The Event Horizon of Time

Emery drew my attention to this Wiki article about (the) Technological Singularity--an imagined point in the (relatively near) future where the technology of man starts to advance so far, so fast, that all current prognostications of the future beyond it are utterly useless. Since we've lately been talking about paradigm shifts (a concept closely linked) and humanity's certain doom that lies just around the next corner (okay, not the next corner...but definitely the corner after that....), I thought it merited a paragraph or seven of rumination.

The Technological Singularity purports to be the point at which the first posthumans appear, at which point human progress takes off so incredibly rapidly that our current paradigms of being and progress become worthless, such that we can't "see" beyond it. In this sense it's like a black hole singularity, so dense that no information of any kind can escape (well, except for tiny little bit of radiation from the edge of event horizon that's able to escape by using the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Thank you, Stephen Hawking)--only instead of space from whence no information can escape, it's time.

Okay, fine, we're all already cyborgs; it's the freaking future, of course no information is escaping it; we've already seen this sort of thing in Terminator 2: Judgment Day--not that these aren't interesting critiques, but you don't read OaO to get critiques you can read elsewhere (you read OaO because you went to college with me, are one of my parents, are married to me, don't own an iPod, or because you're lost. Doy). I, too, think the AI future is relatively near at hand (no, really this time), if only because in the last ten years or so we've discovered that conscious intelligence acts lot less like a computer program (platform + set of instructions) and more like an anthill (a collection of individually "mindless" actors working in concert). It does seem, however, like the Technological Singularity is remarkably Humanity-Right-Now-Centric. If one acknowledges that the folks of the 19th century couldn't possibly imagine what was going to happen once we got computers, and the pre-writing tribes of man couldn't envision a life post-printing-press, one has gotta recognize that Technological Singularities are happening all the freaking time.

The metaphor of the black hole is another possible explanation of why the future holding certain doom for humanity seems to be such a pervasive meme. The idea that it too is an incredibly dense singularity from which no information can emerge goes a long way towards explaining why we as a population might happen to feel such visceral dread about our prospects in it.

What's also interesting in the Wiki article is the charting of the general acceleration of Man, His major advances, and His technology. The evolutionary leaps are happening fast and furious now; the things that took years today will take nanoseconds in the future, at least if this graph is any indication. My favorite koan on this topic goes like this: imagine the technology of, say, the Athenians versus the Romans a thousand years later. Unless you're an historian, you probably think of them as pretty similar in their technology. The Romans were, in fact, much more advanced--they had plumbing, aqueducts, and a radically advanced military, but compared to nuclear power and several million transistors on a chip less than an inch square, there's not that much technological difference between the two civilizations in the mind of the average person of today. Now think of the person two thousand years hence (or only two hundred?) whose technology is so advanced that he or she very roughly equates the technology of the present day with the technology of 1000 A.D. Can't imagine that? Me neither.

Next: That was only five paragraphs!
Tags: Technological Singularity, Paradigm Shifts

The Network is the Computer

A little bit of semi-dismissive hype for the emerging Browser-Based OS'es appears in Slate this week. The author's major objection--users won't want to store their data on remote servers because they won't trust it--I find to be half irrelevant (as we maintain here at OaO, there are two types of data in the world: encrypted and world-readable) and half mutable (trust in product x equals good experience plus time). My current objection to the OS-in-a-browser (Slate reviews YouOS, I've also checked out Goowy) is that, on the client side, it is slower than dirt and keeps hanging my browser. At least for the time being this undermines the mythical touchstone of the (also, thus far mythical) Google PC--it'll be fast because it's running on the servers at Google. If the applications, written mostly in JavaScript and connecting over a DSL or even T1 pipe, can't keep up, it doesn't really matter how fast the underlying servers are.

I expect this problem to get solved in some meaningful way, because I too think the concept of the browser OS is just too freaking yummy. Being able to work on "your" desktop anywhere you can find a browser, much like the advent of web-based email ten years ago, has a lot of appeal; the current OS-specific attempts to allow you to work on your desktop machine remotely are slow, cumbersome, and prone to rather enormous security holes. Also, worrying about the amount of hard-drive space you need and backing up your own data against a crash is an enormous pain and off-shoring that problem to Google or YouOS seems...better. On the other hand, the Thin Client machine has supposedly been coming soon to a home near you for a long time, and we've yet to see it. This revolution, like the coming Web Service/Web 2.0 insurgency I keep heralding, still requires some technology changes. I'm not sure if it's necessarily a super-fast broadband connection in every home so much as something small that changes the perspective of the multitudes out there. Today 90% of the computer users out there think of their computer as a machine that runs Windows, and Windows in turn runs things on their computer. So what has to happen to make users think of a computer as something that runs a browser instead? And would this be a thing good or bad?

Next: Dirt! Is it really that slow?
Tags: Google OS, YouOS, Goowy

View From the Flip Side

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan starts off from roughly the premise that follows. Think of the flower and the bee. The bee thinks that he's just out gathering nectar from the flowers to make delicious honey (Mmm...delicious honey). He's also getting pollen on his legs while he does this, and unknowingly carries it to the next flower he pillages for nectar (with which he will make delicious honey, mmm, honey). Thus is he an agent in the reproductive cycle of the flower--in some evolutionary sense of the idea, the flower has gotten the bee to spread its genetic material for it, ensuring its survival. Now think of the corn plant, from the same perspective: here is a plant that is so incredibly successful that it has an highly advanced and mechanized animal (man) clearing entire forests and putting down nitrogen fertilizers just so the plant can grow for another generation. Sure, it's so that we can eat the plant, but as far as the corn gene is concerned, an individual corn plant isn't the point, is it? Wolves seem sharper, fiercer, more free, and more resourceful than the common domesticated dog, but in America today there are 10,000 wolves and 50 million dogs. So which animal is "smarter" about figuring out the world and how to survive and prosper in it?

In this blog I spend a lot of time arguing that you and I are the assembled sum of our genetic material, environment, and timeliness of our births; that, e.g., the idea that you have some sort of distinct "you-ness" that is constant across time and space, that you could be born in some other time and place and still be you is fallacious. It's not that I don't believe that there aren't aspects of our selves that are outside of genetic makeup and context, more that I think these aspects are shared among all of humanity, possibly all of life. This is, more or less, the evolutionary view of existence, and it's only when you (and by "you" I mean "I") read a book like The Botany Of Desire do you realize how contrary to your everyday perspective on your own existence this view is.

I once argued (in such extreme passing that you almost certainly missed it) that our own consciousness, our unique human intelligence, is nothing more than the acquired sum of billions of years of evolutionary accidents/designs like the flower "figuring out" that it can use the bee to spread its genes. In other words, it's not that the billion-year process of evolution that looks like the work of an intelligent actor (thus causing people to think it must be God, for some definition of "God"), it's that what we think of as intelligence and/or consciousness is the connected sum of billions of these accidents/designs. The only difference is that we've evolved that connected sum into a brain that can perform new actions like this in hours or minutes or seconds instead of over the course of thousands or millions of years.

Go back to the flower and the bee: if you look at the world this way, your view on consciousness is essentially how much agency you give the flower in its "decision" to use the bee to transmit pollen. What you're using to read and understand this post or decide what to eat for dinner or blog about tomorrow is the result of some uncountable number of those evolutionary "decisions." Don't think about it that way for too long, though, because probably your connected sum of evolutionary happenstance will explode.

Next: There it was, your moment of zen
Tags: Evolution, The Botany Of Desire, Intelligence, Consciousness

The Auto-Metaphor

Surfing, the actual sport that occurs on water, with a board, may or may not be one of those things one doesn't really get until one does it. It consists of long periods of time sitting out in the water waiting, punctuated by extremely short periods of time of high excitement. Then there's the whole editorializing: catch the coming wave or let it go by? Plus the language. Dude. Whatever.

I'm right on the verge of becoming a freak about surfing. I've done it twice now, and this weekend's foray to the Oregon Coast with friends didn't even involve long-boarding (what you might think of as true surfing), I borrowed one of my friend Ryan's body boards. Still, as with the last time (in Florida, when I actually did long-board), in the days afterwards I keep thinking about it. Mmm...surfing. The instant when you've caught a wave and you're propelled forward on the wake is the kind of thing that makes you want to look around and see who's watching you, as if you were ten years old. It's like a moment of Zen that lasts for ten seconds instead of the Planck Time-length instants you usually get.

The thing about surfing is that it's the perfect metaphor for what it actually is: you're literally riding a wave. All the things surfing brings to mind--patience, devotion, balance, going with the flow--all of those things seems like they're metaphors for things in life that then come back and are themselves metaphors about surfing.

