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[28 Sep 2009|04:32pm] |
Do drugs
Have sex
Worship Satan
Study Physics
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[27 Sep 2009|04:43pm] |
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Last night, driving down a dark country road, Eagles of Death Metal on the stereo, I had a sudden need to stick my head out the window and vomit all over the side of my car. I wasn't drunk or anything. In fact I haven't had any alcohol in at least a month. My theory is my body just decided that that would be the rock and roll thing to do. Sometimes my body is an asshole. And not just the asshole part.
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[28 Aug 2009|12:25pm] |
This morning I was listening to a Radiolab podcast. The subject of the show was stress and of course there was a lot of interesting information, but the bit that I would choose to pass on to others because it reinforces my existing belief on how I want to live my life comes from a guy who spent years living with and observing baboons. The baboons live in troops of about 30 to 40 apes. There is an alpha male. The way you get to be alpha male is by beating the shit out of all the other males. So the best fighter is the one who gets all the females and gets to pass on his genes. Of course there comes a time in every alpha male's life when some young baboon challenges him and wins, removing him from alpha position. This becomes a very stressful time because all the other males in the troop who he's been beating up for the last 5 or so years remember what a dick he was, and they all start regularly kicking the shit out of him, and he gets knocked down from the top spot to usually somewhere around the low end of the middle.
The interesting thing was how the ousted alpha male would cope with all this. About half of the time, the male leaves the troop and finds another to join. He won't enjoy a high rank in his new troop, but nobody there has a grudge so he's able to get along without taking beatings. But the other half of the time, he'll stay with his troop. So the researcher wanted to find out what were the factors in deciding whether to skip town or to stick it out. He thought maybe the ones who were most cruel were the ones who got driven out, or something like that, but he found that it wasn't the other males who determined whether he left or stayed. The determining factor was how nice he was to the females. Most of the time, an alpha male doesn't really give a shit about a female unless she's ovulating. But baboons are social animals; they do form lasting friendships. So when a female is not ovulating, the former alpha male can hang out with her. They sit around and groom each other, share food, shit like that. And it's the males who have established good friendships who get to stay in the troop after they lose alpha status.
It turns out that from a purely Darwinian gene-spreading point of view, the nice ones who have friends do significantly better than the assholes. Nice is a relative term, these guys did spend years as alphas, beating the shit out of all the other males. When the researcher did paternity tests, he found that the former alpha continued to produce offspring after being ousted if he had good friendships, and even in some cases produced more offspring than the new alpha. It was observed that often while the new alpha was fighting another male for the right to fuck an ovulating female, she would run off with her friend male and fuck him. So it turns out that even in a hierarchy built on physically dominating others, the nice guys still finish ahead of the assholes.
Well, okay, the nicer assholes finish ahead of the total assholes.
While I'm here, the last couple weeks have been disgustingly positive. I feel so good about my life right now, you don't even know.
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[18 Aug 2009|02:05pm] |
The other night I turned off all the lights in my new home and went into the backyard. The only electric lights I could see were on airplanes overhead. Even the glow from the city was really low and faint. I've been collecting information on telescope building since then. I thought I'd have to buy the mirror, but from what I've read, it seems easy enough to grind your own so that's what I'm going to do. I've wanted to own a telescope since I took an astronomy class around 5 years ago. Now that I live in a place where I could have fantastic seeing from my back yard, it seems like an obvious choice. Of course I have all these grand ideas popping into my head for a motorized base which will automatically point the scope at whatever I want to look at, and more importantly, automatically compensate for the earth's rotation once it is pointed at the right object. I want to design the software that controls the motors as well as a custom interface for the computer which will only use black and dim red so as not to mess up my nightvision when using it.
That's going to be a big project and could take quite a bit of time and money to complete. I am going to start with a telescope and simple base.
I didn't want to mention this plan to anybody since I've observed that the more one talks about doing something, the less likely they seem to be to actually do it. I of course don't have any real data to back that up, and I'm just pretty excited about the idea of having a bad ass telescope so I find myself telling everybody I talk to about it.
