The Grand Perspective

What's wrong with the Bill Gates' foray into educational research & reform

2011-12-03T09:39:00.003-08:00

#1 Bill Gates is not an education researcher, let alone an educator, or a researcher.
Don't get me wrong. I love that Bill Gates is identifying education as a key issue to focus on. I love that he is taking an interest in improving education. I am not questioning his motives. Just his methods.

What I hate is that his approach is the same know-it-all attitude that many take towards education and education research. It's the old "I turned out okay, and I know what worked for me, therefore I am an expert on education" approach.

Good ol' Uncle Bill knows all there is to know about education reform

Which would be bad enough if he were just Uncle Bill, telling-it-how-it-is from his comfy chair at a holiday party. But instead, he is using his name to garner authority on a subject he knows little about.

#2 His ENTIRE research program is explicitly based upon students' scores on standardized tests
The following is taken from a recent report by Gates' MET project:

THE THREE PREMISES OF THE MET PROJECT
The MET project is based on three simple premises:
First, whenever feasible, a teacher’s evaluation should include his or her students’ achievement gains.
Second, any additional components of the evaluation (e.g., classroom observations, student feedback) should be demonstrably related to student achievement gains
Third, the measure should include feedback on specific aspects of a teacher’s practice to support teacher growth and development.

NB: "Achievement gains" are edu-jargon for increases in standardized test scores. There are so many problems with this, I don't know where to begin. For one, there is the obvious: these standardized tests DO NOT MEASURE what students are learning. But a more important issue to me is that: THESE TESTS DO HARM TO STUDENTS. And I'm not talking just about "they get stressed when they take tests." I'm also talking about the WEEKS of instructional time lost to testing throughout the school year, and the MONTHS of instructional time lost to test-preparation throughout the school year. I'm talking about the science classes, the history classes, the art classes, which ARE NOT TAUGHT so that reading and math test scores can improve.

This is just a little slice of the Test-Mania inflicting the schools where I make my rounds. I wonder what the kids make of this poster, as they pass it in the hallway every day. And I wonder how it makes them feel.
I know what I think when I pass it: 58.3% is SOARing??

See, the biggest damage done is not from the 5-hour-long sessions of sitting at a desk to take these tests; it is in the life-long damage to the students done by the test-mania they are subjected to in school. At the heart of the issue is the damage done to students' conceptions of what it means to learn something.

As a science educator, I am most concerned about how the tests distort students' views on what it means to learn and to do science. The students take away such distortions from this test-crazed school culture when it is working as it is supposed to. That means under Gates' ideal conditions, students' conceptions of science (and who knows what else!) will be destroyed, or at least distorted beyond recognition. I have seen this first hand in my time in the classroom as an instructor, and as a researcher.

The fundamental principle of educational reform should be the same as it has been in medicine: DO NO HARM. Gates' program, despite its best intentions, is a way of institutionalizing harm to children. This is what happens when you jump from your own biases to institutionalizing them as recommendations. Which brings me to my next wag-of-the-finger:

#3 Gates is jumping right from making assumptions to making recommendations
It's one thing to do descriptive statistics. It's another to make causal claims. But causal claims must be substantiated BEFORE making recommendations. And the research that's already been done must be addressed first.

Yet somehow, Gates decided that he can simply dismiss all the research that shows the positive correlation between small class sizes and student learning (one of the most robust findings in educational research). His recommendation: INCREASE class sizes, so we can force teachers to do more for less, and with less resources to help them do it.

Again, if this were just Uncle Bill ranting at a party it would be one thing. But this is a person who is determining the future of the educational system with billions of dollars of investment in harmful and misguided policies and their proliferation.

#4 He wants traffic cameras in the classroom...
...except instead of being used to issue speeding tickets, they will be used to punish teachers. Big brother, anyone? What a great way to encourage teachers to enter into the profession and stay there (which, by the way, is really the key issue, if you ask Uncle Luke). And by "great" I mean "idiotic."

TEACHERS:

Gates knows when you've been boring, Gates knows when you've been late...

Gates knows when kids are snoring, so give them tests for testing's sake!

Okay, enough ranting. Here is something good I think Uncle Bill is bringing to the table, although he is horribly misusing it: using videos of classrooms to improve instruction & learning. Video of classroom practice can be extremely helpful for teachers, UNDER THE RIGHT CONDITIONS. Larry Ferlazzo has written a wonderful article on how video can be used productively to improve teaching. Mr. Ferlazzo *voluntarily* used video of his teaching in order to have an open discussion with an external evaluator *and his students* about his teaching *in that video* (not to summarily characterize his teaching). That sort of practice has great promise, if you ask Uncle Luke.

What are the lessons to learn from Columbus?

2011-10-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

Was Columbus a hero or a villain?

We all know that Columbus' legacy is a controversial one. Many history books have painted him as an intrepid explorer and overlooked the facts that would paint him in a negative light. Some Columbus scholars have admitted that he encited a devastating genocide, but dedicated no more than a sentence to that fact (see, for example, Samuel Eliot Morison).

So which is it--was Columbus a hero or a villain? And how do we decide? One thing that would be important to determine is what Columbus himself thought he was doing. Perhaps he was trying to do good. Perhaps he did not mean to exploit and kill all those natives...maybe it was his lower officers that took things into their own hands and got out of control.

Fortunately, we have Columbus' log, as well as the log of several of his viceroys, and so we can find some answers to this question. This, for example, is what Columbus wrote about his first encounter with the natives:

They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Well, he pretty much just comes out and says that he is intentionally subjugating them and making them do whatever they wanted. And, also according to Columbus' own words, they wanted them for two things: gold and slavery. So he took many as slaves and set everyone else to the grueling work of looking for gold where there wasn't any to write home about. The working conditions for finding the gold were miserable, and the penalty for not meeting one's gold quota was chopping off the hands and bleeding them to death.

The situation was written about extensively by one of Columbus' appointed governors, Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest who initially took part in the conquest and held slaves and such, but became disgusted by the cruelty of the Spaniards. Here he describes the working conditions for the Arawaks faced under Columbus' rule:

Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... in this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . .. and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. ... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. ...

When Las Casas arrived in the Bahamas in 1508 he documented the unbelievable scale of the devastation:

"there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."

And so the question of whether Columbus' behavior was villainous seems pretty settled, based on his own writings as well as accounts from his officers. What is not yet settled, for me at least, is how Columbus justified his behavior to himself. With his reports to the King and Queen of Spain he could talk of subjugation without needing to explain how that is a good thing. But what was going through his head when he went to sleep each night? Was there any recognition of the evil actions let alone remorse? Did he think he was being a hero? Did he, as a devout Christian, think he was saving the souls of these natives? If so, did he somehow twist this reasoning to render his maniacal methods as somehow forgivable, even noble? Is there a way we can ever find this out?

I don't know the answer to these questions, perhaps nobody does and nobody ever will; but I think it is an extremely important set of questions with which to struggle. You see, Columbus is not the only instance of such a horrible turbulence between two cultures as they newly meet. If anything, subjugation and genocide seem to be the norm of two intersecting cultures, especially in the Americas. The same sort of despicable treatment of human beings, from slavery to torture and genocide, accompanied the missions of Cortes in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and English settlers in English Settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts with the Powhatans and Pequots.

The lessons we learn (or do not) from such conquests could make or break the survival of the Earth, if extraterrestrial beings ever pay us a visit. Is there a way for two cultures to intersect and mutually reinforce each other, or is war and death the only inevitable outcome? Or maybe we will one day venture out to the stars, and we could end up being Avatars, i.e., Columbus 2.0. These are big IF's, of course, but I think it is worth thinking about how we might do things better next time, whichever end of the ordeal we end up on.

Columbus apparently went down a slippery slope, thinking it his spiritual duty to convert these natives and save their souls, which let him to thinking, how better to convert people than by the club, and what makes a better club than a sword? By turning to the sword, Columbus ultimately succumbed to blind and arrogant self-righteousness which nothing--not the absence of gold nor the decemation of an entire people--could snap him out of. Let's learn to avoid this in the future, what do you say, fellow humans?

Electrons have their cake and eat it too...

2011-08-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

A zen monk named Yogi Berra once said, "If you see a fork in the road, take it." Quantum mechanics has shown us that elementary particles, such as electrons and photons, seem to take Yogi's advice. That is, when an experimental physicist gives a quantum particle such as an electron or a photon a choice between two paths, it can take both at once. This is evidenced by an interference pattern that results when you recombine the paths at the other end of the experimental apparatus. The interference pattern shows that not only does the particle take both paths, but it actually "gets in its own way" as it does so!

But it gets weirder. The electron does not always take both paths. Sometimes it takes one path or the other. But this only happens when you try to find out which path it took! In fact, the more you know about the path of the electron, the less likely it is to show an interference pattern. In other words, the electron seems to respond how much we *know* about it! If we set up our experiment to get any "which path" information, it will only take one path. But if we set up our experiment so that we do not know which path it took, it will give an interference pattern showing that it took both paths. So we can decide, based on how we set up our experiment, whether an electron took one path or both paths.

But it gets EVEN weirder! Not only can the experimental physicist decide whether it took one path or both paths by changing how they set up the experiment, but they can do so *retroactively*, i.e., after the electron has made its way through the path(s)!! This is called the delayed-choice experiment. Here is a description from John Wheeler, who came up with the idea:

In the 1970's, I got interested in another way to reveal the strangeness of the quantum world. I called it "delayed choice." You send a quantum of light (a photon) into an apparatus that offers the photon two paths. If you measure the photon that leaves the apparatus in one way, you can tell which path it took.

If you measure the departing photon in a different way (a complementary way), you can tell if it took both paths at once. You can't make both kinds of measurements on the same photon, but you can decide, after the photon has entered the apparatus, which kind of measurement you want to make.

Is the photon already wending its way through the apparatus along the first path? Too bad. You decide to look to see if it took both paths at once, and you find that it did. Or is it progressing along both paths at once? Too bad. You decide to find out if it took just one path, and it did.

The delayed-choice experiment may be weird, but it is not mere science fiction. It was first carried out by physicists at the University of Maryland, where I go to school. Actually one of the physicists who did the experiment works across the hall from the office where I spent most of my time here, Dr. Alley.

Shih & Alley carried out the delayed-choice experiment in the late 1980's using photons, and it has been replicated several times since then. They decided, retroactively, whether the photon took one path or both paths by shifting the experimental arrangement after the photon was well on its way along the path(s), several nanoseconds after it would have had to "choose" one path or the other.

But wait, it gets EVEN WEIRDER!! In principle, as Wheeler has pointed out, this experiment could be carried out using astronomical sources. A photon from a distant quasar, for instance, could have the option of taking two paths towards Earth due to an effect called gravitational lensing. The photon could go straight to Earth or it could be pulled around another path by the strong gravitational force by a galaxy along the way. Since we can still decide whether the photon took one or both paths by how we set up the experimental apparatus on Earth to measure "which path" information or to find an interference pattern, we can decide which path(s) the photon took BILLIONS OF YEARS AFTER it had to have taken them!

Good luck getting to sleep tonight.

A nifty little use of big binder clips...

2011-07-08T18:44:00.001-07:00

It both keeps the toothpaste squeezable and also holds it upright.

I imagine someone more artsy than I could think of ways to improve the aesthetics...maybe some designs with white-out on the black part?

And yes, I am a total nerd.

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A Little Rule That Could Change Your Life Forever

2011-05-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

So, I am such a big dork that I am proud of the way I organize my folders, both real as well as the folders on my computer. If you're like me, your folders have way too many things in there to keep track of visually. It may looking something like this:

Ugh, that is visually daunting. It's hard to see any details or structure for how things relate to each other, and frankly it just gives me a knot in my stomach looking at all the things I'm supposed to be keeping track of in my life. In fact, I'm crying right now.

BUT THERE IS HOPE! I have gotten my files and folders in order, and you can too if you follow one simple rule.

That's right, folks, you heard it here. My organizational system follows one rule, and one rule only. It is a rule that is based on empirically grounded psychological principles of how the mind works. In fact, it is based on perhaps the most robust result in the study of human memory.

Now there is long term memory (memories of childhood, memories of alien abductions, etc.) and there is short term memory (memory of what you just read literally a second ago, weren't you paying attention??). Long term memory is a mystery as wide as the ocean. But short term memory--the memory underlying your attention--is not so daunting. It's at least something we can explore experimentally without having to wait a long time. So, it is attentional memory that is the critical factor here.

Speaking of which, I'm probably losing your attention, so here is the rule: 7+/-2

This is the number of things you can store in your short term memory. And therefore it should also correspond with the number of things in an open folder. Any more than that, it's time to organize it down to 7+/-2. (That's anywhere between 5 and 9, for you mathematically disabled folks).

So here goes the principle in action. Above, you got to see my "2011 Articles" folder (and don't you feel a little closer to me now??) which is way too cluttered. At the bottom of the Finder on my Mac, it actually tells me how many items there are, in this case 25. Sheessh 25 things to keep track of! Too much. So, that made me organize so that there were only 7+/-2 items. And here's the result:

And it took me like 5 minutes, tops. (don't ask how long blogging about it took me...) I just decided to consolidate. First I noticed that several folders could be considered "Discourse Analysis" and so I put them into, of couse, the Discourse Analysis folder that was already there. And then I even realized that I'm really only keeping Discourse Analysis stuff because it relates to my dissertation. SO, I put it in the Dissertation folder. And so on, and so on.

There it is. When your life is feeling full to the brim and hard to keep track of, chances are, your folders are too. And here's the simple rule to fix both: open folders should have only 7+/-2 things in them!

Thank you, goodnight.

Design principle: don't break the stream of the user unless you mean it

2010-08-12T15:06:00.001-07:00

Design principles are often most noticeable when they are violated. You may personally experience frustration as the result of design flaws, and/or on a larger scale you may notice that nobody follows the design.

This came to my mind as I exited a bathroom of a coffee shop in Portland after washing my hands. On the door hangs a sign telling me to use a paper towel to turn off the water.

Uh, too little, too late!

It also tells me to use a paper towel to open the door as I leave. Now, I could either go back to the paper towel dispenser or I could do what I normally do--use my foot or elbow or try to touch the door where nobody else has. Based on the wear and tear around the door handle this is what other people have done, too.

Lastly, it tells me to throw out the paper towel in the trash can. Only problem is, there's no trash can anywhere nearby. That there are no paper towels on the ground therefore suggests that nobody bothers to get them in the first place.

They apparently want the bathroom users to get a paper towel to turn on the water, then go get another one to turn off the water, then another to open the door, then go back in to throw it out. Then another to leave after throwing the first one out. But then go back in to throw the second one out. But then another to leave again...maybe they don't want anyone to leave.

