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.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
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.
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.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
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.
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?
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?
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
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.
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.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
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.
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.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
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.
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.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Greetings, traveler
Editor's note: This entry refers to the previous name of this blog, 'Pornstar,' and as such doesn't make so much sense now. As you were...
Greetings, wayward internet traveler in search of porn. It's late at night, you're a lonely fellow, and you've probably stumbled across this site by accident. Perhaps you have seen the disclaimer at the beginning which...
Q: Fuck that. I'm looking for porn. Not some weird new-age acupuncture student freak and his musings about the nature of being. Give me some pictures of hot naked chicks doing questionable things with light industrial farm equipment.
A: ...as I was saying, I have this disclaimer at the top of the page. See? It's "Porn" with an asterisk after it, so it's like, "Porn Star," but then also it's like, not really, because the asterisk indicates qualifiers...
Q: Screw you, hippie. I have already hit the back button and am scrolling down the page of my Google search, hoping to find some hot Wankel-Rotary-Engine-on-girl action.
A: No you haven't. You're still here, reading this.
Q: Well, okay, yes I am. But I'm using a browser that supports tabbed browsing, such as Mozilla, or Safari, and I've definitely got a lot of internet porn open in other tabs.
A: Fair enough. I'm glad to have been a short stop in the midst of your long journey. Even if it was due to slight duplicity on my part.
Q: Um...slight? "Porn" appears in huge capital letters at the top of the page.
A: It's actually...
Q: "Porn Star," yes, thanks. I got it. What's your point? Pick a demographic.
A: I have. I am looking for the person who thinks everything I think now is complete and utter useless flakey weird crap. I am looking for the person who lives in the actual material world, who knows all about it. I am writing for the person who understands it all. And then I'd like to quietly, subtly, and insidiously, blow his or her fucking mind.
Q: ...
A: Yes?
Q: Well, I mean, for starters, you haven't said anything about "what you think now." Or how it's different from "what you thought then." Or who you are. Or what you think. Or, anything about nature or the meaning of life.
A: Yes, yes. I'll get to that. Soon.
Q: When?
A: Soon.
Q: I'm closing this tab.
Greetings, wayward internet traveler in search of porn. It's late at night, you're a lonely fellow, and you've probably stumbled across this site by accident. Perhaps you have seen the disclaimer at the beginning which...
Q: Fuck that. I'm looking for porn. Not some weird new-age acupuncture student freak and his musings about the nature of being. Give me some pictures of hot naked chicks doing questionable things with light industrial farm equipment.
A: ...as I was saying, I have this disclaimer at the top of the page. See? It's "Porn" with an asterisk after it, so it's like, "Porn Star," but then also it's like, not really, because the asterisk indicates qualifiers...
Q: Screw you, hippie. I have already hit the back button and am scrolling down the page of my Google search, hoping to find some hot Wankel-Rotary-Engine-on-girl action.
A: No you haven't. You're still here, reading this.
Q: Well, okay, yes I am. But I'm using a browser that supports tabbed browsing, such as Mozilla, or Safari, and I've definitely got a lot of internet porn open in other tabs.
A: Fair enough. I'm glad to have been a short stop in the midst of your long journey. Even if it was due to slight duplicity on my part.
Q: Um...slight? "Porn" appears in huge capital letters at the top of the page.
A: It's actually...
Q: "Porn Star," yes, thanks. I got it. What's your point? Pick a demographic.
A: I have. I am looking for the person who thinks everything I think now is complete and utter useless flakey weird crap. I am looking for the person who lives in the actual material world, who knows all about it. I am writing for the person who understands it all. And then I'd like to quietly, subtly, and insidiously, blow his or her fucking mind.
Q: ...
A: Yes?
Q: Well, I mean, for starters, you haven't said anything about "what you think now." Or how it's different from "what you thought then." Or who you are. Or what you think. Or, anything about nature or the meaning of life.
