Shouting in a Void

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

2008-05-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-13T07:29:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-04T06:44:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

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.

We've got a blind date with destiny...and it looks like she's ordered the lobster

2007-08-10T07:08:00.000-07:00

This is one of those posts that may, depending on your viewpoint, make me look like a jackass.

So be it.

I know better than anyone that dating is fraught with difficulty and pitfalls. So how wonderous it is that yesterday, when my browser started on the front page of MSN (I really need to change that), I saw this article explaining to me who should pay on a first date.

Naturally, it is the man who should pay.

The thesis here is

a) the woman on the date is judging the man on his generosity, and will judge him lacking and lose interest if he does not pay for dinner;

b) the man, being "the pursuer" in this scenerio, will lose his pursuer status if the woman pays, and will therefore lose interest in her;

c) these two facts are ancient genetic imperatives, and are true whether we want them to be or not.

Well. Let's leave aside for a moment questions like, if the people on the date are both gay, then who pays. What I notice here is that what we have here are a bunch of unsupported claims made by the author and a few people who all agree with her. Viewpoints other than the author's aren't just given short shrift, they're entirely unrepresented.

So, for instance, the author never interviewed anyone who said, "I really want to avoid the dating politics where, if the guy pays, then I owe him." Which opinion has been expressed to me personally by a few women I've talked to.

And I can personally attest that, when I'm on a date, "I'm the pursuer" isn't a factor for me. Frankly, I'd like my date to demonstrate some interest in me. Having her say "You should buy me dinner or I'm not interested" accomplishes the opposite, by showing me that she's unwilling to put anything in.

My point being, (a) and (b) above are dangerously sweeping generalizations that are demonstrably wrong. At least not so ubiquitous as the author claims. Maybe some polling data would be helpful here, rather than just quoting a couple people who agree and acting as though that proves the point.

Claim (c) is even worse, not even being based on anecdotal evidence. While I'd probably stipulate that genetic predispositions toward certain behaviors and attitudes are a factor here, no effort was made in the article to justify the claim that those factors are universal and dominant.

Worse still is the implicit claim that "is" is the same as "ought," i.e., assuming all men's and women's attitudes are X, that's the reality and we should accept it by having the guy buy dinner. As opposed to watching out for those attitudes creeping into our thinking and taking care not to let them influence our actions, which seems to me far better. Just what decade/century/millenium are we living in, anyway?

If there is a reality of the situation, it is that dating is complicated and situational. Trying to claim that the situation is uniform, and that the correct thing to do is apply universal rules popularized in 50's "how not to be an awkward teenager" filmstrips, does not help the situation.

You can't make me, nyaaah

2007-07-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

Mmkay. So, last week we had this thing go down.

Essentially, Congress got annoyed at the President and his people over their stonewalling on the US Attorney firings bit. Congress instituted contempt of Congress proceedings against some people in the administration, which would be investigated/prosecuted by the Justice Department. That's the way that's supposed to work.

The President said, no, that can't happen.

The excuse the President uses is this: the "unitary executive" theory, to which the President (claims to) subscribe, says that according to one reading of the constitution the executive branch is a united whole: everyone who works for the executive branch is under the complete control of the president, and the entire branch represents a projection of the president's will. Under this theory, the executive branch shouldn't be thought of as a bunch of people working together, but as a single entity. Basically, the entire branch is the President.

Well, if the executive branch is a single entity, then that leads to a number of interesting consequences. For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency can't sue the military. Since they are both arms of the executive branch, and the executive branch is essentially the President, that would amount to "the President suing himself."

Bear in mind this is a constitutional argument. The argument therefore is seen to trump any mere legal issue.

Well, now we come to this matter: Congress has instituted contempt of Congress proceedings against some people in the administration. The Justice Department has the job of investigating this. Except that, remember, under unitary executive theory the Justice Department and these administration officials are the same entity. That would be like someone prosecuting themselves. That, the President says, can't happen.

Well, more to the point I think, he says he will tell the Justice Department not to pursue the case.

What I'd like to point out about this line of reasoning is, at the end of it, the executive branch and everyone in it is exempt from prosecution. So long as everyone in the administration is doing what the President wants, if any of his people get into legal trouble, he can simply tell the Justice Department not to prosecute them for executing his will. The executive branch is essentially above the law.

Even more than that, if the argument is that the Justice Department can't constitutionally prosecute administration officials at all, then that leads to the even more wacky conclusion that even if the President's people are doing illegal things against his will, they can't be prosecuted for it.

What occurs to me is that this puts the President and the arguers for unitary executive here in a bad position. Either they have to admit that the President's people aren't even under the President's control, or they have to admit that the President can constitutionally bring legal charges against his people, in which case the executive isn't quite so unitary as they're trying to claim and the President is simply being very selective in how he chooses to fulfill his constitutional obligations to uphold the law.

Divorced from the (apparently vacuous and poorly-thought-out) constitutional and legal arguments, however, it seems to me that this is just another of a long series of incidents wherein the President reveals his true nature, a bratty little kid on a playground who thinks he can do whatever he wants and get away with it.

And dare I say, it's the well-being of the nation that's the toy he's stolen and is now beating on the ground to see if it breaks.