At least, that would explain why there were 37 very confused people in the bathroom spinning around in circles...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:NE Holladay St,Portland,United States

Grilling at the heart of the world

2010-04-20T17:19:00.001-07:00

We tend to think of modern scientists in the reductionist tradition to have thought more deeply about the world than ancient thinkers. Thomas Kuhn, at his most extreme, was convinced that ancient theories were no more or less true than modern theories, just different. Sometimes, when I'm standing under a big tree, with birds chattering, and the moon just as aloof now as it was 1,000,000 years ago, I can convince myself of the same thing. But then I remember it's time to flip over the pork chops on the grill.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:My backyard

Where Have all the Flowers Gone?

2010-02-22T07:27:00.000-08:00

Watching the Olympics this past week has conjured up a lot of memories of various moments in sport that I have found particularly moving. One of my favorite moments was one you probably do not remember. It was 1994, at the Nagano Winter Olympics. This was the much-anticipated Olympics of the Nancy Kerrigan-Tanya Harding drama, when skating had reached new high in the amount of attention from the public by hitting a new low morally and emotionally.

Under the radar was two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt, who had just come back to figure skating that year. Coming into the long program, she -stood in 6th place. Witt dedicated her long program performance to the city of Sarajevo, where she had won her first gold medal 10 years before. (Sarajevo in 1994 was under siege in the midst of the genocidic Bosnian war.) In an elegant and simple dress (in contrast to a lot of the gaudy sparkle-fests worn by her competitors) Witt skated her program with soul, grace, and fluidity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjB17Cn_Hd8

I especially love the ending, 4min into the video--I find it visually stunning and powerful. I think it is noteworthy that the crowd was so taken by the performance, they were throwing flowers onto the ice. Even more telling are the boos and hisses from the crowd when Katarina's abysmal scores were announced. She came in eighth in the long program, because she just didn't do enough triples to impress the judges, like her upstart competitors did.

Why has this moment stuck with me for so long? I think it is because even then, when I was 16, I could sense the irony expressed by Katarina's performance. There was the explicit message that in an age of war and aggression, we should seek peace and beauty. There was also the implicit message sent to the sport of figure skating--in an age when skating had become little more than a triple-axle competition mixed with a reality TV show, Katarina was expressing that it had come at the expense of honesty and elegance.

I think the sport of figure skating has tried harder and harder to become an "objective" sport, under the assumption that the more objective it is, the more you can prove through measurement that one performance was better than another, or that one skater is better than another. I think Katarina Witt's performance at the Olympics in 1994 was one of the most telling reminders for me that the most important things cannot be measured.

I would vote Coakley on Monday, if I were still in Massachusetts…

2010-01-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

…and here’s why.

Of course there’s the health care reform, but we have to remember that this vote for a senate seat, not merely health care reform.

An issue of equal importance, in my book, is education. Coakley’s stances are well-thought out and will make positive changes within the currently wretched policy environment. Brown’s stances are backwards and will only take things from bad to worse.

Being a doctoral student in education, I am particularly passionate about the importance of good education in fostering a stronger nation and a better life for its citizens. Through my studies and experiences, I have come to believe that our nation’s educational policies (ahem, NCLB) have had a lasting negative impact on our nation’s schooling that only promises to get worse unless something drastic happens.

I have been working in schools over the last 10 years as a teacher, as a teacher supervisor, and as a professional developer fostering innovative teaching techniques. I started teaching in 2000, before NCLB was passed, and I felt the winds change. These winds brought in some dark clouds: my efforts at improving education have been continually (and continue to be) thwarted by the current policy environment. And making positive changes has only gotten more difficult over the past 10 years.

The whole premise of NCLB is misguided, however well-intentioned its writers may have been. The whole idea is that all students, 100%, every single one, will score “proficient” or above on a standardized test by 2016. This is regardless of whether they are: bad-test-takers, severely mentally disabled, rich, poor, recent immigrants (legally or illegally), attend a good or a bad school, have good or bad teachers, have an f’d up home life, etc. This would be a laudable goal, albeit a bit pie-in-the-sky, if only the standardized test had anything to do with what we would really want to call learning and thinking. It does not.

The worst, most idiotic, and most damaging part of NCLB is the “Adequate Yearly Progress” clause. Not only must schools get all students to 100% proficiency on the standardized test, but they must also get better and better scores each year. Highlighting the short-sightedness of this policy, Bush in 2001 ended up awarding both the Blue Ribbon of excellence and also the ‘failing school’ condemnation to the very same schools! There was a USA Today article on it at the time; you can check it out here.

School systems, because of NCLB, are addicted to proving “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP), because this determines the federal funding for the school, and the employment of its administrators and teachers. This prevents any adoption of new curricula or teaching methods, unless they are likely to greatly improve test performance. And guess what greatly improves test performance? That’s right: learning test-taking strategies. So, instead of learning to think, or learning to do science or music or art, or math, or learning to read or right, students are pushed to learn how to take standardized tests. And the problem is, the test-taking strategies are in fact improving their test scores! But at what cost?

Research in education is uncovering a scary picture of how NCLB has affected what goes on in classrooms. Researchers at the University of Maryland happened to be closely studying the activities of the classroom, when right in the middle of their study NCLB was passed and implemented. They were tracking, with PDA’s, the minute-by-minute goings-on in the classroom. They found that, in every classroom they were monitoring, the amount of high cognitive demanding questions went significantly down, and the amount of low cognitively demanding questions and tasks went way up. Now THAT’S scary. NCLB, and the high-stakes testing environment, apparently lowers the standards. How’s that for ‘accountability’? (BTW: This research is reported in the book Test Driven, but be forewarned that it’s very research-y!)

Accountability is a buzz-word that has nearly lost all of its meaning in education, and when a politician mentions it it is because they are trying to sell you something. (Thanks, George Bush!) So, it makes me cringe when Scott Brown makes that the centerpiece of his education platform. He also

vows to fight for standardized testing as a measure of accountability:

Scott Brown’s Education policy statement: I am passionate about improving the quality of our public schools. Accountability and high standards are paramount. I support choice through charter schools, as well as the MCAS exam as a graduation requirement. I have worked to ensure that all children have access to a quality education. I am a strong advocate for the METCO program, which provides lower income students with broader educational opportunities.

Martha Coakley, on the other hand, is looking forward. Not only is education a more important issue to her, but she has sensible plans for actually improving it.

Martha Coakley’s Education policy statement: Martha is deeply committed to public education. As Senator, she will fight to improve teacher compensation, fund programs that connect students to innovative technology and industries, and implement education reform that fosters and rewards innovation.

I encourage you to go to her site and read more about her education policy stances (I would tell you to read more about Brown's stances, but what I pasted was all he had to say.) Here’s my favorite part of Coakley's statement:

Martha supports efforts to move away from measuring adequate yearly progress (“AYP”) based on standardized testing. These tests fail to recognize that all children do not learn in the same way or at the same rate, especially in high-risk schools. By holding schools accountable to this one-size-fits-all standard, many are improperly labeled as underperforming and subject to unfair and counter-productive federal sanctions. Martha supports the use of growth models and indexing systems to focus on tracking the progress of individual students over time.

If you want a senator working for positive change in educational policy, I suggest all you massholes vote for Coakley!!

What’s really happening

2009-12-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

A story about stories

There is a fundamental paradox that we are all vaguely aware of, even if we haven’t quite articulated it to ourselves. Unlike the paradoxes of physics and philosophy, which we may never personally encounter, this paradox resides right under our noses. More specifically, it resides right at the tip of our tongue. It also buzzes incessantly right between our ears, being the fabric out of which even our internal monologue is woven. It is the paradox of storytelling—the holy trinity of the story, its teller, and its audience.

When I say storytelling you probably think of the sorts of storytelling done by professionals such as Twain or Poe, or the kind that is performed to a group sitting around a campfire or a dinner table. And I do mean those; but I don’t mean only those. I mean storytelling as grand as telling the story of our cosmic origins, or as minute as silently but persistently telling ourselves what it is we are thinking about at the moment…and everything in between.

We are all storytellers.

Historians compose stories about civilization, the ideologies and innovations that compete and collaborate to form periods of stability, progress, and revolution.

The press and its journalists compose stories that amount to the history of “now”—events at the intersection of people, their roles, and the motivations that drive them to act according to their roles.

Biologists tell same sorts of stories as historians and journalists; the differences amount to ones of scope, with roles played by very different sorts of characters, the innovations of a much less teleological nature, and the motivations largely being those of survival. But really these are not such dramatic differences after all.

Physicists tell causal stories about particles and their interactions.

Your mind tells stories about you, what you’re doing, what you have done, and what you plan to do.

How many stories are there?

We like to think of history as a continuous stream of goings-on. So much so that we each tend to decide on one story and stick with it, quickly forgetting, ignoring or even deleting versions that don’t jive with it. We all know it’s the winners that write the history books; this is true of the shared history written down in books as well as our personal histories written down in our stream of consciousness. But if you’re really observant, you can sometimes spot multiple drafts of the same story before one get chosen and the other swept under the carpet.

Case in point: the recent protests in Iran (video). There are two major versions of the same events. I’d like you to suspend judgment, if just for a moment, which version you believe. (btw I’m going off this NY Times article)

Version #1: The Iranian government says that western countries helped orchestrated the protests, and that shots from the crowd struck and killed several people, including Ali Mousavi, the nephew of the opposition leader.

Version #2: The people in the street says that the protests were peaceful, but that revolutionary guard soldiers violated the rules of the holy day by shooting into the crowd, possibly even assassinating the nephew of the opposition leader.

These two versions of the story seem completely incompatible. How can one person ever believe both at the same time? How can it be decided which version is a “factual” account of the events? Most likely what will happen is that one group of people will believe one version, and another will believe the other. Whichever story gets believed by more people in the end will survive and become the “official” account, the other will pretty much die away.

What’s the real story, and who gets to tell it?

And now for the paradox.

We all know that there are many sides to a story. And so it makes sense to say that there is no one real story of what really happened. There are only versions of stories, which are unavoidably colored by who is telling them and who they are being told to.

But on the other hand, to say that there is no privileged version of what really happened—there is no plain and simple truth, no bare fact of the matter—seems totally crazy.

I think this paradox, just like any paradox worth its mettle, is inherently unresolvable. But that does not make it a dead end. Keeping this paradox in mind helps us remember that we may always be wrong about even the things we’re most certain of. I think this is a crucial step—perhaps THE crucial step—towards the peaceful resolution of conflict.

viewing the world through googl-y eyes

2009-11-24T15:29:00.000-08:00

Google Scholar search results for "since september 11"

before 9/11/01: 85
since 9/11/01: 9,910

Voting ≠ Democracy (part I)

2009-11-07T18:13:00.001-08:00

What is democracy? I was brought up to think it meant that people got to elect their leaders. But we don't live in that kind of dreamworld. There are so many assumptions that get broken down in the real world.

First of all, who votes? Not everyone. Therefore there is a selection effect. The poorest, which coincides at all times with the racial minority, get left out of the decision making. Furthermore, it is not our vote that determines the most important political position (the president). We vote for members of the electoral college, who then verbally promise that they will vote for who we told them to. And the primaries really mess with the idea of a pure democracy as well.

Second of all, what does your vote DO? The idea is to vote for a leader who will make decisions representative of the people's best interest. But WHICH people--not all the population has the same best interests. And who gets to decide what actions will serve our best interests? The leader determines how to act, and therefore determines WHICH peoples' interests to serve, and HOW to serve them. But these things can seriously diverge from the public's view of their own best interest. George Bush's 27% approval rating is indicative of this. "History will vindicate me" he says. What if it doesn't?? Mugabe in Zimbabwe only legitimizes the votes of the people that are in line with his own best interests--whatever doesn't do that is due to the "influence of the west." How do we draw the line?

Third of all, who do we vote FOR? It's not the president, as I said, it's the electoral college. But for whom do they vote? Not the president, because its not the president who makes all the decisions and policies. It's the presidential cabinet--his advisors such--that really make the policies. The further away from the vote these people are, the more they can diverge from the people's best interests.

Fourth of all, WHY do we vote for them? It's not really their policies and beliefs. It's their name. It's their appearance. It's their soundbites. It's their verbal miscues. There is data to back this all up. Are these really indicators of the best interests of the people?

No, voting does not mean democracy. Voting is one way of getting at the greater principle at stake here, which is the coupling between the voiced needs of the people and the actions of their leaders. Voting is supposed to do this in two ways. (1) it selects leaders that are pre-aligned with the perspectives of the majority of the people, and (2) it puts pressure on the leaders to keep listening and acting for the interests of the people. This latter point is an often-overlooked component these days. In Iraq, for example, the U.S. only paid attention to (1).

We have to ask if voting is the only way of implementing (1) and (2). The answer is no. (1) can be fulfilled by a revolution, for example (see U.S., France, Cuba). Therefore, the U.S. should not consider a country to be a part of the "axis of evil" just because their leader was not elected. China, for example, has elections and they have no regard for the interests of the people. The reason is largely the lack of free press. A free press can carry out (2) more effectively than even voting can in certain circumstances. The lack of free press undermines the principle of democracy in very serious ways. For one, it convinces the people of what their best interests are. One way it does that is it selects and therefore distorts the facts by only presenting one point-of-view; that of the government who are trying to preserve their own best interests. This prevents the public from having the proper grounding in the present to determine for themselves what their best interests are.

Voting and free press I'm sure are not the only aspects of democracy, I'm thinking justice system, educational system, and army and such, but I'll have to come back to those because I am hungry and late for school.

Norton AntiVirus is a Virus

2009-08-21T13:06:00.001-07:00

There is a program that has gained access to my computer without me knowing or wanting it, regularly disrupts my computer's normal functioning, eats up tons of memory, and resists being erased. It could happen to you, too, so I want to warn you to watch out for this horrible, senseless malware. Its name? Norton AntiVirus.

Ironically, Norton AntiVirus was designed to find and destroy programs with just these qualities. I believe the cliché applies here, that you become what you hate.

If Norton AntiVirus now wants to save its own credibility, it must remove itself from my computer.

I'm not holding my breath.

Bass Jam #1

2009-08-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

I was simultaneously testing my microphone and my bass, and I can up with this little improv...how does it sound to you?

coincidence?

2009-06-15T14:44:00.001-07:00

Thou Shalt Not Take the Bible Literally…

2009-05-28T14:45:00.001-07:00

…not if you want to avoid some severe epistemological conundrums, that is.

Some things can't be true

Many people claim to take the Bible "literally," but besides the problem of defining just what "literally" means, there are many reasons to believe that this is not possible—let alone desirable—even for the deeply religious. Here I will lay out a few of the problems you have to grapple with if you claim to take the Bible literally.

Epimenides was a Cretan philosopher whose claim to fame was his declaration that "Cretans are always liars." For centuries, scholars have wondered whether Epimenides, himself a Cretan, was telling the truth when he said that. Paul, in his epistle to Titus, did not seem affected by the paradox since he simply stated that Epimenides' statement is true:

¹⁰For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group. ¹¹They must be silenced, because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—and that for the sake of dishonest gain. ¹²Even one of their own prophets has said, "Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons." ¹³This testimony is true. (Titus 1:10-1:12)

This is a problem. For if it is true that Cretans are always liars, then Epimenides is always a liar, and so he must have been lying. In sum, if his statement is true, then he must have been lying and so it is false, which makes it true because he said they always lie, which makes it a lie, etc. etc. etc.