A: Yes, yes. I'll get to that. Soon.
Q: When?
A: Soon.
Q: I'm closing this tab.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
This week's truth
I love The Stranger. It's the alternative weekly tabloid in Seattle (that is to say properly that it's only one of several, but that's only true in theory. In practice it gets a definite article in front of it). It's a newspaper written by people squarely in my demographic, most of whom live in my neighborhood (Capitol Hill--Seattle, like many cities these days, is a very neighborhood-y city). They're unabashedly liberal, gay, offensive, crude, funny--the mouthpiece of the kind of society that gives the Religious Right fits.
But this is not a mash note for the paper edited by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage. The Stranger, like probably every other free weekly tabloid in the nation, runs from time to time full page ads from whomever cares to pay to run them (I assume also there's some manner of editorial screening process, but The Stranger seems generally not the type of organization that would judge you). This week there's a two page spread, consisting entirely of type that appears to be about .000016 point Times New Roman, from this guy. He appears to have, in the past, claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ. On the other hand, in his messianic state of being he also claims that George W. Bush is his opposite number, so it's, you know, hard to argue with that. This week he seems to be claiming that people who reject the idea of incest are full of shame, whereas people who accept the beauty of it are full of love, and that soon the incest taboo that exists in our society will be destroyed, possibly violently. There also seems to be something about Niel (sic) Young and how he's some manner of prophet. Also somebody named Reuben seems to be involved. I couldn't quite understand it all. Though I tried.
It's pretty easy to skip these things over. I assume that's what nearly every body does. It's also pretty easy to read a paragraph or two to your friends, laugh hysterically, take another hit from the gravity bong, and turn back to re-runs of The Simpsons (I'm not saying you're a bad person if that's what you do. Like Dan Savage, I'm not here to judge you). What turns out to be surprisingly hard is to try and figure out, I don't know, what the hell this guy is trying to say.
Maybe this is guy is literally having sex with his uncle on a regular basis, and he's trying to make it okay, hence his fascination in this week's two-pager with incest, shame, and "Niel Young." But I doubt it. Or rather, I hope not, because in that case...well, first he's literally having sex with his uncle (but again, I'm not here to judge), and second, this installment of his on-going, ten-trillion word manifesto has a lot less potentially interesting subtext (literalness is soooo mundane, don't you think?). Whatever the case, this guy is not on the same plane of existence as I, whereas he's clearly got a lot on his mind and has gone to great lengths to say it, whether anybody else is listening or not (though probably orders of magnitude more people are reading his thoughts than are reading mine these days). (Apparently in the process of writing this entry I have been possessed by the parenthetical-comment making spirit of David Foster Wallace. Sorry about that). (Have you seen that David Foster Wallace wrote a book about infinity? It's like irony is dead. Or something that's like irony, only with more footnoted digressions). I can't understand his symbolism, or metaphors, or what his personal shame is, or what he thinks mine is. But what really is the difference between this Manifesto-Man and somebody else with a lot on their mind, say David Foster Wallace?
Q: Um, the difference is that David Foster Wallace is not totally freaking insane.
A: Actually David Foster Wallace is totally freaking insane.
Q: Okay, yes he is, but you know what I mean.
A: Yes. I could argue semantically with you for hours, but I do know what you mean. I'm looking for the other side of the coin, though. Isn't his being insane also equivalent to my inability to perceive reality on the same level as he?
Q: Uh, no?
A: Perhaps you're right.
Q: Can I just say that none of this is making me want to get acupunctured by you, now or ever?
A: Hmm...interesting.
