The Event Horizon of Anxiety

There aren't any personal-level events that strike me with an existential terror.  As an adult male human of the large, imposing, American, hairy sub-types, I don't worry about physical violence, accidental death, accidental maiming, or much else.  I don't worry about these because should they happen, I will not be the initiator and thus these events will be out of my control.  There's nothing to worry about in events I can't control for what I think are obvious reasons, and need no explaining. 

There are a few impersonal-level events that do strike with an existential terror, on a fairly regular basis and while I recognize the irrationality of this fear since the events will be far outside of my ability to help or control, I still think about them.  Surviving a nuclear exchange is one such event, and I agree with my father's words to 8 year old me, "if there is going to be a nuclear war, I would prefer that you and your brothers not live to see the world after."  That was an interesting trip to the guidance counselor after a duck and cover drill.

One of my favorite movies details the after effects of another sort of event that wakes me up at night.  The simple premise is this: sometimes humans are too smart for their own good, and sometimes we experiment with shit that could result in a bad event, the sort of bad event that instantly causes us, our planet, or possibly even the universe to just go away.  I'm smart enough to have gone further with my education but as a young genius I was unmotivated and that might be for the best because I'd probably treat the LHC as the biggest Nerf gun and mini black holes as foam darts.  In other words, I'm smart enough to know exactly how crazy I am for worrying about this, but I'm still just a genius who worries about one or two things. 

I was reading about some ideas some other smart people have for detecting the presence of other dimensions through the detection of mini black holes using the LHC and science to do sciencey things when the anxious voice in my head said, "this is how the universe ends, if you can bend or break a fundamental rule of the universe and then everything goes blip."  I thought about this for a minute, my mouth full of coffee and my brain full of stupid.  Then I remembered that the universe is really big.  Like, really really really big.  We know that the universe is big because look up at night, that just goes on for effectively forever.  If that alone isn't enough to remind you that no matter how smart you are, you're still just a bag of meat on a rock, then you're probably a priest who is utterly confident of your place in some imaginary plan.  The fucking arrogance of thought that the idea of a greater plan to life just irritates the ever-loving shit right of me.  Seriously, if I'm constipated I'll just think about "God's plan for you" and then I'm destroying porcelain.  That's the worst type of consolation, there's a plan for all suffering so that makes it ok because you're meant to experience life this way, starving orphan or crack-addicted newborn or mildly inconvenienced middle-aged person.  I'll be right back.

Anyway, I was describing how I logiced my way out of anxiety.  The point is that the universe is big, there millions or billions of galaxies, and those galaxies have lots of stars, and some of those stars must have planets, and some of those planets will have life, and some of that life will be multi-cellular, and some of that multi-cellular life will be investigating the universe just as we are.  Since the universe is around 18 billion years old as far as we can tell, and our planet is only about 4 billion years old (suck it, creationists), and since there may be very old black holes which may or may not have started as stars, there exists the possibility that there is a much older civilization of intelligent enough creatures to build a Large Hadron Collider-equivalent.  The universe is so vast, ooo you are so big, that this possibility is really more of a certainty.  So my fears of some genius like me who wants to play Nerf tag with a particle accelerator and some micro black holes accidentally destroying this existence are stupid because if that were possible someone would have done it by now. 

Now all I have to worry about is some sort of localized disruption of the time-space continuum rendering this section of time-space so wibbly-wobbly that we can not exist within it.  That is much more comforting.

Of course the unlikeliest event of all would be the arrival of an alien super-intelligence and the co-opting of all life on this planet, but that's probably not going to happen and would be essentially the same as the events of the previous paragraph.  I am so relieved.

Philosophy in Comic Form

This recent Scenes from a Multiverse reminded me of Action Philosophers.  I should reread my collections, and maybe my philosophy texts.

Coincidence...or Fate?

Having just seen (500) Days of Summer, I found it amusing that, in the space of a city block, I pass a man smoking pot in the shadows of the bushes by his stoop, and then an office building wherein the security guard was watching Weeds with his laptop.

I don't believe in fate because it interferes too much with free will. I do believe in Infinity and Serendipity. The first being the sum total of all occurrences, and the second being the chance that any one of those occurrences happening to you. You can affect both through your own actions. A job, or love/heartache, isn't likely to find you if you sit in your apartment all day. None of this is particularly original, nor does it explain why I was the only one laughing at more than six scenes of this movie. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and I was surprised by how much I had felt in my own life on both sides of the relationship. Damn good job.

I would recommend this movie to any man, but not necessarily to any couple. I am not sure how well this would resonate with a woman seeking solace. Anyone married to their college girlfriend would not appreciate this the way I did. Also, such people cheated at life. Yeah, I said it.

