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Announcement

2007-11-15T19:04:00.000-06:00

As basically anyone can tell at this point this is a dead blog. But if people are curious I'll be heading over this way and posting there at some point in the future, possibly even regularly. I'll let people guess at who I am, if anyone still reading this doesn't know me personally, which I kind of doubt, to tell the truth.

Poor Sentence Paragraph Structure Or....?

2007-03-03T15:14:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I wonder about my students. For example:

All great movements have taken someone to break from the mold and go against the current of society. Take, for example, slavery; slavery was so widely accepted and it took a few people to argue the morality of it to begin a massive movement. Slavery is now looked at as a very immoral time that still holds great shame, but the people who started this movement, and the others that believed in it, were hated for it. The same applies to Catholicism....

I think this is one of those cases where I just pass over the whole thing in silence.

I Thought Alvin Plantinga Was Supposed To Be Clever

2007-03-01T12:04:00.000-06:00

It turns out he's capable of utterly empty headed useless nonsense, though.

His review of Dawkins's The God Delusion is completely embarrassing, both in that it says things that are obviously silly, and that it misrepresents much of what Dawkins is saying so clearly that even someone who hasn't read the book can tell. As an example of the first, take this passage:

Well, why does Dawkins think there almost certainly isn't any such person as God? It's because, he says, the existence of God is monumentally improbable. How improbable? The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously claimed that the probability of life arising on earth (by purely natural means, without special divine aid) is less than the probability that a flight-worthy Boeing 747 should be assembled by a hurricane roaring through a junkyard. Dawkins appears to think the probability of the existence of God is in that same neighborhood

Either Plantinga is being very clever, and using an example of something being improbable that, as an argument, is utterly embarrassing, or this really is something that he considers worth bringing up. I can't rule out the first - that this is a clever bit of irony - but there's little reason to believe, given the rest of what he says here, that he isn't just that dumb.

For those who care, and haven't already figured this out, the lunacy of Hoyle's calculation is that it relies on the notion that chemicals combine randomly. In other words, if we assume that various chemicals present on the primordial earth combined randomly the odds of a single protein (or a living thing, or whatever) showing up are astronomical. This is true, and the argument is more or less valid. Of course, as it turns out, chemicals do not actually combine randomly, but in certain regular, patterned ways, and the study of these ways is called... chemistry. Hoyle's argument, in other words, presupposes that reality is such that science, and any other form of empirical knowledge, is impossible. In such a universe, where chemicals randomly combined as opposed to combining in some fairly limited and predictable ways, the appearance and continual existence of living things would be some rather impressive evidence of something pretty significant. This is mostly because of the significant differences between that universe and this one.

In general, the positive reference to an argument of this stupidity is generally a good reason to stop reading or listening to someone.
As an example of the latter, consider the following (rather closely following) passage:

So why does he think theism is enormously improbable? The answer: if there were such a person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747."
...
But why does Dawkins think God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is?

This is something that is pretty clearly recognizable as a misreading, even to someone who, like me, hasn't read Dawkins's book. Why? Well, because the most current attempt at a Hoyle style argument generally goes something like "Living organisms are really complex, and have lots of information.* This information or complexity could not have come from something with lower complexity. Therefore living organisms haven't developed naturally but have been in some way or another created by something with higher complexity, by which I mean God." The obvious response to this sort of claim is, well, just what Plantinga suggests that Dawkins is saying. The chances that Dawkins is actually advancing the premises of this argument, however, are deeply unlikely (because they are, you know, very very silly - especially to biologists who study in depth precisely how greater complexity arises from lesser complexity, and the like.)

It is also hard to imagine that Plantinga isn't simply being dishonest in his review. He argues that Dawkins, generally and not specifically in this book, is guilty of arguing a certain way with regards to evolution:

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;
Therefore
p is true.

Where, of course, "p" is something like "life has come to be as it is now through unguided Darwinian (broadly speaking) evolution". The problem here is that this is only a decent reconstruction of Dawkins's argument if we take it for granted that, really, there is no evidence that things actually have evolved. And Plantinga really does seem to want to give this impression - as when describing Dawkins's general strategy:

First, he recounts in vivid and arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best. Second, he tries to refute arguments for the conclusion that blind, unguided evolution could not have produced certain of these wonders of the living world—the mammalian eye, for example, or the wing. Third, he makes suggestions as to how these and other organic systems could have developed by unguided evolution.

Note that what is left out here is any actual suggestion that there is evidence that things really did evolve a certain way. It is as if the entire field of biology were playing what-if games: animals are a certain way, and this might have come to be in way x. I am not a biologist but I suspect that there may be a little more to it than this: say, some sort of attempt to demonstrate how things actually happened, as opposed to how they could have happened.

Of course, if there's anything of the sort going on in addition to the sort of 'it's logically possible' thinking that Plantinga suggests then of course the argument he claims Dawkins is making would have to look something like the following:

We have sufficient empirical evidence that p;
We have certain claims (x,y....) that p is nevertheless impossible;
But we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p, as (x,y...) are easily debunked;
Therefore
p is true.

