Blogozic

Some cute kid on YouTube

2006-11-16T21:29:00.000-06:00

This actually isn't just some kid, this is my kid:

Mr. T Loves His Mother

2006-11-16T10:38:00.000-06:00

Quick quote:

2006-11-11T22:15:00.000-06:00

. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

* Douglas Adams, as quoted in Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Adams

Goodbye Ann

2006-09-16T09:17:00.000-05:00

Ann Richards was possibly the funniest, wittiest, smartest, erudite, and real politicians this country has ever known. No one could deflect the mean-spiritedness of conservatives better than her. Her even temper and humor gave her an air of poise and self control that could only be dreamed of by any politician today. Her willingness to listen to what people have to say created bonds of trust and empathy. I remember hearing her on the Al Franken show and finding myself laughing more at what she had to say than what Mr. Franken was saying. Her humor was her tool for creating a comfortable environment to discuss the harsh realities of life. She was more open and honest than any other politician I know of. For example: instead of hiding her past problems with alcohol she openly acknowledged that she was an alcoholic and that she was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Unfortunately, her political career was swiftboated not unlike many other people who have run against our current president. She was the victim of swiftboating before "swiftboat" was a verb.

Ann's life will continue to be a shining example for progressives for many years to come. She will be missed.

Here are several quotes that I feel illustrate her best:

I am delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.

He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.[about George Bush senior]

The regular Democratic Party and its organization was run by men who looked on women as little more than machine parts.

The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.

Steve Irwin Dead

2006-09-04T00:22:00.000-05:00

The Crocodile Hunter finally met his end by the barb of a stingray through his chest.

A Perspective on the Israeli/Lebanon Conflict

2006-07-28T20:14:00.000-05:00

The response of Israel to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hisbolah is without a doubt a war crime. What if one these US anti-Mexican vigilante border patrol groups that we've been hearing about so much kidnapped a couple of Mexican soldiers? Would the appropriate response from Mexico be to bomb US civilians? Of course not. This is a police matter, NOT a millitary matter.

My Current Project

2006-07-21T19:37:00.000-05:00

A quick google search revealed that though many many people have written random sentence generators, I could find none that relied on linguistic theory to generate gramatical sentences. So this has been my latest project. I have set up some criteria for myself:

1. Sentence lengths are not predefined and could theoretically go on ad infinitum.
2. Sentences must satisfy the theta criterion.
3. The generator must be able to generate sentences in any tense and mood.

So how is it going? Very slowly. Here's a couple of examples of the output:
"Bob or a towel practices is Jim was fetched but sings".
"Jill is fetched".
"a bird but Jack shakes but made walk".

As you can see I have a long way to go.

Answer to Anna's Question

2006-04-05T16:11:00.000-05:00

An inciteful friend of mine, asked me a question the other day, and though I understood the answer, I couldn't quite explain it the way she deserved to hear it. The way to explain it came to me today, and I thought it worthy of a blog entry:

Q:Why is there such a disparity between the amount of resources that each sex puts into their offspring? Why does it seem that females get the short end of the stick?

A:To put it bluntly, males are selfish mutants. Here's why:

Imagine a species where there is no difference at all between the sexes, in fact there would be no reason to distinguish them as two different sexes. They still reproduce sexually but the sex cells split evenly in both parents and both parents swap them and both get pregnant. The resources for reproduction would be shared evenly between the 2 parents, both would have to deal with the costs of gestation and rearing. Now imagine that a selfish mutant comes into the population and decides it only wants to inseminate but not be inseminated because it doesn't want to invest the resources and time required for gestation. Because of this, this selfish mutant can spend the time it normally would gestating getting other organisms pregnant. In the next generation of these organisms the selfish mutant genes will have higher numbers than any one of the non-selfish ones. This generation with a higher population of selfish mutants will produce even more selfish mutants in the next generation. However, since these mutants can't get pregnant, the proportion of mutants to non-mutants will quickly rise to 50% and stay there unless there are other external factors at play. This is what's called an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Populations of individuals need to find strategies that maintain the population without having to be disrupted by an even more selfish individual happening upon them. Many of the breakthroughs associated with modern biology come from this line of reasoning. It was first proposed by John Maynard-Smith and has since been a powerful tool in understanding animal behavior.

If this piques your interest I highly recomend Richard Dawkins's the Selfish Gene.

