Just Enough Craig

Physicalism and resurrection

2012-02-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

Those of us who don't believe in souls have some explaining to do. Without a soul to identify what a person is, we're left with only the person's body and the physical stuff it comprises. But that's not the whole story—there are loose ends. Some of those loose ends came up in Kagan's Philosophy of Death class, the first half of which covers a collection oftheories and arguments about personal identity. Though Kagan himself is settled as a physicalist, and thus rejects the existence of souls, he acknowledges that his arguments leave open many questions.

One problem for physicalists has to do with our notion of resurrection. According to one version of physicalism, resurrection entails nothing more than reconstructing a body identical to that of a body from the past—presumably the body of someone now dead. Such a reconstruction could be the result of a Star-Trek-like replicator device, which conjures physical things from raw materials. After replicating a body, the body's corresponding person would be brought back into existence. Or would it? Here are two analogies of bodily reconstruction that lead to different answers to that question.

Analogy #1, the bicycle

(In his class, Kagan uses an example of a watch, but I prefer to use a bike because I know more about bikes.)

Imagine you have a bicycle. You take the bicycle to a mechanic to have it overhauled. As part of the overhaul, the mechanic will take the bike completely apart to clean the parts and possibly replace some parts. He'll strip everything from the frame—wheels, chain, gears, cranks, brakes, cables, shifters, etc. After having cleaned or replaced each part, he'll put the bike back together to make a bike nearly as good as new.

But midway through the overhaul, the mechanic spots a problem. He phones you during lunch and says your cassette shows signs of wear, do you want to have it replaced? You're wary of the bike shop and wonder if the mechanic is trying to overcharge you by selling you unneeded parts, and so you respond that you'll stop by the store that afternoon and take a look yourself. Later that day, in the bike shop, the mechanic greets you and shows you your bike. It consists of a frame, fork, handlebars, and wheels lying in a heap on the floor and the other components in a cardboard box on the counter. Where's my bike? you ask.

Right here, say the mechanic, pointing to the heap on the floor. "And there," then pointing to the box on the counter.

That's no bicycle, you say. That's just a bunch of bike parts.

Well, yeah, it's your bike midway through an overhaul, responds the mechanic. By the way, your shifters are gunked up. You want to just upgrade your whole drive chain? We have a special deal on Campy—

—But the shifters were working fine when I brought the bike in… And so you drop the ontology argument and instead arguewith the mechanic to keep your original parts (and a smaller bill). The next day, overhaul completed and a new cassette installed, you go to the shop and retrieve your bike, restored to full form from the mere heaps of parts it was the previous day.

In summary: Take a bike, strip it down to bare parts, clean some and replace others, and then put the bike back together: same bike.

Analogy #2, the block tower

A four-year-old boy builds a massive tower out of toy blocks in the living room. He's proud of his achievement and shows his dad, who's impressed with his young son's promising architectural skills. But alas, it's past the boy's bedtime, and the dad says as much.

But can't I show Mom my tower? the boy asks.

No, kiddo, it's bedtime, says Dad, and Mom is out with her friends till late tonight. I tell you what: I promise I'll show Mom your tower as soon as she gets home. Now, off to bed.

Father and son walk to the boy's bed, where Dad tucks the boy in. On the way back to the couch in the living room, when passing by the tower, Dad accidentally kicks a key block at the tower's base, causing the entire tower to fall over, sending blocks scattering across the floor, the tower now thoroughly destroyed. Oh no! Dad thinks. I just promised him I would show Mom that tower.

Fortunately, Dad took a photo of the tower before its untimely destruction, back when the boy was showing it off. Gathering the scattered blocks, and using the photo, Dad constructs a tower identical to the one his son made an hour ago. He places the base of the tower in the same spot on the floor, and he meticulously chooses blocks of the right color and shape to match the blocks in the photo. After a few hours of careful reconstruction work, Dad finishes the tower, just as the front door opens and Mom walks through the door. What's that? she asks.

That's a tower our son made. Isn't it wonderful?

Here, many people will say the dad is lying, or at least not being truthful. The son didn't make that tower; he make a tower that was knocked over and no longer exists. The new tower, however much a facsimile of the original tower, is a different tower than the one the son made.

In summary: Take a block tower, knock it over, and have someone else recreate it: different tower.

Which story?

Which story best matches the resurrection of people's bodies? Is a body like a bike, where taking it apart and putting it back together means the same person is brought back into existence? Or is a body like a block of towers, where if destroyed and brought back into existence a new person is created?

My own interpretation is that both analogies fall short—for a reason I'll discuss in a future blog post. But if I had to choose from the two choices here—bike or tower—I would say that a body is more like a bike. I would think the summary from the second analogy is wrong: that the tower built by the dad is indeed the same tower built by the son. The tower isn't defined by who constructed (or reconstructed) it; rather, the tower is defined by what it is.

But what I find most interesting is how both analogies fail.

Stop

2012-02-09T18:49:00.000-07:00

Yet again in Arizona there's a proposed law to allow cyclists to treat stop signs asyield signs. This isn't the first time this change his been proposed and killed, so there's reason to doubt its passage. But if the bill does pass, it won't change much in the real world: most cyclists treat most stop signs as yield signs already, so the effect of the bill would be to decriminalize what cyclists already do, not change their behavior.

I don't advocate that cyclists follow traffic laws. Instead, I advocate that cyclists protect themselves. Usually that means following the law, but sometimes it means breaking the law. In the case of stop signs, I fail to see how coming to a full stop is de facto safer for the cyclist. Rather, I see the opposite. Bydefault, a bicycle is unbalanced when at rest and unwieldy when started from a full stop. Also, unlike motorists, cyclists are vulnerable while stopped in the road; we don't have bumpers and two tons of mass to protect us from rear-end collisions.

But it's not my intention to argue in favor of the law. Yes, I support it because it would decriminalize part of my behavior, but the practical effect would be small: I've never been ticketed for running a stop sign—and that's not for lack of police witness.

Legally, a bicycle is a vehicle, and cyclists are subject to most of the same laws as motorists. However, in the real world, cyclists constitute a tiny minority of traffic and are mostly left alone by law enforcement. The unwritten rule for cyclists is: stay off the busy roads and don't cause trouble, and the police will leave you alone. It's the kind of just privilege that history often affords tiny, voiceless minorities, and it's as it should be.

But I fear someday cycling will catch on and grow from being a voiceless minority into being a vocal minority, and consequently its truce with law enforcement will end. Rather than empowering the cycling community, the result, I predict, would be to spark a backlash from motorists. Roads are built by motorists for motorists, just as traffic law is written by motorists for motorists. Cyclists don't pay gasoline taxes, yet we're tossed 1% of urban road budgets by way of perks such as bike lanes. That fuels resentment from motorists. And we break lots of their laws too; that also fuels resentment.

The greatest danger in being a cyclist is that you're invisible to motorists: they don't see you coming. But we're also invisible to the establishment, and that's our greatest safety.

Writing philosophy

2012-02-06T20:00:00.000-07:00

By listening to the two remaining lectures this morning, I completed my audit of Shelly Kagan's Philosophy of Death class that Shafik recommended to me a year ago. The lectures are freely available asboth video and audio-only clips recorded from the spring 2007 semester Kagan taught at Yale.

Like with a lot of other great philosophical discourses, Kagan's lectures left me with the impression that I didn't learn much. But I know that impression is false; it's just that Kagan is so clear in making his points that everything I learned seemed obvious in hindsight, as though I was merely rediscovering my own knowledge rather than learning anything new. Kagan always has the perfect example to isolate philosophical principles and to exaggerate consequences to absurdity, such as with his example against the two-state requirement.

The two-state requirement has to do with the topic of suicide and whether it ever makes sense to say so-and-so Jones is better off dead. According to the requirement, such statements are alwaysillogical because Jones can be better off following some X only if he's around to experience the effects of X. For example, Jones may be better off learning Spanish because he'll have a before state of not knowing Spanish and an after state of knowing Spanish and he may be better off in the after state than in the before state. But in the case of death, Jones has no after state because after dying Jones doesn't exist. Therefore, Jones can't ever be better off dead.

But against the two-state requirement, Kagan uses the following example.

Imagine that you've got some happy person, some incredibly happy person with a wonderful life filled with whatever goods you think are worth having in life—love and accomplishment and knowledge and whatever it is. He's walking across the street and he's about to get hit by a truck. And so, at some risk to yourself, you leap into the way, pushing him out of the way, saving his life. And happily, you don't get hurt either. He looks up, realizes he was this close from death and he says, Thank you. Thank you for saving my life.
And now what you have to say is, I'm afraid you're rather confused. Because to say thank you for my saving your life is to presuppose I've benefited you in some way. To presuppose I've benefited you in some way is to assume that you're—it's a good thing that your life has continued. But, you see, given the two-state requirement, we can't say it's a good thing that your life continued, because the two-state requirement says we can only make that kind of remark when there's a before state and an after state. And the after state would have been nonexistence. So, you see, you're really rather philosophically confused in thinking that I've done you some sort of favor by saving your life.

Brilliant! No amount of theoretical abstraction will dispel the two-state requirement as well as an example like that. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then examples are worth a thousand arguments.

As I continued listening to the lectures, I became increasingly impressed by Kagan's clear way of talking, and I thought about how to bring that clarity into my own philosophical writing. It's one thing to write clearly about other, less abstract topics, such as some maintenance work I did on my bike or having reinstalled Linux on my laptop. But philosophy is conceptual and thus hard to write about.

But there's more to writing well than merely producing better blog posts. If, as William Zinsser says, clear writing is clear thinking, then one's philosophical ideas are only as good as one's writing. That's the challenge in writing better philosophy.

Funny movies for men and women

2012-02-02T19:23:00.000-07:00

Few women appreciate Blazing Saddles for the brilliant movie it is. This isn't Mel Brooks's fault; most comedies appeal unevenly across gender. But there are exceptions.

Here's my tentative list of the five funniest non-romantic comedies that are equally funny to both men and women.

Groundhog Day
My Cousin Vinny
Toy Story, or just about any Pixar or Disney animated movie
The Princess Bride
The Mask

Please respond with your own additions or corrections to the list.

Bike update

2012-01-30T19:34:00.000-07:00

The good news is my bike isn't totaled. In fact, it's far from totaled. This last weekend I repaired the damage to my good bike owing to my chain-jump mishap several weeks ago, and I got it into working order for lessthan $40—and most of the expense entailed buying a chain whip and lockring so that I can do the job entirely at home next time.

That said, it's unclear whether the rear wheel is fully repaired.

Not having the two aforementioned tools to remove a cassette, I took the wheel to my nearby bike shop, with the remaining links of a mashed-up chain wedged between the big sprocket and spoke flanges. The mechanic removed the cassette, which had hidden the extent of the damage to the spoke flanges. At least a sixteenth of an inch of metal had been ground away, exposing shiny and now minimal flanges that now just barely hold the spokes to the hub.

It looks bad but it's only cosmetic, said the mechanic.

I'm mostly sure he's right, but I'm not entirely sure, and that's a big difference when all the chain-side spokes are now secured to the hub by the thinnest margin of aluminum. But wheels are expensive, and I'd prefer not to buy a new wheel on the spot if I mustn't. I should do some wheel-banging curb-jump tests near home before taking it out on a hard ride.

As for the root cause of the chain jump, I think this is no more than a case of the limit screw having been incorrectly set. I blame this entirely on the bike shop where I bought the bike, for limit screws shouldn't need to be adjusted after having been initially set at the shop. My guess is the mechanic who put the bike together adjusted the dérailleur cable but neglected the limit screw. While on my ride I tightened the micro-adjuster, which pulled the cable dérailleur out of alignment and into potential for jumping off into the wheel. Murphy's Law took care of the rest.

Pound foolish

2012-01-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Laura and I went backpacking in Saguaro National Park. It's the first time we went backpacking since our trip to Pine Mountain last April. This time we went with a group, the Arizona Backpacking Club.

Laura and I were in the company of people who know a lot more about backpacking than we do. Many of these people have backpacked many dozens of times, all over the state or beyond, in all four seasons, sometimes for many nights at a time. Unsurprisingly, a lot of their gear is much better than ours.

Many ABC members use ultralight gear. They carry an astonishingly small amount of stuff to survive a night in the cold desert wilderness. One guy, Mark, carried a pack that totaled fifteen pounds in weight, and that included some splurge items, such as a pair of binoculars, as well as necessities that Laura and I do without, such as a stove. By comparison, my backpack when empty weighs nearly half as much as Mark's entire load. Add to that a tent, two sleeping bags (because I play sherpa for Laura), a sleeping pad, food, clothes, water, tools, first-aid kit, and other miscellanea, and my load was triple the weight of Mark's.

My gear suits car camping, where weight doesn't matter and size barely does. For backpacking, my gear is merely adequate. But even so it's a stark improvement compared to what I used for the Havasupai trip three summers ago. On that trip I didn't even have a backpacking backpack. Instead, I bungee-tied half my load to a day-hike bag, which lacked a frame and sagged under the weight. In hindsight, that setup was probably sufficient if I had carried the featherlight load Mark carried to Saguaro NP last weekend, but instead I carried a heavy Wal-mart tent amidst a heap of other junk that included four pounds of cheese.

My gear is heavy because ultralight equipment is expensive and fragile whilst I am cheap and destructive. Also, when considering one piece of gear at a time, weight savings seem insignificant. An ultralight stuff sack may weigh an ounce less than a non-ultralight stuff sack, but it costs more and is more likely to rip because of its thinner material. An ounce doesn't seem like much, so at the time of purchase, the non-ultralight sack seems like a better deal. Because the same logic works for most other equipment, the result is that piece by piece, ounce by ounce and pound by pound, one eventually buys the straw that breaks the camel's back.

That said, I own one piece of gear that's good: my spork. Annoyed after having gone on several trips where I packed and carried conventional silverware from the kitchen drawer—a knife, spoon, and fork trio adding up to a pound or so—last year I bought a titanium spork. It cost me about $8. That's a lot for an eating utensil, but as sporks go, this one is full-featured.

In addition to weighing nearly nothing, and rather than awkwardly combining the spoon and fork together at one end so that it's too small for soup but too fat to stab lettuce—as a traditional spork is—my spork has a full spoon on one end and a full fork on the other. Both ends act as a handle for the other, which isn't gross by camping standards. What's more is that one of the outer tines on the fork end is mildly serrated so as to act like a knife in a pinch. Because the spork replaces the full trio of utensils, it saves me one pound of weight.

Thirty more pounds to go.

Bottle imp paradox

2012-01-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

Imagine you buy a magic lamp. After buying it you summon its genie within, and once summoned the genie grants you one and only one wish. And it's a nice genie, too, not a jinn that interprets your wish overly literally and transforms your pleasant wish into something terrible. No, this is a beneficent genie who will give you one thing you want, and you'll be better off for it. But there's a catch: once the genie has granted you your wish, you must sell the lamp, and you must sell the lamp for twice as much money as you paid for it. If you fail to sell the lamp in this way—say, within a week—then not only will your wish be reversed (whatever that means), but the most terrible of all fates will befall you—for example, you'll be tortured for the rest of your life. Also, the buyer to whom you sell the lamp becomes subject to the same stipulation, that the buyer must find another buyer who buys the lamp for double the previous sum—that's quadruple what you paid for it—or else the first buyer suffers that terrible fate. And so it goes to infinity, with each buyer required to find an ever richer buyer.

This is known as the bottle imp paradox. What makes it a paradox is that the lamp is theoretically worthless. That's because no matter how little you pay for the lamp—say, $1—after a few dozen transactions the lamp will cost more than the richest man in the world has. Thus, the last buyer—call him Mr. Z—will suffer a terrible fate. But Mr. Z would know his fate before buying the lamp (having done the math and checked it against the latest Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people to know he'd be the last possible buyer), and so Mr. Z wouldn't buy the lamp. That instead means the lamp's previous owner—call him Mr. Y—would be stuck with the lamp and the terrible fate. But Mr. Y too would have foreseen this, for Mr. Y would've gone through the same logic as the hypothetical Mr. Z did to know there would be no Mr. Z to buy the lamp, so Mr. Y too wouldn't have bought the lamp. But by the same logic, the previous owner, Mr. X, wouldn't have bought the lamp either, knowing there would be no Mr. Y. Nor would Mr. W, Mr. V, or anyone else have bought the lamp—not even Mr. A, who could have bought the lamp for a measly dollar.

And I'll point out, for you creative logic-lawyer-types, that there are no loopholes around the lamp's rules. For example, Mr. A can't wish himself a quadrillion dollars and then use some of that money to buy the lamp from Mr. Z, thus allowing for a possible infinite cycle of buyers. That's because the lamp can't be owned by the same person twice. Or whatever—any loophole can be closed with an explicit rule we imagine. The point isn't beating the game but dealing with the paradox.

That said, the bottle imp paradox demonstrates a rational counter to the greater fool theory. While the paradox says that the lamp is worthless because all potential buyers will have accurately valuated the lamp and will thus refuse to buy it, the greater fool theory says you should go ahead and buy the lamp for a $1 because you're sure to find a fool who'll buy it for $2. But that fool isn't quite so foolish because there'll be another fool who'll buy the lamp for $4, and so on. The greater fool theory works out well—until you get to the fool who can't find another fool, at which point the bubble pops and someone is in a lot of pain for the rest of their life.

For a long time, I've thought the stock of any company that forever refuses to pay out a dividend should be worthless. I concluded this using the same logic as used in the bottle imp paradox: that if a stock never pays anything back to the shareholders, then its only value lies in shareholders finding other fools who're willing to buy the stock in hope of finding yet other fools. I'm no fool—or so I like to think—so I figured companies shouldn't refuse to pay dividends on principle. Rather, they should fail to pay dividends for a good reason, such as their being broke.

Specifically, I thought Warren Buffett was foolish for being anti-dividend. How can his company, Berkshire Hathaway, be of any value if it doesn't eventually pay back investors? Without an eventual payback, its value must be entirely the result of a bubble of greater fools. But it turns out I was wrong: Berkshire Hathaway is indeed paying back investors. Recently, Buffett announced that Berkshire is running out of places to invest its mountain of cash, and so the company is returning some of that money to investors, who presumably will have better things to do with it. But Berkshire isn't paying its shareholders with cash dividends. Rather, it's paying back exclusively with stock buybacks. The buybacks work by reducing the number of outstanding shares, which raises the remaining shares' value. The reason for doing a buyback rather than a cash dividend has to do with incurring less tax liability, but in effect a buyback is the same a dividend.

Here's an articlethat explains these silent dividends.

Back to Arch

2012-01-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

My discovery (or rediscovery) that my laptop's hardware is 64-bit and my subsequent switch to 64-bit software meant reinstalling the OS, and this spurred me to challenge my recent decision to stick it out with Ubuntu.

Six years ago Ubuntu was the cool Linux distro. It was the first Linux you would dare take home to show your parents. And I did just that: after getting snagged by Windows security problems, my parents ran Ubuntu for a year or two before spending their big retirement bucks and switching to Mac. But I digress—

Ubuntu was the first distro that was easy to use. After installation, everything just worked: wireless cards with proprietary drivers, laptops with complicated power options, graphics hardware acceleration—if there was a way to do it at all in Linux, Ubuntu probably made it work without fuss.

I, like many other Linux users accustomed to hardship, switched to Ubuntu early on. It began a Golden Era of Ubuntu, when things were still new and uncomplicated but also sophisticated enough so that things usually worked. This was also around the time when the web began taking over and locally installed apps became less relevant, and that made Ubuntu (or any other free OS) make more sense. For a few years, during the Golden Era, I didn't know what was going on within the system, like what kernel version I was using or how to set up encrypted wireless manually—and it was all due to Ubuntu.

But every golden era must end. A few years ago, I switched to Arch because Ubuntu had become too fat (This—becoming fat—is the evolutionary pattern for most sophisticated software.) Whereas Ubuntu aims to be easy to use, Arch makes no attempt to have things just work. Even in 2012, upon first starting your computer after a freshArch installation, you get only a Bash prompt; anything extra you must set up manually. This discourages most Linux users, and we're accustomed to command lines and to figuring things out.

Arch's objective is to be as simple as possible—but not simple as in easy to use. Rather, Arch is simple in the same way a bicycle is simple: it has few parts and complications, and little is hidden. The result is Arch is elegant. Also, Arch teaches you a lot about how a Linux system works, if only in the course of keeping up with the rolling updates.

These last few years, I've flip-flopped between Arch and Ubuntu several times, but this may be my last switch for a while. I may have entered the Golden Era of Arch.

Imagining the end of the world

2012-01-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

According to Dan Gilbert, we're not any better off, on average, if we win the lottery than if we become paraplegic. It turns that a year or more after a life-changing event, most people revert to their old level of happiness.

It's facts like these that cause a lot of people to lose faith in the scientific method. I for one believe the evidence, and I even believe the conclusion that we humans are rotten at predicting our emotions, but if you were to force me to choose between instant wealth and losing my legs, not only would I pick wealth every time, I'd feel rather strongly about doing so. For me, the thought of never again riding a bike feels a lot like imagining the end of the world. This is one case where I can't bring my intuition to agree with reason.

An accepted theory about this phenomenon is that humans suffer from a cognitive bias called impact bias. In short, impact bias is the tendency to overestimate the importance of short-term effects while underestimating the importance of long-term ones. When I imagine losing my legs, I fixate on the immediate difficulties, such as losing my ability to bike to work or climb the stairs to my apartment, but I neglect thinking about the long-term, mundane details, such as how I'd eventually cope and that I'd still be a productive person who finds meaning in life. As I imagine them, the short-term effects are vivid, but the long-term effects aren't. Rationally, I understand all this, but emotionally I can't feel it.

There are many ways impact bias plays out around us, and given that we observe the effects of shortsightedness everyday in our own lives and in others', there are many possible topics to write about. But today I'm going to write about one that has bugged me in particular for a few years, ever since I learned about peak oil, and that's the problem of why people are so bad at predicting societal change.

As writers such as John Michael Greer point out, there's a baffling disconnect between history as it has actually happened and the future as it's popularly imagined. In short—at the risk of oversimplifying—actual history moves slowly while the future is imagined to move fast. Great peoples and civilizations rise for centuries and fall for centuries, and yet in the minds of many people living today, utopia or dystopia is just around the corner.

Creation myths and their Edens notwithstanding, we don't have any evidence of civilized life being anything but a struggle for most individuals alive at any moment—meaningful though that struggle may be. So much for utopia, despite most generations thinking utopia is within reach. As for the opposite view, the one that says we're headed for the abyss, we lack evidence for sudden, swift falls, too. Even the Mayan collapse, thought to be one of the fastest collapses, took two full human lifespans to complete from start to finish. This means if you find yourself thinking about scenarios where things fall apart—as I often do—know that you won't be alive to see the end. And you'll likely fail to identify the beginning except in hindsight.

But with every boom and bust that befalls us, sentiment swings from rosy to bleak and back again. I previously thought such wild optimisms and pessimisms mostly had to do with a refusal to deal with one's circumstances; that is, it's tempting to think big, sudden changes are on the way when the alternative is to believe in a slowly changing world where we all must wake up tomorrow, go to work, pay our bills, and own up to our burdens and mistakes as they are. Frankly, for a lot of people, the end of the world is a pleasant prospect.

However, I've changed my mind: I think our frequent failures in imagining the future have also a lot to do with impact bias and our tendency to project the near future onto the far future. Swings between bullishness and bearishness say more about our present circumstances than they do about any rational view of the future. Dramatic events capture our imaginations, and we extrapolate the current dramatic events into future ones, leaving us to struggle with picturing the mundane details. But it's those mundane details of a system keeping itself in check, with people adapting to change, that make the real world creep along at the pace it does.

Dumb

2012-01-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

Sometime around four years ago, I bought the laptop I'm now using to write this blog post. Though since then I've banged it around in my backpack and bike panniers, and though I've reinstalled Linux at least a dozen times since wiping clean the original Ubuntu that it came packaged with, the laptop has served me well. Despite its age, it's still a sleek machine.

However, I recently got a hankering for a 64-bit laptop. I don't know why—it's a desire that just came on. So I started checking out new laptops online—you know, just to get a feel for what's out there. And what I saw is that laptops haven't really improved much in either speed or cost in the last four years. Even quad-cores remain rare. And in particular for me (and my unusual case), there are even fewer Linux laptops available nowadays, which is sad. The hidden Windows fee on new PCs is in the neighborhood of—last I heard—$100. It's satisfying not to send that money to Redmond.

After searching new laptops for a while, I decided it would be smart to check out my current laptop's specs to get an idea of how the new hardware out there compares to what I already have. Even I though I'm often taken for a computer geek, I really had no idea what was actually in my laptop. And cat /proc/cpuinfo is mostly gibberish to me in my hardware ignorance.

So I looked up the specs and saw that I have an Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 processor. And I looked up the specs for that and discovered that it's a 64-bit processor. Did I know four years ago I was buying a 64-bit laptop, but chose to run 32-bit software, and then forgot all about the hardware; or am I just stupid?

Feel free to post comments below, but keep in mind it's a rhetorical question.

Central Ave bike lanes

2012-01-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

This morning on my way to work, the city of Phoenix surprised me with a gift: freshly painted bike lanes on Central Ave for the one mile between Bethany Home and Camelback Rd. Here's the relevant AZ Central article, complete with the usual user-comment trolling that accompanies any article about bicycle infrastructure in this city.

I welcome this change. The addition of this one mile stretch of bike privilege increases the total distance I travel by bike lane during my morning commute to 1.3 miles. That's more than a 300% increase. Way to go, Phoenix!

Seriously though, if someone had asked me where to install one mile of bike lanes anywhere on my morning commute, this is exactly the mile I would have suggested. From my (admittedly subjective) perspective, it's the busiest, nastiest stretch of Central Ave anywhere between the Mountain Preserve and downtown. North of Bethany Home, Central Ave drivers are polite and patient. South of Camelback, they may be less polite and less patient, but the inclusion of light rail infrastructure chokes traffic and generally befuddles a lot of drivers, with the end result that they drive slower and more cautiously. But for the one mile between Bethany Home and Camelback, drivers are jerks. Were jerks. Now, with the addition of the bike lanes, drivers are choked there, too. Way to go, Phoenix!

This isn't to say I favor the outright choking of drivers—not even literally. Rather, I favor road design that encourages consistent driving, and if that means slowing traffic in one spot to match the speeds driven in the surrounding spots, then so be it. Hopefully the city then compensates for the change by quickening traffic somewhere else, say on the parallel-running 7th St and 7th Ave roads, to encourage northbound and southbound motorists to take those roads instead of Central Ave. Those two roads are already unsafe for cyclists, so we may as well squeeze through a few more cars on them.

While I can't imagine the addition of bike lanes ever making a road less safe for cyclists, I often imagine better ways to calm traffic or force drivers to pay more attention. But I'll take the new bike lanes on Central Ave.

Bike fail

2012-01-05T23:25:00.000-07:00

Some bikes come with an optional part called a spoke protector. A spoke protector is shaped like a disc and, on modern bikes, is usually made out of plastic. It fits on the rear wheel between the right-side spokes and the cassette, and it prevents the chain from jumping off the largest sprocket and getting caught in the spokes, which can cause a lot of expensive damage to the wheel and drive chain.

Spoke protectors are optional because the chain should never jump off the cassette. Bicycle derailleurs have a pair of screws, called the min and max screws or limit-stop screws, that forcibly prevent the derailleur from shifting too far left or right. On a well tuned bike, one where the limit-stop screws are set correctly, the rear derailleur can't shift far enough to the left to cause the chain to jump.

However, this morning I learned that my sporty, carbon fiber bike isn't a well tuned bike. I also relearned how finicky sports bikes are compared to, say, touring bikes. While I'm unsure whether my touring bike, which I've been using for heavy commuting for the last month, is well tuned, it has a spoke protector. That's because commuting or touring without such a cheap safeguard part is stupid, in the same way that removing the seat belts from a cargo van for performance reasons is stupid.

But for regular road bikes, which are rightly considered toys by most Americans, a spoke protector is yet another part that adds unnecessary grams—and in the worst place, the wheel. Also, spoke protectors make bicycles look less sporty. So most sports bikes don't have them.

The problem, as I've discovered the hard way, is that one doesn't know for sure whether a bike's chain can jump until after it has done so. I've ridden my bike for two years and several thousand miles, and this morning, for the first time ever, the chain jumped. It happened while I accelerated with a medium effort from a quiet intersection. I didn't know what happened at first, only that something had slid undone or had broken. For the few seconds until I came to a halt, I heard awful grinding and popping sounds.

I don't yet know what the total damage is because, as of writing this, I haven't been able to pry the chain from the wheel. I can see that a lot of the chain was ground away where it wedged itself between the spokes and cassette, and it looks like parts of the spokes and hub have been ground away, too. Also, the ordeal stressed the rear derailleur, so there's a fair chance that that's damaged, too, though hopefully it's no more than bent—derailleurs can be bent back into alignment. Strangely, through all of this, none of the spokes broke outright.

I own four bikes. Of the other two not mentioned in this post, one is a triathlon bike and the other is an $80 junker. Why couldn't this have happened to the triathlon bike instead?

A-ha!

2012-01-02T20:29:00.001-07:00

With another year done, I've now gone two consecutive calendar years without changing a major opinion. It's as though I really am getting older. Though, there's nothing wrong with that; growing older continues to beat the alternative.

But I'm not yet ready to be one of those guys who has it all figured out and needn't budge on his stances. So for 2012 I'm resolving to do a little self-improvement and change at least one major opinion.

And, no, this won't include whatever decision I end up making about the Houston Astros and their pending move to the AL. As I see it, I won't be changing an opinion there; I'll merely be deciding which of the two I value more: my hometown team or legitimate baseball. Theoretically, that choice has always existed, it's that the universe has only recently conspired to force me to decide between the two.

No, I'm talking about a real, honest change of opinion, such as me joining a political party or coming to believe I have an everlasting soul—i.e., something big. The last time I changed my mind like that was in 2009, when I decided that economies are subsystems of the environment, rather than the other way around. That may not seem like much, but it's a mind-changer that has me still working through the consequences and re-figuring my stances on a lot of issues. But that re-figuring is all derivative work of the original change-of-mind from three years ago. Now I want another a-ha!

I have no idea what that change should be—which I think is the point. Craig-of-the-Present may see no immediate way to improve upon any of his ideas, but every Craig-of-the-Past thought similarly. And those Craigs proved to be, well, sadly mistaken about a lot of things. So it's foolish to suppose Craig-of-the-Present has it all figured out.