Of course, unlike this above construal this is a more or less reasonable sort of way to argue. There is evidence for a claim, there is no immediate reason to discount that evidence - or at least all attempts to do so have failed (laughably) - and so it is reasonable to believe the claim. And all that it takes to change the argument that Plantinga suggests Dawkins is making, and the argument here is the notion that there is evidence for the claim in question: surely Plantinga can't be suggesting that Dawkins doesn't think there is any, can he? And certainly if there is evidence of this, it would be the sort of thing a biologist would be privy to, that being his or her field of expertise.

Plantinga's review concludes with an embarrassing display of irrelevant learning: first he argues that there is a long tradition of viewing God not as complex but as simple. This is all well and good: if he is simple then the Hoyle style argument that Dawkins is objecting to fails, as simple things cannot give rise to complex things (or, alternatively, they can and so there's no objection anymore). Secondly he objects that Dawkins claims that God is improbable (whether complex or not), but has no reason for thinking this. But here it's pretty clear that he's sliding a very odd sort of notion of improbability into place. Very quickly, there are two senses in which we might talk of something being improbable (and very closely related): first we might say that something is improbable if, objectively, the odds for it happening are low (flipping a fair coin 8 times and getting 8 heads); secondly we might say that something is improbable if given what we know it is unlikely to be true (it is improbable that George W Bush has a functioning conscience, say). The second is a comment about what is rational to believe, the first is about how reality (in as much as it is probabilistic as opposed to deterministic) is. The second is generally evidence for the first. Plantinga is clearly taking Dawkins to be claiming something along the lines of the first sense ("out of possible worlds W(1)......(Wn) God exists in only n/10 of them"), whereas it's pretty obvious that Dawkins thinks something far more like the second ("given the way things are, the chances that God actually exists, or the extent to which it is rational to believe that he does, is low"). The difference is both metaphysical and practical - mostly in that evidence for the truth or some proposition affects the second sort of talk, but not really the first. Also referring to the Ontological argument, as Plantinga proceeds to do, really doesn't help much when the opponent is speaking in the second sense (and, in addition, it's a little embarrassing to claim that it has never been adequately debunked, given its history).

The review continues on through several more embarrassing arguments, most of which I can't help but suspect even Plantinga finds hard to take seriously**, but I've gone on long enough here as it is.

*Information in the technical sense, that is, meaning astonishingly little. It's a very useful term that as far as I can tell is this way mostly because it says almost nothing above "it looks a certain way to me" but sounds like it means far more than that. At any rate, I have yet to see any useful and consistent way of using this word in a technical sense - though plenty of either of the two conjuncts.
**I am particularly suspicious that Plantinga takes the fine tuning argument, provisionally accepts the notion that there are multiple universes, of which only this one is fine tuned, and then asks "Yes, but what are the probabilities that it was this one that was fine tuned?" It's hard to imagine that he meant this seriously, but there you have it. He also argues that naturalism and natural selection are incompatible, since only the existence of God can make our belief that we can have knowledge at all rational, and hence naturalism is incompatible with claiming to know anything about the world. Or something. It's a little murky exactly where the epistemological and empirical trade off here, but the premise itself is loony enough to be ignored.

We Fear Change

2007-02-28T12:51:00.000-06:00

Apparently I can no longer get away with ignoring Blogger's recommendation to change to the new version. The real question now is whether I should go back over all the template settings/etc and try to see what's new and if I should change things around (like getting rid of that odd profile thing at the right), or just be lazy.

If you thought that was a serious question, though, you're mistaken. I'm not going to do anything (except, maybe, eat some peanut butter).

Update:
Being absent minded pays off! I didn't make it to the bus stop in time to go to my earlier class today, and as a result was around when the UPS man delivered a package!

Sadly, though, it's not a package I was really interested in getting. (That would be the nerf pistol I ordered, but which hasn't arrived yet. Soon, though....) It was a care package from the church I used to attend (I have complained about this before, right? They still haven't stopped.*) It's kind of amusing to note that they still seem incapable of grasping the distinction between college and 'school-after-high-school', though, both in terms of what they think to send, and that they send anything at all my god why won't they stop. Also that they just send so much random stuff (the prize last time was a single, large butterfly clip singly packaged). This time I recieved:
1 Cup of Nissin Cup Noodles (beef flavor)
3 packages odd chocolate covered peanut butter and bread snacks
1 tube of Mentos mints
1 Ziplock bag of granola (I hope to god it's homemade granola, because otherwise that's scary)
2 lollipops (one with bubble gum in the center)
4 packages Swiss Miss hot chocolate
1 single serving package of salted peanuts
1 single serving package of Quaker Breakfast Bites (apple crisp)
11 Disposable ballpoint pens
1 white board style felt tip marker
1 Small oval box containing stationary paper printed with folksy drawings of mistletoe
1 Package of Pop Tarts (no flavor information included)
1 Package Doublemint Gum
1 Reese's Peanut Butter Cup
4 York Peppermint Patties
1 Hershey's bar (with Almonds)
4 Packets Austin brand crackers (1 cheese with peanut butter; 1 toasty crackers with peanut butter; 1 wheat with cheddar cheese; 1 vanilla cremes)
5 Nature Valley trail mix granola bars (Fruit and Nut flavor)
2 Crunchy brand granola bars (Oats 'n Honey)
1 Crunchy brand granola bar (peanut butter)
2 Nature Valley brand granola bars (peanut butter)
1 Nature Valley brand granola bar (Oats & Honey)
1 Nutri-grain bar (blueberry)
3 Lifesavers (fruit flavors)
8 Lifesavers (mint)
1 Copy of Three Stories from The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne. (Printed in 1970, with Illustrations by Ernest H Shepard).