Mr. Freud...paging Mr. Sigmund Freud

2007-06-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night where I discovered this two-inch-deep chasm across my torso, from lower left to upper right. When I poked around in it, I discovered shelf fungus growing in it, like grows on trees.

Also, I was jamming with a band with Jennifer Aniston on vocals. We played Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter." Jennifer only knew the first verse, so I was trying to write the lyrics down for her while I was playing.

They really did that?

2007-05-31T10:36:00.000-07:00

More politics.

The intrepid Pete pointed me to this NYT article, dealing with a recent Supreme Court decision.

The back story here is that a female management-level employee at a particular Goodyear plant had been paid less than her colleagues for twenty years. Having finally found this out, she sued her employer under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the intent of which was to prevent employers from discriminating thusly.

Though the law does say that a person has 180 days to report a violation "after the unlawful employment practice has occurred," it has traditionally been held by the federal enforcement body, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, that this is 180 days from the last incidence of discrimination. Meaning, in this case, the last paycheck where the plaintiff's employer underpaid her based on her gender.

For whatever reason this case got to the Supreme Court. Who, on Tuesday, reversed that opinion. According to the NYT:

The court held on Tuesday that employees may not bring suit under the principal federal anti-discrimination law unless they have filed a formal complaint with a federal agency within 180 days after their pay was set.

Meaning, after the date of their initial employment. By ruling of the five-justice conservative majority of the Supreme Court, unless you find out within 180 days after you are employed that you are being discriminated against, you have no legal recourse to force your employer to fix the matter in any way. Other than to quit.

Now, as Pete points out, that's just ludicrous. It's highly unlikely that anyone can figure out that they're being paid less than their colleageus who are doing the same work during that period. Essentially, this ruling reinterprets the law such that few people (if anyone) will meet the standard set by the court. The law cannot in practicality be enforced, and employers need not in practicality abide by it. Employers now can discriminate as much as they want, and since they likely won't be caught in time, they will get away with it scot-free.

That is, in and of itself, a travesty.

And let me get this straight, what actually happened here. The Supreme Court just ruled to reinterpret a law in a way that defeats the clear and stated intent of that law, which was to prevent workplace discrimination. If that's not "legislating from the bench" I don't know what is.

So, I can expect any time now the howls of "judicial activism" coming from the usual suspects on the right side of the isle?

...any time now...

I would also have given pandas a real thumb

2007-05-15T19:59:00.000-07:00

Jerry Falwell is, as you might know, dead.

I could perhaps write a post opining that his death is squarely the result of his displeasing God. Since, were I God, I would certainly have been displeased by Jerry Falwell. Being, you know, pretty sure I had made it clear that people are not supposed to act that way.

However, that is not why I am writing.

I am writing because, on my way home from work this evening, I noticed that at the post office down the street from my work, the flag there...

...was flying at half-staff.

Now, a brief searching around for a reason why that might be turned up nothing...other than the suspicion that some official representing our government...everyone in America's government...had taken it upon themselves to use a public facility to express sadness at the death of Jerry Falwell. The guy who blamed the 9/11 attacks on lesbians and the ACLU. The leader of a particularly virulent and hateful minority group of ultra-conservative religious extremists.

That is, in Pete's words, too terrible to contemplate.

Oh, for the love of Charlton Heston

2007-04-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

In all the coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting, all the people expressing their horror at the tragedy, this quote from Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino jumped out at me:

"The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," Perino said...

Now, in all fairness, this comment was one line in a statement expressing sympathy on the President's part. Which is kind of my problem. Bush just couldn't help himself but to throw his personal politics into this, to exploit the situation and his public podium as President of the United States to shoot his mouth off.

What is the purpose of Bush issuing a statement like that? To help and comfort people in a time of tragedy, right? Well, just who is that part supposed to help and comfort?

Evil Erin and the Origami Rose

2007-04-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a woman acquaintance of mine said just about the nicest thing to me.

So once upon a time, I was dating a woman whom I now call "Evil Erin," because her name was Erin, and she was eeeeeeeevil.

(Note that she is not to be confused with my friend Good Erin, who I sometimes also speak of on this page.)

Well, so it happened that Evil Erin and I were dating during Valentine's Day, and it happened that she liked roses. So I figured it'd be nice if I made for her an origami rose for Valentine's Day, which I did. I had to go buy the special paper, and then spent most of two days figuring out how to make this thing, and practicing it, and then making the good rose. It wasn't easy, but I thought the result was pretty cool.

Well. Evil Erin did not think it was cool. When I gave her the rose, she got this look on her face, which said very clearly, "What the hell is this? I don't want this! What does he think I'm going to do with it? What a jackass!" And I knew right at that moment that we were later going to have a very heated conversation where she brought this up and used it as a bludgeon with which to beat me. Which is exactly what happened.

Now, the upsetting part of that for me was Evil Erin's total failure to appreciate the fact that, even if the end-product wasn't to her liking, I'd thought about her, and put effort in, and made a gesture which under most circumstances would be considered kinda sweet.

Well. So, I had related this story to my woman acquaintance. This was probably a few months ago.

Yesterday she told me that she'd been thinking about me and my story. Apparently her boyfriend had been out in the yard, and had seen some spring flowers and picked them for her, and brought them to her. At which point, she told me, her immediate internal reaction was, "What, you were too cheap to go to the flower shop?"

