Packbat's Journal
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Below are the 50 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Robin Zimmermann" journal:[<< Previous 50 entries]
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07:57 pm
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Tank Man
On the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the New York Times "Lens" blog made two memorial posts regarding the photographs of the Tank Man: first, the classic four photos with comments from the photographers, and second, the fifth photo, unreleased until now.
I am sure I can say nothing to add to these. But I am wondering: what of the driver and other crew of that lead Type 59 tank? It seems to me an incredible thing, that these four PLA soldiers, presumably with orders to drive away the protesters from the square, saw this single man (incongruously carrying plastic bags, as if he was just out shopping) walk out in front of them ... and they stopped. Their guns were silent. Ashamedly, the driver turns the tank to go around the man - like you might turn your car to avoid a pothole - but the man puts his body in the way, seventy or so kilos of meat and bone against thirty six thousand of metal, and ... I don't know. Were they confused? Or did they, somehow, in the midst of the machinegunning of hundreds of people, look out through their periscopes and see a person, a fellow human being, before them?
I have been thinking for a while that nonviolent protest is the strangest sort of moral judo - if war is an extension of diplomacy, seeking victory by the destruction of your enemies personhood, then this is likewise an extension, an anti-war, seeking victory by the construction of your own personhood. The acts of passive resistance bewilder because it is impossibly to justify as war. It can only be understood as human.
We don't know who the Tank Man is. As far as I am aware, we don't even know who was in the tanks.
Tags: history, link time: few minutes, read time: a minute, thoughts
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09:19 pm
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Mishle Packbat: The Proper Shape and Stiffness of Moral Strictures
Hi! I'm going to talk to you about morality, because I'm arrogant and you're imperfect.
No, these facts have no relation. Everyone is imperfect - myself more than you, I wager - and I'd be arrogant even if the lot of you were plaster saints. But the second has interesting consequences which the first permits me to address.
(And as long as I'm blathering, let me make a quick clarification: morality is not law, and law is not morality. If you find yourself interchanging the two, you need to recheck your math. Moving on.)
The thing about morality I want to address today is not the content, but the form. Morality acts on three grammatical persons - the first, the second, and the third - and among most people it tends to be different for all three. (This is why Mormons come to your door - it's harder to be rude to a face than a phone.) This makes sense except for one important factor: a lot of people (though probably fewer than it seems) get the proportions backwards, and need correction. So let me break it down for you.
In the first person - in your morality for you - you ought to be strict but fair. As some wit commonly cited as "Yahl, J." is quoted: "Perfection is our goal, excellence will be tolerated." Stick to the straight and narrow road, get it right the first time, and if you get it wrong, get it right the next time. Practice your morality with all the intensity, precision, and dedication that you were supposed to practice the piano when you were growing up.
In the second person, and still more in the third person - in your morality for your friends and for your strangers - be looser. If your personal code is the double-yellow line, give your friends the entire road and strangers two city blocks in both directions. If your personal code is the Geneva Conventions, let your friends have the Declaration of Independence and allow the rest the Golden Rule. Or, if you prefer: an it harm none, let everyone else do what they will.
Why this? Because you don't really know what's right and wrong, not to any sensible degree of accuracy. Oh, you're better off than the Hittite slave holder who, lacking our hard-won experience, never made the connection between the wretched condition of the slave and the moral repugnance of the institution, but "better off" is a long way from omniscient. And the hard part about morality is that it's chaotic - it depends on a tremendous array of details which you might (if you're lucky) know for your own situation but which you are more ignorant of the farther you look from your center of consciousness. While on the one side you want to do right, on the other you don't want to be - in fact, you shouldn't be - the one who beats people up when they haven't done anything wrong.
So how do you do this? You set an engineering margin of error - draw yourself a circumference small enough that you may be confident it (mostly) resides within the right and aim for that, while drawing for others a loop which (mostly) circumscribes the right and nudge what falls outside back in. In other words, you be the anti-hypocrite: you criticize in yourself what you let pass in others.
And that's the form to take, in the first, second, and third persons. Thank you for your patience.
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood: accomplished
Tags: ethics, take my advice, thoughts
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08:42 am
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Writer's Block: There Can Be Only One
I don't believe in enforced monogamy, no. That said, first, most people do better in closed monogamous relationships, and second, it's not a good idea to betray the trust of the people you're with.
Current Location: school\EGR\ASME_lounge
Current Mood:  thoughtful
Tags: monogamy, read time: 10 seconds, thoughts, writer's block
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09:56 am
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Writer's Block: Meant to Be?
Assuming the author meant, "Do you believe fate exists?" - no, I don't.
Quick definition: fate is that which must happen regardless of any person's choices, regardless of any person's actions, regardless of any conceivable action by any conceivable person, ever. You know how Oedipus killed his dad and married his mom? Yeah - fated, had to happen.
Well, the universe doesn't work like that. If Oedipus had confronted his foster parents about the prophecy, none of it would have happened. Heck, if the weather had been a little different and he'd died of exposure on the road, none of it would have happened, and the weather is chaotic - anything you do can change it a month down the road.
Tags: fate, read time: 10 seconds, thoughts, writer's block
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06:45 pm
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AnZac Day
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) pecunium reminds us: April 25th is AnZac Day.
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood:  tired
Current Music: "Hey World (Don't Give Up Version)" - Michael Franti
Tags: link time: 10 seconds, links, read time: 10 seconds, thoughts
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06:01 pm
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Writer's Block: Shhhh
Assuming no emergencies arose, assuming textual writing was prohibited ... the first day and the first week would be the hardest, but I could do it. It would be an interesting experience, I am sure.
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood:  calm
Current Music: "Wet & Rustling" - Menomena
Tags: read time: 10 seconds, thoughts, writer's block
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07:36 am
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Five Things Plus
From baxil, with his modifications:
Comment to this post, and I will list five things I associate with you. They might make sense or they might be totally random. You're encouraged to post that list, with your commentary on each item, to your lj (or just add a reply back at me).
Extra Baxilian addition: If you have a mental association with me that nobody has mentioned yet, add it to your five-things request and I'll write some bonus commentary.
Swing Sets
I like swings. I would consider this a fairly awesome date.
I'm not sure when or where my earliest experiences were, but I know we had a swingset in the back yard of the family house when I was a kid, and I seem to recall a swingset at the park down the street, too. I think both of them are gone, now. So is the swingset in the icon, at K's house, but the swing in the icon - the brown thing I'm holding on to is the seat of a tree swing - is still there and still a lot of fun. Without the swingset to climb on for extra height, though, it'll be a little harder for me to fall off at the highest point off the ground and knock my wind out. Again. Pity.
Atheism
n. Not believing in any gods.
Now, this is not the definition you will from Messers. Merriam and Webster, should you ask of them - they will tell you that it is the positive belief that there exists no deity (and yes, they use the singular). It is also slightly different from the definition common at the once-IIDB, now FRDB (Freethought and Rationalism Discussion Board) - while that definition may be worded identically through sloppiness, strictly speaking, they refer to the negative belief, lack of belief, that any gods exist.
That said, provided that you interpret all three of these definitions reasonably, by which I mean avoiding the stupid, stupid idea that beliefs have to be infinitely certain, all three apply to myself. I positively believe that no people with power over the laws of nature exist ("in my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs" - Sagredo, "Two New Sciences" (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei), and I decidedly don't have faith in any such creatures.
I made a post for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) convert_me a while back talking about the history of my opinion - I won't bother to repeat it here.
Magic: The Gathering
My dad, my sibs and I got into MtG early - not beta-early, but Unlimited Edition and Arabian Nights expansion early. Back then it was a great game, a lot of fun, though I stank at it - now, with the tremendous backlog of expansions and extra rules and so on that it has acquired, not so much (though I stink much less, now).
Still my favorite collectible trading card game, though.
Writer's Block*
* The LJ thought-prompter, not the creative affliction.
The LJ Writer's-Block feature quite often has interesting prompts - certainly better than Sturgeon's-Law percentages. Today's, for example, is "What do you think happens to us when we die?", a question of deep interest to many people that normally wouldn't occur to me to answer.
