The Role of Calvino Will Be Played By Sam for Tonight's Performance

This post started as a comment on Sam's last post on the ongoing dialog about the Doomsday Argument (see below), but then it became hopelessly too long for a comment. If you are coming late to this argument...um, move on to something else more interesting (This must be what it is like if you're, e.g. dailykos versus drudge report, or whatever. Endless co-mingled threads that eventually manage to lose absolutely everybody. What fun).

Sam: I still think that Bayes tells (you) nothing about (you) being an American, until after he has found out his IS American, at which point Bayes and (you) agree, in that the latter says 'the odds are one' and the former says, 'we do not have a random sample any longer, so my logic does not apply'. Also, by the way, SEGA! iPOD NANO! RAGE!

The Stoat: Indeed, and perhaps I have previously said Bayes, author of the probability theory, where I meant Leslie, who is the author of the Doomsday Argument. Sorry about that.

Sam: I see. So we agree that the Doomsday Argument is wrong, and that it's because Bayes' Theory does not apply. Then what is your quibble?

The Stoat:My quibble is perhaps really only semantic, but it's that trying to attack the Doomsday Argument by figuring out whether you are a random sample of all of humanity is the path of madness. It seems hung up in problems of temporality, which Leslie tries to overcome with this idea of "Doom Early" (a bag with a few marbles) versus "Doom Late" (a bag with many, many marbles). Much argumentative reasoning ensues. My point is that it is for naught. Leslie is unlikely to be convinced, and you are unlikely to be convinced by Leslie, and I think it's because randomness doesn't enter into it. My argument is that deciding whether you are a random human is logically equivalent to asking "What are the odds that I would be born at the time I was actually born?" The question has meaning, but it is not about statistics or randomness, because you were actually born at that time, it has already happened. It's an Odds Are One™ question (I'm totally going to trademark this and then the residuals are going to start pouring in).

Sam: What does this have to do with Bayes' Theorem?

The Stoat: Nothing. My argument is that not that it doesn't apply because you're not a random human, my argument is that probability does not apply at all because you are already you, stating the argument.

Sam: I have completely, totally and utterly lost you.

The Stoat: Here is the argument I thought of on the walk to work this morning. Either this will help, or I should abandon this line of reasoning forever. The argument begins now. *Ahem*. One of the (many) things we gloss over in the Doomsday Argument is the idea that there is a discrete first human (or for that matter a discrete last one). Unless we are Creationists, we wouldn't argue this, but we are assuming that it doesn't matter too much. Anyway, assume you believe in evolution.

Sam: You may make that assumption.

The Stoat: Then, you, Sam, for the sake of argument the current person considering the Doomsday Argument, cannot trace your lineage back to a distinct first human. Nor can anyone. The so called "bag" containing all of humanity, even as a species, cannot be traced back to a distinct Homo Sapien #1.

Sam: Yes, I agree. But I don't see how it's a problem that the line is a little bit fuzzy between Homo Sapien and Homo Erectus, or whomever.

The Stoat: So if it's not, is it okay if our "bag" contains some Homo Erecti, or some thousands to million of years of transitional species, just to make sure we get everybody who might possibly be considered Homo Sapien #1?

Sam: No, no, I see where you're going with this. I'm going to get on a slippery slope wherein we wind up having to trace the human lineage back to amoebas or something when in fact I could never have been born as an amoeba.

The Stoat: Indeed, the odds of Sam being born an amoeba are zero, For You Are Sam.

Sam: For I Am Sam.

The Stoat: Anyway, that's not quite where I'm going with this. My proposal is that including subjects in your metaphysical grab bag, such as homo erecti or amoebas as whom you have no chance of being born invalidates the terms of the experiment.

Sam: I want to believe you, but I don't quite see that as a problem. Nor do I see that it can't be solved by starting a couple thousand years into the advent of Homo Sapiens and numbering one of them human number one, just to be safe.

The Stoat: I'll grant you the latter thing, because I don't actually need it to make my argument. What I need is the former thing. Recall why the Doomsday Argument actually seems to work: You have a bag labeled "All Humans For All Time," and you know that this bag has two possible identities: Doom Early, meaning that there are 70 billion total humans in the bag, and Doom Late, in which there are many trillion humans in the bag. You reach into the all-humans-for-all-time grab bag and pull out a human--it happens to be you, and you have a number affixed to you that's your birth order, and it is under 70 billion, you apply Bayes theorem, blah blah blah.

Sam: (makes the "blah blah blah" hand motion)

The Stoat: There's all that confusion about whether you being born is equivalent to somebody outside of time and space reaching into the bag a picking out a random person. In order for this to be valid, not only does the probability of you being selected have to be as likely as selecting anyone else (you are truly random), but the entity you select out of the bag has to be as likely to be you as anyone else (your probability space is truly random).

Sam: Um...no? Why?

The Stoat: Those are the terms of the experiment. To be a random sample you'd have to be able to pop out at any point in history (that is, with any particular "number" affixed to you).

Sam: Ah, right. Isn't this what I was arguing?

The Stoat: Perhaps. Anyway, it's obvious that you have no chance of being an amoeba or a homo eretus. Now, if we solve this problem by removing the transitional species as you suggest above, and then reach into the bag and select...Njorl Hroffssen, fierce Norse warrior living in 800 C.E., what are the odds that this person is Sam?

Sam: Oh no....

The Stoat: ZERO! There are no odds! That person is not Sam. You reach into the bag and pull out Zarf VIII, Galactic Neural Coupling Plumbing Engineer, living in the 389th Solar Mega-Cycle after the dawn of the Total Information Era, what are the odds that this person is Sam?

Sam: I beg you to stop now....

The Stoat: None! Nada! Zilch! That person is not Sam. Sam does not and cannot exist outside the historical and societal context in which Sam exists.

Sam: Yeah. I made this exact same argument, only I used fewer words, and it made more sense.

The Stoat: You almost made this argument. My argument is that the Doomsday Argument might work fine in the abstract, with the idea of looking outside of time and space and reaching into the bag and pulling out a human and looking at his or her birth order. But the moment you apply the problem to yourself, a person alive right now, and this is the only way the argument could work, you fix yourself as you, Sam, and suddenly you cannot be a human pulled out of a bag at random, you can only be Sam. Sam does not exist at other times and places in the history of time. He only exists now. Bayes theorem does not apply not because you're un-randomly selected, but because probability does not apply to this question. The odds that you are you are one. The odds that you are not you are zero.

Sam: ...

The Stoat: Yes?

Sam: I hate you.

The Stoat: I know you do.

Odds Holding Steady At One

Apparently this whole idea of "Your Frame Of Reference Is Flawed Because You're You" thing is nothing new to anybody. The linked paper is about the flaws in the Doomsday Argument, a modification of which I presented in my first Odds Are One-themed post. The abstract contains is a nice summary of many of the things I've tried to say on the subject:

For example, we have a tendency to infer non-randomness from apparent patterns in random events (witness the incorrigible optimists who spot trends in the spins of a roulette wheel or the ups and downs of the FT Share Index); at the same time, the history of statistics suggests that, when random samples are required, we often mistake the merely haphazard - or whatever happens to be near at hand - for the truly random.

In my continuing attempts to gauge my audience, I would guess that your eyes would glaze over were you to attempt to read the paper, or this, which is a pretty good explication of the Doomsday Argument, and which presents it in relation to the weak anthropic principle. It has been proved, after all, that you are Humanities-studying iPod owners (I mean, okay, I imagine Sam probably spent some hours of class time discussing the Doomsday Argument, but the rest of you probably not so much).

What's interesting about The Doomsday Argument (and if you haven't clicked one of the links, the explanation I gave previously, while not quite the same, works fine: it seems like you'd be statistically more likely to be born in the latter 2/3rds of all humans who have ever been born than in the former 1/3, but if that were the case then humans would have to become extinct in a few hundred years) is that at first it's hard to understand why this is actually any sort of philosophical problem--it just seems like The Damned Lies of Statistics (which, as I will one day blog about, are not Damned Lies of Statistics, they are Damned Lies of Language. Many people are just calling them "lies" these days). Then after you've groked the argument, it's equally hard to understand why your initial arguments against it don't quite work--it's based on the idea that the fact that You are Here, Now has some particular intrinsic meaning--or rather, that it doesn't, that you are a random sample from the grab bag labeled, "all humans in history." This makes counter arguments difficult, because You are, in fact, Here Now (e.g., counter-arguments like, "Yeah, but the Doomsday Argument has been true for everyone who has ever lived or is currently alive," seem like they're putting you on an equal observational footing with every other person in the "experiment." They're not. If there are only every going to be, say, 100 billion humans in the history of time, including humans 1 through 99,999,999,999 in your experiment doesn't give you any more information than you already had. You'd need the 124 billionth human in your sample to get any premise-shattering data, and you can't have him or her (or it). As soon as you state the terms of the argument, you put yourself at the argumentative "end of the line," as it were, and...okay, already your eyes are glazing over. You have no idea what I'm saying right now. I've completely lost you...uh...never mind).