But then, she told me, she'd thought of me telling her about my experience with Evil Erin, and had been able to flip her thinking to, my boyfriend just made a sweet gesture, and I'm going to appreciate that.

And then she said just about the nicest thing she could have said to me:

"Your story actually helped me."

Wow.

So, I'm going to take my personal triumphs where I can get them. And if tales of my misfortunes can somehow help others, then you all are welcome to them.

What's legalese for "bite me?"

2007-04-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

Warning: politics.

Today we're going to talk about the issue of Monica Goodling, who is/was a senior aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. For those of you not following along, Ms. Goodling has been in the public light recently for having refused to testify before Congress on the matter of the firings of US Attorneys, by invoking her 5th Amendment right to not incriminate herself.

Leaders of Congress understandably raised a stink about this, along the lines of, that is tantamount to an admission of criminal behavior on her part, and how is it that she hasn't been fired?

Well. Apparently Ms. Goodling's attorneys weren't going to stand for that. According to this Washington Post article:

Attorneys John M. Dowd and Jeffrey King wrote that Goodling's assertion of her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination "can in no way be interpreted to suggest that Ms. Goodling herself participated in any criminal activity."

They also accused Congressional leaders of using McCarthyist tactics, which I find a very interesting thing for lawyers to do. It's almost as though they were not trying to communicate their position and intentions to Congress so much as grandstand in front of the court of public opinion. And further, I don't see how poking Congressional leaders in the eye really serves their client's interests.

Anyway.

Pete has some interesting things to say about this whole thing, including the fact that it's not really legitimate to use the 5th Amendment as an excuse to not testify at all, which is how it's being used by Ms. Goodling.

My thing is this. Not being a constitutional lawyer or anything, but...

How does the response of Ms. Goodling's lawyers here make any sense at all?

If the 5th Amendment says I don't have to provide self-inciminating testimony, and I say, "I am invoking this rule," then the only two possibilites seem to be 1) I have done something illegal but am making use of my constitutional right not to be compelled to say so, or 2) I am not legitimately invoking the rule.

Am I missing something here? Perhaps Ms. Goodling's lawyers would prefer that Congress believe the second possibility, rather than the first one?

Or, perhaps they're hoping that Congress and the American people don't realize that simple logic leaves these people no ground on which to stand.

Somebody remind Uncle Buzz.

2007-03-20T06:24:00.000-07:00

Friendly reminder: I'm told that the official moment of the vernal equinox, which is the start of Spring here in the lovely Northern hemisphere, is tonight around 8 Eastern time.

Please note again that this is not to be confused with the Summer solstice, which is the beginning of Summer and happens around June 21st. Buzz Aldrin, I am looking at you.

Thanks to the interesting (some would say wacky) mind of Erin, an interesting fact/controversy has come to my attention. Modern pagans often associate the vernal equinox with the celebration of a (poorly documented) ancient goddesss of the Anglo-Saxons, Eostre. It's likely that the Christian holiday Easter got its English name from the Anglo-Saxons' holiday in honor of this goddess.

However, so far as the modern pagans' thing, it turns out the Eostre was mostly associated by the Anglo-Saxons with the month of April (thus the Easter thing), and was not really associated with the vernal equinox. So, probably the modern pagans are making a mistake by attaching Eostre to their celebration of the vernal equinox. Sorry, guys.

Check out the Wikipedia entry for what they say about this.

Anyway, vernal equinox it is, so I recommend you celebrate this occasion by drinking heavily and/or doing some outdoorsy thing, or whatever heathen rituals your non-Christian religion dictates.

Wasn't he a character on "The Muppet Show?"

2007-03-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

Politics follow. Fair warning.

I've of course been following the trial and conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick "Shooter" Cheney.

(Sorry, couldn't resist. I know, it was too obvious.)

For those of you not following along, Scooter has been convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury for his actions during the investigation to find the leakers of the identity of Valerie Plame.

Was chatting about the conviction briefly with Pete yesterday. After I bemoaned the fact that we haven't actually managed to convict or even charge anyone for leaking the fricking information, Pete expressed the opinion that maybe now that can move forward. If Scooter is facing 20 years in prison and a fine of millions of dollars, which apparently he is, he'd have pretty strong motivation to turn on the people who did the actual leaking so as to save his own bacon. Perhaps motivation strong enough to overcome the whole White House inner-circle loyalty. 20 years in prison is a long time.

However. The defense team here wasted no time in proclaiming that they would a) ask for a new trial, and failing that b) appeal the verdict.

What I notice is that such proceedings could reasonably last for more than two years, until after the next election cycle. At which point no one would care.

This even aside from the fact that President Bush, whose primary characteristic seems to be loyalty to "his" people, could easily pardon Libby and skate for it in any case.

As a side note, Bush's post-Libby-conviction quote was that Scooter had done "amazing service for the American people" or some such. Hey, wait. I'm an American. What's Scooter done for me?

So, yeah. I'm going to go ahead and opine that in fact there is little or no pressure on Scooter to turn on the real leakers, and predict that sadly nothing substantive will come of this.

An interjection starts the sentence right

2007-02-12T06:45:00.000-08:00

Fair warning: half-baked hypotheses and uninformed drivel are sure to follow. I'm writing it anyway, because I can.