A lot of things happened the last couple of weeks that I've wanted to blog about--the last book read, the last tv show watched, the most recent trip(s) taken, the state of the latest musical foray into which Mark and I have ventured, how school is going, and so on. They've all seemed connected lately, a zone where everything is related to everything else, everything a metaphor for itself. Or, you know, whatever. Dude.

Next: A metaphor for surfing!
Tags: Surfing, Meaning Of Life

Writing Begets Writing

Come in to the V.U. on a cold Fall night,
Blending with the crowd in my trench coat and a tie.
Everyone will dance and we will rock and roll all night long.
The Fellows are opening for Jon and Ken,
Helping us to reach a state of teenage Zen,
As cool as anything that I knew; I knew I was wrong

And you always wanting everyone you know to be okay.
Be okay.

Follow you at night we go across Red Square,
It's one in the morning and there's no one else there.
Kneeling in the fountain, I hear your whispers in the dark.
The viewing of the sky in telephoto lens
Gave me the illusion we could still be friends.
Now we've shaken hands, agreed to always drift apart.

But I loved you so, even though you would already leave me,
When you took a stand next to The Man Who Used to Hunt Cougars For Bounty.

Next: Context!

Quick-Hitter Wednesday

• The Gadflies have lately returned from a trip to Yosemite National Park with the Gadfly in-laws. I hope to have pictures of the purple mountains' majesty Flickr'ed soon. Once upon a time this was supposed to be a nature journal, so you'd think I could come up with something, you know, insightful about the nature of being based on this trip, but I can't think of anything. We did some great hikes, experienced the train-wreck (or rather, bus-wreck) that is the Yosemite shuttle system, and got eaten by three trillion mosquitoes. Good times.


• Whilst I was there, I picked up The Botany Of Desire from the pile of books that's found in every rental cabin and bed and breakfast from Here to Somewhere Very Far From Here. The awesomeness of this book cannot be understated, and soon I shall blog about it.


• To this article I can only say: Yes. Duh.

Next: Content!

Blink

Blink is Malcolm (The Tipping Point) Gladwell's most recent book, a monograph about making snap decisions based on nothing but immediate impressions. So far, the thesis of this book seems to be: sometimes snap decisions are good. Sometimes snap decisions are bad. To be fair, Gladwell is also interested in what happens in the brain in the first two seconds it's confronted with a situation that make it come to an immediate conclusion. To be fairer, Malcolm Gladwell is a much more interesting, much better writer than I. Anyway, some random thoughts on the subject:

• One of the first examples in this book made me think that the whole premise was crap. It's this: in a psych experiment, students are shown video of a professor teaching a class and then asked to fill out a teacher evaluation based just on that one class. They do, and the evaluations turn out to be remarkably consistent with evaluations completed by students who actually took a class with that professor. In the next iteration, students are shown the video for ten minutes and then asked to evaluate; the results are the same. In the next iteration, students are shown two seconds of a video and asked to evaluate the teacher; the evaluations are still consistent with those filled out by students who took a class from the professor. Ergo, you can tell whether you like a professor, whether that professor is a "good" professor, based on very little observation.
  
  Right now, at least two of my readers are screaming at their computer monitors, because they know another fact that's pertinent: teacher evaluations tend to correlate more with a teacher's age, gender, and general demographics rather than, say, actual effectiveness as a teacher. Here's what you can tell from watching an hour, or ten minutes, or two seconds of a video of a teacher: age, gender, and general demographics. So maybe what we really learned here is that people tend to decide how they feel about somebody within the first two seconds of seeing or meeting them and then never change their minds.


• Second experiment. You're in a room with some furniture (tables, desks, chairs), an electrical extension cord, a pair of pliers, a yardstick, and some other detritus. There are two ropes hanging from the ceiling. The ropes are close enough and long enough that one could tie the ends together, but far enough away from each other that you can't hold on to the end of one and pull it to where the other one is. The task: tie the two ends of the ropes together. There are four ways to do this, so the researchers claim. If you want to play along at home, stop here and give it a quick ponder (Theme from "Jeopardy" plays. Thumbs are twiddled. Time elapses). Here are the first three: tie one rope to an item of furniture, move that piece of furniture towards the other rope, grab the other rope and bring it to where the furniture is. Make your arms longer, either with the yardstick or possibly a chair, so that you can reach the second rope. Finally, you could tie the extension cord to one rope to make it longer, so that it will reach the other rope.
  
  These solutions are kind of hard to think of if you're not in the room; e.g. it's not clear just reading about it that the yardstick will be long enough to reach the second rope while you're holding the first. There's a fourth solution, which nearly no one actually doing this experiment thought of initially: tie the pair of pliers to the end of one rope making a pendulum, and start it swinging so that you can grab it while holding the other rope. The trick of the experiment was this: when, as invariably happened, the experimentees couldn't figure out the pendulum solution, a researcher would go into the room to open a window or some such thing, and in so doing would "accidentally" brush one of the ropes and make it start swinging. After this happened, the subjects would immediately figure out the fourth solution. However, when asked what made them think of it, every person had a different story ("It just came to me," or "I thought of how I used to swing from ropes in gym class"), and nobody seemed to recognize that it was the researcher bumping the rope.
  
  Gladwell takes this as evidence of what he calls "the locked door," wherein you don't have conscious access to the unconscious inspiration that happens in your brain. It's not that the experimentees were lying, it's that they simply didn't have access to the information that would tell them they were inspired to make a pendulum, so they had to make something up.
  
  I take this as evidence of my favorite OaO chaotic bugaboo, The Post-Hoc Narrative Interpretation of Otherwise Unparseable Happenstance (must come up with a shorter name for that). Every one of those subjects believed, I'm sure, that the explanation they gave was in fact the actual cause of their inspiration (that is, he or she wasn't even aware he or she made it up), because we're well practiced in generating little narrative translations for the chemical signals that go off in our brain. What's unique to me about this experiment is not that its subjects made up a story to explain a thought they couldn't otherwise explain, because that's happening all the time, every instant of every day, every thought you have (c.f. my last post). What's unique about it is that there's an actual tangible source for the key inspiration--as Gladwell would say, we have a window through the locked door. In fact, I'd be willing to argue with Gladwell/you/anyone who cared that you can't actually make a case for the researcher brushing the rope being any more of a cause for the inspiration than whatever the subject him or herself came up with post-hoc. But that's probably a topic for another post.

Next: Pre Post-Hoc Narrative!
Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

Enlightenment Wednesday

Tuesday nights are band practice nights (where "band practice" = "Mark and me playing extended jams to a click track, recording it on computer and attempting to meld a song out of it."), making Wednesday the day when I've got a couple of new mixes to listen to, ponder, and deconstruct while I'm sitting at work.

I don't know if it's this precise process (trying to criticize my own musical work) that made me aware of it, but somewhere along the line I realized that the workings of my brain are like a giant David Foster Wallace novel of which I am generally only dimly cognizant. It goes something like this:

• Brain has thought
• Thought is translated into English
• Translation is compared to original thought, and possibly retranslated
• Various other metaphors for original thought are constructed
• This happens, like, 20 more times whilst at the same time, the footnoting and reanalyzing of the original thought begins
• All of these thoughts must be translated, checked for translation accuracy, metaphorized, repeated, analyzed, footnoted, etc. etc.
• Repeat ad infinitum

The other thing I realized is that this David Foster Wallace novel is extremely self-critical of...um...itself. In the particular arena of mention above, the critical analysis has lately come to the conclusion that I can't play the guitar for shit. A typical exchange goes like this

• Thought evoked by listening to a bit of one of the rough mixes of last night's practice
• Translation: "I screwed up in that bit."
• Query: "How bad a screw up was it?"
• Analysis: "Your finger fell off the string and it killed the note right in the middle of the phrase."
• Metaphor: "Your guitar playing here mirrors your inability to produce anything of artistic value ever. Every time you venture towards something good you try to get too fancy and you kill it."
• Protestation: "But this is just a jam session. You're improvising here. Everyone makes mistakes in this context."
• Critique: "That's not the point and you know it. Your mistakes should be beautiful things, too. But they're not. Your playing is utterly without spirit."
• Rejoinder: "That's only because you're listening to yourself. All you can hear is the mechanics of it. You'll never be able to hear your own music as just music."
• Critique: "Um...no. It just sucks."
• etc., etc.

Yes, my own internal monologue refers to me in the second person. I'm not saying it's not weird. Most of the time this goes by and I'm not really aware of it. Only when I'm paying attention to it is it that literal. Anyway, if I've read and understood the writings of the Buddhists and the Taoists, the state enlightenment, vis à vis what I've got going on now, should be something like this:

• Thought
• Other thought
• A third thought
• ...