How many grandmothers do you have to go back till you get to eve?

2006-03-11T09:13:00.000-06:00

I was laying on my sofa today while my daughter was watching an extremely annoying kid's show, when I realized that it would not be hard to figure out how many generations back you have to count to get to the first homo sapiens. The answer shocked me and my wife.

If we say that on average there are 4 generations per 100 years, and human beings have been around for 200,000 years:

(200,000/100) * 4 = 8,000 generations

This can help explain why there isn't much diversity in human populations. In fact, there is more diversity in one small tribe of chimps in the jungles of Africa, than there is in our entire species. This is but one factor to take into account to explain our variation riddle, I'll save the rest for another post.

An Improbable Universe

2006-03-10T15:57:00.000-06:00

This is the first time in a while that I've felt like blogging. So here's another entry for my die hard fan (Love you Mom!!):

I had to choose improbableuniverse.blogspot.com as the url for this blog because somebody already took consilience, the title of a book by biologist Edward O. Wilson which has been a big inspiration for me. So far I haven't explained what is meant by "improbable universe". For this, I will refer to Richard Dawkins's excellent analogy of the improbable occurence of a hurricane blowing through a junk yard and by chance assembling a 747 from all the parts laying around. The arrangement of matter in living systems is so improbable that there has to be some reason for it. Some people would see this as proof of god's creation, and others would say it is proof of evolution through natural selection, and still others would say that it is god choosing natural selection as his/her/it's tool for increasing the complexity of matter. I see this as proof that given enough time, all the things that are possible, however improbable, will happen.

What is the probability that the circumstances that transforms subatomic energy into matter? It must be probable because it happened. At this level of organization, subatomic particles don't have that many different behaviors. 2 or 3 at the most. Let's say that energy forming into matter requires a long permutation (order matters!) of these behaviors. How long does this hypothetical permutation have to be until it becomes impossible for this universe to exist as anything but subatomic particles? My guess is roughly 1 - the sum of all subatomic particles in the universe.

If we apply elementary probabillity theory to this stage in the evolution of the cosmos as a method of finding out how many possibillities could arise we would get 10e1000000000000000000000000000000...^3 possible outcomes. Even if the probabillity that matter would form is less than a millionth of a percent, it is still a small subset of the number of possible outcomes for this universe.

The probabillity that life would arise is smaller than that of matter forming from energy because once matter is formed the number of different behaviors increases by orders of magnitudes. Then once replicators like DNA start replicating the amount of total behaviors of all substances in the universe grows to almost infinity.

It is safe to say, that for each new level of organization in this universe, the amount of behaviors possible increases on scales we cannot imagine. If we abstract the universe into two components, actors (A) and behaviors (B), we can say that all the possible outcomes for this universe can be expressed as A^B. We can then express this iteratively to describe how outcomes increase as we move to higher levels of organization:

L = level of organization
N = number of possible outcomes

N[L+1] = A[L]^B[L]

So the probabillity (P) of any given outcome at any given level of organization can be expressed something like:

P[L+1] = 1 / O[L]

This is VERY simple math. And to tell you the truth, you now have seen nearly all of my paltry math skills. But what I'm hoping is appearent, is that for every new level of organization, the probabillity of the universe being what it has turned out to be decreases. So the Universe as we now know it, is the result of stacking statistical outliers on top of eachother.

If you read this and disagree, please post a reply. I'm pulling stuff out of my ass here. Set me straight!

The Beauty of Linux

2006-03-03T15:48:00.000-06:00

Here's an example of how beautiful a desktop can be:

ADD, a True Disability

2006-02-13T20:26:00.000-06:00

Everyonce in a while it dawns on me that I truly have a disability: ADHD (inattentive type). It's not the kind of disability that is very noticible when you have it. I've always been this way, and as far as I knew up until I was about 13 was that everyone else was like me. It's not like I woke one day and couldn't concentrate. It's not like I got my attention cut off in an industrial accident. You can't see a lack of attention like you can other forms of disability.

Because of the invisibility of ADHD, some people just think that I didn't get hit enough as a child. I still get this from people sometimes, though usually in the form of "maybe your parents just didn't discipline you well enough?". I'm hesitant to tell people that I have ADD because I am affraid that this is what they'll think, or that they'll think that I use ADD as an excuse for being a slacker. This is especialy the case when it comes to teachers, bosses, and authority figures in general.