I really am baffled by this situation: I don't have any particular desire to keep receiving these random packages from this place. But I also don't have the ability to be mean or to tell them to just leave me alone because (1) I never see them, ever and (2) this is still the church that my parents attend, and I don't have any desire to make trouble for them. I can only wait and hope that sooner or later enough people will forget me (not likely, as these are Mennonites), or will eventually decide that I'm probably old enough to stop counting as a college student. Of course, since I'm 26 now the latter is looking less and less likely, but I don't think they'd keep sending these things once I was out of graduate school, would they?

*If you didn't read previous complaints, the general issue is that I attended this church while in high school, and then, when no longer required to go, never returned.

**
Ok, and then I edited the template after I said I wouldn't. But who wants to see my name right up there, anyway?

Also, I don't have the ability to edit comments anymore. This is really frustrating - what am I supposed to do with spam posts when I'm bored - delete them? Good grief, it's only been a few hours and I already hate the new blogger.

I don't have to grade papers - I'm doing Research!

2007-02-23T16:31:00.000-06:00

Can I jump from a standing position and clear the couch in the living room?

No.

Can I make it if I get a one-step running start?

Not without tipping the couch over in the process. But I'm a lot closer.

(Note to roommate: I caught the sofa before it fell, everything is fine.)

It's the little things, really.

2007-02-22T11:10:00.000-06:00

Just this week my life has gotten quite a bit better, as the weather here in Minneapolis has risen above the freezing point (well, at least during the day, and a little above). This is good not because I have some principled objection to the cold, but because my bike apparently does - at some point this year it started seizing up whenever the temperature dropped significantly below the freezing point. I imagine this is mostly the result of something or other caught in the gears or axle, but there's not much I can do about it above washing the bike (which didn't help). So this sudden warm spell means that I can start riding my bike to the University again, instead of taking the hated, hated bus. The bus is not hated because I have some principled objection to the bus, but because I don't like having to get up earlier, and because on one occasion it drove right by me when I was waiting at the bus stop, making me late for an important final.

And, to my surprise, even after two months of not regularly riding my bike I'm finding that my legs are adjusting astonishingly quickly to the task. Within three days I've gone from pain and trembly feeling legs to a barely noticeably soreness. But even better than this, and the fact that I really do enjoy riding my bike to the University (it gives me a chance to listen to house music on my headphones - really loud), is the other less immediate effects of starting to ride my bike again.

For example, it has had a remarkable effect on my diet. Now, I'm far from a dainty or delicate eater (rather impressively far, in fact), but having laid off the biking for so long in favor of not dying, and instead just working out in warmer (ie, inside) contexts has made the transition back somewhat shocking to me. Yesterday, for example, I ate five cookies, a bag of potato chips, a half a bag of Fritos, one of those packaged cinnamon rolls, a large bowl of rice (one cup, dry) heavily covered in green curry (with Tofu - I'm finally using my leftovers!), and somewhere between 2/3 and one full pound of capellini with, as a sauce, a tin of tuna, a quarter stick of pepperoni, a green bell pepper, three stewed tomatoes (finishing off a tin), and three large eggs (and various herbs/etc, of course, but those really don't count too much). And I woke up today... hungry.

And the real joy in all of this, to get to the point finally, is that every morning when I go to the bathroom for the first time, I get to feel like I've really accomplished something. Seriously - I mean, we're talking close to a third of the volume is above the water level and everything. It's a wonderful start to my day, honestly.

(Out of curiosity, is this one of those things that everyone can humorously relate to in a sort of "yeah, I guess that is true" way, or am I just going to get looked at funny if I say this sort of thing in public? I mean, I'm probably going to either way, but I like to know and I can't usually figure it out on my own.)

Either I am incompetent or someone is playing a very funny prank on me.

2007-02-08T22:52:00.000-06:00

Apparently at some point in life everyone else in the world learned how to make their cell phones deal with call waiting.* I... have not done so. All I know is that my cell phone beeps, displays a yellow screen, and then promptly hangs up on everyone involved if I do anything more than just keep talking to whoever it is who was on the line in the first place. I imagine there's some way of switching around those calls (otherwise why tell me? why?), but I certainly don't know what it is.

And like most things that confuse or baffle me this seems to happen, and in particularly confusing ways, an awful lot.

Specifically, it has happened twice in the last week or so - and very suspiciously as the same person was involved in both cases. The second time, this afternoon, I called him and got his voicemail. Before I could hear the tone, I heard those ominous two beeps, and saw that I had a call waiting from him. (This sort of timing is impressive.) So I blindly stabbed at the buttons on the phone, which had the usual effect (see above). This didn't connect me to him, of course, and had no noticeable effect other than to hang up on everything involved. Two seconds later, however, I received a new call from a very mysterious source (to my phone, which told me that it was an unknown caller) who happened to be this same friend. This is not automatically an interesting story, I admit. The first, and logically prior time this happened** though everything went just as above, only instead of the unknown caller being my friend the unknown caller was my friend's voicemail.