I was thinking once about interjections, about the role they serve in language. The interesting thing about interjections is that they have sort of an atomic meaning: if I say "ow," you know I've been hurt. You know that just from one little inarticulate utterance, without my having to get multiple words and syntax involved. The word has its own complete meaning, without the need for nouns, verbs, adverbs, or what have you.

For the most part, other parts of speech can't be used that way, to themselves convey all the meaning you need. Other parts of speech mostly depend on other words and syntax to get the meaning across. But not interjections.

So why does that interest me? Well, communication interests me. In particular, human language. So far as we know, humans are the only creatures on the planet that use syntax in their communication.

But that isn't to say that other creatures don't communicate. Far from it. They just don't use syntax in their communication.

So how do the other creatures communicate? Lots of ways, including chemical, physiological, and behavioral, but I'm interested mostly in vocal here. How do other creatures communicate vocally without syntax? Well, they make sounds that others of their species will understand to have a particular meaning. So they make a particular sound, and the sound has a complete meaning, by itself and without the need for syntax: "I see a predator, we should run away," or "I'm upset," or "I've been hurt," or whatnot.

And if you asked me, what's the closest equivalent to those sounds in human language, then I'd say it's the interjection. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the usage is exactly the same.

Now let's assume that humans developed over time from other creatures. (I do so unapologetically.) This means that, at some point, we had ancestors that didn't use syntax in their vocal cummunication. Their decendants must have added syntax, since we have it now. How did they do that? We don't know exactly, of course, but the reasonable path for that to happen is over top of what existed previously. Nouns and verbs and adjectives got added on to what they had, which was the inarticulate utterances with their own complete meaning, the interjections.

I would conclude that, in human language, interjections are very likely a sort of vestigial remanant of pre-syntactic speech.

The monster drops 15 silver pieces of taxable income

2007-01-31T06:50:00.000-08:00

Speaking of the game, I recently heard an argument that I find a little disturbing, if sensible.

The argument goes like this: at some point in the future, it's very likely that virtual property, stuff you acquire in virtual worlds like the game I play, will be taxed by our real-world governments.

How, you ask, can a government reasonably expect to collect real money from non-physical property?

Well, they can reasonably expect that because, as a matter of practicality, much virtual property does have real-world value.

For instance, for a long time now gamers have been selling valuable game items to other gamers for real-world cash. So, say they found a valuable game item that other people might want. They advertise this game-item on E-Bay or some such, somebody pays real cash for it, and the item is transferred in-game.

In fact, an entire cottage industry has grown up in China involving people collecting game money and items and selling them for real money. These "Chinese gold farmers" have been a significant presence in my game ever since I started playing it, and odd as it might sound, I'm told that some of them get enough real money that way to make a living from it.

So now your government gets involved. A government could possibly say, "Well, if this virtual property has real money value, then that virtual can be taxed for its real money value." And governments being what they are, this as-yet-unrealized possibility becomes a likelihood.

Of course the sale of virtual property for real money should already be taxable. Income is income. The argument here is rather that the transfer of virtual property...perhaps when the owner dies and wills the property to someone else...might also be taxable, even though no real money exchanged hands. The virtual property has real value, and it's being transferred between two people, so that would reasonably fit into the same category as other sorts of taxable property transfer.

There would be some obvious problems with this...how would the government reasonably keep track of ownership virtual property, or assess its value for taxation...but these are not problems without hypothetical solutions.

And governments sure do like to tax things, so there's motivation to find those solutions.

"Erigeneia" seems like a nice name

2007-01-30T11:22:00.000-08:00

So I was playing the game last night, and as I was out in the wilds doing game-stuff, another player happened along. She asked me if I was on the quest for a particular item, and I said no, I was doing a different thing, so she wandered off.

A few minutes later, long enough for me to finish what I was doing and travel to the other side of the map, I saw a message on general chat from this player: "Does anyone know where the item is for this quest?" Ever helpful, I sent her a private message saying that the item she's looking for is back where we met, and gave her detailed directions.

A few minutes after that, I got a reply from her, "I found it, thanks so much!" So I replied back, "No trouble!" and expected that to be the end of it.

But no. She said, "I'm having contractions, but I had to stay and finish this quest! Can you say addicted, lol"

That gave me a few moments' pause, but not being one to judge others for their priorities, I suggested she name the child after me, and wished her luck.

I havbe found teh Intarnets

2007-01-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

They were right where I left them.

So, after two weeks of my internet being down for arcane technical reasons (*cough*), I got a new ISP, and I once again have network in the apartment.

Given the choice in ISP's between DSL courtesy of SBC/Ameritech/AT&T/whatever else they're calling themselves these days, and cable courtesy of Time Warner, I went with the DSL. Time Warner wanted to bundle network with digital cable, which I did not much like, and while they had a decent introductory rate, the base rate sucked. SBC gave me decent bandwidth at a decent price, and I figured if the quality was bad I'd dump them.

Portability was also an issue; the DSL lets me plug the splitter into any phone jack in my apartment, so I didn't have to string hundreds of feet of CAT-5 cable around the place. (No, I don't agree that stringing CAT-5 cable "builds character.")

On the bad side, SBC made me buy their hardware, which is a DSL modem/router made by 2Wire. That wouldn't have been my first choice. However, the setup wasn't bad. Aside from having to figure out the port-forwarding issue, everything was relatively straightforward.

