What a crazy week.
On Saturday, while trying to get home, the people who ran AirTran airways had so many backed-up flights, that all the people waiting to get out of Boston had congregated around the flight counter so that by 7:30, the entire place was Bedlam. The state troopers were there at the scene trying to keep things (more or less orderly). Due to the chaos, and the fact that I was weighted down with all of my "I'm done with school" stuff, I didn't manage to fight my way to the front of the counter in time to check in for my flight. The result? I had to dither around Logan airport for 13 hours hoping to make a standby flight so that I could get home for Nelsen's wedding.
Unfortunately, the management was not cooperative at all, and even after a shouting match, they said they could promise to send me at the soonest only by Monday. So Monday it was, and I had to miss the wedding. I was not happy.
So I stayed an extra 48 hours in Boston. I had a nice lunch and dinner with Marina's family (mmmmmmmmmmm, crepes), but I was still agitated that I couldn't go home.
Once home, I proceeded to chill. I told Mom all about what's been going on in my life and all of that. It was good to relax and sleep in. Also, very good to see my mom.
On Wednesday, I went back to Cincinnati. Dad and I have been bombing around a lot together, and today at Target, we ran into Nick Mahan. It was kind of cool to see him, if only because I really haven't heard from him since we graduated from high school. He wants to get the hell out of Cincinnati, which I sympathize with. Apparently, Florida beckons.
Last night, I was invited to dinner at Chez Schram. It was a great dinner and we played "Settlers of Catan". I highly recommend that game to anyone, its a blast. Its not as well-known as the more traditional board games, but its one of those cool strategy games where you don't have to know a background story and you don't have to learn a lot of intricate details.
Anyway, I'm having a lazy afternoon right now, and don't feel much like talking any more. I'm having dinner tonight with Julia and Nelsen, and hopefully, go crash with Henry down at UC tonight.
Its good to see my friends and family again.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Home
I'm back.
Long story, will relate tomorrow. Apparently, the days where one could show up at the airport and breeze right through to the gate are dead. Very sad.
Now, to sleep.
Long story, will relate tomorrow. Apparently, the days where one could show up at the airport and breeze right through to the gate are dead. Very sad.
Now, to sleep.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Scatalogically eschatalogical (Or, How to Philosophize with A Battle Axe)
Notice: Now that it has been repeatedly brought to my attention, I have enabled anonymous commenting on my blog, so those of you sans blog can leave your own comments.
Before addressing the long-winded title of my post, a quick recap of my last week in Boston.
So far, I have attacked packing in leaps and bounds, but half-heartedly. I've really enjoyed my summer here, and I am not looking forward to leaving.
I had dinner with Amy, Samantha, Frankie, and Elizabeth in Nahant (which, as you'd probably be interested to know, Nathanael, is a rare example of a populated island connected by a tambolo.) 'Twas great. Ate too much. Made "Your Mom" jokes. Said some good byes, plus got an awesome early birthday present of a water balloon slingshot from Amy.
Work is about as slow as molasses, and lazier, to boot. I wore my Jack Daniels shirt to work today, and nobody blinked twice. Where else in my life am I going to get a job that pays this well and requires so little? Unless, of course, I join a union...Tomorrow is my last day.
Nathanael asked me to critique a series of essays (The 30 Theses by Jason Godesky) by a primitivist who claims that the civilization as we know it is facing imminent collapse. Although the sort of doomsday scenario the essayist foresees is slew of very modern problems, the thinking that inspired him is very old. Rousseau is certainly smiling in his grave that his adherents have adopted so well to the Information Age. Never minding the obvious silliness of a software engineer heralding a return to nature, he is not as smart as the old philosopher, but certainly better informed. A bit like arming a baby with a Kalashnikov. The technology exists, but the capacities are lacking. I don't think good old Jean-Jacques would have been floored with Godesky's Disneyesque invocation of the "scientific" moral virtue of diversity, per biology and physics in his first thesis. Reading it felt like I was reading the "Circle of Life" scene in "The Lion King" rewritten for grownups. Heavy on the factual theatrics, light on substance. Also, claiming the virtue of "diversity" as your cornerstone while gearing yourself up to rewrite the entire human order is about as vapid as it gets, as it is worth point out that diversity is about as relative and an artificial structure as it gets. "Diversity" is entirely dependent on how advanced our notions are of the multitudinous options that exist, in the natural world or otherwise. If we aren't educated enough to realize that there are 1,000 of different types of ivies, trees, fauna, or what have you, then we can't appreciate the "moral of diversity." If diversity is the only moral, and humans in Jason Godesky's world are living in societies without the resources to teach an appreciation of diversity, then by his own logic, they are ignorant of morality. So what then is the point? Diversity is too unstable a foundation on which to properly attack modern society, precisely because the concept of diversity is so thoroughly a modern concept and a creature of our age, and no matter how many times you invoke the Big Bang, it just doesn't cut it.