What's always bugged me about that is that, well, it doesn't seem like enough. I mean, it would be great for my state of mental well-being if I could shed all of the meta-commentary that surrounds everything that goes through my head, but it doesn't seem like it would turn me into the Buddha. Somewhere in the music of this last Tuesday night, though, I had a little moment of Zen where I realized that, in fact, that is all there is to enlightenment. Being that it's the Tao and as soon as you put the Tao into words, it's not the Tao any longer, I can't really explain the insight. I think it's something about shutting off the commentary track and just enjoying the movie. Maybe, if I don't think about it for a little while, I'll come up with a better koan for it.

Next: The Sound of One Hand Clapping!
Tags: Meaning Of Life

Truths, Convenient and Otherwise

Sorry about the gap there. I suppose a week and a half isn't all that interminable a lag in the grand scheme of things, but the point of blogging is to keep up, post something every day, blah blah blah. After a month of non-stop school and work, though, I needed a week of doing nothing. Anyway, nobody really complained that I wasn't blogging, which is...probably...a bad...sign.

So, yeah, that Al Gore movie. Go see it. It's not as overtly political, extremist, or unbalanced as one might expect (and by "one" I mean "I"). It's pretty straightforward without being boring, and it has a handful of really breathtaking images--or rather, pairs of images (then and now pictures of glaciers of the world, and the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf, e.g.). If you're not convinced yet, it also functions as a movie-length ad for Mac laptops. Just throwing that out there for any interested readers.

You read this blog so you know that climate and weather, being one of those systems that is subject to incredibly small variances in temperature, pressure, cow flatulence, cosmic rays and muons from space, solar flares, and so on, is an agglomeration about which it is impossible to make discrete inferences. You simply cannot say that storm 'X' or drought 'Y' was caused by Global Warming (actually, you read this blog so you know that it's my contention that you can't even make inferences about discrete coin flips. So, you know, whatever). This was, for me, the strength of this movie--it looks at the very long, continuous, much more inference-able view.

Over the course of the last several million years the earth has gone through a relatively predictable course of ice ages and subsequent warmings. It's only in the last 50 years or so that we started measuring atmospheric CO₂ levels, such that fifty (and thirty, and twenty) years ago, the popular scientific view was that we were headed back into another ice age. Then came weather balloon studies, and then they started drilling cores in the polar ice caps and doing some detective work. What they discovered was that there seemed to be a very clear historical connection between CO₂ levels in the air and mean atmospheric temperature of the earth. This is the first graph presented in the movie and it's an incredibly powerful metric, showing both what carbon dioxide levels have been doing over the past 650,000 years and what they've been doing in the last fifty. Gore points at the height at the last ice age and follows it to where we are now and says, "The spread of this graph is, in the city of Chicago, the difference between a very nice day and having a mile of ice over your head."

Where we are now is in one of the temperate periods--the difference this time is that instead of heading back down into the next ice age, as we did all the times before, both CO₂ levels and temperatures are heading upwards ever faster. And where we are now, as it turns out, is also this odd little quirk of the Earth's history. As has been pointed out many places, the human species has had the brain capacity it has now for the past 50,000-odd years, but it's only in the last 5,000 or so that civilizations arose. It's Odds Are One for the history of humanity--it happened to be that big-brained homo-sapiens landed in a climate where you could stop hunting and gathering and start farming and domesticating (other people are just calling that "luck" these days, but I hear that if you invent a hermeneutic principle that describes the same thing using bigger words, people will give you a book contract). Having gotten to this point, and seemingly having a vested interest in, you know, sticking around, it seems that not only do we not want it to get markedly warmer, we kind of need to maintain the same conditions that we've grown up in. That ice age we might otherwise head into isn't going to be much fun either. If by some miracle we actually don't heat the earth up beyond its carrying capacity, our next problem will be figuring out long term climatological geostasis. Well, not your or my problem. But somebody's problem.

Next: Knee-jerk critiques of more texts!
Tags: Global Warming, An Inconvenient Truth

Poli-palooza

One last thing about warrantless wiretapping and data-mining that was referenced in the Salon War Room Blog that I linked to at the very top of my last post. It is nicely illustrated by this week's Tom The Dancing Bug (subscription, or watching a brief ad, required). This strip, by the by, is seriously the best weekly comic in the history of the world.

The following thing needs to be said. If you believe that the government is illegally spying only on The Terrorists, you believe something that is simply irrational. If you do not believe that the government is using warrantless wiretapping and data-mining programs to monitor its political enemies, you are holding to a precept that is not rational to hold. Sadly, if you do not think that every email you send is being data-mined for keywords by net-monitoring computers at the NSA, you are not thinking rationally.

At every revelation of the illegal monitoring program, the government has stated outright untruths about its scope. First they claimed they always got warrants. When it turned out they weren't getting warrants, they claimed it was only international calls. When it turned out it wasn't only international calls, they claimed it was only calls where at least one party was international. When it turned out it wasn't only calls where at least one party was international, they refused to acknowledge the program existed. If you don't think they're telling the truth right now, you are not paranoid. It is simply not rational to think otherwise.

Next: Sigh.
Tags: Warrantless Spying, NSA, Rationality

Seriously, what now?

I simply cannot read another story like this and, you know, stay sane. Here, apparently, are The Rules: you cannot criticize the government because that emboldens The Terrorists. You cannot limit executive power because the would inhibit the ability of the executive to fight The Terrorists. You cannot investigate the possible misuse of power by the executive because then The Terrorists will find out how we are fighting The Terrorists. Here's what you can do: shut the hell up and sit there while the executive does whatever he feels like doing.

I was reading the latest Dan Savage last night, in which he picks up the latest hit from the Religious Right, the War on Contraception (Second Americano's recent take is here). His thesis is basically this: "Okay, I don't agree with it, but I understand if you didn't want to all stand up for gay rights, because you're not gay. But straight rights are being trampled on as well, and I simply don't understand why everyone is taking it lying down." On this subject I want to say this: opposition to gay rights makes me insanely angry. The anti-choice movement makes me insanely angry. People who oppose contraception make me insanely angry. And it's not the fact of it that makes me insanely angry, people have a right to their religious beliefs and if they don't believe in contraception or abortions or that people should be gay, they don't have to use it/have one/be gay. What makes me insanely angry is that these positions aren't being taken as moral ones, they are taken as political stands that must be enforced on everyone.

I'm sure my model of the world and how it should work is riddled with hypocrisies that I just don't see because, well, I'm me. Maybe the only difference between the leaders of the Religious Right and me is that they're in positions of power and I'm not. Maybe all of their fears about liberals and liberalism are correct: if I were running the country, I'd probably want to have long talks with The Terrorists about their feelings while forcing everyone to have secular gay abortions after giving each other hand jobs while the Religious Right is taking a nap on the front porch. I do, after all, have True Belief that they are wrong and I am right. A fundamental tenet of these beliefs is that I don't get to legislate what they do with their lives and in their homes, and neither do they. But maybe this tenet is more mutable than I think, and that, like State's Rights, it's something one only has when one is not the party in power.

Anyway, the theme that these two things (objection to both religious intolerance and unchecked executive power) share is that I simply don't know what to do about them any longer, other than stand up and say that they're not okay with me. If you're waiting for a groundswell of popular opinion to force some kind of change and/or accountability, I gotta tell you: so am I, but I don't see it happening. If you're waiting to see what happens in the 2006 elections, I can save you the suspense. What will happen in the 2006 elections is nothing. The polls you've been reading that say congress has approval ratings lower than the President? Irrelevant. Voters hate pretty much everybody in congress except their own representative, whom they will happily re-elect. What voters want is for people in other districts to toss their own representative out. What will happen in 2006 is that the Republicans will lose a couple of seats in both houses, and the Bush administration will crow that since they didn't lose control of any branch of government, the nation agrees with them and their policies. The media will repeat this claim. And the slide will continue.

Somebody out there tell me what to do. Don't tell me to march or write or sign petitions or donate money or call my representative, because I've done all these things and they don't work. The only thing I can think of to do is go take a shower, because every time I blog about politics, I feel dirty.

Next: Something somewhat happier!
Tags: Politics, Religious Right, Activism

Paradigm Shifts of Doom

2+2=5
for large values of 2

(on a t-shirt I saw in the halls at work this morning. There is probably nobody on earth who will think that's as funny as I do, on account of no one else is that much of a dork).

I'm rather skeptical of the word "paradigm" myself, though this is probably due to the fact that I work in corporate America where, as Sam points out, "paradigm shift" means, "change." (Really it's only to be expected from the universe where "functionality" was coined to replace that unwieldy and opaque word, "function"). Sam/Rebecca's paradigm post (link above) does, however, sequé nicely into some things I ran out of room in which to say last post.

Sam:

This is what happens when we run out of a primary energy source - we switch to another one. And we don't know what the logic of the economy, the environment or world politics will look like in that new energy paradigm - because we aren't in it.