So, is it true or not? Philosophers tend to say it is neither, preferring instead to call such paradoxical statements as "undecidable."

Paul's statement adds another layer to this problem. Is everything in the Bible literally true? Well, if so, then Paul's statements also have to be true. If Paul's statements are true, then his statement "This testimony is true" is true. If this testimony (i.e. that Cretans are always liars) is true, then Epimenides was always a liar. If Epimenides was always a liar, then he lied when he said Cretans are always liars. So then Paul is wrong. So then the Bible contains things that are not literally true.

Even if you concede that "Cretans are always liars" is not false—it's just undecidable—then Paul is still wrong to say it is true.

Some things aren't supposed to be true (literally)

Maybe you're worried at this point, but don't be. It's okay. The Bible literally says not to take the Bible literally. For example, Jesus admittedly taught much of his important messages metaphorically, in parables. He would explain the meanings of these parables more straightforwardly to his 12 apostles:

And His disciples asked Him, saying, "What might this parable mean?" And He said, "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God; but to others in parables, that `seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.' " (Luke 8:9-10, 21st Century King James Version)

So, if you want to take the Bible literally, it seems you are going against what the Bible literally says to do.

So You Think You Can Philosophize: Episode 2

2009-04-27T15:59:00.001-07:00

This week's contestants, Destro and Cobra Commander, consider whether there can be any critical experiments in science. That is, until their boss catches them.

	There can be no critical experiments in science, if you believe in structural realism.
	There can't be any critical experiment, no matter what your theory, if you ask me.
	Well, that depends on what you mean by critical experiment.
	So what do you mean then?
	I mean an experiment that, if it comes out a certain way, proves your theory wrong. An example would be the 1919 test of Einstein's theory of relativity by observing how far the distant starlight was deflected by the curvature of spacetime around the Sun. If there was no deflection, Einstein would have been proven wrong. That's a critical experiment.
	So it sounds like critical experiments in general have to be defined counterfactually.
	Hmm, I never thought of it that way, but it would be an interesting thing to explore. What do you mean?
	Well, if a theory is successful, it has passed all the experiments, or at least all the trusted experiments, that have been done to test it. If they were critical experiments, then they can only be described as such counterfactually, . I.e. had they come out differently, the theory would have had to be abandoned.
	Okay, but that doesn't preclude critical tests of the theory in the future, does it?
	How do you mean?
	Well, the tests it has passed in the past may have to be counterfactually shown to be critical tests, but there is still the future to look forward to. The theory will be put to more tests. And if it makes predictions that differ from reality then it ruled out. In that case, it was a critical experiment, not counterfactually.
	Okay, yes. But still any passed test can only be defined as a critical test artifactually, right? Can we agree on that?
	Well, it seems so right now, so I'll go with it. But it may happen in the future that something comes to light that would rule it out. Moving on.
	Point noted. So, what was that you were saying about structural realism? I'm afraaid I don't know quite what that is.
	Oh, structural realism? It's a nifty way of looking at progress in science. You see, there is a strange tension in the progression of science. Our numerical predictions are getting more and more precisely verified by experiment. Therefore, some reasonable people say that science is getting us closer and closer to the truth. Or, rather, that science gives us the truth, in ever more fine grained detail.
	Yeah, that seems right to me.
	Ah, but then you have the problem of scientific revolutions. As Einstein put it, "no amount of experiments can prove me right, but a single one can prove me wrong". Now, what do you think he meant by that?
	Well, it sounds to me like he's talking about critical experiments.
	That's right, I think he was talking about crucial experiments in the last clause. But the first clause is curious, isn't it? "no amount of experiments can prove me right."
	He was a very humble man.
	Well, I don't know about that. He also was trying to figure out if God had any choice in creating the universe…not so humble if you ask me.
	Alright, alright. But he's just saying in that quote that his theory will never gain 100% precision. There will always be some uncertainty, so if certainty is your criterion for his theory being "right", then you are out of luck. But that is a very stringent criterion for a theory to be considered "right". Clearly the theory is right, to the extent that your GPS unit has to use his theory to account for your correct coordinates.
	Okay, I see you point. That is one way of interpreting his statement, and now I see why you think he is being humble by saying so. His theory is obviously right to some extent, but he is taking the high road but not claiming to be settled completely. Well, there's another way of interpreting his statement that you may want to hear.
	Let's hear it.
	Okay, so he's saying that no amount of experiments can prove him right, and that one can prove him wrong because he knows that someday his theory will be overturned. He has said as much elsewhere.
	Huh.
	Right. But think about it: his theory was overturning Newton's in a sense, a system of laws that had been taken as gospel for hundreds of years. And yet a single experiment, the eclipse observation of 1919, was sufficient to overturn it. This has happened time and time again in the history of science. A theory is thought to be "right" but then at some point an experiment proves it wrong. So, if it can always be proven wrong at some point, then what does that say about it's chances of being right? Those chances are apparently zero.
	Unless you have the correct theory of everything.
	And that only makes sense if you are a unificationist, I think.
	Huh?
	Nevermind. So, do you see the tension now? On the one hand it seems that are theories are getting us the truth, more and more precisely. Even when a theory is overthrown, its in a regime where the old theory wasn't designed to tread anyway, and the mathematics are continuous by design. Quantum mechanics mathematically reduces to classical physics in the limit of h bar being very, very small.
	I see that.
	But on the other hand, there are radical revolutions of theories, in which the old theory is not continuous with the new. Newton's law of gravitation explained the motions of the planets in terms of gravitational force, which emanated from the center of massive bodies and acted over a cosmic distance. In Einstein's theory of gravity, there is no gravitational force. There is only the local curvature of spacetime that massive bodies follow along in the straightest line that they can. Entities such as gravitational forces that were the main players in one theory are completely absent in another.
	But their roles are still present. Something is still present that makes the planets move as they do.
	In a sense, yes, I think I agree with that. Although a little nagging doubt thinks about Wheeler's book "Spacetime Physics" which says that the natural state of motion in GR is free-float, and it's deviations from the geodesic path that need to be explained. But I'll leave that issue aside for now and just say that I agree with you. For this is what I think structural realism is all about. Science gets at the truth in that we are discovering the true roles, the true structure of the universe. But we may, in individual scientific theories, be getting the players of those roles wrong.
	So scientists are writing a play, and their first performance may have had a bad cast, but the screenplay is still great if we can only find the right actors to play the parts.
	Something like that.
	So back to your original point--how does this preclude critical experiments?
	Well, to follow the play analogy, how can we ever really know if it's the actors that are bad, and not the script? If it's really hard to find an actor that does a role justice, is it a problem with the actors or with the role?
	What do you think?
	Well, I don't know. There may not even be any fact of the matter. But for now, I will assume that there is a fact of the matter and keep running with the metaphor. The director can decide to tweak the script to find a balance with the actor that he's got. Or, more radically, he may take that role out entirely.
	But then you have to worry about whether its even the same play anymore.
	That's true, depending on the role. If the play were Hamlet, and you took out the role of Hamlet, it seems clear that it's no longer the same play. But if the roles were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Then it's not so clear. Perhaps it's the centrality of the role removed that determines to what extent the play has changed. But you agree that it's not an on/off thing?
	Well, I don't know. If you change the main character, for whom the play is named, that seems pretty on/off. What if you took King Lear out of King Lear? Godot out of Waiting for Godot? The silence out of "2:00 of silence"?
	But on the other hand, if you change the other roles there seems to be varying amounts of grey area. What if you took Brutus out of Julius Ceasar? Or just the chorus?
	Okay, so I'm having trouble seeing how this gets back to crucial experiments in structural realism. I got a little lost in the metaphor.
	Fair enough. I can see how that might be the case. I am, after all addicted to metaphor, but that's a discussion for another day. If structural realism says that we have the roles correct, as expressed in the explanatory and mathematical structure, but we get the details wrong about ontological entity filling those roles, then I suppose a critical experiment would be one that puts to the test one of the roles in question. And if all we are ever changing in practice is the actors that fill the roles (gravitational force vs. curvature of spacetime) rather than the roles themselves, then we are never doing critical experiments.
	Wow, that seems pretty weird.
	So if we never put roles on the chopping block, then maybe that means we've had all the roles all along. Which makes me worry that we are just filling out theories constrained by the very structures of our brains.
	Well, you are a worrier...I think that's a big leap.
	How so?
	Well, I'm not sure yet, but I'm trying to work that out. For one, we can't have had all the roles all along. There are new roles introduced by theories all the time.
	How so?
	Well, quarks, for instance. Higgs particles. Fields. We didn't even know atoms had a nucleus until the last 150 years, so how could the role of keeping the nucleus together been around before that?
	That's a good point, but I'm not sure we're talking about the same level as being roles. We might be though. But maybe what I mean by roles is an explanans--quarks play the role of keeping together something that otherwise shouldn't be together. If we didn't think like charges repel then we might never have needed the role that quarks play.
	What about astronomical observations? What role is played by black holes, quasars, things we can observationally detect that we wouldn't have dreamed of before?
	Well, I'm not sure. Perhaps you make a good point. So maybe my worry was misplaced after all.
	I'll give you something to worry about! What is this insubordinance?! Get back to work, you slimes…this, I command!
	Serpentor! I should have smelled you coming.
	Destro, the tricky details of your thesis have to be done by showing when roles were introduced and by showing to what extent they were really put on the line. But that is a task for another day, my friend.
	Long live Cobra Commander!
	Cobra!!

So You Think You Can Philosophize

2009-04-22T13:27:00.001-07:00

This week's contestants, Joey Lawrence and Paris Hilton, discuss free will and causation.

	David Hume said we cannot directly perceive causation, but that's not true. We experience causation all the time.
	Prove it!
	Just wiggle your finger.. (she wiggles it) Now, focus in on that control you feel while you do it. Got it? Now, make your heart skip a beat.
	Hey, c'mon, that's different!
	Yes, and that's precisely my point! You can cause one but you can't cause the other. That's the difference!
	Hmm…that seems sketchy to me. (deep in thought) I got it! I can make it skip a beat. Move over.
	What? Okay, I've got to see this. Don't hurt yourself.
	Don't worry, I won't. (She lies down on her side, feeling her pulse) Yep. Feel it and weep.
	(He feels her pulse) Holy shit, you did it! What's your trick? How do you do it?
	I have conscious control over my heart.
	Shut the fuck up.
	No! It's true. I know that whenever I lay on my right side, my heart tends to skip. It's a correlation I can count on. That's all causation is—correlation you can count on.
	Bullshit! Consciously doing something else that you know will affect your heart is clearly different from consciously controlling your heart directly.
	How? How exactly is it different?
	Well, it's hard to put into words.
	I thought it was supposed to be clear…
	It is, perfectly clear in fact. Something can be perfectly clear without being easy to put into words.
	Like what?
	Well, um…like…like this! Like how it is totally clear how something can be totally clear but hard to put into words, but hard to put into words.
	What the…
	But listen, that's besides the point. The point is, you agree that when you lay down just then, you did it to speed up your heart.
	Correct.
	But you can't speed up your heart without doing that.
	Well, so far as I know right now…
	Yeah, yeah good enough for me. So that's completely different from there being no other actions that you need to perform to make your heart skip other than the very act of skipping your heart.
	Hmmm…good point. But now that I think of it, this is exactly the point I'm trying to make—there's always intervening actions…it's just that some we're so used to that we don't even notice them. Or there's no mechanism for noticing them, because they're so innate.
	But you're always acting in some way, that's my point…you're always causing action!
	No, you're not.
	How are you not?!
	Listen, have you heard of these studies, where they hook up a person's brain stem to an electrode, and using a little electric shock they make the person wiggle his finger. Funny thing is, the person thinks he chose to wiggle his finger! He even reports to the people, "Oh, yeah I just decided to wiggle my finger right then."
	No! Really?
	Yeah really.
	Whoa!! I'll have to check out that study, but if it's true then, damn!
	Yeah, that's what I'm saying! So, what if we're making up the story all the time, whenever something moves? In fact, that's precisely what we're doing! Everything happens according to the laws of physics. They have all the equations they need to predict how everything interacts--it's just the initial conditions that are hard to put into the equation because things are complicated. But they know the laws of the universe, and they know that everything obeys them. So do you. It's just that you have this propensity to make up a coherent story.
	But you're still saying that we choose to make up a story! That's still the causation that I'm talking about!
	No! I'm not saying you choose! The person isn't lying. It's unconscious. Split brain patients do it all the time. They say they intended to draw the drawing they did, and they believe it, too. It's their brain that puts the story together, checking for global coherence. They're listening to the explanation the first time just when you are! And they believe it, even though you, the researcher, knows better about their own actions! It's crazy, but true!
	Well, okay but still you're saying that the story's made up for us by our brain (whatever that could mean) and we are just attributing ourselves as the authors of the actions. Why would the laws of physics dictate that that should be so?
	Beats me, I didn't set it up. That's just how it is.
	But why would we make up a story about some things and not others?
	Why not? We can't make up a story about everything…
	But we only make up a story for actions that feel like we are controlling, like wiggling our finger as opposed to making our heart skip, yourself excluded.
	But the feeling is the story! That's the point! The feeling of control is the story that your brain makes up to keep global coherence.
	Ah, that's just a homunculus. And who tells the brain to tell the story? And who tells the brain-teller? And the brain-teller's teller? It's an infinite regress. As the chain grows, the first person has to know and say an exponentially growing list of people to tell. Even the fourth homunculus down the line has to tell the brain-teller's teller to tell the brain-teller to tell the brain to tell the person that he wiggled his finger, not the laws of physics.
	You lost me.
	Think about it some more. Alright, never mind, I'll just stick with the last step in the process: why would the brain deceive us at all?
	It's not trying to, it's trying to tell the truth!
	And we're back to the homunculus.
	What's the homunculus? Is that some weird philosophy thing?
	Uh, if you don't know, it won't help to have it explained to you I'm afraid. At least not now. Let me go a different route. If it's trying to tell a story, and it always works out to be the most globally coherent story, than doesn't that count as evidence that the story is right??
	You're assuming there's a "right" story.
	No, you're assuming that, and I'm just going with it!
	How's that?
	Because you're saying that there is a correct story—the laws of physics wiggled his finger—and that the person isn't privy to the real story. He's deceived, even if he knows the laws of physics, since he'll never be able to calculate them in time. Hey, that's interesting…if he could calculate fast enough, would he be able to predict his own motions?
	Yeah, I suppose…
	So will he be able to predict that he's going to predict what he's doing?
	You're losing me again, I don't see how this pertains to the argument at hand.
	It just shows that you're still supposing there's a real cause when we wiggle our finger and we are just not that cause…the laws of physics are.
	Okay, so what are you saying?
	I'm saying our body gives us good perceptions of cause. We cause our finger to move, and we feel ourselves deciding to and making that happen. We cannot do that with our heart, no matter how hard we concentrate. The difference is the difference between cause and not cause. Control and not control.
	What about your lungs? Sometimes we control our breathing, and sometimes we don't! Is it an override, or a linear combination of neuron firings resulting in one action, or is it a nonlinear pattern of neuron firings…
	Huh? Well, I don't know. I bet the breathing would be really interesting to study in terms of causes.
	Or swallowing…You only start the muscles during swallowing…the rest happens automatically.
	Yeah, you would know about swallowing, wouldn't you? Anyway, I'm saying that it's wrong to dismiss our biological basis for perceiving cause as 'animistic', whatever that would mean. It's important to take the things we're given and work with that. And we are given a front row seat to the decisions of our own actions. Even if we don't see every one, and sometimes we see things when they didn't happen, we are still remarkably reliable in being right about our own intentions. Not only can we perceive cause, we can perceive a single cause. That's something Hume could never do.
	Yeah, well there's no such thing as a single cause. There's always a whole bunch of causes leading up to the action. For instance, each neuron causes the next one to fire, presumably. But we can't control a one of those!
	That's true, that's a good point. But we can control the lot of them! It's a holistic thing. Besides, we don't have particular individual neurons as intentional objects. We do have the action as an intentional object—an object we can think about. That's the difference, I suppose, or part of it. The action has to be an intentional object, that is, a "think-about-able" thing.
	Well, that doesn't seem right either. If your wiggling finger inadvertently hit a hidden launch button for a nuclear missile while it was wiggling, we have no reason to say that you did not decide to launch the missile. You only decided to wiggle your finger, but your wiggling finger did cause the missile launch. You didn't even have the missile as an intentional object but you did cause it to launch. The finger caused it to launch, but it can't hold any intentional objects in its mind because it doesn't have a mind of its own (despite what your girlfriend says, hey-o!)
	Well, okay, I'll step that back a bit. I guess I'm just saying that actions that start as intentional objects and end as actions are an important case to study, since we see causation from the inside in those instances. Even if it's not perfect--we can be wrong about being the cause of our own actions if, for example, an electrode actually causes our finger to wiggle—there is still a fact of the matter to be determined. Then it becomes a problem of how to determine it, which leads us away from ontology and into epistemology.
	Fair enough. Speaking of which, I have to take an epistemology right now…peace out! (she goes to the bathroom).

