Heavily invested in the "smiling and being cute" talent tree

Along the lines of my previous account of the woman I met in-game who went into labor, some other friends of mine related this story:

Apparently the group of them were recently in a raid, which for those of you not into game-speak is a difficult encounter with lots of players involved that typically takes a fairly large time commitment. One of the players was a female friend of theirs who was nine months pregnant. They all knew this, so she would occasionally tease them with comments like, "afk, labor." ("afk" is shorthand for "away from keyboard," which you say to let people know that you're busy with something not the game.)

Which was pretty funny, until she actually went into labor, and had to drop from the raid to go to the hospital. Then it became hilarious.

Fortunately, her party was understanding. One said, "Giving birth is a perfectly valid reason to take an afk."

Apparently the new mother nicknamed her child "Ding," which is game-speak for gaining a skill level.

Back of the envelope

So, lunch conversation at work being typically eclectic, the subject came up of how fast we're moving (relative to the axis of the Earth) due to the rotation of the Earth.

Well. Here in sunny Cleveland, the lattitude is about 40 degrees. The radius of the Earth is about 6378 kilometers, and the rate of rotation of the Earth is 1 revolution per 24 hours, or 2pi rad/24 hr, which is 0.262 rad/hr.

The linear velocity of everything here in sunny Cleveland is then r*omega, where r is the distance to the rotational axis (not the center) of the Earth, and omega is the rate of rotation. So, linear velocity v = 6378 km*cos(40 deg)*0.262 rad/hr = 1279 km/hr, or about 795 miles/hr.

That inevitably raises the question, if the Earth abruptly stopped rotating, and everything on the surface (this means you) kept going at 1279 km/hr (795 mph) tangent to the surface of the Earth, how high above the surface of the Earth would you get before you face-planted going that speed? After all, the Earth is curved. Seems like you should get some altitude.

However, gravity is not your friend. Let's assume that a person has a center of mass 1 m above the ground. Let's also assume that the person's feet have been yanked out from under them by the stopping of the Earth's rotation, so they're in free-fall. We can break the person's motion up into two components, one normal (perpendicular) to the Earth's surface and one tangential (parallel) to the Earth's surface. Now, we can assume for the moment that the gravity ("normal") component of the resulting velocity is perpendicular to the linear velocity ("tangential") component calculated above, and do a calculation based on that. If the distance travelled by our hapless victim becomes significant compared to the radius of the Earth, that means our assumption that these components are always nearly perpendicular was bad, and we'll have to do a more complicated thing to figure distance.

So. How long would it take for our hapless victim's center of mass to fall 1 m, resulting in a face-plant? That's pretty easy: from highschool physics, d = (1/2)at^2, where d is distance, a is acceleration, in this case the acceleration of gravity at the surface of the Earth (9.8 m/s^2), and t is time. So t = sqrt(2d/a), or in this case, t = sqrt(2*(1 m)/(9.8 m/s^2)) = 0.45 s.

That's not quite the end of the story, since the curvature of the Earth could hypothetically save our victim from face-planting for a bit longer. So we need to know if we can safely approximate the Earth as flat over the distance the victim would travel.

Well, the linear velocity component v = 1279 km/hr = 355 m/s. The horizontal distance you'd travel before face-planting, approximating the Earth as flat, is d = vt. Using our time-of-fall calculation above for t, this is d = 355 m/s * 0.45 s = 160 m (about 160 yards, for you all still stuck in English units). That's 0.16 km, which is 4 orders of magnitude smaller than the radius of the Earth, 6378 km. We can therefore safely ignore the Earth's curvature as being insignificant.

In conclusion, what would happen if the Earth suddenly stopped rotating is that our hapless victim, resident of sunny Cleveland, would be thrown (at most) 160 yards and face-plant in (at most) 0.45 seconds going about 795 mph.

Poetic justice

Next time I hear someone argue that the victim of some crime/harassment/whatever was "asking for it" and the perpetrator just couldn't help themselves, I am going to beat that person up and steal their stuff, and then tell them that they were asking for it by having stuff, and I couldn't help myself.

That is all.

Actually, I want to establish the religion of Pastafarianism

According to this article in Talking Points Memo, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, known for his non-Christian religious beliefs, has some uncomplimentary things to say about those of us who do not subscribe to any:

"It is as if they're intent on establishing a new religion in
America – the religion of secularism. They're wrong," Romney said...

Now, this is of course not the first time I've heard social-conservative types making an argument along the lines of what Romney said, but let me just point out a few things that are wrong with it, since he brought it up.

Secular behavior is by definition not a religion, or a lack of one, but a lack of reference to religion. So "religion of secularism" is an oxymoron. It's not unusual for religious types to try to make the claim that "secularism" is a religion, thus putting it on equal grounds with actual religions so far as the law or the tenor of the argument is concerned. The argument's patently bogus, but that doesn't keep people from using it.

Which brings up another problem, the conflation of "secular" with "atheistic." Those are different things. Atheism may be a set of claims or beliefs regarding religious matters, and a person could certainly widen their definition of religion to include atheism. I claim that this would render the definition of religion so broad as to be essentially meaningless, and it certainly wouldn't match the currently accepted definition, but a person could do it. To say that some group is secular, however, is not to say that they have a set of beliefs at all, but that they've made a policy choice: the choice to not make reference to religious matters in either a positive or a negative way.