What's also interesting about the Doomsday Argument is that I think problems like this are windows into new models. Whatever our current models for understanding probability and observation and, you know, being itself are, they can't quite handle this problem, which means some tear-down and rebuilding is indicated.

By the way, I stumbled upon all of this via this post, which I found through about Five Degrees of Blog Separation, a phenomenon with which, since my post on audience the other day, I have become obsessed. Interestingly, this guy thinks this paper solves the issue, which I don't at all.

Goodnight, Sweet Pad

This is a just a short post to memorialize the place we have, last night, agreed to sell to someone else. Plenty of stuff could go wrong between now and the time it actually is to become that unmet person's property, but last night was the occasion upon which we agreed to terms, so I'm having my little moment now. It served both as my swank bachelor pad and also the first place L. and I lived after we were married. Plus, goddammit, it was a cool little crib. Quoting Ani DiFranco:

I'm recording our history now on the bedroom wall
and eventually the landlord will come
and paint over it all

On Audience, Redux

Someone walked by my office on Wednesday afternoon, reached down to give the dog, curled up in her usual place in the hallway just outside the door, a good scratch on the head, and asked if this was the famous brilliant yet neurotic dog, and oh, did we find a house yet? This is somebody known by me only to the eye--he works in another group on another floor, and I didn't know his name, nor had we ever had a conversation. He turned out, however, to be a manager on the Mechanical Turk project, and apparently one of the things you do if you're a manager on the Mechanical Turk project is search blogs to see what people are writing about your new product. So anyway, here was some fellow who'd figured out whom I was based on the fact that I worked peripherally on Mech Turk (which is what we cool "tech" people call it), and that I was the owner of a smart neurotic dog (who is, I might add, now utterly famous because what she does with her day is walk around the floor and wander into people's offices so that they can scratch her. Most people, apparently, have never met a dog this...personable). And, most importantly, he had read my blog.

Here in this ring of blogs we talk much meta- about what we are writing and for whom we write it, and I suppose some large portion of me hopes or imagines that I'm blogging to the masses, to people I don't know and who don't know me. A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Sam and U2 and acquired a comment from someone named Tarn, author of Matrices of Syncopation. She's at St. Mary's College, ergo a former collegue of Sam and Rebecca, and it turns out that she found me and had blogged about my blog a couple of months back (although she makes reference to me being funny, and what with our forays into intense Capitalism dragging me into glumness, I feel like I haven't written anything funny in awhile).

Anyway, it made me want more. You know, more audience. Audience is yummy. As I've said, almost the entire content of what I write is (un) secretly notes to L., or Sam & Red, or Greg, but every now and then I seem to be hitting something that worms its way into a slightly wider circle, and gives me that momentary glimpse of an idea that if I were writing slightly differently, I'd be...what? A rich and famous blogger? If I wrote about U2 or my insider view of the latest tech news all the time, I'm sure I'd find an immediate audience, but I think I'd find it pretty hard to tell my story within a context like that. And it's not at all clear what the story I'm trying to tell is, other than to write something that people want to read. Anyway, writing about U2 on the day or two after Sam and Tarn had had their transcendant experience at the D.C. show seems to me to be the closest I've come to what I'm trying to be get at. And it was kind of opportunist, and still a long way off.

By the way Mechanical Turk TPM Dude (and everyone else), we did get a house, we closed on Tuesday, I'm sitting in our new breakfast nook in our new kitchen using our new wireless broadband here at the end of a Friday night and thinking that, after all of that, it's a pretty fantastic thing.

This Sort Of Thing Is Not My Bag

I don't much post on politics these days because of its constant self-satirizing ridiculousness, but this is...really heavy with the irony.

The Mechanical Turk

It's one a.m. on Friday night/Saturday morning, and I'm working. The reason this is happening is because a) I work on the internet, in all its 24-hour, global reaching glory, b) something is broken with said internet, and c) some of the people who work on part of this internet live in India, and this is the time during which both parties are awake.

The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton built by an 18th Century Hungarian. It was a box with a mannequin attached to it, with a chess board on top of the box. The box was visibly filled with gears and springs, and it seemed you could wind up the box, and the mannequin would play chess against any opponent, and almost always win.

Mechanical Turk is also the name of the project that's keeping me up late into the night tonight. It's an idea that sounds either very cool or completely useless, depending upon what kind of mood you're in. The idea is that humans are good at some tasks computers are not good at, such as recognizing if a photo contains a picture of a particular person, or writing an essay, or whatever. If you're writing a computer program, and you want to, e.g., evaluate a photostream, you'd like to be able to write something like this:

  /* publish only photos that contain 
      that God of Rock and Roll, The Edge
   */
  foreach p (photostream) {
    if (doesPhotoContainTheEdge(p)) {
       publishPhoto(p);
    }
  }

What you had to do previously is get a person to look at the photos and choose some. What Mechanical Turk lets you do is...get a person to look at the photos and choose some. You pay them three cents or so for doing it, and the Mechanical Turk website runs the process in between somebody looking at the photos and turning that into information you can aquire from a computer program, plus the administrivia of getting people paid (and taking a cut) and making sure workers are doing a reasonable job. It's banking on the idea that there are enough people in the world with nothing better to do so as to make this massive, constant, virtual artificially intelligent workforce. And that there is going to be some useful application out there in the world for this.

Amazon has become large enough to throw money at things like this, things which are functionally R&D products brought to the market just to see what happens. I gather that basically Jeff Bezos thought it was a cool idea. It might turn in to something, or it might die a swift death after creating a bunch of wonk-fueled buzz this week. What it makes me think of, sitting on the couch with a computer on my lap and a hands-free device in my ear, listening to people on two continents discuss a problem with the website that I already know we're not going to be able to solve tonight, is that no matter how automated a process seems to be, how mechanized the job that's being performed, there are always humans hidden away, deciding how the pieces will be moved. The secret of the original Mechanical Turk was a chess master concealed in the mannequin--the gears were just there for misdirection. Tonight I'm feeling like a lot of these things that look like the work of machines aren't really that much more automated--human intervention is still required. The only thing that has ever changed is how many levels deep it's hidden.

There Was Nothing About It That Didn't Suck

I've been thinking all day about what I wanted to write about the process of buying a house and selling our condo, and while it's not even remotely over, I'm logging in at this point in the perhaps vain hope that it gets better from here (please knock wood when you read this). But I can't think of a more cogent summary than what titles this entry. It long ago stopped being about the amount of money things cost, or the complete arbitrariness of the market. It's become instead this misery of having relationships with people grounded in the conscience of money, and being in this place where you're not supposed to take it personally.

The last time I came upon this, I boldly proclaimed that the problem was Capitalism itself and that it all had to end. That was a fun thing to say at the time, but surprise, the simple weapon that will allow a member of the unwashed masses to take down a fully armored multi-national corporation from 100 yards away hasn't yet occurred to me. Yet I still really want to know what the answer to this is--how do you return some humanity to this system which governs all of these basic human interactions? Getting a loan, being hurried through signing form after form with only a dim idea of what we were signing, making offers on houses, changing our minds about making offers on houses, firing our real-estate agent because of our discomfort with him on that same human level--because I couldn't not take them personally, all of these things made me feel like I was A Bad Person. And I'm pretty sure I'm not.

A Shout-Out to My Peeps

An article on one of our favorite topics, the ill use of the word literally.

We used to joke about how one day, the dictionary entry for this word would look something like this:

• literally lit·er·al·ly adv.: figuratively.

It turns out it's almost already happened.

Gaining My Religion

Though I'm never one to pass up another occasion to laugh at Sam, his post-U2 concert fervor reminds me of something I've wanted to blog about for awhile: the religious experience. What is it? And how much does it actually have to do with religion?

It is the considered opinion of Thea, my erstwhile acupuncturist, mentor, and friend, that U2 are in fact exactly what Sam claims--not just a band, but a conduit to a preternaturally transcendant experience (this is doubly notable because Thea is not at all the kind of person you think of when you think, "U2 fan." Then, neither is Sam). No qualifiers or hedging needed: Bono is transmitting the universe, or god, or whatever your favorite word is, from a form that you cannot comprehend or experience into a form that you can. If that's not a religious experience, nothing is.

I think, moreover, that you're having this kind of experience, to a greater or lesser extent, every time you get lost reading a good book, watching film or t.v., or pretty much any time you "lose yourself." That's supposed to be what religious enlightenment feels like, isn't it--the loss of ego to some sense of ecstasy, no self consciousness, just joy? Having the ability to take someone out of themselves with narrative or art is a shamanic skill--most people I know simply couldn't invoke the kind of energy, e.g., to fill an amphitheater no matter how many lights, sound effects, tv screens, microphones, and guitar effects you gave them.

L. said that she never understood Catholicism as a religion until she stepped into a church in Rome. Seeing the art and the sculpture and the gold leaf and the stained glass, she realized what it must have been like hundreds of years ago when life was constantly cramped, dark, and smelly, and then one day you walked into one of these enormous, ornate, echoing light-filled temples. You really would experience god.

For me there's a certain pattern to it. As L. also noted a long time ago, experiencing really good narrative is a lot like falling in love. While you're in it, you just want more, because it's pulling you along, telling you the answers you've always wanted to know to the questions you never knew you wanted to ask. You can't wait for the next episode, or chapter, or tomorrow, to arrive.