But this is not a mash note for the paper edited by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage. The Stranger, like probably every other free weekly tabloid in the nation, runs from time to time full page ads from whomever cares to pay to run them (I assume also there's some manner of editorial screening process, but The Stranger seems generally not the type of organization that would judge you). This week there's a two page spread, consisting entirely of type that appears to be about .000016 point Times New Roman, from this guy. He appears to have, in the past, claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ. On the other hand, in his messianic state of being he also claims that George W. Bush is his opposite number, so it's, you know, hard to argue with that. This week he seems to be claiming that people who reject the idea of incest are full of shame, whereas people who accept the beauty of it are full of love, and that soon the incest taboo that exists in our society will be destroyed, possibly violently. There also seems to be something about Niel (sic) Young and how he's some manner of prophet. Also somebody named Reuben seems to be involved. I couldn't quite understand it all. Though I tried.
It's pretty easy to skip these things over. I assume that's what nearly every body does. It's also pretty easy to read a paragraph or two to your friends, laugh hysterically, take another hit from the gravity bong, and turn back to re-runs of The Simpsons (I'm not saying you're a bad person if that's what you do. Like Dan Savage, I'm not here to judge you). What turns out to be surprisingly hard is to try and figure out, I don't know, what the hell this guy is trying to say.
Maybe this is guy is literally having sex with his uncle on a regular basis, and he's trying to make it okay, hence his fascination in this week's two-pager with incest, shame, and "Niel Young." But I doubt it. Or rather, I hope not, because in that case...well, first he's literally having sex with his uncle (but again, I'm not here to judge), and second, this installment of his on-going, ten-trillion word manifesto has a lot less potentially interesting subtext (literalness is soooo mundane, don't you think?). Whatever the case, this guy is not on the same plane of existence as I, whereas he's clearly got a lot on his mind and has gone to great lengths to say it, whether anybody else is listening or not (though probably orders of magnitude more people are reading his thoughts than are reading mine these days). (Apparently in the process of writing this entry I have been possessed by the parenthetical-comment making spirit of David Foster Wallace. Sorry about that). (Have you seen that David Foster Wallace wrote a book about infinity? It's like irony is dead. Or something that's like irony, only with more footnoted digressions). I can't understand his symbolism, or metaphors, or what his personal shame is, or what he thinks mine is. But what really is the difference between this Manifesto-Man and somebody else with a lot on their mind, say David Foster Wallace?
Q: Um, the difference is that David Foster Wallace is not totally freaking insane.
A: Actually David Foster Wallace is totally freaking insane.
Q: Okay, yes he is, but you know what I mean.
A: Yes. I could argue semantically with you for hours, but I do know what you mean. I'm looking for the other side of the coin, though. Isn't his being insane also equivalent to my inability to perceive reality on the same level as he?
Q: Uh, no?
A: Perhaps you're right.
Q: Can I just say that none of this is making me want to get acupunctured by you, now or ever?
A: Hmm...interesting.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Jos Claerbout
Today, Flag Day, is my friend Jos' birthday. The morning of August 20th, 1999, Jos got up, went to the gym to lift weights, and then biked to the offices of WebTV, in Mountain View, California, where he worked. A few minutes later he was dead of a heart attack. Today he'd be 31.
Do a Google Search of his name and you'll find hundreds of references to him--many of them are kept by his father, who has collected a virtual memorial of many of things Jos wrote, made, filmed, recorded, or otherwise produced. If you happened to be a knitter, you might have stumbled across the incredibly elaborate, incredibly funny site he created about the hats he made (on which, if you hunt closely, you will find my picture). If you write software, you might have run into Don't Fear the OOP, which compares object-oriented code to a trashy western novel, and has been reprinted all over the web.
Jos' father Jon also collects friends' memories of Jos. There's a brief paragraph from me among them, something I rattled off a few months after he died. It wasn't really what I wanted to say on the subject, and it's been six years and I never did get around to saying it. I don't think I ever got around to figuring out what it was, actually. I guess I read what other people had written and it seemed like everybody had better memories of him than I. They were clearer, more articulate, smarter, funnier, and more real than anything I had to offer. So I never did write anything down.