First, an interesting thing to note is that we actually haven't run out of a primary energy source before--at least not on the global scale that's likely approaching now. I gather that in the mid-nineteenth century it was starting to get dicey with whale oil, but then petroleum showed up and blah blah paradigm shift blah. Having only read half the book at the time, I also short changed The Long Emergency a little bit, because the author does speculate about what the possible paradigm shift is likely to look like: economies become local again, suburbanization ends, people migrate away from deserts as it becomes impractical to pump fresh water to them, etc. I also...uh...long changed him a little bit insofar as now I've gotten into the chapter about prions and mutating viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and have at this point concluded that I am reading a book whose thesis is, "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!"

The other night L. was talking to Mr. L. (her Dad, not me), who pointed out that when he was growing up they were certain they were all going to die of polio, unless of course the world was annihilated in a nuclear conflagration first. It's not that I don't believe these things weren't or aren't terrible threats and that we shouldn't take whatever steps we can to deal with them; in this case I'm more interested in what one is actually saying to/about the world when one proclaims that therefore The End is Nigh. Not so much Eschatology as, I guess, Meta-Eschatology.

I have an OaO answer, of course, which is that it's about ones narrative needing to have onesself be, you know, the end result of things--the same phenomenon that I claimed earlier causes people to reject Evolution in favor of Creationism. If things keep going on after you're gone and 99.999999...% of creation doesn't really seem to notice, that narrative you're making for yourself right now has this rather gaping plot hole. On the other hand, that answer doesn't entirely click for me--there's something really primal, it seems to me, in this belief/creeping suspicion we seem to have that we are Living at the End of Days. I suspect, like the Redness of Nature's Tooth and Claw that I mentioned last time, it is related to something that helped us survive at some point. Maybe it's from our mammalian ancestors who managed to survive the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs (which, I guess, really was the End of Days for them).

Next: the odds are again one!

Pre-Millenium Tension

Before I dive in to my next intractibly large post that weighs in on themes to broad to possibly sum up in a single short essay, let alone some academic article, I would just like to say this: Freedom From Blog is fucking awesome. Take this post as one example. Put it on your list of daily things to read, so that you can say you liked them before they were cool.

I'm in the process of reading The Long Emergency, James Kunstler's apparent rebuttal to those Julian Simon-inspired Long Boom missives from the age of soon-to-be-realized global prosperity. If I am already sounding skeptical of warnings of coming doom and/or clarion calls of coming utopias, it's because the various histories of the future have proved to be invariably and utterly wrong. The whole bio-/eco-/socio-/whatevero- system in which we exist is a chaotic amalgam susceptible to infinite factors small and large, and you're likely to have as much luck predicting the future by observing the flap of butterfly wings as global peak oil production.

I do, generally, find Kunstler's arguments pretty persuasive: our way of life, in America and more generally the developed world, is based on the fact that oil is cheap and readily available. We can live in the suburbs, eat fruit from California, wear nylon, raise mega-cattle on mega-farms, and buy lots of cheap plastic things because power from burning fossil fuels is extremely easy to get. The second point is that running out of oil is not the problem so much as the fact that once we reach the point where we are pumping out the maximum amount of oil that will ever be produced, we're screwed. Demand will keep increasing, but supply will never again be able to catch up (this is the so called "Peak Oil" point). Kunstler goes on to argue that none of the current alternative energies will be able to take the place of oil. He further argues that, therefore, there will be a bunch of wars and terrible conflagrations as our societies, built upon fossil fuel burning, fight to the death over the dwindling supply of it (and all of this is, of course, quite apart from global warming).

It's not, then, that I don't believe in the dark nature and/or stupidity of humans to kill a whole bunch of ourselves in order to merely put off something that's going to happen anyway (and maybe I shouldn't call it stupidity--we have an animal nature and it's apparently hardwired to protect our own genes at the possible cost of all others, such that it should not be surprising when we try to kill a bunch of Them so that We can live long enough to reproduce again. Maybe that's just as far as we're capable of seeing). (Question: what has to happen so that this urge is bred out of us? Will the Red In Tooth and Claw parts of us always survive because, well, they are what made us survive in the first place? Discuss). It's more that I am highly skeptical of the argument that we are living at The End Of Days. This argument has always already been made, and it has always (already) been wrong. "Repent, the end is nigh" is oft repeated. So far, the end has yet to be nigh. I'm sure a recession is coming (GWB has made sure of that) and there's probably a depression right behind it, made more likely the longer we insist on trying to milk the petroleum lifestyle. And, if we elect our Red-in-Tooth-And-Claw nature into office again, there'll be some more wars. It'll probably suck. It probably won't be the End of The World.

Next: Less Gloom! More Doom!
Tags: Peak Oil, James Kunstler

Posts Of The Damned

If I have a major problem writing OaO, it's that I start these entries on enormously weighty subjects and then don't know where to go with them. This, rather than any particular time pressures in my life, is the most frequent reason I don't post for long periods of time--I'm working on a particular post and I get stuck. I've got six or seven posts sitting in this unfinished, unpublished state. Today I've decided to drag them out in a sort of pastiche of things never to be blogged about, on account of how they are no longer timely. Maybe you and your reader-response can fill in the missing narratives.

• Thought Experiments

  Emery says this:

  The eternal return thing is just strange. Clearly, the repetition of my consciousness is an impossibility, because if it happened again, it wouldn't be mine. Part of individual identity is the continuity of existence. I am me because I was me yesterday, and the day before, and back in 1985, and back in first grade, in 1975, and so on. If there was some physically identical-to-me person in three trillion years, that would be a physically identical-to-me person, not me.

  I made this same statement, although in a totally different context. Suffice to say I agree with the conclusion of the argument. I don't, however, agree with the a priori (that it's because of some sort of bodily or existential continuity). Most all of the cells that made up Emery in 1975 have died and been replaced, the osteoclasts and osteoblasts have torn down and rebuilt the matrix of his bones several times over, and that person was four years old or so and Emery is in his mid-30s (I have met Emery only once, and I didn't know Emery the person I met and Emery the blogger were the same person (and I will happily accept arguments that they still aren't) until last week). But this isn't why I reject the idea of continuity as being the key to our sense of identity. In fact I think that continuity is a complete illusion....



• "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

  Seeing things on stage, for whatever reason, tends to often speak to the state of our (where, for the purposes of this sentence, "our" = "L.'s and my") existence. So it was at the end of last week, where the official and actual end of our epic real estate saga and seeing August Wilson's last play, Radio Golf at the Seattle Rep, coincided. Radio Golf is about a lot of things, but one of them is about "playing the game," so to speak. If you, e.g., believe that the process of politics in this country is in some way broken, should you run for office? Yes, you've thrown your hat into the same broken process you want to fix thereby further validating it, but at the same time, how else can you change things...?



• Coastlines

  How would you measure a coastline? Do you walk along the waterline with a tape measure? At high or low tide? Or what if you took a piece of string and started winding it around each stone, or pebble, or each grain of sand? There is of course, no numerical answer to this question, but there is an interesting non-answer. For some abstract definition of the word, "interesting," anyway....



• Camp

  When I was 18, I was in a high school production of Grease....



• (Baseball + "The Zone" * Kant) / (Steve Miller)² modulo Synchronicity = superposition(Randomness, God)

  It just seems so obvious that organisms or systems that are more "fit" would naturally survive, even if they emerge totally by chance, because...well, because they're more "fit." It's a hidden tautology. This is something I've long been meaning to blog about--maybe next post.

  
  So here it is, the next post. This thread has gone in all sorts of directions at this point, you can pick it up at Freedom From Blog, or Second Americano, or not at all if you choose.
  
  Some defender of ID, perhaps in the recent Pennsylvania court case, trying to envision an experiment which would support ID as a theory (which, of course, you can't do, but that's for the next paragraph) came up with observing some bacteria in a petri dish, get a number of generations going, and seeing if any of them evolved some sort of flagellum. His argument was that you wouldn't, because a flagellum is irreducibly complex, therefore ID is true (no word on why the Intelligent Designer wouldn't decide to intervene in the experiment and give all the bacteria flagella immediately--maybe his or her work is already done here?).
  
  The only problem with that example is that this experiment can actually be done, and it proves exactly the opposite, that a flagellum is very reducibly complex. This is what happens: you put, say 100 million immobile E. Coli in a agar solution and they sit there. Eventually, they run through the food that's around them and, since they can't move to a place where there's more food, they die. Or rather, 99,999,999 of them die. One of them has a mutation that makes a protein filament near its cell wall stick out a little bit, and when the cell is literally in its death throes, the filament wiggles a little bit, and it actually propels the bacterium a few millimeters to some available food, and it survives. That's the only one that lives to pass on its genes, and now the next generation has a little extra filament that helps it move. Soon that generation uses up all the food within a few millimeters, and so the only ones of that set that will survive have to be able to move a little bit farther. Repeat ad infinitum, for a billion years.
  