The second thing that deeply annoys me about primitivists (and their more intelligent cousins, the anarchists) is a total lack of appreciation of the consequences of their dreams. I read a really good example of this phenomenon, of ideologues versus reality, in Newsweek Magazine, usually a source of the most shallow news coverage available. A man making a documentary found a group of pro-lifers protesting outside of an abortion clinic, and asked them a very simple question:
"Ok, if abortion were made illegal, what should be the punishment for a woman who gets one anyway? These women would then be legally committing murder."
The responses are hilarious. Most of them looked stunned.
"I don't know"
"Not my place to say"
"Pray for them"
One person tried to suggest punishing the physician who performed it. When the man asked about cases of women performing them at home, without assistance, the person just looked helpless and shrugged.
The lesson is that its one thing to protest something you believe is immoral. Its something entirely different to actually enshrine your beliefs into law. Do these pro-lifers have the guts to actually throw real women into prison? Can they seriously believe abortion will just disappear if you make it illegal? The documentary suggests otherwise.
(For the sake of curiosity, I performed this experiment on Nelsen. I asked him the same question, and he responded with "Its not my place to judge." Bullseye.)
Anarchists and primitivists are in a similar boat. Its a beautiful thing to say that civilization corrupts. Its even more beautiful to make pretty speeches and post manifestos on the internet. But actually condemning the entire human population to living on subsistence scavenging? You believe that children, the sick, and the mentally handicapped would be better off in the wild? Are you actually willing to close down the day care centers, the institutions, and the hospitals and personally wheel those people out into the fields and say, "Best of luck to you buddy. Just remember, if you don't make it, its because evolution is a beautiful thing and you just happened to wind up on the wrong side of the genetic lottery." If you can do these things personally, then you'll have my ear, and also my hand on my cell phone, ready to call 911 for when you get violent.
Of course, for the weaker of stomach like Mr. Godesky, who secretly hope that some deus ex machina (or in his formulation, hominis ex machina), will do it for you. No need for revolutionaries to storm Shriners. If civilization collapses, it'll be done for them without the need to sully their hands (and souls) with actually taking real action to make their dreams come true. It's escapist at best, but still cowardly in spirit. So I find myself staring at 30 theses, over half of which go to great pains to show how we're going to wake up any day now and find that its all gone. Poof. Vanished. And people like him are ready to make it in the wild. Beneath it all, you grasp that he hopes in his heart of hearts that it could happen today. Now. Right now. He's ready, just you wait. He saw it coming all along. Never mind that if he believed this deeply in his dream, he'd quit his job and go about trying to do everything he could to tear it all down. Best not to muddle one's conscience and convince yourself that society will do it for you.
Lastly, lets say he's right and I'm wrong. Do they seriously believe that a civilization can never rise again? Somewhere along the way, we did it once. One tribe went from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. So if we return to being hunter-gatherers, what's to stop one tribe from deciding all over again to start farming.? Short of nuclear winter, we'll never be able to completely eradicate all arable land to the point where nothing can grow. It may no longer be optimal in a lot of places, but absolutely barren? Dream on. Go back to ag school. Surely that evolution you revere so much is efficient enough to create a plant that can thrive even in denuded soils. Or is evolution only useful to invoke when you want to try and enchant your audience (and yourself)? For if there's one thing that Jason wants to make sure we understand, its that life marches on, thanks to good old natural selection. And life abhors a vacuum. Someone will eventually discover all over again that the fastest way to gain power in a world where all previous forms of temporal power have been conveniently erased is through a civilization. Uh oh. Sorry Jason, it looks like we're just going to start all over again.