This, you see, was the puzzling part to me. I had received a call not from someone in particular, but from someone's voicemail, and there's something awfully surreal about picking up the phone only to hear "...if you wish to send a numeric page...". Luckily after hanging up on it a second time I managed to get through to my friend - but still this was an utterly baffling experience.

Now, normally this is where I would explain how this all could happen, and so demonstrate my amusingly stupid inability to figure it out at the time. But, honestly, I have nothing here. If you're doing this to me on purpose, though, Ian, I do have to say I'm impressed and as soon as it stops being fun for you I want you to tell me how to do that so I can do it to people as well.

Oh, and one final thing - how's that PZ! 30 days exactly! See you next month, sucker!

*I imagine this was at the same meeting when they all learned how to have romantic relationships, and at which no one noticed that I was ill that day and took notes for me. Or something.
**This is a Wilfrid Sellars joke. Feel free to roll your eyes, or sigh, or do whatever you do when I make these sorts of jokes in your company.

What?

2007-01-08T13:05:00.000-06:00

The local grocery store stocks a brand of low carbohydrate pasta.

Yes, pasta that is low in carbohydrates. I don't know what the idea or execution here is. It's also not weird enough that I'm willing to buy it for that reason - unlike, say, jars of gelatinous mutant coconut, or a plain container marked "All Purpose Sauce". So my roommate doesn't have to worry about that, at least, just that some day I'll actually open the jar of gelatinous mutant coconut and try to make her eat some (this will not work, I imagine). The very notion, though, is distinctly odd: pasta is, after all, essentially made up of carbohydrates held together with a hefty dose of protein. This is why it is both fairly healthy and really, really tasty. And low carb pasta would be... what? The label doesn't say explicitly, though they cheerfully imply that it has to do with making some significant amount of the carbohydrates indigestible, instead of using other ingredients which is what other low carb pastas do. I'm uncertain of the nutritional benefits of eating indigestible food, or of what exactly they mean by this.

Also, didn't we all, as a society, get over the whole 'carbs are bad' thing a year or two ago? I mean, there was that Atkins diet fad (official motto: sick people weigh less! eat things that make you ill!), but I figured that more or less evaporated when Atkins died of what may or may not have been heart failure (but probably was), and was notable obese when he did (this is assuming that what is alleged by the Atkins foundation - that he gained over sixty pounds in a little over a week while in a coma due to, um, bloating - is the obvious nonsense it appears to be). The last time I checked, at least, medical knowledge has not changed dramatically since then, and I'm baffled at the continued presence of low carb foods (that is, ones that would otherwise be high carb foods but aren't - not, say, broccoli). Who buys these things?

Footnotes I have Removed from Papers This Term

2007-01-05T17:40:00.000-06:00

From a paper on Schopenhauer on ascetism and suicide.

"The ascetic continually presents himself with disagreeable things so as to mute the Will to live, and stifle his various desires and cares: he continually abstains from good food, mortifies his flesh, etc(1)...

(1) He is, in other words, a nincompoop."

And from a paper on Aristotle

"(23).... . And there may well be some general account of these sort of significantly other-regarding states of which I am unaware, but if so I am unaware of it."

Odds and ends

2006-11-10T13:59:00.000-06:00

Damn it! Not again - they.... wait, what?

This last week has been a little confusing to me, I have to admit. It's not that I wasn't expecting serious gains by the Democratic party in the election or anything. And while dramatic as all get out the results weren't crazily above what could have been expected going into the thing. But still I'm having some trouble getting used to the results - I mean, what do you do when the election results aren't horrible?

Bear in mind, this is easily the first election in my life that I've participated in that hasn't resulted in people I thought both entirely incompetent and morally bankrupt winning, and I'm just not sure how to react to this. Jubilation? Hope? Vindication?

Well, some combination of those, certainly, but mostly foreboding. Sure things look good now, and the obvious chances for bad consequences turned out fine, but deep down I know exactly how these things end: badly. It's really only a matter of time, isn't it?

If I can derive anything from a contradiction, can it be a free pizza?

The other day, in the list of coupon fliers that inevitably clogs up the mailbox every, oh, other day I noticed a coupon by a local pizza place. It read, in large print, "Five Dollars off Your Purchase of Twenty Five Dollars or More!". And, below that in much smaller print, "No purchase required". Is there any way of making sense of this combination? What would the purchase not be required for? (I am almost tempted to go hand them the coupon and see what they do, but I think I'll just throw it out instead.)

And They're All Phonies Too

2006-10-27T12:38:00.000-05:00

Maybe I'm just going wrong or being mislead by my attraction to irony, but when I read this (or parts of this, at any rate, it's a little intolerable after a while) I couldn't help but think it sounded awfully ... childish.

I imagine his Grandfather didn't go on and on about how people were being children or writing what appear to be books about it either. I'm also impressed by how much of that list he writes sounds like "My grandfather didn't have an inner life - he didn't need one!" I suppose there's some consolation here in that if he's right and self-examination and so on is a bad thing it's at least fairly clear that he hasn't done too much of it.

Guy Ritchie is Dead To Me

2006-10-25T19:14:00.000-05:00

Hey, remember how great Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was?

Ok, maybe not great, but fun at least, right? Lots of fun. And remember Snatch? That was just an awesome movie.