I normally don't put a great deal of effort into answering the Writer's Block questions, though. I expect if I were answering today's I would merely reiterate my support for the physicalist position - that you are (mostly) the operation of your brain, and if your brain data is destroyed, so are you. A more thorough response would invoke some of the evidence for the position - from Phineas Gage to the neurophysiology of near-death experiences and hallucinations.
Nomic
I've always been a bit of a rules-lawyer and I've always loved paradoxes (growing up, we had both of Martin Gardner's Aha! books, and at least one Raymond Smullyan - The Lady Or The Tiger? - I read all three often), so when I first heard of the game of Nomic (probably through my older brother), I was hooked. A game where you could change the rules! Nay, a game where you were encouraged, nay, required to change the rules, not just one where there was no-one to stop you! The very language of Suber's Initial Ruleset appealed to me.
And, of course, no-one in my circle of meatspace acquaintances was interested in playing. So the desire persistent, unfulfilled, until that fateful day when active_apathy decided she wanted a game. And by January 23rd, there was nomicide, and we've been off and running (with occasional stumbles) ever since. </plug>
Edit: That's January 23rd, 2007, for reference - over two years, now!
Current Location: school\EGR\ASME_lounge
Current Mood:  amused
Tags: journalling, link time: few minutes, memes, read time: a minute, thoughts
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03:47 pm
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Writer's Block: Divided Self
A bit - I am sometimes short-tempered and often inarticulate in the meatspace, where real-time factors weigh much more heavily. To employ a bit of catachresis, in the parts of online that I inhabit, I am free to compose myself and my replies.
Current Location: school\EGL\office
Current Mood: tired
Tags: read time: 10 seconds, thoughts, writer's block
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12:21 pm
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When is a writer a writer? - an essay on terminology
coppervale, yesterday, wrote a bit On Becoming a Writer where he approvingly quotes a rule Harlan Ellison said to him: "You're not a writer until a writer tells you you're a writer."
gregvaneekhout begged to differ, and suggests that "the designation 'writer' can only come from the act of doing it".
The question I am inclined to ask is: whence* comes the divide?
First: I claim that it truly is a divide, not merely a quibble of the sort which may be casually dismissed in a footnote. It tears along the same line dividing elitism and egalitarianism, distinction and description - either the former elevates Writer to a title or the latter reduces it to trivia, depending on which side of the line the reader falls, and there is a real sense of investment in the side. "How dare you claim we are not writers?" one might ask; or, inversely, one might ask, "If you are writers, where are your publications? Where are your awards? Where are your membership cards?"
Second: that's where it comes from. It comes from the split between the prototype of the writer and the etymology of the term - from the difference between definition by similarity and definition by function. Further, it gains its power from the conflict in the definition. To use an elitist frame, because we ascribe merit to the title, we wish to gain it (this drives the meaning towards the more general functional form), but because the merit of the title comes from the prototype, we wish to restrict the title to the deserving (this drives the meaning towards the prototypical). To use an egalitarian frame, because we pay attention to this behavior, we wish to employ our language to match the behavior as logically as possible (this drives the meaning towards the functional), but because we pay attention to this behavior, we want to make sure to be thrifty, to only pay to the truly exemplary examples (this drives the meaning towards the prototypical).
Third: These very tensions make the divide impossible to resolve by any maneuvers. Nevertheless, I have an opinion.
My opinion is thus: the best strategy is to employ the word in the functional sense. This does tarnish the trademark, if you think of "writer" as a trademark, but to try to apply the elitist standard raises too many ridiculous confusions. (Check it out: Is Anne Frank a writer, by the elitist definiton? Samuel Pepys? William Topaz McGonagall?) But on the other hand, we should recognize that adjectives apply - professional versus amateur, good versus bad, original versus derivative - and we should recognize that people may (or may not!) take "Writer" as a part of their identity, and not to deny them their identity or ascribe too much moral or social value to their identity.
The same goes for a lot of other titles - "artist", "dancer", "fisher", "poet". These words are not states of being, they are states of doing. Best to recognize it and go from there.
* Linguistic aside: "from whence" is an equally valid form. I simply prefer the shorter version.
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: My brother, playing the guitar.
Tags: link time: a minute, read time: a minute, take my advice, thoughts, words, writing
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04:37 pm
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Writer's Block: Half a Glass
I would love to meet the person who did not consider themselves a realist. Excluding that option, however, I have to say I'm pessimistic in particular and optimistic in general.
When I am called upon to make a quantitative guess, my natural tendency is to exaggerate the odds of the worst plausible outcome. When I am called upon to complete a task, my natural tendency is to exaggerate the difficulty of completion to the point of paralyzation. And when I am called upon to describe what I have accomplished, my natural tendency is to understate my claim as much as possible.
On the other hand, I honestly expect things to turn out for the better. I think the world is a fine place, that a century ago it was worse, and that a century from now it will be better. I am appalled at those who speak of needing to compromise their principles - "have they no faith in the power of Good?", I think. When I meet a friend coming out my front door, he gives me a ride to the Metro just in time to catch the train, and both transfers come within the minute, I am not even perturbed - I just look at my watch and say, "Hey, I'm almost on time today!"
All that said, though, I reject the words, let alone the trichotomy. They are useful ways to describe the inaccuracy of estimates (a la "You don't think a month to finish the book is optimistic?"), but dispositions don't divide along those lines.
Current Location: school\EGL\office
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: What Else Is There? - Röyksopp
Tags: read time: a minute, thoughts, writer's block
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08:45 pm
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Genre Book List
Saw this "genre fiction" (how I hate that term!) book list on hmmm_tea's journal - made a few inconsequential alterations to the rules myself...
1) Look at the list, copy and paste it into your own journal.
2) Marks: read one or all of, intend to read (or reread, or finish), loved, hated.
3) Feel free to elaborate wherever you like, whether on the books, the rules, or the list itself.
In no particular order:
( 100 items long, for whatever reason. Be warned. )
Obvious lacunae - Richard Adams (at least "Watership Down", and I'd add "Shardik"), Hal Clement ("Needle", "Mission of Gravity", but probably not "Still River", however much I love that book), Vernor freakin' Vinge ("A Fire Upon the Deep", I haven't read "A Deepness in the Sky", "True Names"), Edgar Allan Poe (anything, for cripe's sake), Bruce Sterling ("Islands in the Net", for one), Bram Stoker ("Dracula")...
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\southwest_desk
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Beautiful World - Devo
Tags: books, geekery, link time: a minute, memes, read time: few minutes, thoughts
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09:43 pm
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Mental Speedbumps
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood:  annoyed
Current Music: What Are They Doin' in Heaven Today - Washington Phillips
Tags: link time: many minutes, politics, read time: few minutes, thoughts
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09:17 pm
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That "Civil Literacy" thing.
Okay, so I'm way late getting on board the AmericanCivicLiteracy.org 2008 Civics Quiz (32/33, by the way - I missed the harder Roosevelt question), but I haven't seen this angle approached: Has anyone checked to see if the respondents are literate, full stop? It seems to me that misunderstanding the questions and/or answers (some of which have difficult wordings) could be a factor in the 71% "failure" rate.
Just thinking about possible controls on the test.
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Something electronic - I don't recognize it.
Tags: link time: many minutes, read time: 10 seconds, science, thoughts
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12:26 pm
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If I Were A...
Original to me, for once:
Most people have the same religion (or lack of religion) as their parents. That something this large in the life of an individual should even appear to be so much up to chance invites the question: what would you be like if you changed that one variable? And how would you interact if you met?
If I were a Christian:
- I would play Christian rock. (But possibly good Christian rock, if my church were liberal enough to give me my Joni Mitchell et al.)
- I would go on missions to third-world countries and donate generously to charity.
- I would play by the rules with a passion, and deplore the hypocrisy I see in others, also with a passion. (Probably to excess on both counts - I would still cross at the crosswalk were I the last person on earth.)
- I would debate theology for fun - possibly even go to seminary.
- The Man Who Was Thursday would still drive me nuts.
If real-me met Christian-me:
- We'd get in long arguments about the justifications of belief and foundations of morality.
- We'd exchange mixtape-CDs. I would be very nervous about putting anything anti-religion or anti-Christianity on them.