But I admit I don't know how to change my mind. (Does anyone?) That makes this resolution risky. Typically, a New Year's resolution is a test of willpower, such as making eating less enjoyable. But is it possible to will oneself to change one's mind? That seems impossible to me. Changing one's mind seems to be more a matter of luck, which is to say my resolution is in one way as stupid as a resolution to be struck by lightning. But my resolution has better odds—I've changed major opinions more years than I haven't—and I can improve the odds further by listening to and reading new, creative ideas rather than surrounding myself with old, stale ones. As for what comes of that, I'll let you know about 100 blog posts from now.

Reading log, 2011

2011-12-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

All during 2011 I kept a list of the books I read. I don't feel like writing any book reports, or even short blurbs, so here it is: just the list.

Chris Townsend
The Backpacker's Handbook (2nd ed)
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
Lisa Rogak
Moving to the Country Once and for All
William Gibson
Neuromancer
Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs & Steel
William Zinsser
On Writing Well
Wanda Urbanski & Frank Levering
Moving to a Small Town
(various essayists)
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
T. C. Boyle
Drop City
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
John Steinbeck
Travels with Charley in Search of America
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
John Michael Greer
A World Full of Gods
Henry D. Thoreau
Walden
John L. Casti & Werner De Pauli
Gödel: A Life of Logic
Dan Brown
The Lost Symbol
Edward Feser
Aquinas
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Sean Carrol
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

From Eternity to Here

2011-12-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

I wish I could write something insightful about Sean Carroll's book From Eternity to Here, but instead I wrote today's post. This is not to say anything bad about Carroll's book—it's a great book. Rather, it's to say there's nothing like learning a few facts to realize just how little I know, and that's what I got from reading Carroll's book: a few facts a big dose of humility. Cosmology isn't my strength.

Carroll's main point has to do with explaining time and why we experience it as moving forward. The short answer is that time appears to move in the direction of increasing entropy. But this raises another question: why is entropy steadily increasing? The majority of the book explores this question from a multitude of angles, and along the way I learned some interesting facts, which I've summarized in bullet-list form.

The laws of physics, even at their most fundamental level, may be reversible, which is to say time's arrow mayn't be caused because of low-level interactions. Particle physics appears reversible along the three reflections of nature: time, parity (i.e., right and left, like what a mirror changes), and charge (i.e., positive and negative). When all three reflections are inverted, a particle or a system of particles will run backwards. So, for example, imagine you start with a box, mostly empty save for gas particles crammed into one corner. That's a low-entropy state. Then let the particles bounce around until they fill the box uniformly, which is a high-entropy state. If, at some time after the particles settle into a uniform distribution, you invert each particle along all three reflections, then the particles will move in reverse, with the effect that entropy will decrease from high to low in the box.
Entropy isn't one-to-one with disorder. Counterexample: oil and vinegar, when mixed and allowed to increase in entropy, will separate into a higher-order state. Thus, sometimes an increase in entropy denotes a decrease in disorder. So it's a good idea to be precise with the terminology and say entropy when that's what you mean, not disorder.
There is something called a Boltzmann brain, which is a hypothetical brain, or mind, that floats in outer space unattached to any body. But the brain is alive, thinking and feeling just like any human brain does. As extraordinarily unlikely it is that a Boltzmann brain actually exists (for the odds of a brain forming in a near vacuum are extremely tiny), it's more likely for a Boltzmann brain to exist than Boltzmann himself. This is because Boltzmann (the physicist) comprises a brain and a body, which is even lower entropy than just a brain.
Indeed, Boltzmann brains are maybe the biggest reason why it's important for guys like Carroll to figure out what time is. Boltzmann brains tell us—not the actual brains, mind you, just their possible existence—that we ourselves are more likely to be Boltzmann brains than real people on a planet, just as it's more likely for the universe to spontaneously generate a loaf of bread than it is to generate a loaf of bread and a baker. But we're not Boltzmann brains, so cosmology ought to account for why the universe has much less entropy than it could otherwise have for there to exist someone who, like us, observes what's going on. If Boltzmann brains were impossible, you could merely posit a low-entropy beginning condition—i.e., the big bang—and say the universe had an infinite amount of time before that time in which to fluctuate into the big bang's hot, dense low-entropy state. But, once allowing for the possibility of Boltzmann brains and how we'd much more likely be Boltzmann brains than real people on a planet, we need to explain why the universe's past low-entropy condition was lower than it needed to be—i.e., low enough to produce us.

Carroll explains such a possible model in his book. But that's all you'll read about it here.

Does this ever happen to you?

2011-12-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

At least this much happens to everyone: you've closed your eyes but haven't yet fallen deeply into sleep. Suddenly there's a loud sound, such as the slamming of a door or the ringing of a phone, and you're startled awake.

What does that sound feel like to you?

I feel a curious sensation whenever I'm startled awake this way. I see the sound. The part of me that's jolted awake is done so by sight. What I see—every time—is a sudden flash that looks a lot like TV static. Whatever I was seeing before, whatever nascent dream was working its way through my unconscious mind, is replaced by a blinding flash of snowy noise that then fades out, just as if turning off a CRT. Then my mind hears the sound, and I awake and open my eyes—peeved but aware of what awoke me.

How many other people feel this sensation?

Information and entropy

2011-12-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

I have a correction to make. A few weeks ago, I wrote that information increases as entropy increases. I was wrong. The relationship between entropy and information depends on who you ask.

Sean Carroll, in his book From Eternity to Here, repeatedly states that information decreases as entropy increases. I take this to be a view more common than mine, though I had long thought it was mistaken. Reading this book changed my mind. It turns out there's more than one way to define information, and unsurprisingly, not everyone chooses to define it as though they're a computer scientist.

As to why there exist different definitions for information, some leading to opposite descriptions of the world around us, that's something of a riddle. Today I'm going to describe that riddle.

First, take view that information and entropy are indirectly proportional—i.e., the view Carroll expresses in From Eternity to Here. Carroll uses an example of a glass containing warm water and an ice cube. The ice cube melts, causing the water to become cool. This change entails an increase in entropy. But as Carroll puts it, information becomes lost along the way. That's because the situation ends with a glass of cool water, but a glass of cool water can result from either an ice cube melting in warm water or else a glass whose water was cool to begin with. Two possible states evolved into one—i.e., information decreased.

However, that's not how I normally think about entropy. I take the view that information and entropy are directly proportional. To see it my way, take another example. Imagine you flip a coin a thousand times, and it comes up heads every time. That's an unlikely, low-entropy result. It's also the simplest result to describe; the two-word description 1000 heads suffices. Contrast that to any high-entropy result you're likely to achieve with a fair coin, where no discernible pattern emerges. In a patternless result, the only way to describe all coin tosses is by listing each toss individually—e.g., heads, heads, tails, heads, tails, tails, tails, etc. That's the meaning of patternless. Thus, higher entropy requires more information to describe what's going on.

So what's going on with the difference between these two scenarios? Which way is the right way of looking at the relationship between information and entropy? I wish Carroll had elaborated on this in his book, but From Eternity to Here is chiefly about time, not information, so I didn't learn why physicists find it compelling to look at entropy and information as being indirectly proportional. I understand only my own view, which stems from a background in computation.

My perspective is that of dealing with computer stuff, including data compression and the shortest program to do X. Put simply: the more random something is, the less it can be compressed—the longer a program must be to contain it. That leads computer scientists to the counterintuitive notion that high-entropy randomness is full of information, whereas patterns are not. That means we look at a TV showing static as containing more information than a TV showing a show, just as a shredded book contains more information than an intact book. As you may imagine, this view takes some getting used to.

As to the riddle of the two examples, and what causes the difference between the two views, the difference is whether one's view is macroscopic or microscopic. The macroscopic view leads to the physics perspective, where molecules are course-grained into big states, such as warm water with an ice cube. As entropy increases, the number of possible macroscopic states decreases, and that's perceived as information loss.

The microscopic view leads to the computer science perspective, where there is no course graining and one keeps track of each individual bit. As entropy increases, the number of possible microscopic states increases, and that's perceived as information gain.

That solves that riddle, but it suggests another riddle entirely: what is information, really? May we say something objective about it?

The new commute

2011-12-15T18:42:00.000-07:00

The new commute is tough. But because it's by bike, being tough isn't necessarily bad.

The shortest and fastest legal-and-not-too-likely-to-get-me-killed route to work is the one straight down Central Ave, from the AZ Canal path to downtown. It's a tad over twelve miles, vertically descends about 150 feet, and takes me 45-50 minutes to complete most mornings, door to desk. My guess is that's about 15 minutes slower than taking the freeway by car and a little faster than taking the express bus. Again, this is figuring total time from door to desk.

The route home is different. It ascends 150 feet, and though that's not much spread over twelve miles, it makes enough of a difference when biking in rush hour traffic. Negating the gradient subtracts several KPH from my average speed. That makes it harder to ride with traffic, to time lights and to evade. Add to these the phenomenon—as I observe—that afternoon rush hour traffic is more aggressive and unpredictable than morning rush hour traffic, and I have sufficient motivation to take a more out-of-the-way route home, one that's calmer. That route sends me all the way to 20th St and the AZ Canal path near my old neighborhood. It's more than fifteen miles but traverses only a dozen traffic lights or so, which is remarkable considering I cross through downtown at the start, and downtown is a dense matrix of traffic lights. But the afternoon route's elevation gain and added distance cause it to take more time than my morning route; it takes between 60 and 80 minutes, depending on how much power I put to the pedals.

On another note, last week I had the foresight to buy a set of fenders for my touring & commuter bike. I installed them Monday night and tested them in the wet and muddy conditions during Tuesday's commutes. Conclusion: fenders are amazingly effective. Upon finishing both the morning ride and the afternoon ride, my legs were dry and clean, and that's after speeding through inch-deep puddles. Had I ridden a bike without fenders, I would have been a sopping mess from waist to toe—I know that from experience. Tuesday alone made me pro-fenders.

The sleeping mind

2011-12-12T08:00:00.002-07:00

What modern materialist explanations of mind get right, I suspect, is their assumption that minds are entirely material phenomena that abide all the same physical laws as any other material we observe. But what materialist explanations get wrong, I further suspect, is nearly everything else.

It's not just the details we're wrong about; the metaphors we're using for our basic understanding of the mind are misleading. To show what I'm talking about, take as an example: sleep.

Sleep is ubiquitous for all animals possessing a nervous system of sufficient complexity. Even fruit flies appear to sleep. But sleep patterns vary to extremes from one species to another. For example, humans sleep an average of eight hours per day with nearly all sleep happening in one burst. Giraffes and cows sleep only about four hours per day, and armadillos sleep about eighteen. A house cat may sleep twice as much as its human roommate without ever sleeping more than a couple hours at a time. Ostriches sleep fifteen minutes or so at a time. Some animals sleep nocturnally; some animals' diurnal phasing changes with the seasons. Some birds and many aquatic mammals sleep with half their brain still awake, though REM sleep always requires both hemispheres. Seals sleep both in the water and on land, but they attain REM sleep only on land. And so on.

Given the wide range of sleep behaviors across different species, it strikes me as more than an accident that all animals of sufficient neural complexity sleep. Rather, it seems as though sleep is a necessary condition for self-sustained neural complexity, and the wide range of sleep behaviors we observe are animals' diverse ways of coping with the necessary but strategically disadvantaged position of being unconscious on a murderous planet.

Yet, as far as I can tell, sleep figures prominently into no modern explanation of the mind. Modern materialism's guiding metaphor for the mind remains the digital computer and its mechanical manipulation of information. But digital computers don't need sleep, so as a metaphor I doubt they'll take us but partway if anywhere to figuring out what's going on in the mind. Indeed, my guess is that computers' freedom from sleep remains one of the major limitations preventing us from making machines humanly smart, though how we should make computers need sleep is anyone's guess.

I suspect a good theory of mind will make strong claims about sleep and answer many of the puzzling questions we have about it. It will explain why complex neural systems need to shut down and reboot from time to time. And it will explain dreaming.

opinions.go

2011-12-08T20:02:00.000-07:00


package main

import "time"

func main() {

  // FIXME: This is not thread-safe. Then again, that just makes it
  // interesting.

  // All opinions strengthen over time, given no facts.
  go func() {
    time.Sleep(24 * 60 * 60 * 1000000000) // 1 day
    for _, op := range opinions {
      op.strengthen(stuckInMyWaysDelta) // presumably >0 but small
      // NOTE: stuckInMyWaysDelta keeps getting increased each time we
      // release. This is becoming a problem.
    }
  }()

  // Accept incoming facts, adjust opinions accordingly. Congruent facts
  // strengthen opinions, incongruent facts weaken opinions.
  go func() {
    for f := range factChan {
      for _, op := range opinions {
        agree, value := op.arbitrateFact(f)
        if !agree {
          value = -value
        }
        relevancy := op.factRelevancy(f) // >= 0.0
        op.strengthen(value * relevancy)
      }
    }
  }()

  // Contrariness loop:
  // Disabled if pleasant or uninteresting.
  if !pleasant || interesting {
    go func() {
      // For each incoming opinion (from another program), reconcile with
      // existing, local opinions. Unlike facts, opinions are strengthened
      // because of disagreement, not agreement.
      for inOp := range opinionChan {
        for _, op := range opinions {
          agree, value := op.arbitrate(inOp)
          if agree {
            value = -value
          }
          value *= howMuchICareCoefficient // see social.go
          relevancy := op.relevancy(inOp) // >= 0.0
          op.strengthen(value * relevancy)
        }
      }
    }()
  }

  go inspireNewOpinions()
  go garbageCollectStaleOpinions()

  metabolize() // doesn't return until SIGTERM
}

On the origin of minds

2011-12-04T20:23:00.000-07:00

From Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop:

But consciousness is not a power moonroof (you can quote me on that). Consciousness is not an optional feature that one can order independently of how the brain is built. You cannot order a car with a two-cylinder motor and then tell the dealer, Also, please throw in Racecar Power^® for me. (To be sure, nothing will keep you from placing such an order, but don't hold your breath for it to arrive.) Nor does it make sense to order a car with a hot sixteen-cylinder motor and then to ask, Excuse me, but how much more would I have to throw in if I also want to get Racecar Power^®?

Like my fatuous notion of optional Racecar Power^®, which in reality is nothing but the upper end of a continuous spectrum of horsepower levels that engines automatically possess as a result of their design, consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. Fancy 100-huneker-and-higher racecar brains like yours and mine have a lot of self-perception and hence a lot of consciousness, while very primitive wind-up rubber-band brains like those of mosquitoes have essentially none of it, and lastly, middle-level brains, with just a handful of hunekers (like that of a two-year-old, or a pet cat or dog) come with a modicum of it.

Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel's strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you've got self, you've got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed.

Hofstadter's analogy between consciousness and Racecar Power® succinctly explains what I find lacking about non-materialist criticisms of materialism. Just as you can tear apart a racecar engine block, grind it to metal shavings, and never once observe an atom of Racecar Power®, so too you should never expect to discover consciousness as a tangible entity anywhere in nature. But we don't go around claiming that Racecar Power® is an immaterial entity that defies materialist explanations; to the contrary, Racecar Power® is exactly engineered by precise and intentional exploitation of physical laws. So too consciousness is consequence of physical laws applied to plain, ordinary material stuff.

Nevertheless, I find Hofstadter's strange loop view of consciousness lacking. Though the view makes more sense of what I see than non-materialist views, it strikes me as being like guessing the right answer on a test: it doesn't show that we understand what's going on. As yet another analogy, the strange-loop view is like pre-Darwin ideas about evolution, which also were good guesses but guesses nevertheless.

It may surprise some people to know that ideas about evolution predate Darwin, but as far as we know, the idea goes back at least to the Greek philosopher Anaximander, who in the 6th century BC proposed that life began in the seas. Darwin's big contribution to the idea of evolution is the idea of natural selection. Natural selection provides the framework through which we can say how evolution occurs and even a little about what forms it takes. In other words, natural selection is the glue that binds evolution to falsifiability, transforming a weak explanation that says life changes to a stronger one that says life changes as a result of selective pressures of the environment. Pre-Darwin, ideas about evolution were speculative; post-Darwin, evolution serves as a framework that points us to explanations and further questions.

Materialist views of consciousness such as Hofstadter's strange loop are interesting but speculative. What's missing from them is consciousness's analog to evolution's natural selection—i.e, the driving force that explains how the emergent phenomenon works. As for what that analogous thing is, no one knows. But evolution as an idea was around for at least 2,300 years before Darwin entered the scene, and a theory of material consciousness may take as long or longer to emerge—though, if consciousness has no analog to evolution's Galapagos Islands, the problem may be intractable.

Of shirts and cars

2011-12-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

On Monday, for my first day at work, I forgot my shirt. How's that for a first impression?

Wallets, keys, phones, papers, packed lunches, etc—these are easy things to forget. But not shirts. It's hard to slip out the front door of your home having accidentally forgotten your shirt. Unless, of course, your shirt is supposed to be out of sight, packed in one of your panniers because you're dressed in cycling attire. Then it's easy to forget that shirt—which you pressed the night before and what a big deal that is because you haven't ironed anything for years and the iron emitted an aroma of melting plastic because it hasn't ironed anything in years either—draped over a kitchen chair.

The company I work for makes chargers for electric cars. Some people thought the future arrived when they first watched a movie on their phone. For me the future has arrived in that I have the guts of an EV charger on my desk at work.

For a guy like me who's pro-bike, it may seem strange to work somewhere that's furthering car culture—even if it's a new fringe part of it. I also spent more than four years working at a company that made software for car dealerships—and car dealerships are evil, no doubt. The truth is: most software development in the world is, well, corporate, and I'm not above selling out.

That said, I don't believe electric cars are the way of the future. (Shh, don't tell any of my coworkers I said that!) Electric cars require a lot of system complexity just to maintain the status quo. I liken our culture's sudden enthusiasm for EVs as a sign that we're entering the bargaining phase in our grief over the continued erosion of our way of life. Please, please let me keep driving a one-and-a-half ton vehicle 60MPH on the freeway. I'll do anything—even put up with limited mileage, higher costs, and the extra inconvenience of electric charging to pumping fuel. Please?

While sitting at my new desk and familiarizing myself with the details of EV charging, I ran some Physics 101 calculations to compare pumping gas to electric charging. Here's what I got:

There are 4,184 watt-seconds in a Calorie.
A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 Calories—or what I like to call 31 burrito units.
At the gas pump, gas flows up to 10 gallons per minute, though I suppose most pumps do about half that—let's say 5 gallons per minute.
There are 60 seconds in a minute.
Thus, 4,184 watt-seconds per Calorie, times 31,000 Calories per gallon, times 5 gallons per minute, times 1 minute per 60 seconds is 10 megawatts.

To make that clear, whenever you pump gas for your car, you're controlling an energy flow equivalent to about two to three thousand McMansions. Granted, you fill your tank in only a few minutes, whereas those McMansions keep sucking power all day. But the next time you stop and fill-'er-up during rush hour, look around at the other ten or so pumps in use and keep in mind that that gas station is outputting as much power as a small coal-fired power plant.

This is to say people's dreams of electric cars replacing cars as we know them probably aren't going to come true. Even if we solve battery shortcomings—and that's a huge if—there's still the problem of replacing the convenience of fueling at a rate that's three orders of magnitude greater than what your house consumes. I just don't see that happening. Ever.

The way of the future for personal transportation will involve the word smaller and probably the words slower and nearer. Everything between now and then is bargaining and depression.

As for me and my new job, I'm just glad they don't mind me wearing an undershirt to work.

Where time becomes a loop, where times becomes a loop, …

2011-11-28T08:00:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned last week, I'm reading From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll. It's a physics book for laypeople and is about time.

Time is a funny thing when you stop to think about it. What exactly is it? How do you define it in non-temporal terms? That isn't easy to do, and you won't be getting any answers here. If I thought I was out of my league while reading medieval monotheistic philosophy, then I feel doubly so now, reading about general relativity and spacetime curvatures. But I like the book a lot. I'm not taking notes—just reading through and absorbing whatever happens to soak in.

Physicists sometimes talk about time as a fourth dimension, but time doesn't appear (at first glance) to have the same symmetries as the other three dimensions. As Sean Carroll puts it, you can turn whichever way in 3D space and maybe even get lost, but you can't make a wrong turn into yesterday. That is, time always runs forward—at least as we perceive it. Why? That's a big question the book aims to answer. At the heart is the idea of entropy and how the quantity of information in the universe has steadily increased ever since some initial high-order state, which we call the Big Bang.

A lot of people wonder where order comes from, even to the point where it affects science's credibility, such as when someone professes their skepticism that complex life could self-arrange from simpler components. The question where does order come from? is interesting, but there's a good answer for it: order comes about by making some other place even less orderly. In that sense, order isn't any more mysterious than the cold air blowing out of an air conditioner. Where does refrigerated air come from on a hot summer day? Answer: by pumping heat uphill to the outdoors—i.e., making some other place even hotter. Marvelous, yes, but straightforward nevertheless.

But the where does order come from? question leads to a compliment question that's harder to answer: where does disorder come from? Currently, no one knows. Not all disorder comes about as a result of order increasing somewhere else. Disorder is, on average, increasing in the universe, so some disorder is coming about from—well, no one knows. Whatever the answer, it appears to have something to do with the essence of time itself.

Time travel

You can't write a physics book about time for laypeople and not include a chapter about time travel, and this book dutifully has one. In it Carroll discusses qualitative features of various theoretical ideas about time travel. One idea is the closed loop of time, called a closed timelike curve in the book. A closed timelike curve is spacetime that bends enough to form a circle, thus causing events to cycle repeatedly, like in this episode of Star Trek TNG.

I'm going to spoil the plot: it appears unlikely that it's possible to create a closed timelike curve if the universe isn't set up from the get-go to produce one. This has to do with the enormous amount of energy required to bend spacetime into a circle. Nevertheless, such loops are interesting to think about as thought experiments. In particular, they necessitate what seems to us to be a problem: a choice between paradox or defying entropy's relentless march.

To explain this, Carroll uses an example of a gate that leads into yesterday. That is, if you walk through the gate at 3PM on Wednesday, you will emerge on the other side at 3PM on Tuesday. Other than this fact, there's nothing weird about the gate—no strange force field, no Hollywood-style light show. You walk through it like any ordinary gate. Someone watching you from the Wednesday side would see you pass through normally, though on the other side you would be in Tuesday. (The observer would be looking backwards in time when they see you on the other side.)

Once in Tuesday, you would walk around as though it were any other ordinary day and re-experience the previous twenty-four hours, but at the end of that time you would return to the Wednesday side of the gate and pass through again. That is the meaning of a closed loop. The paradox problem stems from the notion of freewill: what if you chose not return to the gate? What if you instead decided to board a plane headed to another continent or to shoot yourself in the head? The idea of a closed loop of ever repeating events conflicts with our sense of freewill.

We may resolve the paradox by hypothesizing there's no freewill. But without freewill we're presented with another problem: entropy. After passing through the gate, you spend the next twenty-four hours walking around, doing whatever it is you did previously, and then return to the Wednesday side the gate. However, the condition in which you return to the gate must be exactly the same as the condition you were in when you last passed through the gate. Your hair must be the same, the specks of dust and dirt on your pants must be the same. Every cell and every atom in you must be exactly the same. You must not have aged, learned anything, forgotten anything, or changed in anyway. But this sort of thing just doesn't happen over the course of any twenty-four hour period. Things wind down, and they become more disorderly. A closed timelike curve defies this.

As I said, you won't be getting any answers here.

What happened, dear Astros?

2011-11-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I found out the Astros will move to the American League after this coming season. Upon hearing the news, my first impulse was to resign as an Astros fan. But such an overly dramatic and potentially regrettable decision is worthy only of Mets fans, and I know as plain as any fact that in baseball one doesn't give up on one's home team on one bit of bad news alone. Rather, one first waits a few years, enduring bad trades and losing seasons؟

But moving to the Devil League is the worst possible news. To put this in perspective, even if the Astros were to lose all 162 games in a season I would think to myself, Well, at least the Astros played baseball, not like those imposters in the AL, who don't make everyone hit. In baseball, every player hits. Every player hits. I looked at the Astros' presence in the NL and the Rangers' presence in the AL as tangible proof that Dallas is an inferior city to Houston. Now they're division rivals., and I'm forced to rethink my conclusions.

Though, the core of my problem isn't so much with the Astros as it is with MLB. Don't misunderstand me: I fully expect any professional sport to whore itself out given the chance—kudos to anyone who figures out how to earn good money through recreation. But MLB continues to degrade itself from its former position as a high-class call girl to that of a common street hooker on dollar day. Baseball has always been idiosyncratic and resistant to change, but now it seems regretful about it, reforming itself slowly enough to hope no one notices. Well, I notice.

First they created the DH as a kind of pre-retirement package for aging players—a change that appeals to the kind of fan who conflates hitting home runs with strategy. Then they devised interleague play, which eliminated the mystique of the NL-AL distinction and the privilege of the World Series. Then there was the steroid era and MLB's complicity in trashing sacred records to win back fans from the 1994 strike. Now, using the Astros' league switch as an excuse, MLB is increasing the prevalence of interleague play.

I say MLB should stop beating around the bush and just openly mimic the NFL. Here's an idea. Even in pro baseball, not all players excel at both offense and defense. How about splitting each team into two squads of specialists, one for offense and one for defense? Batter shows bunt? Bring in the special team to handle that.

</rant>

Grammar Gripe Tuesday

2011-11-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

Three words rarely used correctly and meaningfully are: clearly, obviously, and literally. Though these words have their appropriate uses, they've become so misused in modern English that they should raise a red flag each time you write them.

Clearly & obviously

Clearly and obviously both suffer from the same common misuse, which is that as a meaningless transition between two ideas. Take the following example:

X and Y are large values. Clearly, we don't have enough time to compute Ackermann's function with X and Y as its inputs.

Such use of clearly is self-defeating. If the reader happens not to know about Ackermann's function, then clearly is flat wrong; it's not clear. But if the reader does know about Ackermann's function, then you don't need to alert them to the clarity of the statement. If the statement is clear, they'll know. In any event, it's bad form to point out the obvious.

Obviously, X is greater than Y.

If it were obvious that X is greater than Y, then hopefully you'd have the sense not to write it. Maybe the word you're looking for is thus or therefore.

Literally

The average person probably has a good reason to use the word literally no more than four or five times a year. Literally shouldn't be a common word, but somehow it is, having taken on a new meaning as a kind of superlative—as when mere figurative speech won't do.

On our camping trip the mosquitoes literally ate us alive.

Wow! Man-eating mosquitoes! A zombie that can write! Forget whatever point the author was trying to make; I want to know more about what it's like to be reanimated.

The correct use of literally is when you intend to be taken non-figuratively while using a phrase that's commonly a figure of speech. For example:

George literally worried himself sick over his midterm exams.

We know George is not merely anxious about the exams; he's actually sick, and probably puking is involved.

These gripes may seem small, but they're part of communicating well. These days, anyone reading your words has countless distractions vying for their attention and thus isn't in need of additional reasons to find something else to read. To be taken seriously, first use your words seriously.

Aquinas

2011-11-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

To understand Aquinas's philosophy, such as his Five Ways, one must interpret Aquinas's arguments according to the Aristotelean metaphysics that underlies them. That's the main point of Feser's book Aquinas, and according to Feser, few modern philosophers interpret the arguments as such, instead interpreting them according to different metaphysics frameworks or even ignoring metaphysics altogether and taking a scientific, empirical view.

Feser devotes about ten dense pages to each Way, first describing the Way and then identifying various objections to the Way and how each objection fails according to an Aristotelean point of view. I gave an example of such an objection last Monday: To Aquinas, the common objection of the First Way, What moves God? makes no sense because God is unmoving.

And so it goes: many common objections to the Five Ways aren't objections but rather misconceptions. However, I won't describe the Ways here, nor will I enumerate the misconceptions; there are other things I find more interesting and I wish to move on. Suffice it to say if you're interested in sharpening your understanding of classical monotheism—and I think that's a worthwhile goal for nearly anyone—you can read Feser's book, settle for Feser's blog, or probably find other authors who have made similar points.

Instead, I'm going to jump straight to commentary.

After finishing the chapter on theology, I feel that Aquinas's Five Ways are solid arguments and atheists who argue against them are usually misguided. That differs from my opinion before starting Feser's book, back when I agreed with some of the common objections because I didn't interpret the Ways according to their Aristotelean premises. That said, Feser cemented my preexisting opinions that (1) Aristotelean metaphysics aren't compelling and (2) the God proved by classical monotheism has little to do with the God that monotheists actually worship.

Indeed, starting with the second point, I felt disappointed that the divine attributes turned out to be the well known infinite qualities such as immutability, eternalness, immaterialness, perfection, supreme simplicity, and so on. These attributes suggest God is another word for impersonal, unfeeling law or order, as in the kind of universal regularity that scientists try to discover through empirical investigation. Indeed, I find the Five Ways to be an interesting set of arguments for the claim that the universe is merely bound and that an absolutist view of things—rather than a relativistic view—makes the most sense ultimately. And here I use the word bound instead of finite because a thing may be infinite yet bound, such as how an endless string of 0's is infinite though possessing a fixed, limited quantity of information. Analogously, the Five Ways suggest the universe, irrespective whether it's finite or infinite, may be bound and thus ultimately subject to scientific law.

That brings me to my first point, which is that I don't find the Ways' underlying metaphysics to be compelling.

Pardon my metaphysics

At the heart of the problems I have with Aquinas's premises is his distinction between form and matter. To me, this distinction is dubious.

The key idea underlying form-matter dualism is that not everything can be material stuff alone—material stuff being matter and energy (and possibly spacetime itself?). Skipping past awkward, macroscopic examples of rubber balls highlighting the difference between rubber as matter and ball as form, there's the idea that concepts, like say, triangularity, necessitate the existence of something beyond mere material stuff. Such matterless things are forms. In the case of triangularity, a triangle is a conceptual thing independent of matter and thus exists as pure form.

Do forms exist as tangible things as though in another realm? Unlike Plato, Aquinas doesn't think so, and in any event we have no evidence for it. But maybe forms are merely mental—i.e., projections humans place onto the universe they observe. Not so, for even if all humans vanished triangles would still exist. For example, the angles of a triangle in Euclidean space add up to 180 degrees regardless whether there are any humans around to appreciate that fact.