Will humans have the last laugh?

2009-04-14T20:56:00.001-07:00

We humans, when looking around at all the creatures who we share the Earth with, have since time immemorial have considered ourselves to be special. The chosen ones. The cool kids. And we've had plenty of good reasons to think so. We use tools, we make fire, we socialize, we have good memory, we have concepts & reason, and, of course, we have breakdancing. Aristotle went so far as to define Man as "the rational animal". It's no wonder, given all of our special abilities, that we have concluded that we are divine, in some sense. We look at the world around us, and we "get it" in a way that a dog or a giraffe does not. We must have something extra that accounts for this awareness—a soul. A divine Creator who considers us to be his finest creation.

The more we have studied science, the more it has challenged our special status on Earth and within the cosmos. Copernicus had to convince everyone that the universe does not revolve around us, literally. We are just one of a handful of big rocks revolving around the Sun. The Sun, it was found out, is nothing but your average middle-aged star. In the last quarter decade, we have found hundreds of planets scattered throughout the galaxy. The more we looking out into space, the more it seems were no more special than a grain of sand on a vast beach. But at least we humans are the king of our little grain of sand, right?

Well…even on Earth we're finding out that humans aren't so special. We've always tried to set ourselves apart from the species we share the planet with, but nearly every unique characteristic of humanity apparently has its example in the animal kingdom as well.

Using the wonders of the world wide internet, something the animals haven't caught onto yet, I have accrued a some amazing videos featuring animals doing things previously thought unique to humans. Enjoy, and thank god for opposable thumbs!!

Tool Use:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg This crow decides to bend a wire into a hook to get some food

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RpOGYYKdaQ This crow figures out it can use a stick to get some food across the cage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfRqYjv9QgA Finally, an octopus that can open my beers for me!

Problem Solving:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySMh1mBi3cI This chimp is smarter than me, I'll tell you that.

Problem Solving by Cooperation & imitation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOrgOW9LnT4 These chimps solicit help to complete tasks they can't do themselves. They also step in to help others, too! Nice chimps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhG-_KsDYTA These chimps keep up with the Jones'—they learn to use a complicated device by watching their neighbors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GOb3nFpewM These dolphins help out the local fishermen

Self-awareness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-pc_M2qI74 Chimps can recognize themselves in a mirror…humans can't do this in general until they're 2 or 3.

Language:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz3sQsTE5tA These dolphins understand 60 words and thousands of sentences, including word order.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN5igku_kGk Wild honeyguide birds, who speak specifically to humans! This is my personal fav...

Play & Laughter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuceywaOUs Rats laugh when they get tickled! I guess we just never knew because we were never really tempted to tickle a rat…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q Dolphins blowing bubble rings & playing with them…very cool!

Culture & Medicine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ghocsuXVVU These chimps have tribe-specific cultural knowledge, including smooching, shaking hands, and herbal medicine!

Symbolic language: These apes not only draw to communicate, they also start fires, play Pac-man…lookout!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8nDJaH-fVE

Defibrillating Capitalism

2008-12-30T13:55:00.001-08:00

Remember the wooly mammoth? It was a large, hairy ancestor of the elephant that thrived during the ice ages. Overhunting and rising global temperatures led to its extinction, but recently scientists have decoded 80% of the creature's genetic code, raising the possibility that we will one day in the not-so-distant-future see one in real life. Will it once again range the Earth freely? No, more likely it will be sustained in a lab or a zoo. Perhaps McDonald's will come out with the McWooly.

Remember the Chrysler auto company? It was a large, hairy ancestor of the Hummer that thrived during the oil era. Gas guzzling and rising global temperatures led to its extinction, but recently the Executive branch of the government stepped in to resurrect it with a $17.4 billion dollar get out of bankrupcy free card. Coincidence? I think not.

Do the recent collapses in the auto and securities industries represent the dying coughs of capitalism? No. Contrary to common belief those industries were not capitalistic, and haven't been for a long time. In that sense, capitalism has been writhing around on the ground for a while. Although they may have been necessary in the short term, the bailouts amount to kicking capitalism while its down.

What should we do? Can capitalism be saved? I say it can, and I have an idea of how to do it...

First, it is important to realize that capitalism works in much the same way as evolution: there is a diverse field of competition for limited resources, and the fittest survive to fight another day. The auto companies, like a lot of old industries, have become big, clunky dinosaurs in the modern era. There is no longer a diverse field of competition, because the car companies offer the same old gas-guzzling crap and if they all fail the government just gives them money anyway.

If capitalism were to work itself out, then we would expect it to happen by new car companies starting up and try something new. If they are fitter for the present economy, the auto startups would take over the market. But there's one problem for capitalism working here: capital. None of the existing companies have the capital to try anything risky (like seriously marketing a hydrogen-cell car) and nobody else has the capital to create a start-up car company. Are we stuck? If so, we are screwed.

There is hope. Another business that is becoming a relic of a bygone age is gold mining. The mines are running out of gold, and it is too expensive to risk digging in new places. Nobody has the capital to create start-up gold mining companies. But one company found a successful work-around. Goldcorp did something completely unprecedented in the gold industry: they made their gold maps public and held a competition in which anyone who could find gold would get part of the treasure. The Goldcorp Challenge worked brilliantly: new sites were found and the company jumped from a $100 million failure to a $9 billion success story.

This is not the only place this worked. Another outdated beast with high production costs is space travel. Until recently, there was no real competition--only governments could afford to send people into space. That is, until the Ansari X Prize inspired 26 teams to spend a combined $100 million dollars to figuring out a low-cost solution to putting a person into orbit. At first, the task seemed insurmountable, but in 2004 Scaled Composites won the prize 8 years after it was announced.

What should the U.S. government do to save the auto industry? Not what it's currently doing. It's giving out free money to the very companies that were selected against by the economy. That's like trying to resurrect the wooly mammoth in our post-ice age modern world. Instead, the Senate should allocate funds towards an H-Prize: $500 million to the first company to market an affordable Hydrogen fuel-cell powered car. Or something like that, anyway…you get the idea!

Making competition based auto payouts would not signal the end of capitalism, but the return to capitalism. It's well worth the shot.

NCLB: No Country Left Behind

2008-12-14T23:12:00.001-08:00

It's 1983. Ronald Reagan initiates project "Star Wars". Michael Jackson's Thriller tops the charts. And America's education scrapes the bottom of the charts.

An educational review commissioned by Ronald Reagan summarized their findings in the document: "A Nation at Risk." It starts off with a bang:

"Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world…We report to the American people that … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people."

Why all the hubbub? The first piece of evidence is international test scores:

"International comparisons of student achievement, completed a decade ago, reveal that on 19 academic tests American students were never first or second and, in comparison with other industrialized nations, were last seven times."

The commission made a few, clear, and urgent recommendations. For example:

School boards should adopt an 11-month contract for teachers. This would ensure time for curriculum and professional development, programs for students with special needs, and a more adequate level of teacher compensation.

It is now 25 years after this broad-sweeping and influential criticism of the American Education System. No Child Left Behind, the most substantial educational policy change in decades is well underway. So how are we doing?

Well, not so great. Shockingly few of these recommendations were ever implemented. And the results in international test scores are still abysmal, as you can see for yourself in this Washington Post article:

International Science Exam Shows Plateau in U.S. Performance

Francis Eberle, the director of the National Science Teachers Association, had this reaction:

"We need to pay attention to the results. We're just static, and other countries are improving. Whether it's global warming, energy production or conservation or homeland security, people need to be able to understand enough to make decisions as a citizen."

What does it mean to be able to understand enough to make decisions as a citizen? That is the crucial question that we need to answer to fix education. So far, our answer has focused too narrowly on the content, and not enough on the context—i.e. what to do with that content and when. The current system is built upon the mistaken notion that information can be disseminated and regurgitated independently of its relevance or actual use. NCLB exacerbates this problem by emphasizing high stakes, across-the-board tests, which, due to outdated theory and pragmatic-economic reasons consist almost entirely of cookie-cutter, decontextualized trivia problems. And even though Obama is following the recommendation to increase teachers' pay, he is doing so on the condition that there will be more "teacher accountability" (read: standardized tests).

Nearly half of Americans don't believe in the theory of evolution. Nearly HALF! This is not a good thing. How does this naïve view persist in this, the era of science, and the era of greater "accountability" and standardized tests? Well, the standardized tests measure whether you know what answer the test-makers are looking for. It doesn't test whether you believe them.

By no means am I endorsing some way of making students evaluated based on their beliefs. That goes against the very principles this nation was founded upon, and really is only a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from Thought Police. Instead, what I am arguing for is to stop worrying so much about the conceptual aspect of Eberle's plea, and more on the epistemological. We need to stop trying to shovel "knowledge" down the kids' throats without ever teaching them how to evaluate it, how to be critical of what people say, to deliberate over conflicting ideas and make a personal decision based on evidence, not rhetoric. These days we still demand that they not question authority, that there is one right answer, that creativity is not an appropriate skill to bring to school. We push harder and harder to standardize our children, when in fact human beings cannot and should not be standardized.

Although it's 25 years later, it still sounds a lot like 1983, to me. Or even 1984.

University of Maryland Water Polo Team on CBSSports.com

2008-12-06T12:33:00.000-08:00

Very few cameras have the temporal resolution to be able to capture and accurately portray my water polo moves on film. A foolish, if intrepid young photojournalist has recently attempted however, and you can check it out by doing the following:

Step 1: Go to http://www.sportsline.com/video/player

Step 2: On the menu on the right, click the option for UWire

Step 3: Out of the videos on the far right, click on "Water Polo Moves East"

Step 4: Make some popcorn

Step 5: Get ready to have your mind blown and your entire outlook on life changed

wordArt7: the dorkiest dork

2008-11-17T19:35:00.000-08:00

Are You Liberative or Conserveral?

2008-09-19T12:21:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time, there were couple mild-mannered, well-meaning political ideologies: liberalism and conservatism. Liberals would have you believe that the government should be utilized to solve problems. Conservatives would have you believe the opposite; keep the government out of our lives and we can solve our own problems. For example, the welfare system was started by the liberal FDR to allocate government money to give relief to the poor, among other things. Conservative critics hold the current welfare system up as an example of "big government" sticking its tail where it don't belong.

The distinction is not, and perhaps never was, so clear cut as either side thinks. Conservatives cry for the government to get out of their lives (e.g. taxes, gun control, welfare), while paradoxically condoning government control of much more personal things like high-stakes standardized tests, wars, drugs, abortions, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. Liberals are arguably just as self-contradictory, pushing for racial, sexual, and socioeconomic justice from up on a pedestal. For example, 72% of all university faculty are liberal, while they work in environments that continue to have severe inequalities in tenure and pay with regard to race and gender.

Recent studies in psychology have started to reveal a new picture of the distinction between conservatives and liberals. The greatest predictor for whether you are a liberal or conservative is the extent to which you feel open to new life experiences. The second greatest predictor is the number of body piercings.

Pop quiz: which of these dudes is a liberal?

Go to http://www.yourmorals.org/ and take one of the quizzes, to see where you stand (don't worry, the site is a legit research site). Far from having political origins, the distinction between liberal and conservative has more to do with one's sense of morality. Conservatives tend to value loyalty to a group, whereas liberals tend to value "fairness" amongst a group. Here is my graph, where green represents my score (blue is liberal, red is conservative):

As you can see, I'm conservrativally liberacious. And part German.

Musicians are underrepresented amongst our national holidays

2008-09-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Holidays are our nation's way of ceremonially celebrating it's most influential people and its proudest accomplishments. They are dedicated to the nation's founders, leaders, influential politicians, and pivotal events.

I think it's safe to say that music is one of the finest gifts to the world that the United States has offered. To quote House Resolution 57, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1987:

Whereas, jazz has achieved preeminence throughout the world as an indigenous American music and art form, bringing to this country and the world a uniquely American musical synthesis and culture through the African-American experience and...makes evident to the world an outstanding artistic model of individual expression and democratic cooperation within the creative process, thus fulfilling the highest ideals and aspirations of our republic...it is the sense of the Congress that jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated.

I suggest that one great way to devote our attention, support, and resources to our native music idioms such as jazz would be to dedicate national holidays to our greatest musicians.

Perhaps for starters, we could make next Tuesday, September 23rd, "John Coltrane Day". John Coltrane was born September 23rd, 1926 in Hamlet, NC. On stage and on record, he traveled deep inside to bring back out for his audience virtuosic and hearfelt "sheets of sound". His music captured the complexities of the experiences and emotions conjured by life in tumultuous times. His music evolved from cries of despair to soothing cries for peace and ascension. His music has not only stood the test of time, it is timeless. He has influenced generations of musicians to search for diligent virtuosity as well as true expression.