(In case you want to argue that it'll be impossible for some reason blah blah, etc. etc., lack of resources, blah blah, don't forget the Infinite Monkey Theorem. With absolute certainty (i.e., probability equal to 1), we know that if you give a monkey who can live forever a keyboard that'll work forever, it will type the complete works of Shakespeare in chronological order not only once, but infinitely many times. That's how infinity works. A probability, no matter how small, as long as it is not zero, can happen with absolute certainty if the lifespan approaches infinity for all intents and purposes. This is mathematical fact, and I'll be glad to give anyone who asks the proof.)
Man, I haven't really talked philosophy in a long, long time. I realize I've lost most of my readers already, but its sometimes good to exercise other parts of my brain.
Of course, arguing with fools is making a fool of yourself. So I guess the last laugh is on me.
Before addressing the long-winded title of my post, a quick recap of my last week in Boston.
So far, I have attacked packing in leaps and bounds, but half-heartedly. I've really enjoyed my summer here, and I am not looking forward to leaving.
I had dinner with Amy, Samantha, Frankie, and Elizabeth in Nahant (which, as you'd probably be interested to know, Nathanael, is a rare example of a populated island connected by a tambolo.) 'Twas great. Ate too much. Made "Your Mom" jokes. Said some good byes, plus got an awesome early birthday present of a water balloon slingshot from Amy.
Work is about as slow as molasses, and lazier, to boot. I wore my Jack Daniels shirt to work today, and nobody blinked twice. Where else in my life am I going to get a job that pays this well and requires so little? Unless, of course, I join a union...Tomorrow is my last day.
Nathanael asked me to critique a series of essays (The 30 Theses by Jason Godesky) by a primitivist who claims that the civilization as we know it is facing imminent collapse. Although the sort of doomsday scenario the essayist foresees is slew of very modern problems, the thinking that inspired him is very old. Rousseau is certainly smiling in his grave that his adherents have adopted so well to the Information Age. Never minding the obvious silliness of a software engineer heralding a return to nature, he is not as smart as the old philosopher, but certainly better informed. A bit like arming a baby with a Kalashnikov. The technology exists, but the capacities are lacking. I don't think good old Jean-Jacques would have been floored with Godesky's Disneyesque invocation of the "scientific" moral virtue of diversity, per biology and physics in his first thesis. Reading it felt like I was reading the "Circle of Life" scene in "The Lion King" rewritten for grownups. Heavy on the factual theatrics, light on substance. Also, claiming the virtue of "diversity" as your cornerstone while gearing yourself up to rewrite the entire human order is about as vapid as it gets, as it is worth point out that diversity is about as relative and an artificial structure as it gets. "Diversity" is entirely dependent on how advanced our notions are of the multitudinous options that exist, in the natural world or otherwise. If we aren't educated enough to realize that there are 1,000 of different types of ivies, trees, fauna, or what have you, then we can't appreciate the "moral of diversity." If diversity is the only moral, and humans in Jason Godesky's world are living in societies without the resources to teach an appreciation of diversity, then by his own logic, they are ignorant of morality. So what then is the point? Diversity is too unstable a foundation on which to properly attack modern society, precisely because the concept of diversity is so thoroughly a modern concept and a creature of our age, and no matter how many times you invoke the Big Bang, it just doesn't cut it.
The second thing that deeply annoys me about primitivists (and their more intelligent cousins, the anarchists) is a total lack of appreciation of the consequences of their dreams. I read a really good example of this phenomenon, of ideologues versus reality, in Newsweek Magazine, usually a source of the most shallow news coverage available. A man making a documentary found a group of pro-lifers protesting outside of an abortion clinic, and asked them a very simple question:
"Ok, if abortion were made illegal, what should be the punishment for a woman who gets one anyway? These women would then be legally committing murder."
The responses are hilarious. Most of them looked stunned.
"I don't know"
"Not my place to say"
"Pray for them"
One person tried to suggest punishing the physician who performed it. When the man asked about cases of women performing them at home, without assistance, the person just looked helpless and shrugged.