Slow News Day

Here's our deep thought from Sunday brunch: one learns in 5th grade that the image of the outside world that ones brain receives from the optic nerve is inverted. The light that comes from the plane above eye level passes through the lens and is reflected onto the bottom of the optic nerve, and the light that comes from the below that plane is reflected onto the top. The reason we know it's not the optic nerve or its connectors that switch bottom to top is illustrated by the film I saw in the same 5th grade science cycle. They took a guy and put this apparatus over his eyes that switched the image he saw with a couple of mirrors--what was being fed to his eyes was already upside down. He wore the device continuously, and a week or two later, his brain adjusted and he started seeing right side up again. They showed him riding a motorcycle to prove that he could see okay. Question: Did his brain just undo the flip that it normally does, or did it flip the image again? Is there any physiological difference between these two things? Sub-question: Why hasn't someone released all of those fifth grade science films from the 1950's on DVD? First, they rocked. Second, it would prove that I wasn't crazy, since nobody seems to have seen this particular film except me.

Anyway, this all struck my ten-year-old brain as impossible. On the one hand, the dude could ride a motorcycle, and that's pretty compelling evidence. On the other hand, it seemed to ten-year-old me that you see from your eyes, not your brain. I didn't even buy that the image from my eyes was somehow upside down in the first place. I mean, I was looking right at it. I could see that it wasn't upside down.

So here's the deep thought. If your brain does something as dramatic as invert the image your eyes receive before you actually "see" it, what the hell else is it doing? What's being received that you don't see? What's not being received that you do?

(Editor's Note: this post markedly more interesting if you are stoned.)

TheOddsAreOneInSix

From a paper on Pride and Prejudice, written by a college student, somewhere in America:

"This shows that, though the marriage between Elizabeth and Darcy is the ideal match, it only happens one sixth of the time."

(Yes, he or she counted the number of marriages that take place in the novel).

I just love that on so many levels.

One Blog A Second

...it's a stat in the Harper's Index™ this month: "Average number of new blogs created each second: 1." Which just goes to show you (and by "you", I mean "me"), you're not nearly as unique as you thought. For those of you playing along at home that's 3600 blogs an hour, 86,400 blogs a day, 604,800 blogs a week, 31,536,000 blogs a year. A large percentage of these must be these bot-created spam blogs that seem to exist only to create Google hits (which, frankly, I can't figure out--it seems like the easiest thing in the world for search engines to weed out. Clearly I'm missing something). Another large percentage has got to be people who say to themselves, "hey, I'll start a blog, that'll be keen," write one entry, and never come back to it. But even if only one out of every ten blogs is actually somebody writing his or her (or its) thoughts on any sort of regular basis...well, you do the math.

I talked before about how, given a large demographic sample, you can make acurate behavioral predictions that are impossible to make about an individual in that group. I started a blog for a reason that, I imagine, is relatively atypical (though given 31 MILLION blogs a year, if only one in a thousand blogs are started as a project for school, I've got a lot of company anyway). After I'd been doing it for a month or two, I discovered a bunch of my friends were also blogging, and I sort of joined their club, and modified the things I blogged about, and so on. In other words, from the perspective of my little brain, the reasons I write a blog are rather nuanced and complex and seemingly unique. From the perspective of, e.g., the dude who compiles Harper's Index™, the fact that I write a blog is neither remarkable nor particularly surprising.

All this is by way of making an "it's a map, not the territory," argument. I can predict, for instance, that if you're reading this right now that you either, a) own an iPod, or b) are married to me. Well, I'm right, aren't I? And yet it's a strangely unimpressive inference. It's factually true, yet says almost nothing about the incredibly complex process that went into you deciding to (circle one) buy an iPod/marry me (if you're reading this blog and you neither own an iPod nor are married to me, well, who the heck are you? Leave me a comment or something). The model of the universe in which you are merely the sum of your decisions and actions, in which you are an actor in some mass market or abstracted closed system, is a useful model for making generalized predictions about the behavior of you and others who are in some way, "like" you. And it's a model that says nothing about how you, blog reader and iPod owner/spouse, got where you are, where you're going, or what's going on in your little brain right now.

Harper's Index™ is a registered trademark. Oh yes it is.

Slow Foods

Mark, of bachelor party fame, now reads this blog from time to time, so in the theme of writing letters to people via blogging, this missive is about something he brought up the other night. He and Adrienne just returned from their honeymoon in Italy last Friday. That is to say that she returned last Friday. Mark lost his passport and had to wander the streets of Milan, and then Copenhagen, for two days while waiting for a replacement passport (nobody who knows Mark is remotely surprised by this story. Such things are part of Mark's Essential Nature. Mark has fully accepted this part of his essence; when it pops up, he nods to it by saying, "Don't worry, baby. You're on the Cooper Train." Being on the Cooper Train means that something is about to go very, very not-as-planned).

They had us over on Tuesday for a post-wedding fiesta, during which we did absolutely nothing for four hours but cook and then sit around and eat. It was a four course meal wherein each courses had multiple sub-courses, and between each course were small breaks wherein we stopped to prepare the next thing we were going to eat, and also did some digesting. During the course (ha!) of all this, Mark brought up the Slow Food Movement, whose stated goal is to preserve food and the culture that goes with eating from, well, modern life.

I try to avoid, on principal, diatribes about how modern life is bad, because it really, really isn't. Modern life is pretty freaking awesome--not for everyone, obviously, and it should not be inferred that I'm advocating complacency because things are okay for you in particular. I just think there aren't many major truths that can be divined from statements that start "'X' ain't as good as it used to be" (or, frankly, the contrapuntal, "The advent of 'Y', will surely foment a revolution that creates a new utopia for all Mankind!" That really hasn't been true of much since the printing press, and even then, it's not like it ended war or world hunger). (As to the invention of the internet, see: printing press, the). And, I don't think that the rather unhealthy relationship we (very broadly speaking) have with food these days, about which I'm going to talk briefly in the next paragraph without making any definitive argument on the subject, doesn't have as much to do with "modern life," whatever one takes that to mean, as we probably generally think it does.

Jesus H. Ted, I use a lot of words.

It's no particular secret we're obese as a population, and it's no particular secret that there seems to be a fair causal relationship between that and the fact that we eat processed foods in large quantities and in short amounts of time. I think another problem, as I've mentioned before, is how far removed we've become from the process of actually acquiring and preparing our food. The only next logical step is to remove us from the actual eating of it, and I offer this, a breakfast item they sell in the cafeteria at my work, as evidence that this particular inconvenience is being worked out as well. Again, I'm not arguing for the return of The Golden Age of Sustinance Farming here, I'm arguing that removing ourselves from the actual process of gathering, preparing, and eating your food is actually tangibly harming our health. I'm not saying you gotta go out and hunt the stuff (though bully for you if you do), but I do think you have to pay attention. And jeez, might as well enjoy it too, while you're at it.

Meta-Letter To Greg

Another reason I started this blog, besides the ostensible reasons, was to collect my thoughts on a particular subject. It's not clear what the particular subject is, something about why I'm pursuing a career in acupuncture and what I think it's all about, or whatever. One of the assigned texts for my first year in school was called Essential Spirituality, it's a 250-odd page book with a thesis that can be summarized thusly: Surveying the world's major religions (which the author selects for us, though no suprises amongst them either), one discovers they have some essential tenets in common. His argument is that you can infer from this how you should approach your spiritual life.

I thought that this book was highly dumb, because a) it should have been about ten pages long, and b) Okay, so one should chill out, treat everybody how one wants to be treated, and get rid of ones material attachments. Sattva enlightenment ensues. That's not so much the question. The question is how you do those things. It's not that this book is without advice on the subject, it's just that the advice looks like this:

Relax. Take deep breaths. Meditate. Empty your mind. Focus on loving kindness for all living things.*




*Offer valid only if you are upper middle class, pretty much don't do anything with your day, and don't have to spend time worrying about anything, such as money, food, a daily commute, buying or selling anything, politics, the environment, religious fundamentalism, the state of the world in general, or coming into contact with anyone who might, say, not want to focus on loving kindness for some reason. Offer not valid in territories, protectorates, the Continental U.S., Europe, Capitalist Nations, Socialist Nations, Communist Nations, or countries or collectives bound by laws or communal social contracts of any kind. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. Attempting to achieve inner peace may cause passers-by to gawk and small children to poke at you with sticks. In the vast wide history of time, enlightenment has only been achieved by a couple of people sitting under trees three thousand years ago and some dude the Romans ended up nailing to a cross, so good luck with that.

Anyway, I thought: you know what, I could write this book. Only I could write it such that it was, a) actually useful, and b) entertaining enough that people would want to read it. I bring all of this up...(this sentence, or ones like it, now litering the discourse among the Three Weblogs of The Apocolypse)...because of Stonesthrow's last post about doing...stuff...with/in your life. I, too, tend to be an incredibly lazy ass, most of the time. Or that's my perception of myself, and probably everybody feels this way at least some of the time--the sensation that one should be doing 'x', but is not doing 'x', and instead playing solitare on the computer (or maybe that is just me).

