Alter.Nost

Introducing a new alternative to daily horoscopes! "Alter.Nost" or "Alternate Nostradamus", your one-stop shop for alternate prognostication! (aka "Fognostication" or "Flognostication" depending on your sign).

The only think you need to do is determine your "sign". But once you've done that, you are ready to go!

Today's Alt.Nost for the Sign of the Underemployed:

Stay out of the narrow aisles today.

Today's Alt.Nost for the Sign of the Overlysensitized:

Your gravitational field is far too strong today and you are attracting idiots.

Today's Alt.Nost for the Sign of the Poorly Placed Electrical Outlet:

You're going out dressed like that? Well....Ok.

Healthcare and Convictions

I trust that those who have been campaigning so vociferously against the "public option" in healthcare reform will follow through and refuse to use Medicare, Medicaid or VA healthcare should the time come when they desperately need care but can't afford it (owing to limited income as retirees etc.)

I mean it would be grossly unfair to force someone to take government-directed healthcare when they expended so much effort telling us how horrible such a concept would be.

Seems like Americans are long on "fiscal responsibility" except when it comes to healthcare where we pay more, per capita, for healthcare than just about any OECD country yet don't live as long as countries where people pay less. And our healthcare system was ranked #37 in 2000 by the W.H.O.

Besides, it's not like healthcare is a normal market good. I don't seem to see too many folks suffering from aggressive life-threatening illnesses taking the time to do "comparison shopping".

Most Americans probably can't tell you how an MRI works, let alone assess if they need an MRI done. Good luck with "shopping around".

But I am assuming the good folks who have, yet again, kept us from moving forward into the same area that almost every other developed nation has in terms of healthcare, are going to follow through on their convictions. And, when they retire and are living on a fixed income, they will dutifully turn down Medicare and go try to get coverage at a private health insurance company.

Of course that will be easy enough so long as they don't have any pre-existing conditions, or ever been to a doctor for any reason in their life, for that matter! The insurance companies will welcome them with open arms.

Oh yeah, and they'll pay a lot for the insurance too. But that's the free market, isn't it?

Watchmen...wtf?

Well, I endured watching "Watchmen" this week. I hope I am not offending but it only serves to reinforce my dislike of the recent trend of movies based on graphic novels.

I liked the effects in the movie and I even smiled at the "alternate history" where Nixon is a 5 term president fighting the Russkies.

But omg the plot was like a frankensteinian grafting of the brains of a savvy observer of human nature and a 25 year old geek-virgin who still lives in his parents' basement. It lurched sickeningly between the clever and the bizarrely naïve. Drooling as it went from politically clever concepts to stupid teen dreams all taking place in inane costumes replete with capes and headgear.

The smartest man in the world??? Oh that about killed me right there.

"Dr. Manhattan"? Really?

And "Rohrschach". Why not just call him "Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory" and have his alter ego named "Meyers Briggs"? (Although I did like the shifting face mask and the possibility of some underlying symbolism of his character reflecting society on some larger scale...when of course I wasn't distracted by Harvey Birdman having "relations" with Silk Specter II in an aerodynamically impossible craft high above the city.)

And the fact the movie went on for like 15 hours indicates that someone just KNEW they wouldn't be able to milk this for a sequel so they tried to cram it all into one movie. Blowing their lot all in one shot...not unlike the airship scene.

My brain hurts and not in a good way now.

Blasphemy

I was thinking the other day that blasphemy is one of the most powerful and empowering things imaginable.

Think about it. Blasphemy is, for lack of a better word, "thoughtcrime". One is forbidden to think, say or express something that is offensive about a "sacred" item or concept.

To do so is to needle the ultimate powers of the universe.

Or so we are told by other people. If something is "sacred" it is sacred to someone. If I don't find it sacred I am not beholden to respecting it or worrying that saying sacrilegious things about it.

I am an atheist (now) and a ong-time sufferer of OCD. During my days as a believer I often feared that I might think or say something blasphemous. Offend God, whatever.