  Even among the evolution crowd the language used to describe this process is about "nature engineering a solution," or "adapting." That's not what happens--what happens is that everybody else dies. Survival of the fittest isn't about being fit at all. It's about being incredibly lucky. Given a very large number of organisms, someone might get lucky. Given a few billion years and the luck might pile up. You can tell this is true because, you know, it has already happened.
  
  Rebecca has nicely pointed out (Second Americano, linked above) that Intelligent Design isn't about God, religion, or faith--it's about politics. ID is, like just about every other model of God, about trying to put Him/Her in the gaps--the gap between the model and reality. Rebecca says this quite nicely:

  If there's anything that exhibits Derrida's point about nothing being outside the text, it's faith.

  What bugs the living crap out of me about ID is the fact that it tries to create gaps to fill (and, as Rebecca points out, those gaps are entirely political in nature). The guy giving the example above is not saying, "It's not understood how flagella were created, therefore it must be God," he's saying, "I can't understand how flagella were created, therefore it must be my God...."

Next: Who freaking knows?!
Tags: Random Thoughts

Holy. Living. Crap.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled musings on the nature of being to comment on Stephen Colbert's appearance Saturday night at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I doubt anyone reading hasn't already seen it, but if not, it's here (if you haven't seen it, watch it. Do it now). It's probably extremely telling that our first reaction upon watching this was, "How was this allowed to happen?" He rips apart everything the administration has tried to pass off as, you know, some version of reality, and he's standing ten feet from the President of The United States while he's doing it. It's not just that Colbert lambastes the President, the press, and pretty much everyone in between, it's that he never breaks character. He's Stephen Colbert, the television persona, the entire time and it's brilliant.

The second thing that's simply incredible is the way it's being covered by the major news outlets. Here, for instance, is the A.P.'s report. Reuters' take is here. Colbert was the featured speaker and he's barely mentioned in either story. The Reuters story states that he performed to "muted laughs," giving the sense that he bombed with his audience, rather than, as is clear from watching the clip, that his audience became increasingly uncomfortable as they realized he wasn't going to let them off the hook. Ever. Notice that in the first five minutes of Colbert's monologue, CSPAN shows a couple of reaction shots of GWB. After that, they stop and we never see him again. Try and guess why.

It's late Sunday night and I don't know if anyone will pick this story up come Monday--so far the only things I've seen written about this have appeared in left-leaning blogs. If, indeed, the news cycle these days is still determined by the major news services, then this already won't be in it, and that will be that. No doubt Colbert's scathing critique of the media in general has played and will continue to play a large part in that. But on the other hand, holy crap. It would be hard to sum up the state of the nation in 20 minutes or less better than Stephen Colbert did on Saturday night.

Next: Meaning of Life, Redux
Tags: Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents' Dinner, George W. Bush, Mainstream Media

Ephemeral Fame is Mine, and Other Thoughts

• Going through my regular internet stops this morning whilst eating my bowl of cereal, I came across this article on The Hardball Times, which is the blog bible for statistical analysts of baseball, and the people who love them, everywhere. The article this morning is about Win Probability, and has linked back to my post on the subject. It's not the first time that somebody I don't know has acknowledged my existence, but on the other hand, dude: The Hardball Times! They're, like, real bloggers and stuff.


• Sam and TenaciousMcD started up a thread (here, and then here) from the end of my last post, which addresses the question "if all is randomness, whither order? Whither morals? Whither justice?" (I'm paraphrasing. A lot). TenaciousMcD's question:

  How, for example, could any structure--even one we, creatures of nature that we are, superimpose--come from shere [sic] abject randomness, or how sense out of nonsense?

  Sam's response:

  When I read [TenaciousMcD's question], when I hear it, I don't think the question has the 'hook', for lack of a better word, that [Mr. Tenacious] expects it to. Perhaps I should be, but I'm not really all that bothered about how sense emerges from nonsense. Indeed, I think that's just how sense emerges –from nonsense. We produce meaning in the world, we read it into a world without meaning, and as Paul tells us continually, we construct narratives that give that meaning a place to rest, and a place from which to emerge. Structure emerges out of randomness (see Paul's many iPod posts); order comes from chaos. I'm OK with that.

  I take Sam's position in this, though I want to radicalize it a little. Or hone it. Or something. I once likened the way order seems to emerge from chaos, at least in the evolution of life on earth, as the action of an editor--he or she had no control whatsoever over what was produced, The Editor could only look at the results and, essentially, say yea or nay (pretty much everybody else is calling this, "Natural Selection" these days). In a truly random model of evolution, it seems like this mechanism is always glossed over. I think this is the "hook" to TMcD's question that Sam is looking for. It just seems so obvious that organisms or systems that are more "fit" would naturally survive, even if they emerge totally by chance, because...well, because they're more "fit." It's a hidden tautology. This is something I've long been meaning to blog about--maybe next post.


• I'd also like to observe, as TMcD brings up apparently non-random constructions like morals and justice, that these things are also (literally) evolving, and that there's no particular reason to think that they too aren't borne out of an endless frenzy of random attempts to optimize the interactions of communities or societies or entire species.


• Tarn asks:

  [S]uddenly I am hearing many voices -- both the familiar and alien -- and though their stories and their histories are, in detail, not alike, something tugs from deep within the seat of my capacity and nudges at me to learn a specific lesson common to All The Variety of Living....Does anyone understand this language I'm speaking? If so, please help me identify it. Seriously. I'm not joking. Anyone? Anyone?

  L. and I frequently ask this question, in a different form, usually when we keep running into the same obstacles in life over and over again. "Clearly," says one of us to the other, "There is something we are meant to be learning from this that we are not learning." In one instance, where we eventually got an answer, we had an ongoing (about three year) bout with trying to figure out where we were going to live, Seattle versus Baltimore (versus Florida. Don't ask). The first time, after an incredibly agonizing process, we decided Baltimore. Then, a year later, the decision came up again and we decided Seattle, but only temporarily, because we were going to move to Florida. Then it came time to move to Florida, and lo! The same incredibly agonizing decision came up again. Eventually, we figured out that we wanted, or the universe wanted us, to live in Seattle. This goes back to my earlier recurring point: life is hard when it's happening to you. To Tarn I have this to say: yes, I understand your language. Give me specifics, I can probably come up with an answer for you.

Next: More Bullet Points!
Tags: Random Thoughts

Methodology

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the statistics I presented in my last post are far from canonical, and that there is in fact a fair amount (among, you know, anyone who cares about this at all) of disagreement about how likely was Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hit streak. My methodology was extremely simplistic, essentially treating each game in DiMaggio's career as a coin flip. Here, by contrast, is a study that tries to estimate how likely a 56 game hitting streak was to occur in a season like Joe DiMaggio's 1941. In this season he hit .357, but of course a season's worth of games is far fewer than a career's worth. They conclude that by random chance, in about 16,000 seasons like 1941, Joe DiMaggio would have a 56 game streak exactly once (by comparison, I said 24 in 10000 careers, DiMaggio's career was 15 years long, so my estimation was more or less 1 streak in 6250 seasons).

You might at this point note that all of this statisticalizing pretty much flies in the face of everything I profess to believe about statistics. The fact is, DiMaggio's 56 game streak already happened, so did his 61 game minor league streak, so did his .325 lifetime batting average. As such, my statistical analysis above is just as valid as the above linked folks who figured out the odds of hitting in 56 straight games in 1941, that is to say: not. The odds of these phenomena happening are one, because they happened. In the universe in which they didn't (which I don't believe exists, but whatever), this entry is an analysis of some entirely different phenomenon from baseball or somewhere else in the world of happenstance.

The nice part of Odds-are-One-ness is that it cuts through a lot of otherwise intractable problems--for instance, a direct corollary of it is that the disagreement about the statistical odds of DiMaggio's streak exists precisely because the question has no statistical answer. The more difficult part of OaO-ness is avoiding the resulting nihilist pitfall, e.g. saying that DiMaggio's streak was meaningless. It clearly wasn't: it happened 65 years ago and statisticians and baseball fans alike still talk about it. Once you figure out that you're posing the question in such a way as to be unanswerable--"What are the odds that Joe DiMaggio will hit in 56 consecutive games?" OaO-ness doesn't really direct you other than to say, "Mr. DiMaggio has already done this. Can I interest you in rephrasing your question such that I can give you a more informative answer?"

So what is it about things that, while they have in fact occurred, somehow seem unlikely to have occurred? It's the only thing that's keeping the Creationists going at this point, for instance. It seems to point to a hole in our model of history, of how events transpire, of how we got from there to here. I'm still working on the new model. I'm sure I'll have it for you any day now.