So do triangles exist even if no material stuff exists anywhere in the universe? Aquinas thinks so, but this is an open question. Unlike the scenario whereby humans and only humans vanish, if all matter, energy and spacetime vanish then it's unclear what, if anything, remains. This leads to our most basic questions of what reality is all about.

For all I know, Aquinas answers the question correctly. But we can't be sure, and so (I think) it's better to build one's understanding of the universe around what one does know, even if that entails starting with the macroscopic stuff in the middle and using lenses to focus on bigger and smaller things over time. I just can't stop looking at things empirically.

Moving on

As Shelly Kagan jokes in the second lecture of his course on Death (which is open courseware, meaning you can freely read, listen to, or watch all the lectures—oh, how the Internet is a treasure!):

[You] will hear on several occasions over the course of the semester, I'm a philosopher. What that means is I don't really know a whole lot of facts.

Before starting Philosophy Monday on JEC, my intention was to read and blog about one book on polytheism (check!) and one book on monotheism (check!—though I'm ignoring the chapters on the soul and on ethics) and then move on to indulge myself in what really interests me: secularism. And in particular: secular ethics. My plan was to read and blog about Derek Parfit's quietly influential book, Reasons and Persons, which explores just how bizarre rational ethics is.

But those first two philosophy books have left me starved for facts, so I'm changing plans. Instead, I've started Sean Carroll's book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. It's a popular-level science book about cosmology and time. I'm unsure how inspiring it will be for Philosophy Monday material, but on the other hand I've got other things on my mind worth writing about.

The only real freedom

2011-11-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

Two jobs ago I worked with a guy named Randy. Randy was a middle-aged developer who had a single-digit employee number and more years with the company than I had with life. He was an opinionated Republican and social conservative, a Vietnam Vet, and an enthusiast of a generally strange view of the world. So when I was assigned to help Randy port his disk storage software from Windows to Linux, we hit it off.

The two of us spent countless hours in his office, half working and half shooting the breeze. I figured that since the company paid me half what I was worth—as I figured it—and that since Randy came and went as he wished anyway, our arrangement with the company's time was fair.

Randy and I rarely agreed about anything philosophical, but one thing we did agree on was the inseparable link between money and freedom. As Randy put it many times: the only real freedom is financial freedom.

Now, civil rights are important freedoms. The right to free speech and the right to due process are important freedoms—critical freedoms. But no rights or freedoms granted to you by any parchment or legal act will keep you from becoming someone's tool, someone's serf. To be your own person, you must have your own wealth. Otherwise, someone will be there to tell you to show up to work on days you'd rather not show up, on days you're inspired to create something of your own, and thus you must drudge through the mediocrity of earning a living.

These last six months I've taken what many people would call a sabbatical. Six months ago I decided I was better off leaving my job, and so I left it. It was that simple. I left because I wanted to and I could. I took the time off to be myself, to set goals for myself. I learned two new programming languages. I made a bike rack and shoe rack. I read philosophy and then moseyed around the neighborhood to think about what I read. I nursed an Achilles' tendon injury. I bonded with Laura's cats.

Sadly, though I'm not fully shackled, neither am I fully free. And so I'm bringing my six months of self-direction to its end. Today I accepted a job offer and will be going back to work.

The new job has a few things going for it. For one, the company makes chargers for electric cars, which is cool even for a product, and making products beats making services. Also, the office is in downtown, and I love downtowns, even Phoenix's, what with their plazas and gigantic public art and their compactness that lets you walk to nearby shops and restaurants. Not that I spend money at shops or restaurants. But it's neat to be one of the shabbily dressed people who walks around, awkwardly staring people in the eye and muttering under his breath.

Proof from motion

2011-11-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

Onward, out of the mire of metaphysics and on to firm ground!

The First Way—the proof from motion—is one of Thomas's five arguments for the existence of God. It goes something like as follows:

Motion—i.e., change—is caused by something that already exists.
Nothing can be both moved and mover at the same time.
There can be no infinite regression of movers.
Thus, for any given motion, there must exist a first mover—an unmoved mover—and that is taken to be God.

After describing the First Way, Feser raises the common objections and explains why the objections fail. For example:

Objection: The first mover could be anything; this proof doesn't say anything about God.
Answer: The First Way doesn't intend to prove the existence of God. Rather, it shows that if God exists then God should have, among other properties, the property of being a first mover. Other parts of the Summa Theologiae ascribe the divine attributes to the first mover.
Objection: But what moves God?
Answer: Irrelevant, the proof doesn't claim God moves. God is pure act and thus, possessing no potency, doesn't move.
Objection: Why can't a series of causes—i.e., motions—regress to infinity?
Answer: Because they can't.

OK, Feser answered the third objection a little more rigorously than my three-word summary, but I found his answer lacking nevertheless. As for the first two objections, these are the kinds of ideas that drew my to learning about Thomism in the first place—that many of the common criticisms against classical monotheism are based on misconceptions of the underlying philosophy.

An infinite series of movers

Though he didn't convince me that there can exist neither an infinite series of movers nor a circular series of movers, Feser did answer a few of my questions I posed last week: specifically, that causes really do happen simultaneously with their effects and that the distinction between essence and accident is well defined.

Indeed, the difference between accidental causes and essential causes is that a series of accidental causes occur non-simultaneously whereas a series of essential causes happens simultaneously. This definition of essential causes differs from a casual, man-in-the-street view of causes, where we perceive things in the past to cause effects in the present or more recent past and things in the present to cause effects in the future. Essential causes all happen now. For example, imagine a moving hand that moves a stick that moves a rock that moves a leaf. The motion of the hand is an essential cause for the motion of the stick, rock, and leaf, and all move together simultaneously.

Such a simultaneous series of causes can't regress to infinity. Why? I don't know, and this is one aspect of the explanation I found lacking. Another aspect I found lacking is whether any two causes in a series can ever happen simultaneously. Taking the view of modern physics' general relativity, where no information can travel faster than light, it seems safest to presume that there exists no series of essential causes greater than one. Just as we may define a three-sided polygon who angles sum to 270 degrees in Euclidean space, we're playing with a definition of a thing that doesn't exist. We know from experiment that the hand and the leaf really don't move simultaneously.

What the First Way doesn't say

The big idea I gleaned from Feser's explanation of the First Way is that the First Way isn't a proof for God's existence, though it's commonly marketed that way. Rather, the First Way is a conditional statement that goes something like as follows:

If motion is only caused by something that exists and if nothing can be both mover and moved at the same time and there can be no infinite regression of movers then motion is ultimately caused by something that itself doesn't move.

This seems valid to me. Interesting, though, what the First Way doesn't say. It doesn't say:

There can be only one first mover in the universe.

Nowhere do I see it argued or implied that all series of essential causes are themselves linked together to the same first mover. For example, two different hands and leaves moving about may have two distinct first movers. This is a point Greer made in his polytheism book: that with the exception of the Ontological Argument, all the arguments for the existence of one god work just as well as arguments for many gods. Thomas himself rejected the Ontological Argument, so I'm eager to see how he ascribes the divine attributes of a singular, infinite God to the being postulated by his Five Ways.

$4 lesson

2011-11-11T12:21:00.002-07:00

Last week I took my touring bike to the shop after neglecting a repair job for a few months. The problem was that the left-hand brake lever component was loose and would slide up and down the handlebar when I put even a little force on it.

I do as much of my own bike maintenance as I can. Doing it myself serves two purposes: first, I learn skills and become less dependent upon specialized, paid-for help; and second, once I know what I'm doing, I do a better job than a paid-for mechanic does because I have more incentive not to be sloppy.

But I didn't know how to fix my brake-lever problem; I didn't know what needed to be tightened. I tried to figure it out by first peeling the rubber flap that covers the brake lever attachment to the handlebar, hoping that doing so would reveal the secret of what keeps the component in place, but that revealed nothing that could be adjusted. Next I peered into the component itself through the small space that opens behind the lever when the lever is squeezed. All I saw was a single tri-bit screw, and I figured that screw was loose and thus was my problem.

I had never before needed a tri-bit screwdriver when doing any bike maintenance, but I've long become accustomed to needing new, specialized bike tools. My latest tool acquisition was a cone wrench, which is an especially thin spanner wrench used for tightening the cones when replacing the bearings in older wheel axles, like those on my Benotto 10-speed.

So that's how I ended up at the bike shop with my touring bike, waiting to have the mechanic use a tri-bit screwdriver to tighten my brake lever. The mechanic took my bike into the back room. For the few minutes he worked on it I tried to watch what he was doing, but I couldn't see what he was doing without crossing into that strange, employees-only area, and I had to resort to asking him what he did when he was done.

Oh, I just used a —mm wrench, he said.

You mean a tri-bit screwdriver? I asked.

What? You don't need a screwdriver. He was now looking at me as though I'm a mechanics imbecile—which isn't far from the truth.

Yeah, I saw there's a tri-bit screw head in the component. Isn't that what you tightened?

What? No. There's a hex bolt right there that adjusts the tightness.

I then took another look inside the brake lever, which I should add is black and made darker from looking in through a small hole with poor lighting. But now knowing what I was looking for, I discerned the grays of a hex bolt easily accessible through the small hole. Now this repair job made sense: nearly everything that can possibly need tightening on a bike is tightened with a hex wrench, and the brake lever's attachment to the handlebar is no exception. That tri-bit screw is only an internal piece of the brake-lever component and never intended for adjustment.

I asked the mechanic what I owed him, and he said four dollars. I paid the four dollars and thanked him for making me feel stupid—but also smarter.

Thomism C.A.Q.

2011-11-07T14:52:00.004-07:00

I now doubt I chose a good book for learning about Thomism. It's not that Edward Feser's book isn't good—it may very well be. Rather, when reading Feser's commentary, I feel like I've imposed upon a heated exchange between a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan: an argument that's been going on a lot longer than I've been alive and is about something I don't care much about. In this case, the argument is between philosophers and is about things philosophers care about—non-falsifiable claims science expelled as irrelevant a long time ago. But I've imposed upon the exchange between the two fans, and now one of them is telling me I'm mistaken for not caring about the Red Sox and Yankees and I ought to take a side.

Thomists and Catholics, like most people in the world, wish more people listened to them and took them seriously. But to be taken seriously you must first take other viewpoints seriously, if only to understand how to phrase your explanations to people who see things differently. I want a book about Thomism that takes my viewpoint seriously and then explains Thomism's relevance.

The book about Thomism I'd like to read would be written for people who aren't impressed with metaphysical systems just because they possess internal logical consistency—i.e., claims ultimately backed with you can't prove me wrong. The book would start with the assumption that the reader takes a skeptical view towards uses of the word natural and would start with Gödel and Chaitin and logical incompleteness, and go from there to show Thomism still matters even after knowing these things. Does such a book, however unmarketable, exist?

I doubt it, and I won't be the one to write it because I don't understand Thomism. Instead, today I'm posting my ignorance in the form of a CAQ—Craig-Asked Questions—questions I derived from the notes I jotted in the margins besides my main notes from Feser's book. These notes pertain only to the chapter on metaphysics.

Note: Unlike FAQs, CAQs don't have answers, just more befuddlement.

How does one know which potentialities of an object are natural and which are unnatural?

Using Feser's example, rubber balls don't bounce from here to the moon, nor do they move by themselves and follow people menacingly, because they lack the potential to do so—i.e., such potentialities are unnatural. What then is the definition of natural?

Forms are abstractions, but is matter not an abstraction, too? If it's not an abstraction, what then is matter made of?

This reminds me of my philosophical position on atoms: atoms don't actually exist, but they're useful constructs to keep in mind when reading a chemistry textbook. Ditto for circles with respect to math textbooks.

Are substantial and accidental forms relative?

Using Feser's example, painting a ball a different color causes the ball to lose one accidental form (i.e., non-essential form) and take on another accidental form, but the ball's substantial form of being a ball remains. But perhaps instead of saying we started with a ball that happened to be, say, red, we said we started with a red thing that happened to be in the shape of a ball. In such a case, the accidental and substantial forms would be flipped. Is this a valid way to think about the metaphysical truth of the universe? If so, are there limits to how relativistic accidental and substantial forms are? Without limits, there exists an infinite combination of accidental and substantial forms that may be applied to any one thing.

If substantial and accidental forms aren't relative or are limited relativistically, then what criteria ought we use for determining them?

And how do we justify the criteria themselves? And how do we justify the justification of the criteria? And so on.

What are the final causes of stochastic radiation?

Is chance event a valid final cause? If so, how do we know when chance event isn't the final cause of something?

If causes happen simultaneously to their effects then how does motion occur at all?

I suspect I missed something here. According to Feser's example of a brick smashing through a window, the brick pushing into the glass and the glass giving way are simultaneous events—indeed, actually the same event considered under different descriptions. But cause-and-effect are used to explain change, and saying that a cause and its effect are simultaneous implies a sort of Zeno's paradox whereby change cannot occur. What did I miss?

Are final causes and privations relative?

This deserves a story. I once remarked to my former coworker Shafik how it bugged me that electrons in electrical circuits flow from negative to positive, all due to Benjamin Franklin's arbitrary 18th century terminology. Because of Franklin, a positive potential signifies a negative concept: a lack of electrons.

Shafik put me to ease with an idea so simple it frustrates me I didn't think of it myself: Craig, if the terminology bugs you, then think of a positive potential not as a lack of electrons but rather as a positive desire to obtain electrons. Only because of mental feebleness does this cause electrical flow to make more sense to me.¹

Shafik's advice follows from a relativism heuristic that aids in understanding a lot of math and science: use whichever terminology makes the most sense of what you see. How does this heuristic apply to final causes and privations? For example, maybe the final cause of an eye is to see and cataracts are the result of a privation that hinders the final cause of sight. But maybe instead the final cause of an eye is the development of cataracts and all our early decades of clear sight are a privation of cataracts? Is any one system of terminology more valid than another? If so, what are the criteria for judging the validity of one final cause theory over another?

Why are final causes not tautologies?

(obligatory xkcd reference here)

Feser explicitly claims the notion of final causes is non-tautological, but he doesn't explain why. To Feser, the two statements:

Opium causes sleep because it causes sleep.

and

Opium causes sleep because it has the power to cause sleep.

are inequivalent. Why are they inequivalent? From the book:

[The second statement says] that opium has a power to cause sleep; that is to say, it tells us that the fact that sleep tends to follow the taking of opium is not an accidental feature of this or that sample of opium, but belongs to the nature of opium as such.

That leads us back to the question of the relativism of accidental and substantial forms and how we judge one accidental-substantial pair as more valid than another. It seems Thomism hinges on a preformed notion of natural.

What's insufficient about the distinction between context-free and context-specific that makes final causes necessary for understanding the significance of a given causal chain?

Feser gives the example of how bear DNA causes bears to be big and furry but bear DNA doesn't cause bears to be good mascots for football teams. Feser's point is this implies there's a final cause at work with DNA, and the final cause includes size and furriness but not mascot-worthiness.

But bear DNA does cause bears to be good mascots, just not directly. The issue here is the distinction between context-free and context-specific causalities, not end causes. Bear DNA causes bears to be big and furry regardless whether humans exist, but whether bear DNA causes them to be good mascots also depends upon (1) humans existing; (2) humans playing football; and (3) humans choosing mascots that are big, furry animals. Biologists don't study mascot-worthiness genes in DNA because such genes require context that transcends the scope of biology—but the genes exist nevertheless.

What's the final cause of a final cause?

And what's the final cause of a final cause's final cause?, and so on. How do final causes work at all without leading to an infinite regression?—or are we allowing for infinite regressions?

By the way—and this isn't a question—a decrease in entropic order is an increase in information.

From the book:

…would contradict the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that order (and thus information content) tends invariably to decrease, not increase, within a closed system.

Not to pick on Feser here because this is a common misconception: order is a lack of information, and the amount of information in a closed system increases with time as order decreases. As with electrons and the flow of electrical current, many people see this as a backwards way of looking at things. If you're such a person, try thinking of order as a reduction in complexity or a kind of data compression.² For example, if you sort your books according to the Dewey Decimal System then you need only a simple, concise card catalog to describe where any book is; without sorting your books to some such system, you need more information to describe where any book is.

^[1] The backwards terms for electrical charges are useful for pointing out that electrical current is arbitrary. In batteries what flows are protons, not electrons, and the protons do flow from positive to negative.

^[2] But don't think of order as lossless data compression if you want to be exact about it because lossless data compression doesn't eliminate information; instead, it squeezed a fixed amount of information into a smaller space.

Not proved wrong

2011-10-31T11:46:00.000-07:00

I glossed over the two terms last week, but the linchpin of Thomism is its distinction between efficient causes and final causes, which together and only together explain change.

An efficient cause is that which actualizes a thing's potential property. For example, cheese melts when heated, with melted-ness being the cheese's potential property made actual and heat being the efficient cause, or actualizing agent, of the change. A final cause, on the other hand, is the end purpose of such actualization. In the same example, cheese melts when heated because the end purpose of heat as applied to cheese is for cheese to melt.

A lot more can be said about efficient causes and final causes, and usually a lot more is, but the previous paragraph provides the gist. As for efficient and final causes' place in modernity, science of the last few centuries conditionally accepts the notion of efficient causes, though in the jargon they're referred to as causes, but it dismisses final causes, regarding them as lying outside science's domain. And this brings me my main point.

Falsifiability

One problem with beginning a book with a chapter on metaphysics is that the author alienates most readers who don't start the book already agreeing with most of what the author has to say. It turns out metaphysical reality is a lot like pornography: we know it when we see it, but when pressed for precision, our opinions often differ. That's to say we each have our intuitive notions how the universe works, but nature at extremely small and big scales, as measured either in size or complexity, eludes descriptions that are both exact and predictive. And if you make a claim that's inexact or non-predictive, then you invite people who disagree with you to continue disagreeing.

Another word for predictiveness is falsifiability. Thomism is non-falsifiable, and I gather as much from the first dozen pages in Edward Feser's book. This doesn't surprise me; a key attitudinal difference between religious-minded folk and science-minded folk is how important they think it is for claims to have the capacity of being proved wrong. Religion values falsifiability little or none at all while science depends upon it. The end. It's not even worth getting into a discussion about the value of falsifiability itself because values are themselves non-falsifiable. Suffice it to say, either you think falsifiability is important or you don't. Those who think it is start with that as their axiom—albeit, one that's a self-referential paradox—and run with it as far as the evidence goes. Those who think falsifiability isn't important run even further.

Let's take an example. Suppose I claim there exists alien intelligence on the other side of the galaxy. My claim is, practically speaking, not a falsifiable claim. Though it can be shown to be true by way of evidence—for example, by receiving an alien radio transmission or by being visited by green men in flying saucers—it's beyond our ability to prove the claim false. Despite any lack of evidence for alien intelligence, there remains the possibility that the alien intelligence remains unobserved because it's well hidden though nevertheless out there somewhere. So in a way my claim is safe. When asked to defend it, I might say, You can't prove me wrong, or No one has ever proved me wrong. That ends the conversation—or the useful portion of it, anyway—because you can't prove me wrong. Whether alien intelligence exists across the galaxy from us is doomed to speculative judgment so long as (1) humankind hasn't yet observed positive evidence and (2) humankind hasn't ruled out every possible alien-intelligence-sized happening 100,000 light years away—and we can't do that even for the nearest stars.

Is not being proved wrong a defense? I don't think so. That's because I value falsifiability. Unless already interested in the topic, I don't care about the validity of your claim X, any X, if it doesn't predict some future, testable event. Claiming there exists intelligence across the galaxy from us doesn't tell us anything about the future: the aliens may remain hidden forever or tomorrow they may show up and solve our nonrenewable-resource crisis with their Mr. Zero-Point Energy devices. The claim about aliens works with any possible tomorrow because the claim doesn't say what tomorrow will look like.

But a lot of people do think not being proved wrong constitutes a valid defense. You who're reading this post may very well be one of them: someone who sees things differently than I do and who cares about non-falsifiable claims—or at least a few specific ones. That's OK. I doubt valuing falsifiability as I do is the best choice for all people because I doubt it allows an individual on average to live his or her life better. In any event my goal with these Monday religion posts isn't to change opinions but rather to sharpen them; my goal today is for you to understand the distinction between falsifiable claims and non-falsifiable claims. Just as you wouldn't expect to be understood if you continued speaking English to someone who doesn't understand English, you should recognize when you're talking to someone who values falsifiability and alter your expectations for the conversation accordingly. It's up to you whether that means saying something different than what you would say when around like-minded people or instead forcing no replacement upon silence. But rarely if ever will insisting the other person stop caring about falsifiability do either of you much good.

In my opinion, the point of studying philosophy is not to be brought closer to the truth—whatever that means!—nor is it to argue a few particular points better. Rather, the point is to be able to argue all points better, not because you believe any of them, but because by being able to better argue for something you don't believe, you enter the minds of people who disagree with you and thus improve at communicating with them—at teaching them and learning from them. Can one love wisdom any more?

Some people may say, Yes, Craig, rah rah empathy sounds goods, but the question whether there exists alien intelligence on the other side of the galaxy has a definite, true-or-false answer. Falsifiable or not, there's a decision to make here. By now if you can't see how I see such a question as irrelevant, then probably nothing I write about these matters will ever make much sense to you. That's OK. That needn't end the conversation just yet: next week I'll write specifically about Thomism metaphysics.

Go hack

2011-10-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

I didn't post either of the last two Thursdays because each day I was too engaged with my hobby-work in the Go programming language to care about blogging. So it goes. After working with Go for a few months, I feel I've attained a feel for the language and can offer insights about what it does well and what it doesn't. In this post, I'd like to focus on one thing it does well: It makes hacking on the standard library easy.

That first Thursday I didn't post I was busy finding and fixing a nasty Go problem that suddenly manifested up on my laptop. In short, Go's WebSocket support stopped working. One minute my prototype web server handled WebSocket connections flawlessly, several minutes later WebSocket connections in Chrome failed to connect. In the minutes in between, I upgrade Chrome, so it looked like the problem was due to the browser. This surprised me. First of all, like many people, I've come to expect Google products to work as is (unlike certain other tech companies' products). Secondly, I upgraded Chrome as a regular apt-get update && apt-get upgrade Ubuntu update, which should include only fixes, not new features. Why then was Chrome upgraded from version 12 to 14?

In any event, I debugged my code and confirmed that the problem was indeed somewhere in the Go standard library websocket package, undoubtedly manifested because of a change in Chrome. WebSockets are new and not yet standardized, so such breakages are to be expected. The new Chrome implements a newer draft of the WebSocket protocol, and so Go needed a corresponding upgrade.

This is routine stuff for Go. You first install Go by pulling a local copy of the upstream Mercurial repository and locally building the compiler, library, etc., so updating the Go standard library is straightforward, entailing pulling new content from upstream and running a script to rebuild everything. However, pulling the latest from upstream failed to fix my WebSocket problem, so I had to switch from the stable release head (r60) to tip, which is where newest, experimental Go development occurs. I'm not a Mercurial user, having only recently gotten into learning distributed source control by way of git, so I'm a little shaky at switching heads. This time, after switching to the tip head, Go did not build. One of the standard library tests broke. What to do? The r60 head's WebSocket support was broken, and tip failed a test that maybe doesn't matter. I decided to play it safe and make a Frankstein Go. I copied the tip's websocket package into the r60 head and rebuilt everything. It worked: all tests passed, including the websocket's. And my prototype web server program worked again, too, now with the newer version of Chrome.

My point here is Go makes its internals easily accessible. I can't imagine making such a copy-and-paste-between-versions change to the C standard library and not end up spending a few days working through problems. Nor do I imagine this kind of fix would be easy in Python or many other nice languages. Partly Go benefits because nothing on my laptop uses it other than the few programs I write, so I can tinker with the Go standard library all I wish without system consequences. However, even if most of my OS were written in Go, Go makes it easy to sandbox development by having simultaneous Go installations.

But there's more to this. In no other language have I found myself daily reading through the language's source code to figure out how it makes things work. With Go I find it's useful to look inside the standard library. It's also easy and fast to insert Printf()'s inside the standard library to debug problems and work around incomplete documentation. Between the ease of (1) hacking on the standard library and (2) having a runtime that catches most runtime errors and prints stack traces and useful error messages, Go is unusual in that it uses pointers and bare access to memory heavily and yet I rarely find myself wishing to use a traditional debugger like gdb.

So the standard library and the development environment is something Go does well. But there are things it doesn't do well, too, and I've now spent enough time with the language to come to understand many of its limitations. (You don't really know a language until you can list a dozen problems with it.) Perhaps I'll write about those in the future.

Aquinas

2011-10-24T22:38:00.000-07:00

Three clicks away from John Michael Greer's blog I found Edward Feser and his blog. Feser isn't someone I'd likely read past the first paragraph, owing firstly to his material and secondly to his polemic style, but the first post I read on his blog caught my attention. In it Feser made an analogy between the history of philosophy and the Godfather trilogy of movies. Suppose you knew someone who has seen half of the first Godfather movie, none of the second, and the third fifteen times. How would that person's opinion of the trilogy compare to someone who's seen all three movies? Answer: their opinion would be skewed. Not only would they know little about the first two movies and what made those movies great, but they'd probably be confused about many parts in the third movie as well, despite having seen the third movie many times.

So it goes with philosophy. Western philosophy divides into three eras: the classical era of the Greeks and Romans, the medieval era of the Scholastics and of classical theism, and the modern era consisting of a hodgepodge of poorly written nonsense. And yet most people's knowledge of philosophy is as warped as the previous paragraph's Godfather fan's knowledge of the Godfather trilogy: most people's understanding of philosophy includes a little about the classics, little beyond a caricature of the medieval period, and a whole lot of the modern period, usually starting with Descartes and I think therefore I am. And so it goes that we should stop re-watching the third movie and get busy learning what makes the first two movies masterpieces.

Feser's analogy sold me: I ought to learn more about medieval philosophy. Years ago in college I took two philosophy classes, one a generic intro and the other an ethics class (which gave me more questions than answers), and from those courses, as well as my ongoing interest in loving wisdom, I can't say I know more than a shadow of what was going on in the minds of learned Europeans one thousand years ago. Feser's academic specialization is St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century, in case you're wondering), who is to classical theists as Adam Smith is to modern free-market supporters: often cited, rarely read. But Feser has made a career out of Aquinas, and he knows his topic—or purports to know, for I'm in no position to judge. He's written a few books, and he says that few people really know what Aquinas is all about. Aquinas has never been refuted, only neglected. If only more people watched the first two Godfather movies in whole, we'd realize how special classical theism is.

The book I'm reading is titled simply Aquinas. It's a beginner's guide and fulfills one of my requirements for reading about other religions: it's short, just around 200 pages. I was pleased to discover the book is also clear and mostly devoid of clutter. What will follow on Mondays here at JEC for the next few weeks are my thoughts and impressions of the book's content.

Metaphysics, briefly

Feser begins with a chapter on metaphysics, that quagmire of a topic useful for transforming conversations from evocative to provocative. I'm halfway through the chapter, which makes up nearly a third of the book, so I can't conclude on the matter just yet, but so far Aquinas's metaphysical framework looks much the same as the classical ones I learned in school—mainly, the Forms.

I admit to never making much sense of Platonic and Aristotelian forms while in school and learning only enough lingo to get by on exams. In his book Feser makes something clear that would have helped me as a student: the primary difference between Plato's forms and Aristotle's forms is that Plato's forms existed as real things in a heavenly realm of forms, whereas Aristotle's forms are merely the yin to the yang of tangible matter. Take as an example my touring bicycle. It comprises matter by way of steel, rubber, aluminum, plastic, cork, and so on, and its form is of bicycle-ness. According to Plato, you could destroy the matter and the bicycle-ness still exists, somewhere out there, but Aristotle—and Aquinas, who takes Aristotle's side—argues that if you destroy the matter then you've destroyed the bicycle-ness, too.

In addition to the forms, there's the duality between actuality and potency, and there are the four causes. Actuality and potency pertain to an object's properties: actuality being the set of properties the object has, and potency being the set of properties the object may attain through change. The four causes then explain change. The first two causes, the material cause and the formal causes, are matter and form restated. The other two causes are the efficient cause and the final cause. The efficient cause transforms a potential property into a actual property, and the final cause is the teleological end, or purpose, of a change.

I'm rushing the descriptions of these concepts because I expect most people will skip past them no matter what I write, with maybe one person interested enough to read about them elsewhere. So far Feser's book reads much like any other I'd expect to see in an intro philosophy course, so I'll wait at least another week before giving any commentary.

Not to scare away further comments, but...

2011-10-17T22:13:00.000-07:00

According to the schedule, today I'm supposed to write about St. Thomas Aquinas. But according to the schedule, I was supposed to post something last Thursday. Let's just say I haven't been well taken with schedules lately, and this week I'm going to shirk Aquinas and instead respond to Shafik's long comment to last Monday's post.

Those of you who haven't figured out you can save time by skipping these Monday philosophy & religion posts will remember last week's post was about how absolutism and relativism both make no sense as judged by the principles of the other. The post garnered a few comments, which makes it a successful one as measured by my validation-seeking blogging mindset, and one of those posts—Shafik's—included eight question marks, which makes it a good comment as measured by my opinion that questions are generally more interesting than answers. Shafik invited me to speculate further about the mysteries of the universe, and I'm not one to resist making non-falsifiable claims when asked. So here's my response to Shafik's comment.

* * *

Does Relativism make any sense if no consciousness is involved?

If a universe falls in a forest and no one is around, is the universe still sound? My guess is consciousness has nothing to do with relativism vs absolutism. While it's hard to imagine relativism being meaningful without a sentient entity around to use it, the same goes for absolutism, too. What does meaningful mean when no one is around to ascribe meaning? As for whether the secrets of the universe are any different only because the universe now contains small pockets of complexity capable of referencing some of those secrets—I'm skeptical.

Talk about a nature of things invites a slew of question-begging. What nature? How do you know? How are you sure? How are you sure about being sure? And so on. I've seen nothing further down those holes but faith and mysticism, and everyone's mileage varies with those. Even scientism, which is the belief that science is making progress, is merely calling the other side of the same absolutist coin. Only after starting with some form of absolutism do any of these modes of thought make any sense.

Care must be taken, however, to prevent Relativism from becoming a destructive tool against well-backed and strongly justified facts and "truths" about the universe.

Relativism and absolutism both can be taken in, muddied, and used to project rainbows and shadows onto the universe one sees. These days relativism is most closely associated with secularism, which is the socio-political equilibrium you get when you put together millions of materially wealthy, differently thinking people. It's also the system that affords people the freedom to sit at home with their laptops and trash secularism on their blogs, but that's another matter.