The lesson is that its one thing to protest something you believe is immoral. Its something entirely different to actually enshrine your beliefs into law. Do these pro-lifers have the guts to actually throw real women into prison? Can they seriously believe abortion will just disappear if you make it illegal? The documentary suggests otherwise.
(For the sake of curiosity, I performed this experiment on Nelsen. I asked him the same question, and he responded with "Its not my place to judge." Bullseye.)
Anarchists and primitivists are in a similar boat. Its a beautiful thing to say that civilization corrupts. Its even more beautiful to make pretty speeches and post manifestos on the internet. But actually condemning the entire human population to living on subsistence scavenging? You believe that children, the sick, and the mentally handicapped would be better off in the wild? Are you actually willing to close down the day care centers, the institutions, and the hospitals and personally wheel those people out into the fields and say, "Best of luck to you buddy. Just remember, if you don't make it, its because evolution is a beautiful thing and you just happened to wind up on the wrong side of the genetic lottery." If you can do these things personally, then you'll have my ear, and also my hand on my cell phone, ready to call 911 for when you get violent.
Of course, for the weaker of stomach like Mr. Godesky, who secretly hope that some deus ex machina (or in his formulation, hominis ex machina), will do it for you. No need for revolutionaries to storm Shriners. If civilization collapses, it'll be done for them without the need to sully their hands (and souls) with actually taking real action to make their dreams come true. It's escapist at best, but still cowardly in spirit. So I find myself staring at 30 theses, over half of which go to great pains to show how we're going to wake up any day now and find that its all gone. Poof. Vanished. And people like him are ready to make it in the wild. Beneath it all, you grasp that he hopes in his heart of hearts that it could happen today. Now. Right now. He's ready, just you wait. He saw it coming all along. Never mind that if he believed this deeply in his dream, he'd quit his job and go about trying to do everything he could to tear it all down. Best not to muddle one's conscience and convince yourself that society will do it for you.
Lastly, lets say he's right and I'm wrong. Do they seriously believe that a civilization can never rise again? Somewhere along the way, we did it once. One tribe went from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. So if we return to being hunter-gatherers, what's to stop one tribe from deciding all over again to start farming.? Short of nuclear winter, we'll never be able to completely eradicate all arable land to the point where nothing can grow. It may no longer be optimal in a lot of places, but absolutely barren? Dream on. Go back to ag school. Surely that evolution you revere so much is efficient enough to create a plant that can thrive even in denuded soils. Or is evolution only useful to invoke when you want to try and enchant your audience (and yourself)? For if there's one thing that Jason wants to make sure we understand, its that life marches on, thanks to good old natural selection. And life abhors a vacuum. Someone will eventually discover all over again that the fastest way to gain power in a world where all previous forms of temporal power have been conveniently erased is through a civilization. Uh oh. Sorry Jason, it looks like we're just going to start all over again.
(In case you want to argue that it'll be impossible for some reason blah blah, etc. etc., lack of resources, blah blah, don't forget the Infinite Monkey Theorem. With absolute certainty (i.e., probability equal to 1), we know that if you give a monkey who can live forever a keyboard that'll work forever, it will type the complete works of Shakespeare in chronological order not only once, but infinitely many times. That's how infinity works. A probability, no matter how small, as long as it is not zero, can happen with absolute certainty if the lifespan approaches infinity for all intents and purposes. This is mathematical fact, and I'll be glad to give anyone who asks the proof.)
Man, I haven't really talked philosophy in a long, long time. I realize I've lost most of my readers already, but its sometimes good to exercise other parts of my brain.
Of course, arguing with fools is making a fool of yourself. So I guess the last laugh is on me.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
One Hundred Hours of Solitude
So John is gone
Class is over
I have one week of work left
I decided not to go to New York after Henry said he couldn't meet up with me in Chinatown.
The result? Peace and quiet for the first time in weeks.
Bliss.
My class is over, and the final was tough as nails. Ugly. Probably one of the hardest tests I've ever taken. Its less that the questions were insanely difficult, and more that even for 8 questions, there wasn't enough time. The entire class was working on it until the last minute, and I think everyone felt the same way I did:
"Good questions, prof, but I just needed a bit more time to thread my way through it."