Anyway, the thing conected with few hassles, transfer speed is respectable (if somewhat less than the gigabit to which I became accustomed while at CWRU), latency is low, and all seems cool.

And I will say this: after two weeks of no network, when I started up my game and it connected, all was suddenly made right in the world. I have a monkey on my back that is internet addiction, and he is a vicious bastard.

I want it to loom.

2007-01-11T10:54:00.000-08:00

You know when you have a friend who you think is pretty cool, but then something happens, they move away or you move away or somebody's life changes, and you're just not in the same sphere as them anymore? And maybe one or both of you try to hold on to the friendship in spite of that, but the day inevitably comes when either you stop writing emails (or whatever) or they stop answering them, and that's just it, you never hear from them again?

I hate that.

I even know it's going to happen, because it always does. But that doesn't help. I still hate it.

I don't know how other people feel about this...I can't imagine it's anybody's favorite thing...but as for myself, I don't often feel connected to people on any level, so when I do, it's very important to me, and I suppose I want to hang on to that if at all possible.

And if I should still feeling connected when the other person doesn't, that's a particular thing. If I'm making the effort to keep in touch and this other person just isn't, then that's kind of a slap in the face, isn't it? Sure, maybe they're busy with whatever, but that's ony valid up to a point. If they can't spare thirty seconds to respond to an email or IM, you know, "Hi, thanks for writing, really busy, bye," then they just clearly don't care at all.

Don't much like having my face slapped that way, especially by people whose opinions I actually value. I start thinking, well, that's great, they don't value the friendship at all, and hey, for all I know maybe they never really did, maybe they just kept me around for their own amusement value (*cough*) or whatever, and so on.

Yeah, I'd guess none of you know what the hell I'm going on about at this point. Alright, I'm done bitching now. Moving on.

A preposition is a horrible thing to end a sentence with

2006-12-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

If I use my old computer to prop open my door (which is about all the good it is), then doesn't that make it a doorstop?

Well, so consider this sentence: "Engineering is a bad field to go into." It ends in a preposition. Which is bad, I am told. I'm not supposed to do that. It's grammatically incorrect. A preposition is supposed to start a phrase which modifies some other part of speech.

Except for this: if I were to examine that sentence without regard to what is or isn't supposed to happen, I would come to the conclusion that "into" is used as an adverb there. It seems to be modifying the verb "go."

Well, it occurs to me that the argument against this, to wit, "'into' is not an adverb, so you can't use it as an adverb," is fairly silly. If I use "into" as an adverb, then as a matter of practicality, it is an adverb. If it's also used as a preposition elsewhere, then that seems irrelevant to its use here as an adverb.

I'd say, then, that to claim "The language is now used this way, and so to use it some other way is incorrect, and you shouldn't do that" represents a certain inflexibility of thinking. And a denial of practical reality. The underlying assumption there is that language is some monolithic thing which cannot and should not ever change, whereas the fact of the matter is that language does change, continuously. Words do not keep their same meanings and uses forever, but over time acquire new ones. (I am looking squarely at you, you people who argue that "marriage is by definition between a man and a woman, so gays aren't qualified, so they can't get married.")

Yeah, I may be reconsidering that whole grammar-Nazi thing.

I don't wanna eat the beets

2006-12-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

Well. My holiday happened, and it was pretty cool. Got to hang out with my mom for a few days, which was nice. Cooking dinner was soothing and fairly low-key, and it all came together. So, that's nifty.

My mom's cat was pretty seriously sick starting last week, and had to be persuaded to eat anything, so mom brought the cat along for the visit.

Every few hours my mom would get some food and try to feed the cat, who wasn't very enthusiastic about it. Mom had to be fairly persuasive. So she'd be sitting there spoon-feeding the cat and making encouraging noises: "Here, have some of this, it's yummy...mmm, wasn't that good? Here, have some more...oh, what a good cat, you've had two whole bites! Isn't that good food, yum yum yum!"

The way mom was talking to the cat left me pretty disconcerted, and I finally realized that I was probably getting a little glimpse into my own distant past, one in which mom was trying to feed me out of a jar and I was unenthusiastic about eating the pureed beets.

So, yeah. Holiday both wonderful and informative in a disturbing way. Huzzah!

Hey nonny nonny.

2006-12-21T07:32:00.000-08:00

I would like to wish everyone out there a very happy Winter Solstice, and I hope that all of you are celebrating this most joyous day in a manner appropriate to the traditions of your culture. So light up a bonfire and dance around it until the cops come, take a moment to cheerfully taunt the stuffily religious, and definitely practice your fertility rites.

Enjoy the holiday before Hallmark gets ahold of it.

What I've noticed this year is that I'm fairly disconnected from the changing of the seasons. When I was a student/teacher, I was very driven by my college's schedule, which was of course very seasonal. This is late Spring so it's finals season, this is Winter so take a break for a month, that sort of thing.

Now, though, my work is very non-seasonal in the sense that the schedule of what I'm doing doesn't depend on the season. So I find myself a little disconcerted by that.

Maybe the bonfire will help.

...all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile...

2006-12-20T11:06:00.000-08:00

I am told that many people become sad and depressed around "the holidays," and that even more find it unhealthily stressful.