When I hear someone say, People ought to do X, I like to play a game with myself and speculate as to whether people alive 500 years from now will be more likely to agree or to disagree with the statement. It's my guess that little of the knowledge and material wealth we value highly now will be much valued by people then, and meanwhile they'll care a great deal about many things we value little now. I for one draw comfort from this transience, just as I draw comfort from a universe that's uncaring. It really takes the pressure off.

…Godel's theories…

I agree.

What about the strange and esoteric world of Quantum physics?

While you have to give up the old-fashioned notion of absolutes to make any sense of quantum physics, many people argue that quantum physics is merely pressing forward to an ever more accurate model of the universe—i.e., scientism and its absolutism deja vu. But quantum physics, computation theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and many other recent successes requiring relativistic thinking suggest there's merit to learning how to use relativism as a tool.

Or do they? Actually—and this is where I disagree with most atheists—I'm not at all convinced that building a more accurate model of the universe, whatever that means, is of much help to most people. In fact, I strongly suspect self-delusion is one of mankind's greatest survival skills. Some people need a deadline and some pressure to get things done. Speaking of deadlines, let's see if I can get around to that Thursday post…

The relativism that can be told

2011-10-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

The relativism that can be told—to borrow a line from Eastern mysticism—is not the eternal relativism. But that doesn't stop people from trying.

Cutting out the jargon, many philosophical debates centering around relativism vs. absolutism reduce to a pattern like this:

Relativist: There are no absolutes in the universe.

Absolutist: On what absolute are you basing that?

Relativist: Dang, you got me.

Afterwards, the relativist holds his head low, his relativistic universe thoroughly rocked. How can relativism be defended without abandoning the principles of relativism? It can't be done.

But the absolutist's trick cuts both ways, with some other debates reducing to the following, different pattern:

Absolutist: There are absolutes in the universe.

Relativist: Yes, according to your premises. But I reject your premises.

Absolutist: But my premises are not mere abstractions. They're truth.

Relativist: So you say.

The trick both patterns exemplify is: both absolutism and relativism make no sense as judged by the principles of the other. Want to poke holes in the other guy's framework? Easy: use your own framework to do so. And thus legions of philosophers, professional and amateur alike, continue poking holes and begging questions. The usual strategy I observe them using is obfuscation: syllables and complexity are added to the debate until at least one of the debate's participants no longer recognizes how the debate fits into one of the two patterns above. But just as you can't change what's in one book by writing new books, no amount of adding to can get around these two points: (1) to the relativist, absolutism's objectivity remains ever yet another framework among many and (2) there's no room for relativism's infinite speculation in the universe of truths as seen by the absolutist. But this isn't the end of the conversation. The nonsense to the other relationship between absolutism and relativism is asymmetrical. Specifically, relativism is indefensible.

The relativist who disagrees with that last point is stuck in debate pattern #1, playing the part of the absolutist and by my account better labeled as such, though of a quasi-relativist kind. That relativism can't be defended is not mere sophistry: it has to do with the absolutist's monopoly on defense itself. Things are objectively right or wrong and objectively true or false only in the absolute universe. Thus relativism, unequipped with even the language of right and wrong and true and false, can't argue its own point one way or the other according to the classical standards of Western argumentation, which hold it as absolute truth that ideas should be defensible. Rather, relativism merely is, and that's about all that can be said for it.

If a conclusion is the place where someone got tired of thinking, many absolutists peter out after the previous paragraph, saying something along the lines of: What good is relativism if it can't even be defended? That's a white flag of surrender (and irrelevance) if I ever saw one! But the absolutist derives his valuation from his own premises, which are exactly what are in question: generally, whether the universe makes some degree of objective sense, and specifically, whether our attempts to make sense of the universe should be defensible. You can't bootstrap absolutism with anything other than absolutism. In all its variations it requires the universe to obey at least one bedrock claim, even when that claim is the one made by the quasi-relativist who says paradoxically but with conviction: Humans are incapable of understanding the universe.

While it's fair to call absolutism a belief or a world view, in my opinion relativism is better described as a tool. Just as there are no perfect carpenters in the world but only people with varying levels of carpentry skill, there are no perfect relativists, only varying degrees to which people are comfortable with and are capable of using relativistic thinking. To borrow again from Eastern mysticism: The relativist that can be named is not the eternal relativist. There's no such thing as an unqualified relativist.

It's little surprise to me then that relativism invites the scorn, ridicule, and bafflement it does. The relativist's world is indefensible, utterly bizarre, and commonly misunderstood. The relativist navigates his ship without longitude and latitude to dock without anchor or ropes. Knowing where you are only in relation to what you see around you sends the mind reeling, not unlike trying to keep one's sense of direction intact while doing a flip off the diving board. And just as there's no trick to doing flips off diving boards, there's no trick to adopting the relativist mindset: it just takes a lot of practice to get the hang of it. As for whether it's worthwhile to do flips off diving boards, that's up to each of us to decide.

Next Monday I'll begin posting what I learn about St. Thomas Aquinas and classical monotheism, just as I've posted about polytheism for the last many weeks. Though I'm no polytheist, I found writing about it straightforward because polytheism employs a lot of relativistic thinking, and I've felt comfortable with relativistic thinking ever since it captured my imagination for keeps in a non-Euclidean geometry class I took in college. So when, for example, the polytheist claims it doesn't matter whether different cultures' conflicting thunder gods are the same god, that makes sense to me, just as do triangles with angles summing to 180 degrees or 270.

Aquinas and classical monotheism, on the other hand, are by no means relativistic. From the start they espouse absolutism by claiming things have a true nature, and it's hard for me to see such teleology as anything other than an assumption—and one that's more misguiding than useful, in my opinion. When such a claim comes from the eleventh page of a 200-page book, time-saving heuristics in my head urge me to dismiss the whole discourse. But that's the disservice I see Internet philosophers doing to themselves daily: judging the value of the other guy's ideas using only one's own ideas. It's no random happenstance we lose a lot of mental flexibility as we age, and I suspect time-saving heuristics have a lot to do with it.

Reading about Aquinas requires a hefty mental shift on my part, but that's a shift I'll try to make here at JEC for the next month or so. Writing about classical monotheism purely by my own standards wouldn't contribute originality to the Internet, and neither would it be much fun to read. Instead I aim to write about classical monotheism according to its own standards and to see what interesting things it has to say. Hopefully you'll find them interesting too.

This

2011-10-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

You believe this sentence is false.

If you're not from Mars then you believe this sentence is false.

If and only if you prefer to be right about this sentence then you do believe this sentence is false.

If the previous sentence frustrated you then you believe the next sentence is false.

If you haven't yet caught on that there's something screwy about logic then you believe the previous sentence is false.

Polytheism: myth and meaning

2011-10-03T15:30:00.001-07:00

If gas prices hadn't spiked to $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008, I wouldn't be reading Greer's opinions about polytheism today in 2011. But such strange connections make up the stuff of life. I discovered Greer through his peak-oil blog in my search for explanations about what was happening to the oil markets three years ago. What initially attracted me to his site among the many others was the historical sensibility of his stance that civil collapse is a long and messy process—not at all the abrupt end of the world so many people imagine. But what kept me reading his blog week after week was his strange way of explaining his stance through his talk of myth and meaning.

Though I find myself eager to finish A World Full of Gods and to move on to the next topic of classical monotheism, I want to include a post about Greer's ideas about myth and meaning. He raises the topic in the eleventh chapter out of thirteen, which from my point of view as a polytheist skeptic may be mistakenly too deep into the book. It's the chapter of most value to non-polytheists, as the skill of thinking-about-thinking benefits oneself in so many endeavors, both inside and outside religion. On the other hand, most people read for the confirmation of their existing beliefs, and I doubt many non-polytheists will ever crack open this book, so what does it matter how far into the book this chapter is? As it is, I'll relate some of Greer's ideas about myth and meaning here at JEC because I've intertwined his ideas into my own jargon for talking about philosophy and science, and I want to share the story.

According to Greer, a myth is a story that gives meaning to the world. This sharply contrasts from the term's common use, where myth means a falsehood. Indeed, as Greer points out, a myth that's unequivocally false would do a poor job providing meaning to anything and would thus be a poor myth. Rather, the validity and meaning of a myth lies in the ears of its listener. No one doubts Easy Rider is fiction, but how many of the Baby Boomers we see riding their motorcycles out on the open roads on any given weekend haven't found at least some meaning in Peter Fonda's and Dennis Hopper's portrayal of nomadic independence? Myths work on many levels, unlike facts.

As with trying to make sense of a Coen Brothers' movie, problems emerge when people ask what a myth is about. Myths aren't about anything; they're mere stories, building blocks for people to ascribe meaning to the universe they experience. A listener can give any story a wide range of meanings, from the literal to the abstract symbolisms we drudged through in high school English classes. Those differences in meaning stem from differences in interpretive schemes, and no scheme is right or wrong except as measured by other myths and their schemes.

Myths are not veiled presentations of some other discourse; all other discourse are veiled presentations of myth…

Thus, there's no way to escape the use of myth. The human brain hardwires us to use them as a way to understand things. Indeed, the modern man's belief that he doesn't believe in myths—that mythical thinking went extinct along with many other superstitions from long ago—follows from his very belief in a specific myth, a myth that has captured our collective imagination for the last couple hundred years, the Myth of Progress. The Myth of Progress holds that humanity, darling of the universe, moves ever onwards and upwards to bigger and better futures, that our lives are better than our parents' and our children's lives will be better than ours. There's no room in the ascent of man, as the myth goes, for the irrationality of myths.

Greer's point in all this, far from the impossible task of ending our beliefs in myths, is that we ought to know more myths. No myth makes sense of all phenomena, and our ability to make sense of our experiences is largely tied to how many myths we know.

Our problem is not that we have no myths, but rather that too many of our myths tell the same story and make sense of the world in the same way. Most of our stories end and they all lived happily ever after. We are left floundering and baffled when things do not turn out that way, and our hopes of perpetual improvement burst like bubbles—financial or otherwise.

This is where polytheism comes in. Paganism has a wealth of myths covering many possibilities and circumstances: triumph and defeat, pride and humiliation, fidelity and adultery, and so on. There's no one moral or one set of morals one can derive from Paganism. Such diversity empowers.

I take Greer's ultimate battle here to be with secularism and its linear view of history. However, Greer also criticizes monotheisms for their myths' otherness, their detachment from nature. Greer is a druid and likes his stories, on the whole, to draw from and reflect nature and its balance, limitation, and reciprocity. Greer advocates his view well, though in the end it's all just another story.

Moving, again, again, …, again

2011-09-29T20:46:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'll finish moving the last of my junk out of my apartment, and I'll hand my keys to the leasing office, thus terminating my lease. This is my eleventh move in as many years since first moving into an apartment my last year in college. By now I'm well experienced with the process, though each move presents its unique surprises. This one is especially heavy, what with the bicycle and shoe racks, the tools I used to build them, and other accumulated clutter. This afternoon I asked Laura after she arrived home from work, Will you help me move the gardening stuff from my patio—

—Right now?—

—sometime this evening?

OK, let me change my clothes.

Cluttering my old apartment's patio were potting trays, two bags of dirt, one bag of vermiculite, and other remnants of Laura's and my attempt at patio gardening last spring. There was also a small trash can filled with the remnants of a not-so-successful experiment with patio composting. The trash can had finished its week-long quarantine exposure to the September Arizona sun to dry out and kill the maggots.

I'm not touching that, Laura said, pointing at the plastic green cylinder that once served as my bathroom trash can. Maggots are yucky creatures, but how much worse are they than what was in the trash can in years past? In any event, the trash can was my responsibility, to be handled later. For now, we moved our gardening implements to the grassy yard on the other side of my patio wall and set about planting our fall garden. We replaced the dirt in the trays with a mix of fresh potting soil and vermiculite, and we planted onions and carrots, each occupying one row in one tray, each about two feet long.

The vermiculite is a new trick. Organic gardeners make a point how soil is more than a medium for holding plants upright and that what goes on below the surface is richer and more diverse than what goes on above. Potted plants are particularly disadvantaged because they exist isolated in a monoculture, and in our case with no input other than tap water. It doesn't help that the old soil in our trays had compacted and compressed by about a fifth in less than half a year, either. Supposedly the vermiculite will help keep the soil looser, though like with the composting, this is all trial-and-error experimentation. From our spring harvest we received nothing but a few unfertilized blooms. Perhaps this time we'll realize a morsel.

Polytheism and salvation

2011-09-26T21:36:00.000-07:00

For a while now, with the goal to continue these Monday religion posts, I've aimed to read next a book by a Catholic scholar about Thomas Aquinas. My reason is I've observed a trend of classical monotheists who imply or outright claim that non-monotheists don't really understand monotheism and it's their ignorance that causes them not to be monotheists. So it shouldn't surprise you to know that I'm a little fearful of the next assignment; I'm expecting it to be an endeavor of antagonism, one full of clearly's, in fact's, and obviously's I don't find clear, factual, or obvious.

In the meantime, A World Full of Gods continues to inspire me with new writing topics each week, enough so that I'm having to pace myself with the reading part to avoid backlogging the writing part. My enjoyment of the book comes despite my disagreement with the author, which I've come to realize is high praise of a writer's skills. Most people can write appealingly to readers in agreement; it's the ability to write appealingly to those who disagree that takes the most skill and is something worth aspiring to.

* * *

Early in A World Full of Gods, Greer claimed the core difference between polytheism and monotheism (and between polytheism and atheism) is that polytheism alone ranks experience above theology (and philosophy). In short: polytheism gives the benefit of the doubt to nearly all claims about the gods—even claims that on the surface conflict with each other. I've come to think of this as that P's believe it when they see it, whereas M's (and A's) see it when they believe it.

Greer takes this another step further and says most seemingly conflicting claims about the afterlife are true, too. Can souls live on after the body's death? Yes. Can souls reincarnate? Yes. Can souls become spirits that interact with the living? Yes. Can souls be brought back to life after death? Yes. Indeed, it's exactly the diversity of near-death experiences, as well as experiences of apparitions and of children with previous-life knowledge, that make a diversity of afterlives plausible.

Greer has written many books about the occult, so I'm not surprised he takes deathbed phenomena seriously. I don't. But though I usually find such talk about souls and the afterlife nonsensical according to my own Story of Materialism, what's interesting here is a greater point implied by polytheism's afterlife-diversity: polytheism is not a religion in search of a problem to solve.

Much of what a religion has to say about life is implied by what it says about death. These days most religions in the world, from Western monotheisms to Buddhism, claim there's an improvement to be had by dying and therefore that there's a fundamental problem with living. Polytheism—or at least classical polytheism, with its broad beliefs in the afterlife—does not make this claim. According to polytheism, some individual humans may find themselves in trouble from time to time, maybe even most of their lives, but other individuals may be in no trouble. To the polytheist, religion may help people with their problems, but its purpose isn't salvation because people, as a whole, don't need saving.

To some extent, this resonates with me. In the last few years—long after I graduated college, I might add—has it been pointed out to me how unthinkingly teleological most modern thought is, from the most devout of monotheists to the most devout of atheists. The case of salvation is no different. There can be an essential problem with humanity only if humanity ought to be doing or being something different than it currently is. This presupposes an objective viewpoint. But if our planet's ongoing evolution is purposeless then humanity is what it is, so to speak, and it has no essential problem—onlyour individual, misguided expectations placed upon a finite existence.

Project: shoe rack

2011-09-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

Today I took a 2x10 and some dowel rods I bought a few months ago and I made a shoe rack. It took six hours to make.

This is my second woodworking project, the first being the bike rack I made a few months ago. Unlike the bike rack, which is modular and capable of being disassembled, the shoe rack is one piece, more like regular furniture. Shoes rest atop one-inch dowel rods that span the length of the rack and which are held in place against the side boards with glue and pegs I cut from smaller, three-eighths-inch dowel rods. Four pegs on each side go through the side board to the exterior and provide additional hanging. In all, the rack fits twelve pairs of shoes, plus room for two pairs of sandals below. On top is a solid shelf, useful for stashing junk you take with you when you put on your shoes. And stay-at-home junk, too.

The shoe rack is no fine furniture, but I give myself a passing grade for shop class.

To you, I offer this post

2011-09-19T21:41:00.000-07:00

A former coworker of mine, Steve, said a lot of nutty things, but one thing he said is some of the best general advice I've ever heard: to receive more of something, first give it away.

Steve was talking about reciprocity with other people, such as how if you want other people to listen to you and take your opinions seriously, you should first listen to them and take their opinions seriously. After listening to them for a while, they're likely to listen to you—probably without realizing it. Ditto for respect, trust, love, money, and nearly anything else you give and take with others.

Steve's advice helps me make sense of Chapter 8 of A World Full of Gods, which is about polytheist worship. According to Greer, The essence of Pagan worship is reciprocity between divinity and humanity. The polytheist universe is populated only by finite beings and entities, and this universal finiteness means all things exist through giving and mutual interaction.

Religion in the Pagan sense is a matter of exchange. While the gods are greater than human beings, they are not infinitely so, and humanity thus has the potential to bring something of its own to a relationship with divinity. Each participates in the relationship in a manner proportioned to their relative place in the cosmos, but the relationship is never merely one-sided.
The principle of reciprocity provides the proper context to the much-misinterpreted Roman religious maxim do ut des, usually translated I give that you may give. Too often, even by those alert to the complexities of Roman religion, this has been read as a commercial transaction in which Roman worshippers paid their gods in advance for some benefit.
This is unjust. What the maxim actually implies is the exchange of gifts as an expression of ancient rules of friendship and hospitality. Behind this conception lies a concept of an exchange of gifts between different orders of being as the bond that unites the universe.

While I don't doubt there were at least a few self-interested Romans who gave to the gods with the hope they were partaking in a commercial transaction, the idea of reciprocity makes sense of a puzzling question I've long had about polytheism—as well as other religions—Doesn't anyone care about track record? Just as with the recent, well publicized rain prayer in Texas and how it didn't immediately conjure an end to the state's drought, it must be ages since people first realized the gods don't respond predictably to offerings and beseechings.

Modern theorists of religion have wrestled with the habit of making gifts to gods, ancestors, and spirits, on the assumption that there are no obvious returns on the investment. To ancient and modern Pagans alike, however, the assumption is transparently false. If such beings exist and govern the natural world, their gifts are as obvious as food and drink on the table, rain on the fields, fertility in the soil, and the fact of life itself. The gods are primarily and superlatively givers of good things, and the world in which life takes place is their gift to us.

In other words, the polytheist doesn't make an offering to the rain god simply to ask for rain. Instead, he makes the offering to fulfill his end in his coexistence with the rain god, who has already provided the polytheist with a lifetime of rain.

For the core of Pagan sacrifice is participation and celebration, not appeasement or renunciation. Making offerings to the gods is central to Pagan religious practice because it allows human beings to respond to the generosity of the gods with gifts of their own. Prayers are accompanied with offerings, or with promises of offerings to come, to reaffirm that gods and humans both participate in the web of reciprocity, celebrating their friendship with an exchange of gifts. Thus the old Pagan rituals of animal sacrifice were festive events for the entire community, more like a barbecue than like most modern religious rites. The gods received their share of the offering, and the rest was cooked and served out among the worshippers.

The polytheist gives to the gods not only because giving is good for the gods but also because giving is good for the giver. This reminds me of Christianity and how it advises us to forgive others for their transgressions again us, not only because forgiveness benefits the transgressor but because forgiveness benefits the forgiver.

This perspective leads me to wonder to what degree the modern world's slew of philosophies and ideologies centered on markets and rational self-interest are by-products of our world's increasing detachment from the natural world and related ideas such as the web of reciprocity. When most of what we consume is bought from strangers, prepackaged and paid for using money, each transaction ends with the deal squared, freeing both participants from further responsibility. But if detachment from nature is a fiction, as many ecologists are apt to point out, perhaps such arrangements are not so rationally self-interested after all.

Where's the Thursday post?

2011-09-18T16:00:00.000-07:00

The Thursday post was out late, losing money while playing poker at a friend's house. (Meanwhile, Not Enough Laura was winning faster than Just Enough Craig was losing.)

For the next two days, the Thursday post continued procrastinating the inevitable by working on its web development project rather than its writing. Finally, the Thursday post decided it just wasn't going to happen this week.

An interlude about a limitless entity

2011-09-12T21:45:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I asserted that it's impossible to conceptualize an entity that's both all-powerful and all-beneficent without diluting the meaning of the terms. An old friend of mine, Josh, commented how he thinks it's indeed possible to reconcile such ideas. I replied—as it's my policy to respond to all readers' comments—that my full answer would entail a post of its own. This is that post.

The context of the conflict is that people encounter what seem to be moral conflicts. For example, there are situations when you can be kind or honest but not both. Furthermore, these situations are not rare but instead happen most if not all days. Driving a car seems to force the issue every minute. How can an all-powerful entity, who thus has the ability to make the universe anything it wishes, also be the morally best possible entity if it rigged the universe to impose such conflicts? Why force people to choose between the better of two imperfect choices?

I admit this is a delicate topic, with many centuries of thought on the matter yielding their own entire branch of philosophy, called theodicy—and I further admit I'm going to ignore the reams of complexity that those centuries have heaped upon the question and give what seems to me is the straightforward, sensible answer. After all, it's part of my trade as a software developer to determine when leaky complexity has been heaped upon a faulty design and to figure out what needs to be removed to make the thing work. And yes, sometimes that means throwing away some cherished code you wrote awhile back.

The simple answer to the all-powerful, all-beneficent question is that such a limitless entity poses a paradox. Josh proposed a moral hierarchy as a solution, where some traits rank higher than others, but this solves a different problem. It solves the problem of choosing between the better of two imperfect solutions. The perfect solution, though only conceptual and impossible to realize, is that you get to have your cake and eat it too. In the example of kindness or honesty but not both, supposing that one of the virtues ranks higher than the other—say, honesty over kindness—means only that by choosing to be honest and unkind you have selected the better of two, flawed choices. A hierarchy of moral values allows for an entity that is all-powerful and as-beneficent-as-possible or instead as-powerful-as-possible and all-beneficent, but not both. Either way, the meaning of the terms has been diluted.

Another proposed solution thought up a long time ago is that the universe is indeed the best possible universe and that these conflict situations aren't conflicts at all. Rather, the conflicts play out—or can play out—according to what's in our best interests. So, for example, choosing to be honest and unkind is even better than if we could somehow be both honest and kind. Perhaps it's through the act of committing evil—or lesser good—that we gain some maximal good, such as spiritual fulfillment.

Yet another proposed solution to the problem is that the entity chose to give humans freewill—somehow, the best of possible choices it could have made—and because we're neither all-powerful nor all-beneficent, our choices require the universe to impose moral conflicts upon us. Yet another proposal asserts that these matters are entirely beyond our comprehension, that such a limitless entity is possible but we'll never know how.

These three solutions all reduce to: It cannot be known. Why is it good for us to make imperfect choices? It cannot be known. What is freewill? Why is the universe better off having it than not? It cannot be known. Why can't we know? It cannot be known.

What does all-powerful mean? It cannot be known.

What does all-beneficent mean? It cannot be known.

What does it mean to dilute the meaning of a term? To say: It cannot be known.

The easy way out of this mess is to drop the claim that one can both conceptualize a limitless entity and not dilute the terms all-powerful and all-beneficent. After all, diluting the terms' meanings says nothing about the entity's existence—only our ability to make falsifiable claims about it.

For what it's worth, this analysis makes me more appreciative of religions that embrace mysticism.

Achilles' heal

2011-09-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

At last, I've turned the corner with my Achilles' tendinosis injury. Or at least I think I've turned the corner. Though at first it seemed minor, this injury surprised me with a continual nagging that has left me less active than during those two months I suffered, half bedridden, through Valley Fever three years ago. But persistence is a common characteristic of tendon injuries.

Generally, when sick or injured, I try to adopt as a mindset the Stockdale Paradox: to continue believing in the happy ending without putting any deadlines on its arrival. For me, this is tough to do. Weeks ago, just after I admitted I was hurt and needed to take time off, I did what impatient analytical types are apt to do and I scrutinized my heel for change and extrapolated. It's feeling better three days straight, I would say. I might be running again by next weekend, only for that weekend to come and go and for my heel to have regressed. It's as though the brunt of healing doesn't happen until I've submitted to the injury and become prepared to do whatever it tells me—which of course means sitting out longer than expected, another reference to Hofstadter's Law.

Also, as far as tendinosis goes, Medicine is in the dark about diagnosis and treatment. Two years ago I hurt my knees during my California bike trip. It wasn't a serious injury—just a little pain and tenderness while riding, no doubt from overuse. The next day after returning to Phoenix I began taking ibuprofen for anti-inflammation. That week I resumed my normal level of activity, including commuting to work sixteen miles round-trip each day. I took the ibuprofen for about a week, and my knees healed fine, no problem.

Compare that to my current injury. While in New York, after a run, my Achilles' tendon began to hurt. It wasn't a serious injury—just a little pain and tenderness while running, no doubt from overuse. A few days later, after having returned to Phoenix, I began taking ibuprofen, and I resumed my normal level of activity. After nearly two weeks, my heel was much worse. I could no longer run or ride with my usual intensity.

I'm about 80% confident both injuries are tendinosis: both entailed isolated pain near joints following strenuous bouts of activity. Websites about tendinosis tend to agree that tendinosis is degeneration, not inflammation, and that anti-inflammatory medicine likely has an adverse effect on the tendons' ability to heal. But my (admittedly non-scientific) experience has been that anti-inflammatory medicine does help, though only when the injury is minor. (When the injury is major, the medicine only masks the pain and allows the sufferer to continue inflicting further damage.) I stopped taking ibuprofen for my heel after those two weeks, and along with resting my heel it began improving immediately. But recently that progress stalled, so I took ibuprofen again, for two days, after which my heel felt noticeably better. Small sample size, anecdotal evidence, no controls…am I refusing to admit I know nothing about these injuries?

Polytheism and the cosmic unity

2011-09-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

I suspect many of you readers have found at least one problem with polytheism, but I further suspect most if not all of the problems you've found with it are on your own terms, using your own assumptions and values. But some of you who've paid attention these last few posts and stirred some neurons may have spotted a problem with polytheism on its own terms—a way in which it's rendered self-defeating. That problem is: Because polytheism ranks religious experience as more important than theology, what does it mean for billions of monotheists to have experienced a one, true God or some other cosmic unity?

There's no fully satisfying way around this. You can't claim both that religious experience is #1 and also that some people's religious experiences are wrong. Just as with having and eating cake, one of two must budge.

Greer budges a little and provides an answer in the pay dirt chapter I wrote about last Monday. He points out how most of us—myself included, upon first reading the chapter—are confused about the term ineffability. Ineffability is not (as many of us believe) an absolute quality but instead is a relationship. Specifically, it's a relationship between an idea and some given language whereby the language can't fully describe the idea. For example, quantum physics is ineffable in the English language. (And if you think it isn't, then you don't understand quantum physics!) We can approximately talk about atomic and subatomic particles using such terms as wave-particle duality, but our grasp of such small scales is incomplete and hazy. Just as planetary orbit was ineffable in the ancients' languages because they lacked laws of motion, quantum-scale motion is ineffable to us today. But someday quantum physics may not be ineffable. (Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.)

Saying that something is ineffable—that is, ascribing ineffability as an absolute property of that thing—is equivalent to claiming that that thing can't be described in any language. That includes all possible languages—forgotten languages from the past, languages we'll know only in the future, and languages we'll never realize. Can we know something is indescribable in all of these languages? Computation theory deals with this very problem from a purely logical perspective, what with Turing completeness and so on. In short, limitations indeed seem to exist in the most powerful languages, which would make some things ineffable in all languages, but we can't be sure that any proof of such limitations isn't an artifact of the language we're using to make such a proof. So it's inconclusive.

Within this wiggle room Greer has his answer. Religious experiences may be fully describable in a language, just one we don't possess. (A theory of mind is a candidate for such a language.) Religious experiences, including those of an exclusive God or other cosmic unity, may be imprecise ways of talking about phenomena that are in actuality precise, just as planetary motion turns out to be precise though it was once ineffable to all known languages. Thus, while religious experiences may rank higher than theology to the polytheist, religious experiences may not signify literal meanings—they may be interpreted in many ways. As for experiences of cosmic unity, here are Greer's own words.

As we have seen, people experience and revere many different sacred entities, some personal, some not. The fundamental unity of the cosmos is one of these, but not the only one. Many people worship it, and many have experienced in it one way or another, but the same is true of other sacred presences and powers. Nor is it automatically true that a cosmic unity is necessarily a better god to worship than some entity closer to human existence.

Go channels

2011-09-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

Between learning Go, learning JavaScript, and learning web development—what with JSON and AJAX and the difference between PUT and POST and so on—I'm most intrigued by learning Go. With everything else, I'm learning a lot of stuff, detailed but straightforward. With Go, I learning a new way of thinking about synchronization.

Go provides two main features for synchronization: goroutines and channels. Goroutines are a lot like threads, only they're scheduled by the Go Runtime on top of one or a few system threads. But you, the programmer, may pretend goroutines are threads. Channels are new.

Superficially, channels are synchronous queues built in to the language.

ch := make(chan int)

 

a := func() {

    ch <- 42

}

 

b := func() {

   fmt.Println(<-ch)

}



go a()

go b()

In the above code, there are two concurrent functions, a and b, and one channel, ch. The function a sends the value 42 on the channel, and b receives the value (42) from the channel and prints it. Either the send or the receive operation on the channel will block until both the send and receive are ready, at which time both the send and receive occur. (Channels can be asynchronous, but that's another topic.)

In the example above, the channel sends and receives values of type int. But channels' power stems from how they can be used with any other Go type, including functions and other channels. This allows programmers to structure their programs wholly differently than in traditional languages. Consider the code below.

type Request struct {

    // other data go here

    respCh chan *Response

}



type Response struct {

    // other data go here

}



func main() {



    reqCh := make(chan *Request)



    go func() {

        for {

            req := <-reqCh

            // handle request here

            resp := new(Response)

            req.respCh <- resp

        }

    }()



    req := NewRequest()

    reqCh <- req

    resp := <-req.respCh

}

This is a thread-safe request handler. A goroutine (running an anonymous function) continually receives requests on a channel. It returns a response to each request on a channel contained within the request. This is a concise server-client model, scalable as is to many concurrent request handlers and many concurrent request senders. Also, consider how the Request type could contain function closures that execute within the context of the request-handling goroutine.

ch := make(chan func())

ch <- func() {

    fmt.Println("Print this in another goroutine.")