Western Thought Wednesday: Berkeley and That Other Guy

That Other Guy said, "I refute Berkeley thus." He then kicked a rock. Berkeley has yet to be impressed by this comment. I wonder what he would think of today's XKCD.

BBC Needs Some Proofreaders

This is exactly why you have proofreaders:

The Death Zone

Expedition organisers only learned of the avalanche after a group of climbers arrived back at the mountain's base camp on Saturday evening.

The mountaineers included Koreans, Pakistanis, Nepalis, Dutchman and Italians, reports say, but exact details remain unclear.

They at an altitude known as the Death Zone, where oxygen levels are not high enough to sustain life.

I keep writing all these really awful jokes here, but eleven people died doing something I will never attempt and I am trying to reconnect with the human race, so I keep deleting the jokes. The view must be amazing, and all the more so for the struggle.

Poeticly Licensed Justice

Life goes on in a rather similar fashion to much as it ever has.

I am trying my hand at wingnut poetry. The above sentence is a good example of pointless complexity. It could say everything it says with only three words: Life goes on.

The Debates Rage On

12. Truth

Wikipedia's entry for "truth" should be applauded for its cleanliness and concision; it touches on schools of thought like constructivist theory and philosophers like Kant, then directs users to those respective pages. But the battle behind the scenes is much uglier, running through 12 archived pages with subject headings that range from "truth in jurisprudence" and "the semantic theory" to "Oi! You SIMPLIFY!!!!!" and "Please Kill Me Now!" The behind-the-scenes discussion captures Wikipedia's tendency to collapse into autobiography. "When you trace out all availible information from science and experiences," Jiohdi says, beginning a long take on a personal approach to truth, "they all trace back to one core understanding, namely, that everything perceived is generated by the perceiver and is thus not a completely reliable guide to reality nor truths about reality." "These," Rick Norwood responds, "are beliefs discovered by most people in their sophomore year."

Too bad The Great Orange One's page didn't make it to the list. That cobag can't even get decent ratings with the Onion.

WEstern Thought Wednesday: Changing Realities

"We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time," Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee. "There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed."

Lt.Gen. Hayden is being pretty clear in this statement. He is saying that waterboarding is bad and considered torture, unless you really need the information and then reality distorts and waterboarding can no longer be regarded torture until reality undistorts.

Of course, if you are a group of individuals that like to sit together in your gym shorts smoking fine Midwestern hash while singing songs and pontificating on the nature of laws and legalities and how a can we really define a country by some line on a map that isn't there when you actually go to the border and pick up coke from that dude on the other side of the invisible line that only really separates our minds, man, then you might come up with this sort of defense. It depends what the meaning of is is. I mean, well, you know what I mean, right? I mean, like, come on, bro. How can we be breaking the law if we don't agree on what the law says? You say waterboarding is torture and I say it isn't. Let's just agree to disagree and go get ripped to the tits, broseph!

Or let's not. We see the same shitty excuse on parade against the global consensus of scientists on climate change. The Bush administration's behavior is killing what's left of our democracy. They have decided time and again that they do not need the Constitution of the United States to govern their actions. Every single time anyone has acted to limit the rampantly unethical and illegal actions of this insane Executive, they have countered with nothing more than a legal-speak version of "No. NONONONONONONONO!" This does not set a dangerous precedent for the next president, this destroys our government. I am not only worried about Bush being able to wiretap every phone in the country, I am worried about Obama or Clinton or McCain or Romney or the 46th through 52nd presidents doing the same thing. I am worried about every following president making signing statements that nullify every law passed. I am worried about a Congress that refuses to stop this nonsense. I am worried about a Judiciary that presides over the erosion of the constitutional checks and balances. I am worried about our future as a country.

Filosophy Friday: Fortunately Not Fecal

I was reading XKCD and checking out the t-shirt store because I don't have unique t-shirts for each day of the year yet and I clicked some link to a story about magic as it relates to computer hardware. I remembered a couple of stories wherein I received a gift of insight from the universe. Both of these were totally accidental, as the best insight is, and about as mundane as finding Jesus in a smudge of ink on a paper jam in the office copier.²

During one of the years I took off from my regularly scheduled college visits, I worked in a bowling alley. I was a pinsetter mechanic and spent a lot of time digging random shit out of the jammed machines. Most of the random shit was bowling related like shoes, broken balls, pieces of broken balls, pieces of carpetting, bowling shirts attached to very flat people, etc.