Here are some facts:
50 - 70% of people with ADHD drop out of high school.
8 - 10% of people with ADHD graduate from college.
Teen pregnancy rates are much higher among ADHD populations.

Considering these facts, I think I've managed to do pretty well. I have a high school diploma, I had my first child at 22 (I'm currently 24), and I'm about a year off from getting my bachelor's degree (it's only taken me 6 years).

I think a great deal of my success has to do with being medicated. My older brother hasn't had that benefit. He dropped out of high school, and got his GED. As far as I know he has no plans to get any higher education. Last time I checked the very thought of it made him have to swig another beer. He's a brilliant guy. I don't want to say that his brain is going to waste. He's doing the best he knows how to do. I hope the best for him.

This is for everyone out there that has ADHD:
Your are not undisciplined slackers. The modern environment puts us at a disadvantage, but we can succeed. It's not right to compare our achievements to "normies". They may have one-track minds , but we have the legal right to own high strength amphetamines!

Poster-Boy for Gun Control?

2006-02-12T22:09:00.000-06:00

We told you he was dangerous!!!!

2006-02-12T21:57:00.000-06:00

I've heard some conservatives say that Dick Cheney scares even them. But I'm betting Harry Whittington's more scared than anyone else.

Read how Dick Cheney shot him in the face here

Linus' Law as an Ultimate Hypothesis

2006-02-12T15:49:00.000-06:00

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux (which is also where Linux gets it's name), has been credited with the law (though he might not have put it this way himself) that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". What this means for non-hackers is that the more people you have looking at a problem, the greater the probability is that someone will find a solution.

This has been a powerful tool for the development of Linux. Linux, once a user has climbed the learning curve associated with it, is a much more stable and powerful operating system than Windows. The development model of Linux allows for greater innovation. It also allows for greater schisms as well. As of now there probably somewhere around a hundred plus different types (or as linux users call them "distributions") of linux. Each one of these has it's costs and it's benefits. For example: The distribution of Linux that I use is called "Ubuntu". This is by far the best distribution for users who believe (like me) that computers are a means to an end. It's not the quickest distribution, and there isn't as much software for it as there are other distributions. But from the moment it is installed it just works. You don't have to fiddle around with it to get it to work.

Another distribution, Gentoo, is a complete pain in the ass to install. You have to basically build your computer from the ground up. Every single bit of code that gets put on you hard drive is put there by you the user. However, every bit of code that gets put on your hard drive is chosen by you. Gentoo gives the end user WAY more choice as to what the end operating system will be. Through some very innovative programming, Gentoo also allows you to install nearly any linux program from it's source code, unlike Ubuntu. Because of the way Gentoo is setup, it is a very fast distribution. But the wo/man hours needed to get an Ubuntu system up and running is way more than the average user of a computer would ever want to put in.

Enough about linux. What I want to focus on here is Linus' Law (LL). Computers are not the only environment where LL applies. The way I see it, it has been at work for thousands of years. If we assume that the causal relations of geography and culture/technology put forth by quite a few people, including Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs and Steel fame) holds true, than we can formulate an hypothesis regarding LL and cultural development.

History shows that the technologies that led to European dominance were not unique to Europe. In fact, they were variations on a theme of technologies that were brought from the ajacent longitudes along similar lattitudes. The land area from Asia to Europe is immense. The amount of people in this area is also immense. Therefore, we have more eyes looking at the same, or at least very similar sets of problems. LL then predicts that as the population increases in this area, the rate of advancement should also increase, which is what we see. Someone could probably develop an equation that models this process. When innovations occured they traveled in a latitudinal direction.

Applying LL to cultural development explains why the tribes that were indigenous to what is today South Africa didn't develop as fast as those populations in Eurasia. The South African climate is very similar to that of the parts of Eurasia that had fast technological growth. However, the land mass of this advantageous climate is much smaller than that of Eurasia. It is also isolated from for similar climates. For the domestic animals that flowed from the Middle East to Europe, getting to South Africa requires travelling through drastically different climates. It would be impossible for a cow, which requires an enormous amount of grazing land to survive. A cow would not be able to survive in the deserts and jungles that separate North Africa and South Africa long enough to make it through to South Africa. This assumes that someone consciously intended to bring domestic livestock to South Africa before colonialization by Europe.