Well Guy Ritchie has another movie out - and it's another crime/heist sort of movie too! It's just amazing and you should all see it- really. It's called Revolver, and the plot revolves around a con man who takes down a casino owning crime boss at the gambling table and then finds himself in a lot of trouble. First a bunch of people close to him are murdered in an attempt on his life. Then he discovers that he has a fatal illness which will kill him within the next three days. Then he becomes involved with a bunch of loan sharks who start taking all his money, and he plays a lot of chess and has some very involved discussions. Then we learn that his ultimate enemy is named "Mr Gold" and the loan sharks are somehow associated with him. Then we learn that... Mr Gold is.. the voice inside his head? And is hiding from him pretending to be part of himself, and there's a lot more involved discusion. Then we leave the room in annoyance and do some cooking. Then we come back to discover that the entire movie seems to be about Ray Liotta looking particularly sweaty and drooling while wearing nothing but bikini briefs and shot through a blue filter yelling "Fear Me!" for no apparent reason. Then we make sure to leave the room until the movie is over.

Seriously, I mean, what the crap?

Two Stories

2006-10-14T16:57:00.000-05:00

Dropping the Soap

Sometimes I really impress myself with my ability to do very unlikely things. Unfortunately, those unlikely things are almost universally things that no rational person would ever intend to do, and as often as not things that I myself would never intend to do. For example, a few mornings ago I managed, while showering, to accidentally grab the soap in just the wrong way, causing it to fly out of my hands and fall down around my feet. Bear with me, because that in itself is something that everyone does. What I did that was so impressive was that I managed to drop it with such precision and dexterity as to cause the bar of soap to strike the hot water faucet on the way down in such a way as to turn it to the off position entirely.

No, I'm really not sure how that worked, but I am very sure that it did. I didn't realize this at first, of course, since it was early in the morning and I didn't have my glasses on, for very obvious reasons. But I did realize what had happened very, very quickly. As I recall my exact thoughts were something along the lines of "Shoot - there went the soaFUCK! FUCK! FUCK!!"

An interesting fact about the shower in my apartment is that despite being a full (claw footed, like all bathtubs in Minneapolis that I know of) tub, the shower curtain and hence the usable portion of the tub is somewhat smaller. This made my incoherent thrashing to avoid the sudden freezing cold water less than effective, as there really was no place that I could stand that wasn't more or less directly underneath the water. After a few agonizing seconds I managed to strike the nozzle of the shower, directing the water immediately downwards and away from me, but it was an impressive few moments, I thought.

Of course, this only meant that to turn the hot water back on I had to go and get underneath the cold water, but at least this time I had the time to prepare myself for the shock.

Nice Backhand You've Got There

I just recieved a very nice thank you from a friend whose wedding I attended a month ago or something. While overall very charming it also included the following line: "And I can't get over what a handsome young man you've become!" The last word really brings up a lot of questions, doesn't it?

I would be offended except, really, it's pretty clear that I wasn't one earlier, and I remain nothing of the sort.

How to speak deceptively

2006-10-09T08:50:00.000-05:00

From the New York Times article on the recent nuclear test by North Korea.

But the explosion was also the product of more than two decades of diplomatic failure, spread over at least three presidencies. American spy satellites saw the North building a good-size nuclear reactor in the early 1980’s, and by the early 1990’s the C.I.A. estimated that the country could have one or two nuclear weapons. But a series of diplomatic efforts to “freeze” the nuclear program — including a 1994 accord signed with the Clinton administration — ultimately broke down, amid distrust and recriminations on both sides.

On the one hand, this paragraph is exactly right, but it is right in a way almost guaranteed to be dificult to puzzle out. For example, talking of failure spread out over three presidencies is quite right, however mentioning Clinton immediately afterwards when, as it turns out, his administration was not one of those presidencies is a trifle deceptive (the three presidencies were, from the dates they give, Reagan, Bush, and the second Bush). Clinton's acheivement was hardly a failure - it only collapsed in 2003 when Bush decided to renege.

So the timeline goes something like this: in the 1980s it became fairly obvious that North Korea was trying to get nuclear weapons (probably quite sensibly given its history, though of course this is hardly an endorsement). And by the early 1990s they had a pretty threatening looking program under way. The Clinton administration negotiated an accord under which their nuclear program was locked up and under careful international scrutiny, and it basically stayed that way from 1994-2002. In 2003 Bush decided that this deal was no longer a good one, and changed it to the now very familliar tactics he uses on almost every occasion. North Korea started their weapons program, expelled the people watching their sites and materials, and now have several nuclear weapons.

And this is what is summarized in the above paragraph?

Snakes on a Motherfucking Pirated Movie

2006-09-06T22:47:00.000-05:00

So people are angry at the blogosphere for creating an internet buzz about Snakes on a Plane and then not going to theaters to see it. Stop and think, media pundits. Buzz among people on the internet. And they didn't turn up to see... a movie showing in theaters in the real world.

As for me, I watched it tonight in the comfort of a friend's home, streamed from the computer in his bedroom to the modded Xbox in his living room to a very big tv. As for where it came from... I do not know the intricacies, but there was the occasional shadow of a patron's head obscuring the opening credits, which leads me to question its legality.

I'm not saying that the only reason there was internet buzz and low theater turnout is that the buzzing internet has other channels than theaters for obtaining films. But it may be one.