Maybe that's what I want to say about Jos. He was clearer, more articulate, smarter, funnier, and more real than anybody I ever knew. He had that thing that you want, that you want to be around all the time. He was that person whom you wanted desperately to like you, and then he did, and you couldn't believe your luck.
Jos and I met in college, where a long, slow conversation about life started. We carried it on via the U.S.P.S., and then later electronic mail. Every couple of months or so I'd write something long and involved and then a couple of months later he'd write something back, and I'd go about my daily life and sift it over and then the next time it came into my head, I'd write him back. Jon has published an expurgated version of part of the dialog here. It was called 'The Utility of Belief'. There was a lot more to it than appears, but it was also very personal and so it seems appropriate that Jon has edited down to Jos' writing about his experience finding the first job he really loved.
This was the part of the conversation where Jos realized the value of faith in something you couldn't experimentally verify (yet). It didn't matter whether you believed there were aliens in spaceships on their way to bring us peace and love, or that the unified universe is made up of tiny pieces of vibrating string of unmeasurable length, or that there was a girl out there that was your one true soul-mate. The important thing was to believe it, because that was what was getting you where you were going, and that was making the universe go around. I never really stopped to think about it in an analytical way, but I think that idea got absorbed right into my core tenets and it forms the basis of what I'm doing with my life now. I miss that conversation we were having. But then, I guess I'm still here, having it.
Do a Google Search of his name and you'll find hundreds of references to him--many of them are kept by his father, who has collected a virtual memorial of many of things Jos wrote, made, filmed, recorded, or otherwise produced. If you happened to be a knitter, you might have stumbled across the incredibly elaborate, incredibly funny site he created about the hats he made (on which, if you hunt closely, you will find my picture). If you write software, you might have run into Don't Fear the OOP, which compares object-oriented code to a trashy western novel, and has been reprinted all over the web.
Jos' father Jon also collects friends' memories of Jos. There's a brief paragraph from me among them, something I rattled off a few months after he died. It wasn't really what I wanted to say on the subject, and it's been six years and I never did get around to saying it. I don't think I ever got around to figuring out what it was, actually. I guess I read what other people had written and it seemed like everybody had better memories of him than I. They were clearer, more articulate, smarter, funnier, and more real than anything I had to offer. So I never did write anything down.
Maybe that's what I want to say about Jos. He was clearer, more articulate, smarter, funnier, and more real than anybody I ever knew. He had that thing that you want, that you want to be around all the time. He was that person whom you wanted desperately to like you, and then he did, and you couldn't believe your luck.
Jos and I met in college, where a long, slow conversation about life started. We carried it on via the U.S.P.S., and then later electronic mail. Every couple of months or so I'd write something long and involved and then a couple of months later he'd write something back, and I'd go about my daily life and sift it over and then the next time it came into my head, I'd write him back. Jon has published an expurgated version of part of the dialog here. It was called 'The Utility of Belief'. There was a lot more to it than appears, but it was also very personal and so it seems appropriate that Jon has edited down to Jos' writing about his experience finding the first job he really loved.
This was the part of the conversation where Jos realized the value of faith in something you couldn't experimentally verify (yet). It didn't matter whether you believed there were aliens in spaceships on their way to bring us peace and love, or that the unified universe is made up of tiny pieces of vibrating string of unmeasurable length, or that there was a girl out there that was your one true soul-mate. The important thing was to believe it, because that was what was getting you where you were going, and that was making the universe go around. I never really stopped to think about it in an analytical way, but I think that idea got absorbed right into my core tenets and it forms the basis of what I'm doing with my life now. I miss that conversation we were having. But then, I guess I'm still here, having it.
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Fight fight fight
I also read a lot of blogs--I'm not just the president of Hair Club for Men, I'm also a client. Daily Kos and Salon's War Room are two of my favorites. I was wondering if one of the things I'm not doing, that I should be doing, is pulling out and posting the writings of my critics, and systematically taking them to pieces. It looks really, really fun.