}

Closures make it so that the request handler in the above example doesn't even handle the requests directly; a closure in the Request could contain the details. This opens up numerous design possibilities even in simple programs—without using mutexes or other traditional synchronization primitives.

What are the gods?

2011-08-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

In Chapter Seven of A World Full of Gods, I struck pay dirt—I gleaned insight into what polytheism is about, what its gods are. But before I expound upon that insight, I wish to state my intentions with these Monday posts.

Two things for certain I believe: firstly, continuing education is a fine pursuit, and secondly, we oughtn't be modest about it. We should share what we learn. We should show it off, flaunt it. People who aren't interested needn't listen.

My purpose then with these Monday posts is to share what I learn, my goal then to stir the neurons in others' heads—if only a little. Any post receiving a comment stemming from a stirred head is a post that succeeded. It's not my goal to change anyone's mind, with the exception of people who believe they shouldn't question their own beliefs. But such exceptions are few, and they needn't listen.

The reason I claim no goal to persuade isn't to get your guard down. Rather, it's to apologize for the brevity of this post. I've had the benefit of reading a hundred pages of Greer's prose, in which he presents his case with many supporting details, presumably all with the intent to explain and persuade. I'm merely writing to explain, and I'm using far fewer words to do it. This creates gaps, and those gaps appear even wider if you presume the explanation is an argument meant to persuade. It's not. It's meant to stir.

Now, down to business.

As I said, Chapter Seven is pay dirt. From it I understand what classical polytheism claims the gods are—or I think I understand. They're not bearded men and stately women hanging out on a tall mountain in northern Greece—why else didn't Greeks climb Olympus, meet the gods, and resolve the issue once and for all?—but instead are more like the incorporeal nous of classical monotheism. Only, in the case of polytheism, the gods are numerous and finite. Here's a passage from the book.

Consider the ancient Greek idea that mountains and rivers are gods. Modern readers of classical literature often think that the ancient Greeks were talking about supernatural beings who were related to a given river or mountain, but who were distinct from what we perceive as a geographical feature. But this is not what the ancient Greeks were saying. To them, a mountain or a river was not simply a geographical feature. What we call the mountain or the river was the body, the physical expression or dimension of a more complex entity. That entity also had a self-aware personality; it could perceive, choose, desire and take action.

In other words, the gods are the consciousnesses underlying natural phenomena. This isn't a stretch. Right now I'm apt to personify Phoenix's summer, such as how it's going through a mid-life crisis and showing off to excess its still plentiful virility. Or maybe Summer is defensive about Autumn nearing too close to Summer's throne, and Summer is shouting his might. You needn't believe Summer is an actual, personable entity to understand my point that Phoenix is especially hot right now in late August, and my personification is simpler, though less precise, than describing the details of high and low temperatures, dew points, and seasonal averages.

But polytheists don't merely personify nature; they believe the gods exist. I'm personifying when describing the icy hands of the Methow River, which I fell into a few years ago, but that doesn't mean the river is alive. Personifying summer doesn't mean there exists a living Summer. Or does it?

It thus makes sense to ask whether at least some gods are embodied in nature or specific natural phenomena, or even to speculate that these gods may be the inner dimension, the dimension of awareness and mind, of the natural world. From this point of view, a god of weather could be conceptualized as the indwelling consciousness of the lower atmosphere itself, related to the complex physical structure of winds, clouds, topography and energy flows in exactly the same way that the human mind and personality relate to the physical brain and body.

Here Greer hints at that troubling question: how do we know any of the people around us are real, are conscious? How do I know? It's possible everyone around me is an automaton giving the illusion of having a mind. That they're made of the same organic compounds as I and give birth to other automatons only shows how complex and well functioning they are. So too do their well reasoned pleas that I think of them as living beings.

The answer—my working answer—is I don't know for sure. I can't even be sure whether I'm alive. But as with neutrinos' existence, the universe appears to work as though our consciousnesses exist. That is, my best guess is other people are alive. As far as mental frameworks go, ascribing minds to other people is a good one; so far it's explained human behavior my whole life—political discussions excepted, of course.

So why not accept a mental framework that ascribes minds to natural phenomena? Why give the benefit of the doubt—and, consequently, souls—to humans but not to rivers and mountains? This question hits upon our core assumptions in metaphysics and epistemology, and perhaps I'll give my own answer, for what it's worth, in a future post.

I'm sorry, Jason

2011-08-25T14:31:00.001-07:00

Jason P. had devised a weekly schedule with each day of the week assigned a specific activity. On Monday I work on an open source project. On Tuesday I run. On Wednesday I read. And so on.

After he finished telling me about his plan, I laughed. How could anyone stick to a regimen so rigid? The first Friday someone invited him to a Fun Time doing something Unproductive, he'd bail on whatever Friday Chores he had scheduled. And I struggled to imagine anyone reading one day a week and staying enthusiastic about it. But in hindsight I know I shouldn't have laughed. I had a friend named Jason.

Jason and I met as coworkers at our first real job after graduating college—and by real job I mean a stodgy, nine-to-five corporate gig writing software. I was a year-and-a-half ahead of him and thus less sensitive to it, but we both acutely grieved the loss of free time that was part and parcel with our job's compensation package. Everyone who has worked a job knows how this goes: you devote time and energy to readying for work, going to work, working at work, and going home after work, and by the time you arrive home you're tired and need a break. But it's during this break-time that your real life happens, and if you spend the time vegging out with television, computer games, Internet surfing, or whatever spins your scroll wheel then you've been broken. You're someone who consumes and doesn't produce. You've no art, no purpose.

We're most vulnerable to the artless life during the first few years following college graduation. Middle class American life doesn't demand much from us. You need only continue showing up and trying a little, and the world bestows upon you a material comfort that would have paid a king's ransom in earlier ages. But after awhile, the artless life gnaws upon our happiness. We seek to create and accomplish. Something. Anything.

It's easy to blame artless living on our jobs. We invest a lot of time and energy into them. But for Jason and I, post-dot-com circumstances shoved us face-to-face with an unpleasant truth. We had both been unemployed for several months before finding our jobs, and we had both squandered the trove of free time we had had during those months. With the sun always rising tomorrow, we had failed to seize any one day among the hundred, though later when employed we seized with the regrets of goals and projects not pursued when we had had the time. So we came to understand by counterexample that though it seems choring ten or so hours a day with work-related activities is a valid excuse otherwise, we're unproductive in our real lives because of the choices we make.

One reason I quit my job in June was to prove those unemployed months nine years ago were a fluke, that now I'll choose to be artful despite being given ample, unrestricted free time to tempt me otherwise. If Jason and I were still in contact with each other, it would be his turn to laugh. Today is Thursday. Today I post to Just Enough Craig, study the Greer book, and hack on my web application demo.

…as though they do

2011-08-22T19:37:00.001-07:00

The cosmological argument, which I wrote about last Monday, is but one argument for the existence of God. It's also an argument for the existence of multiple gods. As Greer writes in A World Full of Gods: most arguments for the existence of one god also work in favor of multiple gods because nothing in the argument requires exactly one god. Indeed, the only monotheist argument that fails for polytheism without objection is the ontological argument, which rests upon the idea of one greatest conceived being. But the ontological argument is a strange flight of logic. I doubt many people use it to convince themselves of anything they don't already believe. It's so abstract—so philosophical—it doesn't seem to apply to real life. Suffice it to say I'm not going to write about it here.

But Greer's point goes further. Other theist arguments don't work equally well for monotheism and polytheism; some work better for polytheism. For example, take the moral argument. Claims that there exist objective moral values are incongruent with our experiences of the real world. Consider the case of someone having to decide between two virtues, say, honesty and kindness. Sometimes you can be honest or kind but not both. Sometimes we are conflicted. Such moral conflicts are hard to reconcile with the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent entity without diluting the meaning of omnipotence or omnibenevolence. But if the universe is as traditional polytheists say and the gods are limited and in contention with one another, then moral trade-offs probably result as a routine matter. That is, the world we see matches the world we expect.

A multiplicity of gods explains a lot about the real world. The atheist argument from evil, which argues against the existence of God based on the presence of evil, fails against polytheism because the gods' limitations allow for the existence of evil. Indeed, some gods may willingly be a source of our problems!

Can it be that simple? I acknowledge the polytheist makes defensible claims, but is he saying anything meaningful? What does it tell me that the heavens roil with a chaos that matches our own world's? How am I wiser by knowing this? Take the following passage in A World Full of Gods.

Thus it's perfectly valid to say of gods and neutrinos alike that while we don't know if they actually exist, the universe appears to work as though they do.

This sounds nothing like the religions I was taught growing up. The passage has a scientific flavor—I doubt the reference to neutrinos is an accident. Just as science doesn't prove anything but instead offers best guesses to explain what we see, is polytheism too offering mere best guesses? Again, polytheism shows itself to be founded on experience, not theology. As for what's gained by theorizing gods into existence, I hope that's covered somewhere in the second half of the book.

Go perk

2011-08-18T18:55:00.000-07:00

Preferring to read than to listen or watch, I don't often sit through hour-long tech-talk videos, but several months ago I happened upon this one given by Rob Pike, and it captured my attention.

The lecture is about Newsqueak, a language Rob invented in the 80s, and its channels feature. Though I don't know Newsqueak, I know about channels because they're a part of another one of Rob's languages: Go.

Go is qualitatively different from all other traditional languages I know, such as C and Python. Most of this difference stems from channels and how they change the way I implement concurrency. In short, I have yet to use any conventional synchronizations objects, such as mutexes, in a Go program. As the Go documentation says:

Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.

The lecture linked to above explains what this means and how it works. In most cases, it's more elegant than what we write in traditional languages. It's also a fun way to look at an old problem.

The cosmological argument

2011-08-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

What philosophers call the cosmological argument is what countless people have figured out for themselves through casual reflection on the nature of the universe. As the argument goes, the universe can't always have existed; it must have been created by something.

More formally, the argument may go as follows.

Everything in the universe is contingent—i.e., everything that exists has been brought into being, or has been caused, by something else.
The causes are also contingent.
Together, statements 1 and 2 conclude there exists an infinite regression of causes.
But an infinite regression of causes is impossible.
Therefore there exists a cause that isn't contingent—i.e., a First Cause or a Necessary Being.

Polytheist perspective

The CA is most often used to justify monotheism, but the argument doesn't rule out the possibility that there exist multiple gods. Statement 5 may be written in the plural: “Therefore there exist causes that aren't contingent—i.e., First Causes or Necessary Beings.” Nothing in the preceding four statements implies only one cause can be without cause.

Furthermore, the CA doesn't require of its First Cause that it be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, or possessing other limitless attributes. It need only be powerful enough, knowledgeable enough, and loving enough to create the universe. For all we know, the creation the universe may be a mindless task. The CA doesn't show the First Cause to be a deity or worthy of worship.

Counter-counterargument

An interesting twist in the CA occurs in subsequent counter-argumentation, whereby the CA is itself encapsulated within an infinite regression, shown as follows.

The CA is invalid because it's possible for an infinite regression of causes to exist.
But the infinite regression of causes itself must have a cause.
Therefore, there exists a cause that isn't contingent—i.e., a First Cause or Necessary Being.

The idea here is there exists a First Cause even within a universe that permits the existence of an infinite regression of causes. But this is only one possible conclusion. Another is that the cause of the infinite regression of causes is itself part of an infinite regression of infinite regressions of causes. We may continue proposing further infinite regressions, too, until we have taken things to their logical conclusion and have proposed an infinitely dimensional infinite regression. This hints of Cantor showing infinite sets having different cardinalities.

My opinion

I reject the CA because it isn't falsifiable. Does the universe permit infinite regressions? Who knows. Maybe the universe is like the implication of Berry's Paradox—i.e., infinite in one direction but lacking a well defined beginning in the other. Or maybe the CA is valid insofar there once existed a First Cause, but the First Cause no longer exists. Or maybe the First Cause is evil. And so on. In no way does the CA help make predictive statements about the universe and is thus of little use to me. But your mileage may vary.

Go peeve

2011-08-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

Take the following Go program.

package main



import "fmt"

import "json"



type Foo struct {

    Wham int

    Bam  string

}



type Bar struct {

    gee  int

    whiz string

}



func main() {



    var f Foo

    f.Wham = 42

    f.Bam = "hello world"

    msg, _ := json.Marshal(f)

    fmt.Println(string(msg))



    var b Bar

    b.gee = 42

    b.whiz = "hello world"

    msg, _ = json.Marshal(b)

    fmt.Println(string(msg))

}

Before knowing any better, I would have guessed the program produces two lines of JSON, with each line populated by two fields. But what the program actually produces is as follows.

{"Wham":42,"Bam":"hello world"}

{}

In other words, the first object is converted to JSON, but the second one isn't. The reason why has to do with what, in my opinion, is a design flaw in Go.

Go, like some other modern languages, tries to prevent style-and-format jihad from breaking out between developers by forcing them to use a specific style. Relevant to this case is that Go determines whether a member is public or private depending on the capitalization of the member's name. Lower case members are private; uppercase members are public. No argument.

Until now, during my tentative forays into Go, I've perceived this as a harmless quirk of the language. But when using the standard json package, it's not harmless.

The json.Marshal() function, which converts arbitrary Go objects into JSON-formatted strings, works only on public members. All lowercase members are ignored. In other words, you can't use Go and JSON and lowercase names—at least, not easily.

Normally, I don't care about style requirements imposed by languages. I adopt a when in Rome attitude and squash opinions about how code ought to be formatted, instead formatting my code the same as the language's standard library. But by using JSON it's nearly certain I'm interfacing between two or more languages—e.g., Go and Javascript—and in this case Go's quirks are imparted onto those other languages.

In Javascript I use camel-back notation for member names, thus matching the convention of the language. But I can't use camel-back for members of a JSON-derived object if that object is ever accessed in Go. Fortunately, Javascript is flexible and doesn't care how I name members, so I can make things work by using uppercase. But still this highlights one way in which imposing style on developers is problematic.

By the way, I'm aware that today is Saturday, just as I was aware that I last posted on Wednesday and that this week's blogging schedule differs from my regular Monday-Thursday. I assure you the oddity has nothing at all to do with how I've lost track of what day of the week it is because of my unemployment. Rather, I wish to post three times this week. That is all. It shan't happen again!

Tribulus terrestris

2011-08-10T15:41:00.002-07:00

After a breakfast of eggs and toast, I load my backpack with a water bottle, my camping knife, and a trowel. I strap my claw hammer to the outside of my pack, congratulating myself on having the foresight to bring such a tool. Then I put on my hiking shoes and don my adventuring hat and set out. It's 7:00 AM.

Among the various effects of having Achilles tendinosis is that my Tuesday mornings are free. This Tuesday morning I'm not biking; I'm walking—westward. Minutes into my walk, as I pass through a neighborhood of houses, my left shoe begins to scratch the ground with each step. I stop and balance on my right foot while lifting my left sole, and I pull out two goatheads. I place them on the sidewalk and smash them flat using my hammer. Then I re-strap the hammer to my pack and continue walking. Soon I arrive at my destination: the DC path.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new bike. It's a touring bike, meant to replace my previous touring bike, which was stolen a few months ago while locked up at a transit hub parking lot. I never fully liked that previous bike—I prefer my new one already—so the theft is no loss but the money and effort accompanying the purchase and breaking in of a new bike. As part of that effort, my first ride on it was to the hardware store to buy a bolt for its rear rack. In my experience, the bolts that come with rear racks are always too long and get in the way of the rear cassette.

The hardware store literally no longer allows customers direct access to its nuts and bolts, so I had a store employee help me find the right bolt. While doing so, she asked about my bike, which was leaning against a rack of plumbing parts. We talked about biking, and she said she had a problem with flat tires. “What do you do about flats?” she asked. I started my standard speech about flats, saying how some tires are better than others and which ones and so on. “Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires are good for casual riding,” I said. “Supposedly you can't even hammer a tack through them. That means you're just about invulnerable to goatheads.”

“You mean like the goathead that's stuck in your tire right now?” she responded. I looked down and indeed saw a goathead stuck in my rear tire. (The bike did not ship with Marathon Pluses.) I pulled out the goathead. Fortunately, it hadn't yet penetrated the inner tube.

I finished my business at the hardware store and continued thinking about that goathead. This was a new bike, and I had scarcely ridden it one mile. “Where do these things come from?” I wondered. I had biked only through a neighborhood and along the DC path. Come to think of it, the last two times I biked along that route I had gotten flats. At the time I blamed my bad luck on the cheap Panaracer tires I had been using, but maybe the problem is the route itself. And if the problem is the route, then it's probably the DC path, not the neighborhood streets. With that, I rode back the way I came, slowing down on the path to look for signs of puncturevine.

The DC path is not the same as the canal path. The canal path is the main thoroughfare for cyclists and pedestrians and lies between the canal and the diversion channel, the latter being a concrete trench fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep. The DC path, wherever there happens to be one, is a secondary path sandwiched between the channel and the backyard fences of houses and businesses. The path I was on then isn't landscaped; the only places anything can grow are the raised beds next to the backyard fences. But the beds are mostly barren dirt with only the occasional weed or bush. “Where's the puncturevine?” I wondered as I slowly rode along. And then I realized: those weeds are them.

Tribulus terrestris. Goathead. Devil's thorn. I had never before identified it, having seen it only in photos. In person the leaves looked much smaller. And it's not so much a vine as a broad, flat patch that grows along the ground. It's a handsome plant, actually, with dark green leaves and small yellow flowers. But then on closer look there are the seedpods: dozens of light green goatheads maturing on the plant, waiting to be dropped on the ground, dozens more already on the ground and awaiting a shoe or tire on which to hitchhike.

Most of the weeds along this path were puncturevine, amounting to thousands of goatheads in all. My stomach knotted sickeningly. I mounted my bike and continued riding home, stopping at the end of the path to make sure no goatheads had stuck to my tire. “Never bike here again,” I told myself.

But though I can't bike the path, I can still walk it. This Tuesday morning I walk it armed with weeding tools. Why wait for the bureaucracy of a utility company to do the right thing? Arriving at the first patch of puncturevine, I hop onto the raised bed and pull my trowel from my pack and begin digging.

Two or more gods

2011-08-08T18:40:00.001-07:00

Grand Archdruid John Michael Greer is a self-professed history geek. Falling somewhere between carrying out impeccable research and possessing an encyclopedia knowledge of world history, Greer includes countless historical examples to infer parallels with the present in his blog, The Archdruid Report. But if Greer is so smart and knows so much history, why is he a polytheist?

Growing up, what I learned about polytheism is what I think most of us Westerners learn about it: A long time ago most people were polytheists, but eventually they grew up and became monotheists or atheists. How then can someone both intelligent and knowledgeable choose to believe in multiple gods? Where have they been since Plato and Epicurus?

As part of my ongoing effort to learn about topics I know little or nothing about, I've begun reading Greer's book, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism. As I expected, it's no wishy-washy, touchy-feely account of polytheism; it's a hard, logical case for the existence of multiple gods. To correct a lesson I learned long ago: Polytheism is grown up, or at least as grown up as any of the religions I know—including my own.

Though I'm not yet halfway through the book, it has inspired me with today's post. But firstly, I apologize to those who think it's distasteful to discuss religion in mixed company. And secondly, I'll state my bias: I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist most of my life, from the moment I was born, with only some teenage experimentation as the exception. And now, with my disclosure over (along with any chance of me ever being elected to public office), here's something I've learned about polytheism.

In general, the core difference between a polytheist and a monotheist is that the polytheist draws his theology from religious experience while the monotheist judges religious experience using his theology. Which you rank as more fundamental—theology or religious experience—dictates how many gods you believe in. As Greer writes, “religious experience is inherently polytheistic” because different people experience different gods. If you take everyone's religious experiences at face value then you must be polytheist. Therefore, those of us who are either monotheist or atheist do not take all religious experiences at face value. We rank something else more fundamental than religious experience alone.

My Achilles' heel

2011-08-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

These days I'm sporting an Achilles tendon injury on my left leg. It started a little over two weeks ago while in New York as a result of running and walking too far without being in good enough running and walking shape to withstand the stress. In the beginning, the injury was a small nuisance whereby the tendon was stiff and painful only for the first few steps of the morning but otherwise OK, and it has since blossomed to hurt most of the time—even when walking and biking. Though the cause of the injury is overuse, which is a euphemism for “having been insufficiently conditioned for all that running and walking in New York and then having been stupid enough to continue worsening the injury,” the cause is compounded by the Five Fingers shoes I wore. Thus, I can credit this as my first Five Fingers injury—though I'm still fond of those shoes.

After a few Web searches, I've learned that I have the symptoms of Achilles tendinosis. This is degeneration of the tendon, not inflammation. With that I've learned one useful fact about treatment: anti-inflammatory medication, such as Ibuprofen, is detrimental to the healing process. Instead, treatment requires relative rest and, optionally, stretching and icing. “Relative rest” sounds a lot better than just “rest” because it means I continue to be active, though only with activities that don't aggravate the injury. In other words, swimming is OK. And I ought to be doing more swimming regardless.

Another benefit is that I can apply some of my own wisdom and save money by not competing in a couple of races I was planning to do. Through those aforementioned Web searches, I learned that my grade 2 or 3 tendinosis requires one to three weeks of relative rest. Add to that Hofstadter's law. Add to that the lesson that it's unsafe to ramp up training too fast, and the result is that I won't be in good form until this year's races are over. I'm not complaining or pleading for sympathy. This will probably lead to the better use of my free time.

Infinite confusion

2011-08-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

As any kid who has learned about infinity will tell you, infinity plus one is still infinity. “Even infinity plus a million?” Yep. “Even infinity plus infinity?” Yep. It's easy to think there's only one infinity. But there's not. It turns out there's an infinite number of infinities.

This remains one of the most interesting ideas I learned in college. In my discrete math class my freshman year, the professor went over Cantor's diagonalization argument, and I still haven't gotten over it. Briefly, the argument goes as follows. (And by “briefly” I mean I'm not going to include proof.)

There are an infinite number of whole numbers. If you add to the whole numbers all rational numbers, you still have the same number of numbers—infinity—because you can map each rational number to a whole number, one-to-one. But if you add to the rational numbers the irrational numbers—e.g., π, √2, etc.—you will have a greater infinity of numbers than with the rationals alone because you can't map each irrational number to a rational number. You'll have irrational numbers left over.

The neat thing about Cantor's argument is that it proves there's no possible one-to-one mapping from the irrationals to the rationals. Thus, some infinities are bigger than others. QED.

If that doesn't make you suspicious of your intuition about infinity, there's Berry's Paradox. It goes like this.

There exists an infinite number of whole numbers, and there exists a finite number of syllables (in English). Therefore, there exists an infinite number of whole numbers that can't be described in English in fewer than, say, twenty syllables. The question is: What is the smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables?

A description is an unambiguous expression or name. Let's start from the beginning.

Number	Description	Syllables
1	“one”	1
2	“two”	1
3	“three”	1
4	“four”	1
5	“five”	1
6	“six”	1
7	“seven”	2
8	“eight”	1
9	“nine”	1
10	“ten”	1
11	“eleven”	3

Eleven is the first number whose name is more than two syllables, but it's describable as the “fifth prime,” which is two syllables. So:

11	“fifth prime”	2
12	“twelve”	1
13	“thirteen”	2

And so on. The key is that we're describing numbers, not just naming them. Any unambiguous description will do. For example, “one hundred twenty-one” (six syllables) is also “fifth prime squared” (three syllables). “One thousand one hundred eleven”(nine syllables) could be described as “four ones” (two syllables);—if we allow such shortcuts. But no matter how many shortcuts we allow—no matter what grammar we decide upon—because there are a finite number of syllables, eventually we'll run out of whole numbers describable in fewer than twenty, and that will be our smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables.

But there's a problem. “Smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables” is itself an unambiguous description of a number—a description that itself is fewer than twenty syllables. Thus, the smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables can be described in fewer than twenty syllables by using this description. Paradox!

What's neat about Berry's Paradox is that it defines an infinite set of whole numbers for which there exists no smallest number—no first number, no “beginning” number. This is another property of infinity that runs counter to intuition.

Tube patching

2011-07-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

I've had an on-again-off-again relationship with bicycle inner tube patching going back nearly five years. The cycle goes as follows: for months I patch punctured tubes with the hope of saving money; then for months I curse at leaky patches and toss tubes after new flats. Leaky patches are the worst—a failed patch is a single flat twice repaired.

Are patches worth it? Can they be made to work reliably? I've reentered the on-again phase and after successfully patching seven straight tubes, I think this time it's the real thing and patches are worth it. What changed is that I discovered I was previously doing it wrongly.

There exist numerous how-to guides on the Web for patching tubes, and they all say the same things, so I'm not going to further that redundancy. But I know I can read every word in a short how-to and still screw it up, so I'm going to describe some between-the-lines wisdom I've gleaned from experience—including what I was doing wrongly.

Keep some air in the tube while patching. I aim to have the tube be the same size as it will be when inflated inside the tire. The reason for this is that patches don't stretch, and patching an uninflated tube creates a cinch spot that won't evenly expand to the shape of the tire.
The step of sandpapering the tube before applying the rubber cement is critical. This is because you're not just “roughening up” the tube surface; instead, you're removing the non-stick layer put there to prevent the tube from sticking to its mold during manufacturing. That non-stick layer serves no purpose after manufacturing, so sandpaper thoroughly.
As for what I had been doing wrongly in previous years, that has to do with using a small amount of rubber cement, not a big amount. This has to do with a counterintuitive property of rubber cement, which is that it must be completely dry for it to adhere—unlike glue, which must be wet. I now use my fingertip to smear a layer of rubber cement thin enough so that it dries within seconds. If it doesn't dry within seconds, I've used too much.
Keep in mind you needn't entirely remove the tube from the tire to patch. If you know where the leak is, such as when you hear the “hiss” of a fast leak, you can remove only the leaky part of the tube, thus keeping the wheel on the bike. This is the fastest way to fix a flat other than a wheel change.

Le Tour

2011-07-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

What a Tour de France this year's has been! From the first week on there were great moments nearly each day: Team Garmin-Cervélo won the team time trail and four stages in all; Thomas Voeckler earned the yellow jersey midway through the race—like in 2004—but this time defended it through the Pyrenees and the Alps until the last day in the mountains with just two stages to go in the Tour; last year's winner Alberto Contador lost the Tour early but won over some of us cynical fans with his never-give-up attacks in the mountains the final week; and Cadel Evans won the general classification—finally, after two runner-up finishes in previous years—with tough, smart riding from both him and his teammates.

A common opinion among cycling fans this year is that the pro peloton is cleaning up. Cyclists are less doped—so the opinion goes—and looking more human as they crest alpine summits out of breath and as they finish mountain stages with slumped shoulders. I for one think the peloton is cleaner but still plenty dirty—average speeds remain suspicious—but I think the sport is different now than a few years ago, like in 2006 when Floyd Landis broke away solo in the mountains 120 km out to win stage 17 by over five minutes—and not even looking tired doing it.

It's been a few year's since I concluded most of the pro peloton dopes and most of these respected athletes are liars. (See here.) But even so I thought doping wasn't a big deal. Sure, doping isn't something any normal, sane individual would do, but professional athletes have a different mindset than us normal, sane individuals, and that difference includes taking bigger risks with their long-term health to achieve short-term gain. I thought the ubiquity of doping in cycling makes the sport fair in its own twisted way, as though when everyone is cheating then no one is cheating. But this year's Tour makes me think otherwise.

Many people—and I'm one of them—think Thomas Voeckler's defense of the yellow jersey this year would have ended much sooner if the climbers were as dirty as in years past. Also, clean team Garmin-Cervélo wouldn't have won the team time trial if they were chasing the times of teams with systematic doping programs like in past years. These events and others, with yesteryears' scandal-free, middle-tier cyclists now competing nearer to the top, changes the sport for the better, not just for the sake of cleanliness but because it's more interesting. Doping makes the race more predictable. It also removes the romanticism of the suffering the Tour imparts on its riders.

Sure, maybe Voeckler does dope. Maybe some guys on Garmin-Cervélo do. But even if they are dirty, their level of dirtiness is now enough to matter. That's new. And the race is more interesting as a result. I for one hope that the gap between doping technology and anti-doping technology continues to narrow.

Some resolutions

2011-07-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

Why wait for a new year to make resolutions? I've made two this summer.

The first is to show up on time. I'm not a punctual person, though usually I'm not late by much, and I show up to dental appointments and bike rides on time—i.e., occasions when timeliness matters—but habitual tardiness is a flaw despite the excuses—hence my resolution to show up on time.

This will be tough to carry out—impossibly tough—because sometimes it's out of my control whether I show up on time, like when I have a mechanical problem with my bike. But usually when I'm late it's my fault, and usually the cause is my habit of cramming in last-minute tasks before leaving for an appointment. “Three minutes till I must leave? I'll wash the dishes.” Or: “I think I have enough time to read another chapter.” Or: “My toenails really need cutting.” As far as optimization goes, I manage my time well and get a lot done, but it causes me to be late at least as often as I'm on time. So to habitually be on time, I must become less optimal and accept “wasted” slack time.

My second resolution is one Laura and I made together: eat out less. There's nothing strictly wrong with dining out, but it's an expensive alternative to a square meal at home—expensive both in time and money.

Our goal is to eat out only when we've scheduled it in advance by at least a day and therefore avoid impulse dining. So “let's pig out on Ultimate Nachos at Garcia's next Monday” is OK, as well as “let's go to trivia at the pub this Tuesday.” What's out is “I don't feel like cooking anything tonight so let's go out.” Most of our dining out has been impulsive, so this one change is an easy way to cut back.

These are my summer resolutions. What are yours?

Laura Rent-A-Cat

2011-07-07T20:30:00.002-07:00

Last Monday afternoon, as I sat on the floor in my apartment and drafted that day's blog post, I saw motion in the corner of my eye. This was the second time that day I saw a quickly passing shadow on the floor by the coat closet, and this time I was just fast enough to see a gray mouse crawling under my stove, having passed from the coat closet to the kitchen. I searched under my stove and behind my fridge, and, though the mouse was long gone, I discovered that my kitchen is riddled with mouse holes.

That is, I think the rodent I saw was a mouse. But it could've been a rat. After searching Google for “mouse versus rat,” I'm more skeptical than ever about my ability to visually identify rats versus mice. I also can't tell the difference only by hearing them—as I would later find out.