One of the theses of this imaginary book I'm at least pretending to write is that I tend to think this phenomenon is some sort of a denial of ones true and essential self. If, for instance, you smoked and really, in the true and essential sense, wanted to quit, you would just do it. I don't mean to say that if you can't quit smoking you're weak-willed or nothing (there is that thing about nicotine being as physically addictive as heroin and all), more that your true and essential self really wants a goddamn cigarette, and that's the thing that needs to be addressed (if I can get a functional way to help quit smoking, or turn off the tv and instead paint your house, based on this idea, then I'll really have something). Greg pretty much sums this up, in the context of writing, when he says, "...I decided that I was just a procrastinating writer, and to suck up and deal, (but) I am perhaps too willingly accepting this."

I've thought about writing some sort of long narrative (many people are just referring to this concept as a 'book' these days) for years, basically since college, and every time I sat down to try it, I found I just couldn't make myself write. I thought for a long time I didn't like writing, but in fact I like writing a lot--e.g. I used to write letters with an obsessive focus. On the other hand, it turns out that I like blogging, it seems to be something I want to do, so I've tricked myself into writing this way. Or, in the above-described model, I've discovered a particular thing about my essential writing-self and I'm trying to work with it.

One can make onesself do things one doesn't really want to do. Sometimes one has to do this, but on the other hand, it sure isn't fun, and one surely is miserable while it's going on. So you: want to quit smoking/can't get yourself to write/don't want to paint the house/get off your ass and make the world a better place/etc. That seems to be step one. Step two is recognizing that an essential part of yourself needs nicotine or doesn't like painting or whatever. It's not that I don't believe in laziness, I believe that laziness is a symptom of trying to make onesself do something one doesn't want to do, or doing it in a way that one doesn't want to do it. I don't have step three formulated yet. I'm working on it though, because goddammit Greg, you've got to quit smoking.

Take Your Dog To Work Day

The oft-referenced unnamed e-commerce giant for whom I work has a couple of odd holdovers from its days as a startup. One is that we all work on "door-desks", which are fashioned from a birchwood door you might buy at a hardware store, four two-by-twos, and some corner braces (and which, when our founder famously built them by hand when the business was headquartered in his garage, were surely cheaper that buying office supply desks. Now that we've got 50,000 of them, I imagine they aren't). Another is that they allow dogs in the main corporate offices, so on every floor of the Pacific Medical Building in Seattle, there are four or five dogs roaming the halls.

We are the proud owners of a very intelligent, very neurotic border collie (the fact that she knows the word "neurotic" about sums it up) named Calli, and until Friday, I'd never brought her in to work, reasoning that she doesn't play well with other dogs, and likes people a little bit too much (so much so that she'll readily jump up on somebody who appears like they might pay her some attention). Also, not everybody likes dogs, and even if it's already part of the corporate environment, you never want to add to the annoyance of someone who's already having to suffer the hostility of a dog-ridden place of employment.

Unfortunately, the "Not Everybody" who likes dogs has lately included the people who live in our building, who have started complaining to us that she's barking all the time when we're not there, and since we're never ever ever ever going to find a house, it seemed like a good idea not to anger them all. With me working and L. teaching full time, Calli was spending a lot of the weekday alone, so on Friday I brought her in to the office for the first time, with not a little trepidation that she might freak out in a new environment. She is, after all, almost completely neurotic.

I believe about dogs the same thing I believe about very small children, which is that they are pretty much reflections of the energy (substitute for "energy" your favorite word that encapsulates the concept I'm about to outline) that's in their environment, filtered through their own dogness, or small-child-ness (actually, I believe that about people, too, it's just that dogs and small children don't have spoken language, and that makes the phenomenon more interesting). (Okay, what am I saying, I believe this about everything, animate and not: a topic for a future post, no doubt). A barking dog is reflecting stress in its environment, a crying child reflecting sadness in his or hers. You could argue that the dog is barking because the dog is stressed, the child is crying because it is sad (or hungry, or whatever), but like the Buddhists and a fair share of philosophers, I argue that such an isolated self doesn't exist (or, I should say, this model is less illuminating), that there is no barrier that distinguishes between the self and the non-self, just one long slippery slope (again, post for another time). And it's funny, but I think being a dog owner is the thing that solidified this concept in my mind.

Calvino: Whoa! Hold on there. Are you about to make some point about how your dog is some essential and inextractable part of your own self?

The Stoat: Well, actually, this was supposed to be a post about how Calli came to work and was an incredibly good dog and everyone loved her. But it, like everything else that ever appears in this blog, has devolved into a mass of Existentia. Anyway, yes, I would make that point.

Calvino: This is your dog you're talking about, right? Your pet. The thing that obsessively fetches tennis balls and is terrified of bugs?

The Stoat: And spends hours lying on the floor, idly chewing on her own paws, yes. That dog.

Calvino: You are one weird dude. And I'm pretty sure "Existentia" isn't a word.

The Stoat: Whatever. Language doesn't work that way.

I don't know if I meant this entry to be a Chicken-Soup-For-The-Soul, Lessons-Our-Dogs-Teach-Us story (as reflected through the Odds Are One's metaphor for being, whatever that is), but I brought the dog in on Friday, she met the other dogs and the other people and settled right in. She curls up on the floor or wanders through the halls into other people's offices (so that they can pet her, natch)--a coworker said to me, "You should bring her into work every day, it's so relaxing to have a dog just walk into your office. You can pet her for five minutes and then go back to what you were doing." I felt like a proud parent.

Please Welcome As-Yet-Unnamed-Male Teter

As of 9:17 p.m. P.S.T., I'm an uncle. No great accomplishment on my part, I realize. On the other hand, you're going along in your life, doot dee doot dee doo, and stuff happens and, sure, you get married and whatever and that changes things a little, but you're still basically the same person you were when you were fifteen and whatever, and then all of sudden, BAM!, your sister has a baby, and all of a sudden your dad is Grandpa George and your mom is Grandma Linda and you're Uncle Paul. And you're like, holy crap, Uncle Paul is that guy who has been married to Aunt Paulette since before I can remember, that's not me, but the universe is like, no dude, that's totally you now, this is what happens in life, things change and it's totally freaky.

Anyway, welcome to the world, small child. Be well and do good, and try not to be freaked out about how your mom is actually my little sister.

"...and talk about the weather."

One of the best-kept secrets (which I'm just about to blow) is that the summer in Seattle is unbelievably perfect. From about July to about today it's 75 degrees and sunny almost every day, it's never too hot, and there's daylight until 9:30 or 10:00, depending upon how far it's drifted from June 21st.

It's a very poorly concealed truth that it rains in Seattle all the rest of the year. It's a kind of thumpy, thick, slow, meandering rain, kind of like plodding in thick soled shoes slowly down the street to a job you hate, day after day. It does that pretty much constantly until, you know, April, starting from well, about today.

It was beautiful this week, sunny every day, warm out, and then this morning it was overcast and in the early afternoon the wind kicked up and blew out the sunny and the seventy degrees, not to be seen again until probably next summer. I was just out walking the dog and that rain had started falling. So that's it then.

Blogging For Letters

I used to write a lot of letters, the on-paper kind that got mailed and arrived in envelopes days later. I was the guy looking soulful in the back of the coffee shop in the late '90s who looked like he was journaling, except I was actually writing epistles, so it was okay, I was cool and not a dork. No, really. I don't do it much anymore, the reasons for which are many and varied, but that's not really the point of this entry. Well, maybe it sort of is.

L. and I sometimes still write each other letters, though we have lived in the same space for years. Mine are usually writ when I am on a plane trip somewhere, she sometimes just writes whilst I assume she is doing prep work for school. It's an ongoing narrative--when we were dating but living on opposite sides of the coast the narrative was about dual meanings of writing each other--both the act of sending letters and the act of creating the other person out of words, a liter(al/ary) conjuring act (God, that was soooo post-modern I can hardly stand it). The other person isn't there, so you write them. The other returns the favor by writing you.

L. wrote me a letter a few weeks back positing that this is exactly what I am doing when blogging, is writing letters. Sam and Rebecca have pretty much the same dialog going that L. and I do, only it is posted for all to see, the acknowledgement that they are writing each other only tacit. I haven't written either of them an actual physical letter in years, but we've been trading acknowledgements back and forth for a month or two now, never directly acknowledging that this is what we're doing, but a dialog goes on nonetheless. It's like having a conversation with someone at the next table in a restaurant by overhearing the conversation they're having, and then responding by having a conversation with the person with whom you're actually sitting.

Did I have a point here? Did I even have a thesis that wasn't borrowed from my wife? Em...no. Apparently not.

On Language, Or Whatever

It's Tuesday night, I'm sifting through a bunch of thoughts, wondering where to go next, wondering if, in fact, I am a good blogger. I don't blog every day, my blog is really just a long stream of thoughts seemingly unconnected by any actual events that occur in my life, and I'm not really blogging about trees and flowers, which was, to review, the original assignment. So tonight, it's a couple of quick hitters.