Sometimes being really profound is not entirely... useful.

2006-08-26T18:45:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it's a little too easy to miss something really rather obvious when trying to come up with a profound insight. And, for once, this isn't a lead in to an embarrassing story about me - rather it's an embarrassing story about someone else, namely Ronald Aronson who wrote the following article about gratitude in The Philosopher's magazine. His thesis is, I suppose, interesting enough - it's not something I'm particularly sympathetic to or fascinated by, but it certainly sounds like the sort of thing many people would find interesting. The only trouble is that he seems to have gone searching for a question to match with an answer he already had, and found a question that it wasn't a very good answer to.

The suggestion of the article is that, loosely, we ought to revise the way we think about gratitude and get out of a narrower conception on which it is a purely interpersonal sort of feeling. If we do that then we can make sense of feeling grateful that, say, the Earth orbits a sun that is helpful rather than going to kill us all shortly and the like. He is also of the opinion that being able to feel grateful is a large part of what makes the lives of sincerely religious people meaningful and so very interested in being able to get in on some of that himself - ideally, as above, without having to imagine that there's someone giving, say, the physical attributes which allow the universe to support life to him.

There's just one small problem that I can see with his account - and it's most obvious when he talks clearly about the sort of feeling he is trying to capture:

The first step of such a project concerns paradoxically, the issue of giving thanks. Gratitude, central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is virtually absent from our secular culture, except in relation to the “oughts” of individual interactions. But this deprives living without God of much of its coherence and meaning.[*] My thesis is that there is much to be grateful for. Exploring this feeling and idea, so little noticed from a secular point of view, opens a new way of experiencing our relationship with forces and beings beyond our individual selves.
Hiking through a nearby woods on a late summer day recently, I followed the turning path and suddenly saw a pristine lake, then walked down a hill to its edge as birds chirped and darted about, stopping at a clearing to register the warmth of the sun against my face. Feelings welled up: physical pleasure, delight in the sounds and sights, gladness to be out here on this day. But something else as well, curious and less distinct, a vague feeling more like gratitude than anything else but not towards any being or person I could recognise. Only half-formed, this feeling didn't fit into any easily discernable category, evading my usual lenses and language of perception.

What strikes me as utterly bizarre about this passage - particularly the second half - is that I would think it's pretty clear what experience he's describing, and furthermore I don't know why he doesn't have a catagory for it. Even the devoutly religious have a conception of wonder, don't they? I would find it dificult to imagine why not, at any rate. And it strikes me as entirely obvious that what you get when you remove the interpersonal aspect from gratitude (which as far as I can tell is what makes it gratitude in the first place) just is wonder.

I may just be being uncharitable here, but is there really anything more to what he's describing or trying to account for in quasi-religious terms that isn't immediately obvious as just the regular old feeling of wonder? If so I must say I've never experienced what he's talking about (and I've had any number of religious experiences (you know - "in college")). I wouldn't describe my life as devoid of coherence or meaning (though I would probably say "meaning" with a slightly skeptical tone of voice, because I generally hear it used in ways that I find... sneaky at best). At any rate, I'm certainly not aware of any loss on my part nor do I appear to be any worse off than anyone else in that sort of department - so if I just am left out of this sort of thing it doesn't appear to make much of a difference. And if not, wouldn't someone have pointed this out to him a long time ago - say, before he published an article arguing that we should have a word like "wonder", only more conducive to being talked about the way very religious people talk about wonder?

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*Somehow. I think magic must be involved. It's either that or he's just making things up.

I wasn't expecting that

2006-08-22T15:23:00.000-05:00

So, my new roommate has a scales, and I weighed myself for the first time in a while. I had thought I was losing weight recently, but apparently that is... not the case. I now weigh approximately 190lbs! It's scary - I'm only 5'8" or so, and I don't know where that weight is hiding.

"Congratulations! $500 Taco Bell Gift Card!"

2006-08-21T17:57:00.000-05:00

Many of the subject lines in my spam quarantine are similar variations on the "You Just Won x!" format, but this one was especially good.

I like Taco Bell, but trying to imagine $500 worth of its fare is a challenge. By my calculations, I could get 561 bean and cheese burritos (ignoring tax).

Oh Dear...

2006-08-14T20:08:00.000-05:00

While I have to say I do agree with the child in this story, there's something a little off about that response coming from a small child. I can only hope he was just repeating something he'd heard and not being straightforward about it.

Adventures in Cooking

2006-08-12T19:08:00.000-05:00

I don't have a rice cooker at the moment - the one at my old apartment was my roommate's, and while I have ponied up for a large bag of rice I haven't managed to properly steel myself to go spend money that, honestly, I don't really have for the machine to cook it. As a result I've been making even more bread than normal - or more accurately making the same amount as always, but lacking other people in the apartment to eat it. It feels like more, though.