I was walking behind the machines one Monday morning and found something truly extraordinary. A bowling pin had broken and been spit out of the back of lane 5. This was not a rare occurrence but the manner in which the pin had broken was. The core of the pin had been ripped out by the plastic ring on the bottom of the pin. These rings keep the pin from developing a tilt and are flush with the plastic coating of the pin. The wood used in bowling pins is solid maple heartwood, one of the strongest and most resilient woods. Maple is heavy and dense. Something had managed to grip the plastic ring with enough force in just the right way to avoid breaking the ring while also ripping out a cylinder of wood along with the ring. If the wood had been ripped out along a glue seam, that would be evidence of a bad pin. The core had been ripped out in such a way as it split the pieces of wood through the center of the wood. This was not torn along a fault in the wood or a knot or something like that, the tear was just shredding right through something designed to take repeated hits by an 18 pound ball at high speeds. There is nothing in the pinsetter machine that should have been able to break a pin in this manner. It would take a specially designed machine to break a pin this way. In short, I was staring at two pieces of a physical impossibility. If the impossible happens than it must be possible. I fit the two pieces together and then bashed them together until the core went back in and gave it to my philosophy professor the next semester I was back attending classes. We had a little chat and he said that I had learned something very important. If I remembered this and did my homework, I might be able to pass his classes quite successfully.

The next incident happened at the ruins of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco but started in a seminar class on Plato. I had chosen to lead a discussion of the Socratic dialogue Euthyphro and we were discussing the nature of certain immutable terms and concepts in the universe. We were having a really lively debate about the concepts of good, evil, holy, righteousness and all that and somebody made the claim that you couldn't have a concept of good without God and how God, by definition, couldn't exist without good. We were kinda stuck on this point because she wasn't willing to concede this point to move on to the discussion the rest of the class was having about immutable concepts.³ I was trying to come up with some description and explanation that would suit her when I said, "Look, I think we can all agree that God is just an enormous jellyfish with a diamond in the center!"

Everyone in the class looked at me in stunned silence, including the professor. "The diamond represents all these eternal, external concepts and the jellyfish is just the incorporeal body of God that has no real-" and that is where everyone started laughing at me. I was trying to make a point that while God can not exist without these concepts, God likewise can not change those concepts without also changing the nature of God. This explanation did not have the desired effect. Everyone agreed that it was the best discussion we had all semester and that they learned quite a bit⁴. The professor said that he had never heard anyone explain God in such a fashion before. He also said that he hoped he never did again. While it is interesting imagery, it is also distractingly odd which does not help in educating.

About a year later, one of my Brother of Indeterminate Number and I were wandering around the Sutro Baths. Sutro Baths was a complex of public pools built by a rich guy named Sutro, aptly enough. Some of these pools were fed directly by the ocean which is pretty nifty. There are concrete ruins by the beach and melted bits of stained glass buried in the hillside of the cove where the baths were built. I recommend it for a picnic. My Brother of Indeterminate Number and I had walked down to the water to watch the sun go down and I saw an odd pink-ish grey rock at the surf line. It was smooth and almost perfectly hemispherical, about 18 inches in diameter and somewhat translucent. I looked at it for a while and figured that it was some leftover glass or something from the baths. I ran up to it in between waves. It was even odder looking up close so I poked it. The thing quivered and I yelled and jumped about four feet in the air. I was back beyond the surf line when I realized it was an enormous jellyfish.


Photo found at Shifting Baselines Blog

God likes to hang out on beaches in San Francisco, apparently.

1 I apologize for that title. It has been a long short week.
2 That is yet another dig at Harriet Myers. Finding Jebus in an office? Yawn.
3 She was, however, quite willing to just erase arrows she had earlier written a diagram of Kantian ethics that had previously represented some point. When fulsome asked her about the relevance and meaning of that error after she made some other claim, she just erased it like that was a complete explanation. Don't leave holes in your arguments because he'll drive a truck through them.
4 Mostly about how I think, but that is still something.

Bleg? and Finders Keepers versus Cultural History

A friend of mine needs help with her dissertation. She needs people to take a survey about public opinion regarding the use of bones in Archaeology. If you have the time, please help her out by taking the survey. Please only fill out one survey and please be serious, it's only her future on the line.

I was flipping channels on the RSS the other day and I saw something on the Discovery feed about some people finding an estimated $500 Million in silver and gold coins. The discoverers, Odyssey Marine Exploration (OME), claim that the find was in international waters and refer to the wreck as the Black Swan. They are keeping the location secret for obvious reasons. The Spanish government is claiming that the coins must have come from one of their ships sunk some time in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries. As an anthropology student, I found this situation to be an interesting ethical dilemma. There is a substantial dollar value associated with the find but there is also a substantial historical value. For the sake of argument, we will allow that OME found the wreck in international waters. We will also allow that it is definitely a Spanish ship. International salvage law is a little murky in this situation, if you'll pardon the pun, so let us also assume that international salvage law states that derelicts are the finder's. The UK's Merchant Shipping Act 1995 says that all property remains the property of the original owners. If the wreck were in British waters, I guess this would apply and the wreck would belong to the original owners. These owners are long dead and I don't know if the ownership would transfer down 2-400 years. This point is further muddied because the cargo may have been owned by someone else, the Spanish government for example. We have two sets of regulations that are allowing each side to claim the treasure as their own. OME did all the work in finding the wreck and deserve the fruits of their labor. Spain has a cultural heritage to protect and possible legal protections. The location of the wreck greatly influences the argument. At what point does a cultural heritage override a salvage right? Does twelve miles really matter?