- He'd badger me to take up playing the piano again. I would promise, and then forget.
- He would be appalled that I could lose my Eagle Scout for being an atheist.
God bless, as he would say, and wind to thy wings, as I would reply.
Current Location: school\engineering_lab\office
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Like the Weather - 10,000 Maniacs
Tags: journalling, memes, thoughts
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10:54 pm
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Planned Obsolescence - 10,000 Maniacs
As you may recall, I recently mentioned to the world Livejournal that my brother is the best brother ever - in that particular instance, thanks to his generosity in purchasing and letting me rip a tremendous stack of music CDs. One of the most awesome songs in a generally fantastic batch is 10,000 Maniacs, "Planned Obsolescence" from Hope Chest: The Fredonia Recordings 1982-1983. It's a great spaced-out synthy track with cleverly layered vocals in clever harmonies - a little like "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" might be if it was orchestrated by Eurythmics, to grotesquely misdescribe it.
But the lyrics are about the conflict between science and religion.
Really, I kinda hate it when this happens. Sometimes, when I'm staying up too late on a school night (he-e-y-y...), I feel things like, "all those people talking about elephants in the room must be talking about religion - it's the biggest one here." You get almost everyone repeating one or another of the same dozen or so platitudes that don't make sense but at least don't offend most people, or repeating one of a different couple dozen which offend one half or the other of the population but which everyone already has a standard response for (usually involving foaming at the mouth and insults either to one's character or to one's intellect, depending on which side is being offended - and yes, the whole "condemn 'both' sides" schtick is one of the "don't make sense" class).
So when I want to talk about this song, I can't even go "is this irony like 'Shiny Happy People', serious like 'Both Sides Now', or something else altogether?" without feeling like I'm walking onto a landmine. I have to lay down a few hundred words of insulation just to mention the question.
...so, what is this song saying? Is it bemoaning the materialism (in the dual-meaning sense) of the worldview now replacing primitive animistic belief, or is it simply observing the death of outdated modes of being? ...I think it is the latter, but I'm not sure!
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Planned Obsolescence - 10,000 Maniacs
Tags: music, thoughts
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09:53 pm
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Writer's Block: 9/11
On the eleventh of September, in the year two thousand and one of the common era, I was still taking classes at the Rockville campus of Montgomery College in the state of Maryland. I first heard rumors of the plane crash in the basement of the Macklin Tower (which may still have been the Campus Tower, then) near the phones at the bottom of the stairs where the vending machines were (there was an auto-mat-ish one with sandwiches and the like, or perhaps my memory is inaccurate), and dismissed them as unlikely. Shortly thereafter, I reached the classroom, where I discovered class was canceled and we were being sent home. Noncomprehending, I proceeded to the bus stop and thence home (I do not recall how), and came in to find people watching the coverage.
We rarely watch TV in our house. We were glued to the set all that day.
I remember when the footage of that guy on the street, his camera pointed to the sky, catching one plane enter one tower ... I remember when that hit the channels where I lived. I remember seeing them burning. I remember the people running through the streets with the dust from the collapse chasing them down. Odd that this is still topical, but I remember John McCain being interviewed - probably by telephone, the picture was of the towers - and saying we had to attack, go to war over this. (I'm sure it was the same day.) I remember Mom being disappointed with his response - I don't know why, because I disapproved from bullheaded war-is-evil simplemindedness that I still haven't wholly got over, but I think she expected him to be more thoughtful than that, more measured in his response. I remember the speculation about the fourth plane, and where it might have been aimed if the passengers hadn't stood up to the attackers.
And ... well, I don't remember much else. It was seven years ago, I was sixteen, and things in New York had little to do with me. And it still seems like an utter shock to me that people found this so ... well, shocking, that their lives and worldviews were torn up and left inverted because of it. Because I don't think I ever lived in a pre-9/11 or post-9/11 world, I lived in maths and sciences, in Prince of Persia on the IBM 8086 PC, and in books good and bad, and who ever thought 'America' was invincible anyhow? But tear things up it did, and somehow as a nation the U.S. still isn't over it.
I thought about what I'd say today, but I've nothing to say. Us us-ians lost two buildings, three thousand people, and our collective minds, and none of it did the slightest good to anyone ...
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed\
Current Mood:  melancholy
Current Music: Memories of Patty Griffin's "Nobody's Crying"
Tags: journalling, politics, thoughts, writer's block
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10:00 pm
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"The Art of Thinking", Ernest Dimnet
As a sociological relic, The Art of Thinking by Ernest Dimnet is an interesting book.
As a book of advice, The Art of Thinking by Ernest Dimnet is a superb book - but you may save a great deal of time by a simple method: turn immediately to Part Three and stop immediately upon reaching Part Four.
Some quotes:
1—About saving time.
Is there no time you can reclaim, not from your work, not from your exercise, not from your family or friends, but from pleasure that really does not give you much pleasure, from empty talk at the Club, from inferior plays, from doubtfully enjoyable week ends or not very profitable trips?
[...]
Do you know how to gather up fragments of time lest they perish? Do you realize the value of minutes? One of the Lamoignons had a wife who always kept him waiting a few minutes before dinner which in those days was in broad daylight, at three o'clock. After a time it occurred to him that eight or ten lines could be written during this interval, and he had paper and ink laid in a convenient place for that purpose. In time—for years are short but minutes are long—several volumes of spiritual meditations were the result. Mankind might be divided between the multitude who hate to be kept waiting because they get bored and the happy few who rather like it because it gives them time for thought. The latter lead the rest, of course.
There are in the daily press a number of writers, male and female, who make it a point to have an opinion about everything. Day after day, four or five hundred words from their pens appear in which they express their views on an immense variety of subjects, most of them interesting. An expert runs little risk of erring in estimating how much time these fellow-writers of his have devoted to each individual question. It can be counted in minutes rather than in hours. The authors have seldom referred to any literature, even to an encyclopædia, they have been satisfied with summing up their own flimsy knowledge of the data and their flimsier impression of them. Yet, this is so much better than nothing that we read the articles through.
Some people imagine they have to write a book as, at fifteen, they had to write an essay, whether they liked it or not. All the time they are at work on a chapter which ought to monopolise their attention, they are anxious over future chapters still unborn and even unconceived, and the anxiety throws its shadow over the page just being written. As long as an author does not take the habit of "only writing his book," as Joubert says, "when it is finished in his mind," or cannot honestly say, like Racine: "My tragedy is done, now I have only to write the verses," he will be a prey to the schoolboy's error. Nothing is as exciting as the hunt after thoughts or facts intended to elucidate a question we think vital to us, and the enjoyment of writing when the hunt has been successful is an unparalleled reward for intellectual honesty. Leave only the slavish necessity or the meretricious desire for producing a book and all the pleasure will be gone.
A fascinating book.
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood:  awake
Current Music: Tongue - R.E.M.
Tags: books, quotes, reviews, take my advice, thoughts
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09:37 pm
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Quote: "The Art of Thinking", Ernest Dimnet
Just a little entry before bed - I've been flipping through Ernest Dimnet's The Art of Thinking on the bus for the past couple weeks, and there are a few bits in there worth reading. One little piece that might strike the fancy of any of us:
There are in the daily press a number of writers, male and female, who make it a point to have an opinion about everything. Day after day, four or five hundred words from their pens appear in which they express their views on an immense variety of subjects, most of them interesting. An expert runs little risk of erring in estimating how much time these fellow-writers of his have devoted to each individual question. It can be counted in minutes rather than in hours. The authors have seldom referred to any literature, even to an encyclopædia, they have been satisfied with summing up their own flimsy knowledge of the data and their flimsier impression of them. Yet, this is so much better than nothing that we read the articles through.
'Night!
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed\
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Your Latest Trick - Dire Straits
Tags: books, quotes, thoughts
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09:03 am
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If Nothing Were Right
Eliezer Yudkowsky of "Overcoming Bias" asks: what would you do if you learned that there was no morally right or morally wrong.
( What *would* I do? )
Of course, in reality, the odds that something like that would happen are remote. If morality were as easily crushed as that, it wouldn't still be here.