Isn't that enough for one day of recognition?

wordArt #6

2008-09-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

Guess who's back in style??

2008-07-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

Back in style:

Truckers! Truckers stole our hearts with their dedication to supply all of our goods while looking stylish and talking cool the whole time.

Ten-four there, Goldie Wang. This is Rubber Duckie. What's your ten-twenty? Over.

Back in Style:

Ninjas! Ninjas are sweet and totally fast. They will kick you in the face and not think twice about it. That's why ninjas are cool again.

3 Facts about ninjas:

1. Ninjas are mammals.
2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

Back in Style:

Pirates! Avast! If'n ye don't think pirates be grand, fine booty, then by the powers you land-lubbers will be fixin' for a taste of the cat o' nine tails. Argghh.

Q: What kind of socks to pirates wear?

A: AAAARRRRGGGGuile

Soon to be back in style:
Pilgrims! Pilgrams are zany and happy-go-lucky, as you can tell by their hats. They love to eat corn, make cornucopias and fire muskets. Fact: A pilgrim can make 3x his/her own bodyweight worth of pumpkin pie in one sitting. That's why pilgrims are going to be the next big thing.

In honor how cool pilgrims are, I hereby declare this Friday, August 1st 2008 to be the first annual International Dress-Like-a-Pilgrim Day!!! Who's with me??

Uncommon Courtesy

2008-07-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

This is my friend's awesome band called Hugo...I'm actually playing bass on this track. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Uncommon Courtesy

Hugo's website: http://www.hugorock.com

When it rains it pours. Here’s why.

2008-05-28T22:59:00.001-07:00

I have been doing a final project in math class on how long it takes a cement square to completely saturate with rain at the start of a rainstorm. Inadvertently, I missed my last class to do gather some observational evidence in Mallorca, Spain.

It was, as a trip, comparable to National Lampoon's European Vacation, and I was Clark Griswold. I will spare you the details expect for a highlight real: it poured rain the whole time, my uninsured rental got keyed, and I ran over Eric Idle while he rode on his bicycle.

The pinnacle (or whatever is opposite of pinnacle, that is) of the madness was when the rental car broke down in the most precarious spot of road ever invented—a hairpin turn on the side of a mountain with a cliff on either side. Actually, with the magic of Google maps, I can show you. It was right here:

Just for fun, here's a contour map, and if you've studied your contour maps (you have, right?) you will see it's WICKED STEEP:

The car battery just died as I was making the turn. Since we were going up a hill, I had to back it down out of the dangerous curve. Since the power steering was dead, I had to back it into the wrong lane. Since it was in Mallorca, we had no working cell phone and thus we had to stop cars by hand to ask for theirs. Since they were all tourists, they didn't have any either.

And since we were in such a dangerous spot, I got to wear a sweet yellow vest (that really tied my whole outfit together) and we had to put up a danger triangle. Here's a pic of me directing traffic in my snazzy vest:

Just when we flagged down the most amazingly nice French couple who offered their help, all of a sudden a lightning storm surrounded us that was so fierce it seemed as if God was trying to personally smite us after a few glasses of Mead.

One thing I noticed as I stopped traffic to (a) prevent a disastrous cataclysm and (b) find a cell phone, I noticed something on that road. It never seemed to be one car that went by, enabling a safe stopping for help. It was always a cluster of cars and buses meeting perilously at the bend in the road, even if it was 10 minutes since the last car came by, making it a completely dangerous situation every time. (wasn't Avis so nice to tell us to just "deal with it")

Why do cars always cluster in the worst possible way? Why do bad things come in three's (or in the case of this trip, bazillions)? I can see 2 answers to these questions:

There could be a selection effect. There may be many cars that go by alone—many bad things that happen in isolation all the time—but since they did not lead to near disaster I didn't notice them as much.

There could be a mechanism at work. In the case of cars, there are always cars that are slower than the average. The faster cars will tend to get stuck behind them, making them all travel together as a clump. In the case of bad things, the first one will put us in a bad mood, which makes it all the more likely that we will see more events as "bad," or worse, even start to make bad things happen.

I think the real answer is a little of both. And the solution is acceptance. At best, you will see less bad things happen. At worst, you won't be able to prevent the bad things from happening anyway, so you might as well accept them so you can move on.

I think Tom Robbins puts it best in his classic Another Roadside Attraction. The narrator notices how Amanda and John Paul Ziller walk through the Seattle rain:

"They strolled calmly and smoothly, their bodies perfectly relaxed. They did not hunch away from the rain but rather glided through it. They directed their faces to it and did not flinch as it drummed their cheeks. They almost reveled in it. Somehow, I found this significant. The Zillers accepted the rain. They were not at odds with it, they did not deny it or combat it; they accepted it and went with it in harmony and ease. I tried it myself…I got no wetter than I would have otherwise, and if I did not actually enjoy the wetting, at least I was free of my tension. I could even smile."

And so we tried, on that precarious bend in the road, to smile. And the French couple that was helping us smiled. And more people stopped to help us. In fact, one of them road over our danger triangle and destroyed it. Instead of thinking, "oh great", we laughed. Eventually Avis came around and gave us a new rental. We made it to the top of the mountain, and the clouds broke, offering us one of the most amazing scenes I have ever taken in.

I think the answer, expressed in its most direct form, was taught to me as a poem by my father when I was young:

Smile a while
and while you smile

another smiles
and soon there's miles and miles of smiles
and life's worthwhile,
because you smile.

More Brilliance from Microsoft

2008-04-24T19:28:00.001-07:00

I was just trying to open Powerpoint, but it froze when this dialog box popped up:

I wonder if this dialog box knew that it was the very dialog box that prevented me from opening Powerpoint...hmmm...

Clearly someone at Microsoft is a big fan of Catch 22. I am not making this stuff up I swear!

Fear Hillary!

2008-04-22T18:58:00.001-07:00

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
~Plato

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself

I used to be pretty undecided about who I wanted as our next president. I am not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor Republicrat. I do not follow a dogma, but rather prefer to think carefully through each issue, look at evidence, hear arguments from all sides, and make up my own mind as much as possible. In the end, I am conservative about some things, and liberal about others. So, I have tried my best to go based on the actual priorities and stances of the candidates in this election.

First step, I tried going to the websites of the top 8 contenders from both parties early on, in order to get a good take on their priorities and stances. No luck. It was all glittering generalities like, "I am for the children" and other teary-eyed hogwash.

So then I watched all of the major debates of both parties, in order to get a sense of their policies. I decided that my priorities and stances seem to line up rather well with what Obama, Clinton, and Edwards were saying; basically that we need to pull our priorities away from a baseless war and get them back on problems such as education, poverty, civil rights, and dismantling militant networks such as Al Qaeda. That is pretty much the opposite of what I took most of the Republicans to be saying.

That left me stuck between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. Well, Edwards dropped out, so one down, one to go.

Lately, Clinton helped me make up my mind. She has demonstrated that she will stoop as low as she needs to in order to sway people's votes based on fear and negativity. This was capped off yesterday with her last ditch effort to appeal to the rural population of Pennsylvania: an ad meant only to instill fear in order to gain political credibility. As the quote from Plato implies above, this type of evil manipulation is as old as politics itself.

Watch the ad here:
Clinton's "Kitchen" Ad

Displaying images of the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the 1970's gas hike, and Osama bin freakin' Laden, among other things, does nothing more than try to conjure up negative emotions in the viewers.

The only claims being made in the ad is that being president is "the toughest job in the world," that you "need to be ready for anything, especially now," while showing a video of what people really seem to fear the most—the digits of the gas prices going up on the pumps, in fast forward no less.

The video closes by asking "Who do you think has what it takes?" What is the point of the ad? Since there are no real claims made, no evidence cited, and no policies even hinted at, it is clear that the only message to the viewers can be "you need to be afraid, and vote for the candidate that will ease your fear."

Kind of reminds me of this ad, from another candidate who punched people in the gut in order to get elected: "Changing World" Ad, oh, and this one: America!

This is based on a common theme that has been used throughout history to win elections; that today's world is a dangerous place and candidate X is the one who 'has what it takes' to save us.

What war hero General Douglas McArthur noted in the past is just as true today:

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."
~General Douglas MacArthur

I have decided I don't want to vote for more of this fear crap. This leaves me with two questions in order to decide who to vote for…

#1 Is Obama Any Better?

Now, Obama is trying to punch you in the gut too, with his messages of Hope and Change. EVERY dang politician EVER has said, "Blahblahblah what we need is CHANGE blahdiblah rabble rabble." I don't know how Obama cornered the market on Hope and Change, but I DO know that Clinton and others have literally and verbally conceded this to him. That is perhaps WHY Hillary has gone to fear, in a last ditch effort to corner ANY market. And when it comes to choosing between hope and fear, I think Bill Clinton has said possibly the only sensible thing of his life:

"If one candidate is appealing to your fears, and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope." --Bill Clinton

#2 CAN we have hope, or SHOULD we be afraid?

The candidates have agreed that we are voting between fear and hope. Which one should we actually be feeling? Perhaps Hillary and the Republicans are right. Maybe the world is going to shit and we need to vote for the only one that can save us. I'm pretty sure it would be Indiana Jones. Maybe Luke Skywalker.

It sure seems like the world is crazy and only getting crazier. Is there any evidence of this? Well, it seems there is. We can get a sense of how the danger in the world is changing by examining, for example, the change in the risk of the average person dying in a war, or by murder, or by state sanctioned violence. By all of these measures, the world is a much safer place than at any time in history. Moreover, the present United States just about the safest place in the history of the world.

If you're interested, here is an interesting talk that argues this point very well and displays some of the evidence: A Brief History of Violence

Why do these politicians claim that the world is getting more dangerous? One reason is that they actually may believe it. It's hard to imagine that they would so blatantly lie to so many people, but it would certainly not be without precedent. Another is that they know that the American people believe it—the press has seen to that.

Whether politicians believe in this fear or not, certain politicians believe it is in their best interests to utilize the fear. Hillary has just shown that she is one of these politicians. If we are to believe what Obama says, he is not. In that case, the only thing Hillary has to fear is...not enough fear.

T-Shirt Design #3

2008-04-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

T-Shirt Design #2

2008-04-08T20:11:00.001-07:00

If you want one, I'll kick your name and take your size.

Shame on you, Ben Stein (part 1)

2008-04-01T18:57:00.001-07:00

I just gave in and clicked on one of the advertisements that gmail subtly displays while I check my inbox. What I saw when I clicked it was so disturbing that, against my better judgment, I will discuss it here since chances are you will probably hear about it anyway from other sources.

Ben Stein, THE Ben Stein, i.e., Ben "Beuler? Beuler? Anyone? Anyone?" Stein, former speech writer for two U.S. Presidents and former Emmy-winning game show host of an entertaining know-it-all game show, has made an anti-Darwinism "documentary" style movie that is set to hit theatres soon. What the?

For many months, I didn't click on the link that taunted me by saying, "Expelled – Ben Stein - www.Expelledthemovie.com - Why is Big Science suppressing the evidence of Intelligent Design?" It was the "Ben Stein" part that first caught my eye. "Why is Big Science suppressing the evidence of Intelligent Design" part did not catch my eye, because in my time on the internet I'm used to seeing such ridiculous statements all the time. But then what really caught my eye and made me click on the link was the fact that Ben Stein and this ridiculous statement were for one and the same link. Surely, they mean some crackpot religious zealot that happens to be named Ben Stein—they don't mean THE Ben Stein—the intellectual and hip pop-culture icon Ben Stein, right? Wrong.

Creationists used to make me really uncomfortable. I used to get in heated debates with them until we were both literally red in the face. This is no longer the case. I have gained some understanding of a few things. The first that I realized is that I cannot, by arguing with them at a Starbucks, convince a creationist to a doctrine that they perceive to be completely at odds with what they believe. The second, and more important, thing that I realized is that it makes sense to me that certain people are creationists. If you believe that God created this world, AND you believe that the Bible is the immutable word of God, AND you take all the words of the Bible at face value, THEN it seems you must believe that the world was created about 10,000 years ago. And if the purpose of life is to fulfill God's will, than what could be more important? It now makes sense to me why certain people believe their religious beliefs over their scientific beliefs, even if I don't see it that way.

Am I a little surprised that Ben Stein, presumably a gifted and intelligent academic, is a creationist? Yes, a bit. But in my eyes, that does not make him a zealot or an idiot. You can be plenty rational, plenty intelligent and be a creationist.

What I am appalled at is the message Ben Stein is about to send to millions of viewers, that Darwinists are getting defensive because they are 'hiding something.' What I am even MORE appalled at is the fallacious propaganda he is using to send this message. And I do not use the word propaganda in any hyperbolic sense of the word; I mean it quite literally and seriously. It is disgusting.

Let's take a look just at the advertisement itself, shall we? "Why is Big Science suppressing the evidence of Intelligent Design?" This alone already contains at least seven clearly identifiable propaganda techniques. Let's spell them out, shall we? The first is a fallacy known in the practice of law as the "loaded question" or "presupposition of a question". In Walton (1989, p. 28), a presupposition of a question is defined as a proposition that is presumed to be acceptable to the respondent when the question is asked, so that the respondent becomes committed to this proposition when he gives any direct answer. A good example of these would be to ask a witness, "Are you still beating your wife?"

But wait, there are more fallacies. The phrase "Big Science" reeks of the techniques of ad hominem, the technique of attacking the opponent rather than their ideas. It would be the equivalent to if I had decided to refer to Ben Stein in this article as B.S. (which I was tempted to do…) The idea that "Big Science" is "suppressing the evidence" also relies on the techniques of "appealing to fear", "common man", and "demonizing the enemy." Big Science is not even a real entity, just a propaganda placeholder for "science." The phrase "Intelligent Design" itself utilizes the propaganda technique of "virtue words." See the links at the bottom of this page if you'd like more details on what these propaganda techniques entail.

So far, we've only talked about the advertisement banner, and we've seen how Ben Stein is "aiming below the belt" to convince people without facts. He has presented it in such a way that facts aren't even on the table for discussion, only emotions. But granted, all I've discussed so far is an advertisement banner, and such banners are notorious for saying controversial things to get you to click on them. Perhaps the movie trailer will be different?

Nope. It's much, much worse. Take a look at it for yourself…I'm going to comment on that trailer in the next post…TO BE CONTINUED...

Please Comment!

2008-03-31T17:47:00.000-07:00

So, I realized I mistakenly had my blog set to only accept comments from those with a Google account. I have now disabled that feature, so now ANYone can comment.

I would love to hear what you think!

please wait

2008-03-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

Recently, my computer froze as a mysterious box appeared from an unknown program:

Apparently the program is entitled, "Please Wait" and its main operation is to ask you nicely to wait. I wonder what happens if I cancel...do I still have to wait?