• I have a sort of quasi-mentor, Thea, who teaches at the Academy for Five Element Acupuncture in Hallandale Beach, Florida. She was also my practitioner in a past life. We've been trying, off and on, to establish a long distance mentor/mentee relationship and have never quite succeeded at it. She logged on and read my canoodlings some weeks ago and said, in response, "I can't read your blog thing. I slide off the slick surface...It's not my experience of you." This leads me to...
  


• ...I am using a lot of words. One of the tenets of Five Element Acupucture is the Law Of Least Action--one should seek the treatment for a particular condition or imbalance that requires the fewest number of needles. The ultimate treatment is one perfect needle. And then no needles at all. And then no treatment. Words are the same. It's a tell-tale sign of my novitiate status that I can't get my point across in a sentence, or a paragraph, or even one endlessly prolix entry. I just keep on using words.


• I am working my day job a lot lately. And kind of enjoying it. I'm kind of embarrassed about it, and kind of afraid to get attached to a job that I plan on abandoning, or that will abandon me in five years and get off-shored to India.


• Ones life is, so the man says, the things that occur whilst one is making other plans, and there is a lot going by at the moment whilst we are making other plans, and I fear that I am missing it.

Or Maybe I'm Just Naïve...

After two months looking we thought we'd finally found our house. Location, condition, yard, kitchen, space, character. It was vastly above the original price we'd intended to pay, but it seemed like it was worth it. However, if you want to buy a house in Seattle these days, especially in the price range where everybody else is buying, you have to get into a bidding war. After months of saying that was insanity and saying we weren't going to get involved in it, we decided, "This is our house, this is what it takes to get a house in this market, let's write the offer we think will take to get it." So the night before last, that's what we did.

Then the freak-out happened.

I bought the place we live now about five years ago, so I'm a little used to what happens to you when you sign away a ginormous amount of money for something, but this was different. We started to realize just how far above our original price we were, how much money the escalation clause on our offer left us open to paying, how we would be affected if L.'s teaching job didn't get renewed and she couldn't get another one. We thought: "Holy shit. We can't do this." Long story short, we called our agent the next morning--he wasn't, you know, happy with us, and he countered, why don't we submit the offer, but just take out the escalation clause--we probably won't get the house, but you never know. So we assented, certain that someone else would get this house, and frankly kind of relieved about it.

Yesterday afternoon, our agent called. The sellers thought our offer was really strong and if we would increase it $6000 dollars, we could get the house. Having originally thought the price of the house would get bid up 10% or more, this seemed great to us, and we said yes pretty much immediately. Our agent said great, called back the other agent...except, oh wait, somebody must have misunderstood, they weren't actually going to sell us the house for that price. It turns out what we did instead was trigger somebody else's escalation clause. We'd been played. Or rather, somebody else had been played--that buyer paid, as it turned out, $15,000 more for the house than they should have based on the offers the seller received--the sellers just used us as a pawn to do it.

L. and I are sitting here today have pretty mixed feelings about buying a house now, and after 24 hours of thinking we were just bad people because we didn't have the balls to get into a bidding war over a house, we are today thinking that, well, thank god we didn't have the balls to get into a bidding war over a house, because it seems an awful lot like that agent would have found a way to make us go to the top of our escalation clause. I am not Playa-Hatin' (said the whitest white man in the history of blogging) here. It was, based on the laws of markets and capitalism, absolutely the sellers' agent's job to get the best price she could for that house, both on behalf of her clients and herself. What I am doing is Hatin' on The Game. This is people's life savings, they are (nigh literally) mortgaging their future, and to squeeze more money out of them, as L. said yesterday afternoon, is just mean.

The Game is to get the best deal you possibly can--you want to get as much x for as little y as you can. You want the other guy to pay you as much y for as little x as you can give him. Nowadays, y is pretty much purely symbolic scrip, electronic tallies moving from one person's account to another. So perhaps it's my fault for attaching any value to it at all; an enlightened person would say, if it takes 15,000 more electronic tallies to make the seller happy, they should have them.

I'm not making an ethical judgement here either--maybe the other seller's escalator clause really did say, anybody makes an offer and we'll beat it by x dollars. Technically, we did make that offer. We made it because we thought we were actually buying the house for that money when we weren't, but we did make it. You could argue for hours about business ethics in this or any case, but I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that it's mean. The Game rewards meanness, rewards you for taking advantage of someone who doesn't have all the information, or writes their business contracts with the incorrect legalese because they didn't have expensive enough lawyers, because they made "bad choices." You can argue all manner of ethics, fault, coulds and shoulds, choices and obligations. You can't argue that it's not mean.

So that's it. Enough. I'm giving my notice: I'm bringing down Capitalism. In the same way that Feudalism fell to the long bow, a small and simple invention is going to bring down the established social structure that governs how we relate to one another. I might know what that innovation is, and I might not. But Capitalism is going down.

On Balance

I talked to Sam this morning--our intrepid friends at Second Americano have moved off to Wales to try their fortunes in the British higher education system. They've been there a week so far and it sounds as if it's working out pretty well for them. First off, Sam's teaching a number of hours, this year, that's so, so incredibly low the manufacturer won't allow him to print it. I'm not complaining...no, no, sorry, my mistake, I am complaining. L. and I have been working without a break this weekend, at the same time worrying about whether we have a chance of buying this house we found, wondering, if we manage to even get this house we found (there's no guarantee, given the housing market in Seattle, Washington, that somebody won't bid the price up outrageously) what kind of income we'll be chained into earning, at the same time wondering what in the hell we are doing.

Chaitania, who runs the psychology program at my acupuncture school called last week wondering, well, where the heck I have been. I've missed two of the past four lab days, and haven't otherwise been around much. Between work and looking for a house, I've been spending the last two months doing a lot of things I don't really want to do. Two months ago I also got married, so really what I want to be doing all the time is hanging out with my wife. So acupuncture school is the thing I've let slide.

I'm a smart guy, I'll catch up. So this weekend will come and go and I'll write some papers and log back into work and figure out the coding problem that has been plaguing me all week. I'll get back on top of it and everything will be fine. That's not what troubles me.

One learns in life, or in my case in acupuncture school, that the entities upon which one focuses ones problems are just that and no more. They aren't the source of ones suffering, they are but its avatars. Another way of saying this is, "it will always be something." One might tell onesself that ones problems will vanish once one buys a house/finishes school/gets past the product launch at work/etc., but those things aren't really the source of ones troubled mind. The way you can tell that this is true is that new problems of similar nature pop up soon after you've defeated the avatar of your previous problem.

We aren't by any means miserable people. We are pretty damn comfortable and happy. As L. says, we have what we need and the rest is gravy. Anyway, today it's, "We can't buy a house and I can't keep up with everything, so I'm letting my schoolwork slide." I don't know what it will be when I've solved those problems. Or what I'll find when I stop attaching my stress in life to things that aren't really its cause.

My Day Job

I had this impassioned, overtly political post in re: conservatism as a doctrine and the resulting effect on humanity and then posing a hypothetical that what if it really isn't the government's job to help those whom the market doesn't favor, and even granting that maybe it really isn't good for the long term greater good to organize a welfare state, and maybe people really will just take advantage of it and never attempt to lift themselves out of poverty or need. Then I asked, can you, as a doctrinally conservative human being, really stomach the results? Because New Orleans is what the results of this philosophy look like. But then a bunch of other people wrote the same thing. And the point has pretty dramatically been made here this past week. So I decided to let it go. Almost.

Instead I thought I'd write about what I do for a living when I'm not studying acupuncture or musing about philosophical meta-modeling. A month or so ago I took a job in a different department of the unnamed E-commerce giant for whom I work. I kind of work in the abstract these days: I don't sell anything, buy anything, or process anything, I don't sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed (I'm not linking that one. You either recognize the quote or I don't want to know you). What I do is write code for a platform called "Web Services," which, they tell me, is on the cutting edge of the future of software and computing.

If you're not familiar with...well, the cutting edge of software and computing, it might be hard to grok what exactly it is I do. And I'm not going to try really to explain it, instead I'm going to make a comparison. Computing is like just about every other discipline in the world: it goes in cycles surrounding the creation of platforms and the building of things upon those platforms. In the 20th century, for instance, Albert Einstein and Max Planck kicked off a revolution with a new platform in which energy came in tiny packets instead of continuous quantities, and one frame of reference was equivalent and just as valid as any other, unless of course you were accelerating. Then a bunch of other physicists, using that platform, developed a whole bunch of new science, creating television, computers, and the atomic bomb. In the 70's. some government researchers created the ARPANET, and a decade and a half later a bunch of people realized they had an entirely new platform upon which to build...things: games, retail stores, meeting locations, news media, and so on. Web Services is (yet another) attempt to build a platform upon which things will be created and discoveries will be made.