As a result, I've also run out of flour, more or less, and have a couple days till my latest order from King Arthur Flour arrives. (Seriously, this is a great place to buy flour - and, I calculate, if you order more than a couple pounds it ends up being cheaper than going to the store and getting it there. Better selection as well.) As a result I'm making bread with hilarious ingredients at the moment. Currently in the kitchen there's a dough rising (which, automatically, is a win for me) composed almost entirely of pumpernickel and durum flour. I filled in the gaps with some all purpose flour that was lurking around a bit, dumped some extra wheat gluten in to strengthen it, and made it into a Cornell Bread recipe (if you search on google for anything more specific you'll get a recipe, but I don't trust it - just make bread with the linked additions), just for kicks. I also added a half a cup or so of ground Flax seeds, on the recommendation of a friend in Medical school, making this possibly the most pointlessly nutritious substance possible. Does anyone know much about adding Flax to things? I may have poisoned myself, or wasted a lot of flour.

I also just recieved a new cookbook that I ordered - The United States Regional Cook Book. It's a combination of some really impressive looking recipes ( it has an entire section on Pennsylvania Dutch cooking! I can make red beet eggs, and shoo-fly pie, and so on for my friends who may or may not appreciate it!) and some really hilarious ones. I don't mean bad ones, per se, but it's a different sort of cookbook that will include recipes that have, as a listed ingredient, "200 pounds of fresh-killed beef", or "one large hog's head". I am also quite amused by the instruction on a recipe that I will keep mysterious: "set in cool place and leave undisturbed for one year".

Things are looking up when it comes to eating, I think.

Behold My Power!

2006-08-05T23:04:00.000-05:00

Best duplicate wedding gift received: the TV-B-Gone. (Yes, we registered for one). I took mine out to Blockbuster tonight and turned off not one but two of their high-mounted movie-preview-playing televisions. It felt so enjoyably devious. The workers didn't notice until we were on line to leave, so it was wonderfully quiet for our whole trip. I was too heady with power to pay close attention to choosing a movie, though. In the future, we look forward to putting our TV-B-Gones to good use in bars and airports.

The only thing that would make it more fun would be if I could do it simply by glaring.

Being A Wet Blanket

2006-07-29T16:41:00.000-05:00

I hate to do this to such wonderfully flattering notions, but I can't help but suspect that the GRE/IQ conversions mentioned by Scott, here, are a little off.

I, for example, achieved a 1440 combined verbal and quantitative score on the GREs (split, interestingly, straight down the middle). According to the website this means that I (probably) have an IQ of (roughly) 149 (Stanford-Binet), or 146 (Wechsler). However, when tested as a child (fifth grade, as I recall), I scored 127, or so. And as people mature they tend to regress to the mean, so at this point my IQ is probably below that barring some sort of horrible test mishap*.

Any flattery of Philosophy or Philosophers in general, however, can go right ahead. I'm behind that all the way.

---

I'm not going to rule out entirely something odd with my IQ score - I had just moved to America from Africa, and no one bothered to tell me (as I remember, at least) what was going on when I was given the test. All the same, 146 seems awfully high to me.

Brief Update

2006-07-28T19:52:00.000-05:00

This is just a short update on how things are going. There's not much new with me, honestly (cough, cough LG), but here goes.

1. I (think I) killed a chipmunk this morning.

I was out on my bike ride, to be more specific, and as far as I can tell the chipmunk had had enough of the heat wave and decided to put itself out of its misery. How else to explain it running across the bike trail at full speed not a foot in front of my tire? And how else to explain how, when by some stroke of luck it actually made it with about two centimeters to spare, it doubled back directly under my front tire? I didn't really have enough time to swerve out of the way the first time, so the doubling back really caught off guard and before I knew it I heard that unfortunate bump that comes from going over something soft in a bike. The story really only gets better when it's revealed that after this happened I looked back up from the pavement (after trying to avoid it) to see that just in front of me and going the opposite direction was a father and his young (seven or so) son. That must have been a fun one to explain.

2. It's really, really unpleasant moving.

I always think I remember how much I don't like moving until I do move, and then it turns out I like it even less. You'd really think I'd be more used to moving, given that this is at least the eleventh time I've done it (not counting moving back and forth from various dorm rooms and home each year) and I'm twenty five. But no - each time it catches me by surprise. It's especially fun, I'm discovering, when you have to do it during a heat emergency, and when your means of transporting your possessions from the old apartment to the new one is walking (ok, and the occasional friend with a car helping out - because frankly there was no way I was going to make it carrying the subwoofer, or the kitchen table, for more than a block or so). I'm just lucky I finagled a two week overlap in leases - though that's coming to a close pretty soon, obviously. I've only got a few more things to do, though, and I'm done with the books. I've also learned that nothing makes you feel older than back pain, or at least nothing I've experienced (and I've lived a good twenty five years now, so it's been a while, and I'll shut up about that now).

3. Ok, fine, global warming. How about some global drying?

If there's one thing I really can't stand it's humidity. I actually like the winters here in Minneapolis. Why? Because they're not remotely moist in any way. They're cold, yes, or at least they have been in the past (it may be a fluke, I suppose, but even in the past few years that I've lived in the region the winters have started feeling less and less severe - and older professors tell stories of heating oil freezing in the pipes and the like, which certainly isn't happening these days). And the past few weeks have been nearly intolerable to me. I'll take the heat - really - but the humidity needs to quit it right now.

How are people fooled?

2006-07-23T18:13:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that I am at times amazed by how people manage to have serious academic careers, and get published, while at the same time being imbeciles. Now, perhaps the person I'm thinking of here isn't usually stupid, or he may even regularly produce brilliant work. But I can identify a rather striking moment in which he was, in fact, being rather unfortunately dimwitted - namely an article in the latest edition of Analysis titled "A non-theistic cosmology and natural history".