Earlier today, I was reading the writings of some critics, particularly this. The temptation to excerpt whole paragraphs of it with copious comments is, well, overwhelming. I'm basing my whole future career on the idea that acupuncture works, so it's hard not to take some psychic hit to the gut from all the people who say that your chosen discipline is bunk.
I like to think that I'm a highly rational individual. I was educated to think critically about everything I read and learned. I learned to look for the places in which I accepted some facts and not others due to my existing beliefs or prejudices. And, mostly in the time after my formal education was over, I also learned to examine the model in which those facts existed (and then, of course, the model which I was using to critically examine those models, and then the model that I used to model those models, and then the way I thought about the nature of models, and so on, until my brain collapsed into a huge gross, smelly mass of meta-, and I found myself on the ethereal plane having tea and sticky buns with Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. may they rest in peace, whatever that means to them). Um...sorry, what was I saying?
We have a definitional model of science that boils down to, essentially, this tautology: science is whatever we can prove using our present rational model. Whatever has been demonstrated in the past using this model is science. So, in the past, it was the excepted principal of learned men everywhere thought that the earth was the center of the universe; that the planets moved in perfect circles around some invisible fixed point, and that fixed point moved around the earth; that a twenty pound weight would fall to the earth twenty times as fast as a one pound weight; bleeding a sick patient would remove the poisoned blood from his or her body; that frontal lobotomies were a fine cure for mental illness; and so on. Some of these models were crap and some were fine--Ptolomy's model of the solar system, e.g., made much more accurate predictions of planetary movement than the later Copernican model in which orbits around the sun were perfect circles--but all were replaced when somebody, somewhere, stepped outside the accepted model of how things were and thought...what if?
Imagine the scientists 100 years from now, looking back at us. Imagine the ones a thousand years from now. Imagine someone looking at us and regarding our science, our medicine, being as medieval as we regard the science and medicine of 1000 B.C. Try and imagine what among the things we're doing now in the name of science and medicine that they will find inhuman and unfathomable. Because I'll tell you what, I'm pretty sure performing surgery on people with chronic back pain isn't the end-all be-all of therapy. I'm pretty sure the true answer to hyperactive thyroid disease isn't to dose patients with radioactive iodine, which kills their thyroid and forces them to take those hormones by pill for the rest of their lives.
So I could be crazy, irrational, and wrong-headed to pursue the career I'm pursuing. As listed above, there are plenty of people who think that I am. I've got my own evidence, too (which maybe I'll get around to talking about some day), and my own reasons for following this which I think are pretty rational. But most of all, I think this: 99.9999% of the people who step outside the accepted model of things, looking for a better one, get nowhere and nothing. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. I mean, it's not a terrible thing to do with your life, is it?
Friday, June 03, 2005
Oh...THAT American Life
My fiancee and I are sitting at home tonight listening to This American Life which, this week, is doing a show ostensibly on the separation of church and state. This is the kind of thing that makes my darling wife-to-be insane, because Ira Glass is letting the other side speak and isn't, well, correcting them. She doesn't ask much, really, just that somebody, when Kenneth Blackwell maintains insistently that Christians are oppressed in America today while at the same time claiming that the point of democracy is to enforce the legislative agenda of their super-majority over the objections of the non-Christian, says, "Actually, Kenneth, I don't think that is the point of democracy, and your two points contradict each other besides." But the interviewers don't oblige her, so she becomes insane.
Before I return to my zen-like, acupuncture-acolyte, at-one-with-the-universe self, I'd like to say this on the subject of the media: presenting "both sides" of an argument when one side is giving making an actual argument and the other side is telling lies IS NOT OBJECTIVE REPORTING. I'll leave it to the reader to apply any context that may be lacking in this statement.