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[16 Aug 2009|11:58am] |
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It is much too early to really know, but my impression based on the last few days is that I may have just stumbled my way into the most pleasant living environment I've had in years.
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[31 Jul 2009|04:58pm] |
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Patti Smith and Werner Herzog are both doing book signings at the same place in Hollywood tomorrow. Maybe I'm just drained from a nine hour work day, but I think I'll just stay home, even though they are both people I'd like to meet even if just for a moment. I just really don't have the energy for crowds.
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[27 Jul 2009|04:49pm] |
I saw a truck today with an advertisement on the side of the trailer which said "Increase your vocabulary. Say it with flowers."
Three hours later, and I'm still thinking about it. A vocabulary is not a value; it can't be increased. You could expand your vocabulary, or you could increase the size of your vocabulary, but the word increase just shouldn't apply to the word vocabulary. Besides that, saying something with flowers isn't using vocabulary at all. Flowers aren't words.
The worst thing is from the moment I saw it, I knew that it was just supposed to be a stupid joke that nobody thinks about longer than it takes to think "Oh, I should send some flowers to..."
Usually I just let shit go or don't even notice, but for some reason this just won't leave my brain.
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[20 Jul 2009|10:23pm] |
I spent a large portion of my Sunday watching these Richard Feynman lectures. Apparently Bill Gates spent a summer in his 30's watching science lectures like these and this series was one of his favorites. It had been a dream of his for a long time to acquire the rights and make the series freely available to the public. He has now done just that, and plans to do the same for lectures on many sciences. That is really one of the best ideas I've been made aware of in a while.
It should not be surprising to anybody who knows me that I think more public awareness and involvement in science is a great thing. Since I was in second grade I've wanted to be a scientist. Now, almost 30, I am closing in on that goal, having chosen the field of computer science to study. A lot of people do not think that computer science is really science. I think this is mainly due to a misunderstanding in large part due to its stupid fucking name. It should really be called something like computation science. Calling it computer science has been compared to calling all of astronomy 'telescope science.' But that's the name that stuck, and so we live in a world where people think that computer scientists and computer programmers are the same thing.
In fact I think that the most common criticisms of science are due to misunderstandings or even complete ignorance. One thing I hear a lot, and I feel is probably the most erroneous statement that is frequently made is that science is its own faith of sorts. First of all, let me talk about faith. That word, in its typically used sense carries with it a positive weight. Having faith is thought of as a good thing. You can see evidence of this pretty easily. For example, think of those cheesy candle sets with words like "dream," "love," "relax," "friends," etc. "Faith" is often right in there. To me, though, faith is not a good thing. It is a word which has been given a positive spin in order to sugar coat the incredibly dangerous and damaging concept of credulity. Faith has been described by people who call themselves faithful as not needing evidence in something to believe in it. I fail to see how that is a good thing. It is thought of as a virtue, though. My guess is that this instance of cognitive dissonance, like many others, has its roots in religion.
There are many religions which teach their followers to have faith. Not just in their gods, but in the leaders of the church. Now, in this country and many others, the religious are often told by their religious leaders that is is just as important to have faith in political leaders as well. (But only when the republicans are in power.) At least we have taken the step so that the religious leaders and political leaders are not the same people. People in other countries and other times are/were not as lucky. Some people take the concept to an even more retarded level and continue to believe in a thing not only despite a complete lack of evidence, but also despite the existence of evidence to the contrary. Often overwhelming evidence is completely ignored in the name of faith.
If we didn't have the word faith, the concept of credulity would be a lot harder to swallow. Things like "Faith based initiatives" would have a lot less public support, and maybe, just maybe people would use their brains more. That's probably just wishful thinking, though.