Jos once wrote about a brief moment where he was sitting in a meeting at work and had a transcendent glimpse of the future. I was sitting in our quarterly department meeting a couple of weeks ago and the same thing happened to me. Again, it's kind of hard to explain the way that Web Services is abstracting the internet (because probably the internet already seems pretty abstract to you). But I'm here to tell you the following: the speed and age of the machine sitting on your desk or your lap is going to cease to matter in the relatively near future. Mechanical storage (CDROM, hard drives, flash drives, whatever) is going to cease to matter in the relatively near future (not that it hasn't already). Software applications are going to cease to be a thing that you go and buy, or even download. Whether you're aware of it or not, you already do an alarming amount of computing on computers that are sitting in a warehouse in Virginia, or downtown Singapore. So if you've been paying attention, you've noticed that this is happening already, and in five or ten years all that's going to matter is how much data you can get across a wire from your desk to that computer that's sitting in Virginia. Well, that, and how good an encryption algorithm you're using. You might want to try and get a good one.

Unexpected Follow-Up to the Inevitable Sequel to the Inevitable Entry About Evolution

I just can't let this one go.

See, here's the thing: 42% of Americans believe in creationism (In the study I've linked, the statment is actually, "believe that living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time"). That's compared to 26% of them that believe in natural selection, 18% who believe in Intelligent Design, and 14% who don't know. And that's to say nothing of the 64% of people who are at minimum open to having both creationism and evolution taught together in school.

Calvino: Well, sure. But can't you imagine a somewhat useful lesson in reason and argument steming from a comparison of the arguments of creationism versus evolution?

The Stoat: Um...no? The entire argument of creationism and/or intelligent design is "It's because of God." Any counter argument you might try and make is dismissed as your own lack of faith, or that you're speaking with the tongue of the devil in an attempt to test the faith of the true believer.

Calvino: Well, yes, but this wouldn't be that situation. This would be a school lesson. It's not a useful science class, but if you grant the initial supposition that an intelligent demiurge is responsible for everything you see here, you can then create a rhetorical lesson in which you explore the basic assumptions of the creationist argument. For instance, why would an intelligent guiding creator include vestigial organs like the appendix, or the remnants of a tail, in the finished product? What about organs like the spleen or the gall bladder: functional, but not essential? Why do we share nearly all our genetic material with simians--did God create humans and then get lazy and just recycle most of his work? Most importantly, what about the most egregious design flaw of all: why is it that when you bite your tongue, the part you bit swells up so that you just bite it again?

The Stoat: Yeah, but can you imagine how many school districts in America would actually present creationism this way, given a mandate to teach it?

Calvino: Hmm...probably an embarrassingly small minority.

The Stoat: Probably.

At the end of all of this, you've got 60% of the people in this nation who believe something that is contradicted not only by current scientific thinking but, as I've said in a previous post, rudimentary observation of onesself and ones surroundings. At least more people believe in evolution than in Intelligent Design, but still. Evolution is apparently really hard to accept for reasons that I think have as much to do with a need for narrative as devotion to religious zealotry.

L. has created quite a cogent model of the universe based on the idea of narrative (if indeed she ever starts blogging, her URL will probably be "itsbecauseofnarrative.blogspot.com"). It basically states that you can determine the rightness or validity of a particular viewpoint by whether or not it works as narrative. You can, e.g., tell that conservatism, as it's practiced in this country, is wrong because it makes crappy narrative. You cannot name one good story that has ever been written by anyone in history that you'd ever want to read, she would say, where what you learn is that supply side economics is the moral of the story and because of it everyone lives happily ever after.

Calvino: What about Atlas Shrugged?

The Stoat: You actually want to read Atlas Shrugged?

Calvino: Good point.

I myself subscribe to what you might call The Weak Narrative Principle. I'm a pretty poor judge of what makes for good narrative anyway. I think (and I'm quoting myself here) that we're all always already creating narrative for ourselves. It's not because we're bad or egocentric, it's just how we make sense of the universe and our place in it. When faced with information that contradicts the narrative one has created for ones self, one can a) ignore it (e.g. creationism vis a vis the fossil record), b) attempt to fit the new information into the existing narrative ("The fossil record has been placed there by God/The Devil in order to test my faith"), or c) toss the narrative and create a new one (I can't think of a catchy quote for this one. "Um...whoa dude. Like, I just totally bagged my heretofore unshakeable model of the universe." See, it's difficult to sound-bite The Truth). The reason, I think, that only a quarter of the population of this country accepts evolution as the explanation for life on earth is that it's absolutely narrative shattering. There's pretty much no way to both construct a linear narrative that begins out of nothingness and winds up at you at the same time that you accept the swirling chaos that is the evolutionary model. At least, as we say here at The Odds Are One, not without living with a fair amount of cognative dissonance on the subject.

I Took A Trip....

My friend Mark is getting married next month (it's all the rage these days--all the cool kids are doing it), and I attended his bachelor party this past weekend. Mark is a guy's guy in all of the good ways and none of the bad ones--he's a craftsman, knows how to use tools; he's resourceful, a little bit crazy, and full of love. His bachelor party consisted driving out to central Washington, near Leavenworth, and spending the weekend camping out on a plot of undeveloped land owned by one of his friends.

We left Seattle about 8:00 pm on Friday night, and made it out to the site about 11, where the main activity of the weekend--preparing, roasting, and eating a whole pig--was already well underway. The pig was stuffed, sewn up, and placed on a smoker that had been fashioned out of an oil drum, and the bachelor-celebrants stayed up in shifts during the night tending the fire. In the meantime I pitched a tent out in the middle of the property and slept for a few hours under stars that, being that we were hours from any major metropolitan area, you could actually see.

I'm an ostensible pescitarian--I cut beef out of my diet after, in college, a friend convinced me that it was the devil in meat form. I later decided the same thing about chicken, and eventually cut out all land-roving animals. I'm not grossed out by meat and I don't object to killing animals for food--yet another cursory observation of nature seems to reveal that eating other animals is about as natural a thing as there is. At this point I don't eat the land rovers because I think we're too far removed from the fact that we're eating another living thing. The animals we're fed are penned up and slaughtered out of our view, pre-processed and packaged and delivered to us in a box with nice pictures on the front. All of the viscera and ugliness of nature, red in tooth and claw, is neatly disposed of. I've kept fish in my diet on the reasoning that I've actually, in my life, caught, killed, and eaten them. In general I believe that if you are farming or hunting your own meat, you're eating a diet that's a lot more moral than mine. All of that is a round about introduction to the fact that my objections to eating meat didn't really apply to the pig we roasted this weekend--one of Mark's friends bought it from a small farm, and they cooked and ate it whole. But I still couldn't bring myself to eat it--I don't quite know why. I brought some salmon and veggie burgers with me and grilled them while my compatriots, after roasting it for 16 straight hours, ate what was apparently the best pork in the history of time.

So anyway, I hung out in a field with a bunch of bachelors whom, apart from Mark, I really didn't know. And they all, without exception, turned out to be the best kind of guy's guys--handy with tools and full of love. Over the weekend, we cleared some brush and dug out some stumps, threw the football around, went swimming in a river, and sat in the shade drinking beer and collectively working on the cryptic crossword in the back of Harper's Magazine (and really, what's more manly than that?). Driving home on Sunday evening it struck me that it had been a really honest kind of weekend. I guess the purpose of a bachelor party is to enjoy the freedom you had as a single man, and this gathering was about that only in so far as it wasn't about that at all--we'll probably be back out to camp some more in October. I don't know that we broke any new ground on what it means to be a man and to be okay with the fact that hegemony works in your favor. Instead we all spent two and a half days without indoor plumbing, or indoor anything, and we were okay with that. And we had a really good time doing it.

Things Mean A Lot

I don't know who you are, but it's extremely unlikely that you read this blog and don't also read the two blogs linked at the right. If not, well, why aren't you reading the two blogs linked at the right? What on earth is wrong with you? We're all having a fine little blogging career meta-blogging about each others blogs, and you're missing it.

Well, okay, whatever. Just this, and then I'm done with all the intra-blogspot incestuous posting for the moment. Over at Second Americano, Sam has an entry he's aptly titled, "That One Thing." It's about, he claims, what is really the only idea he's ever had. He phrases it thus (again, paraphrasing, because some times it's nice to have your work done for you): "Language is not a tool for use by humans; rather, language is that upon which human existence depends and that in which it flourishes." Language makes us human; it's Sam's statement of, "I think, therefore I am." It is not, as we might want to interpret it, that thinking (or talking) proves that we exist, it's the opposite. Thinking (or talking) is the necessary and sufficient condition for existence (or humanness).

I think there really is only one thing. I, last week, have been framing it as a discussion about evolution. Down the road at Stonesthrow, Greg is talking about it from the perspective of The Enlightenment. Sam and Rebecca have pretty much created entire careers out of it. I don't quite know what "it" is, but I think every now and then when we step out of our normal perspective, we see it. It's like a koan--an instant of confusion and ridiculousness that gives us just an instant where we glimpse enlightenment.