Where was I? Oh yes, the separation of church and state. A little later in the evening, my local NPR station was replaying Friday's Talk of the Nation interview with Bill Clinton, and for just a little while we got to re-experience a time when just hearing the sound of the voice of The President of The United States didn't make us completely insane.
Apparently, in the eight years when Bill Clinton was President, there were some conservatives in this country who were driven insane (insane!) when they were forcibly reminded that he was leading their country in the same way that I, and 125,000,000 of my closest friends are presently driven mad by the fact that George W. Bush is the holder of the highest office in the land when he is, well, the very beatable combination of religious conservative and a not very smart man. It's obvious to me what makes us insane about GWB, but it's not so obvious to me what makes the right so insane about Bill Clinton leading the country. Nor is it immediately obvious what makes the Religious Right so insane that some people in this country don't agree with their beliefs, don't take the bible literally, and don't particularly want to have their lives governed by laws based on those beliefs or a literal interpretation of the bible when, in fact, we live in a country founded on the very idea that this was wrong, very wrong, incredibly and demonstrably WRONG.
(Sorry, I lost my "objective" slant there for a second. It won't happen again. Until it does.)
So in that respect, what makes us (by "us" here I mean my fiancee (who, in a sub-parenthetical remark I will here and now dub 'L.' and refer to her as such from now on) and me, but you can substitute whatever "us" you like) insane about people spouting that they're being oppressed for trying to express their religion is that they so fundamentally don't "get it." At the same time, they're sitting around thinking the exact same thing about me (or, people like me, since I'm pretty sure they don't know me. Yet). So what is that thing that I'm not getting?
I would imagine it's the "God" part. Sometime in the future I'll talk about my huge problem with the anthropomorphic Christian God that--while apparently unconditionally loving and all-powerful--hates homosexuals, people who have sex before a Christian church okays it, people who choose to use birth control or have abortions, and people who vote for any of the people who believe that any of these things are actually not mortal sins. And, oh by the way, sorry, but the same God, again, all-powerful and all-loving, gives you one 80-year shot at figuring out that you, e.g. have to hate homosexuals, is going to fuck with you the entire time, and if you don't get it right in that time, is going to banish you for all eternity to unbearable torture and damnation. I mean, nothing says unconditional love like that.
(I'm sorry, I did it again. On the bright side, now I don't have to write that entry about my problems with the Christian god. Pretty much covered it there.)
*ahem* I imagine it's the "God" part that they're insane that I'm not getting. Because of course the "God" part is there. I have to imagine a reasonable, loving Christian is a little embarrassed about the people who interpret the metaphor of the Bible as literal fact, but at the same time recognizes that their hearts are in the right place because they recognize the truth of "God." What that truth is, I gotta tell you, I have no idea. But I'm working on it.Thursday, June 02, 2005
Everybody in Seattle...
If you live in Seattle and are ever downtown during the day, then you know this guy. He's been standing there, shouting at buses and cars most days since he was kicked out of his residence in the Frye Apartments, a subsidized housing development in Seattle. His name is Juan, he's mentally ill, and he's incredibly persistent. It's not just that he's been there at the same location, 6th and Pine, in Seattle, day after day, for years now. It's that his determination is unshakeable. He shouts the same message to whatever unfortunate vehicle happens to get stopped at the corner when the light changes. It sounds something like this:
"Everybody...in Seattle! Outsidah! Ah pee-po! Below below! The Seattle Police, they're COM-munist!"
It's like Starbucks or McDonalds: when you see one, you know what you're going to get. Each repetition every day every year has been exactly the same, the meter and rhythm, the intonation. I was once riding a bus and the bus-driver pulled up and at the light and repeated Juan's rant right along with him (We all chuckled, which inspired a woman sitting on the bus to say indignantly, "That man is braver than any of you people." Which I can't disagree with. But it was still kind of funny).