This hereby confirms my theory that Vista was programmed by Monty Python.

What a Bunch of Caucus

2008-03-18T13:14:00.001-07:00

Demockracy.

You may or may not have heard this, but just in case I thought I would bring it to your attention. The voters in Florida and Michigan did not get to choose their democratic presidential candidate. A few years back, the Democratic National Party revised the timing of presidential primaries and caucuses, setting February 5^th for the earliest possible date (not including Iowa and New Hampshire). This revision also laid out the penalties for violating the timing—a state going too early will forfeit their delegates. And in case you slept late during this lesson in American Government class, we, the people do not actually vote for presidential candidates. We vote for delegates.

I was stunned to learn that the legislatures of Michigan and Florida then passed bills that set the date of the primaries in January, in full knowledge that this was against the rules! I was so confused by this that I felt compelled to do a little investigation of my own. Whose fault was this violation of democracy? Did these states just not get the memo?! Was the national party's language ambiguous, lending itself to be misinterpreted?

What I have found out so far has shocked me even further. They did get the memo, they knew they would forfeit their delegates, and they voted overwhelmingly to do it anyway. Here is a little snippet from the report of a House committee, headed by republican David Rivera, that was considering the date-setting amendment to their bill:

As most observers of presidential politics would agree, national conventions in the modern era have become proforma exercises organized to coronate a pre-determined presidential nominee rather than a genuine selection or nomination process where the outcome is in question. The role of a delegate in a modern day political party convention has been relegated to that of rubberstamping the decision made in each delegate's respective state during that state's presidential primary. Under these conditions, priority should be placed on the role Florida will play in selecting a presidential nominee rather than on the opportunities for a select few Floridians to attend a national convention.

After I read that, I felt sick. Not only did these congressmen purposefully forfeit the people's say in the election, they did so based on faulty reasoning!! A little demonstration will help here to illustrate just what I mean:

A couple of riddles
As a student of science education, I have learned a very important lesson—intelligence is context dependent. Let me give you a quick and dirty example of what I mean. Here is a puzzle that is supposed to judge your 'logical reasoning ability'. There are four cards, each with a number on one side and a letter on the other. The rule is: if there is a vowel on one side of the card, there must be an even number on the other side. Which card or cards must you turn over in order to check that these cards follow the rule?

If your answer is to just turn over the card with "E" on it, you are wrong. There are some who assess your mistake to mean you have deficient logical reasoning skills. Don't worry—this claim is wrong, and I can prove it.

Here is another riddle: you are a bouncer at a club where everyone is required to carry a card with their age on one side, and their drink on the other. In America, the law says that if someone is under 21, they must have a non-alcoholic beverage. Which card or cards must you turn over to make sure that everyone is following the law?

Easy huh? Now let me call your attention to the fact that these two puzzles are the SAME puzzle! Perhaps you can answer the first one now…but even if you still can't that's beside the point. The point is that reasoning becomes much easier when you are familiar with the topic.

A political riddle:

Here is another puzzle for you. Point out the error in the following line of reasoning:

Beavis: "The higher the payroll a baseball team has, the more likely it is to win a World Series. Take the 2007 Red Sox, for example—they had a payroll six times that of the last place Devil Rays. Therefore, in order to win the World Series, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays should give each of their players a six-fold raise."

Answer: Duh, Beavis. If there is only one lesson from statistics that you learn it should be this: Correlation does not imply causation!! The Red Sox paid more because, on average, they had much better players! That is the real cause behind the correlation—having good players is what really increases your chances of winning. Just paying the Devil Rays' crappy players more won't make them better (in fact, as Mo Vaughn taught us all, it can make them much worse!) The Devil Rays would have to get better players in order to win, which will most likely also cause a higher payroll.

Now compare this with the reasoning provided by Florida's House of Representatives for moving their primaries to a date that would strip them of all their delegates:

Butthead: "In the last two presidential elections, Florida has been one of the few states that have closely mirrored the final nationwide results.Florida's presidential election results for 2004 were Bush 52% and Kerry 47%. The national results were Bush 50% and Kerry 48%. This means money spent to win the Florida primary will also benefit candidates in the general election."

Butthead, oh, sweet, ignorant Butthead. When will you learn? Correlation does not mean causation!! You've made essentially the same bonehead argument as Beavis. Don't be embarrassed, others have made it too—it's called the fallacy of common cause. Here's another example: "The more firemen fighting a fire, the more damage there is going to be. Therefore, we should send less firefighters to all fires."

Here is the Floridian line of reasoning, which has more than just the common-cause fallacy wrong with it:

In the last two presidential elections, the state results were kind of similar to the national results.
Therefore, in order to win the national election, you need to spend more money to win the Florida primary.
Therefore, the Florida primary should be sooner.
As long as they are sooner, they don't have to actually count.

You don't have to be a logician to see how ridiculous that is.

Now, it would be understandable for a non-politician to get tripped up in the loquacious world of legislation, just as most people get the "S 20 E 13" card problem wrong. But these are politicians!! This is their world! This should be like the "Coke 16 Scotch 52" problem for them! Therefore, I have just proven that, even when accounting for context-dependence, Floridians are all idiots. Modus ponens.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

2008-03-14T09:38:00.001-07:00

Red Sox vs. Yankees

If you have ever had the pleasure to be at Fenway park for a Red Sox vs. Yankees game, you will know that there will up upwards of 10 fistfights that break out by the end of the game. Of course 10 out of 10 fistfights are between fans of the opposing teams. (and 10 out of 10 of the arrested fans are Yankees fans...but I digress)

Why is it that Red Sox fans don't fight each other? Is it because we are all the same, that we live in peaceful harmony, always agreeing with each other and never arguing? Nope. During a typical game, while sitting rather peacefully in my seat, I will have beer spilt on my by some drunken jerk, have my view blocked by some idiot standing up in front of me to take 12 pictures, and have chewed peanuts sprayed on me by the lady in the seat behind me who's yelling, "A-ROD'S AN A-HOLE!" But I love them all, because we are all Sox fans. We have laughed, cried, screamed, cried, and rejoiced together. We have sat, stood, and kneeled and prayed together. And that shared suffering, that shared jubilation, unites our souls forever, and any adversary from New York or otherwise be damned.

You may have noticed the resemblance between the scene I have described and a typical Catholic mass. In fact, the similarities cut deep, very deep…

Creationists vs. Evolutionists

The only place I have been to that rivals the childish fighting between Red Sox and Yankees fans has been at a meeting between creationists and evolutionary biologists. They screamed at each other, pumped their fists in the air, stamped their feet, and I heard almost every insult short of "Oh yeah, well you're a poop-head!" hurled from each side. The reason for this fighting is much the same as the brawls at Fenway. Each side, through their shared dreams, hopes, and experiences of suffering and jubilation, has constructed a shared worldview that cannot be questioned.

One common criticism that has always been raised against science is that it offers a cold and belittling picture of our insignificant place in a mechanistic universe, while religion puts humans at the spiritual (if not physical) center of a warm, vibrant universe that was given to us as a gift. I'm here to say that it doesn't have to be this way!

Who Created Whom in Whose Image?

Each person's view of God tells you more about that person than it ever could tell you about God. Ever notice how only funny people claim that God has an infinite sense of humor? Or that the embattled and persecuted Jews from the Hebrew Scriptures viewed their God as testy, vengeful, demanding, and at times almost irrational? Or how the ancient Greeks, as they uncovered the wondrous insights of geometry, mapped these principles into their view of the Heavens and the Earth's place at the center of the Celestial Spheres?

I think the reason that science is perceived to give a cold, mechanistic view of the universe is for much the same reason--this is the view that was held by the cold, impersonal scientists who came up with the big theories. Newton, for example was reported by those who knew him to be a misanthropic prick. It is only natural for such a pompous genius to assume that universe must conform to his own values of logic and mechanism—hence the clockwork universe that needs no further care once set in motion.

I argue that this bleak picture of the universe is really not indicative of science, but rather of the scientists who conceived it. It doesn't have to be this way. Whether you believe in God or not, I believe science can paint a picture of the universe every bit as wondrous and welcoming as that held by believers. All it takes is a change in perspective.

Tiny, but Not Insignificant
The more we study the universe, the more we find out how small we are compared to it. Space is mostly, well, space. If the Sun were the size of a grapefruit, then Earth would be a pencil point 30 feet away. Pluto would be in the next town, and you’d need a microscope to see it. The nearest star would be another grapefruit, on the other side of the country, with nothing in between. Once you realize how much nothingness there is in the universe, it makes it really special that we are part of something.

We, all of us, are on the same little blue speck of dust, hurling around a little bright dot on the far reaches of a dinner plate hurling through an infinite space at unimaginable speeds. What if there is nothing else; no afterlife, no spiritual realm—what then? Then that would mean we were all in this together, this 'life' thing, with all the joy, suffering, love, and pain that comes along with the human experience. We are all rooting for the same team. If nothing else, can't THAT make us get along??

Tee Shirt Design #1

2008-03-11T16:59:00.001-07:00

Thoughts in Honor of Einstein's Birthday

2008-03-08T14:19:00.000-08:00

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

I have heard this quote often attributed to Einstein, but I've never heard it in its original context. I'm not sure which of the two options he meant to be 'better', if either of them. However, it does seem to me that at least implicitly, he lived as though nothing is a miracle. That is, he at least did science as if everything is explicable in terms of the elegant yet strict laws of nature.

His theory of relativity took away the miracle of gravity. To Newton, it was a miracle that masses exerted forces on each other; and moreover that the very masses that create the force of gravity also resist it proportionally. Why should the universe conspire to make sure everything falls at the same rate?? For Einstein, this was no miracle. Nor was it a miracle that even light was bent by gravity. It was inevitable. The curvature of spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to curve. Both oblige eachother, with no choice in the matter, so to speak. That is why, on the eve of the solar eclipse that would determine whether he was the greatest scientist of his day or whether he was just plain wrong, he went to bed early. If the observation went against his prediction, he quipped that he "would have felt sorry for the Lord--the theory is correct!" And, of course, it is.

Perhaps the only miracle in Einstein's universe was the fact that the laws he discovered were so simple. G=8*pi*T--that's it! This elegance fascinated him: "The only incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." But he was not content to concede this as a miracle, either. He spent the last decades of his career trying to unify all the known forces of nature into one ultimate law. His ultimate goal in this program, what really interested him, was "whether God had any choice in creating the universe." If his program had succeeded, then perhaps the answer would be no, he had no choice. The equations determine everything.

That seems to me to be precisely why Einstein hated quantum mechanics so much. The laws of nature don't determine where the particles are or where they go; it's pure chance. Thus, he was forced to treat each and every moment as if it were a miracle. Or rather, 10^83 miracles. "I don't believe that God plays dice with the universe." That would mean that God had--and continues to have--no choice in creating it, no choice in how it all unfolds. This seems to weigh against the point I was making with Einstein's quest for unification, but in this case even the equations didn't determine everything, and that's what really bugged him. But on the other hand, if even God doesn't have a choice in the matter, would that be the ultimate miracle??

best hair EVER.

2008-02-04T13:23:00.001-08:00

I don't know if you've heard the legend of Lee Ritenour...everything he touches turns to hair.

wordArt episode 4.

2008-01-19T19:29:00.000-08:00

wordArt episode 3.

2008-01-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

wordArt episode 2.

2008-01-17T00:52:00.000-08:00

A victory for the common folk

2008-01-11T16:05:00.000-08:00

Warning: this post is a weblog-rant, aka a "blant." Read at your own risk.

Fact: You are an organism made of tens of trillions of cells--microscopic organisms that have no idea who you are and couldn't care less about your needs.

This is the concept of an emergent property--a quality possessed by the whole but not by its parts. The property of 'you-ness' emerges out of the interactions of trillions of you-less cells.

Fact: Sprint PCS an entity is made of thousands of employees--macroscopic organisms that have no idea who you are and couldn't care less about your needs. But out of the scripted interactions between these employees emerges a company that knows and cares who you are to the extent that they want all of your money with as little in return as possible.

The way Sprint PCS treats customers is pure evil. However, to blame any individual employee for this evil would be like blaming an isolated skin cell in your arm for punching that hobo down by the railroad tracks (yes, I know about that, you sicko). Sprint made the genius move of hiring so many employees that when blame is distributed amongst them, it is such a thin layer of guilt that they can simply brush it off their shoulders as they disconnect you. Any amount of blame, divided by infinite, equals zero. So, the only entity left that you can be mad at is Sprint PCS, which takes the form of a 1,000 foot hydra made of smoke. Very hard to fight.

But, I have fought. Through a brave display of calm-headed civil disobedience (i.e. a very sophisticated form of laziness and avoidance), I have fended off the evil empire and restored peace throughout the land. Let me briefly summarize the epic battle:

It all began on a night just like this. I had finally gotten the phone I ordered from sprint.com, which was 100% satisfaction garaunteed for 30 days...what's the risk? I followed the instructions, using the phone to call the toll free activation number. The first person couldn't activate it, so I was transferred to an activations manager. They could not activate it, so I was transferred to a managerial manager. They also were unable to activate me, so I was transferred to the boiler room of one of Sprint's Indiana offices...which ironically was the most helpful department to this point. They couldn't activate my phone, but they knew who could, and they transferred me to the Great Wizard.

"WHO DARES DISTURB MY SLUMBER?!" bellowed the Great Wizard.

"It is I, Sir Luke" I answered, trying to maintain a facade of self-confidence.

"WHAT IS YOUR QUEST?!" the Great Wizard's voice was like a thunderstorm.

"Oh Great Wizard, I humbly seek to activate my new phone."

"WHAT IS YOUR 13 DIGIT ACTIVATION CODE?!!"

"I don't know, your majesty. Forgive my ignorance, but where can such a number be found?"

"WELL, INSIDE THE BATTERY CASE OF YOUR PHONE, OF COURSE!"

"The very phone that I was instructed to use to call you, oh Great One?"

"YES, FOOL, THE VERY PHONE WITH WHICH YOU TALK TO ME NOW"

"Oh, dear. So you're telling me that I have to hang up, after nearly an hour and forty-five minutes of being transferred around, in order to get the number to activate my phone, so that I can call back and wait another hour to be transferred back to you, oh great one, in order to activate my phone?"

"YES."

"Why don't we just call this whole thing off. I'll send my phone back to you & get my money back."

"FOOL!! YOU MUST WAIT FOR THE ILLUSTRIOUSLY DIVINE RETURN KIT AND CALL US WHEN YOU HAVE THE UPS 13 DIGIT TRACKING NUMBER BEFORE YOU CAN SEND THE PHONE BACK! YOU ARE HENCEFORTH BANISHED!!"

And so I waited for the illustriously divine return kit, which surprisingly never came. After trying to sort this whole mess out with at least 27 different employees, after 8 hours of phone calls (70% of which were disconnected) I was told to just send the phone back myself, without the illustriously divine return kit, and keep my fingers crossed.