After that brief search in the kitchen and coming to grips with the realization that I was cohabiting with a rodent, I decided to call up Laura Rent-A-Cat. “Hello, Laura Rent-A-Cat? I'd like to rent a cat.” Later that night, just before I retired to sleep, Laura herself installed a litter box in my apartment and filled a pot of water and placed it on the floor. The two cats, Emerald and Nutmeg, explored their temporary home. That was good; I wanted those cats to know their arena well before their upcoming melee.

That night I slept on an air mattress instead of my normal spot on the floor; I didn't want to be any closer to the upcoming combat than necessary. But that was my first mistake; soon after I drifted off to sleep, Nutmeg decided to go off her watch and join me on my mattress. I snapped awake for fear of claws puncturing the mattress; I tried shooing Nutmeg off the mattress, but it was clear from her obstinance that if she wasn't allowed on the mattress then so wasn't I. I gave in and propped the mattress against the wall and took my accustomed spot on the floor.

That night, it seemed I awoke from every creak and rustle, both real and imaginary. “What was that? Is it the mouse-rat?” I would look around; the cats would be asleep, but each time they lay in a different spot. “At least the cats are awake enough to move about,” I would think. Then I'd fall back asleep until the next creak or rustle would wake me.

At about three in the morning, I awoke to a loud, sudden “splat!” What was that? Oh, it's just Nutmeg, walking around on my kitchen counter, playing gravity with my day planner. I fell back asleep. Minutes later I awoke again, this time to a distinctive whooshing just behind my head. What was that? Oh, it's just Nutmeg, peeing in the litter box. Again, I fell back asleep. I had less than an hour before my alarm would wake me for my morning ride, but again, only minutes later, I awoke to another strange sound. What was that? Oh, it's just the two cats running from one end of the apartment to the other, chasing the mouse-rat. Chasing the mouse-rat!

I jerked awake, all brain functions immediately on. I was on my feet, I had the light on, and I tracked the cats' battle progress. They had the rodent in full chase; it first tried to find safety amid the clutter of tubes and tires beneath my bike rack, but Nutmeg flushed it out. Then the rodent scrambled along the wall to its haven of the kitchen and its under-the-stove escape. But Emerald out-flanked the rodent and closed off the stove escape. Then she attacked. With typical feline swiftness, Emerald lunged at the rodent and took it within her mouth. The rodent, which squeaked all during the chase, was now frantic in its distress. Emerald dropped the rodent onto the kitchen floor. The rodent squawked and flipped back onto its feet and tried to make a getaway. Emerald struck again. And again she released the rodent. And struck again. And released again.

By now I was cheering as happily as any good gladiatorial spectator. I retrieved the one-inch dowel rod that I use to secure the sliding patio door shut and returned to the scene. The rodent was again on its back, squawking and trying to make a getaway. “Should I pin it down and finish it off?” I thought. “No, let the cat finish it.” But the rodent flipped onto its feet and ran towards the kitchen sink, on the opposite side of the kitchen as the stove. Emerald calmly stared after the rodent, and it was only after some seconds of silence that I figured out something was wrong. I peered under the cabinet overhang where the rodent should have been, but the only thing there was yet another mouse hole. Dang!

The rodent escaped, presumably unharmed. The cats are too well fed to have interest in hunting beyond inflicting pain on other creatures. These kibble-fed kitties need their killer instincts sharpened. So, as I wrote today's blog, when Emerald brought into the apartment—Laura's apartment, in fact—a lizard, I gave her free rein. And Emerald killed it. Well, almost killed it. She ripped the lizard into three pieces before losing interest; the lizard continued breathing its final breaths, slowly. It's saddening to see a harmless reptile die such a death, but that lizard is necessary warm-up for tonight—for tonight the cats do battle again!

* * *

I'll be out of town for the next week-and-a-half, and I won't blog again until Thursday, July 21.

Project: Benotto 10-speed

2011-07-04T20:22:00.000-07:00

Since I ruined my Schwinn, I've been without a get-around bike, a bike that's reliable enough to take on short trips and that's cheap enough to warrant leaving locked up even in seedy places.

I began looking on Craigslist for a replacement get-around bike soon after wrecking the Schwinn. I knew what I wanted: another old-fashion road bike. Road bikes are faster, and for me, speed is comfort.

I found and bought a Benotto 10-speed that I guess dates to the 70's or 80's. The bike was in poor condition, but I liked how despite years of obvious neglect, both dérailleurs shifted and both brakes worked. Also, the wheels looked true enough to work as is. I figured all the bike needed to be ridable was a new chain; I would swap out the tubes and tires from the Schwinn.

To get started, I bought a new chain from the local bike shop. Then, upon ripping off the rotting tires and tubes, I realized that the old rim tape was rotted, too. (I should have guessed that before taking off the tires.) I had one roll of rim tape in my bike parts box, so I bought another roll, again from the local bike shop. After taping the rims and trying to swap on the old Schwinn's tires, I realized that the Benotto has different-sized wheels: 27-inch, not the (now) standard 700c. Twenty-seven-inch wheels are slightly larger—just enough so that tires are not interchangeable between the two sizes of wheels. So I bought new tires, but from online, not from the local bike shop. Tires are significantly cheaper online.

Finally, after receiving the tires in the mail, I put the bike together: new chain, borrowed tubes from the Schwinn, new tires, borrowed saddle from the Schwinn, borrowed pedals from the Schwinn. I made a couple of tweaks along the way. First, I used some anti-rust solvent on the rear spindle because the quick release screws were nearly stuck in place, making it hard to get the rear wheel on and off. Also, I cut the new chain two links short because the rear wheel doesn't free-spin well, and a shorter chain forces the hub to free-spin when coasting. This isn't ideal, but it works.

Now I have a working get-around bike. There's still more work to be done on it, like replacing the cables and fixing the rear hub, but the bike proved itself yesterday afternoon on its maiden voyage—a trip with Laura to the Sunnyslope swimming pool about four miles away. The bike did well—even through the dust storm on the way back.

Cost:

bike	$80
chain	$15
rim tape	$10
tires	$60
tubes	$0
saddle	$0
pedals	$0
total	$165

Project: bike rack

2011-06-30T22:28:00.001-07:00

After two years of thinking about it, two months of procrastinating doing anything with it, and two weeks of building it, my bike rack is done. Now I can store up to five bikes in one corner of my apartment. Also, I proved that I can make something useful out of real materials, not just out of abstract sequences of 1's and 0's.

The rack is of my own design and meets the following requirements:

The rack shall stand freely—no holes in any walls, no leaning against the wall.
The rack shall be compact and fit within a corner of my apartment. (Actual dimensions: 3ft x 4ft x 8ft)
The rack shall be capable of being taken apart and put back together.

Of course, there are the obvious requirements, too, such as not crumpling and thus not damaging a few thousands dollars worth of bikes.

Overall, the rack works well. The bikes are staggered in height so that five bikes fit in four feet of width. Getting a bike in and out of the rack is no harder than what I did before having the rack, which entailed maneuvering bikes stacked against each other, all leaning against a wall. Now, with the rack, I can retrieve any one bike irrespective of the others.

There's a problem with the rack, however, and that's that it leans. This is because the combined weight of the bicycles—100 to 150 pounds when the rack is fully loaded—pulls the rack forward. The five vertical, weight-bearing 2x4's bend under that forward pull. But the rack feels sturdy, so I think this is only a cosmetic issue. As far as I can tell, any alternative design that wouldn't lean and would fulfill the freestanding requirement would require more wood—more joints, more nuts and bolts, more work. Possibly I would have been better off designing the rack to lean against the wall. However, the best solution, for those who own the walls they live in, is to drill the bike-hanging hooks directly into the wall's studs and be done with it.

But I'm happy with the rack. I could have bought something pre-made and machine-precise, and maybe that would have been cheaper and certainly it would have been easier, but if I had pursued that route I wouldn't have learned as much as I did making my rack.

This one's about the weather

2011-06-27T21:35:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again: monsoon season is setting in. Temperatures are high; the dew point is inching up: and each evening the buildings, roads, and sidewalks belch their daily heat into the warm city air—air trapped between mountains and with nowhere to escape. It's hot and getting hotter.

Not counting my first five years, I've lived only in places where summer is the dreaded season. This is truer in Houston than in Phoenix; Houston summers are tougher and last a month or two longer. (Clearly I'm not talking about calendar summers here.) But in both places—and San Antonio, where I lived a couple of summers—spring and fall have the easiest weather, the golden mean between the extremes. I'm interested to know what life is like someplace where the extreme itself is golden, where summer has the easiest weather.

Though, in three months, I'll go back to not caring.

Nothing to get cranky about

2011-06-23T22:41:00.000-07:00

For about an hour this morning, only one of the four bicycles I own was in working condition. This was down from two the hour before because I ripped off the left crank during the last few miles of this morning's ride. After failing to reattach the crank using a tiny Allen wrench I borrowed from a passerby cyclist, and after deciding not to dandy-horse it home the six or sever miles remaining, I phoned Laura for a rescue. But other than that the ride was a good one.

Unlike that time I used sheer herculean lower body strength to rip apart a chainring on my fixed-gear Schwinn, this morning's bike destruction was due to negligence. I started my ride (and Tuesday's ride) knowing that the crank bolt had fallen out sometime on my Sunday ride. The only things keeping the crank attached to the bottom bracket were the two hex bolts on the cranks—I recommended against riding a bike like this. Those two hex bolts held for eighty miles or so before letting go and stranding me. Fortunately, neither I nor the bike incurred any permanent damage, as far as I know.

What about my other two non-working bikes, the ones that weren't working at the start of the day? One is the Schwinn I wrecked. The other is a used road bike I bought off Craigslist to replace the Schwinn. It's a sun-faded and slightly rusted Benotto 10-speed I think I can make into a working beater bike suitable for leaving locked up in public places. It's non-working because it's missing a chain, tires, tubes, and rim tape. After acquiring rim tape today (when I picked up the new crank bolt at the nearby bike shop), I'm now ready to get the Benotto cruising.

Hopefully, I'll soon be up (and down) to three-out-of-three working bikes.

Free-camping

2011-06-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago, when Laura and I traveled to Kansas to attend a wedding, we agreed to split rental car fees with four of Laura's friends who were also flying in town for the wedding. It was a smart plan, but it had a catch: our flight arrived late at night; their flights all arrived the next morning.

Where do we sleep?

How about in the airport?

Is that allowed?

I think it is. But we'll find a secluded spot in case it isn't.

I enjoy sleeping in airports and in pullouts off unpaved forest roads and just about anywhere that's free. After doing so, I awake the next morning pleased with having saved $50 or so by avoiding hotels and motels.

In addition to saving money, sleeping out gives me the thrill of meeting a challenge, of making myself safe even though I go unconscious for the night and am my most vulnerable. Even before falling asleep in that airport a year ago, on the second floor in front of some administration offices, Laura and I scouted the airport and decided upon the least probable spot we'd be disturbed. All night the PA system blared messages for the cleanup and maintenance crews, and not until we awoke the next morning to the sounds of early morning travelers did we know how it would turn out. (By the way, always pack earplugs when you travel.) I'm lucky that Laura mostly agrees with me on my affinity for sleeping out. Mostly agrees.

I like having a bed and a pillow.

You have a blanket in your backpack and your stuff sack of clothes functions as a pillow.

On our recent California trip, we avoided the hotels and motels altogether, splurging only twice by spending the night at paid-for campgrounds. We free-camped the other nights—in the barren Nevada desert; at the commune in Northern California; in Death Valley National Park; and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, waiting for the next morning to replace a blown-out tire. It wasn't glamorous, but it was adventurous. (By the way, don't leave on a road trip with bald tires.)

Have crutch, will travel

2011-06-06T23:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow Laura and I will begin our California road trip. Our one goal for the trip is to visit Laura's sister, who lives in a commune in the northern part of the state. Beyond that one goal, we have little planned for several of the trip's days, and nothing is definite. But I think we'll have no problem finding good places to be and worthwhile stuff to do; today Laura checked out from the library a few California travel books, and I'm ready to decompress into unemployment and self-imposed structure.

However, I'd be lying if I said I was 100% excited about the trip and could think of nothing else I'd rather do. Many people wouldn't feel this way if they were leaving for a carefree road trip the next day. For them, traveling is an end in itself and what Laura and I will be doing for the next week-and-a-half is the Good Life.

But the truth is I dislike traveling. My attitude towards it is like what many people feel towards exercising: when I do it it's because it's good for me, but most of the time it feels like a chore. I rarely feel that way towards exercise, but regarding travel it's the exception that I'd not prefer to do something else. I'd prefer to do my routine at home.

It's taken me a long time to come to terms with disliking traveling. Our society tries hard to convince people to be dissatisfied with their day-to-day circumstances—satisfied people are less inclined to spend their money—and what better exemplifies day-to-day dissatisfaction than believing you're better off some place other than home? That's the view I'd like to take—that those of us who prefer to stay put are somehow more satisfied with our lives—but probably it's false. I dislike traveling because I feel a compulsion to know in advance what my week will entail and to have that week go a lot like the previous week. Compulsion has little if anything to do with satisfaction.

Just as it's taken me a long time to come to terms with disliking traveling, it's taken me a long time to accept that routine is a crutch, a weakness—another comfort zone I should exit once in a while. Having a routine is a luxury of normality, and normality is a luxury of prosperity. Only a prosperous person—in the broad sense including all people of the world—can afford to know in advance how his or her week will go. Impoverished people must be more adaptable, more willing to bend to unforeseen opportunities and risks as they present themselves. For such people, most weeks may pass unchanged from the one that preceded it, but such people must be ready to modify themselves according to changes in their environment rather than the other way around.

So I look at Laura's and my upcoming California road trip as an important opportunity for me to walk awhile without a crutch—to go without the comfort of knowing in advance how things will turn out. Who knows? Perhaps someday such opportunities will be forced upon all of us.

* * *

I figure I should embrace my lack of a routine while on the road, and thus I won't be blogging. I expect my next blog post will be on June 20.

I, Schwinn

2011-06-02T20:05:00.000-07:00

We all die eventually, but somehow I figured I was a survivor and would live to be a hundred. I didn't have any rational basis for thinking this; it just seemed right. Is that hubris? Did thinking this way let me take life for granted? I don't know.

Now, young in years but old before my time, I'm broken and useless. What little I still own will soon be taken from me, and I'll be tossed out with the garbage. How quickly things can change.

I was never much for looking into the past, and I don't like to talk about the years before I moved to Phoenix. Only through the nostalgia of youth can I say those were happy times. In truth they were unproductive years of neglect and unhealthy want. But Phoenix! The Valley of the Sun. How that move changed me! How free I became! How happy I was exploring the city and learning new routes. Everyday it seems I went someplace new. I was doing what I had always wanted to do. Because of that I can say that I got to live—if only for a short while.

Of course, the initial exhilaration of new settings wore off in time, and my joyful explorations ebbed into steady routine. My body began failing me—in small ways at first, a spoke here, a new chain there. I could no longer deny I wasn't the spry youth I once was. Aging causes some of us to do stupid things. In hindsight I realize the surgery was a mistake. Keep the body God gave you—that's the lesson I learned. But I gave in to impulse and went under the wrench. I trimmed down, lost the gears and the free-spin hub, and proudly showed off my mid-life crisis as a fixie. Graceless aging is all it ever was, though.

Some decisions can't be taken back—especially when your original guts end up in a landfill far away. And it's not that I was useless. Not yet anyway. But life can be awfully short, and it can be taken from you in an instant. That's another lesson—but one that's hard to learn before it's too late. But I learned it. Now I'm broken and useless and ready to be tossed out with the garbage. Maybe I'll finally be rejoined with my dérailleurs and shifters and rear brake in the landfill?

Software development: the 80-20 rule

2011-05-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

At one place I worked a high-up guy once remarked how he was puzzled how there could be such wide divergence in the level of effort software developers make. He stated it something like the following:

I look around and I see some people working really, really, hard—putting in extra hours and so on. Then I look around and see some people working not very hard. And I wonder why everyone isn't working hard. If those in the second group worked as hard as those in the first group, then we'd be getting a lot more done.

This guy wasn't the big cheese, but he was up there a good ways on the ladder, so I'm unsure whether his comment was merely an attempt to motivate us or if he really was puzzled about his employees' work ethics. I'm not puzzled why it's in some developers' self-interest to slack-off (because I've been in that position a few times). I've even formulated my own 80-20 rule to explain it.

In a sufficiently large software project, 80% of the developers produce about 20 hours of work, on average, each week.

Those words, “sufficiently large”, can cover a lot, but I mean them in the way that you'd probably expect—a project that's too complex to be understood fully by any one person and where (probably) not all developers know all other developers—at least, not well. In other words, I'm talking about a software project with a non-trivial social hierarchy.

As to why the phenomenon of the 80-20 occurs, here's my theory: Developers show up to work because of the paycheck, but they work hard only when they're mentally rewarded. Stated another way, a paycheck buys compliance but creative ownership earns actual productivity.

Small software projects can hand out the juicy, fun, creative problems fairly evenly among developers, but somehow this doesn't happen when there's a social hierarchy. When not everyone knows everyone else, when not everyone trusts everyone else, there exists perceived incentive to keep those juicy bits for oneself, and somehow, in sufficiently large software projects, the Keepers of the Juicy Bits self-organize to become about 20% of the project's staff. Everyone else is just going through the motions, solving routine problems at an easy-does-it pace and baffling the higher ups with their casual attitudes.

I don't have a solution to the 80-20 rule, and the higher ups may endlessly continue to puzzle why they can't get their developers to care as much as they do. But from the individual's perspective, the 80-20 rule suggests avoiding becoming lost somewhere in the 80%.

Aimful

2011-05-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

Maybe the biggest reason I'm quitting my job is that I want to make sure I'm still alive.

The last time I was unemployed was nine years ago. I was twenty-three years old and one year out of college, and I had just been laid off from the startup where I had done unremarkable work. Like many post-college kids at that age, I mistook laziness for existential crisis, and unemployment fit me well in that way.

I soon moved back to Houston to live with my parents, and my chief responsibility that spring and early summer was chauffeuring my dad while he recovered from complications from cataract surgery. My other duties included playing a lot of Scrabble—with good humor Dad blamed his losses on his semi-blindness—and getting in a few good bike rides on the open roads west of town. I also really really intended to get around to doing something about one of my many loose ideas for a software project.

But I never got around to doing much of anything productive in the four months I was unemployed—a fact I later learned to regret once I found a job and lost my free time. Regret has since morphed into a fear that I can't be productive when unemployed—that I must be anchored to a fixed schedule to avoid being aimless. I described this fear to some Phoenix friends, and many of them were surprised because I'm regimented and focused. Yes, but you've never see me unchained from the nine-to-five.

What I mainly remember from those idle days nine years ago was that I enjoyed not doing anything, though there are obvious money issues that go along. I remember being asked by friends and relatives about my job search and being reminded each time that I was suppose to feel sad about my situation. What's sad is feeling sad about not working for someone else.

These days I have no shortage of interests: my bike rack project, teaching myself basic chemistry, learning Go and AJAX and git and other software technologies, becoming a better writer, and so on. I don't know whether I've developed so many interests because I haven't had time to pursue them all or because I've matured and learned the value of hard work. That's the lesson taught in Candide—that we should all tend our garden. I want to believe that I've learned that lesson and I'm ready to tend my garden awhile—now that I won't be tending anyone else's this summer.

I quit, again

2011-05-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

Today at work I gave my two weeks' notice. As now planned, my last day will be Friday next week, thus bringing my stay with Astronautics to a total of four years and eight months, the longest I've ever held one job. In answer to the questions that logically follow: No, I don't have a new job lined up, and no, I haven't even begun looking.

Happy employees don't quit without good reason, such as getting a better offer elsewhere or wanting to move to a different city. I could say that my reason is that I'll be spending the summer with Laura, traveling and otherwise taking advantage of what may be the only time we'll ever be able to afford having extended time off from work at the same time. But this reason doesn't capture it fully. If I had wanted to stay at my job while taking off two months, I may have been able to work out something with management. I didn't even try.

I'm thirty-two years old, and despite all of Laura's jokes about me being an old man, the truth is that I'm too young to continue grinding it out at a place where I'm not learning a whole lot. I feel that's my situation at Astronautics—at least when considering the time I'm being asked to put into it. When I'm sixty-two I might be able to get by on what I already know, but at thirty-two, not growing is a slow death, however comfortable and materially rewarding it may be. This second reason won't be easy to describe to the countless people who ask me in the next few months why I quit my job, but it's closer to being the real reason.

Agent Smith Visions

2011-05-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Not to beat it to death, but there's a bigger problem with Isaac Asimov's Malthusian reasoning in Robot Visions, one that I didn't write about on Monday but is worth bringing up because it's a common belief, and it's wrong. I think of it as Agent Smith's fallacy.

There are many reasons not to like the movie The Matrix: Using humans as power sources doesn't jibe well with the law of conservation of energy, for one, and the hand-to-hand combat scenes are silly. But The Matrix is a fun popcorn flick—despite Agent Smith's humanity-is-a-virus speech.

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.

Natural equilibrium? This is wrong. Do lions go on hunger strike when their numbers swell too large? Do deer choose not to breed so that they don't have too much impact on their environment? Do bacteria have any instinct at all? There is no such thing as an instinctual will to equilibrium. Every species is doing the best it can to increase its population; they just happen to fail most of the time and instead maintain a stable population. Humans happen to be increasing their numbers right now.

Many people—not just Asimov—think something similar to what Agent Smith thinks. Humans consume too much. Humans destroy too much. Humans are evil. There's a tacit assumption that the misfortunes humanity creates for itself are done so through deliberate choice, whereas other species on the planet are mindlessly behaving according to harmonious instinct. What evidence do we have for this distinction between us and other species? This is a flimsy proposition, and we wouldn't believe it if we didn't want to believe it.

There are many reasons to project sin onto humanity—some of them even useful—but the two reasons that stand out to me are: (1) you call evil only that which has power over you—in this case, humanity and the inhibitive social order it imposes over individuals— and (2) the alternative explanation—that no one is in control—is scarier than believing we're evil. For if we're not in control, then we won't ever choose our equilibrium with the environment, but instead we'll have that equilibrium “chosen” for us.

Exponents are hard

2011-05-16T21:35:00.000-07:00

It's the year 2030, and a group of scientists figure out time travel. Due to the particulars of how time travel works, they're unable to travel backwards in time and thus cannot change the past, but they're able to travel into the future and return to the present.

The scientists decide to run an experiment to send someone 200 years into the future to determine whether humanity survives the threats of overpopulation and poverty. They send a robot because they agree it's too dangerous for one of themselves to go. Archie, the robot they choose, sits in his time-traveling contraption and blinks in and out before the scientists' eyes. Though taking no time by the scientists' perceptions, Archie reports that he spent five years 200 years in the future.

All is well with humanity, Archie says. In the future, poverty has been solved for all, and the world's population has been brought down to one billion from the ten billion living in 2030. Furthermore, humans are thriving in bases on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt. In short, the future is magnificent.

—So Asimov wrote over twenty years ago in one of his last robot stories, Robot Visions. The story continues with its unnamed narrator not believing Archie's report and not sharing the scientists' relief of humanity's good fortune. As the narrator figures:

I asked myself if population decreased from ten billion to one billion in the course of two centuries, why did it not decrease from ten billion to zero? There would be so little difference between the two alternatives.

Asimov was a smart guy, but how could he be so wrong about this point? As anyone knows who's had an infestation of cockroaches, ants, or any other pest, there's a big difference between most dying and all dying. In this particular case, for a population of ten billion to reduce to one billion over 200 years requires an annual growth rate of about -1%. That's barely negative and is the consequence of small changes in the mortality rate and the birth rate. Today in 2011, some industrialized countries, such as Japan, already have negative growth rates due only to a decrease in the birth rate.

Whereas, for a population to go extinct over 200 years, the annual growth rate must be about -10%. That's a big difference—like suffering an epidemic every year for two centuries. Or suffering continuous non-stop war as destructive as the world wars. While a -1% rate is historically precedented, a continued rate of -10% is not. Surely, Asimov knew this. I guess you ignore a few details when you average 1,700 published words per day for 40 years.

Where's the Monday Post?

2011-05-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Monday Post was out sick with a high fever, sore throat, infected sinus, and extreme fatigue. The Thursday Post will be out of town to attend a wedding. But Next Monday's Post will be here as usual.

I don't know SQL either.

2011-05-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

Often I wake up Monday or Thursday morning with no more than a notion of what I'm going to blog for the day. Sometimes it's easy to transform that notion into words, sometimes it's hard. Some days I begin without even a notion; today is one of those days.

It's also my 210th post. By now I don't remember all of what I've written about here at JEC. This is problematic because sometimes I wake up Monday or Thursday morning with a notion, begin transforming it into words, and then realize that I've already written a post about that exact thing. That's embarrassing and time-consuming—not to mention it makes me wonder about my chances of avoiding senility. But it's the wasting of time that stings right now, and I've made this mistake enough times to consider it a problem worth solving. Because I don't have an Internet connection at home—not one that I pay for—I can't count on Blogger's search box being available whenever I need it. Instead, I'm working to archive my posts locally, offline.

Blogger has a feature for doing this. It allows you to download your blog as a massive XML file containing all posts, reader comments, and some settings junk. If you're looking for a machine-readable copy of your blog, this is perfect. However, I want a human-readable copy, and that requires some tinkering. The solution I'm working towards is to hand-craft the XML back into separate HTML pages—that's 210 pages and counting. I reason that this solves having a local copy while presenting me with an opportunity to learn HTML. That's right; I don't know HTML.

Sure, I've written a few simple CGI websites, so I know enough of the basics to get by. But I've never used, for example, cascading style sheets or JavaScript, and only recently did I learn <em> is the appropriate tag for making text italic, not <i>. By hand-crafting my JEC pages offline, I expect to fast-forward my HTML knowledge 12 years to the 21st century. This might be a good fallback in case my career in embedded software development doesn't pan out.

As to whether any of the knowledge I acquire will propagate up to the online JEC, that remains to be seen.

Chemical hate

2011-05-02T20:32:00.002-07:00

My hatred of chemistry began in the 10th grade, only a month or so into the first and only chemistry class I've ever taken. I still resent being made to memorize that long list of ions. Everything I was suppose to learn in the class after that assignment was noise that I retained just long enough to earn a B grade. Sadly, the only thing I learned in high school chemistry is that I hate chemistry. As an adult I'm confronted with my teenage apathy every time I use any of the mysterious chemicals I store beneath my kitchen sink without understanding how or why they work.

Now that I'm older, I realize that I don't hate chemistry; I just hate the particular way it was taught to me. It's unfortunate that high school science is taught as though every student is going to be a scientist. Professional chemists need to know their ions without taking the time to consult a textbook, but the rest of us don't. While it's good that we all spend at least a little time learning how to balance equations, what we non-scientists need most is a broad, qualitative foundation sufficient for allowing us to teach ourselves the little science we need or want as adults.

Awhile back I bought a used chemistry textbook at Goodwill for a few dollars. It targets liberal arts students who take chemistry as their science elective. “Perfect,” I thought. “This is exactly what I need to understand those chemicals beneath my sink.” If a liberal arts student can understand the book then so can I.

Two weeks ago I began my chemistry self-study program—my attempt to undo the damage I did to my own brain seventeen years ago. I'm even using pencil and paper to answer the review questions and problems at the end of the chapters. Hopefully I'll teach myself that I like chemistry after all.

Errors

2011-04-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

I've randomly picked for analysis this blog post among the countless millions on the Internet. It exemplifies the shoddy writing and fallacious reasoning that pervades blogging.

In it, the author argues that baseball's error stat should be abolished. His argument may appeal at a superficial level, but it's loaded with fallacies—so much so that the author should concern himself more with eliminating his errors, not the ones decided at the MLB scoring table.

Consider the piece's third paragraph—where the meat of the argument begins:

There are two facets to the E: defensive and offensive. Defensively, it's widely believed that the E is a poor stat to compare fielders with, as the Wikipedia article points out. To compare fielders meaningfully, we must either use a new stat—like UZR—or resort to gut instinct—as most of us do anyway.

Those three sentences contain no fewer than five distinct, logic errors.

Appeal to popularity—“it's widely believed” and “as most of us do”.
Appeal to authority—“as the Wikipedia article points out”.
Begging the question—”meaningfully”.
False choice—“must either use a new stat … or resort to gut instinct”.
Inconsistency—“use a new stat—like UZR”. Ultimate Zone Rating is based, in part, on the error stat. You can't eliminate errors without also eliminating UZR.

The last one—suggesting that the UZR can replace the error—demonstrates that the author hasn't done his homework, and thus, far from furthering the author's point, it warns readers not to continue reading. However, those who do continue reading will be greeted by two more problems a few paragraphs later.

Offensively, the E affects batting average. It's a shame that a batter is penalized for what a fielder does just because the fielder does something irregular. The whole game is irregular.

Appeal to emotion—“It's a shame”.
Hasty generalization—“The whole game is irregular.”

And as though the author is purposely presenting a bad case, he concludes his argument with one final logic mistake.

Replace ERA with RA and make pitchers accountable for everything going on on the field. This is already accepted practice with the W–L stat.

Two wrongs make a right—“already accepted practice”

Unfortunately, this stuff passes for standard fare on the Internet. We ought to take care not to be swayed by such faulty reasoning.

Nix the E

2011-04-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

Let's talk baseball. Let's talk about stats. Take the following from the Wikipedia article about the E.

[F]ans and analysts have questioned the usefulness and significance of errors as a metric for fielding skill. Notably, mental misjudgments, such as failure to cover a base or attempting a force out when such a play is not available, are not considered errors.
A more subtle, though more significant objection to the error, as sabermetricians have noted, is more conceptual—in order for a fielder to be charged with an error, he must have done something right by being in the correct place to be able to attempt the play. A poor fielder may “avoid” many errors simply by being unable to reach batted or thrown balls that a better fielder could successfully reach. Thus, it is possible that a poor fielder will have fewer errors than an otherwise better fielder.

The above is not an objection to the E—it's a criticism of it. I object to the E altogether. The E shouldn't be an official stat in baseball. Baseball stats ought to be free of human judgment save the on-the-field calls made by the umpires.

There are two facets to the E: defensive and offensive. Defensively, it's widely believed that the E is a poor stat to compare fielders with, as the Wikipedia article points out. To compare fielders meaningfully, we must either use a new stat—like UZR—or resort to gut instinct—as most of us do anyway.

Offensively, the E affects batting average. It's a shame that a batter is penalized for what a fielder does just because the fielder does something irregular. The whole game is irregular.