I've wondered what the world looks like out of the eyes of..insert your own musings on the nature of mental illness here. Consider the way in which we deal with it in our society, on a socio-scientific and spiritual level. Tie in the effect of the conservative hack-job of social welfare that was performed by Ronald Reagan in the 80's and how he literally and figuratively created "the homeless." I would have done this for you, but it's time you stopped drafting in my wake and held your own for awhile. Also, I'm lazy. Anyway, back to the regularly scheduled program....with the chicken and five yards of surgical tubing. It's truly a profound lesson about interconnectedness and the true nature of being.
I ride the bus through downtown to work in the morning, which is usually when I see Juan. I'd been away for a while, so yesterday morning was the first time I saw him for awhile. He's still there with the same sign, but all of sudden, he's mixing it up: "Below-below! Below-below! Everybody in Seattle! Everybody! Everybody! Ah peepo! Ah peepo! Below-below! Below-below!" It's like suddenly something shifted and he found a new rhythm. He's singing a different tune. He's downloaded and installed the latest security patch. He's made some new playlists for the iPod (no, no, wait...this is going to get funny any second now). It wasn't a big cosmic shift or nothing, but it was enough to move the otherwise intrasigent and immovable, just a little bit. Big change is afoot, I tell you what.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
On the nature of observing nature
As I utterly failed to make plain in my first post, the ostensible point of this blog is to fulfill a school requirement that I observe nature and then write about it. So I could, for instance, write about trees, flowers, and grass. But this would bore you and you would probably stop reading. You'd probably rather read about how I think George W. Bush is kind of dickwad, or the ways in which I like to make fun of cats.
Q: Aren't you an acupuncture student?
Q: Aren't you an acupuncture student?
A: Yes.
Q: Aren't you supposed to be, like, one with nature or something? You just referred to the President of the United States of America as a dickwad.
A: He is a dickwad.
Q: Well...yes. But aren't you supposed to, I don't know, have compassion for all living beings, including cats and the President?
A: The road to enlightenment is long, and is paved with name-calling and jokes about cats. Besides, this blog will now pop up whenever anyone does a Google search using the words "George Bush" and "dickwad."
Anyway, my point is that nature takes many forms. Actually, my point is that nature takes on all forms. And my other point is that not only would you rather read about other things than trees and flowers, I would much rather write about them, too. Hence, while the broad subject of nature is the subject of this blog, reading this blog you will learn about life, the universe, and everything.
Q: Um, really? Will I learn the meaning of life by reading your blog?
A: Yes.
Q: Really?
A: Yes.
Q: Really really? When?
A: Soon. Keep reading.
Q: Are you totally full of crap?
A: It is entirely possible. But keep reading anyway.Monday, May 30, 2005
Hello again
Every couple of years I come back to writing, to see how it is. Today it's because it's an assignment, but I'm trying to make something more out of it. So without further ado, we present:
-PORN* FAQ's-
Q: Who are you?
A: My name is Paul. I am 32. I live in Seattle Washington. Part of my life is spent working as a software engineer, presently for an unnamed, Seattle-based e-commerce giant. In the other part of my existence, I am a student at the Wu Hsing Tao school of 5-Element Acupuncture.
Q: Is the "unnamed, Seatle-based e-commerce giant" for whom you work actually Amazon.com?
A: No. Don't you want to ask a question about 5-Element acupuncture?
Q: No, I don't. Come on, it's Amazon, isn't it?
A: If I say yes, will you ask about 5-Element acupuncture?
Q: Sure.
A: Okay, yes it is.
Q: Haha! I knew it. Are you the same Paul Mariz with whom I (once worked/went to high school/went to college/know from that three-day artificial-sweetener-and-soft-taco binge in Manitoba in 1997)? If so, should I be worried that, as you mention that you are studying acupuncture, you have gone all weird and new-agey on me?
A: Why yes, I would be happy to tell you about 5-Element Acupuncture. 5-Element acupuncture is method of healing thousands of years old that...no, forget it, already I've become bored. Here's somebody who's doing a fine job of it already.