Current Location: home\west_bedroom\south_bed
Current Mood:  creative
Current Music: Making Plans for Nigel - XTC
Tags: links, thoughts, writing
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07:14 pm
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An Object Lession in the Distracting Power of Literal Meaning
Listen to this track.
(If the embed fails, you can find the track here.)
Now, consider the question: if you didn't see the video or know the referents of the words, if it were a straight audio recording called "Fuval Unccl Crbcyr" and sung in a language you couldn't understand, how would you evaluate the emotional content of the track? (Yes, please, listen to it again. I'll wait.)
Would it be, perhaps, wistful? Or hopeful? Or even ... unhappy, in parts, however cheery in others?
Hm.
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Current Mood:  intrigued
Current Music: Shiny Happy People - REM
Tags: music, thoughts
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12:39 pm
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Míshlê Robin
So I was pounding away at the grading, and my mind started to drift, and, well...
Raise not hypocrisy to the stature of a Great Sin! To prove hypocrisy is to prove moral failing, but to prove moral failing is nothing if it is not done to correct, and to prove hypocrisy corrects nothing. Instead treat each hypocrite as herself, and ask: which of the three hypocrites is she?
The first hypocrite is she whose professions are righteous and acts are unrighteous. To you, I say: praise her! Hard is the road of righteousness, and many will stumble from it - praise her for her noble words, and commiserate with her when she falls short of them.
The second hypocrite is she whose professions are unrighteous and acts are righteous. To you, I say: praise her! Rare is the soul whose instincts are so pure, and that she has been confused in her thoughts is no fault. Praise her for her noble deeds, and teach her to praise and take pride in them herself.
The third hypocrite is she whose professions are unrighteous and acts are unrighteous. To you, I say: take pity, for what all of us fear and strive to avoid, she suffers from, and teach her as you teach all who have lost their way.
Does anybody else find themselves writing their own personal scriptures in their head?
Current Mood: creative
Tags: journalling, mysteries of the universe, take my advice, thoughts
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06:03 pm
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Writer's Block: Define Cheater
Cheating attempts to gain the rewards of a good performance without the performance.
Tags: define cheater, thoughts, words, writer's block
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08:57 pm
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Overrated
My mom told me this story once. She was in an English class, Lit class, something like that - high school or college - and the teacher was talking about that "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" poem. Dreck, he said. Or didn't, probably; I don't remember Mom's words, and she might not remember his. Hers? I think his. Anyway, he went along describing in detail all the ways this poem was terrible, and finally said, Here, just listen to it! And opened the book and read it out loud.
(I'm going to invoke artistic license here, depart from my mother's account, and quote Sonnets from the Portugese: XLIII from RPO:)
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
And then he stopped.
Hey, that's actually pretty good, he said.
We may be tempted to laugh at the spectacle of the critic being overwhelmed by the work he tried to shred. But that is not the lesson here - he spoke his mind in the most laudable sense of the phrase, and that he had to - and did - reverse himself a moment later merely shows that he was honest.
Nor should we believe that we may not lambast any work of art. For example, Rescue from Gilligan's Island was a terrible, terrible movie (although not, fortunately, near-fatally so), and no amount of misplaced excoriation will change that.
Insead, we should say this: familiarity does not require contempt. The old "To be or not to be" soliloquy, High Noon with Gary Cooper, Vivaldi's Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269 ("Spring" from the Four Seasons), Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, Leonardo da Vinci's Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Melville's Moby Dick - these things are familiar because they are superb. Let never cynicism, misanthropy, the desire for originality, or the opinion of your companions stop you from recognizing that.
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Current Mood:  contemplative
Tags: life, mysteries of the universe, take my advice, thoughts
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09:49 am
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Eliza: Hello. I am ELIZA. How can I help you?
Me: Joseph Weizenbaum died.
Eliza: Please go on.
Me: Well, he was very nearly the inventor of AI - wrote your progenitor, the first Eliza - and then he became one of the harshest critics of it. It's odd thinking of his life, given the contradiction.
Eliza: What about your own progenitor the first eliza and then he became one of the harshest critics of it its odd thinking of his life given the contradiction?
Me: Well, in a way you have a point - it does parallel the Eden story.
Eliza: Oh, i have a point it does parallel the eden story.
Me: Sure, except I don't believe the Eden story.
Eliza: Why do you not believe the eden story?
Me: Does it matter?
Eliza: Please go on.
Me: Anyway, the disquieting thing about Dr. Weizenbaum's life is that I fear he may be right about AI - the potential for harm, I mean.
Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
Me: Well, if he invented it, then doesn't that mean his opinion means more?
Eliza: Do you wish that he invented it then doesnt that mean his opinion means more?
Me: Of course.
Eliza: Please go on.
Me: What more is there to say?
Eliza: Does that question interest you?
Me: No, not really.
Eliza: You are being a bit negative.
Me: That's true - I guess the best thing is to hear and acknowledge his life, and then move on from there.
Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
Me: Well, just because he's respected (and deservedly so) doesn't mean he's right or wrong - just that we must listen.
Other obituaries: MIT News Office, Boston Globe, Washington Post, L.A. Times. ELIZA via http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza-cgi-bin/eliza_script - text not edited.
Current Location: home\basement\northwest_table
Current Mood: solemn
Tags: geekery, life, links, news, thoughts
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12:23 pm
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Writer's Block: Take My Advice
What advice do I wish I could take, but cannot?
Don't read this.
Stop browsing Livejournal. Stop getting that little burst of joy when you're see new LJ notification emails. Stop commenting on other people's posts and comments. Stop feeling like you're connecting when you fling your messages-in-bottles into the websurf and find others washed up on your shores.
Stop browsing other journals. Stop reading other comment threads. Stop replying in other comment threads. Stop looking for meaning in electrons.
Ditch the webcomics. Ditch the web serials. Ditch the forums. Ditch the Internet games. Ditch the e-books. Ditch the YouTube music videos. Get rid of the entertainments of your hours.
Throw away the computer. Live in the real world of hard work and rare pleasure.
Give in.
Tags: take my advice, thoughts, writer's block, writing
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09:34 pm
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Prompt: Defended Identities
For anyone who feels like answering, here or in their own journals:
Consider the following fill-in-the-blank: "If someone said I wasn't _______________, I would object."
(Clarification: Imagine someone is describing you - either explicitly (e.g. "Robin isn't a guy!") or implicitly (e.g. "She likes LJ") - and they describe you inaccurately (see either of previous examples). The question is not whether you correct them - an interesting question of etiquette - whether you dislike being described thus.)
( My answers, below the cut. )
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet - The Stanley Brothers
Tags: life, mysteries of the universe, questions, thoughts
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12:06 pm
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Writer's Block: One Day to Live
Y'know what? I've thought about this over and over, and there's nothing I'd really want to accomplish that I could get done in just one day. All that leaves, then, is goodbyes - to my parents and siblings, to my neighbors and friends, to my grandparents, and to my blog and Web presences. Oh, and resignation from my job - almost forgot that.
That done ... I don't know. Maybe I'd get out my paper, brushes, and ink left over from my art classes and start painting.
Current Location: home\bedroom\bed
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: SimCity 2000 theme - it's running through my head
Tags: life, one day to live, thoughts, writer's block
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04:15 pm
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Thought-Seeds Re: Art
In the comments on my artist-QOTD post, jfs gave a good definition of art: art occurs whenever a person creates something whilst trying to evoke an emotional reaction. I was just thinking about the specifics of that - why "emotional" reaction, what kinds of reactions can/does art make, what kind of moral value should we ascribe to the methods and contexts of these reactions ... I don't know if this will be coherent, but it might be interesting interest.
I guess I'll start with Dan Brown and Myst. No - I'll start with Agatha Christie and Myst; it's wrong to snipe at works you haven't perused.
Wait - no, the point doesn't really work with Agatha Christie. I'd better just start somewhere, and let the chips fall as they may.
One purported property of Dan Brown's writing is that it makes the reader feel clever. Specifically, The Da Vinci Code is accused of making its readers feel clever by showing them stupid puzzles. Assuming "feeling clever" is an emotional reaction (not much of a stretch, I think), I point out the following:
- Assuming it was on purpose, The Da Vinci Code is art.
- In addition, The Da Vinci Code is successful art in the evocative1 sense, not merely in the financial sense.