But it was an imaginary fear. I had no evidence that God existed, but I was told by other people not to say or think blasphemous stuff. It was quite scary to imagine the possible bad that could befall one who broke this mandate.

One of the ways I try to deal with OCD is to push through the fear, to habituate to those stimuli that are particularly painful. Of course it's not always possible. When it comes to religion the hardest part for me was to suggest that there may not even be a God. Surely a blasphemous thought. Certainly an "evil" thought!

Still, even today, years after my "deconversion" I still find blasphemous thoughts hard to get through. So well-ingrained is the opprobrium of that. I have a tough time saying anything particularly harsh about religion to my religious friends for fear of hurting them. And to what end? To make myself feel "strong" that I can say blasphemous things knowing no lightning will come strike me?

The worst part of religious thought for me is that so many of the "best" threats religion carries is the "unknown distant future". Teach a child that they can do something horrible that will not result in any known punishment until some secret time and secret place that no one will ever see (after death).

Maybe training children up to have these kinds of fears is the ultimate blasphemy. If nothing is sacred there would be no blasphemy, but aren't "thoughts" sacred things that no one else should be able to stall or halt or control in you? Isn't that the ultimate desecration of the most holy we have? Our own thoughts controlled by others?

Wilco and the End of the World

Recently I have been listening to the new Wilco album (Wilco (The Album)), note here my expert use of nested parentheses.

I like Wilco, but I'm not fan of "poetry" qua poetry. I do love a turn of phrase or moving lyric. And while I recognize that Jeff Tweedy is a new poet laureate of alt rock, I try not to get too bogged down in the "poetry" of Wilco. They are a great band and put out some excellent music.

And Tweedy does have a gift with the lyric.

In one of the songs on the new album there's the lyric

"Come on children
you're acting like children.
Every generation
Thinks it's the end of the world"
-You Never Know

It's a great lyric because it just sort of comes out at you and makes you think. Especially since it's surrounded by some great music (Nels Cline is still on guitar on this album, so you know it's got some great guitar parts).

What I love about this lyric is that it does make me think. I think it is part of our human nature to think we are the ones who will be around when the party is finally over, when the lights go out.

I think back to my grandma who was born in 1901 and lived to the age of 94. Throughout much of the time I knew her she was convinced that the end times were upon us. But she was never morose about it. She was never a "downer" on the topic, it just was what it was. She seemed to be one of the more psychologically stable people in my family! Certainly the one everyone could get along with.

But I realized she spent a great portion of her life thinking she was among the last people. I think, in a sense, we all are prone to that. Hence the nice long list of apocalyptic thoughts from across the span of human history (A Brief History of the Apocalypse).

We are either prone to some sickened wishful thinking that we are the ultimate humans (in the sense of "last", not greatest necessarily) or some fear that we are somehow responsible for the last act. We are paying the bill set aside during our forebears time or we are the ones who "finally screwed it all up".

But possibly moreso, that we are going to see some fundamental change because everything has gotten so abhorrent.

Who knows what our collective consciousness is on this?

I know I'm prone to occasional bouts of "eschatology". I believe in global climate change and recognize there's a possibility we may be acting too slowly to make the necessary changes to save ourselves. I believe that we are at or near peak oil and may soon see our economic structures start to decay as we lose access to ever-increasing volumes of this cheap energy source. And I wonder if, indeed, we are seeing a massive turning point in how we will live, or at least how future generations will live.

I also recognize in myself this need for near constant "change". I grow bored with what is around. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was a "hard reset" to reality and we all had to start over or had to survive some new way? A great leveling of the playing field as the world is overturned for everyone?

In summation:

It's great when a lyric makes you think. And a well-crafted lyric in a great musical surround is thing of beauty. And this is a lyric that provides near endless opportunities for me think.

Science F

Well, apparently the folks at SciFi networks wanted a brand all their own so they are changing their name (CNN Linky):

But the funniest part of the article, IMHO, was this quote:

"The last thing we want to do is alienate our core audience," he added. With the
new name, shows such as "Galactica" can be exposed to a wider audience, one not
scared away by all that "Sci Fi" connotes ("space and aliens and the future," in
Howe's words).