Q: Hey, you didn't answer my question.
A: Well first of all, turbinado isn't an artificial sweetener. But otherwise, yes, I probably am he. And thereafter it depends what you mean by 'weird and new-agey.' I'd like to think the answer is no. On the other hand, after going through roughly ten years of the so-called quote real unquote world (you know the one, it's the thing in which you're living right now, probably, unless you're still in school, either because you're, like, 19, or you keep meaning to graduate and get a job and just never get around to it, in which case, dude, I totally understand, I was there myself, and anyway, whatever, roughly the same rules apply), everything looks a lot different to me than it did when I started. However it is that we live these days, it seems to me that most of my friends and also me are just about getting to the point where we're wondering what the hell it's all about. I was under the impression that one didn't start wondering about these things until after, like, two kids and twenty years of career. But apparently these days we do these things on internet time. So that's what this blog is about. Sort of.
Q: Why is this blog called, "Porn," then?
A: The correct reading of the name of this blog is, "porn star." Get it? Do you? DO YOU? It is called this for two very good reasons. The first one escapes me at the moment. The second one was something about a naked attempt to get people to read this blog by associating it with pictures of naked people having various types of sex, which seems to be popular on the internet these days. But I can't quite remember it exactly. It was probably something about how I am, like, too clever by half.
Q: Despite the fact that you've written almost nothing on the subject, I'm really curious about acupuncture and want to be treated by you. Can I? Huh? Huh?
A: Well, it depends. First you have to live in the general Seattle, Washington area. Then it has to be some time in 2006 at least, since at the time I write this, they don't even let me touch needles without the threat of immediate expulsion. If those two conditions hold, click the envelope icon to email me.
Q: Isn't this supposed to be some kind of nature journal? You haven't written a single thing about nature yet.
A: In answer to this question, I offer you a Zen Koan. When you understand it, you will understand all (including how this blog qualifies as a nature journal): The student seeks out the master and asks him, "Master, does a dog have the Buddha nature?" The master looks at the student and says, "Mu."
Q: What the hell does "Mu" mean?
A: ...
Q: Hello?
A: ...Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Music Capsule Archives
- 07/01/07
- SONG: Floor
flash thingee from the Band's website - ARTIST:Those Damn Twins
- GENRE: Alternative Acoustical Popishness
- SOUNDS LIKE: A Japanese children's television show that's only coming through on the audio channel.
- 06/25/07
- SONG: Jagged Gorgeous Winter
mp3 from Salon.com Audiofile.
video from YouTube - ARTIST: The Main Drag
- GENRE: Alterna-pop/Emo
- SOUNDS LIKE: Postal Service/Death Cab For Cutie if they were ten times more peppy and baroque and had the lead singer from Frankie Goes To Hollywood doing guest vocals. Also, the video seems to contain a yak of some kind.
- 06/18/07
- SONG: The Last Song [d] [s]
- ARTIST:Slumbering
- GENRE: Pop
- SOUNDS LIKE:
Never before has it been necessary to describe and yet qualify a song thusly: "It sounds like Kate Bush, except weird." That time has ended.
- 06/08/07
- SONG: Montesquo 5 [d] [s]
- ARTIST: Zebulon Revisited
- GENRE: Breakbeat
- SOUNDS LIKE: Being in a dimly lit living room with 60's-mod furniture, shag carpeting, and pop-art on the walls. Possibly in Manchester. Or it sounds like Photek or Dirty Vegas or whatever.
- 06/01/07
- SONG: Lights on(e) remix any old morricone [d] [s]
- ARTIST: JulianC
- GENRE: Instrumental; Industrial; Ambient
- SOUNDS LIKE: The Cure circa Disintegration watch a bunch of Spaghetti Westerns, gag Robert Smith, throw him in the closet, and start sampling and looping. Also, they are stoned out of their minds and they have a harmonica.
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