The next correspondence I got concerning the matter was from a debt collecting agency. They sent me weekly phonecalls and bi-weekly emails threatening to pummel me, stab me, and even make me watch reruns of Alf until I give them $167.23 immediately.

I could write a book about all the fruitless phonecalls I made to resolve this matter, but the short version is that there were a lot of them, and they were epic in their fruitlessness.

But a New Year's miracle occured: a voicemail from Sprint on New Year's Day said that my debt would be essentially cut in half, with no particular reason cited.

Finally, this week, I was sent my final bill. (This was my 7th final bill to date...but I digress). It's hilariously mysterious contents, whose hilarity is surpassed only by their mysteriousness, are included below. Note the strange list of random deductions less than a dollar. However, the real interesting part is the "good will" credit. At last, we return to today's lesson...that amongst the interactions of countless employees completely devoid of good will, good will can emerge. And that's all I have to say about that.

quote of the day

2007-12-14T18:54:00.000-08:00

"...it's inevitable that we've got to bring out the question of the tragic mixup in priorities. We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development...when the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

1st Annual Daily Random Google Image of the Day #5

2007-12-09T19:35:00.000-08:00

word: dumb.

wordArt episode 1.

2007-12-02T20:51:00.001-08:00

1st Annual Daily Random Google Image of the Week #4

2007-10-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

Word: Poker Monkey

Band Name Generator Algorithm

2007-10-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a homework task for you all. Find two words that, when "Googled", don't have Wikipedia show up on the first page of hits. My friend Brian discovered the fact that this is suprisingly difficult, and since then we have each taken the challenge many times...

I have concluded that whatever two words pass the challenge will end up making a pretty darned good band name. Here are my results so far:

Detroit aardvark
Book fart
Justice Amnesia
pascal's drummer
Young Tater
Sandman Junky
shark snark
Boojum Salad

To complete the challenge, make a new wikipedia page for your new band.

1st Annual Daily Random Google Image of the Week #3

2007-10-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

Google word: Hero

gaijin

2007-10-20T17:20:00.000-07:00

Now Herbie Hancock, that is a poet.
The fucker makes notes on the piano rhyme.
Like a stupid-eyed tourist I
wandered through his music for a while,
but the damn notes kept bouncing off my heavy head.

But then, something happened.

I hear Jesus knocked Saul off his horse
with the word of God, and like that
the words started pouring over me
as he ran up the scale and
down in fourths.

The form, the voice, all became apparent;
I wandered blindly, mouth open
like a gaijin who could hear
but not speak.

A perfect night

2007-10-20T17:13:00.000-07:00

We met on top of a Cosmic Ridge
where fog poured slowly over the bridge
until the lake was full.
My face turned up to meet the sky and
you had nearly passed me by
when I came back to say goodbye
that night was wonderful.

The silky form of the Milky Way
was a path worn out of the simple way
our ridge had touched the sky;
as you pulled up with your bottle of wine
what touched your lips will soon touch mine
as we succumb to a night divine
on top of a Cosmic ridge.

I've never seen your face in light,
just carved by fire or starry night,
which makes me think that I just might
see you again someday.
For you cannot just be a dream--
for all the crazy ways we seem to meet
I know I'll always now you
cosmically.

1st Annual Daily Random Google Image of the Week #2

2007-10-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

1st Annual Daily Random Google Image of the Week #1

2007-10-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

A reluctant, and hopefully wrong, prediction

2007-10-17T20:02:00.001-07:00

Recently, China has warned the U.S. against hanging out with the Dalai Lama, with the threatening promise of serious repercussions. That's the most ridiculous thing ever.

It adds to the growing mountain of observational evidence (which started with "W" being "elected") for my personal political theory, cockamamie though it may be:

World War III will commence within the next five years and will feature, in one corner, weighing in at a combined weight of one million bazillion pounds, the world heavyweight champion, the "defender of democracy", the "separator of church & state", the "self-proclaimed benevolent superpower", "purveyor of Truth Justice and the American Way":

GI Joe (United States & England, Israel and maybe Germany, Spain, "Iraq", "Afghanistan", India, Japan, Tibet and maybe even Saudi Arabia)

And in the other corner, with a combined weight of just under one million bazillion pounds…the "master of disaster", the "rouge nations", the "divine rulers", the "Axis of Evil":

Cobra (Iran, North Korea, Syria, China, Russia, Turkey and maybe France &Pakistan).

By the end of the war, the United States will galvanize, with the south joining GI Joe, and the north will join Cobra.

I hope I'm wrong. Perhaps only the Red Sox can save us. What do you think?

The Power of Eyebrows

2007-10-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

One of the more important, if less appreciated, aspects of being a high school physics teacher is drawing sweet diagrams on the board and on tests. It is a medium that few artists have really explored, but it is one that I took very seriously. One lesson that I learned through this exploration was that eyebrows are everything.

Let me demonstrate. Here is a problem that involves a man riding his motorcycle over a cliff. Notice the effect of the direction of the eyebrows. In figure 1, the man is smiling and his eyebrows are up. This implies that the man is uncomfortable with the situation at hand, and may not make it through.

figure 1

A simple switching of the eyebrows can change everything. Compare with figure 2, where the man is still smiling, but his eyebrows are down. This implies that he is a slightly crazy kung fu master, intent on living life by tasting death. He may not make the jump, and therefore succumb to the alligators with African killer bees in their mouths that reside in the pit of unending fire, doom, and despair. But he doesn’t care.

figure 2

I suppose the correct usage of the eyebrows would be to start the man with eyebrows down at the beginning of the jump. Then, if the calculations say that he doesn’t make it, the students could answer by filling in the eyebrows. If he doesn’t make it, the correct solution would be:

Figure 3

If he does make it, the eyebrows could be one up one down, indicating surprise and slight pain in the crotchital area:

figure 4

Nearly the whole range of human emotions can be captured by simply permutating eyebrows, smiles, and frowns. See figure 5 below:

Figure 5

This palette of stick-figure emotion has served me very well in grad school so far. I have found that the answers to most of my physics problems turn out to be a combination of all the possibilities:

Figure 6

The kidnapping of a flock of birds

2007-10-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

I’m going to relate to you a true story of a small but ridiculous nature. It involves the inadvertent kidnapping of a small flock of birds. Or rather, a flock of small birds. It happened at a Seven-Eleven, of all places, the significance of the name of which still eludes scholars. But I digress. One peaceful morning that was almost too quiet, I walked out under the open sky through the streets of D.C. looking for sustenance. There are lots of folks who partake in a similar venture each day, on a more serious level. My search for food had the purpose of sopping up the Jack Daniels that had settled in my stomach, rather than the daily hunger that haunted my bones, but once again I digress. I went in to a local convenience store, got a muffin and a coffee, and stood there underneath the blue sky and its white cloudy freckles. I devoured my muffin in such a way that the crumbs littered the ground, wastefully. I felt bad, but the fight against a hangover is a fight against time, so I persisted. However, the crumbs did not go to waste. Each bite I took, with the rain of manna that it cast upon the ground, was succeeded by the descent of a flock of small birds who hid in a bush nearby. They would descend, and eat, and leave all before the turn of a head or the sip of a hot coffee. These birds were small and meek, cartoon-like in stature. I’m not unconvinced that they weren’t the birds that spontaneously appear to fly around your head after strong contusions. Perhaps they were on a lunch break. Regardless, they took to me like water does a towel. I started to walk away, and they followed. They kept their distance, for sure, but with each bite they would approach and eat the crumbs then recede to a place safely out of reach. I was perplexed, so I even tested this out a few times—I stepped and ate, stepped and ate. They followed and followed. Now came a dilemma. I have to leave. So, do I leave the muffin so the birds can eat in the comfort of their own neighborhood, or do I go on my way and let them go hungry? I decide to leave with the muffin, because Jack Daniels is very persuasive. I thought I had hurt the birds in doing so. However, they just followed me right down the street, eating and retreating, eating and retreating. My own little lamprey eel, in the form of a flock of birds. A symbiotic relationship on the streets of D.C. Bluebirds on my shoulder. I walked all the way to Jeremy’s house, and they followed me nearly all the way. They dispersed with one block to go, flying off in every direction. “My God,” I thought. “I’m doing the same thing to my friends.”

A brilliant Tom Robbins quote...

2007-10-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters. --Tom Robbins

this is from a fascinating article on writing a children's book about beer. check it out!

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/317083_writer25.html

Advice

2007-09-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

Do something good every day. Something so good that it actually makes you slightly uncomfortable.

The World Below My Feet

2007-09-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I could
sense the immensity of the Earth. I could
feel it in my bones.

I remember on one particular occasion I
stared, dumfounded, through the empty night, at the moon.
I, whirling on the edge of the Earth at abstract speeds,
and the moon, standing at attention to the unseen Sun,
an unlikely pair, tonight
we are both so alone.

The Sun was scolding the Moon, while
I hid behind the Earth. My turn
would come in the morning, as
sure as the turning of the Earth.
Damned rotational inertia.
Why do the shadows recede?

Like all aspiring physicists,
for the moment I was able to ignore the air.
The Earth, with no atmosphere and my head
scraping the lower edge of space. I
wondered if it would make a mark there.

On this one particular occasion, I became
conscious of the world below my feet, and the
black empty ocean it swims in.

This world had never felt so
real, so mindless, so
random.

--

if the Sun is a grapefruit in Boston,
Alpha Centauri is an eggplant in Reno—
so much empty space

Something
has to be real,
something has to act.

Something has to produce the
note a jazz musician plays, some strange, spinning
concoction of emotion & chance, spilling energy & control

The molecules that make a man emote
slam the air that
carries the sounds to the
listener’s ear, shakes the listener’s heart
rattling its cup of change.

The solemn listeners nod, fill the room, which is
just a room, in a building, in a city,
on a continent, on a planet, churning lava within,
falling in tandem around a star,
born of a star, born of a star among stars,
born of an explosion that produced,
more than anything,
nothing at all—
nothing
at all.

Writing Drill: Random Poem Generator

2007-09-29T14:46:00.000-07:00

Write a poem about (a/an) __________ (first thing that comes to mind)

1. weasel

Of Murder

You have stolen my chickens for the
last time, you bastard weasel. You
have no soul to hang your cap on,
you have no breath remaining.
Your sneaky habits while it’s raining
and chicken coop with blood a-staining,
it’s all over now, my friend.

Your face is frozen in one last sneaky smile,
a mocking grimace crowned with bear trap teeth, not even
death can beat your will, or make you frown.

I hate to taunt you, I hate to kill you
but, my friend, you’ve have had your fill
of dealing death about at will,
slipping down a window sill
just for that old-fashioned thrill
of murder.

There’s the difference—you and I
have no common motives.
I shrink when meeting death,
and you , my friend, you smile.

2. Bathymetry

Your sweet bathymetry

You have a nice bathymetry, my love,
I don’t need a satellite to know it.
Few realize that the seas will rise or fall
depending on what’s below it.
And although at times the waves will slap
the winds that suck and blow it,
I can see your wherewithall,
even though you never show it.

3. foccacia bread

Here we are, in the same old cafe
that we used to sit for hours,
sipping italian coffee and looking around
to see who was watching.

We used to chat about such incredible things,
the politics, the philosophy, the music, the answer
was in the air between our dancing words, though
we never cared to express it.

On our last night there, I consented
to a piece of foccacia bread that I munched
instead of finally telling you
that I loved you.

4. Dreams

How strange and telling
that the word we use
for our innermost wishes
and most important desires
is the same word that we use to name
the random nocturnal firing of neurons
studied in the laboratory for years,
analyzed by philosophers for centuries,
ignored or forgotten by millions each day...
what if I had written it down
instead of rolling back over
and hitting the alarm
one more time.

Lakatos & Feyerabend

2007-09-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

Milk & fire,
Beethoven & Mozart
love & lust

trust, faith & regret

Not polar opposites, but just

different enough to really

dig each other.

Like sodium & chlorine

no one can really explain

why they come together-

they've no business doing so, but

still they do.

Electrically they're neutral

But there's something about each one

that the other finds so

dangerous, so preposterous, so ridiculous

that they each move in to take a closer look.

Keep your friends close,

and your enemies

closer.

Cheese & Whiskey

2007-09-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

In Frisian, a language spoken in certain unforgiving regions of the Netherlands, the word for 'cheese' is tsiis, pronounced “cheese”. They say this when smiling for a photograph, just like we do in America. I can’t imagine the two regions happened upon this usage independently; one must have influenced the other (or perhaps both emerged from a common source). A more clear case of the spreading of cheese (sorry, bad pun) is in Japan, where it translates to saying “cheesu” for photographs.

The astute reader will realize that the whole point of saying “cheese” for a photo is because it makes you smile. The Japanese, in adopting this ritual, destroy its point; when you say “cheesu” you spend more time going “oo” than “ee”, thereby greatly increasing the chances of looking like an idiot in the picture. This is an example of a strange loop.

A strange loop is something that, through self-reference, destroys its own meaning. For example, take a look at the GIF of the reproduction of the painting of the pipe on the right there. It’s by Magritte who, being French, was very strange indeed (just kidding, all my French readers…Vive le croissant!). The caption says “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” This translates to “This is not a pipe.” On the one hand, you say “What the hell is it then?!” On the other hand, you say “Of course it’s not a pipe…it’s just a representation of a pipe…it’s just blobs of ink on a canvas, and has no inherent meaning.” The kicker is, once you see it that way, you also must agree that the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” is not really saying “This is not a pipe,” but rather is just more meaningless blobs of paint on the page. So, realizing the true meaning of the phrase destroys its meaning. That’s a strange loop.

The most important of all strange loops, perhaps, is Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. The basic idea is that Kurt Godel used mathematics to prove that mathematics is either incomplete, or inconsistent. If it’s incomplete, then there are true math equations you can never derive by using math. If math is inconsistent, then there are false mathematical equations that you can actually derive using math consistently. Either way we’re screwed.

Here are some more examples of strange loops:
· Catch 22
· Russell’s paradox
· Throwing out the baby with the bathwater
· Sprint Wireless customer service

There is hope for the portrait photographers of Japan, thanks in part to my dad (Hi Dad!!). There is a grassroots movement to change the word that people say during photographs over there to “Whiskey”. I should have guessed that these confounding strange loop things could be solved by whiskey. I submit, however, that it should be changed to “beer”. Beer makes you smile more, after all. AND, the great philosopher Homer (Simpson) has already taught us that beer is “the cause and solution to all life’s problems”. Oh damn, that’s another strange loop!

Poetry Writing Drills--Suite #1: Get Things Flowing

2007-09-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

This is something I put together I while back and just found...sort of advice I wrote for myself about writing. I thought it would be cool if anyone wants to give the drills a shot. Feel free to try them and post any interesting results as a comment...

Get Things Flowing--Writing is about feelings. It is about capturing how you feel about certain persons, places, things, or ideas. These subjects could be out there in the world, in the world you create, or they could be so deep inside you that you almost forget they’re there. The feelings you describe could be the essence of your personality, or they could surprise you when they come out. Or they could be made up because they sound nice, but I think the best writing comes from real feelings. But feelings come from the heart, not the head, in a sense. If you have to think about something, it becomes a thought, not a feeling.