In the US, we have NAGPRA. NAGPRA has been helping Native Americans regain their looted past. All federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding, like Beloit College, are required to abide by the act. Complying with the act can take years and decades for some collections, simply because they are so damn large. These collections contain a fascinating wealth of information on cultures that the US did everything it could to destroy^*. The act allows for a period of study after a repatriation request, as long as the cultural connection can be established. 12 to 18,000 years is a long time and many cultures rose and fell in North America long before Columbus strolled along. Kennewick Man (KM) was found in less than ideal circumstances in Kennewick, Washington and has stirred up an endless controversy with several native nations claiming a cultural connection. There is a lot more to this controversy than that but I am interested in the border between a group's historical and mythological claims and the scientific community's claims. There is a lot to learn from KM because he is so old and so odd, for lack of a better term. I met one of the Army Corps of Engineers curators of KM when I was still in school and she was fascinated by the find and frustrated by the legal wranglings. The early period of human exploration of the New World is largely unknown. An almost complete skeleton can tell an archaeologist a lot about the context of its life,specifically about this period in human history. However, if the Umatilla's can claim that KM is an ancestor, then NAGPRA will require the remains be returned to the tribe. The Umatilla's claim may or may not be valid, I am not a judge nor am I an expert in their history or their legal case, but if it is should the scientists and researchers simply hand over such a valuable find without and adequate period of study? Where does the scientific value of a find override the cultural claims of a people?

* An issue for another time.

Needs, Wants and the Road

I am biking more and more these days. I managed to put 68 miles into three excursions last week. I am going to hit 100 miles this week. There is not much to do while biking¹ but think about life. Life is pretty much all I think about at any point in the day, but I am not unusual in this activity. The lack of compelling distractions contributes to my mental clarity while traveling. I don't own a car² so I can delve fairly far into myself while riding the bus or train for hours at a time.³

The last few days I have been thinking about women. The universe tends to throw them my way when I need to be reminded of something. Kim was a government-oriented redhead I met in a bar in Adams Morgan. The line was so good, one of my brothers actually shook my hand. Needless to say, it can never be used again. Kim and I went on four dates over two months which is rather lame but she had international travel assignments and I was unemployed. It might have worked out better between us if I had been employed at one of the many jag-off jobs available in the federal sector. The whole experience reminded me that while coasting on savings was fun and allowed me lots of time to write and meet ladies, it was no kind of life for me.

Leah and I met at a party. I quit my dead-end, low-paying waiting job two weeks later. That job was holding me back and earning me a whole lot of nothing. Two weeks after quitting that job, I got a call from my current employer and never looked back.

Kathleen⁴ came out of the blue sky and by the time that was over, I knew I had to stop talking a good game and start playing one. I am still working on this one.

The most recent woman in my life, however brief, reminded me that I get what I need and don't need what I want. I need something to help drive me or I stall out and watch endless Law & Order episodes. I need the motivation more than I want her or anyone else. In short, I need an unfulfilled want.

1 Besides curse out the idiots who refuse to obey the rules of the road in my head.

2 Give me a non-polluting electric car and an infrastructure to use it and the road trip is back, baby.

3 Tuning out is a valuable skill when you are broke and have 20 hours to wait in an airport for your connecting flight, as is being able to sleep anywhere in any position.

4 Different one.

Mix Tapes vs Mix CDs

Honestly? I never made a mix tape. Maybe it is easier to make a CD but so fucking what? Isn't it the thought that counts? That lesson, like so much else I was taught as a child, no longer translates to today. Too bad I am too stubborn to do anything but continue in my own way.

I am sitting in my apartment with a recently fixed but still buggy computer, some Hofbrau Maibock, the Silver Jews album "American Water" and a new pair of boxers.

The thing about Sisyphus, fulsome will probably get all fucking panty twisted for this one, is that Sisyphus won. He fucking won. I get it and maybe other people do, too, but that is fucking immaterial to my situation. It is also irrelevant. So is the materialness of the relevance. How could any revelation ever be material? That is like having your rebirth to the glorious majesty of Christ in a law office. I mean, judaic God is everywhere and all but that is really stretching the limit of credulity, not to mention faith.