If a batter reaches first base safely on a routine ground ball to the shortstop, then that batter is lucky. But if one batter is consistently luckier than another batter, then batting average should reflect that, not try to ignore it. For example, if a batter runs fast and the shortstop knows the batter runs fast, then maybe the shortstop bobbled the ball because he rushed. Credit the batter with a H.

There are better offensive stats than batting average, so let's keep batting average the dumb stat that it is. Limit mucking with the AB and H to objectively measured cases like fielder's choice and the sacrifice fly. Again, only umpires should make official subjective judgments.

Of course, one consequence of eliminating the E is that we must eliminate ERA, too. But if we eliminate the ERA then how do we distinguish between bad pitching and unlucky pitching?

We can't and we don't need to. Eliminating ERA is far from problematic—it's downright good. Far too long the pitcher has been off the hook for what the fielders around him do. Pitchers create their own luck—at least over the long term. A pitcher who incessantly nibbles around the corners of the plate and tries to deftly strike out each batter is probably going to have less alert—and thus sloppier—fielders than a pitcher who challenges each hitter to put the ball in play. Ditto for pitchers who take an extra rub of the rosin bag and dawdle around the rubber between pitches—they should be punished for boring their teammates. Replace ERA with RA and make pitchers accountable for everything going on on the field. This is already accepted practice with the W–L stat.

I don't expect the E to go away in my lifetime. Neither do I expect our country to do the right thing and amend the Constitution to outlaw the designated hitter. I respect and love baseball's adherence to tradition—even when that means keeping the warts. It's worth it. Tradition keeps the Cubs out of the World Series every year. And tradition allows fans to criticize the E.

Who's at the helm

2011-04-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

Laura told me she disagrees with my post from last week. She thinks people control their own life much more than my low rating of 2 allows for.

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “What did I write?” I intended last week's post to be about societal control, not individual control. I believe individuals indeed do control a lot about how their lives go—a person's attitudes and decisions have profound consequences. Last week's post muddies that distinction.

On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means our choices have no effect on our personal circumstances and 10 means those circumstances are entirely effected by our choices, I stand at a 7. Maybe lower—it depends how much I discount uncontrollable factors like where we're born and what our parents are like. Nevertheless, my score is higher than a 2 when it comes to individual control. It's societal control that I wrote about and scored as a 2, and it's societal control that I think is mostly illusory.

The world is like a ship with a crew but no captain. Each crewman goes about his work, and that makes the ship appear orderly in some ways. But no one is at the helm, and the ship goes whichever way the current leads. Someday the crewmen may decide whether to step aboard a lifeboat or else drown in arctic waters. Or they may choose whether to ferry to a calm beach in the South Pacific or remain off shore. The crewmen choose, and their choices impact their lives. But the kinds of choices they make—their options—aren't up to them or anyone else on the ship.

Almost. That analogy represents the extreme score of 0—where society is entirely uncontrollable. My score of 2 extends the metaphor by saying that occasionally someone succeeds in getting their hand on the helm, and they steer the boat for a while. But not for long. There's a frenzied struggle of would-be captains all around the helm, and there's no limit to their willingness to mutiny against the current captain to set their own course for a few moments. The result is little different than having no captain at all.

Deal

2011-04-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

Saturday I saw a bear. Sunday I saw three snakes, including one that angrily rattled its tail ten feet away from where I stood. Later I drank a liter and a half of scum water because I was desperate enough to drink water with bugs in it.

Laura and I backpacked in the Pine Mountain Wilderness Area last weekend. We intended to do a thirteen-mile loop hike along the Verde Rim, but Sunday morning, seven miles in—that's over halfway—we turned around and backtracked. We turned around because we struggled to stay on the faintly marked trail and because the rattlesnake spooked us and had us imagining every wind-rustled leaf and lizard-nudged rock to be a snake.

I enjoy our backpacking trips into the wilderness. Arizona is a tough place, and spending just one night in it reminds me of the distinction between appreciating nature and romanticizing it. I know a trip is a tough one when I return to the car and am happy to spend a few hours driving back to the smog and noise of the city.

As if to symbolize my urban life, today I mailed my taxes. Today is the deadline, so we all should have mailed them by today. Do you know your tax rate? Not your tax bracket—your rate. Divide how much you pay into your income. I know my rate: for 2010 it's 20%.

That counts everything that's income-related: Social Security and Medicare (the half I pay, not my employer's half), Arizona state, and US federal. US federal—what is actually called “income tax”—accounted for slightly more than half the 20%. Arizona took one-tenth of the 20%.

Twenty percent is not much. Many people argue that I and others pay too much. I'm told that one-fifth of my paycheck is stolen and that it's “my money.” Yet if a thief took one-fifth of my paycheck and built and maintained roads, set aside land for wilderness areas, and provided the other public infrastructures and services I use, then I condone theft. Twenty percent is a good deal.

Controlling one's assumptions

2011-04-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

I try to tell people that I don't want to change their mind other than to get them to better understand their own assumptions. The way I look at it, it's not in my interest to surround myself with myself but it is in my interest to decrease the predictability of opposing opinions. And a good way to decrease the predictability of what you say is to know your assumptions and their textbook criticisms. That's how I see it, anyway,

Discovering your own assumptions is not easy. It's like a fish gaining awareness of the water it swims in. That's especially true for the most deeply held of convictions; that which we most believe in we are least likely to be aware of as being a belief and not a universal, immutable truth. Understandably, not everyone is interested in discovering their assumptions. In many cases I think this is because of fear. Boredom and laziness are also culprits.

I'm not free of these faults by any stretch, but to combat them, in today's post, I'm going to lay bare a bit of my world view by asking and answering a question. It's a question that, when answered honestly, exposes a lot about how a person explains (or doesn't explain) the world around them. Without further ado, here it is: How much of our world's circumstances are the result of choice?

Rate yourself on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means that you believe none of our circumstances are the result of choice and 10 means that you believe all our circumstances are because of choice. Where do you stand? I rate myself at about a 2: some aspects of society—even a few significant ones—are a result of choice but mainly we're riding the wave together.

I'm pretty sure my low score puts me at odds with a lot of other people. Foremost, I'm disqualified from believing nearly any conspiracy theory because every conspiracy theory begins with the assumption that the world is controllable. Usually before the conspiracy theorist can begin his explanation, I'm already lost. Similarly, before I can poke holes in their theory, they're lost. We talk past each other.

Other people I'm at fundamental odds with are people who believe we can bring about some Utopian ideal if only we try hard enough and get everyone to believe X or do Y. Such ideas also rest upon the core assumption that the world is controllable, or at least that we can get from here to there by doing something deliberate. I don't see it that way. I observe humans making a mess of things at least as often as they don't, and it's not for a lack of trying to act deliberately.

There are others who I disagree with. But not optimists. Not all of them anyway, though many people who rate on the high end of the control scale may think I'm a pessimist. I'm not, and I don't see what's depressing about a world whose consequences are not entirely up to us. Indeed, I'm inclined to think that it's the opposing view that's depressing. After all, the world undeniably has a history of having problems, and to think that it's both controllable and problematic is to believe that the wrong people have been in control for going on a few thousand years. What a bad track record!

But don't let me change your mind. Go ahead and rate yourself. How much do you believe the world is a result of choice?

Ninety percents

2011-04-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

I can't find it anymore, what I once read as a rule of thumb for software development that goes something like the following.

The first 90% of a software project is easy. The second 90% of a software project is hard. The third 90% of a software project is where you finally get a good product.

Instead, what I found during my Google search was the following, called the ninety-ninety rule and attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs.

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

Both heuristics describe what is common knowledge to experienced software developers: software development is hard. It's hard in a diminishing returns sorta way, and it's hard because somehow these diminishing returns take us a little by surprise in each project.

These days at work I'm somewhere between the first and third ninety percents and firmly behind schedule. So are the other 100+ developers. It's a grind. First I began getting more done without resorting to working more hours. Then that wasn't enough, and I began working longer hours. That's still not enough, so I'm trying to work fewer hours. That's my best answer to the ninety-ninety rule.

Stepping up

2011-04-07T23:49:00.000-07:00

Three months ago I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers, and I've put a lot of miles on them—not many running miles but a lot of walking miles. They're great shoes. Invariably, when strangers approach me and ask about them, I tell them so. “If you like being barefoot then you'll like these shoes,” I say. Most strangers, I've gathered, like being barefoot and would appreciate a minimal shoe.

I believe in this shoe. I think it marks an important innovation in shoe technology. Yes, Five Fingers suffer from being a fad. I hope they survive their youthful, volatile trendiness and become accepted as a regular shoe someday—the kinda shoe you wouldn't think twice about wearing as business casual. Otherwise it's a shame that we would knowingly turn away from a shoe technology that could save people a lot of pain and disablement due to foot injuries. Vibram isn't the only one; many shoe companies now get it. The natural, flexible abilities of the foot should not be amputated to make room for the prosthetic that is the modern, conventional shoe.

These past three months have been an awakening of foot awareness for me. Before, I hadn't paid much attention to my feet. They were there for making contact with the ground, little more. My Five Fingers exposed my feet's weakness. After walking around for only a few miles, the muscles and tendons in the bottom of my foot felt sore, just like any other muscle following a workout. And just like other body parts following successive workouts, my feet adapted and strengthened. Conventional shoes break down with time; my Five Fingers and the feet inside them are building up.

A month ago I started taking barefooted walks outdoors during the workday. I figured toughening the muscles of the feet is good but building callouses too is even better. I now easily win the dirtiest-feet-in-the-office competition, and my feet are toughening in two ways. Arizona is a great state for testing tough feet.

As a result of my foot experimentation I think my feet's arches are increasing. I regret not having taken “before” photos when I bought my Five Fingers because I have no way of knowing if my arches really have changed. However, a quick Google search shows some evidence that adult arches can deepen with steady doses of barefoot activity. If so, this is satisfying. Healthy feet are a core part of fitness.

Commonsense platform

2011-04-04T17:44:00.000-07:00

Like sharks having sensed blood, big names are circling in on the next presidential election. We've scarcely finished the previous election and are a scant nineteen months away from the next one, so the timing is right.

I advocate citizens ought to uphold their civic responsibility and vote (though my own voting record is dismal) because voting is important. Everyone should vote their hearts and minds. However, I think that voting for President is ineffectual and view the outcome as not likely to have much impact on day-to-day life. But we should all vote, just the same, because voting is important, however paradoxical this is.

I would be enthusiastic about the presidential race if at least one candidate espoused, even just in part, what I call a commonsense platform. A commonsense platform entails using the wide, unconstitutional powers of the modern Presidency to eliminate life's little annoyances. These aren't mere personal grievances but are stances most Americans could agree with. Even if the President also inflated wasteful bureaucracy, started wars, and ate a kitten during their State of the Union address, I'd be happier with their term than with any other President's if only they'd enact one of the follow three agenda items.

Nationwide, no-exceptions abolishment of noise-generating car alarms. Public annoyance shouldn't be an acceptable strategy for theft deterrence. Let's return to the days of quieter parking lots, when sirens and alarms meant something and turned heads. People would still be free to innovate new types of car alarms, like one that quietly sends its owner a text message instead of causing a ruckus and hoping a bystander does something.
Advertised price is what you pay. Signs, fliers, coupons, menus, and any other publicly listed price should include sales tax and other mandatory fees. If a cell phone plan is advertised as costing $30 per month, then the amount billed should be $30.00 exactly. Include the dozen or so taxes and fees in the advertised price. Also, it would be appreciated if trailing 9's were eliminated. That cell phone plan should cost $30, not $29.99. Let's end price gimmickry.
Add the glycemic index to the “Nutrition Facts” label. Many people hate the standard nutrition label and for good reason; there's no end to possible improvements. However, I'm asking for only one: add the glycemic index. Inform eaters how fast a food is absorbed into the bloodstream and how hard the pancreas is made to work. Not all sugars are equal; stop implying otherwise.

That's it. Three things that are non-polarizing, wouldn't cost much to implement, and would make life better for the vast majority. A candidate running on this platform would make me happy to follow my own advice about showing up to vote.

Racing as dessert

2011-03-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

The most apt metaphor I've come up with for thinking about racing is that racing is dessert and training for races is a balanced, wholesome meal. The point here being that a consistent diet of training is good for you and too much racing can be bad for you (but a little is certainly okay).

I think this metaphor applies to all kinds of people. For the person frozen to the couch and who maybe has tried some exercise several times in the past but can't achieve long-term consistency, the ice cream sundae that is a 10K running race three months away may be just what's needed to develop the short-term discipline to eat one's peas and mushrooms of getting off that coach and doing some runs around the neighborhood after work every other day.

However, the way I intend this metaphor is much more self-centered; it is the outlook of a fit thirty-one year-old who holds a mildly skeptical opinion of the racing scene. What I've observed these last few years is that most of my fitness-oriented growth and development, both physically and mentally, comes as a result of all the training I do leading up to a race, and the races themselves contribute little but a treadmill's worth of non-renewable external motivation. Basing a pursuit on external motivation seems dangerous to me, and focusing on racing seems narrow.

Just as dessert does not provide any key nutrients, racing does not provide any unique aspects to fitness. I was reminded of this fact last Tuesday when the Hour of Power morning ride I regularly ride transformed into a race-like environment of attacks and impromptu strategy. The group found itself in between the winter doldrums and summer suffer fests, and with it happening that no one showed who was strong enough or willing enough to dominate, the result was a free-for-all of mayhem and red-lined heart rates. And I didn't pay anything to be a part of it; it's just an informal, group ride. From it I received a great workout, and I burned through a lot of stress chemicals and was left with a sense of satisfaction that lingers two days later. So even the competitiveness of racing is not unique; there are biking and running and swimming clubs all over, and everyone who's not anyone is bound to find others who are their match.

But again, races are not bad, just as desserts are not bad. There's more to life than simply growth and development; we ought to take some time to enjoy the geological blink-of-an-eye amount of time we're alloted. Some of us enjoy racing, and we should race. However, racing is only dessert, an enjoyment to be had after having eaten one's meat and potatoes. Have you eaten your meat and potatoes?

Some thoughts about complexity

2011-03-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

Information and order are indirectly correlated, and this has to do with how the terms are defined. The more ordered something is, the less information you need to describe it; the more disordered something is, the more information you need to describe it. This runs somewhat counter to the everyday, casual use of the words “information” and “order”—at least for me—so I use the example of a ransacked library to keep the concept straight in my mind. A ransacked library is highly disordered; all books have been thrown off the shelves and lie as mountainous heaps on the floor. A concise Dewey Decimal System call number becomes insufficient for locating a book, especially if the book has been ripped into many pieces. Rather, the book and any of its scattered pages must be individually specified by precise directions: e.g., the twelfth book from the bottom in the heap located twenty-six inches immediately south of the corner of the east end of the shelf formerly containing D-E children's fiction.

If information and order are something of opposites, what then is the relationship between information and complexity? Complexity is closely tied to order, with complexity appearing to arise in systems possessing well ordered heterogeneity, so are information and complexity something of opposites, too? Could complexity be defined in part as a lack of information? This certainly runs counter to casual use of the terms!

Complex things we readily observe in the world appear to be hallmarks of embodied information, not islands freer from information than the simpler things of the world. Imagine the space shuttle and the immense web of technical specifications and knowledge needed to design, build, maintain, and operate it. How could complexity ever be oppositional to information?

This poses a problem with the casual notion of complexity: we tend to think of bigger things as being more complex, on average, than smaller things. If we're aiming to isolate the essence of complexity itself, this is no good; we're letting additional characteristics—e.g., bigness— cloud whatever sense we can make of complexity. In the case of the space shuttle, it seems complex because it is big. (It also seems complex because it's high-tech, but that's a whole other point.) As far as embodied information goes, I imagine the shuttle is a good deal easier to describe in full than nearly any other billions-of-dollars set of things you care to name. I write that with some measure of certainty because the shuttle is fully described—or very nearly so—through endless stacks of engineering specs.

Can complexity be normalized to capture its essence better? That is, if two things, A and B, are equally complex and A is twice as big as B, then we would say that A possesses half the quantity of normalized complexity as does B. But how should we measure size? In grams? In dollars? In seconds of existence? This is not clear. But mass seems like a good place to start.

A few Google searches for determining the number of parts in a space shuttle didn't yield any results—maybe that's not public information—but 747's contain on the order a million separate parts, so I estimate that the shuttle has on the order ten or a hundred million parts. Contrast that to the nervous system of a cockroach, which has on the order of a million neurons. But a cockroach's nervous system is far, far smaller than the shuttle. Its “complexity density,” as determined by its part-to-mass ratio, is therefore greater. To some extent this makes sense in that we can design and understand shuttles but as yet lack the ability to design and understand cockroach brains, though we may be getting close. Perhaps complexity density explains why a big but less-complexity-dense entity like the shuttle better yields itself to brute force engineering than do organic, well ordered entities such as cockroaches.

Lt. Commander Data

2011-03-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite TV shows growing up was Star Trek: The Next Generation. And my favorite character on that show was the pale-skinned android, Lt. Commander Data.

Data was a window into the meaning of sentience and of being human. He was also a strange, inconsistent fellow. How could it possibly be that he could perfectly perform millions or billions of math calculations per second and not be able to substitute “I'm” for “I am” or use any other contraction?

When I was young, it seemed everyone older had the answers, but of course the Star Trek: TNG writers were just making it all up as they went, and they met their burden of plausible explanation by having Data and the other Star Trek characters vaguely allude to Data's positronic brain, just as Asimov gave his robots mysterious-sounding positronic brains decades before. As to the question: why is Data self-aware when all our own 20th and now 21st century machines are not? It's the positronic aspect of his brain.

It's hazardous to generalize about sentience, being as how we humans don't know of any other examples in the universe, and it remains an open question in the philosophy of mind as to how much the peculiarities of the underlying hardware affect consciousness, but I'll chuck discretion aside and posit that if there really existed someone like Lt. Commander Data, and he did possess self-awareness, then he would not be able to perform those millions or billions of calculations any faster than I can. That is, he would have to program a computation machine to do the calculations for him, just as I have to do.

The philosophy of mind is a wildly divergent field; its contributers and followers don't yet even agree whether the brain hardware is in someway fundamentally special stuff, as far as the laws of physics go. This is to say that what I'm writing in this post is only my opinion, and it's unaccredited opinion at that. However, here's what I know. I know that the underlying hardware of the human brain is capable of performing trillions if not quadrillions of calculations per second, all taking the form of neurons molecularly adding together the weighted input of other neurons' outputs and propagating their own summation outputs to yet other neurons. Whereas the computer on which I'm typing this blog post performs a small number of calculations simultaneously but performs each calculation in a nanosecond or so, the human brain achieves its speed by performing its calculations with massive parallelism. Even with its “clock speed” over a million times slower than a $300 laptop's CPU's, the human brain is still far faster than any single machine we can fabricate.

And yet, ask nearly any human to do some math, and though our self, our I, rests upon this awesomely fast, biological computer in our head, the human will be slow and error-prone. It's like dropping a 500HP engine into a car and achieving nothing more than golf cart power, only this analogy doesn't come close to capturing the scale of the discrepancy. As to what causes the discrepancy, the philosophers of mind are working on it. My guess is that consciousness is fundamentally computationally expensive. But in any event we know the discrepancy exists. Consciousness appears to be bloatware to a scale beyond anything software developers have been able to create. Even the ones who work at Microsoft.

Returning to the positronic brain, why then should we expect Star Trek's Data to be so perfect and so fast at mental math? Somehow, Data must possess bloat-free consciousness, an ability to cut through its layers and manipulate his “positrons” directly. This makes as much sense as does a human capable of manipulating his own neurons directly. Rather, I'd expect Data to be as confounded and awed by the mysteriousness of his positronic brain as we are confounded and awed by our own brains, and Data would be thinking those thoughts of puzzlement and reverence with the same slowness and fuzziness that we think ours.

On the other hand, I'm just making this up as I go along.

Post #197

2011-03-21T19:53:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been ingesting frequent, small doses of television, owing to the three days a week I'm in the men's locker room at the local gym before and after swimming. My friend Jeff commented years ago that the gym was his main source of keeping up to date with the latest in pop music. For me, the gym is my main source for knowing what's going on in professional sports, being as how the locker room TV sets are more often than not tuned to a sports news show.

Lately, the loudest hubbub on those shows has been about college basketball and, invariably, the various “mistakes” made by the games' referees. (The quotation marks in that previous sentence are quite intentional because little in the way of basketball refereeing seems objective to me.) In this case, a referee called a five-second violation on a Texas player in the waning seconds of the Texas-Arizona game, though instant replay clearly shows that the player signaled for a timeout before his five seconds expired. But the violation call had been made, causing Texas to turn over the ball, and it happened that Arizona ended up coming from behind to win. Thus, thousands of people were arbitrarily made happier here in Arizona while thousands of people in Texas were arbitrarily made unhappier. All this is likely the fault of one guy wearing black pants and a striped shirt. And you think you get singled out for messing up where you work!

Frankly, I don't understand fans' angst against referees who blow calls. I can understand and sympathize with players' frustrations but not the fans'. Listening to these sports shows' commentary in the mornings, it's obvious that, for many, watching sports is more about outcomes and the following of process and proper procedure than it is about enjoyment and entertainment. It seems silly how fans regularly put their emotions at risk like this.

I remember my dad commenting after the Oilers left Houston in the 1990s about how it was much better without a local team around. Instead of the TV always carrying the local game, which may or may not have been a good match-up any given week, the TV stations in Houston were free to broadcast what was expected to be the best game in the league. I think this reasoning can be carried further. Once a fan stops identifying with the success or failure of a particular team or athlete, he can enjoy nearly any game, regardless of the outcome, regardless whether officials blow calls and whatever other controversy occurs. Or, better yet, that fan can stop watching altogether and instead finish putting on his goggles and go swimming.

Blowout

2011-03-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

This last Tuesday during my morning bike ride I suffered a front-tire blowout. It happened on a winding downhill portion of the route immediately following a turn. I was second in the group, in front of ten or so other riders following closely in single file.

Pop! Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss—the unmistakable sound of air escaping a revolving leak. But though a blowout is unmistakable, one has only seconds to react. A blown out 700x23 road tire is flat when its pressure drops much below 80 PSI, and when it's the front tire that's flat, the bike is made nearly incapable of turning, for the wheel rim will slide right off the flattened rubber between it and the road surface and the bike will tip over instead of turn with the wheel. Fortunately, my tire blew out on a straight stretch of road rather than on a turn, and the loud pop of the sidewall blowing out alarmed the other riders enough for me to have room to maneuver to a stop safely on the side of the road.

But what does one do with a blown out sidewall on the side of the road in the dark, pre-sunrise hours? To fix a typical puncture flat, one removes the puncturing debris from the tire and replaces the inner tube. With a hole in the tire itself, any new tube will itself also blow out.

There's a handy fix for this. It's George Washington. A dollar bill makes for an except temporary tire patch for blowouts and, these days, is rather cheap. To use, you fix the flat as you would any other, only before slipping on the tire over the new tube you insert the folded bill between the new tube and tire to cover the blowout. A dollar bill is strong enough to prevent the tube from bursting through the sidewall hole, though every time I've used this technique I marvel at how a thin weave of cotton and linen can reliably hold against 120 PSI. But it has held every time. In fact, one time I forgot to change the tire when I arrived home after suffering a blowout, and I ended up riding on the blown out tire for several months. It wasn't until the same tire punctured in a different spot and my seeing a ratty dollar bill fall out of the tire when changing its tube that I remembered that the tire itself had a hole in it.

Thus, every flat-tire kit should contain, in addition to tire levers, spare tubes, and pump or inflater and CO₂ cartridges, a few dollar bills.

I quit

2011-03-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

I quit. It seemed like a great deal at the time, signing up early for a half-Ironman distance triathlon this April for about $160. But there's a major problem with signing up for these races ahead of time, and that's that one must stay healthy and injury-free to participate in them. I've had good success so far in showing up to races ready and able, but this time the odds have caught up with me, and I'm forced to use two of the most powerful words in the English language. I quit.

In this case, I'm injured. Remarkably, I've avoided sickness all winter long, the first time I've managed that since I can't remember when, but I've made up for healthiness by being not just injured but doubly so. First, I have this ongoing hip problem that first surfaced way back in late 2008 when I picked up running after a two-year hiatus. It's taken a little over another two years for it to become a problem. Second, I have a pulled groin, which is a recent injury I recently suffered chasing skirts in a 400m interval during a speed workout about a month ago. Neither injury affects any activity except running. (My swimming and biking remain fine, insofar as I'm ever able to say that my swimming is fine.) Together, these injuries hint that my running core is weak and in desperate need of improvement.

They also suggest that I'm not a distance runner and should stick with the shorter, less grinding distances I find comfortable. I had been pushing for extra distance in my runs for several months, and I think the coincidental onset of these injuries is not just bad luck. Though I've run for many years of my life, starting during my mid-teens, I've mostly stuck with the about-three-miles run. It's a good distance. It comprised my favorite loop around the neighborhood I grew up in, it's the distance around the track at Memorial Park in Houston, and it's the distance of the run in most sprint triathlons.

The problem with the about-three-miles distance, though, is that it doesn't net you any respect. Sprint triathlons and 5K races aren't really real, just ask any amateur athlete; to impress, you must go for body-grinding and mind-numbing long distances like Ironman triathlons and full marathons, even though such distances come at the cost of slowing down a great deal. So that is what we amateur athletes do; we slow down and go for distance.

I got suckered into this trap. But no more. From now on I have it as a goal to stick with what I'm good at and enjoy most: fast speeds and short distances. Happily, this involves doing something else I'm good at: embracing contrariness.

Descent, pt. 6

2011-03-10T18:42:00.002-07:00

This is the sixth and final entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, Descent, pt. 3, Descent, pt. 4, and Descent, pt. 5.

Down scope!

Previously, I wrote about my skepticism that peak oil's effects, as envisioned within The Long Descent, can be timed accurately enough to base specific preparations on. While it makes sense to learn practical skills and live on fewer resources if that is what you want to do anyway, I think peak oil by itself serves as insufficient reason to make such changes. For those of us who have invested substantial time and money in our current careers, there is considerable risk in walking away from that foundation right now when it may be decades before we must change. For us, for now, it may make the most sense to make what preparations we can while firmly entrenched within our urban, non-productive lifestyles, even those preparations amount to not much. This leads into the issue of scoping.

By scoping I refer to the difference between what is good for everyone and what is good for anyone. I get the impression that Greer is more concerned about the good of all humanity than the good of any one reader, and consequently his advice about what we should be doing about peak oil right now may better target the well being of the collective than it does the individual. I have little doubt that future, yet born humans will benefit greatly by many old, obsolete technologies we rediscover and put back into practice, and the more people invest in old technologies today, the more future humans may benefit. But the individuals who do the rediscovering and the putting back into practice may themselves not fare so well.

This makes for a kind of prisoner's dilemma scenario, but one where the prisoners are playing a game of musical chairs. Greer believes that the winners will be among the ones who bow out early and make their adaptations sooner rather than later. But there are costs associated with being an early adopter, even if it's the adoption of antiquated technologies. Early adopters make mistakes and generally fail to benefit from collective learning. Rather, the winners during the long descent may be among the people who fight as bitterly and doggedly as possible to hang on to dwindling resources, and, once forced to bow out, pick up on key discoveries made by early adopters. Future humans might not benefit from such hanging on, but that is besides the point when looking at Greer's advice from perspective of determining what is in our own, individual interest. What should I be doing?

Creativity

So far in this multi-part post, I've tried to refrain from challenging Greer's assumptions. But before one is to take another's advice seriously, one should test assumptions. What do I think of Greer's?

I assign a high probability that Greer's predictions of very long term trends are generally accurate: industrial civilization's fate will likely be little different on the whole than the slow rise and fall of every other past, great civilization. However, his view of the future seems too inspired by what's in the rear view mirror. I think it will be unlikely that the future will be an unwinding of the past, like a history book read backwards.

My historical perspective suggests to me that humans rarely move backwards. Though older, obsolete technologies do come back into fashion and replace newer ones every once in a while, each generation seems to discover its own solutions to old and new problems. Industrial civilization has changed the world too much, caused too many disruptions, to make a future of regression a solid bet anytime soon. With the last few hundred years' mass migrations of peoples, plants, and animals; its new entanglements of inter-civilization communication; and all the new hard-won scientific information that's been discovered, the future is wide open, technologically. We are prudent to say that future technologies will generally be thriftier with energy than current ones, and this suggests that many 1700s and 1800s technologies may be put back into common practice. However, many wholly new ones will be invented—ideas we can't imagine today. The winners during the long descent may well be among the forward-looking, not the backward-looking.

On the other hand...

Despite my skepticism of Greer's advice in The Long Descent, I'll credit the author and book this much: I can't think of anything better to do than to broaden one's skill set and get into the habit of living on less—at least within the safety of one's current career and lifestyle. What else is one going to do with one's free time?

Despite the skepticism of Greer's advice I've outlined, I have been making small efforts to follow it. I'm buying more bulk ingredients and cooking instead of buying packaged foods. I've taken up darning my wool socks. I've gained a general distrust of outsourcing services to others. I'm planning on building a bike rack for my apartment rather than buying one of many cheaply available ones online, though I'll have to spend less time riding my bikes if I am to ever get around to working on this project… In the end, The Long Descent may be less about industrial civilization and our long-term future and more about what we should all be doing anyway to enrich our lives, today. This makes for sage advice indeed.

Above all, I recommend The Long Descent to anyone looking for an introduction to peak oil. This isn't a book that can be unread; afterwards, readers invariably find themselves challenging their own assumptions and forever viewing the world a little differently than they did before. That is high praise for any book.

Rising food costs

2011-03-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

Since about 2007 I'd been reading a lot about soaring food prices worldwide, and none of it had corresponded to what I'd observed in my own life. Back in 2008, at the height of the hubbub of rising prices, I saw only a few changes, the only specific one I remember being a gallon of organic milk notching up a few dimes at the grocer down the street. Then commodity prices peaked later that year, deflation set in, and the price of organic milk dropped back to normal.

Again I'm hearing a lot about rising food prices, again corresponding with rising energy prices, and again I'm hearing how “soon Americans will be feeling the pinch like the rest of the world.” This time, however, I'm seeing those price increases firsthand. It's no longer just news; it's now real life. Indeed, it seems like everything on the grocery store shelves are notching up these days.