Anyhow, when somebody says that science is its own new faith, that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. The whole basis of science is the exact opposite of faith. It is based on doubt. To compare science to faith seems to imply that it is a system of beliefs. And this is where I think a lot of people are confused. It is my impression that a large number of people think that science is a collection of rules, laws and formulas. No. Science is a process. It is the method people use to find the rules and laws, but the conclusions we come to by way of the scientific method are not the science itself. One might say then that people like me have faith in the scientific process to produce accurate results. This is also inaccurate. It is, at least, if we say that faith is believing in something without any evidence. The evidence that the scientific process produces accurate results is staggering. It is everywhere you look. The fact that you are reading these words right now is enough. It shows that mankind has mastered electricity, one of the fundamental forces of nature, something that was once thought to belong only to the Gods, and now, only through the scientific method, we have gained such an incredible understanding of it that most people don't even think about it. It is just taken for granted that our appliances work when we plug them in. We use electricity for just about everything we do in our daily lives. Without science, it would still be a mystery to even the brightest of people.
It is that. The fact that we can take the results from scientific inquiry and apply them in the real world and they work is evidence that the results produced are accurate. Not 100% accurate of course, but definitely a whole lot more accurate than the ideas we had before we started using it. With all the working applications of the results as evidence available to us, it is clear that no faith is needed to believe in the power of science.
And now I can almost hear the next common criticism coming. That scientists are smug, think they know everything, have no humility, etc. This is not so much a criticism of science as it is of scientists. And like just about any generalization about a broad group of people, it's shit.
First, let me digress a little and talk about knowledge. There are in my opinion, at least two types of knowledge. I will call them hard and soft. Hard knowledge is what most people probably think of knowledge to be. Hard knowledge occurs when something is true, and you are aware of both the thing itself and the fact that it is true. This almost never happens. Soft knowledge occurs when you have a tremendous, overwhelming amount of evidence for the truth of a thing. We can then say that we know the thing, even though it is conceivable that the thing is actually not true. Almost all knowledge is soft knowledge. I make the distinction here to avoid a common problem of getting lost in details.
When I say that I know something, I am almost always referring to soft knowledge. As far as I know, the only place hard knowledge occurs is in mathematics. This, and the amazing ability of math to describe the real world are pretty much the main reasons I get such a huge boner for it.
The reason I bother to make the distinction between hard and soft knowledge is because if I don't, somebody else happily will, and try to use that distinction to claim that they somehow "got" me. This has come up several times when I have discussed my atheism with agnostics. They mistake my 'soft' atheism, in which I do recognize the very, very nearly non-existent possibility that a god exists for a 'hard' atheism, which would mean being convinced that I 'know' that no god exists. Since it is literally impossible to prove that something doesn't exist, I'd be a fool to believe I had real knowledge of that kind. However, I am very much convinced of the non-existence of god mainly by the fact that there is no evidence I've ever seen for the concept, and it's really such a huge, outlandish idea that I'd expect to see a tremendous amount of evidence if it were true. At least if the god that existed were one that I ought to be concerned about, anyway.
But yeah, I recognize that technically it's possible, but vocally acknowledging that possibility is really annoying and should be unnecessary. I have to do it though, because there are people who just love bringing it up. But because in the same sense, literally anything is possible, taking time to recognize the possibility of such things is only slightly more useful than a fart in the wind. Yeah, god might exist, I might be a butterfly dreaming that I'm human, everybody I know might have been killed and replaced by robots. There is value in recognizing the limits of possibility to truly know things in the hard sense, but after a while the whole thing just becomes a tiresome semantic argument.
Okay, back on track now. There may be some smug, know-it-all scientists out there, but in my opinion, they have got to be really bad scientists. As I said earlier, science is based on doubt. It has its very beginning in the idea that "I might be wrong." The very first lesson science taught man is that we don't know shit. We've gained a lot of knowledge since then, but the more we learn, the clearer it becomes that there is a lot that we don't know. It may seem that I pick on or blame religion for a lot of things, but that is going to happen in this discussion because the biggest and most vocal critics of science are religious people. I wonder if they aren't so pissed that scientists are so sure that scientists are right so much as that scientists are so sure that certain religious beliefs are wrong. For fuck's sake look at the current state of mainstream scientific thought on physics. We know that the current models are wrong. We know that because there are some situations in which the models don't work. I'm talking about really extreme situations like the inside of a black hole. Nobody knows what the inside of a black hole is like because the models we have for physics break down when we try to use them to do the calculations. So we know we're wrong, and freely admit it at any time. The irony is some of the religious people accusing us of thinking we know everything, well they fucking think they know everything. We have this book; it's been around for thousands of years. Everything in it is the literal word of god, and it holds the answers to all questions.