LL, however does not explain why Europe developed guns from Middle Eastern bombards, and why Europe developed moveable type from the print making techniques of Asia. LL also does not take into account that some problems require well educated, and highly specialized types of knowledge. This are things to be expounded on some other day.

Middle School Clique Behavior Amongst Academics

2006-02-11T12:17:00.000-06:00

In my middle school, I was one of the first people to hate Green Day. I loved them at first; they were an anthem to horny teenaged boys. Then I decided to hate them--not because their music is crappy (which it is)--but because everyone else LOVED them. I quickly became an anti-trendy after that.

Now my tastes are my tastes despite what everyone else likes. However, on the Ole Miss campus, and maybe every college campus, there is a higher concentration of people who hate this or that simply because it is so popular.

When I was in high school I thought that college was going to be a place where there is a free flow of ideas, and people judge those ideas based on their merit. There is some of that yes, but especially among social science crowds, there are many people just trying to be smarter and more opinionated than eachother. I think this is the reason why Lacan and Derida are so popular. They present incomprehensible academic babble that people pretend is meaningfull so they can sound smart.

The only understandable utterance that spew from these people's mouths is that "white men are evil". But to make a claim against this is like saying you believe in Darwinian Evolution at the Southern Baptists convention.

There isn't a whole lot of difference between Post-Modernism and Christian fundamentalism. They both are extremely distrustful of Science, and they are both radicals.

Quote from the Left Hand of God

2006-02-10T16:11:00.000-06:00

It is the search for meaning in a despiritualized world that leads many people to right-wing religious communities because these groups seem to be in touch with the sacred dimension of life. Many secularists imagine that people drawn to the Right are there solely because of some ethical or psychological malfunction. What they miss is that there are many very decent Americans who get attracted to the Religious Right because it is the only voice that they encounter that is willing to challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation and spiritual loneliness.

Read a longer excerpt

Passive Resistance, Basketball, and Evolution (Served with a side of ADD).

2006-02-10T13:04:00.000-06:00

I've been watching the Civil Rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. The US Civil Rights movement was one of the best examples of Non-Violent Passive Resistance I can imagine.

One of the things someone in the documentary said was (and I'm paraphrasing here) that non-violence only works for the side of good. There's some truth to this as I see it. If an oppressed group does nothing to give excuses to their oppressors to maintain their ways, the oppressor is confronted with their own misdeads and they are forced to change themselves internally.

The only excuse for using violence against violence is a pathetically childish one: "He hit me first!". It has been my experience that fear inhibits maturation. For the people that rely on the "he hit me first argument", who are in fact the ones who were hit first, the fear of being hit again inhibits the rational, mature, response. This is part of our programming, as selected for by natural selection, and has provided fitness at a high cost. Evolution doesn't make perfect systems. In fact it tends to over-generalize.

The other day I told a behaviorist friend of mine that the day after I over-exerted myself playing basketball with him I had a severe allergy attack, and that I need to recoop a while before we could play again. He then reminded me that correlation is not causation and that this is how superstitions start. I agree with him that that's how superstitions start, but in this instance I wasn't willing to test what caused my allergy attack having still not recovered from it. This is exactly the kind of overgeneralization that natural selection selects for. What struck me was his attitude towards superstition. It was almost one of "pfff.... ...you superstitious ignoramous!" only much more mildly. This is just my interpretation of it, I know that's not exactly how he meant it, but my internal reaction to his statement caused me to interpret his it that way.

But he had a point. As a species, we need to take more risks. We need to risk letting go of violence. Nevertheless, there is a snootiness(sp?) to his remark. There is also a snootiness to some of the terms that psychologists use to describe some behaviors. For instance, there is a study that results suggested that "women conform more than men". What this means is that if there are two ATM machines side by side, and there is a line behind one, and not the other, a woman are more likely to assume that the ATM with no line behind it is broken without trying it for herself. I don't see this as conformity, I see it as prudence.

It has been demonstrated with resonable certainty by biologists and evolutionary psychologists that the maxim "eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap" is a truism. It makes sense that women would be more protective of themselves than men. This "conformist" behavior appearently provided more fitness to one sex than the other. In my experience, which may not count for much, women do tend to be more conservative and more religious than men. If this is offensive, I'm sorry, but give me some hard data to disprove it. That's what science is all about.