Partly this has to do with how I just finished shopping at Fry's tonight. I'll be honest here; I despise Fry's. I despise their gimmicks like member cards, coupons, and weekly price fluctuations. I despise their self-checkout system. I despise how they charge twice as much as their competitors do for natural peanut butter and extra virgin olive oil. I despise how they charge twice as much for steel cut oats as they themselves charge for rolled oats. It's the same oat! What gives?

But it's not just tonight's visit to the evil grocer down the street that has me observing rising food prices firsthand. I figure I'm one of the first Americans in line to be directly touched by rising food prices because I eat out infrequently and I rarely eat prepared foods. Most of what I eat I cook: oatmeal from bulk oats, rice and beans, eggs and toast, and so on. I don't cook fancy or complicated meals, just quick and easy ones using simple, cheap ingredients. As such, most of my food costs are going towards the food, not its marketing, packaging, and preparation. Prepared foods like cold cereal and ready-to-eat meals like those in the freezer section have only a portion of their cost based on the cost of their constituent ingredients, so their prices are more insulated from food-price inflation. Whereas, when the price of raw ingredients doubles, then my grocery bill nearly doubles.

So where is this going?

Descent, pt. 5

2011-03-03T22:26:00.001-07:00

This is the fifth entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, Descent, pt. 3, and Descent, pt. 4.

To do what?

What sense is to be made of The Long Descent? Greer plainly asserts that it's in our interest to pursue a produce-more, consume-less lifestyle, that we equip ourselves with the knowledge and skills to produce goods and services that other people will need and that we learn to get by on fewer resources and with less reliance upon the market economy. Does this mean that I should quit my software job and concentrate on raising backyard chickens? How enthusiastically should I take Greer's advice, if at all?

To be fair, Greer does not advocate that we all change suddenly and radically. Though, by arguing that we should be generalizing rather than specializing and pursuing “trailing edge” technologies rather than leading-edge ones, he clearly departs from modern conventional wisdom. Greer suggests that his are lower-risk strategies in upcoming years than conventional wisdom's, but I'm not wholly convinced and for three reasons. These reasons are: timing, scope, and creativity.

Timing is everything

It's no great secret how to forecast with greater accuracy: be more vague. The less specific a forecast is, the more likely it is to come true; the more specific it is, the less likely it is to come true. The Long Descent aims for accuracy but at the cost of specificity. As a result, Greer operates on the scale of decades and centuries rather than months and years. This means that The Long Descent is probably more correct than what could otherwise be expected with a book predicting the ramifications of a big issue like peak oil. (We'll see.) On the other hand, even if Greer gets the big picture mostly correct, his timing may easily be off by decades, and it's the months and years that matter most with respect to most individuals' day-to-day fortunes and fates. For example, if I came into the certain knowledge that the software industry will entirely cease to exist within thirty years, I might continue my current career with the hope that the industry's death happens later rather than sooner. After all, I'm highly invested in my current career, and a shorter career in software may still be more lucrative for me than a longer career in backyard chickens. This is to illustrate how it may be that Greer's argument is both more accurate and less relevant.

Do we have any reasons to suspect that Greer's predictions will be off by decades? I think so. Here are three possibilities.

The trend of decreasing global oil production throughout the 21st century may prove significantly asymmetrical to the increases of the 19th and 20th centuries. The downslope may be flatter than the upslope. There is some evidence to support this currently, as oil production has been flat for nearly a decade now, though some view this as evidence that the eventual downslope will be sharper. I think this shows that we don't know one way or the other.
The other fossil fuels may make up for lagging oil production for a while. Natural gas production is expected by many to peak soon, but coal may not peak for two more decades.
The decrease of prosperity and material wealth may lag behind energy production by a short while. Many instances of our material infrastructure embody more energy than they require for continual operation. Some examples are: houses, roads, and dams. These will continue to provide value for a while after we lose the ability to produce them as cheaply as we now do.
Increases in energy efficiency may slow the decline for a while.

None of these reasons assure me of anything, which is my point. While I think the prudent, long-term bet is to expect longer and harder economic contractions and shorter and milder recoveries, it may well be a few decades before Greer's four horsemen pay us a visit. How should one spend these next decades of uncertainty? If timing the fall weren't difficult enough, there are the differences between how decline affects individuals and how it affects civilization as a whole.

I'm reminded of the saying that a recession is when your neighbor is out of work, and a depression is when you're out of work. Though the patterns of booms and busts for large economies play out as long, sweeping curves of GDP graphs and stock market charts, the perspective of any one individual is more like the discrete, on-off state of a light switch on the wall. The economy's GDP may drop by 2%; if you're not self-employed, chances are that your income will stay about the same or drop by 100%. Civilizations have built into them a complex set of negative feedback loops that work to prevent the civilization from zooming one way or the other too fast; individuals for the most part lack such stabilizing influences, especially individuals utterly dependent upon the market economy.

It's easy to view Greer's catabolic collapse and long descent as abstractions for our own personal fortunes, that our lives will follow a similar long-descent pattern as the world around us does, but such thinking doesn't jive with personal experience with recessions. I think what we should instead expect is that most of us will be largely unaffected at any given time by the descent until the horsemen visit us while sparing our neighbor—or come for our neighbor while sparing us. Or they come for both us and our neighbor while people in another industrialized country halfway around the globe are spared.

Just to illustrate my point, imagine you lose your job and remain mostly unemployed for several years, during which time you also lose your house and your car. You think of several worthwhile career changes, but each change requires further education or certification, and you're too busy and broke muddling through day by day to get back on track with long-term plans, especially if you have a family to support in the meantime. Meanwhile, most everyone else around you is unaffected by the “sluggish” economy and wonders a bit about your bad luck. It might be that the economy will overall take a 75% hit spread out over the seven or so decades of your lifetime, but you may very well take that hit all at once halfway through. The economy sweeps along the mild undulations of the economists' charts; your own fortune blinks in and out like with the flicks of a switch.

What does this mean? My take is that it adds to the uncertainty of timing the descent and suggests that we temper our expectations of our best laid plans. But what about Greer's advice of learning practical skills? I'll expand upon this more next week when I write about my two other criticisms, scope and creativity, and wrap up this long review.

Where's the love?

2011-02-28T22:01:00.000-07:00

Three years in a row now I've participated in the Ragnar del Sol running relay. By now I know the drill well, including Sunday, the day after the event, being a wash for getting anything done but some fast catching up on much needed sleep. This is my way of saying that I spent even less time than usual thinking about what to blog today.

Occasionally I wonder if I should have squeezed in a second minor during my four years in college. In case you're wondering, I majored in computer science and minored in math, which together made for a pragmatic though somewhat humdrum education from which to pursue a career in software development.

I enjoyed taking fewer credits and registering for fun electives with nothing more than fancy as my guide during my last year in college, but maybe I would have been better off going for depth in one field, something unrelated to my then upcoming career. But, if I had had to pick a second minor at the time, I probably would have picked philosophy, and in this I'm glad I didn't chase after that second minor. I've become less impressed with professional philosophy the older I get.

* * *

So this is what passes for professional philosophy these days? This is nothing more than high-brow, jargon-laced rationalizing of your desired conclusions. Are you that blind to your biases?

Yes, I hear your layman criticisms all the time, often bordering on being little more than ad hominem attacks. Why don't you actually take the time to read some real philosophy before bothering to respond with your tired and predictable responses? Maybe you'd learn something.

Why? Because I reject the idea that an education in philosophy makes a person any more qualified to love wisdom.

Really? How about I visit you at your job and offer my criticisms of the software you write? Surely you don't believe that an education in computer science makes you more qualified to develop software than others!

Don't give me that “we should all stick to what we know” garbage. I don't tell a plumber how to do his job. The plumber doesn't tell a bean farmer how to do his job. A bean farmer doesn't tell an accountant how to do his job. And accountants don't tell me how to do my job. That's because these jobs are all regular jobs that produce a good or service. Your job, as far as I can tell, is to come up with “universal principles” that tell you how to tell everyone else how to live their lives. Then you lay down diplomas and reading lists as credentials and gripe when other people dismiss you for admonishing them. If you don't want your ideas dismissed, stopped using words like “universal” and “principle”.

I'm sorry you have such a problem with truth.

Add “truth” to the list of words to avoid. I'd give you guys some credit if your field showed any semblance of convergence. In my field, quick sort is undeniably more efficient than bubble sort. It's pretty well regarded that the indiscriminate use of goto makes for bad code. Whereas, philosophers have been arguing about basic premises for thousands of years and show no sign of coming to agreement. As far as I can tell, if I actually did go read some real philosophy like you suggest, I'd still disagree with you just as I do now, only I'd do so obtusely and every bit as ineffectually. Stop pretending that the only thing holding back the whole world with agreeing with you is that they haven't read enough of the same books as you have.

What a waste of time. Tired and predictable indeed. You completely lack awareness of the subtleties and nuances that have been worked out by greater minds than yours hundreds of years in the past. This conversation is over.

Descent, pt. 4

2011-02-24T17:49:00.001-07:00

This is the fourth entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, and Descent, pt. 3.

Catabolic Collapse

In one sense, The Long Descent is nothing but 250 pages of Greer's commentary on his own 14-page paper written in 2005, How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. In that paper, somewhat obscured in awkward academic prose, Greer presents what I think is the most plausible single explanation for why civilizations cycle through rises and falls. From the paper's abstract:

The collapse of complex human societies remains poorly understood and current theories fail to model important features of historical examples of collapse. Relationships among resources, capital, waste, and production form the basis for an ecological model of collapse in which production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital. Societies facing such crises after having depleted essential resources risk catabolic collapse, a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction converting most capital to waste. This model allows key features of historical examples of collapse to be accounted for, and suggests parallels between successional processes in nonhuman ecosystems and collapse phenomena in human societies.

In a nutshell, the theory of catabolic collapse states that civilizations rise when their consumption of resources nets them a positive return on investment and thus allows for greater systemic complexity, and they fall when that consumption nets them a negative return and requires a return to lesser systemic complexity. The Long Descent applies the theory of catabolic collapse to modern industrial civilization.

The Four Horsemen

My previous post briefly describes Greer's idea of “the stories we tell ourselves”. Through most of the remainder of The Long Descent, Greer explains with a tad more specificity what he thinks we should expect in the decades to come owing to our own catabolic collapse, and he advises what we should be doing about it.

As for what Greer expects, he outlines what he calls the “four horsemen” of catabolic collapse: (1) declining energy availability, (2) economic contraction, (3) collapsing public health, and (4) political turmoil. Anyone who has been following the news since 2008 with even the slightest attention towards long-term trends should recognize an eerie familiarness here.

Basically, Greer starts with the first horseman of declining energy availability following directly from peak oil and the apparent lack of adequate energy substitutes. Declining energy availability leads to breakdowns in system complexity and the second horseman, economic contraction. Economic contraction happens while we find ourselves most needing to spend to rebuild and replace existing infrastructures to accommodate the new and old technologies that supersede our current fossil-fuel-based ones, and this leads to a difficult allocation of resources, likely leading to the third horseman, collapsing public health, where even “absolutes” like sewage treatment become as intermittent and non-existent as they are in the Third World today. Amidst all this breakdown, Greer expects the political system to be less functional and less capable of solving real problems than it is today. This fourth and final horseman, political turmoil, will feed into the other three, as they all feed into each other, in a vicious circle until our consumption level is brought back into balance with what our resource base can sustain.

What to do? What to do?

Is it time to panic? The Long Descent is titularly a user's guide, and Greer has a few suggestions for what we as individuals should be doing about this. On the whole, his advice is rather modest. We face a predicament, not a problem, and there are no silver bullets. We shouldn't expect the political system or any other top-down power structure to solve the problem. On the other hand, we shouldn't “[hole] up with guns and food in a fortified enclave”. Rather, we should be enacting practical changes in our own personal lives that make our lives more sustainable in a world increasingly pressured by those four aforementioned horsemen. Mainly, this reduces to simplifying our lives and equipping ourselves with skills and knowledge that will be useful during the long descent ahead.

None of the four horsemen … are new to human experience. Our great-grandparents knew them well, and today they are familiar to the vast majority of our fellow human beings. Only the inhabitants of the world's industrialized societies have had the opportunity to forget about them, and then only during the second half of the 20th century. Before then, most people knew how to deal with them, and most of the strategies that were developed and used in the past will still be viable far into the future. The one hitch is that we have to be ready to put them into practice. Since governments have by and large dropped the ball completely, it's up to individuals, families, groups, and local communities to get ready for the future ahead of us. Each of the four horsemen requires a different response, and so different preparations will be needed for each.

Plan to cut your energy use “by half, to start with, and be ready to cut it further as needed.” Choose a viable profession whereby you produce a necessary good or service. “Take charge of your own health”. Become an active participant within your community. Basically, Greer offers as mitigation for each horseman suggestions and strategies that are straightforward and logical extensions of his core argument. These suggestions and strategies are all things we can enact in our own lives now, without waiting for some organized power or institution to give us the okay and show us the way. But though simple and practical, these suggestions and strategies also happen to be things most of us would rather not do, given the choice.

There's more to The Long Descent than I can explain in a few blog posts, but that wraps up my summarization on the book. Next week, I'll editorialize and give my thoughts on it, its predictions and its advice.

Memory

2011-02-21T20:43:00.002-07:00

At work I sat staring at the screen in front of me. It displayed a cryptic-looking map file, telling me in its arcane way why not all of my program was loading into RAM like I expected it to. But before figuring out my problem, I became lost in a recollection of a faraway memory.

I'm about seven years old. I'm stopped, straddling my bike atop the levee that serves as the perimeter for the subdivision I live in. I'm looking out, away from the neighborhood, over a barbwire fence upon a cow pasture that borders the prison farm less than a mile farther away. I'm looking at a dilapidated shack in the pasture, maybe a little more than a hundred meters from the levee. I'm alone.

I'm stopped because I came upon a parked ATV and a couple of dirt bikes lying on their sides, kickstands unused. At the shack in the pasture is a small group of boys, playing. They're a few years older than me. They're doing what boys typically do when playing, which this day amounts to trying to destroy the shack piece by piece. I'm watching the boys.

Within minutes, one boy within the group sees me. He calls an alert, which grabs the others' attention. One of them shouts something discernible enough only to communicate its aggression, and they all begin running towards me. Immediate panic grips me. I'm outnumbered, and there are no adults anywhere around. I know only enough to flee. I take off on my bicycle in a spasm, legs pumping furiously, every fiber of me iced in fear. Home lies a ways down the levee and then through a short maze of turns on suburban streets—in total, about a mile away. I look behind me only to see the boys continuing to run towards their bikes and ATV on the levee. The rusted, tangly fence in their way will slow them down only so much. Machine power and age difference make this an unfair pursuit. As I quickly speed down the steep slope of the levee and into the vacant lot to cut back to the streets, I hear the ATV start up. I jump the curb out onto the street and ride as fast as I can over the smooth cement of the road. As I ride, the sound of the ATV becomes louder as my head start in this terrifying race begins to vanish. I'm not far enough to lose them blindly around a turn. I doubt that I will make it home fast enough, but I don't dare stop trying.

It is only with the insight as an adult looking back at this episode that I realize that those boys were probably as afraid of catching me as I was of being caught. Probably it is that fact that best explains how I was able to arrive safely home and avoid being overtaken. I rode up the driveway, discarding my bike in the garage, and fled inside through the back door. This was when our house was new, so new that my dad had not yet put up the privacy wooden fence in the backyard.

I remember this little fact about the fence because another day, maybe a week later, maybe a month, I was still able to look with an unobstructed view from our backyard into the vacant lots behind. At this time, my parents were in the backyard with me, busy transforming their bit of earth closer to their American dream one shovelful at a time. I don't remember what I was doing, but I remember the same fear welling up inside me as I heard the rumble of an ATV approach on the streets on the other side as those vacant lots. It was the same group of boys.

The one riding atop the ATV jumped the curb into the vacant lots and began riding back and forth, avoiding the overgrown weeds and brush. He looked menacingly toward me. They all did. I ran to my parents nearby. I can only imagine how I sounded to them as I, not the clearest of communicators at that age, blubbered with frantic fear and tugged at their arms with desperation. I must not have gotten across to them my point that the boys who happened to be riding around in the lots were clearly out to get me in a bad way. Not getting that delicate point across, my parents may have wondered why I was suddenly so upset. But they did nothing except try to get me to calm down. Eventually the older boys left. I never saw them again, though I worried about them for many months afterward.

By now, my silent, internal narrative of this one childhood memory has autonomously subsided back into the enigmatic recesses of the mind whence it came, and my eyes pull back into focus upon the hex digits of code and data addresses in the map file open on my laptop screen.

Where do these flashbacks come from? The mind is remarkable.

Descent, pt. 3

2011-02-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

This is the third entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1 and Descent, pt. 2.

The honest thing to do

It's my view of long-term intimate relationships that they start as a chemical-induced trance of obsessed attraction that lasts just long enough, in the successful case, for both people to develop enough of a feeling of sunk loss so as to perceive it as being worthwhile staying with and investing in the other person for the long-haul, no matter how unglamorous or unexciting that long-haul proves to be. My sunk loss view of relationships is too unflattering, too unromantic, and far too cynical for many people to embrace, though I think it underscores a positive point: that even an unglamorous and unexciting life spent with another is likely better than a glamorous and exciting life spent alone.

How much did Laura like The Long Descent because of me and her perception of my expectations? I don't know. But I've seen this book work its magic a few times, with each reader coming away with his or her own positive takeaway messages. Years 2006-2008 of Greer's blog, from which The Long Descent is mostly derived, has been a large influence in my own attempt to understand how contemporary, day-to-day events fit within the greater trends and the greater chaos of history—the ebbs and flows that are bigger than any single lifetime. Thus it is that I wish to review the book, both because it's possible that someone reading my review may feel a spark to explore for themselves the possibilities of comparative history and alternative narrative frameworks and also because reviewing my own influences seems like the intellectually honest thing to do.

The Long Descent

The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age begins with the premise that global oil production is currently at (or very near) its all-time maximum, as predicted by the Hubbert curve, and that we face a long, inexorable decline for the next century or so until the precious hydrocarbon is nothing more than an expensive curiosity. Greer doesn't expend many words arguing what new technologies will replace oil. As he sees it, oil is the pinnacle of cheap, abundant, concentrated energy, and no set of new technologies will replace it fully; every potential alternative will be an incomplete, poorer substitute. The decline in worldwide oil production will inevitably lead to a decrease in overall worldwide wealth severe enough to cause an uneven series of breakdowns in existing social, economic, and political systems, just as resource-depletion issues in past civilizations led to similar such breakdowns. We do not have an energy problem, Greer says; we have an energy predicament. Problems have solutions. Rather, the future we should expect will be a centuries-long, punctuated descent into a post-industrial dark age akin to the dark ages that followed all other great, past civilizations. Large, centralized power bases will retract, sometimes violently so, and on the whole people will muddle through, getting by with fewer available resources and simpler technologies.

From this dreary prophesy of deindustrialization arises a surprisingly positive and encouraging book. The Long Descent is not so much about peak oil as it's about how we think about peak oil—or, more often, how we we avoid thinking about peak oil.

A story about stories

At the core of The Long Descent is Greer's idea of “the stories we tell ourselves”.

Stories are probably the oldest and most important of all human tools. Human beings think with stories, fitting what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of all the universe around us into narrative patterns that make the world make sense. We use stories to tell us who we are, what the world is like, and what we can and can't do with our lives. Every culture has its stories, and if you pay careful attention to the stories a culture tells, you can grasp things about the culture that nothing else will teach you.

The more stories we know and tell ourselves, the better equipped we are for understanding what's going on around us. “If you have a wealth of different stories to think with, odds are that whatever the world throws at you, you'll be able to find a narrative pattern that makes sense of it.” However, according to Greer, most industrialized people don't have this wealth. Instead, we're often locked in to one of two stories, with each one seeking to explain everything in the world. The first is the myth of progress, the story that humanity is on a trajectory of vast and glorious improvement, starting all the way back with our baser past as primitive hunters and gatherers and continuing through today and tomorrow with relentless scientific innovation and economic growth. The myth of progress tells us that there is no problem too difficult for us to solve.

The alternative story is the negation of progress. The myth of the apocalypse is the story that humanity is on a trajectory towards inescapable tragedy owing to our increasingly immoral, unbalanced, and unnatural civilization. As a result, civilization will certainly crash, and it will do so suddenly and violently. Most people will not survive the transition, though those who do will find the world returned to a better, truer state free from modern evils.

Greer's argues that neither of these stories deal well with the awkward evidences of peak oil. The myth of progress tells us that oil is just one energy source on the ladder climbing up to ever better energy sources, despite some critical arguments concerning energy return on invested energy (EROIE) of every non-FF energy source today, including nuclear. Never mind that, science will pull through. Future humans will have it even better than us.

The myth of the apocalypse, on the other hand, embraces our decline but accelerates the process to a speed never actually observed. This is where Greer's historical perspective works to advantage, by detailing example after example how though a civilization's fall may comprise a single page in a history textbook and thus seem swift and linear to us nowadays, its reality was something far, far longer, messier, and more complicated, usually with no one person alive both at the beginning and end. Greer asserts we have insufficient evidence to suppose that industrialization will end any differently than past civilizations.

According to Greer, better stories are ones that lie in between the two extremes of progress and apocalypse and align themselves with the patterns and evidences of history. Greer himself spins such a story for the remainder of The Long Descent, a story I've come to think of as the myth of meandering change. In it, Greer outlines a little more specifically some broad, likely trends in the next few decades and proposes some practical advice for what we ought to be doing. And if you'll bear with me and my description of Greer's ideas, I'll finally get to writing about what I think about all this.

How much does a bed cost?

2011-02-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

Oscar Wilde wrote that a cynic “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I'm not so sure. It seems that few people manage even to know prices.

Consider the question: how much does a bed cost? Stop reading; take a minute; and think about the question. Come up with a dollar amount for an answer. Have you arrived at an amount? No? Alternatively, you can cheat (as I did) and ask our God of Answers, Google. Google referred me to that lesser deity, Yahoo! Answers, who claims that the best answer is $789. This seems high. I would have guessed lower, say, a few hundred dollars, but I have simple needs when it comes to beds and never purchased a bed myself.

But, as you may guess, the question is a trick. Even the cheapest of beds cost more than the high figure of $789; they cost thousands more, even tens of thousands more. Why? Because you probably won't own a bed without also owning a bedroom to go with it, and bedrooms are dear, price-wise, even here in Phoenix where they've dropped in price by about one-third over the last few years.

The example of the bed exemplifies a great flaw in typical reasoning about prices; the overemphasis on the cost of obtaining and the over-discount of the cost of maintaining. What does a bed cost? For me, the difference in rent between an apartment that comfortably fits a bed (i.e., a one-bedroom) and an apartment that doesn't (i.e., a studio) is about $100/month. So a bed costs me a few hundred dollars upfront plus $100/month for the life of the bed, plus or minus rent price fluctuations in the future.

For people who are inclined to argue with the details of my analysis and say that you can fit a bed in a studio (which is true), look at this way. Rent costs me about $1/sq-ft-month, and a full-size bed takes up about 30 square feet. This means that in our thriftiest of scenarios, where there's no accounting for space around the bed and rolling out of bed in the morning results in a solid thud of knee knocking into wall, a bed still costs $30/month. Even a low-ball figure like this means that a $360 bed is “repurchased” once each year.

Is a bed worth $30/month? I suppose most people answer in the affirmative. I won't argue against the subjectivity of the question. If beds are worth a lot to you and dollars aren't, then buy a bed and keep paying for it. In any case, the important thing is that we're honest with ourselves about prices. Many things cost a lot just to keep around if for no other reason than the square footage they occupy. Anyone who has bought a lot of square footage in Phoenix in the last few years is feeling this point acutely these days.

In my own case, I don't own a bed. I discovered, largely through chance experimentation with different sleeping arrangements, that camping equipment functions well indoors, packs small, and costs less than conventional furniture. That I don't own a bed makes me feel better about overspending on that carbon fiber bike I bought back in 2009. There's no such thing as a bike-room. (Not yet!)

Descent, pt. 2

2011-02-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

This is the second entry of a multi-part post. The first part is Descent, pt. 1.

Life(style) insurance

Introducing others to peak oil and other resource depletion issues is tricky business. Likely reactions range from flat denial to talking only about what other people should be doing about the problem. It's like trying to start a conversation with your spouse about how much insurance you should buy for your house and your spouse insists either that (1) your house is invulnerable to any type of destruction or (2) that the Powers That Be should get busy about eliminating fires, theft, storms, and floods altogether. Understandably, it's a bit of a drag to make insurance payments when you never file a claim; on the other hand, it's an enormous problem not to have any coverage and to suffer a loss so big you can't afford to cover it yourself. Though we all hope never to suffer such losses, planning ahead for their possibility seems like the prudent, wise thing to do. But somehow this logic gets lost for many people when faced with society-scoped issues like peak oil and resource depletion.

It was with this in mind that I wondered how to broach to Laura the topic of a prudently planned future. The urban, white-collar middle class of which we are a part is now three generations deep into operating under the assumption that the future will be a continuation of the past, only more so. Adolescence to college to job to car to spouse to house to kids to retirement to old age. Throw into the mix divorce and remarriage, too. How many more generations will thrive operating under this assumption? That's not clear to me, but the prudent and wise course is to have that conversation about deciding how much metaphorical insurance coverage to buy against this lifestyle. But how do I start that conversation when the conversation is so often vetoed?

My sneaky plan

The sneaky plan I ultimately settled on was to have someone else start that conversation for me. I purchased online a used copy of John Michael Greer's 2008 book, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, and used Laura's and my standing arrangement of it being okay to “make” the other person read a book from time to time. Despite this arrangement, however, I felt trepidation in undertaking this plan. Was I being too sneaky? Too manipulative? Did what I was doing constitute a breach in our trust for the other? I hadn't even read the book myself and couldn't vouch for it with certainty. Would Laura end up flinging the book against the wall in disgust without even finishing the first chapter (as the author himself wryly suggests some people are likely to do)? How would she react to a world view bounded with hard limits? How would she react to an author who heads his own fringe, polytheistic religion? In short: what was I expecting?

On the other hand, what I knew is that Greer is simultaneously erudite and entertaining and has a masterful command of language, and these skills make it easier for readers to swallow otherwise unpleasing messages. I knew of Greer's skills because I had been reading his peak-oil-related blog, The Archdruid Report, for a while and, based on that, trusted that The Long Descent would not be as hocus pocus as I would have otherwise expected from an author who frequently writes about the occult. I also knew that the book wouldn't stoop to arguing the peak oil thesis point by point, fact by fact, which often results in either the reader's eyes glazing over or else the reader digging in her heels and becoming obstinate and irrational. Rather, I knew The Long Descent would be comparative history. It would present a cyclical view of the past centering around the rises and falls of former great civilizations and how individuals nowadays do or don't incorporate that view into their day-to-day lives when thinking about our own civilization. Solid stuff. Practical stuff. Stuff you can hang your hat on.

What I didn't expect is just how immensely successful and rewarding my sneaky plan would prove to be. Laura enjoyed the book, enough that she since bought it for her parents to read. That's a strong recommendation. While reading it, Laura did a share of initiating conversations about the future. That rarely happened previously. And though we're far from agreement or certainty about what we should be doing, the dialog is now started. Mission accomplished.

Might there be a good way to introduce others to peak oil and resource depletion after all?

Disc wheels

2011-02-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

Triathlons cost money. There is the obvious cost of entry, which ranges from about $50 for short, local races to the $600 or so for an official Ironman. A triathlete who competes in four medium-distance races over the course of a year can expect to pay about $500 for the privilege.

Even more significant are the equipment and training costs. Swimming incurs either the one-time expense of buying a wetsuit or else the ongoing expense of renting them and a continual fee for year-round access to a pool for training. Bicycling costs a bike and its array of related equipment: helmet, shoes, spare tubes, spare tires, and so on. Even running has its costs by way of regular replacement of worn-out shoes and of keeping ibuprofen well stocked in the medicine cabinet. I haven't seen any exact figures, but I suspect that many triathletes average spending more per year on their sport than I ever did on my car. I'm probably one of them. I'm too afraid to run the numbers.

Awhile back, I decided never again to splurge for a mid-end bicycle (and never once to know the feel of a high-end one). Entry-level bikes deliver great bang for the buck nowadays, and even a high-end bike will degrade into a squeaky, barely ridable mess without proper, ongoing maintenance effort and know-how. My plan is to ride low-end bikes and to be expert at keeping them in great condition and thus ride well for cheapish. Hence, when it came time to buy a triathlon bike last year, I bought a low-end one whose price, after taxes and shipping, was less than $1300. That's modest. It's about half of what a “serious” (mid-end) tri-bike costs, and, frankly, I look forward to riding past many of them in my races coming up this spring.

Bang for buck is key for me. For bicycling in triathlons, there are basically four categories in which a person may buy himself a faster time, listed here in decreasing order of bang-for-buck.

Tri-bike (versus upright road bike)
Aero helmet
Aero tri-suit
Disc or aero wheels

The conventional wisdom goes something like: bicycles cost a lot, but you must buy a bicycle anyway, so choose a tri-bike. Then continue to spend on the additional items until you can fit your rapidly thinning wallet into your tight Lycra shorts.

My limit stops after the aero helmet. That's because I feel a twinge of pain just about anytime I spend money on anything, and the amount of pain roughly corresponds to the amount being spent. (I think of this spending-pain as the blessing of being thrifty.) What this means is that I say “no” to the tri-suit and the disc wheels. I can take or leave the suit, but the wheels I wish I had. This is my dark, not-so-secret secret.

It's only through the discipline of rationality that I can convince myself that I'm better off not buying disc wheels. Spending upwards of $2000 to shave off mere seconds in a race, maybe a few minutes in an hours-long ride, is not smart spending. I know this, and from it I feel the sadness of knowing that I will never sit atop a machine equipped with disc wheels. Thriftiness has its costs.

My obsession with disc wheels is complete nonsense. I would want disc wheels even if they weren't faster. Disc wheels are just that cool to me. I like how they look, and I like even more how they sound. I remember the first time I seeing disc wheels on television during the Olympics and Dad explaining to me how the discs made the bike faster. That made no sense to me, and even as an adult I don't fully understand the dynamics of why they're faster. But a bike wheel without spokes? So cool. And that they make a distinct, whoosh-whooshing sound with each pedal stroke? So cool! There's no sneaking up on fellow racers when using disc wheels; it's like shouting from behind, “Awesome machine, on your left.” Or that's how I imagine it. And imagining it is the most I'll ever do.