He posted the answers to the bloodbath online, and as I suspected, I answered it about 60% correctly. I even flubbed the Bayes' Theorem question (a soft ball in theory, although the prof messed us all up by asking us to invert the damn thing), if only because I managed to trick myself into thinking that a particular shortcut was the answer.
Bayes' Theorem is cool, because it is often used to check how reliable medical tests are, among other applications. For example, even for the most accurate test, if the percentage of people who actually have a disease is really small (for example, Ebola or Type I Diabetes), then there's usually a 90% chance or greater that if you test positive for it, you don't actually have the disease. Scary, huh? Even tests that are 99% accurate can report a false positive with probabilities of 75% or greater. Confused on how this works? Check out the Wikipedia article.
So I'm predicting a B or a B+ in the class, given that although I only answered about 2/3 of the questions correctly, I am 99% sure I still did significantly better than everyone else. It was that kind of test.
On a slightly related note, I'm seriously considering auditing multivariate calculus again:
1.) My professor the first time around was terrible. Getting a second helping would allow me to take a second stab at getting something better than a B-.
2.) There were some things I never learned at all. My lack of a thorough grounding in infinite series is killing me. It keeps hurting me again and again.
For those of you not as geeky about math as I am, an infinite series is where you add a number or a function an infinite number of times.
Consider Zeno's Paradox (the Dichotomy one):
The ancient Greek Philosopher Zeno posed this question which mathematics could not properly answer for 3000 years, until the advent of calculus. Lets pretend you're standing in your living room, some distance from the wall. Walk halfway to the wall. Now, walk half way from where you are now to the wall again. And again. And again. The distance you can walk keeps getting smaller and smaller, but if you repeat this process precisely, then in theory, you can do this forever, never actually arriving at the other wall.
But obviously, we all know you can walk all the way to that wall. We do it all the time. So it is with infinite series. If we add 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32+........, then we need to be able to show that it actually equals the distance between our starting position and the wall.
Unfortunately, I've been having to teach myself how to do these kinds of methods. And its not exactly intuitively obvious. Infinite series goes from teaching you how to calculate Zeno's Paradox to this monstrosity. Believe it or not, Ladies and Gentlemen, this can be used to calculate the average of any old set of numbers. I've made a fool of myself for the past year or so, because every time my teachers talked about this method, I looked at them with polite disinterest. If I had learned this in high school (where Brandeis assumes you learn this, because apparently every high school but Finneytown teaches BC Calculus), I would have recognized immediately why it was such a beautiful piece of mathematics.
*Sigh* Oh well.
John's visit was fun. I showed him why Brookline is such a run down dump (just kidding Mom). Actually, I wanted John to go back and confirm to my parents that I was living in a very safe place. We chilled on Newbury Street, got into the MFA for free, and John bedazzled all with his knowledge of European Art. I was a bit humbled. I showed him the "Not for Tourists" version of Boston: Penguin Pizza, Felipe's, Coolidge Corner, and the Kosher Dunkin' Donuts near my place. On Sunday, we went to Marblehead to visit Marina at the beach and she showed us the Old Town of Marblehead.
After I saw John to Government Center on Monday and directed him towards the Airport, I ran over to the Spanish Consulate and grabbed my visa! Cha-ching. So I am now equipped and ready to bugalloo to Espana.
So that's the news for the week, hope everyone else is set. I'm going to go back to my bliss.
Class is over
I have one week of work left
I decided not to go to New York after Henry said he couldn't meet up with me in Chinatown.
The result? Peace and quiet for the first time in weeks.
Bliss.
My class is over, and the final was tough as nails. Ugly. Probably one of the hardest tests I've ever taken. Its less that the questions were insanely difficult, and more that even for 8 questions, there wasn't enough time. The entire class was working on it until the last minute, and I think everyone felt the same way I did:
"Good questions, prof, but I just needed a bit more time to thread my way through it."
He posted the answers to the bloodbath online, and as I suspected, I answered it about 60% correctly. I even flubbed the Bayes' Theorem question (a soft ball in theory, although the prof messed us all up by asking us to invert the damn thing), if only because I managed to trick myself into thinking that a particular shortcut was the answer.