I will admit here that I'm one of those people for whom this time of year is a mixed bag, so to speak.

On the plus side, I get to hang out with my mom and sometimes some other relatives for a few days, and they're pretty cool. The ones I see, anyway.

I also have an excuse to go all-out with the cooking and whatnot, which I don't usually do, and I mostly find that fun and kind of soothing.

Not to mention that I tend to have a very good time on New Year's Eve (hi, Shannon!), which is for me usually a very casual and fun thing, hanging out with friends and whatnot.

On the minus side, I'm pretty bothered by the obligation aspect. I have to do these traditional things; I don't really have the option of taking a pass, should I feel like doing that. It's an expectation, and if I fail to meet it, there's something horribly, drastically wrong with me.

Which is likely true, but I can't have people thinking that, now, can I.

And I pretty much loathe the holiday music, too, which runs the gamut between insipid and overtly religious. Neither of which I'm really okay with.

I will admit, though, that the line "We won't go until we get some" always makes me giggle. Figgy pudding, eh? So, that's what the kids are calling it these days.

Speaking of overt religiosity, some people find the season to be an excuse to wear their particular faith like a badge, which I find troublesome on several levels.

And don't even get me started on that whole Bill O'Reilly "War on Christmas" nonsense.

So, yeah. Hope everybody out there enjoys whatever it is they're doing, but if some of your off-beat friends/relatives don't seem to be having a good time during these few weeks, do me a favor and cut 'em some extra sympathy.

Good for the goose

2006-12-06T06:27:00.000-08:00

Just to warn you, I'm dipping back into the political for this post.

I posted a reply a few days ago on Pete's blog, and I would like to expand on that reply here.

Pete's post was about Jose Padilla, US citizen accused of planning to use a radiological weapon. Padilla's case has become a farce from a legal standpoint, largely because of the executive branch's misbehavior. As Pete points out, if there's any justice to be had for Padilla, one way or another, we are very likely at this point never to know what it is.

The fact that Padilla was a US citizen, who should be constitutionally entitled to protections against the sorts of things the government has done to him, ought to give every US citizen nightmares. What prevents anyone else from being next up for the same treatment?

However, that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the US's treatment of foreign nationals.

I am going to argue in this space that foreign nationals should be subject to the same constitutional rules as are (nominally) US citizens.

I had over the years many conversations with arch-conservative Mark, but a few stick out in my mind. One, right after the 9/11 attacks, was about how we should deal with the terrorists responsible. I argued that they should be tried in an international court for crimes against humanity. Mark was aghast. "What if they're found innocent," he said. This just amazed me. Clearly, if the prosecution can't muster enough evidence to make a convincing case that these are guilty people, then they should walk. Mark was presupposing guilt, clearly, which is not a good idea. Why not? Because if you assume a person is guilty, then you overlook the possibility that they're innocent and you've made a mistake. Maybe you made a mistake identifying them. Maybe they didn't do the things you think they did.

On another instance we were talking about the Guantanamo detainees. I forget the exact context of that discussion...I was probably arguing for humane treatment...and Mark said, "They're terrorists!" The presumption there is that they're all guilty (which is almost certainly untrue), and that since they are guilty they don't deserve any humane treatment.

Though Mark certainly has an extremist political view, I've heard the same sorts of arguments come out of a lot of people, and not just conservatives.

US citizens don't...nominally...have these problems. US citizens are constitutionally entitled to speedy and fair trial, where they are presented with all the evidence against them and have a chance to rebut, and the judgement of their guilt or innocence comes from a jury of their peers. Punishment might come after they've been found guilty, but must not be "cruel and unusual."

A person might argue that the consitution doesn't apply to foreign nationals, and therefore we're not constitutionally bound to treat foreign nationals according to those rules. Which is strictly true. The question I ask is, how should we treat foreign nationals? Is it just a free-for-all, where the US government can do whatever they want, and if somebody doesn't like it, then screw 'em, it's what we're doing? Is that alright?

Why do we have those rules in place in the US constitution, to be applied to US citizens? Because the state, who is prosecuting, is scary, powerful, and potentially malicious, and clearly thinks from the start that the accused is guilty. The state therefore can't be counted on to have the best interest of the accused in mind. Further, the state may have made a mistake as to whether the accused is in fact guilty. If we don't bother to have a trial, then the state's position...presupposing guilt...is the only position, and when inevitably some of the accused are in fact innocent, a vast injustice is done. If the accused doesn't have the chance to challenge every bit of evidence brought against them by the state, then the state has the upper hand in the trial, and the trial is pointless. If the accused doesn't get their trial in a speedy fashion, then in the meantime you may have wrongly imprisoned an innocent person.

This, gentlefolk, is the case right now with regard to foreign nationals. They have been imprisoned indefinitely, without trial, while subject to "interrogation" that certainly doesn't amount to humane treatment. Some of them may be terrorists. Maybe those who are do, in some sense, deserve what they're getting. But so far as we know anything, we know that many of them are not terrorists, and certainly do not deserve the treatment shown them by the US government. "Vast injustice" hardly even begins to describe it.

How do we tell which are innocent and which guilty? The best way we know to do that is to give them a trial according to rules laid out by the US constitution.