We live in a universe where it's been proven that any model that you can come up with, any axiomatic system that describes reality, is guaranteed to fail at some level--eventually you'll run into something that's true or false in your system but that can't be proved therein. You might believe that it was Godel who proved this, or you might believe it was Nietzsche, or Epimenides, or perhaps Lao Tzu (depending, not ironically at all, upon which axiomatic system you prefer). It doesn't really matter. The point is, true revelation, and true genius, comes from stepping out of the model for a moment. Godel's proof of his theorem is a brilliant little moment of meta-, where he creates a statement that talks about his axiomatic system from his original axioms. That stepping out was his moment of enlightenment, just as the revelation of language was Sam's, just as last week understanding that intelligence is born out of an attempt to create a narrative was mine. The only problem is, when we all stepped into the light, we wanted to come back and talk about it, and as soon as we did (remember Sam's thesis), we created a new axiomatic system, which is again incomplete. It's the Tao: we've seen the Tao, but as soon as we talk about it, it's no longer the Tao.

It's the One Thing: a mathematician will come back and talk about it in terms of mathematics, a philosopher in terms of philosophy, a crazy freak-from-hell blogger will talk about it in ways you simply don't understand, and so on, because that's the model he or she works with. But it's still the One Thing.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Anthropic Principle

I just now did a Google Search in order to find a reasonable explanation of the anthropic principle to which I could link in the post below. I was initially a little flummoxed, because the first seven or eight results on the page were all somehow Bible related, and seemed to claim that the anthropic principle somehow proved the existence of (the Christian) God. "What's this?" thought I. "Have the Christians learned the art of the Google Bomb?"

In fact no, it was Ockham's Razor at work again: I had accidentally searched Google for the anthropic principal.

Inevitable Sequel to the Inevitable Entry About Evolution

One of the problems with blogs is the immediate obsolescence: each new entry demotes the previous entries, such that if the reader comes in during the middle of a continuing narrative, the first chapters appear under the later ones and the thread is lost.

Calvino: That is a problem. If only you knew someone who was in any way computer savvy and could figure out a way to link blog entries together in a linear way on a web page.

The Stoat: The problems of narrative have occupied scholars and intellectuals for millennia. They cannot be solved by mere cascading style sheets.

If you have not read the almost previous entry, click or scroll down and pick up on the thread. Then come back. I'll wait...do dee do...la la la...twiddle twiddle. Okay. When we last left our dialog, we were wondering what we were missing when our debate about evolution was framed around whether God was guiding the process or not. Reduced to a debate between intelligent designers and...um...people not so a priori constrained by a particular notion of the creator, arguing God in and out of the debate is like arguing whether, going back to the market analogy, The Invisible Hand of Capitalism exists. It exists if you use Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations model. If you don't, it doesn't (and jeez, have you noticed how much harm gets done to humanity because of people acting in their own economic self-interest? I'm not angry, I'm just sayin'...). You could argue about its existence, but you're kind of missing the point.

A kinder summary of the Intelligent Design argument against evolution is the "what good is half an eye?" question. The example I've seen given is the complement system of the human immune response, a collection of 20-odd proteins which attack invading pathogens in combination. Separately, they're immunologically useless, but together they form the body's first line of defense. The question, from an evolution perspective, is how this would evolve. Since an organism would derive no real assistance surviving from having just one or two proteins, there's no apparent evolutionary path to an organism with the full complement that we observe now. That's not to say there isn't an explanation in the evolutionary model, we just don't have one yet (see the link above). On the one hand it's difficult to look at the amazingly unbelievably complex organic machines that we are and not see it as the result of some plan. On the other, as we say here at The Odds Are One, your perspective is a little unreliable because you are that unbelievably complex organic machine. The problem with any model where God created you in His image is that the most cursory examination of the history of creation reveals that life just keeps adapting and/or getting more complex, so there's no good reason to believe it's going to stop with you (no knock against you. You are a fabulous example of organic machinery. Yes you are).

And that's the rub: from the perspective of an outside observer, it looks an awful lot like nature is learning. It doesn't seem that way to us because nature operates on a time scale that we can't fathom. But if we could, and we were watching a small child presiding over the same task we'd immediately acknowledge it as the actions of an intelligent being. Evolution really is the million monkeys typing endlessly on the million keyboards, with one of them eventually accidentally writing Hamlet. The only problem with that analogy is that, in the case of nature, when that millionth monkey types "To be or not to be," somebody is standing right there to grab the manuscript, make copies, distribute them to the million monkeys, and suddenly where before all they could do was pound on the keys, suddenly now they're all making edits to the First Quarto. You could attribute this editorial decision making to god, but nobody out there seems to be doing it--the Intelligent Designers, e.g., would have to acknowledge that God didn't really know what the fuck he was doing and and was in fact a second rate hack plagiarising someone else's work. Anyway, a better explanation seems to be that this property--the ability of nature to editorially recognize genius--was innate from the beginning of the experiment.

So what about that? You could fall back on the weak anthropic principle--we're inarguably here, so the initial conditions of the universe must be such that life could evolve the way it has--but you're still dodging the interesting question: how come those initial conditions create a system that looks like it's behaving intelligently? If you've been reading closely, you already know one answer to this question: it just looks that way to us because we're looking at it from the perspective of beings who are, right at the moment, the end result of this experiment. That's a fine answer, but it brings us to another problem: if this huge jumble of randomness can look like the results of an intelligently guided experiment, what does that tell us about our own human intelligence? We organic machines achieved a certain level of complexity and apparently somewhere along the line achieved consciousness and what we think of as intelligence. But if intelligence is just an attempt to make narrative out of chaos, what have we really got?

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

There's a sequel to my previous evolution post in the pipeline, but while it's percolating in the remote reaches of my small brain, I thought it might be good to define some of the more volatile words I've tossing around with reckless abandon. This so-called "god" fellow I keep referencing is the first one I'd like to talk about.

Calvino: Yes, let's do talk about that. I can't help but notice that little collection of bon mots at the end about life and god that you blithely tossed in at the end of your post without comment. You always do that.

The Stoat: Do what?

Calvino: Bring up huge, sweeping issues at the very end of your posts and then never actually ever address them.

The Stoat: Oh, that.

Calvino: ...Well...?

The Stoat: You can't expect me to just spoon-feed you everything. You have to reason it out for yourself. I never said I would just give you the answers.

Calvino: Yes, you did. Repeatedly.

The Stoat: Ah. Yes, yes I did. Me. Okay then.

I was raised in a Catholic household, and try as I might I have a pretty negative view of said religion in general, so among other things the word "god" has a lot of pretty unshakeable connotations for me. On the other hand, I married a Jew and it is so far my experience that Jews are incredibly warm and caring people, and their deity is theoretically the same guy, so it's possible that my inborn biases need a little examination.

Suffice it to say I'm not talking about the anthropomorphic deity when I use the word "god." To me a rational view of the universe doesn't support an omniscient omnipotent bearded super-being intervening with greater purpose in every human life. I say this knowing there are people out there who have had life experiences that they feel directly contradict this point of view, and to them I can only say that I believe that they truly have had these experiences. I think there's room for the seemingly contradictory realities, it just depends on the model of the universe/reality/whatever one applies.

These days when I use the word god I'm generally thinking of a pretty ill-formed concept, something about the collective conscious or unconscious, something about the underlying governing principals of physics and cosmological constants and whatever it is that makes atoms form and makes those atoms form proteins and those proteins to form mechanisms whose chief goal is to survive long enough to reproduce themselves and, if there's time along the way after they've eaten and fucked, also to learn about themselves and the universe they're in. That's what god is in my model of the universe and metaphysics. I'm not saying it's a good model--it violates Ockham's Razor insofar as the model where god is a guy with a white beard is a lot simpler. And, for that matter, the model of collective-unconscious-god model has just as many testable hypotheses as white-beard-god model. That is to say, none.

These days I like to tell myself that the primary feature of the mental-chunkings with which I come to grips with all that I observe is that I know fuck-all, my model could be utterly wrong and should not be clung to in the face of contradictory evidence--otherwise one winds up with Intelligent Design or Neo-Conservatism. At the same time, well, I've just out of hand rejected Intelligent Design and Neo-Conservatism--models of the world that seem to me (and lots of other highly rational people) utterly contrary to all that is reasonable and good, but which other apparently rational people find to fit perfectly with what they observe to be the workings of the world. It's supremely difficult to put aside ones bias, especially when, as my wife points out, Neo-Conservativism is just really bad narrative.

Calvino: That was...deep.

The Stoat: Thanks. Do you take my meaning?

Calvino: Not a bit of it.

Inevitable Entry About Evolution

Over at second americano they've lately brought up evolution, a topic that's been much in the news the last couple of lifetimes or so. Lately our dickwad of a President has espoused that "Intelligent Design" should be taught in schools so that our children can see both sides of the issue.

The Stoat: Actually, let's just stop here for a moment and consider that statement.

Calvino: What statement? That George Bush is a dickwad? He is kind of a dickwad. And aren't I supposed to start these dialogs?

The Stoat: Whatever. And while, yes, George Bush is a dickwad, I think he's a total dickwad, whereas you think he's kind of a dickwad. Let's have a fair and balanced debate about it.

Calvino: Um...okay. Well, I'm sure the President has some slightly redeeming qualities. Also he's not literally a total dickwad.

