burner software is offering up yet another obscure error.
of course, having my broadband going out just as i was starting to pay bills (coincidentally, right after i paid the cable bill) didn't help any. then the dial-up access quit too. this was after i discovered that my online resume, on my aol webspace, had decided to quit working sometime in the months since i last checked it. appears to be an aol issue with dhtml behaviors delivered via .htc files. so i moved that over to my own space, because i had just told a job lead where my resume stuff was, and pointing people at broken crap isn't good. not that it mattered much, since it wasn't long after i had moved things onto my own server that the broadband went away.
sigh. the silicon gods must've been bored and looking for a laugh. i'm going to sick the flying spaghetti monster on 'em.
meanwhile, it's nice to have home cooking. mmm, chicken noodle soup ;-)
decoupling artificial links between sex and relationships is a good thing. using sex as a carrot in a perverse attempt to enforce monogamy is plain silly. besides, that's not the origin of that cultural practice anyway. nor are certain kinds of relationships a prerequisite for healthy sex. you can have good sexless relationships, and you can have good relationshipless sex. yes, bad variants are possible as well. but their forced combination is no guarantee of anything. aside from evolutionary imperatives, the association is near meaningless, beyond the trust necessary for safety. and transcending received “wisdom” by interceding intellectually is what humanity is all about, indeed, all of existence. of course, if you're of the mystical mindset you're blind to all of this, using a warped sort of illusory rationalization to view animal instincts and their resulting behavioral anachronisms as god's will.
we can, however, do a lot of damage by screwing with the transition from mysticism to rationalism. the healthy thing to realize is that we can do just as much to ease the transition. i doubt that will happen, as the level of “choice” we both have available and are willing to exercise is minimal. that's how we're built too.
as for diseases, pregnancies and the like, it's our attitudes that need adjusting, not the phenomena. the best thing those self-proclaimed morally superior types could do to eliminate abortion, for example, would be to create an environment of belonging and acceptance without their holier than thou moral overtones, or worse, outright retribution.
a note on positioning:
lest you think i'm just going after conservatives with this one, the flip side of the coin are those with pretenses towards being well-meaning who in the process also destroy what they are nominally after. but i'll leave that for later. there is much more complexity in this realm of thought, making conservatives an easier mark for both supporters and detractors. part of the arguments here would, in simplistic form, resemble the rants of ayn rand against the left. i'll give her credit for pointing out, in extreme dramatic form, possible dangers, but her analysis was superficial, as were her counter-recommendations (what people support as objectivism).
so, although i'd like to refocus on what's wrong with the non-newsmaking_power_groups_of_the_moment, the timing would be poor. it's probably best to save the gadflying for when it's appropriiate, which is to oppose abuses by any power. this of course also means that i do not support the excesses of the opposition. do not mistake a limited perspective on context for reality.
what a co-inky-dink, i was just reading that. or maybe it was His1 doing ;-)
my favorite quote:
"Behe, who was expected to resume testifying Tuesday, compared the outcry over intelligent design to the early criticism of the big-bang theory some 70 years ago.
"Many people thought it had philosophical and even theological implications that they did not like," he said. "
equating i.d. with big bang. what a dope. so, do you have any of those bozo buttons left ? sounds like this guy needs one.
i picked up dragons of eden to read (again) and early on, in this 1975 book, there is sagan calmly and clearly explaining that evolution is a self-evident fact, while any theory surrounding this fact has to do with its mechanism. i am amazed when reading material from that era - say, late 50's to early 70's - how rational and compassionate people sounded as compared to so-called “christians” of today. i recently ran into that huge difference in tone and substance while researching the roots of social security while thzat debate was hot.
in somewhat related recent news, riots broke out over a neo-nazi march in toledo. most hilarious video clip: a couple dozen people from 2005 wearing german world war ii uniforms yelling "sieg heil!". i was rolling. couldn't help picturing a bunch of counter-demonstrators wearing american world war uniforms yelling "i like ike!", or whatever they said back then. and look - here comes the native american tribe around the corner !
more news: a conservative think tank boots out one of its own [sorry, that's a nyt link, it's not a heavily covered story, search google news for more] for writing a book critical of the bush administration. the scary part of this is that the conservatives are mistaking the symbol for the symbolized. it is a standard psychological warfare ploy to demonize a member of the opposition, as many have been doing with bush, in order to discredit the opposition's agenda without alienating the masses associated with them, since they need to be co-opted, not hardened. however, at least some of the conservatives appear to be jettisoning their figurehead, who is increasingly seen as a liability. the thing they don't seem to get is that it's their ideology that's fucked up. well, at least there is no single rallying point, and maybe their natural fractitiousness will keep them off balance. yet, the removal of that point of focus affects everyone, making that dysfunctional fascism harder to strike at. still, i think that a number of groups will be glad of a clear opportunity to dissociate themselves from a neo-con-baggage-laden set of policies that they only went along with in order to further their own often less extreme agendas. i think this applies across the political spectrum, left, right, center, fsm, whatever. well, one can only hope.
so how can we avoid these sorts of ideological disasters in the future ? there is still a huge portion of the population given to this sort of mindless behavior and lack of critical thinking. just because the fascists and their dupes are scattered doesn't mean they have disappeared. the thing to do is recognize a continuing counter-rational ideological insurgency (to use current popular metaphors) and fight it at its roots, never allowing it full expression again. it's the same thing we are fighting overseas. to paraphrase pogo yet again, "we have found the enemy, and he is (among) us".
ziti, heil !