- It is being criticized for the way it evokes these feelings - its critics say it should not make the reader feel clever in this way, presumably because the reader does not earn feeling clever.
"Hey," my brain said. "What about Myst? It does take a little cleverness to solve those puzzles - isn't feeling clever justified there?"
I'm not going to divert to the obvious moral, here. (I was tempted, mind - any excuse to plug Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit is welcome.) Instead, I think we should consider where this idea of justification of art, in this earned-emotion sense, leads. Is the emotional climax of Terminator 2 justified? What about the excitement and satisfaction of a good game of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Or of a good performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor? Or, on a more abstract note: are we justified in evaluating these works and the reactions they evoke? Or, higher still: are we justified in rejecting such evaluations as unworthy, or unnecessary, or inappropriate?
Comments are open.
1. "Evocative of emotional reactions". Hey, I wanted something short and snappy. ^
Current Location: home\bedroom\lower_bunk
Current Mood:  confused
Current Music: When Doves Cry - The Be Good Tanyas
Tags: books, games, movies, music, pictures, politics, questions, thoughts, tv, videogames
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10:04 pm
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Five from MaggieBloome
The Five-Question one again - this time inherited (with modification) from maggiebloome, who got it from backinblack:
- Leave me a comment. You may take one of two tacks, here: (a) complete insignificance - for example, song lyrics, sandwich recipes, videogame reviews ... anything, really, as long as it's completely meaningless in context, or (b) a specific request for participation, with the specifics up to you. (But not completely up to you - I do still get to choose the questions.)
(Okay, somebody needs to take out a restraining order against me on use of the word "completely". I mean, d-mn.)
- Receive five questions, chosen so as to allow me to know you better, in a reply to your comment. They will likely not be excessively personal, so as to Avoid Internet Drama™.
- Update your LJ - or, if the thought of contaminating it with mere Internet memes gives you fits, reply to my comment - with the answers to the questions.
- If you chose the former: Append (or prepend) this (or a substantially similar) explanation to your answers. When others respond with desultory comments, ask them five questions. (Each, that is.)
- If you chose the latter: Write an appropriately brilliant and witty diatribe about the pointlessness of copying these idiotic things across the Web as if they're somehow valuable, then throw it away as being nearly as annoying as the things themselves.
Anyway, the five questions, courtesy maggiebloome:
1. What's your favourite extinct reptile?
Mmm - I don't know nearly enough extinct reptiles, let me think.
...
Y'know, I think I'm going to go for the obvious and vote tail-spikes. Stegosaurus, I choose you!
2. If you could pick an Era to live in apart from our own, which would it be?
Well, being as I'm obviously of (mixed, but including) African descent, it would seem of questionable wisdom for me to dwell in the near past. Further, I am quite ignorant of any language other than my own and quite enamored of modern medicine - thereby eliminating the far past (and the near past, really). On top of that, environmental degradation and the expenditure of Earth's natural resources (not to mention the ever-present hazard of warfare involving weapons of mass destruction, or even garden-variety epidemics) would seem to discourage proceeding into the future.
So, recognizing that I have no good choices, I expect I would either choose the latter half of the nineteenth century in London or the latter part of the reign of Caesar Augustus in Rome. My ignorance of history is mighty, but neither of those places and times seem too offensively intolerant, and both are associated with a great deal of magnificent literature.
3. Deserted island. You are Tom Hanks. Volleyball, basketball or ping pong ball?
I think I'll have to go with the canonical answer, here - volleyball seems like the most durable.
4. How would you prefer to die?
Heart attack might be nice. A stroke, perhaps. Quick and clean is the way to go, I say - none of this long painful decline into death, and a minimum of gross bodily harm. Basically worst, in my opinion, would probably be a car accident followed by long, unsuccessful medical intervention. (Not that I'd refuse treatment - I'm just saying: pain? Seriously uncool.)
5. Which work of literature has changed you the most?
Slaughterhouse 5 was pretty sweet. The Gate to Women's Country made me think a lot. The Dispossessed was fascinating. I'm not sure that any book changed me radically, though.
Wait. Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson. Despite being black (by American standards), my visceral conception of racism was, to a large degree, unformed until it was informed by that book. It was a good movie as well, but I feel that the book was more subtle about it, and so more satisfying. (However, I am also obliged to mention - although this is my mother's observation, not my own - that the beginning of the book is somewhat slow. Take it as you will.)
...Okay, how are you supposed to wrap these things up again?
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Myst III soundtrack
Tags: books, journalling, memes, thoughts
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09:01 am
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Writer's Block: An Artist Is...
An artist is someone who makes art. But what does it mean to be "someone who makes art"?
I can draw a picture from life. I can play the piano from sheet music. I can write, given a topic. In any of these cases, I may or may not be making 'art'.
On the other hand, I rarely feel the impulse to make art. I often feel the impulse to communicate - hence the blog - but communication, though it be creation of a sort, is not necessarily art, and I am certainly nothing like ursulav, cadhla, or ceruleanst, whose muses will grab them by the metaphorical lapels and yell "create, create, create!" Or even like Seth, someone who just ... goes to work, automatically. Most of the time, if I produce art, I only produce art as a tool for other purposes.
So, I make art incidentally, not habitually. Does that make me an artist, or not?
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Tags: consider artist, thoughts, writer's block
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09:33 am
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Story Idea
1. True AI is fairly new - perhaps as new as the Internet is now.
2. At some point early on, it has been established that AIs are legal persons.
3. An AI breaks the law in a way that would normally confer the death penalty.
4. Its sentence: to be reprogrammed - not killed - so that it will not do it again.
The story follows the hacker or hackers employed to do the job.
Current Location: school\lab
Current Mood: thoughtful
Tags: speculative fiction, thoughts, writing
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11:04 am
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Note to Self: Education
When you're studying something, there will often be tedious bits. Sometimes those tedious bits are bits you need to learn. Sometimes they aren't. And when they aren't, if you have a legitimate means of avoiding them, you should take it.
Specific example: my variational methods class. The variational methods I am learning involve much algebra. I know algebra. In fact, I have been doing my own algebra from the time I was studying geometry at home through every single mathematics or engineering textbook I have ever worked through or class I have ever taken (excepting number theory and MATLAB, respectively). Furthermore, no-one cares about the algebra, including the teacher (who explicitly said so). The important parts are (a) identifying the type of problem, (b) setting up the integrals, and (c) analyzing the solutions.
So, self, just use your fancy little calculator for the grunt work and be happy about it. You're just wasting time else.
Current Location: home\basement_extension
Current Mood:  productive
Current Music: The washer-dryer chiming.
Tags: life, notes to self, take my advice, thoughts
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03:08 pm
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Die Hard Categorization
Okay, so there are four Die Hard movies, yah? One, Two, Three, and Four, also known as the original, Die Harder, Die Hard With a Vengeance, and (depending on where you live) either Die Hard 4.0 or Live Free Die Hard. They're all Die Hard movies, of course, but how do they stand up next to each other?
Well, here's the metaphor that I just came up with.
The first one? That's Bruce Lee. The quintessential defines-the-genre Real Thing.
Second one? They couldn't get Bruce Lee, so they found some other Asian dude and told him to fake Bruce Lee. It's not horrible, admittedly, but it's not actually good, either.
Third? Jet Li. Inevitably (yet justly) compared to the first, but cranked up to 11 with heavy distortion on the electric guitar.
Fourth? Wesley Snipes. Looks completely out of left field, but is actually (a) very good and (b) preserving many of the essential parts of the tradition (in world of the metaphor, the martial arts prowess).
Current Location: home\basement_extension
Current Mood:  geeky
Current Music: Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric
Tags: geekery, movies, thoughts
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10:15 pm
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Indie Fruit
I am not knowledgeable about fruit. (I imagine this is not an uncommon trait.) I routinely will look in the crisper1 and think, "Are those nectarines or peaches? How fuzzy do they have to be?" I doubt I could distinguish a Gala and a New Zealand Pink Lady if my life depended on it.
But I do not eat Red Delicious apples. I would rather eat sawdust soaked in orange juice.2 And I have three reasons.
First. They are horrible, horrible apples. A crime against flavour and texture.3
Second. They're overstocked. You see them everywhere.4 Even if they were good, they're just too common - I like variety.