Uhhhhh, isn't that PRECISELY what "Galactica" IS?

Personally I lost interest in the SciFi channel when they dropped MST3K years ago and stopped showing real sci fi movies in preference to their own "Sci Fi Originals" which appear to be made specifically to be mocked on "The Soup".

Doomed to the "Long Tail"

Powerlaw distribution of blog popularity explained!

http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Simply phenomenal.

Sad, but wonderful.

OSS Revolution?

A friend of mine, we’ll call him Dr. P., is a fellow chemist (so you know he’s intrinsically trustworthy) and he has been a good evangelist for Linux and the OSS revolution. Open Source Software and freeware seems like such a great idea and Linux sounds like a great, robust operating system.

So when I recently upgraded and got a laptop (Vista OS) I felt I could spare my old Dell desktop as a “testbed” for Linux (Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope) and test driving free OSS.

So, with significant help from Dr. P., I wiped my old harddrive (I had previously backed everything up so I could still use old files and stuff on my new laptop) and I turned it into a “Linux Box”.

Only problem is; I’m a neo-luddite when it comes to things computer. I like to fantasize about being geeky enough to do Unix and command-line type stuff. I like being able to type commands in and make the computer do stuff, but there’s a big part of me that is NOT an “under the hood” kinda guy.

I am my dad’s worst nightmare. He was old-school and could keep a car running forever because he loved to get under the hood and make it run. I, however, could barely find the gas-cap (don’t get me started about a particularly embarrassing event in my past as I was driving a car in Norway that I literally could NOT get the gas cap off at the filling station.)

So turning a former Windows machine into a Linux box was probably not the wisest move for someone like me who gets easily pissed off upon frustration. Because Linux and OSS, no matter how “user friendly” (like Kubuntu), is clearly a Swedish term for “frustration”.

Then Dr. P. sent me this excellent essay from 2008 that discusses free software usability!
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability

The keys to me appear to be Items #1 and #8 in the list. It is an immutable law of nature that “there ain’t no free lunch” (I believe that Newton or someone came up with it, it’s probably in the Principia somewhere.) For neo-quasi-luddites like myself for whom the computer is first and foremost a TOOL and not an end unto itself, I just want to turn the system on, push some buttons and get my results. I don’t want to sudo any-fucking-thing. I just wanna make it work. Now if I were a L337 H4x0r or some such I would have put in immense hours “learning” this stuff. A lot of work put into it. I would “pay dearly” for the skills to program the computer and code the hell out stuff. Make the computer do my bidding like the little whore it is. OR I’d simply PAY someone to code stuff and make the computer do my bidding with minimal effort on my part.

One or the other. No freebies.

For people like me OSS is the ultimate in cheating. I am way too lazy to “learn” how the system works at that level, nor am I willing to pay someone for their efforts in programming.

And for that I feel bad. So I realize that Linux and OSS will likely always be, for me, a back-up curiosity. I’ll play with it, but I will still, when the chips are down, pay for software that is professionally produced.

I mean, to be fair, I want to get paid for my work, so if someone came along and made free versions of what I make my living from I think I’d secretly hope and pray people who used it would suffer inconvenience of some sort.

There’s often a reason “free” stuff is free.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like Microsoft. I think Office 2007 is an amazing example of people who have taken something usable and turned it into shit. They trained us up over about a decade as to how these software packages worked and then scrapped it all. That means more “learning”, which as I stated earlier, when it comes to software I don’t want to do.

But in the end at least the interface for professional software is “consistent” and “reasonably stable” (sorta kinda). It does what it’s supposed to do most of the time. They could improve, sure. But then I’d have to pay more I suppose. I already feel like I pay too much for shit software, but at least I’m paying something for someone’s work.

So in the end I’m going to pay to play. It’s only fair. I want to “act such that the maxim of my actions should be universal law”, and in this case that universal law is there ain’t no free lunch. For me or for you.