You might be saying at this point:"ATM's are new, how could we ever have evolved behavior to deal with them?" or "Isn't there no harm in testing whether an ATM is busted or not?" Here is an example of how organisms are subjected to new environments which they are not adapted to. Our brains/minds adapted in an environment where every one of our behaviors mattered. When confronted with a new situation, it is safer to do what everyone else is doing. This is not something to be judged in a negative light. Who knows how many times in the past has this prudence saved our ancestors?

But now we are confronted with a new environment, where the consequences of making the wrong decision could mean the annihilation of the human race. To quote a friend "the destructiveness of our weapons grows in orders of magnitudes". I believe now we must find ways of reducing fear, though we more reason now than ever to be fearful, so that reason may prevail.

Let's piss some more people off!!

2006-02-09T16:58:00.000-06:00

These are the cartoons that are causing all the riots.

I believe in the right to free press, and free speech. I'm sorry these things are offensive to some people, but those people need to understand that those rights protect them as well.

ps-thanks Anna for giving me this URL!!

People Everywhere are Pissed!

2006-02-09T16:28:00.000-06:00

I don't know how many people have noticed this, I'd like to think I'm not the only one who has, but everyone feels that their values and beliefs are under attack. Muslims, Christians, Evolutionists, Republicans, Democrats, EVERYONE!!!

I blame the radicals* among ALL these groups, but especially conservative Christians. They have been attacking and attacking and attacking in increasingly organized ways. But unfortunately, the response to them hasn't been much better. When the conservatives call the non-them "evil" and "tools of the devil" and just plain "satan", how do the radicals on the other side respond? "Conservatives are just too stupid to see things our way." I don't know about you, but I think Carl Rove is a pretty smart guy, though he is working for really bad people.

As a part of the Reconcilience part of this blog I would like to state this:
As a progressive, I disagree with much of what conservatives are trying to do in this world. But I do believe that they are doing it because they feel that it is the right thing to do. The average conservative is just trying to be a good Christian, or Muslim. I understand and respect that. I am trying to live up to my beliefs and to do what my conscience tells me to do. We are just trying to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and be proud of what we see.

*the definition of radical I use in this entry is the same as in the previous post.

A new definition of "radical"

2006-02-08T19:29:00.000-06:00

radical:

n. One who feels threatened by the very existence of opinions or beliefs not their own.

I'm a little slow...

2006-02-08T16:51:00.000-06:00

I'm just now reading Guns, Germs and Steel. I knew it has been out for a while now, but I was completely unaware that there's a PBS documentary made from it. It amazes me that I didn't know that because PBS is the ONLY channel I get with my rabbit ears!!

I find the book incredibly liberating. As a white male, I feel incredibly guilty that I'm living on land that was acquired through genocide. What Jared Diamond's book shows me is that the circumstances that lead to the European colonialism, and subsequently much of the state of the world today is all the result of historical coincidence. This does not excuse the immoral behavior of colonialists, but it seems to be arbitrary that these people were white men. I refuse to jump on the white men are evil bandwagon. Diamond illustrates that if Australian Aborigines were in the same environment as white men, we would be talking about the oppressive Yir Yoront hegemony. We would complain about the "black male" bias in our society.

In a way, it's almost unfortunate that the circumstances that lead to European hegemony only happened once. Were it to happen in 2 locations at the same time we might not be so quick to point the finger at some grossly overgeneralized group of people. We would be forced to look deeper into the Ultimate reasons for human history.

In all cases that I can think of in history, attrocities happen when the powerful members of a society seek to exploit the weak of any society, including their own. This is not unique to Europe. I think the genocide of the East Timorese by Singapore proves this point quite well. I think what is missing from the consciousness of many people is that most individuals, white, black, male, female, for 99.9% of human history have merely been trying to keep their families and themselves alive. My family arrived to the United States too late to start the pandemic that killed so many natives. They also arrived to late to take part in the genocidal conquest of the land I know live in. My ancestors were poor farmers who battled cold winters and broken backs. I think this is the story for most people in the world, including most white men.

This is actually something my father tried to tell me along time ago, but like I said, I'm a little slow. White liberal guilt is a hard thing to overcome. It's the product of being empathetic, which is at the core of my system of values. I felt guilty because I care. That's something I will never be ashamed of.

I realize this post doesn't begin to touch the problems of male hegemony. I will save that for another post. But I will say this: chauvanism is also not unique to Europe.