It's here it's here!

So, my new computer got built and delivered in better time than expected.

This is a Dell Dimension 9200 with a 2.13 GHz Core2 Duo, 2 GB of memory, and GeForce 7900 video. The 20-inch wide-screen LCD they threw in with the thing also isn't bad.

None of it highest quality available, you'll notice. My experience with computers is that if I spend top dollar to buy top-of-the-line stuff I'm going to be pretty annoyed when it's not top-of-the-line anymore a year from now, and why the hell did I spend so much money on it, then. This way I rebuild or buy a new one in two years and not be too bothered by the expenditure.

So far as dealing with Dell goes, they made my system with what I wanted in it for pretty cheap, and while I may yet re-install the OS to get rid of the foofy Dell stuff infecting the thing, so far it seems pretty alright. Maybe I can turn off the foofy Dell stuff...

And the case is pretty nifty. My wireless card install was painless, literally. No scraped knuckles or anything. No tools required, layout inside is clean and neat. And it runs really quiet.

Anyway, I'm very happy that I get to play with it over the long weekend, since it'll likely take me the entire time to install all the stuff I want on there. All I got done last night was the basic hardware setup and OS update, and a few other little things. So, I can't tell you at the moment how nice a game of Warcraft it plays.

Though, I can tell you that it is right now playing a very nice game of climateprediction.net.

Life is a placeholder

We're doing this experiment at work involving speech recognition in the presence of noise. When the noise gets too loud, the speech recognizer gets confused, of course. One of the mis-transcriptions it gave for my speech: "Life is a placeholder."

Fun office conversation: Sid, Gus and I were taking a break, talking about Gandhi's pacifist movement in India.

I love my workplace.

Sid was telling us about a particular incident involving a salt tax imposed by the British. The Indians weren't happy about it, so they were protesting. The protest went like this: the Indians would go to the place to collect salt. The British police would be there waiting for them. The Indians would step up to the British police, and the police would thump them with nightsticks, the Indians would fall down and get carted off, and other Indians would step up, get thumped, fall down. They'd line up for this. Sometimes if the Indians weren't too badly injured from their first thumping, they'd get up and get back in line.

According to Sid, the idea there was to induce shame in the British police, for acting in a violent way against people who were not behaving violently.

Well, this got us talking about other sorts of nonviolence and pacifism, including the Jains, who are a sort of pacifist-extremist religious sect. They go to amazing lengths to avoid killing anything, for instance by wearing masks over their mouths to keep from inhaling insects or bacteria, thereby killing them. I mentioned that to a Jain, it's better to let themselves be eaten by a tiger than to kill the tiger in self defense.

Gus had what seems to me the stereotypical problem that most people have when considering that sort of pacifism, which is, that's just not acceptable. If someone attacks me, the argument goes, then I can and should defend myself. If pacifism tells me that I can't do that, then pacifism is wrong.

This misses the point. The ploint of religion in this context is to have you act while alive in such a way as to stand you in good stead in the afterlife. In this view it's the afterlife that's most important, so actions in life that mess up your afterlife for you should be avoided, maybe at all costs. ("Life is a placeholder.") To a Jain, or other sorts of religious pacifists, any violence in this life will ruin/detract from their afterlife. Since the afterlife is more important, nonviolence while alive is the ultimate good.

What Gus's argument assumes instead is that a person's own continued life is the ultimate good. So, then, any action that brings about the end of your life goes against that ultimate good. So clearly that would be unacceptable. Unless, of course, the real important thing is the afterlife, and violence is messing that up for you, like the Jains say.

Which isn't to say that I'm converting to Jainism. I'm just saying that this argument from the non-pacifists is missing the point of the religious pacifists' argument.

Soup is good food

There's this place on the west side of Cleveland called Udupi, Indian vegetarian restaraunt. I've been there a few times, mostly for the lunch buffet. Very good. They have the best lentil soup ("toor dal"), and I've been bugging my Indian friends to teach me to make it. So, I did my research and conducted my experiment, and the results are, if I say so, excellent.

Here's what I did:

Cook a pound of yellow lentils in water until mushy. Takes about an hour. Make sure it's on the watery side for authenticity.

In the meantime, cut up a two smallish red tomatoes. Sautee some red and green chillis, garlic and ginger until the garlic browns. I used two dried red chillis, three medium-sized jalapenos, maybe two teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger, and five cloves of garlic. The peppers make it pretty spicy; I'm pretty hard-core when it comes to that. You might want to adjust to your taste by using milder chillis (pablanos?) and less of the red pepper.

When the lentils are mushy, combine everything else with the lentils and cook a few more minutes to let the flavors mix.

Serve over rice so it feels like you ate something, or have some of those Indian wet rice cakes ("idli") with it.

Other than the tomatoes, which are my addition, probably pretty authentic, simple, easy, and cheap. You might have to go to an Indian food store for the lentils.

Since I'm posting this on my blog where I have never before posted a recipe, you can safely assume that I highly recommend it.

I have the conch!

Gigabyte of memory, doubles as a keychain. And, machine washable!