Next: Propositions! Lemmas! Corollaries!
Tags: Meaning Of Life, History, Statistics, The Odds Are One

Utterly Predictable Sequel to the Inevitable Entry About Baseball

It's a week into baseball season. Everything is just better when it's baseball season--it's suddenly getting warmer and the days are longer, and, being that I live on the West Coast, when I arrive at work somebody somewhere is already playing a game that I can listen to online. There are games all day. I go home at night and there is baseball being played almost until I go to bed. So here's one more baseball/OaO-themed post, and then I'll move on. For awhile, anyway.

Last time I referenced some of the ways that baseball is being analyzed and also statistics versus narrative. One offshoot of these statistical studies, not just in baseball, but in sports in general, was a series of statistical studies about athletes being "in the zone," or "having the hot hand." Everyone in sports, and pretty much in life, recognizes this phenomenon: sometimes players just seem to be "on," everything they swing at gets hit hard somewhere, or they're striking everybody out, or whatever. However, if you're a statistician (or read this blog), you know that actual, real-life randomness has this creepy tendency to look not-at-all random--you flip a coin 32 times, you are more than likely to find a streak of five heads or five tails somewhere in there, for instance.

(You could, of course, immediately conclude that "being in the zone" is a post-hoc narrative interpretation of random statistical phenomena, as statisical studies have generally shown, so that of course it doesn't exist, but then of course it also does exist because of narrative. Then you could, you know, stop reading this post, and also this blog, forever, because as you've realized by now I pretty much only ever say one thing. But then what if I suddenly switch things up on you, as I'm going to do at the end of this post? Then you'd miss out.)

So, there was Ted Williams. Boston Red Sox 1939-1960, easily one of the top five hitters of all time; Bostonians, tired of hearing about that freakin' guy they sold to the Yankees in 1918, frequently argue that he was number one. In 1957, Ted Williams set the major league record by reaching base in 16 consecutive plate appearance. This is about as hot as you can get--an average baseball player will make an out somewhere between 6 and 7 out of 10 times he comes to bat. Ted Williams was no average major-leaguer, but still--for almost four straight games, they just couldn't get this guy out. Now say you want to figure out the odds of this happening...

Calvino: Uhh...one?

The Stoat: Touché.

Say you're not me and you want to figure out the odds of this happening. You'd probably take Williams' lifetime on-base percentage (.482) (which is insanely high, by the way)--he had a 48.2% chance of reaching base safely in a given plate appearance. Two times in a row? 48.2% * 48.2% = 23.2%. Three times? 48.2% * 48.2% * 48.2% = 11.2%, so sixteen times in a row: (.482)¹⁶ = .0000085. 8.5 in a million, or a little less than one chance in 100,000. Seemingly, this was an amazing hot streak.

There's a catch, though (no, not the usual one. A different one). What I've just done is calculated (very roughly) the odds that any point in his career, you would see Ted Williams come to the plate and get on base the next 16 times in a row. During his career Ted Williams came to the plate 9,791 times. As we've learned because iPods read our minds, random data doesn't look random. If you've got a coin that flips tails 48.2% of the time, and you flip that coin 9,791 times, the percentage chance you'll find a streak of 12 tails in a row somewhere in there is about 95%. The percentage chance that you'll find a streak of 14 tails in a row somewhere is greater than 50%. The chance that you'll find a streak of 16 tails in a row is a little less than 8%.

Calvino: Yeah! I knew it was...no, wait. I don't get it. Shouldn't the point have been that we were virtually certain to see such a streak somewhere in Ted Williams' career? What about random distributions and humans wanting to see patterns where there are none?

The Stoat: Well, the first point is that (statistically speaking, not Odds Are One speaking) the "real" odds of Ted Williams having the on-base streak that he had, which at first seemed incredibly small, actually turn out to not be that far-fetched at all.

Calvino: So, I mean, other than the fact that it happened and so the odds are one, what are you saying? That the odds are really 2 in 25? Or that the major league record for consecutive plate appearances getting on base should really be 12, or maybe 14, but because of baseball and narrative, it's 16?

The Stoat: Well, another way to think about it is that if you had a splinter of Ted Williamses, say 13 of them, one of them would likely have such a streak. There haven't been 13 Ted Williamses, there's only been one, but there have been thousands of people who have hit a major league baseball. Even the very very good ones had a smaller chance of randomly getting on base 16 times in a row, but given all of them together, it's not surprising that such a streak exists. It happens to belong to the one of them that has the highest career on-base percentage, but to me that's the Odds-Are-One part of it. We talk about it (where we = "baseball dorks") because it belongs to such a hitter (rather than John Olerud or Barry Bonds, who are in second with 15 plate-appearance streaks. John Olerud was a fine player, but is a marginal Hall-of-Famer. Barry Bonds is, well, still to be judged by history).

Calvino: So, the statisticians are right. There's no such thing as being "in the zone." It can all be explained by the vagaries of random chance.

The Stoat: No.

Calvino: No?

The Stoat: Not quite all of it. There's still Joltin' Joe.

There's still Joe DiMaggio. In 1941, Joltin' Joe hit safely in 56 straight major league games. Joe D. hit .325 for his career, and had 6821 at bats in 1736 games played. With those numbers he had about a 78% chance of getting a hit during a game. With random statistical distribution, a streak like his 56 gamer would show up in his career .24% of the time. Not 24 in 100, 24 in 10000. Given the actions of random chance, in 400 careers like DiMaggio's, you'd expect to find one streak. There haven't been 400 careers like DiMaggio's in baseball history. There haven't been 10.

And here are a couple more things, strictly for narrative: Joe DiMaggio also owns the minor-league record for consecutive-game hitting streaks, with 61. And in the game on July 17th, 1941, when DiMaggio finally went hitless after 56 games, he was twice retired due to great plays by Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner on balls DiMaggio ripped down the third base line that might have otherwise gone for hits. He hit safely in the next 19 games after that.

Next: Same thing, different packaging!
Tags: Baseball, Statistics, Narrative, Meaning Of Life

Right Now

Looking from the windows of our office building, which overlooks downtown Seattle, there is a line of people as wide as the four lane street they're walking down, which stretches as far as I can see. They are heading through Seattle's International District, presumably heading for the King County courthouse buildings. There are easily upwards of 50,000 people, maybe more like 100,000, and certainly more than at any point during the WTO protests here several years ago (Edit: Today's (4/11/2006) Seattle P-I pegs the number at 15,000+, so my crowd estimating skills are apparently not what they could be). They are marching in protest of the proposed zero-tolerance immigration policies in congress, and right now they are having more of an effect on national policy than all of the left's protesting, screaming, and hand-wringing over the last six years. This goes to show you something important. But I don't know what it is.

Next: Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.
Tags: Politics, Immigration, Immigration Protests

Inevitable Entry About Baseball

I love baseball a lot. I'm not generally a sports fan, my love of baseball derives, as L. would call it, from narrative--the stuff that's born from your dad taking you to games when you're small and telling you about seeing Bob Gibson and Stan Musial, how he and his brother used to go to Browns games when the Cardinals were sold out, and so on. Lots of guys love baseball this way, but L. is the first and so far only woman I've ever met who loves baseball for this reason (in her case it was her grandmother who supplied the narrative). The other class of reasons I love it, also fairly common, are the myriad and constantly evolving techniques used to model it.

If you don't follow baseball, or just follow it for the narrative, things like OPS, VORP, EqA, DIPS, and UZR have no meaning for you, but they're part of the family of new statistics that attempt to determine how valuable an individual is to a team, in context with other players at the same or different positions, how much of what appears to be good or bad pitching is actually due to the defense playing behind the pitcher, and so on. If you weren't in the business of actually putting together a baseball team, why would you care about these things? Because you're a dork (and by "you're a," I mean, "I'm a"). Anyway, your or my dorkiness, or lack thereof, is not my theme for today. The theme is a particular stat. Somewhere in the vicinity of two years ago they came up with my all time favorite statistic of...um...all time. It's called WPA, for "Win Probability Added," and it's pretty much "The Odds Are One" applied to baseball.

What WPA does is look at every baseball game that has ever been played (or as large a sample as you can find. You can do this now that you've got computers) and, given a particular situation that's occuring in the particular game you're watching (e.g. the home team batting in the bottom of the ninth inning, down by a run, with two outs and a runner on second), look for all the similar situations that have ever occurred in baseball. Then it looks at what percentage of those games were won by the home team and what percentage were won by the away team. So let's say in the above situation, with a runner on and two outs, 75% of the time the away team won and 25% of the time the home team won. Now you go back to the game you're watching and see what happens. The batter strikes out? The probability of the visiting team winning is 100% because, well, they won. The pitcher gets a +.25 WPA because he took his team's chances of winning from .75 to 1, and the batter gets a -.25 WPA because by striking out he took his team's chances of winning from .25 to 0. If the batter hits a home run, he takes his team's chance of winning from .25 to 1, and gets +.75 WPA, and the pitcher gets a -.75 WPA. If, on the other hand, the batter singles and the runner scores, the score is tied and the game is still going, so you have to go back to all games where the score was tied with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and see what percentage of the time the home team won and what percentage of the time the away team won in order to figure out the WPA of that play. Say it's roughly 50/50. Then, since it went from 25/75, the hitter gets +.25 WPA and the pitcher gets -.25 WPA.