Science Conference Presentation Classification

I just returned from a scientific conference. It was one for the chemists in the company I work for but I noted it was similar to other conferences I’ve been to. I’ve been fascinated over the years as I sit through more presentations. I’ve began to notice, as we all do, that presentations given at conferences appear to break down into certain categories. I suspect similar categorizations are available somewhere else on the internet already. But that won’t stop me from posting my own

Classification Scheme for Science Conference Presentations

Slogsentation: A presentation delivered relatively slowly, without any discernible inflection, near monotone, few breaks, very little in the way of organization, and almost always delivered just at the edge of the microphone’s ability to pick up the sound

Umsentation: A presentation with a density of “um” of >5 ums/20 actual words

Hypersentation: A presentation delivered at maximum speed. Accompanied by 1millisecond/slide

Hyposentation: A promise of actual information which immediately goes very deep into the topic without providing anything like background. Thereby rendering it to be of interest to only 3 people on the entire planet, only one of which is in the room at the time, that being the presenter.

Neutron Presentation: Maximum words on a slide coupled with Hypersentation

Recursive Presentation: Three slides forward, one slide back. Repeat.

Acrosentation: A presentation dominated by acronyms which are never spelled out.

Masturbsentation: Given near the end of the conference showing pictures of a small clique having fun or being “silly” earlier at the conference as if everyone knows the people in the pictures and that these are really fun and wacky people. This is the way to recognize the “really important and interesting people”, as opposed to the people you hung out with.

Bait & Switch: Title indicates technological information will be presented but this is dispensed with in about 2 slides followed by 40+ slides of marketing analysis.

Nobel Laureate

I am from a small town in Central Illinois. It is a town of about 11,000 people. We have about 3 churches for every resident, we have 2 Christian Bookstores and one used book store. The closest thing to a new bookstore is the WalMart on the edge of town which has single-handedly destroyed the downtown area. And while you are likely to see a sign for which girls softball team has won the latest state high school series, or you will be able to read all about Lincoln and his work as a circuit lawyer who stopped often in our town, you will have a damn hard time finding out that we are the hometown of a NOBEL LAUREATE.

I go home to visit the parents and get things done for them. I have no other real connection other than that with my hometown anymore. So I meander around the town trying to re-connect to the town. But it is a sad state of things to know I grew up in this town, spent the first 15 years of my life here and I never knew we were the home of Ed Purcell who won the Physics Nobel in 1952. He was a pioneer in nuclear magnetic resonance and radar at MIT. But I didn't know that until I was living in Boston reading a history of radar. I find out my dad knew Purcell's family.

You can come to this charming farm town and learn all about Lincoln and his "writ of quietus" he requested for the noisy pigs that lived under the courthouse while he was a lawyer. But you would think having a Nobel Laureate son was some sort of dirty secret.

The Fabled Writ of Quietus apparently also applied to talking about my hometown's addition to the world of science. Funny, sad, and it makes me wonder about America's priorities in relation to science.

Surveys

Before I begin my insightful commentary today I’d like you to take a quick survey. It will only take a second and it will help me as n00b blogger better craft my blog to suit your needs.

{Insert Survey Code Here}

Thanks! That’s fantastic. Today I’d like to talk about goddamn surveys. I really don’t think industry “pings” people enough on a nearly minute-by-minute basis in order to present the consumer with the best possible product ever seen in the history of humanity!

Interestingly enough you’ve been randomly selected to take a survey on your general impressions of that last paragraph! It will only take a minute.


{Insert Survey Code Here}

Thanks! Your input is greatly appreciated. You know with the advent of massive real-time feedback we are standing on the precipice of unparalleled advances in customer satisfaction! I’ve never felt more appreciated by the faceless drones or automated computerized phone-answering systems as I do now. When I’m presented with the chance to tell the monotonic mush-mouth who sits on the other end of the phone line how great their company is or how they could improve, I’m fairly drooling at the prospect of answering yet another survey!