And for that matter, there's the word "secularism," carefully constructed to define the terms of the argument to presuppose the speaker's conclusion: note the "-ism," a tacit claim that it is a set of beliefs we're talking about, rather than a policy choice. Certainly people who favor a secular state as a policy have some beliefs as the basis of that. (For my part, they would be that it's better for the state to not refer to religion at all, on the grounds that whatever reference the state makes to religion, it's going to annoy and marginalize someone, which I'd rather the state not do. There are good reasons for the anti-establishment clause in the constitution, and that's one of them.) However, that does not mean that the policy is itself a belief system akin to a religion, or that any religious person should be threatened by the implementation of that policy. Very much the opposite. See Europe, circa 1700.

There's also a personal attack in there, an attempt to ascribe questionable motives to atheists and agnostics. We must be engaging in these deplorable acts (presupposing we actually are doing that) because we're trying to make atheism/agnosticism the state religion of the United States. It couldn't possibly be that we're just tired of the people to whom Romney is pandering shoving their religiosity down our throats from public podiums across the land, and would like them to stop, and feel that it is constitutionally required that they stop. No, we must be bad people with nefarious motives.

Finally, if it's wrong for people who hold a certain set of beliefs to attempt to slant the behavior of the people or the federal government toward actions and policies that are in line with those beliefs, then I would just like to point out that the same social conservative types who presumably were the ones applauding Romney's statement are among the worst offenders.

As a side note, I wonder if Romney would come out saying that those whose actual, stated goal is the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the United States are wrong. Somehow I doubt it.

Personally, I prefer electric

A conversation with the intrepid Pete led to this line of thought:

Occam's Razor says that (paraphrased and in a nutshell), the simplest explanation of some phenomenon is preferable to some more complex explanation.

Now, what we should note about this is that it should be taken as a procedural rule of thumb, not as any sort of logical proof. Between that and the weasel words that exist in whatever version of Occam's Razor we're using, people sometimes abuse the concept.

For instance. I once had a person argue to me that "god did it" is a simpler explanation than "this happened according to natural forces," and therefore according to Occam we should prefer the former explanation over the latter.

This isn't an argument unique to my acquaintance, and there have been attempts to address and refute the argument. One is to say, "any god who created the universe must be more complex than the universe he/she/it created. Therefore, any hypothesis involving this super-universally-complex god is disfavored by Occam's Razor compared to any hypothesis not involving such a god."

On further reflection, I think that goes too far. Presupposing I am a being of finite complexity, given enough time and effort, I could certainly design a system more complicated than I am. Further, without too much effort at all, I could design very simple *rules* for a system that, when implemented, would lead to theoretically infinite complexity. (I used to do fractals as art, so in fact I have done this.)

However, I'd certainly note that in the above two examples I wouldn't claim to be aware of or directly in control of every piece of the system that I designed, and it would seem to more directly follow that if I could be, that would require me to have more complexity than the system I am observing/controlling. So, if the theist in this discussion insists that his/her god is capable of that, then the earlier argument might still be vaild.

Otherwise, the theist trying to use Occam's razor would still have to show (rather than assuming) that the less-then-universally-complex god acting thus-and-so was still a simpler explanation than natural causes, which I think is the actual crux of the matter here. Seems to me we have to presuppose natural forces no matter what we do (since we can, you know, observe them to exist), so, "natural forces" pretty much has to be a simpler explanation than "natural forces plus god."

Only then we start talking about, does our natural forces hypothesis completely explain whatever (hint: no, never), so then doesn't the god hypothesis that does (it is claimed) explain everything escape Occam's Razor thusly, except "god did it" doesn't tell us why it's this way and not some other and so is empty as an explanation, and it gets quite silly, which is why I don't much talk about this stuff these days.

Madness to my method

So, the quarter is coming to an end.

Also, I have "Good Vibrations" stuck in my head. Curse you, J. J. Abrams!

At the company where I work, as I'm sure it is at many other such companies, the end of the quarter is when most of the really fun stuff happens: management gives employee reviews and hands out bonuses, employees rush to meet quarterly goals, pressure to produce results flies everywhere, craziness ensues.

Now, I'll admit that I work best when I have a certain amount of external motivation. Having said that, I do research, and I think it's really best to follow a certain methodology: first see what other people have done along those lines, then try some stuff out, find what's wrong with it, refine what you've done and/or scrap it and start along a different path, rinse and repeat. If that doesn't happen in about that order, then a lot of my effort tends to be wasted in repeating other people's mistakes and trying stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Which is what I see happening to myself these days. My method has been largely scrapped in an attempt to favor "fast" over "good," and the result may be neither fast nor good. Stuff falls through the cracks, I can't remember what I was doing two days ago and I didn't have time to document it, that sort of thing. Madness.

As an aside, what occurs to me at this point is that at the end of last quarter I was writing about similar end-of-quarter craziness and optimistically hoping that it would be better once the new quarter started, and to the best of my memory it really wasn't much better. It's been like this for months.

Sigh.

Don't you think?

Monday bleary-eyed free-association follows.

There are a lot of people who think that, whatever it is that they're doing, god is on their side, and not their opponents'. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that's pretty much a common characteristic of theists, to self-justify into thinking that they are divinely justified. The fact that their opponents think exactly the same about themselves isn't relevant to that line of thinking. "My opponents may think the same thing," they say, "but I'm right, and they're wrong." Mayhem ensues, naturally.

Now, being a nontheist, I don't think that god is on my side.

However, the next thing I sort of habitually say when I start talking about these sorts of highly-questionable matters is, "Of course I could be wrong about that."

That leads to today's USRDA of irony, which is this: I could, in my nontheist refusal to claim that god is on my side, actually have god on my side.

That is all.