To summarize: my position here is that there are good reasons those constitutional rules were created for US citizens; and that the reasons are equally (if not more so) valid when it comes to foreign nationals. We therefore ought to be conducting trials of terror suspects in accordance with the US constitution, regardless of whether the constitution strictly applies. To the extent that we do otherwise, we are permitting and even condoning miscarriages of justice.

We as a nation know how we ought to be behaving here. The fact that we're doing otherwise is inexusable.

And I'm really feeling very old today

2006-12-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

Well. This has been an interesting year for me.

This year I got to try out the career path I'd chosen for myself, which was teaching, on a serious level. Notwithstanding the previous experience teaching the summer class, which I think doesn't really count. I found teaching to be in some ways very rewarding...the "lightbulb look" comes to mind, that look of illumination when a student finally got it. It made me so pleased. I'll always be proud of myself for the teaching, even though I don't know to this day how good a job I did.

I also came to realize that teaching wasn't the right career path for me at all. Moments of transitory reward aside, I just don't have the patience to long put up with a large number of undergraduates being...well, undergraduates. ("Professor, I'm leaving for my Spring break in Florida early, so I think you should let me out of Friday's quiz." Ack.) I guess that is a good thing to know about myself before I committed to a career doing that, rather than after.

I was also in a managerial position for pretty much the first time. I had to ride herd on nine or so TA's for the class, and I can't say I did so well with it. I tended to be a hands-off manager, just giving them something to do and expecting them to go do it. And it didn't really work that way. I suppose on the plus side I'd know better if I ever landed in another managerial role.

I got my first real nine-to-five job as a professional anything. I like my job pretty well, early mornings aside, and my research is interesting and varied. The company actually depends on me to produce things, and if I fail in my task it might go badly not just for me, but for pretty much everybody. This is a strange feeling for me, almost as though I'm a responsible adult-type person.

For those of you noting that this is coming pretty late given that I'm now 36...oh, be quiet, you.

I had a very interesting (ultimately, I mean "interesting" here in the sense of the Chinese curse) relationship that was almost exclusively on-line. I find the fact that I can have those sorts of feelings about somebody I knew only from words on a screen to be both enlightening and, given the outcome, a little disturbing.

I can also be vicious and vengeful, when given a really thorough and painful screwing-over. Whether or not my response was deserved by the receiving party is probably irrelevant. In an ideal world I wouldn't have done it, so I still don't feel that's a side of myself that I should indulge much.

And, I re-started the art thing. I'm now sketching again after a good twenty years of...not. I actually went and bought some drawing supplies from the expensive art store down the street, because I started thinking that what I had sucks, and I needed better. So, yeah, I'm in it now. And I don't think it's going badly for me, either. The sketch I did of Rhea is probably the best work I've ever done. I was very very pleased when Rhea liked it, so...I also might be a little more attached to external validation than I thought, which is probably not a positive thing.

Anyway. I survived another year, had new experiences both wonderous and awful, and learned lots about myself. So, you know. Yay me.

It's here it's here!

2006-11-22T07:54:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-12T11:25:00.000-08:00

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!

2006-11-08T12:45:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-06T06:42:00.000-08:00

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.

Coolest. Pictures. Ever.

2006-10-31T10:25:00.000-08:00

Coming in to work this morning I was listening to NPR, and I heard that NASA had reconsidered its position that using one of the remaining shuttles to service the Hubble Space Telescope was too dangerous, and that a servicing mission was indeed going to happen.

Sure enough, MSN agrees.

On the one hand, I think fixing the Hubble is an excellent move. As I mentioned lo these many years ago, I think the Hubble may very well be the coolest piece of hardware ever created by humans. I mean...this is fabric of the universe stuff here. Fundamental questions of existence stuff. (And the pictures are so, so pretty.) And is it at all practical? Hell no! It's all about pure discovery and the advancement of knowledge. Simply letting the thing die, or more likely going to a considerable amount of trouble to de-orbit it leaving no replacement, would be just shameful.

On the other hand, I am a little bothered. Remember the foam business that ultimately destroyed the shuttle Columbia? Well...it hasn't actually been fixed. NASA went to a lot of time and expense in an attempt to address the problem, but failed. The main tank still sheds foam, which could impact the shuttle during launch and lead to a catastrophic failure on re-entry, just like the Columbia.

I get that NASA really needs the shuttle program, and that they spent a lot of time and resources trying to fix the problem that destroyed the Columbia, and that space flight isn't without risk regardless. But still. This is a known problem with demonstrably fatal consequences, and it hasn't been resolved, but they're still launching the shuttle.

My point here is, I was a little disturbed that the decision was made to take the risk anyway, and the old NASA decision was made for a good reason: if the foam thing crops up again on the Hubble servicing mission, then at best it's a huge deal, and at worst crew dies, spacecraft lost.

So, while I so very much want the Hubble servicing to go forward, I'm a little disturbed that the attitude of the new NASA administration here seems to be, "Risk? Meh."

Besides which I still totally want the job at JPL working on the teleoperated Hubble repair device.

Ooh, Toys!

2006-10-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

When I first started my new job back in early July, the first thing they had me doing was designing analog circuits. Thing was, the circuits they had me designing would have been dead easy in digital, and I mentioned that to anyone who would listen. The response from mangement was pretty much uniformly, "You're probably right, but we need the analog circuits anyway because..."