For that reason, you should at least start off by writing quickly, before you have to time to think about the words coming out. You want to start by getting the pure feelings out there as the canvas, and then use your mind to revise and organize in a way that best presents them. As Forrester says in that cheesy movie, “Write with your heart, revise with your head.”

These drills are designed to practice getting the feelings flowing. Later you will practice controlling the rhythm and the form, but for now don’t worry about these things. The idea is to do these drills quickly, stream of consciousness. Whatever pops up, write it down without hesitation. They may come out as word associations, but whatever. The point is to get the channels open for traffic.

1. Quickly write down your 10 greatest and deepest fears

2. Quickly write down your 10 greatest fantasies

3. Quickly write down 3 things you hope nobody knows about you

4. Quickly write down 4 things you wish people knew about you

5. Quickly write down the names of 5 people you find to be the most interesting.

6. Write a poem about at least one thing mentioned above.

Does Everything Happen for a Reason, or a Purpose?

2007-09-05T09:42:00.001-07:00

What is the question?
This is an important question…perhaps the important question…and boy, is it a doosy. But that’s what makes it so much fun to think about…

First I would like to clarify some terminology here. I think that when people ask the question, they really mean ‘Does everything happen for a purpose?’ which is a religious or spiritual question. Whether or not everything happens for a reason, on the other hand, seems to be more of a question for science or philosophy. Both are interesting, important questions. Perhaps they are connected somehow, but for now I would like to consider them separately.

Does Everything Happen for a Reason?
As an aspiring scientist with a realist and perhaps coherentist epistemology, I would like to think that the answer to that is yes. In fact, I would like to think of science as the search for explanation—the search for reasons. Why did the apple fall from the tree? For Newton, the reason was the force of gravity (working in tandem perhaps with the wind to knock it loose). For Einstein, the reason was the curvature of spacetime. In many cases, the art of physics seems to be the art of creatively finding the reasons that things happen in the physical world. Given the laws of physics and the initial conditions, the apple was bound to fall. A physicist gets paid to search either for the laws or for the initial conditions (or a little of both). When they have both, they have found an explanation to the natural phenomenon.

Are you sure??
This view that everything happens for a reason, which I hold dearly, has some serious challenges. I cannot respond to all of them, which scares me. There are two main branches of physics that challenge the proposition in different ways—one attacks our knowledge of the initial conditions, the other of the very laws themselves.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), (attributed)

Chaos theory threatens our ability to find the reasons behind things. ‘Chaos’ is defined in physics-ese as an extremely sensitive dependence on the initial conditions…therefore, for some things (like the weather & the stock market) we can never do the same thing over and over to test whether we have found the reasons behind it. However, there are patterns among the chaos that allow us to test them slightly more holistically; hence the ‘theory’ part of chaos theory.

Quantum mechanics presents us with a much more serious threat to believing things happen for a reason. In quantum mechanics, we can do the exact same things over and over, and the results are always different! All we can do sometimes is give the probabilities of an electron taking a certain path, and it is the probabilities that follow strict laws & equations. Take nuclear decay (please!). We can never predict exactly when a uranium atom will decay, but we can tell that it will have a really good chance of decaying after a certain time. Put another way, there is no reason for it to decay at any particular time. Einstein didn’t like quantum mechanics for this reason (among others), and famously quipped, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Well, Alby, I hate to say it but it seems like you were wrong about this one! Perhaps the most troubling aspect is when you realize that our everyday world is composed of these inherently random particles that do not obey simple cause and effect.

I have a hope, however, that reasons can emerge out of these little things that don’t abide by reason. For example, you are built out of about 10 trillion cells; each cell is its own living organism, but none of them are ‘you.’ None of them even know who ‘you’ are! It is through their myriad ‘you-less’ interactions that you emerge (fortunately for you). Likewise, perhaps everything in our macroscopic, everyday world can still happen for a reason, even though our everyday world is built out of a strange, reasonless quantum world. That’s my two cents, anyway.

Does everything happen for a purpose?
Like the previous question, I’m very conflicted on this. On the one hand, I want to answer with an emphatic “yes!” I feel it in my bones. It certainly seems like life is taking me on some sort of path…there seems to be some sort of grand plan. One of my first major results of grad school was proving that god exists…I proved this by finding a Dunkin’ Donuts on my way to school;)

On the other hand, and more seriously, I want to scream “NO!!” when I think about things like the Holocaust and senseless murder. What could possibly be the purpose behind such things?? I tend to think that no moral god could ever condone such atrocities, let alone build them right into His/Her plan.

Clearly, I have no qualifications to answer this question. It may be the biggest one of all. But you may like to hear the solution that sticks to my ribs these days. I think it may be sort of the opposite of emergence (‘de-mergence?’). On a large scale, there is no such thing as a grand plan. But on an individual level, it makes a lot of sense. It may be like being in love: by believing it, you make it true. In my mind, this does not belittle the notion of ‘purpose’ in the least. It makes it more real than anything.

Erratum: Maryland is NOT totally lame

2007-08-28T14:02:00.000-07:00

The weirdness of quantum mechanics arises from the fact that when you make an observation, your results tell you just as much about what you're looking at as they tell you about who is looking and how. That being said, my criticism of Maryland revolved around my frustrations with the ridiculous traffic situation, which is indicative of the fact that as soon as I step into my car I become an impatient Masshole.

I wish to take this opportunity to paint a more fair picture of Maryland, not just how I see it through the windshield. So, I give you:

10 Things I Love about Maryland:

#10 Chipotle. Some say their burritos are three bites too big. I completely agree…but sometimes too much is just enough.

#9 Starbucks. I'm not one for big chains…but I love being able to go for a brief walk and get an iced coffee at each and every corner.

#8 Water Polo. Learning to play water polo is actually a requirement for graduation from Maryland public schools.

#7 Big Sky. I was having withdrawal from the ocean, when I realized it was above me the whole time. I don't know why, the sky just seems bigger in Maryland.

#6 Political Discussions. Since it surrounds our nation's capital, the state of Maryland is much more in tune with the goings on of our fearless leaders. In Boston, the chaotic weather provides the baseline for small talk in any situation. In Maryland, it is the chaotic political climate that serves that function.

#5 Street Signs. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts does not like drivers to know where they are at any given time. It's in the state constitution, look it up. This is carried out in part by not putting any street signs for the road your on. In addition, they only put street signs on the cross streets when they find it will enhance confusion. For example, in Roxbury I once found myself at the corner of Columbus and Columbus. Maryland is much nicer in this regard. They figure, if your going to be stuck somewhere for extended periods of time (due to construction) you might as well know where the heck you are.

#4 Just Enough Winter. In certain areas of the country, they look to the groundhog to tell them how much longer winter will be in session. In Boston they don't bother with such superstitions, because every citizen knows that, at any given time, there are always three more months of winter. In Maryland, you only get just enough snow to make it pretty. And it's fun to watch everybody freak out when it happens. In Boston, I would have to dig out my car (see picture) to get to school. In Maryland school is cancelled if anyone even thinks the word snow. As a side note, the Japanese word for snow is "yuki" (thanks, Yoshino!)

#3 The Salad Bowl. Boston is very ethnically and racially clumpy. Far from being "a great melting pot", it is more like a T.V. dinner, with the meat, tater tots, green beans, and applesauce all neatly separated. Maryland is a lot more like a salad bowl, with lots of interesting folks all mixed in together, contributing to the overall flavor. I dig it.

#2 Crabs. In Boston, it takes about three years of intense training, culminating in an associate's degree, to learn how to eat a lobster. The process is nearly as complicated, and equally as sensitive, as neurosurgery. Each lobster takes approximately 2 hours to eat, if it is done correctly. In Maryland, they do it right: a pitcher of beer, a bucket of crabs, and a wooden mallet. Hulk smash!! I love it.

#1 The People. At first I must say I was disappointed at the lack of Mary's in the supposed Land of Mary's (I've only met one person named Mary). After that brief initial disappointment, I realized that the Mary and all the non-Mary's I have met have been totally awesome. And I have solved the mystery of the missing Mary's: Everyone in Maryland is required to have their middle name be Mary. It's in the state constitution, check it. Would I lie?

The Conquest of Maryland

2007-08-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

A little known historical fact is that William the Conqueror, upon landing on the shores of England in 1066, fell flat on his face. His first mate dressed it up a bit when he described William as "falling into an embrace with his new country". Within a few months, William had conquered England, which enabled him to change his nickname to William the Conqueror (in middle school it had been William the Geek).

Well, I didn't fall flat on my face, but upon entering Maryland for the first time, my car overheated. By comparison with William, I had calculated that within about 3 months Maryland would be under my complete control. After a year, I regret to report that it is taking longer than I thought. Regardless, I figured this would be a good time to reflect on the year, and especially to report some of my thoughts on this Land of Mary's...

Overall, as a state Maryland kinda sucks. I give it a 4 out of ten. (this is the state, not the people nor the school mind you...) Below I review what I perceive to be Maryland's weakest points, which I intend to fix when I become king in a few more months...

#1--Awkward Speed
Have you ever been driving on the highway, and the car in front of you is going just a smidge too slow for your own comfort, but just a hair too fast for you to pass, and so you are either stuck behind them in an awkward state of cruising/stepping on the brake, else you try to pass them and awkwardly drive right next to them for an extended period of time? I call this "awkward speed". One of the first things I noticed upon moving to Maryland is that approximately every man, woman and child in Maryland moves at the awkward speed at all times.

#2--Government Control
I may risk my life in telling you this, but I have started to uncover a frightening covert plot being carried out by certain higher-ups to control the people of Maryland--using traffic lights. What else could possibly explain their complete ridiculousness, other than an evil plot? I first became aware of this secret control when I found that I spend most of my waking life sitting at traffic light...even when I'm not in a car! Maryland's Department of Transportation seems to take special delight at having major 4-lane highways meet in four way intersections about every 400 yards. And they have transformed each four way intersection, using an ingenious system of left-turn only arrows, right-turn only arrows, pedestrian-only signals, and pedestrian-with-shopping-cart-only signals, into a 16-way intersection. I have seriously counted up the I time spend, per day, at an intersection where literally no cars are going. It adds up to about 8 hours each day.

#3--Construction
The construction companies are operating in conjunction with government officials in the secret plot to control each Marylander using traffic lights. The first piece of evidence: every intersection in Maryland is under construction. Upon entering the intersection on the four-lane major highway, the left lane is closed off first with big orange barrels. What is happening in the left lane that they need to close it off with barrels? Nothing. Apparently it is a 'buffer zone' for the construction happening on the other side of the intersection. The next lane to close off is the right lane. This is done solely to prevent anyone from being able to escape the intersection by taking a right turn on red. Now we're down to the middle two lanes...the one on the left is taken up by people selling roses and people asking donations to go to poor South American countries to teach them manners (I know this may be starting to sound ridiculous, but I guarantee that it is all 100% true). This leaves one lane, which is taken up by broken down public buses. The only reason I ever get anywhere in Maryland is because, as a physics graduate student, I have mastered the art of quantum tunneling.

There you have it, the three main weaknesses of the state of Maryland. If all goes according to my plan, I will exploit these Achilles' heels to create leverage for me to complete my government coup. I will report back to you when I am appointed supreme-dictator-for-life. Give me at least three more months.

Lessons by the ocean

2007-08-20T18:49:00.000-07:00

I have learned a couple of important lessons this weekend in Boston, as per usual by listening to the ocean. I don't know what it is, but I feel a great resonance whenever I am near a large body of water. I feel there is so much wisdom within there somehow. My truest moments seem to come when I am alone by the seashore, open to the world. The first pure thought I had came when I was pondering my decisions over the past year. I have made some really interesting ones, for sure. Some have been made my life a little sweeter, and some much more sour. But it is important not to dwell on such things, it can only bring anguish. You cannot make good decisions, nor can you make bad ones. The only thing you can do is to make your decisions good or bad. Their prudence is determined by you, the decisionmaker, after the fact, in how you subsequently let them into the life you lead …how you incorporate them into your journey. That was lesson #1.

The other lesson I learned when I stopped by the sea to talk to my main man Paul on the phone. It was night, and the street lights cast their light over the black ocean and its grey waves. While I was talking, I was staring at that light cast over the water, while a huge shadow passed through the light. The shadow was enormous in stature, it must have laid nearly a quarter mile over the waves. When I looked up to find the source, I found it was just a man walking in front of the streetlight. No matter who you are, how small or meager or humble, your effect on the world can be much larger than you can ever imagine.

What are we playing?

2007-08-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

Are we filling out a cosmic crossword puzzle, or is it existential scrabble?

Does Science Lead to Truth?
As an aspiring scientist, I like to think that science leads to truth. But then I know that Newton's theory of gravity was, in a sense, completely conceptually overthrown by Einstein's theory of gravity. For Newton, gravity was a force that prevent the apple from its natural state of motion of remaining at rest, thus making it fall onto his noggin. For Einstein, the Newton's noggin was the force preventing the apple from its natural state of falling. In order to make this switch, Einstein described gravity not as a force, but as the curvature of space and time. At some point in the future, it is conceivable that Einstein's theory of gravity will go over a complete conceptual makeover. Do we ever have the truth?

Does Science Even Approach the Truth?
Perhaps the next best thing to having truth is getting closer and closer to the truth. Is that what science is doing? I always liked to think so, but after reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions this naive view was challenged. Kuhn was a physicist who was forced by his superiors to teach a course on the history of science. He found himself completely bored with it, until he studied the original texts so closely that he understood them as a gestalt switch. Is the picture a duck, or is it a bunny? Was Galileo right in describing the pendulum as friction ruining the ideal periodic motion, or was Aristotle right in describing the pendulum as a string ruining the ideal falling motion? Kuhn, at least in his earlier days, that neither was any more right than the other. In fact, we can't even compare what Galileo meant by "pendulum" with what Aristotle meant by the same word--the two are incommensurable. The switch from Aristotle's views to Galileo's views are not a switch from 'wrong' to 'less-wrong'...it is more like the switch from 'duck' to 'bunny'.

Does Science Construct the Truth?
My gut still tells me that science progress towards the truth in some sense. For a long time, I have imagined this as filling out a great, cosmic crossword puzzle. Perhaps our observations are the clues, and we figure out what to put in the boxes. We can never be completely sure we have put in the right word, but when it connects with more and more words we can become more and more sure that we have the right words in there. When the crossword puzzle is complete, we must have done something right! Maybe one or two words are wrong, but the gist of the puzzle has to be correct. You might call this a 'coherentist epistemology'.

The other day it occurred to me that perhaps we are not playing a cosmic crossword puzzle at all...maybe we are playing Scrabble. Maybe there are no clues and we are just making up the words and fitting them with other words we have made up. Does that have to make them less true??