Briefly, to provide an outline at least, his thesis seems to be that Intelligent Design advocates (he seems to have confused them for people with some sort of intellectual integrity) have a really good point against evolution. But this point can be neatly avoided if we just change the Big Bang theory - which we should do anyway, since obviously time is infinite anyway. (He seems to be under the impression that failing to grant that the universe is infinitely old is, automatically, a form of theism. I am not too well versed in contemporary physics, but nevertheless I get the impression that I'm rather more well versed than he is: for example, I'm fairly certain at least that Kant is not generally taken to provide a serious objection to the theory, and the last I checked, at least, Einstein had written some interesting articles about this subject.) And once we get rid of that, you see, we've got either (1) an infinite time in which mutations could occur, or (2) an infinite repitition of finite times - either of which increasing the likelihood that something might evolve and thus defeating the argument.

This is, needless to say, a rather impressively dramatic suggestion to make when all that is really necessary is to point out that Intelligent Design advocates have yet, in any argument, to fail to be utterly full of crap. Nevertheless, this is something I think he has not realized, as he seems to portray their arguments as reasonable, or failing that, not obvious silly (though they are):

It is easy enough to produce complex (and sometimes rather beautiful) shapes by a series of random alterations to an initially simple one, but the evolution of a complex organism is a different matter[*], one that defies not only belief but also, apparently[**], evolutionary theory. An incipient wing, for example, would be a useless protruding bit of flesh, bone and gristle that, far from lifting the creature off the ground, would slow it down and provide a convenient grab point for the jaws of voracious predators. This transitional structure would thus be a useless appendage, inhibiting, rather than improving, that creature's chances of survival and reproduction as compared with the chances of conspecifics not so lumbered. Therefore, according to evolutionary theory itself, birds should not have evolved. ...[Biologists have "tried hard" to demonstrate otherwise, in various cases, and he admits that in some cases they have something reasonable.] But it is fair to say that the argument has not yet been won...

Of course, I should add that I don't know, particularly, if he's endorsing this argument particularly -- though his attempted counter argument gives it an awful lot of credit. I would like to suggest, though, that this may be the first man published in a serious philosophy journal to have never seen an actual bird.

People with some familliarity with birds (even in the Kentucky fried sense) would of course recognize fairly quickly that wings are just front limbs with a lot of modifications. They might even, if particularly sharp, notice that those sorts of modifications are pretty easy to arrive at without the intermediary of some sort of stubby, useless proto-limbs. Really all that is needed, when it comes down to it, is these three pictures. Is what a flying squirrel has an "incipient wing"? It seems fairly close to what could be meant by that, but of course once you get clear on what an incipient wing might be generally this argument either falls apart (as when considering the squirrel), or is shown to be based on a profoundly silly ignorance (an incipient wing would be like a really crude wing that doesn't work).

One can only wonder why anyone, honestly, might take that to be anything resembling a serious argument in the first place. Now, I understand perfectly well what is happening when a serious ID advocate makes that sort of argument - they're being dishonest. But when someone who, in theory, has some sort of education and still, apparently seriously, makes that same argument? Frankly I'm lost.

There's a fair bit more to say about this article (for example, one might point out that the chances of human beings evolving on earth are rather greater than he takes them to be, as in fact this did happen; or that he seems to have no understanding of what a "mutation" might amount to), but I really don't have the heart to continue. How did the author fail to notice that he was arguing about something of which he has no particular understanding, and how did he end up publishing this in the first place?

*No reason is given for this, aside from what follows.
**At least, apparently to simpletons.

It Tastes Like The Junior Prom

2006-07-23T13:51:00.000-05:00

In this one, isolated case "it" is in fact most of my apartment (the smell is that strong). It's odd to have to even say this, but as it turns out having cheap cologne fights in the apartment is not in fact a good idea. The main culprit here is a bottle of Bod "Blue Musk"* that I bought once because it was both on sale and hilariously awful looking (this can be said about a great deal of my possessions) and my roommate who drunkenly soaked our porch and the bedroom of our third roommate with it. This is in some part a reconstruction on my part because while I was around for a lot of it I spent most of that time fleeing from it, and also because the majority of the trouble happened when I was in the bathroom. (I wasn't in there for too long, but boy did I have a surprise** waiting for me when I left.) I disavow all responsibility, in other words. (Yes, ok, it was my bottle of cologne and I did suggest it at some point and hand the bottle to said roommate who was drunk and sleep deprived at the time - but still, no responsibility!)

We learned some useful lesson from it, though. For example, when they say that it's flammable they aren't joking - you can do a version of that insect repellant trick using a lighter and a bottle of this stuff. And furthermore, that you should never under any circumstances do a version of that insect repellant trick using a lighter and a bottle of this stuff.

We also learned that while you can't actually drink your sense of smell away, you can at least try and that it does help a little.

Boy, I hope the next group of tenants in this apartment like the smell.

*This link is to prove that it exists. Do not purchase this product. Do search around for customer reviews, though, if you want to be deeply saddened.
**Meaning a line in the hallway of friends doing their best to breathe through their mouths and waiting to get to the sink.