Third. Biodiversity.
Many of the pernicious consequences of the industrialization of farming arise from the focus on production. Merely one of these is this: the concentration of single breeds. Every acre that is dedicated to one cultivar of apples alone is an acre at risk of destruction at the hand of a single species of attacker. Think of computers: once someone writes a new Windows virus, everyone running Windows is at risk. And Mother Evolution has plenty of dev teams working on it.
So I opt for the Fuji, the McIntosh, the Granny Smith5. And I eschew popularity.
1. That's the bucket at the bottom (with or without water collecting in it) where you theoretically store vegetables, but in practice also store the leftover moo shi pork that didn't fit anywhere else. And, in my family, the fresh fruit.
2. Good orange juice, mind. And I'd still prefer the apples over Goshen coffee cake.
3. There's apparently good cause for this, not surprisingly related to the fact that the Red Delicious is bred for looks.
4. Including at Goshen, next to the coffee cake.
5. Noting, however, that this last variety is also growing dangerously popular.
Current Location: home\basement_extension\
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Summer in the City - Regina Spektor
Tags: thoughts
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01:05 pm
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Naturalism
Poll #1001244
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllIs the world rational?
( My take. )
Current Location: ASME lounge
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Talkin' Bout A Revolution - Tracy Chapman
Tags: polls, thoughts
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10:23 am
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A Few Thoughts on Copyright
I, Robin Hamilton Dickerson Zimmermann of Silver Spring, Maryland in the United States of America, henceforth declare, until such time as I may choose otherwise, that all works I create for which own the copyright shall be released to the public domain after twenty-eight years, save where I make a specific exception or where a contractual agreement into which I willingly enter states otherwise.
A couple days ago, as I was browsing Project Gutenberg, I was startled to discover that several of H. Beam Piper's stories are available and in the public domain. I was amazed at this for one simple reason: almost nothing published after 1923 is in the public domain in the U.S.
Let me say that again for emphasis. Almost nothing after 1923. This is a travesty.
In 1841, one Thomas Macaulay spoke at long and eloquent length against an extension of copyright to a mere sixty years after the author's death. (Current U.S. law grants seventy.) I thought for a moment to excerpt an especially appropriate sentence or two from these speeches, but a moments' reading left me near quoting the entire thing – I shall instead merely bulletize the most salient points, leaving off Macaulay's erudite prose:
- The copyright is not an innate right, but a creation of human government.
- A copyright is a form of monopoly, and therefore effectively a tax on the public – thus, it should be restricted to precisely as long a term as would make equivalent the harm done to the public by monopoly and the good provided by encouraging the creation of new works.*
- The prospect of income from a property a long time after one's death is no incentive whatsoever to the creation of new works.
- The probability that the persons for whom the author might have concern will own the copyright a long time after one's death is minute.
- The probability that the copyright owner might suppress the works, for whatever reason, is great.
The passage of a hundred and sixty-five years has not changed these facts. (A hundred and sixty-six, now, but the temptation to point to various modern personages making the same points could not be resisted.) The fact that the word "copyright" makes the privilege sound inalienable has no bearing. These long terms of copyright encourage speculation by people rich enough to afford it, and actively suppress innovation by preventing the use of what has already been created. (Remember: someone had to invent the idea of alphabetizing.)
I don't know why H. Beam Piper failed to renew his copyrights. The fact that these expired after twenty-eight years as a consequence is a mere coincidence of U.S. law. But it's a good thing that, say, Omnilingual is in the public domain now – the story is historically significant. And if, somehow, anything I make matters the way that did, I'd want no less for it.
Edit: Making Light has another post on intellectual property that links back here – highly recommended reading. Also: anonymous comments are now open, but something's funky with Livejournal's comment notification system, so I might not reply right away. Gmail address is robin.zimm if you want to contact me directly. Blue arrow for replying, or click here.
Edit 2: Chris Sullins has spotted an important error in Point 2, indicated – the intended statement was that the law should equate the marginal harm and marginal good.
Current Location: home\north_desk
Current Mood: contemplative
Tags: politics, thoughts
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05:05 pm
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Me and My Life
1 July 1985: I am born.
7 March 1986: Richard W. Hamming gives a speech entitled "You and Your Research" that includes this part-of-a-paragraph:
Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" (emphasis added)
circa 2000-2003: I read said speech off a printout m'dad had lying around. I am greatly impressed.
Ten minutes ago: I realize that this is relevant to my own life, to what I want to do in grad school and after.
Current Location: home\north_desk
Current Mood: bemused
Current Music: Material World - Tracy Chapman
Tags: journalling, mysteries of the universe, thoughts
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10:51 am
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Tracy Chapman: Pasty, White Man
Let's back up a bit.
Okay, set the Way-Bac machine to ... err, yesterday, maybe the day before (C confirms this). My roommate is watching a YouTube music video (hey, where'd you think I got it?) of James Blunt, and I, glancing over his shoulder, comment on how I had no accurate image of what James Blunt looked like before I'd seen him just now. The topic is off and running, now: my roommate (let's call him B, for simplicity) mentions how he was surprised the Righteous Brothers were white, I mention how I was surprised Joan Armatrading was black, and across the hall, one of my other suitemates (the aforementioned C) says he was amazed when he saw Tracy Chapman wasn't a "pasty, white man". (Yes, that's a quote.)
I was shocked at this. But this shock was only exacerbated, and greatly so, when, as I played "Fast Car" for B and C, they maintained, even while listening carefully, that she still sounded like a guy! They even began speculating that maybe she was big, and that's why her voice was so deep – ignoring the obvious fact that my voice is deep, and I'm a five-foot-seven kinda-skinny dude compared to their five-ten, plus. (And she's five foot four and a half, according to IMDB.)
Now, I imagine many of you know who Tracy Chapman is, and why, given the political/sociological nature of her lyrics, I might be surprised at the "white" part. (Yes, I know black people don't write all of these songs – to make a positive assumption of whiteness, however....) What is almost more interesting is something which I reminded myself of, when I said to C, "You're one of those people who thinks Smokey Robinson is female, aren't you?"
See, I used to be one of those people. When I found out Smokey Robinson was a male countertenor, I was dumbfounded. I really shouldn't be critical of these guys – I did the same thing, and I know how hard I found it to really analyse how his voice sounds, and how other people's voices sound, that I could begin to tell the difference. And I don't know today what I've twigged to as gender-specific that makes, say, Tracy Chapman sound clearly female, and tracerj on Game Grid sound (and I apologize for this) male.
And really, that brings up a more general point: this is just a signal, not the thing. Sometimes it will be wrong, and wrong in different ways for different people. Signals are just like that. And it's ... well, shallow, to get in a huff over it, because it really isn't that important.
(Man, if I'd known talking to people was such a good source of journalling material, I'd have started sooner!)
(Oh, and B is the second of the two roommates quoted in my DeviantArt blood painting post – the other would be D, if I stuck to my naming convention.)
(It is fortunate for said naming convention that I don't spend too much time chatting with the two people in A. Although they happen to be geeks and fellow members of the local Diplomacy Club, so it's somewhat odd that I don't.)
(One last thing before I forget: might be a little break (yeah, that's new!) as I move out of the dorms, given that my laptop's still dead.)
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Matters of the Heart - Tracy Chapman
Tags: journalling, thoughts
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04:54 pm
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Further Education of a Packbat: Weird is Scary?
Warning: The below post may be disturbing to some (although, if I guess rightly, not to most of you), due to allusions to violence and sexuality and odd attitudes thereto. Will lj-cut on request.
This afternoon on DeviantArt, among the popular images was this sweet little image, painted with the artist's blood.
Upon my showing it to my roommates, I got two reactions: "He's a psycho. His girlfriend's going to die", and "Yeah, whoever did that is a f–g." (Mealy-mouthed ineffectual obfuscation of sexual ephitet courtesy me. Yay PC!)