Yeah that only works until you start using your eyes and ears.
About humility: Astronomy has taught us that we are so ridiculously insignificant in the universe that we might as well not even exist. Biology, anthropology and paleontology have taught us that we are just another animal, albeit one with a seemingly unique gift for figuring stuff out and communicating ideas, but an animal just the same. Genetically only slightly different from chimpanzees. We have found no evidence for any sort of eternal soul, our consciousness has been shown to be the result of physical processes in our brains. To me, accepting these things requires a tremendous humility, and when compared to the belief that we are god's special children, for whom the entire world was created and given to us to do as we please, we are objectively better than the animals, and we have the unique privilege of never really dying, instead going on to live forever and ever in god's perfect kingdom, well, that belief seems completely devoid of humility to me.
What really gets my goat is people who talk and talk about how wrong scientists are. I used to work every day with a woman who was like this. She hated scientists, and took any opportunity, no matter how fallacious her reasoning, to point out their failings. I used to want so badly to say to these people "If you hate science so much, why don't you denounce it? Stop using anything that came from it. Don't drive or ride in automobiles, don't use a phone or computer or TV. Don't even use a fucking telegraph. Don't cook with natural gas, don't eat food that has ever been refrigerated, don't use soap or any kind of disinfectant, when you get sick as a result of this, you'd better not go see a fucking doctor or take any medicine. In fact, if you're over the age of 40, why don't you just go somewhere and kill yourself, because without the knowledge gained by other people as a direct result of scientific thought, in all likelihood, you never would have lived as long as you have."
But now I'm older and I guess I don't give as much of a shit anymore.
......
This has gotten really long and I still have a lot to say, but I'm really tired and my thoughts are meandering too much so maybe I'll write more about this later.
Heh, probably not though. Suckers.
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[20 Jul 2009|04:28pm] |
Woke up and found a flat tire on my car. That was my fault for not paying attention while parking it. Walked to work, did that, came home and changed the tire.
So god damned tired.
I was planning to write something worthwhile. Maybe not to you to read, but at least cathartic for me to write, but that's going to have to wait.
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[19 Jul 2009|01:41pm] |
I think I just need to stop paying attention to the world. I just get all worked up and angry about shit I can't change.
At least there are people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. That shows that humanity isn't a complete failure.
Sometimes I wonder if I've lost my ability to be funny.
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[18 Jul 2009|10:29am] |
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I was supposed to go out and meet a friend last night but just before getting ready I passed out at 8:30 and wound up sleeping for 11 hours instead. I guess two weeks of getting only 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night will catch up on you.
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[14 Jul 2009|03:34pm] |
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I just unloaded nearly 4 tons of lead off a truck by hand, one 25 pound weight at a time. I am so fucking tired. Now I really can't wait to get back to school because working for a living fucking sucks.
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[10 Jul 2009|03:00pm] |
Though I'll miss seeing my friends and family, there's a part of me that really can't wait to get back to Chico.
I've driven past the LA river so many times in the last week. It's just a good symbol of how much Southern California sucks when it comes to nature.
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[05 Jul 2009|12:43am] |
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With this netbook, I can update this livejournal from the toilet.
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[11 Jun 2009|12:04pm] |
I'm twenty nine years old and I'm playing video games at my parents' house.
Fucking. Sweet.
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[10 Jun 2009|04:23pm] |
It's been really nice being back here for the last few weeks, though all the things I'd planned on keeping me busy aren't, so I'm pretty bored a lot of the days.
( Video Games )
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[25 May 2009|12:40am] |
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I swear I've gotten 10 times more busy since finals ended. Moving sucks. I need to finish packing tonight but I'm just so fucking tired I feel like I'll fall asleep in 20 minutes.
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