If you think this statistic sounds completely insane, you are correct. This statistic is completely insane. There are people out there, however, who are doing this for every single Major League Baseball game that's played. Here, for instance, is the graph from last night's Mariners/Angels game. The Mariners were always ahead in this game, so the line tracks steadily upwards, with sharp dips where the Angels got hits that caught them up. What makes WPA cool is that it quantifies the individual contributions of players and when they occur in the game--e.g. if you're a pitcher in a 0-0 game and you give up a run in the bottom of the 4th inning, it doesn't matter that much because your team has time to catch up. If you're a pitcher in a 0-0 game and you give up a run in the bottom of the 9th, it matters a lot, because you just lost the game. At the end of the game you can add up everybody's WPA and see who contributed, and how much, to the win or loss.

What makes WPA completely insane is that, as you already know because you read OaO, it's completely meaningless (and I mean this in the usual Odds Are One way--it's meaningless in the statistical sense. It tells us quite a lot, in this case, about how we think about baseball games). As a statistic it has a number of rather inherent flaws, the most obvious of which is that there are often important plays where it's not clear which individual should get the credit, or how you should score it (if a player hits what's otherwise going to be a home run to win the game, but a fielder climbs the wall and catches the ball for an out, do you penalize the pitcher for losing the game, but then reward the fielder for un-losing it? Or do you treat it as an ordinary out? Do you penalize the hitter for making an out even though it took an extraordinary play to get him out?). It's also not in any way predictive. It looks at games that have already happened and then uses them to quantify plays in the particular game...that have already happened. The only thing it predicts is that when the game is over, one team will have won (Win Probability 1) and one will have lost (Win Probability 0).

Win Probability Added is all about...wait for it...narrative. It takes each event in the game and decides how much it contributed to the final story of that game. As with actual narratives, big events that happen at the end tend to be much more important to the final story that little events at the beginning, and the major characters in the story will have very high WPA or low negative WPA, and the minor characters will have a WPA near 0. All of us who are compiling or studying these metrics are, yes, big dorks. But we're also just making narrative.

Next: Still More Narrative!
Tags: Baseball, Sabermetrics, Narrative

It's a "Metaphor"

What is blogging like? I mean this question to be framed in the recurring theme of modern life about which I blog from time to time. The paraphrase of this idea is something like this: "The things that seem new and different about the modern human condition are repetitions of the same old things in new context. The things that seem like they never change are, in fact, new." My argument for this is somewhat tenuous and perhaps tautological, but it is more or less that the Nature of Things is for them to continuously change, so that a phenomenon that seems constant is actually having to resist the sort of natural order of things. I realize that this doesn't entirely make sense. But, for the purposes of reading this post, take it as an a priori. After that you can dismiss it.

If ones operating theory is that something that seemed like an utterly new phenomenon was in fact the natural evolution of an old one, that the new one had simply grown out of the old one, what was blogging before it was blogging? Blogging is nigh ubiquitous now, some people get paid to do it, and I was noticing yesterday that an alarming amount of my information about the outside world is coming from blogs. It is, at least right now, relatively democratic--anybody with internet access can write one for free, anybody with internet access can read anybody else's blog (offer not valid in China). (nearly) Everybody's writing. (nearly) Everybody's reading. So I don't know, what's that like?

Next: next!
Tags: Blogs, Blogging,

Dreaming Brain Redux

L. sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and says things to me. I am an extremely heavy sleeper, and otherwise don't wake up for almost anything, but when she starts talking, I'm immediately awake and (I think) relatively coherent, trying to figure out what she's saying. It usually tends, as a rule, to be kind of vaguely creepy. One night several months ago she woke up said, "Oh...oh my god, there are two cats in the bed with us." This, of course, was rather alarming, seeing as how we don't have any cats. Well, that, and her general sense of panic at suddenly waking up to find cats in our bed. Except, of course, there were no cats. I looked around to verify this fact and told her that in fact there were not any cats in the bed with us, and she said "Oh...okay," and went immediately back to sleep.

The other thing is, she doesn't remember that this happens. So, for instance, this blog entry will be the first she's heard of the incident from the other night that I'm about to relate. I woke up and she was saying this: "I understand now. The air from outside is coming in through the door of the basement." And then she immediately rolled over and went back to sleep.

I was lying there, now momentarily awake, and the weird thing was that I could pretty much piece together where her mind had been when it had decided to wake up and say that. I can't quite recall what it was now, but I remember thinking I ought to go downstairs and make sure the basement door was locked, but then realizing that this wasn't what she was telling me. She was telling me something else.

Next: More mysteries!
Tags: Dreams

But They Don't Lie

The subject of the damned lies of statistics is something I've been meaning to blog about forever, and this post would be, well, untimely, except that Liz has just posted a response to reading Freakonomics. Somewhere in this book, apparently (I haven't read it, just a variety of summaries of it), appears the old saw, "Numbers don't lie."

In the vast wide history of time, everyone who has ever uttered or written this phrase was, in fact, lying. Liz says this:

Not only do numbers lie, but they actual exist in a natural state of lying. It's not intentional. After all, numbers aren't actually sentient and making the choice to lie. I would also argue that the purveyors of numbers are (generally) not intending to lie, but are unable to gather all the information necessary to force the numbers to tell the truth.

While I'm writing a critique of Liz's argument, I agree pretty much straight up with Liz's larger point about numbers, right up to the a priori of the last sentence I've excerpted here. Numbers don't lie. Numbers don't tell the truth, either.

A quick quiz for you: name the statistical method (or methods) used to show cause (vis à vis effect). That is to say, given an observed phenomenon X (e.g. a drop in crime rates), how do you mathematically demonstrate that X was caused by other phenomenon Y (e.g. the availability of abortions to poor women during the late 70's and 80's, one of the arguments made in Freakonomics)? If you can't remember the exact method, you're probably at least aware that it's a difficult thing to calculate. Mull that over for a second.

Lying is a function of language. Numbers don't lie because they don't mean. Meaning (and lying, and misrepresenting, and misconstruing, and so on) occur when somebody tries to take the result of an equation and meld it to a result in the real world--that is, when somebody takes numbers and tries to model something with them. Some of these models work quite well (Calculus to the motion of accelerating bodies, e.g.) and some of them work for crap (attempts to model the weather or the stock market). But even in the models that are extremely good at making predictions there's nothing that inherently ties it to the phenomenon it models. The planets orbitted the sun before Calculus was invented, and they'll continue to do so if it's ever forgotten.

So how do you mathematically demonstrate that a drop in crime was due to the availability of abortions to poor women and not to, say, better policing methods? You can't. It was a trick question (ha ha on you). There is no way to demonstrate cause mathematically. Cause and effect is a narrative interpretation of phenomena that arise together (were I Buddhist I'd just come right out and say there's no such thing as cause and effect, but I'm not there yet). You can demonstrate correlation until the cows come home, but any more than that is subject to interpretation. What Freakonomics demonstrated (apparently--I haven't read it) is that a mathematical correlation exists between fall in crime rates and availability of abortions, and that this correlation is stronger than the one between falling crime rates and new policing methods. Correlation, though, is an extremely tricky thing to interpret. There is, for instance, a very high general correlation between shoe size and IQ scores, but nobody out there is claiming one causes the other (you would, for instance, find the same correlation between age and IQ scores and age and shoe size). There was also that rather infamous study a few years back that claimed that race and IQ score were linked. Now, this correlation demonstrably exists. African Americans do, on average, have lower IQ scores than white Americans. Here are some other correlations that also demonstrably exist: poverty and lower IQ. Lack of access to health care and lower IQ. Lower levels or quality of education and lower IQ. What is to be learned from this? Probably a lot more about the authors of The Bell Curve than about anything having to do with genetic factors and IQ. Of course, that's just my interpretation.

Next: Less ranting!
Tags: Statistics, Freakonomics

Nostalgia Happens When You Realize How Beautiful You Were Then

Something I realized just now.

Next: More Beauty!
Tags: Random Thoughts

Amazon S3

Another event that went down while I was out in the field was the launch of Amazon S3, a web service for storing data. Amazon S3 was known internally as "Amazon Storage" until about a week before launch, at which point the folks running it sat down with Jeff Bezos, who opined that soon we'd be competing with Google Storage and Yahoo Storage, and how thus would we ever successfully brand or trademark our particular service? Hence Amazon S3 (S3 = "Simple Storage Service") was born. And thus have you learned an important lesson about being the CEO of a major corporation.