"Because" could be complicated, but the upshot was usually that The Russian wanted it that way, and was pathologically opposed to digital anything. Probably because he doesn't understand it.

For months, whenever the subject came up, I'd say "You know, we should really be doing this in digital." ("Carthago delenda est.")

Well, the anaolog circuits got finished, and it finally became apparent to everyone that digital was the only way to go. (So we went to war with Carthage.) It also happens that I'm the only one around with any DSP experience, so I was asked to recommend hardware to make this new stuff happen.

So, I did my research and decided on one of these, a convenient single-board computer built around a TI floating-point DSP chip. I recommended it to management as the thing we want for my research (acoustic echo cancellation) as well as applications a few other people are going to be running.

So they bought it for me. It's sitting on my desk right now, running the idle process at 1800 MIPS.

This all makes me feel very adult. I saw a problem at work, agitated (no other word for it) for what I feel is the right solution, people listened to me, asked me to recommend hardware to do what we needed, I did some research and made a recommendation, the company bought the thing, and now I'm using it.

Actually, I'm totally playing with it like a kid on Christmas morning, on account of it's so cool! Which makes me feel somewhat less adult. But anyway.

I Think a Group of Them is a "Labour"

2006-10-25T06:09:00.000-07:00

FYI, Monday was "national mole day," a holiday in honor of the "mole," which for you non-chemists is the conversion factor from atomic masses of atoms/molecules to grams, 1 mole = 6.02x10²³ particles. So, for instance, 1 mole (6.02x10²³ particles) of carbon-12 atoms will have a mass of 12 grams. Nifty, huh?

Well, some well-meaning but incredibly silly people actually did think it was that nifty, so they invented "national mole day" to honor this...um, sadly unrecognized unit. The holiday was to be celebrated from 6:02 AM to 6:02 PM on October 23. (6:02, 10-23. Gettit?)

They have Mole Day merchandise, "Ask Monty Mole" for all your pressing mole questions (don't ask him to do your chemistry homework, he hates that), and even gods help us a Mole Day Theme, which is every bit as insipid as you might expect.

You know...I'm all for educating people, but...yeah.

L-l-l-l-Lola

2006-10-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

In the sorts of online games I play, it's common to have a visual representation of yourself in the game that other players see, called an "avatar" or "character" or "model" or "toon" (yish) or some such.

The avatars usually have gender, male or female. This opens the possibility that a male player could use a female avatar, or a female player a male avatar.

Some gamers do this regularly, and I'll confess to being among those. This goes back seven or eight years to Quake 2, where I sometimes used female avatars because I thought they looked better. Some people who knew I was male would freak about it, which made me start thinking about why it bothers other people that I and others do this, and why it doesn't bother me.

Well, there are certainly people outside this group who think that we inside the group...well, have "something wrong with them." Gay, gender dysphoric, or whatever. I am looking at you, Shannon, Ms. "You play a chick? Isn't there something...psychological about that?"

This attitude is also much more common about male players using female avatars. Female players using male avatars is apparently more alright in this mindset.

As for myself, it never seemed very important to me whether my avatar is male or female. I am what I am; the avatar is just pixels on a screen. As far as I'm concerned, anyone else I see on the screen could be male, female, binnaum from "Alien Nation," or maybe they reproduce asexually, how the hell should I know.

And why should it matter? When I interact with them by shooting virtual rockets at them, or helping them kill virtual monsters, or whatever, why is either of our genders relevant in that context?

Now, the fact of the matter is that to other people it does matter in that contect, and when they look at my female avatars, they're often making the assumption that I'm female and acting accordingly. So I'm making a choice that I know will lead other people to believe a thing that's not true, and as far as that goes, I feel a litle bad about that.

Though not bad enough for me to stop doing it, apparently.

The ways that people treat me differently when they assume that I am female have also been enlightening. Male (and female) players flirt with me very much more often than when I'm using a male avatar or known to be male. I once had a teenage kid who thought I was female call me a "drama queen," which just made me laugh. I've a couple times had the deprecating "you're just a girl" attitude leveled at me, usually by teenage males. on the more positive side, it seems to me (based on anecdotes) that female players are often more friendly, and male players are often less competitive.

As to why any of this is in any way relevant in the context, let me speculate. People are used to behaving, thinking about, and interacting with others based on gender. People are not used to doing that in a gender neutral/indeterminate way. So, reasonably they might try to shoehorn this new situation...where in the game context people are gender neutral/indeterminate...into the old mindset with which they're familiar. A sort of Homer Simpson "In times of trouble, go with what you know" situation.

It's also reasonable to expect that when it turns out their unfounded assumptions are wrong, they might get upset and feel decieved.

I'm sure there's also an element of the stereotypical heterosexual male homophobia here. This might explain why female players using male avatars is more accepted...that situation wouldn't lead to men unknowingly flirting with male players, see.

I have returned.

2006-10-19T10:39:00.000-07:00

So, once upon a time I had a blog. I updated this blog on a daily basis, and wrote lots and lots in it.

Then I got...shall we say, distracted, and the time and inclination I had to write so often just evaporated. To my shame.

Well, my time and inclination have returned, and I once more may have things to write about that people would actually like to read.

So, let the fun begin.