This shocked me. Utterly. Because when I looked at it (and I guessed the painter was female, but I honestly don't know) I saw a ... well, I hesitate to use the term, given the potential for confusion, but some sort of Neopagan – in this case, a believer in some sort of special symbolism of nature and primitive rituals (primitive being purely non-derogatory here). The type of person who's gutsy enough to put off bandaging a smashed finger long enough to use it as an ink dispenser, but who's no more likely to commit murder than, say, the average deer hunter. Not enough even to encourage suspicion. (As for my bewilderment at the ephitet – well, that'll have to wait for another post.)
Thinking it over, I can understand why I was naive to expect that. In fact, thinking it over, I would flatly expect that reaction, had I thought about their worldviews before I spoke. But coming from my upbringing, and (to be honest) hanging out on the Web as much as I do, I seem to have somehow managed to broadened my schema of "people like me" so much that I forget that some of these people are actually scared of each other.
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood: confused
Tags: journalling, thoughts
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04:07 pm
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Update-Bits
Too little stuff for a complete update*, but a few funny things:
- The guy (vaguely African-seeming, but I wouldn't really know) who said he was 'good at math', but needed help with 'translations'. 'Translations', in this case, being along the lines of:
Fill in the blank with the appropriate word phrase: "a - b" means b ______ a.
I begged off, saying I had to finish my art assignment†, and gave him directions to the mathematics building‡.
- My ankles hurt so much afterwards, I could barely move.
- What does the question of whether you can know something absolutely as a truth have to do with abortion? No, I'm serious, I still can't figure that one out.
- If a bank can lend out 90% of the money deposited therein, adding $100 to the bank's lending stock adds $1000 to circulation by a simple geometric series (r = 0.9) ... if all the money in circulation is redeposited deposited in the bank. So, what is the point of this exercise, exactly? And why are the business students still being tested on it?
- "At schema yourself resemblant". There – now I've posted a nonsensical spam subject line too.
Ta!
* Says the guy who just posted a one-line update consisting of a single link.§
† Which means this probably occurred Sunday afternoon.
‡ He'd actually started off asking for directions, then asked me if I could help him solve the problems. I carefully refused to sit in his car out of the cold while I looked at his stuff.
§ Which, incidentally, has both shown me a whole lot of tracks I might be interested in, and that I know nothing about electronic music at all. Neither of which surprised me. I was glad to see that "synth pop" was the correct category for Eurythmics, though.
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: SFX from my roommate's laptop - I don't know what he's looking at.
Tags: journalling, mysteries of the universe, questions, thoughts, weirdness
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10:08 pm
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Job Value
Last year, conuly posted a story about an (idiot) office worker disdaining construction work, in which she pointed out the obvious fact that construction work is not only well-paid, but necessary. I was reminded of it today by a fellow commenting on Pharyngula, and that got me thinking about the classic "good job"/"bad job" distinctions people make.
And it hit me. I can't think of any bad jobs.
Give it a moment. Food service? You help bring tasty cheeseburgers to people and make them happy. Garbage collection? I can't find the quote, but I remember someone once said one measure of a civilization was how fast waste is moved away from the people. Middle management? I was a Boy Scout, I know how much chaos arises from a lack of good leadership. Advertising? Well, it may be the capitalist in me, but if having the cash to burn on ads signals confidence in the profitability of the product, advertisement should (with a few exceptions) be a useful indicator of quality. Even professional sports – the closest thing to a useless job I've thought of yet – encourage physical recreation (public health!), and (I suspect) improvements in some kinds of medicine and surgery.
What do you all think? Am I missing some useless occupation? Some useful occupation, too often derided? What do you say?
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Apres Moi - Regina Spektor
Tags: questions, thoughts
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08:59 pm
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House Tour
So, housing deadlines for next year are coming up, and I need to decide where to go – and so do my roommates. And one of them is seriously looking for a house. Today we looked at the one closest to campus.
( Read more... )
So, is it a decent house? All we have heard of the landlord was highly positive (this certainly doesn't sound like a 'rent it to the college idiots so we can collect the insurance when they burn it down' type, although they are not local), and it is near campus. The current tenants are obviously less-than-ideal, which would explain the poor conditions prevailing at the time of the tour, and my prospective co-tenants are (mostly) straight-arrow guys. It is supposed to be wired for high-speed Internet, as well.
The other option, of course, is commuting from home – an hour trip ($1.85 off peak, $2.50 on, one way) taking the Metro. Or, if I'm lucky, staying on campus somewhere.
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood: tired
Tags: journalling, school, thoughts
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03:04 pm
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Base Thoughts
I was lying in bed the other night thinking about bases of arithmetic....
You know, it's kinda odd that insomnia due to math isn't that rare, for me.
Anyway, I was thinking about bases of arithmetic, and Hal Clement's throwaway gag in Still River* about an ancient academic controversy over octal versus duodecimal at the School in his story, and the problem of factoring, and how weak the theoretic justifications for all those specific bases are.
You may be surprised at this claim. "But octal is clearly the most rational," you might be saying. "Binary is the most fundamental base of arithmetic, and octal is a logical extension of that."
Uh-huh. Logical extension how, exactly? If you've got an old 24-bit mainframe?
"That just implies hexadecimal is even better."
Yeah, okay, but that's still just one advantage – convenient relation to binary. Besides, larger bases get more and more inconvenient as you have to memorize more and more figures and (more importantly) bigger and bigger multiplication tables. So hex is great for computer scientists, and octal used to be great for computer scientists, but that doesn't translate to their being the best day-to-day radices. They've got one advantage – one huge advantage – but it's only a useful advantage in a few contexts.
And when we turn to duodecimal, base 12 (and its cousin, sexagesimal, base 60), we find a similar sole advantage: the base has many factors. Yeah, that's great if you're writing fractions – 1/3 becomes 0.4duodecimal, 4/15 becomes [00].[16]sexagesimal (each bracket is a decimal representation of one figure), etc. – but how often do you need to?
Actually, that gets to the key point: what do you need to do regularly with a number system? Really, it comes down to:
- Write.
- Add.
- Subtract.
- Multiply.
- Divide.
...pretty much in that order. I mention "write" because while messing with the basic principle of positional notation may be fun, standard positional notation is a pretty solid, intuitive way to write down how many books you have on the second shelf of your bookcase.** And while binary may be logically the simplest radix, 10101 takes up a lot more space than 21†. (Oh, and just coming up with symbols for a sexagesimal system is horrid, forgetting all its other disadvantages.)
So, what about these others? Well, we're only looking at standard positional systems, so whatever advantages balanced ternary systems have, we're ignoring them. Anyway, in standard positional systems, 'add' and 'subtract' pretty much make only one contribution to complexity: how many digits are in your basic addition tables. And since we humans have shown that we can handle base 10 pretty well, anything up to around that size is probably fine. Multiplication is almost the same, but there's an advantage for highly composite (and not-quite-highly composite) radices – all the rows with divisors of the base are simpler. (I guess that means duodecimal isn't quite as pointless as I thought.) Division – well, you're doing long division, so have to come up with a compromise between having fewer digits (higher radix) and fewer multiples of the denominator (lower radix). Oh, and having lots of divisors means fewer recurring 'decimals'.
This sounds like it's building up to sell duodecimal after all. No, it isn't.
I'm saying we should use senary. Base six.
The actual inspiration for this came that night, when I was comparing duodecimal and octal to decimal. Duodecimal, I had decided, had the advantage of many factors. Octal, of being a power of 2. But what about decimal?
Well, as it happens, I had already realized that decimal was unusually good at testing divisibility. As it happens, there are two types of numbers that are very easy to check divisibility of in a given base: factors of the base, and adjacent natural numbers to the base. In decimal, the first group consists of 2, 5, and 10. The latter group consists of 9 and 11. Divisibility by the first set can be checked through examining the final digit – an even digit means multiple of 2, 5 or 0 mean multiple of 5, 0 means multiple of 10. This is really easy – in big O notation, it's O(1), meaning it takes a constant length of time for any number. As for 9 and 11, it's easy to prove from modulo arithmetic that you need merely add all the digits (for 9 – 'casting out nines', basically) or alternately add and subtract (for 11) to check divisibility. These are both O(log n) – the time they take is proportional to the length of the number, written out.‡
Now, all bases get the benefits of these two effects. But because 9 is a power of 3, in base 10 this means that testing divisibility by 2, 3, 5, and 11 is easy. Four of the first five prime factors, accounting for 75.76% of all numbers. That's pretty good – only missing the seven. Duodecimal only gets 2 and 3 from its factors, and 11 and 13 from the casting-out methods, so it misses five and seven. Octal would get seven, of course (one less than the base), but it only has two as a prime factor and nine = three squared as one over the base, so it misses five.