Being able to get generic storage space somewhere out in the ether is not a particularly spectacular innovation. When the first iMac came out (which was, what, ten years ago at this point? Good lord) and there was general uproar over the fact that it lacked a floppy drive, some wonk offered everybody with an email account a couple of megs of storage space on his server so that they wouldn't need one. L. backs up her data by attaching .doc files to emails and sending them to herself at her Yahoo mail account, being that they now provide a Gigabyte of storage for your mail. I suspect this practice is quite widespread. There are, though, two actual innovations with Amazon S3, one lesser and one greater: the lesser one is that this is an enterprise level service (which is code for it being reliable and available enough for Amazon's own use--we're drinking our own Kool-Aid, as it were). The greater innovation here is that we're now able to meter the usage and charge for it (Capitalism: it's what's for dinner).

S3 was slashdotted (here 'slashdot' appears in its past participle form, meaning "to post an item for comment on slashdot.org") a day or so after it launched, and 99% of the posts imagined it as an ethereal backup for ones personal data. You encrypt it (and here I'll make my little pitch again: any electronic data that you would mind if everyone in the world were to read, you should be encrypting. This, sadly, now includes stuff you think is only ever going to be sitting on your harddrive. Don't ask why. Just do it) and send it to S3, where it's reliably stored and available from anywhere. Even with a superfast internet connection, retrieval times aren't going to approach the speed of, e.g., a firewire drive, but if you're just storing and retrieving once in awhile, it works fine. At $0.15 a Gig per month, and $0.20 a Gig for bandwidth (to store or retrieve data), it's a pretty reasonable price for a highly reliable archive. But personal (or even business) archive storage like this isn't the point of S3.

If you're a regular OaO reader and pay very close attention to my postings on things Web 2.0 (hi Sam), you might notice that this is one more piece to the puzzle I laid out six months ago, just after I joined Amazon Web Services. S3 is a virtual harddrive. One use for such a virtual harddrive is to store your data. But in the brave new world of Web 2.0, it's also a data store and information server for this brave new virtual computer running brave new virtual software. The virtual computer is not a machine (hence the word 'virtual'), it's a distributed network of computers that are all somewhere out in the world, and the software isn't a piece of code that's loaded onto a machine, it's tens or hundreds or thousands of distributed functions that, again, run on arbitrary machines somewhere.

So, possibly you're not as excited about this as I. Maybe it really isn't that cool. It might just end up being a place to store your data, that's all, the end. Or it might not.

Next: Something you might conceiveably give a crap about!
Tags: Amazon S3, Web 2.0

Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania

I've returned from vacation and I'm sitting here, on this Tuesday morning, with twenty-thousand things to post on, but a dirth of ideas on how to winnow them down and present them. There was, for instance, this interview with Edward Wilson on the topics surrounding evolution v. religion. Or this complete mind-fuck, a quantum computer program that can solve a problem without ever running. Perhaps the emerging (or, for those who are not upper-middle class and white, ever-present), battle for access to birth control that Rebecca's covering is more your cup of tea. And then there's the alternative medicine seminar I went to the weekend before last, about which I have long been meaning to post something.

Surely I can tie all those threads together here in one neat paragraph, then go fetch some lunch and get back to work...wait...thinking...nope, can't do it today. Instead what I've got is this overarching thing that's been on my mind lately--something about the massive distributed system that makes up the entirety of my being, or your being. I, you, they out there in the world, are the sum of differentiated cells that know nothing of the being of which they are part. They respond to changes in pressure or light or chemicals or electrical charge that occur in their immediate environment; when a change occurs, the cell alters in some way. You and I are one giant collection of stimulus and response--at this level there is no happy or sad, or pain or relief, or love or hate. There are merely chemicals and patterns of electricity.

But I don't feel like a machine that's the sum of these things. Maybe the human condition exists because we have chemical signals telling us to survive and reproduce and that really everything we do is part of the strategy to make sure that our genetic material is propagated--red in tooth and claw and all that. Maybe everything else is, for lack of a better word, narrative that we make up to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe religion is a narrative created to fill in that gap between the massive network of cells and the resulting experience that occurs when you are that massive network of cells. Maybe all of that. But then, and I don't know how it is for you, but I don't feel that way.

Next: What the hell was that?
Tags: Meaning Of Life

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

...is a rocking band I have just discovered because of Pandora, a.k.a. "the music genome project." I am probably the last person on earth to try this idea of custom-tailored internet radio, but now I have, and I am here to tell you: Dude, it's fucking awesome. For the last two days I've been sitting at work meandering through a playlist that I started by telling it I liked Neil Finn and going from there. Subsequently hearing songs by 20 different bands that I a) had never in my life heard of, and b) freaking loved is only one of the the cool things about it. There's also the slow drift through genres that it has done based on whether I give particular songs the thumbs up or thumbs down--yesterday I was in kind of a wispy, folk-influenced kind of place and so after five songs of feedback it was playing this steady stream of Elliott Smith-y, Iron & Wine-y (and the aforementioned 20 folks of whom I'd never previously heard) kind of stuff, and today I'm in a little more of a emo rock kind of place, which led me to thumbs-down some of the folky stuff, so I've been hearing such things as "I Am Warm + Powerful" by these Yeltsin-loving fellows from Springfield, Missouri (which, oddly, is where my mom's family used to live).

The third cool thing is this melding of the unfamiliar with the familiar (stuff I already own) and the ubiquitous (stuff one would hear on the radio), which creates all manner of new contexts for music. The next song Pandora played after the Yeltsins was Stone Temple Pilots' "Big Empty," a song that had previous drifted right over my consciousness, and right now I'm listening to a song by some sort of Poor-Man's John Mayer teen rocker which I'd immediately dismiss in the real world. But the fact that this music algorithm (which affiliates songs by the type of singer, instrumentation, underlying musical influence, etc.--my favorite criterion so far which it's inferred that I like is "a good dose of acoustic guitar pickin'") plays mostly indie stuff overcomes my built-in coolness filter and I end up listening to the songs with a different ear. I mean, okay, that teen-rock song still sucks, but today it gets a pass.

I suppose there's some comparison to be made between the iPod playlist which isn't really reading your thoughts, and this, which is trying to do just that. Like last time, I'm leaving that up to you. It's time you all stop riding on my coat tails and learn to synthesize for yourselves.

Next: the collective musical consciousness!
Tags: Pandora, Music Genome Project, Music

iPod Moments

• 9, 3, 10, 1, 5, 8, 2, 6, 4, 7
• 1, 4, 5, 4, 5, 4, 8, 10, 6, 7

One of these two strings of numbers was generated by a computer using a random number function. The other one was generated by a human (me). Look, ponder, and then file that fact away for a moment.

This morning on my stroll to work I had a nice little iPod Moment. An iPod Moment is when the iPod does something droll whilst it is shuffling randomly through its playlist. A sort of mundane one would be playing two songs by the same artist or from the same album back to back. A more interesting one is when it plays a song and then a cover of that song back to back. This morning's glimpse from Serendip was the selection of Jason Falkner's "Before My Heart Attacks," immediately followed by Falkner's former band, Jellyfish, doing "I Wanna Stay Home."

I am not alone in noticing this phenomenon. I believe, e.g., that the father of one OaO reader has actually called him up on occasion when the iPod does something witty with its random playlist. And there's apparently a small band of fanatics out there who believe that the iPod is reading their minds, or at the very least that the random shuffle algorithm that the iPod uses is not truly random. I have wondered aloud at times whether there's a little humanness built into the algorithm, especially after we hear three songs in a row from the same artists but from different albums.

Generating true randomness is indeed a notoriously difficult task for a computer, and it's caused a lot of people a lot of problems when sets of numbers that were thought to be random turned out not to be. What makes this a somewhat more obtuse problem is that things that truly are random tend to be full of instantly noticeable patterns. Go back to those numbers at the top. There's an absolute dead giveaway that one of them is machine generated and one of them is human generated (actually, there are two). In the first string there are no discernable patterns--the numbers aren't in order, they don't repeat, there's basically no connection between one number and the next. The second sequence has that unusual string of repeating 4s and 5s.

You are clever OaO readers, so you already know that the second pattern is the machine generated one (I didn't manipulate that second pattern in any way--I generated ten random numbers between 1 and 10 and those are the ten numbers I got. I was expecting some sort of pattern to show up somewhere, and indeed one did). The other list was carefully manipulated to remove everything that a human might think wasn't random (the first dead giveaway that it wasn't truly random) and also to use each number exactly once (the second dead giveaway -- a truly random number generating routine will generate a string like this about .03% of the time).

At this point I'd usually offer you some sort of narrative tag that ties all this together neatly, but today I'm all about randomness. So screw you. Make your own narrative.

Next: More narrative made just for you!
Tags: iPods,Randomness,Probability