1 all hail the flying spaghetti monster, for we shall stay sauced !
... by his noodly appendage. arrrgghhh - i'm a convert to the church of the flying spaghetti monster !
and i just ordered a take-out spaghetti dinner. with meatballs. what can i say ? i'm catholic ;-)
and i really like ramen too.
and udon.
yeah, i realize this is rather old news - but it's fun for
me ! besides, i'm getting a spaghetti dinner out of it. self's treat.
... so i'm reading some assinine thread on a forum somewhere 1, and the thought hits me: is there an evolution game out there ? i know there's sim-this and sim-that 2, but how about something with wider scope ? a quick search and all i managed to find were some games in the prehistoric life section over at the bbc.
i think that's a great subject niche for any number of games, especially considering current political debates. in addition the the usual graphical fare, there could also be role playing evolution (which would be a great classroom exercise) in both board and online versions.
one could take on roles of natural law, a particular batch of organisms, or even a designer. which does make it pretty clear that the idea of creationsim / intelligent design cannot occur, because it makes presumptions about a priori knowledge of the universe that aren't available - with the obvious exception, which is what all the noise is intended to force us to conclude.
on the contrary, “designers” are notoriously poor at solving new classes of problems. it takes far more creativity than that, of the serendipitous kind. thus, any creator would also have to be phenomenally creative (keeping in mind the nuances of word usage here). in fact, what is found is that a priori knowledge is not only insufficient, it's crippling when facing the truly novel.
the only possible solution is self-organization.
which, in the smaller arena of mundane human endeavours, is somewhat troubling. take software development, for that matter. or any sort of craftsmanship. craig made mention in a recent discussion the analogy of a begining carpenter trying to plan all possible details, as opposed to the master who is able to adapt as he goes along. the reality, as i argued, is a little of both of chaos and control, and even that balance is dynamic.
why troubling ? in trying to get on top of any problem the impulse is to plan and control. i would like to think that increasingly sophisticated and subtle thinking would, at some arbitrarily sufficient level, present “the” solution (to whatever). but this isn't the case. instead, what you find is that the universe is at its most “creative” when it's at the finest line between complete chaos and more stable dynamics. the “problem” is that there is, by definition, no way of planning or predicting the outcome of such dynamics, except that it will be objectively awesome, proportional to it's closeness to the edge. subjectively, it will be wondrous or horrific or (most likely) incomprehensible.
is this a problem ? only in contrast to certain worldviews and existing structures. so, the “practical” approach is to back away from the edge in order to exert enough control in order to direct the remaining creativity at the desired problem.
the universe does not do this. and it's interesting to keep in mind that humans are merely part of the overall process. in this universe, skyscrapers do just “throw themselves together”. the way it has found to do this is truly amazing. the issue has never been about what the universe is - all we can affect is how we see it. and even that has been part of the entire universal evolution.
so - i want to play a game.
1 the inspirational line was “Because there are monkeys that don't level up enough to evolve.” evolution as leveling! how cool! how juvenile! every time i land on one of these forums (i only lurk) i wonder what the hell is wrong with everyone, and then someone eventually says something like “... and now that i've said i'm a kid everyone will be all biased and stuff”. ahh, that explains it. no, sonny, it's a good thing to have your youth known, it gives you a needed excuse. otherwise you all come off as psychopathic morons. it is very rare that anyone of that group comes off as respectable in the context of the wider world. or so i thought, until i considered that the world at large is simply all these idiots a few years later (ie, “us”). i think maybe the only difference is that “adults” seem to have discovered that there is no one out there to correct them, with the results you'd expect.
2 i think i am underestimating simlife; i've never played it. yet, i get the feeling that it isn't quite what i have in mind. so i guess i'm just inadequately explaining myself.
everybody's wearing them !
- let's all become republicans, then hijack the party. when we're done we can all go and become democrats. repeat until thoroughly mixed.
- i want to start a letter writing campaign. well, more like protective apparel. i mean, i care about our elected officals - don't you ? to that end, let's each send the president a tinfoil hat. feel free to send them to the rest of his staff and appointees as well. and your senator, congressman, mayor, governor.. what fun, the list is endless. oh, and don't forget to save one for yourself.
“shit...”
“what?”
“... i was just running a prime number search ...”
“that old chestnut ? the mathematicians proved years ago that there was no infallible predictive pattern.”
“i know; i was just tuning up these new quantum circuit chips, kinda felt like a laugh, you know...”
“so what's the problem?”
“it stopped.”
“you'll have to be more specific.”
“it was churning right along, then - well, look...”
“heeyyyy - you're right. but that would mean...”
“yeah. i know. it's already started.”