I dunno about you but just knowing that companies care enough to enact surveys which they clearly never bother to follow-through on (hence most people end up feeling even more isolated from the service providers these days), it brings me hope that one day our country will have off-shored all manufacturing and skilled technical jobs and that will free up sufficient bandwidth that we, as a country, can become 300 million fast-food workers and survey tenders. (Oh and CEO’s, because we as Americans know that the only jobs safe from being outsourced are the fearless leaders of industry whose Jekyll and Hyde act cause them to simultaneously gut the spirit of any given company for the expedient of cost AND demand that ever increasing levels of consumer satisfaction information be gathered.

Here’s an idea! Why not spend LESS on asking me how good your fucked up version of “service” is and spend MORE money on actually providing…uh…SERVICE!

Remember, just asking me how much I love your product will NOT increase my love of your substandard, crappy plastic shit supported by dull-witted automatons in “Customer Service”.

One last thing; Are you willing to take a brief survey on how you feel about this post?

Soli Gaussian Gloria!

A friend of mine is an author who, upon completion of certain difficult tasks or after a day of particularly good writing likes to gladly shout Soli Deo Gloria (“Glory to God Alone”) as a sort of thanks to God for his success.

It got me thinking. When I was a “believer” I did a similar thing. Whenever anything good happened I made sure to say a little prayer of thanks to God. I am a sufferer of OCD, so in terms of religion I got the double joy of a little thing called “Scrupulosity”. I obsessively worried about thinking the wrong thing or letting some blasphemy into my head and offending God. On the flip side I wanted to ensure that God was aware of my thankfulness for whatever good had happened. Often times more in hopes that God would be pleased and continue to “bless me” with future benefits.

I have never been particularly troubled by the “Problem of Evil” in that I could “buy” the apologetics and justifications for why God would allow bad events to happen. Of course I didn’t dig too deeply into that reasoning in that if God could forestall a “bad event” is it an act of “omission” to not act?

But I must admit sometimes I had difficulty understanding why God would allow certain bad things to happen. But again that was something I didn’t think into that deeply, preferring not to offend him with a possible blasphemous thought.

But all through this God seemed rather silent on the matter. I was alone in my musings.

When I was able to finally let go of “Belief” I did so precisely because it appeared to me that God was amazingly silent and, indeed, as in most of life “good” happens about as consistently as “bad”. Life is lived in a statistical distribution. One tail is the extremely bad, one tail is the extremely good and shades in between.

Sure you can “bias” the events by not taking extraordinary chances with your actions, but that works both ways. You can stay in the middle path and avoid excessive bad and excessive good.

God was merely an “unverifiable factor” that I perceived as shifting the distribution around me while I held still. One day I might find myself in the “bad tail” and the next in the “good”. But no amount of praying, no matter how obsessively, guaranteed a statistical shift in the outcome.

Past performance was no guarantee of future returns in the “Pray to Pay” scheme.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still an OCD sufferer and like most people I hold ridiculous beliefs that are unverifiable. But God was, thankfully for me, one of those beliefs I could let go. When you hold as many silly beliefs as an OCD sufferer/Scrupolositist, being able to let go of one is a “true blessing”.

So, indeed, Soli Gaussian Gloria. To the statistical distribution of random events all the “glory” (and all the “blame”) go.

Now when something good happens I can realize that it was a combination of my choices (unconscious or conscious) and the random distribution of timing and events. And of equal importance, when something bad happens I don’t have to sit and wonder how an all-loving being who controls space and time could let this happen to me.

Soli Gaussian Gloria!

Introduction

I am, like most bloggers, using this outlet to spew whatever I'm interested in spewing. Regardless of the fact that no one will ever read it or note it, I'll type it up and throw it into the aether.

At least here I can post images and graphs and commentary on whatever I want to comment on.

I've got friends whose blogs are followed and read and I realize mine won't be one of those. But that's fine. I usually don't have anything worth even thinking about. But isn't that what the blog-o-sphere is all about? Pointless postings to nowhere?