Bayes' Theorem is cool, because it is often used to check how reliable medical tests are, among other applications. For example, even for the most accurate test, if the percentage of people who actually have a disease is really small (for example, Ebola or Type I Diabetes), then there's usually a 90% chance or greater that if you test positive for it, you don't actually have the disease. Scary, huh? Even tests that are 99% accurate can report a false positive with probabilities of 75% or greater. Confused on how this works? Check out the Wikipedia article.
So I'm predicting a B or a B+ in the class, given that although I only answered about 2/3 of the questions correctly, I am 99% sure I still did significantly better than everyone else. It was that kind of test.
On a slightly related note, I'm seriously considering auditing multivariate calculus again:
1.) My professor the first time around was terrible. Getting a second helping would allow me to take a second stab at getting something better than a B-.
2.) There were some things I never learned at all. My lack of a thorough grounding in infinite series is killing me. It keeps hurting me again and again.
For those of you not as geeky about math as I am, an infinite series is where you add a number or a function an infinite number of times.
Consider Zeno's Paradox (the Dichotomy one):
The ancient Greek Philosopher Zeno posed this question which mathematics could not properly answer for 3000 years, until the advent of calculus. Lets pretend you're standing in your living room, some distance from the wall. Walk halfway to the wall. Now, walk half way from where you are now to the wall again. And again. And again. The distance you can walk keeps getting smaller and smaller, but if you repeat this process precisely, then in theory, you can do this forever, never actually arriving at the other wall.
But obviously, we all know you can walk all the way to that wall. We do it all the time. So it is with infinite series. If we add 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32+........, then we need to be able to show that it actually equals the distance between our starting position and the wall.
Unfortunately, I've been having to teach myself how to do these kinds of methods. And its not exactly intuitively obvious. Infinite series goes from teaching you how to calculate Zeno's Paradox to this monstrosity. Believe it or not, Ladies and Gentlemen, this can be used to calculate the average of any old set of numbers. I've made a fool of myself for the past year or so, because every time my teachers talked about this method, I looked at them with polite disinterest. If I had learned this in high school (where Brandeis assumes you learn this, because apparently every high school but Finneytown teaches BC Calculus), I would have recognized immediately why it was such a beautiful piece of mathematics.
*Sigh* Oh well.
John's visit was fun. I showed him why Brookline is such a run down dump (just kidding Mom). Actually, I wanted John to go back and confirm to my parents that I was living in a very safe place. We chilled on Newbury Street, got into the MFA for free, and John bedazzled all with his knowledge of European Art. I was a bit humbled. I showed him the "Not for Tourists" version of Boston: Penguin Pizza, Felipe's, Coolidge Corner, and the Kosher Dunkin' Donuts near my place. On Sunday, we went to Marblehead to visit Marina at the beach and she showed us the Old Town of Marblehead.
After I saw John to Government Center on Monday and directed him towards the Airport, I ran over to the Spanish Consulate and grabbed my visa! Cha-ching. So I am now equipped and ready to bugalloo to Espana.
So that's the news for the week, hope everyone else is set. I'm going to go back to my bliss.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Brother's Keeper
In spite of what the Bible would lead you to believe, tomorrow, I get to play brother's keeper.
John's flight doesn't get into Boston until 12:12 a.m. tomorrow. If the T had a responsible sense of civic service, it would (like every other major city in the U.S.), leave the subway open until 2. As it is, the last trains run around 12:30. And Logan Airport is in a bad part of town. Goody. So I'm going to cross my fingers and hope we can at least get to Government Center on the last Blue Line Train out of the Airport. GC is safe and it would be relatively easy to get a taxi from there, and there's not a $6 Logan surcharge from there.
I gotta go catch my train, but I'll finish this later.
John's flight doesn't get into Boston until 12:12 a.m. tomorrow. If the T had a responsible sense of civic service, it would (like every other major city in the U.S.), leave the subway open until 2. As it is, the last trains run around 12:30. And Logan Airport is in a bad part of town. Goody. So I'm going to cross my fingers and hope we can at least get to Government Center on the last Blue Line Train out of the Airport. GC is safe and it would be relatively easy to get a taxi from there, and there's not a $6 Logan surcharge from there.
I gotta go catch my train, but I'll finish this later.
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