The Stoat: Yeah, I was kidding there. Though at the same time cleverly making my point. I was talking about George W. implying that Intelligent Design was somehow the binary opposite of the theory of Evolution. Never mind your feelings about intelligent design, never mind your feelings about evolution, never mind your feelings on the Creation Myths/Metaphors of every major or minor religion on Earth, and never mind even your feelings about teaching in public school a theory the main tenet of which is, "Everything our currently accepted scientific theory about the origination of life on earth can't quite explain is due to the devine action of our god," never mind all of that: saying Intelligent Design and Evolution should be taught side by side so that children can see "both sides of the issue"(!) is still a stupid thing to say.

Calvino: You're right. I bow to your superior argument. George Bush is a total dickwad.

Binary Opposition, mind you, is an entirely useful hatchet with which to mentally hew complex concepts. Apparently our president finds it helpful when thinking about the origins of life on earth. Apparently, also, he'd like his particular hatchet (which, to be fair, many proponents of Intelligent Design seem to share) taught to the youth of America. Anyway, this is not really my point, and for all I know he's just pandering to his base and actually has an extremely complex, nuanced view of the origin of the species. Ha ha.

Let's lay out some ground rules, and if you don't accept the following, you've landed smack in the middle of the wrong discourse: over the course of billions of years, out of the primordial soup, amino acids emerged, eventually one of them happened by a stray phospholipid bi-layer and they had a little party together. One fine day such an assemblage ran into a bit of bacteria that specialized in producing ATP and soon the eukaryotes were born. If you believe the earth is 6000 years old, that man was literally created in God's image, and that dinosaurs never roamed the earth...well, if you don't believe dinosaurs roamed the earth, you probably don't surf the net reading blogs, and probably this site is blocked by your porn-filter over its repeated employment of the word, 'dickwad,' and, actually, you probably don't own a computer. Anyway, you've stumbled on the wrong argument. But on the other hand, if you think the theory of evolution has no room for some idea of god, you're also in the wrong discourse.

If you haven't read Rebecca's post about evolution that's linked at the top, go read it now. Seriously. I'll wait. Or I'll summarize: evolution is not a plan, not in the linear sense of plans having planned outcomes. It's a giant roiling experiment, in which the fittest don't really always survive. Sometimes VHS survives and Betamax fizzles out not because VHS is the better product, but because quirks in the market favor the technologically inferior product. And, then, of course, DVD comes along and tanks them both. The market, actually, is a useful metaphor: in a million years the air might be an unbreathable ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide, while dolphins will have evolved opposible thumbs, and the market conditions will make an entirely new order of animals the king of the heap, and any attempt to put life into a linear narrative would have to look rather different than it does now.

Darwin famously lost his religion over his own realizations and theorizations about that roiling experiment. If one absolutely insists on taking ones creation metaphor as literal truth, one must, faced with evidence to the contrary, reject the metaphor as truth or live with some severe cognitive dissonance on the subject. But there's more to it than that: in a market, one can introduce a new product, hoping that it will solve a problem or need in that market, and design the product thus. The product and the plan behind it might not succeed, but there was an intelligent design (word choice intended) behind it. In life there's no evidence that this is true: mutations and variations occur at random and constantly, and 99.99999% of them have no useful effect, or kill off the organism, but the ten millionth mutation is a sodium channel in the phospholipid bilayer, or a white blood cell, or opposable thumbs. A person who has sodium channels, white blood cells, and thumbs looks back at it and sees a linear narrative, because that's what we do as observers. But that's just our story as observers, and right now that story is the only context in which anyone can find a place for God/god. That's true on both sides of George W.'s imagined dichotomy, and I think the really interesting questions about life and god are being missed because of it.

TheOddsAreOne::TheOddsAreOne

I have this principle, summarized by the phrase that titles this blog. It came about when, on September 11th, 2002, the winning numbers in a daily pick-three Lotto in New York City were 9-1-1. We were sitting around the dinner table marveling about this, and someone said, “Jeez, what are the odds of that?” To which, after a brief think, I replied, “It happened. The odds are one.” There are two aspects to this: one is the obvious—if we had asked the question the day before, it would have had a reasonable answer, because it hadn’t happened yet--on the day before the odds would have pretty much been 1 in 1000. Once it had, the question became statistically meaningless. This leads us to the second aspect: obviously 9-1-1 coming up on a date (9/11) that is meaningful to us already is in itself meaningful. But the meaning is not statistical, it’s meaning that’s defined the moment we asked the question, “what are the odds?”

Here’s a question you have never once in your life asked yourself: “What are the odds I would have a twin brother (or sister)?” The reason you’ve never asked it is because you don’t have one. It's a question without meaning. But people who have twin brothers or sisters probably stop and consider this all the time. It is, for sure, a statistical anomally to be born a twin. Just as it is incredibly statistically unlikely that I (the blogger) would be born in the 20th century in America—this is true of an uncountably small percentage of all the people who have ever lived, or will ever live. And yet here I am. So those odds don’t have the meaning that they appear to have. Or rather, there's meaning in asking the question, "What are the odds I'd be born a 20th Century American?" But they aren't about any mathematical odds. The meaning is in the fact that I would actually think to ask the question, and, in turn, what that says about me.

It completely screws up ones perspective as an observer when you are also a subject of the experiment. To cite yet another little hobgoblin in the mind of inference, consider this question: would you guess that you are among the first third or the second two-thirds of humans who will ever walk the Earth? Odds would seem to favor the latter proposition--it seems like you are more likely to fall into a group that contains 2/3 of all of humanity for all time, rather than one that contains only 1/3. But, on the other hand, if you do the math (which I won't reproduce here, because math is boring), and you answer that you're in the latter 2/3rds, you're dooming the human race to hit extinction within 500 years--that's how it works out based on the current rate of population growth.

So what does it all mean? The foundation of 20th century physics, and the foundations of many things one can name--sociology, advertising and marketing, politics, economics--are rooted in statistical inference. One can't predict what I, a 32 year old white male will buy/watch/listen to/do/vote for with any reasonable accuracy, but given 1000 people in my demographic, you can say with relative certainly how many of them will see a movie, or buy a particular product, or get married this year. But what are the odds that I will do any of those things? One. Or Zero. I will do them. Or I won't.

There are a lot of things that are good models on this macro level. Newtonian mechanics, for example, works great where things are very large or relatively slow. For atomic particles, or things moving at some reasonable percentage of the speed of light, not so much. At the quantum level, or near the speed of light, such fundamental things as cause and effect break down. So this, three months after I started this blog, is my opening salvo. Things look lot different than you think they are based on the model you're using to understand them. That model is not bad at all mind you, it's very good in fact. But it's a map, it's not the territory.



P.S. If you were a Java or C++ programmer, you'd think the title of this entry was a very clever joke.

Calvino: No I wouldn't. I'd think you're a dork.

The Stoat: This is your failing, not mine.

Calvino: No, you're a dork.

The Stoat: Okay, yes. But I'm a dork with a blog.

Hello again, again

Welcome to "The Odds Are One." Or, welcome back, if you were one of the three people in the universe who both found my previous blog and have followed me to the new location. After a move and brief delay (during which I became extremely married), I'm back with a new URL and new name. We've moved on. Keep up, people.

Disclaimer: This blog used to be called 'Porn*'. That URL was taken here in blogger-land, so I had to come up with something else. All references below to things porn and pornographic are to be ignored. I have repented and moved on.

Calvino: Frankly I'm glad of it. I found the whole thing pretentious and cloying.

The Stoat: Well, yes. Though you must admit the new title is equally opaque.

Calvino: I concede that point, at the same time worrying that the whole thing is going to be yet another ruse, itself too clever by half.

The Stoat: All will be revealed soon enough.

Anyway, tomorrow is my first portfolio review at the Wu Hsing Tao school, at which time they will look at this blog and...

Q: WHOA! Hold on there. What's with this "Calvino" and "The Stoat" thing?

A: Ah. Yes. That. I felt that the "Q & A" sections were becoming a little overloaded, in so far as they were really more of an exchange between myself and some imagined voice of critique or reason. In many cases, the Q's were not questions and the A's were not really answers. Hence I have replaced it with a dialog between 'Calvino' and 'The Stoat', a la The Tortoise and Achilles from Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. Q et A est mort. Vive Q et A.

Q: I hate you.

A: I know you do.

Anyway, we're up and running. If you're too lazy to read the rest of the posts (and, to review, I'm not here to judge you), in life I am an acupuncture student, and I started this blog to fulfill a requirement that I observe nature and journal about it. Tomorrow at my review, my school looks at this, and then gently reminds me that by, "observing nature," they meant that I was to OBSERVE SOME FREAKING NATURE.

To this I can only say, I agree, there isn't much about trees and flowers here thusfar. I would also say, in addition to the letter of the law, there's also a spirit, and the spirit seems to me to be a log of observation of onesself and ones surroundings. And, beyond that, the spirit is to ultimately become a better acupuncturist. That's the assignment I'm doing. I'm exploring the nature of the unverse.

Calvino: No you're not.

The Stoat: Yes I...er...he is.

Calvino: No you're not. I have read the entire thing and there's nothing about the nature of the universe in here. There are a bunch of allusions to the fact that this is what you're writing about, but there's nothing actually about it.

The Stoat: Read it again. The nature of the universe is in all things.

Calvino:I hate you.

The Stoat: I know you do.