I am again going to go on about the online gaming. I would invite anyone who doesn't like that to not be snobby.

Instead of regaling you with the truly fascinating tales of my exploits as a 30th level elf rogue seeking the Tome of Eternal Nerdiness, I want to talk about the psychology of people in the "virtual world."

The setting: petty much, in-game interactions with other people are anonymous, or at least as anonymous as you choose them to be. Most people choose to be near-completely anonymous. The sorts of interactions you can have with people are limited almost entirely to text conversation and avatar actions, which are limited by the game mechanics.

Now, depending on the game, some real-life immoral/illegal/unethical/rude behavior is just not possible. For instance, in the games I play, a player wouldn't be able to walk up to another player on the street, put a knife in their gut, and steal their stuff. It's just not possible in the game mechanics.

Some immoral/illegal/unethical/rude behavior is possible in game, but forbidden. If a player misbehaves in these ways you can get a "Game Master" (an employee of the game company with pretty much absolute power in-game) involved to punish them. Punishable offenses depend on the game company's policy, and are usually things like use of profanity, verbal harassment, being openly gay (don't get me started on that), and that sort of thing.

However, that leaves a lot of leeway for people to be total jerks, and this behavior is not within the GMs' purview. For instance, let's say I need to kill a particular monster. There's nothing keeping someone else from standing in the spot where this monster appears and killing it, and doing that over and over so I never have a chance. And this is actually pretty common behavior.

If this were "real life," I could...well, punch this person in the face, or get a group of people to beat them up, or at least give them a piece of my mind. However, in the games I frequent, beating up another player is just not possible. Since they're anonymous, I can't go to their house and beat them up, either. So far as giving them a piece of my mind...I can try, assuming they speak English, but they can just put me on the "ignore list," which means they just won't recieve text from me. So, complaining at people who are misbehaving is almost always pointless. They don't care what you think; they don't have to.

So that's the situation: essentially, some sorts of in-game rude behavior have no external consequences. Which brings me to my first point: people who are largely anonymous and suffer few if any negative consequences for what would be, in real life, rude or anti-social behavior, tend to behave rudely and anti-socially. A lot. It's very "Lord of the Flies," actually. Hardly a game session goes by where I'm not confronted by somebody acting in an "I'm going to do what I want and too bad for you if that screws you over" sort of way. And very often it's clearly malicious.

As a sort of aside: how people can live with themselves doing that is an interesting question. I once got into it in-game with a person who I felt was being a jerk, who claimed to be a philosophy major. He had several remarks I found interesting (and falacious), but the upshot of his argument was, since we were in-game, morality did not apply. Since I argue that morality governs interactions between people regardless of context, and we were people interacting, I find this claim highly dubious.

Anyway. On the other hand, some people, unconstrained in the same way by normal social rules and consequences of misbehavior, still choose to behave in a friendly and socially-acceptable way. (I like to think I'm among those in general, though I'll admit to having my moments.) That is, no one is telling them they have to be good people, and there are no external consequences for not being good people...but they choose to be, anyway. Not everybody goes "Lord of the Flies."

So, the upshot here is: I think of this situation as a test case for what would happen if the normal social rules under which we live were lifted, or there were no consequences for failing to obey those rules. The results of this informal experiment seem to be: yes, a good many people...perhaps the majority...choose to ignore those rules and act like jerks. However, not everyone does; some people choose to follow those rules even though there is essentially no consequence (other than personal feelings on the matter) for failing to do that.

I think there's a psychology study or two to be had here, if anybody's looking for one.

I'm not bad...I'm just drawn this way.

I had a blog post more or less ready, but it was on a USB drive that I left in my shirt pocket, and it went through the washer. I'm going to let the drive dry a few days and see if it still works, and if it does, you'll get to read what I wrote about over the weekend. In the meantime...

Most people know me as more of an analaytic type, but once upon a time, I was actually pretty artistic.

Before I got heavily into the music thing as my artistic expression, I used to draw and paint. I took all the art classes I could in middle school and highschool, and did some painting on the side. Some of my watercolor paintings were...actually pretty good, and my mom still has a few of them around framed somewhere.

So recently I was involved with someone I'll call M. When it came out that I used to do art, and maybe have an artistic bent that I don't indulge much these days, M asked me to draw something. So, I tried my hand at it again, and it turns out that I'm a little rusty, but I can pretty much still do it.

Leastwise, I can look at what I've drawn and say, "Well, that's just not right," and have the patience to keep at it until what I have is at least not awful. And if I don't have great technique right now...well, that feels like just a matter of practice to me.

Well, so then Rhea found out I could draw, and she said "Draw something for me," so I tried it some more, and...well, what I drew for Rhea wasn't awful, but I look at it and think, "I don't hate this, but I could do better."

There's something very visceral for me about drawing. With painting it's a big project, and takes all this fancy equipment. Like, you know, paint. With drawing, it's just pencil, paper, draw. I can do it while sitting around watching the teevee or whatever. And I find it...soothing.

The upshot is, I feel like I should do some more of it, that it's something I should be doing on a regular basis.

I'll letcha know how that goes.