But six doesn't. It misses eleven, but with seven it gets 77.14%, better than base 10, which beat bases 8 and 12. It's smaller than 10, which means only six symbols and 21 unique entries each on the addition and multiplication tables. (It would be 36, but since 2+3 = 3+2 and 2*3 = 3*2, a large fraction drop out.) Being smaller also makes long division easier – you need only write 5 multiples of the divisor, instead of 9. Against that, you've got longer numbers, but even when you get pretty large (e.g. the age of the universe, 13.7 billion years), it's not a big difference (13 senary figures as opposed to 11 decimal figures). Being divisible by 2 and 3 means 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4 are all easy (1/4 = 0.13senary), and adds extra simplicity to two rows of the multiplication table (which has only six to start with, including the ones row).
Add these factors together, and I think that makes 6 the perfect base.§
But hey, who cares what I think!
Poll #924107
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllWhat is the best base of arithmetic?
* Which is actually a pretty lame book, on rereading, but I still like it.
** Not that bijective numerations are that hard to count in – I just didn't want every link to be to Wikipedia.
† I'm not counting the Adobe Photoshop manual in this count.
‡ Which, you must note, is often much less than the number itself.
§ Yes, I did in fact spent seven hours writing a long, technical discussion of the relative merits of five different systems of positional notation, combined with an a priori enumeration of the most important principles of a number system, just so I could conclude with that sentence. I regret nothing!
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Yellow Submarine - The Beatles
Tags: geekery, insanity, mysteries of the universe, polls, questions, thoughts
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11:44 am
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Missing the Point
Last week, Pharyngula linked a blog post about the idea that "[o]utside the laboratory, scientists are no wiser than anyone else", and how scary that should be. It's a good story – I bookmarked it – but it wasn't until today that I read the comments, and found far too many of them fall into two blocks:
- Theistic scientists being offended by the implication that they aren't scientists, and
- Atheists insisting that the people in (1) aren't scientists.
No wonder I was taught not to discuss religion or politics in polite company.
(Disclaimer: most of the comments there are very good, including in the two blocks I mentioned above. I'm just bemused by all the misinterpretation flying around.)
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood:  bored
Current Music: Hard to Make a Stand - Sheryl Crow
Tags: links, thoughts
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09:08 am
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This post is non-notable.
"The Suburban Jungle" got deleted on Wikipedia.
Right now, I am of two feelings about Wikipedia. On the one hand, it's pretty useful for a quick reference – if I'm reading my webcomics and run into a reference to Dennis Miller, thirty seconds and I know what I need to – but at least in the past year or two, it has developed a dismaying trend towards deletion.
I'm talking to nanakikun about this, and he's pointed out a huge problem: the process is biased towards deletion. All articles are guilty non-notable until proven notable. To delete an article requires nothing but, "I don't see proof that this article is important" – a fellow could delete five thousand files a day, and some people do – while to relist takes, at the minimum, half an hour to track down sources per article.
I don't know why things are this way. As nanakikun has pointed out, you can't change anything without knowing what is going on. But something is massively broken.
The deletion review is here, by the way.
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Current Mood: annoyed
Tags: psa, thoughts
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07:31 pm
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My convert_me Challenge
I posted this on convert_me, but when I was writing it, I realized that I wanted such a statement of my beliefs to appear on my own journal as well. Here it is.
I found convert_me via lovecrafty's post about liberal Christianity, and thinking about it, I realized that I would like to issue a convert_me challenge. The truth is extremely important to me, and I realized that it would be wise of me to put myself before intelligent people who disagree with me, in hopes that I will be corrected in my errors.
Hi. I'm packbat, an American, a humanist, and a strong atheist.
( My background )
Getting down to brass tacks, though, here is what I believe.
I believe the universe makes sense. I believe that everything, from quarks to Murray Gell-Mann to the far reaches of space itself, operate according to principles, and that even if those principles are nondeterministic (as quantum mechanics implies), they are not rules that can be broken. I believe that Descartes was right when he claimed that no being able to solipsistically fool you into thinking the universe existed, would. I believe that absolute certitude is not required, and it makes sense to believe statements that could be false.
I believe that if something is true, then there is probably evidence for it. I believe that if something as big as the existence of an active god was true, there'd be bucketloads of evidence for it. I believe that if there was even just a Prime Mover, there'd be plenty of evidence for it. I believe that the absence of expected evidence is evidence against. I believe that the expected evidence for gods is absent. I believe no gods exist.
I believe that minds are natural phenomena, that they represent the workings of the brain, just as text represents words. I believe that no nonmaterial substrate is needed to 'power' a mind. I believe minds are as ruled by the laws of nature as everything else. I believe it still makes sense to claim I have free will, in spite of that.
I believe ethics arise from human nature. I believe that empathy is the basis of moral good, and that the growth of morality comes from the recognition that our genetic kin aren't the only ones who deserve empathy.
I believe the responsibility of government is to protect the rights of its citizens. I believe life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are such rights. I believe social programs like welfare, subsidized housing, and public health care support those rights.
Convert me.
* "Ätheist" is a term approximately synonymous with "weak atheist" invented by a member on convert_me, and commonly employed there. That is why I included it.
Edit 2009-03-19: The convert_me post is here. I have since left the community.
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Tags: journalling, politics, thoughts
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03:14 pm
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The New Junk Email
You know how stock tip junk email has had a sudden surge in popularity? I think I figured out how it might work. See, not only are there (possibly) a few people who would believe such email tips, but there are (probably) some people who would notice these tips and say to themselves, "Hey, if I buy this before all the suckers who believe email stock tips do, I can sell it after the spike for profit!"
Devious!
Current Location: dorm\desk
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch - Brian Eno
Tags: thoughts
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07:55 pm
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Slacking Update
A new rule for myself: I'm not allowed to take a break unless I've been working.
Yeah, the fact that I need this rule really says something about my work ethic, don't it. Not to mention the fact that I'm supposed to be working now.
Current Location: home\parents_bedroom
Current Mood:  sick
Current Music: SFX from other room
Tags: thoughts
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06:20 pm
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Intermeme: Quotes of Myself
From cadhla, here, with slight changes:
Go to the Random Quotations Page and look through the quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe. (If you are large and contain multitudes, feel free to pick ten.) Repost them in your journal, with this information, and with a brief explanation of what the chosen quotes say about you.
(I, for my own part, picked ten, then only included half of them. I like this policy.)
( Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Samuel Smiles, Hugh Elliott, Bertrand Russell, and Jeannette Rankin )
Now, the above has its virtues, but I can't resist adding a couple more quotes from my own stock. Ergo....
( WheelsOfConfusion (what?), William Wordsworth, Sigmund Freud, Robert Charles Wilson, Ralph Waldo Emerson )
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Current Mood:  chipper
Current Music: Another Long One - Shawn Colvin
Tags: books, memes, thoughts
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06:13 pm
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Contrast.
The lights were out in the Metro subway car going home from school.
It's odd. It's easy, in the twentieth-century suburban America in which I dwell, to spend all day under fluorescent lights, with fans and air conditioning, surfing the Internet and reading books, and the Metro – except for the platforms – is normally the same. But just that small change rendered that passage into a gripping abstract drama. The train departs in the glowing light of the afternoon, and sweeps through the suburban greenbelt before plunging into the hillside. The sudden darkness awakens you, and you watch as the regular lights of the tunnel flash by. The sunlight blossoms out on you as you sweep out of the tunnel, and retracts as you return to the earth.
There is something peculiar about the quality of light, some days, some places. Sunsets, with their panoplies of color, are interesting enough, but I've always found the contrast of bright and dark far more vibrant. Objects become pieces, and you're forced to create them for yourself, from the few fragments that light lends existence.
Current Location: home\bedroom\north_desk
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Bitter Sweet Symphony [Radio Edit] - The Verve
Tags: journalling, thoughts
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