The Happy Button

There’s a thought experiment of mine that has always kind of bothered me, and I think I finally worked out my take on it today. That thought experiment is the “happy button.” Simply put: Imagine you have a button, which has a wireless link to an electrode in your brain. When you push this button, you are happy. Why should you do anything besides push the button?

Note that the happy button has several differences from “an IV full of heroin.” There are no physiological side effects and no withdrawal symptoms. Also, you can push the button as much as you want with no supply issues, so you’ll never have to worry about getting more. Finally, the button has no tolerance effect, except insofar as happiness itself does. It produces the same sensation of perfect happiness every time you push the button. I want to stipulate these things so that the heart of the matter is exposed. The question comes down to value systems—is the most important thing in life to be happy?

The reason I have struggled with this highly hypothetical scenario is that I can only answer part of the question. I strongly feel that I would not want to simply push the button. At the same time, I’m not sure why. (If we’re endowing the button with amazing happiness-giving properties, my vague emotional objections would presumably wilt away once I pushed it. Thus, “because I feel icky about it” is again, not a reason to vote against the button.) I like to be able to articulate my thoughts, it makes me feel clever. Yet I also believe that people ought to look after their own happiness as long as it does not harm others, which the button does not. I will use arguments like this in reference to homosexuality and drug legalization. I have said that modern society’s high divorce rate is far preferable to people remaining in unhappy marriages. For someone so opposed to a happiness button, I frequently make reference to happiness as a cardinal value.

Perhaps we can solve this problem with recourse to morality and ethics. Is it wrong to push the happiness button? Unfortunately, I can’t think of a moral system that I support that would consider it so. Years ago on this blog I brought up my issues with divine command ethics, so let’s just discard that right now. Utilitarianism would ask me to judge which of my actions would produce the most happiness. In this case, well, I can theoretically make myself so happy that I would be well in the right. If we judge that I can’t be made that happy, then we run into an issue of whether it is ever moral to pursue my own happiness. After all, it’s highly likely that I—as a middle-class American—could send all my money to the third-world poor and achieve more utilitarian happiness than I would by, say, buying myself Cane’s Chicken. (Oh man, do they not have Cane’s where you are? It’s like, better than Chick-Fil-A and you don’t feel guilty about gay people afterwards.) While I certainly respect that it’s a good thing to engage in charity work, I worry about a principle that suggests I totally retard my own well-being until everyone is at least as well-off as I am. We also have deontological ethics, which aren’t quite as helpful with easy-to-apply rules and formulas. Our best bet is Immanuel Kant’s “act according to that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a universal law.” So, “would it be wrong to press the button?” can be transformed to “would it be wrong if everyone pressed the button?” Everyone pressing the button just makes everyone in the whole world happy. Again, that doesn’t seem so bad.

I could also try to make an appeal to something more than happiness. One character takes this appraoch near the end of Huxley’s Brave New World:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

This is the most attractive option so far. It certainly seems very good, at least on some emotional level. Yet, somehow, I’ve never quite been able to buy it. The Savage seems to imply, after all, that he isn’t happy with hedonism. He speaks about all of his wants, desires not provided to him by the society he is being offered. This isn’t an argument for his position, it’s simply a statement of his position. Certainly, the Savage here is essentially rejecting the happiness button, but he doesn’t really explain why—just that he is. You’ve helped illustrate the position, my friend, but not gotten me any closer to understanding the impulse. I don’t like vague emotional sentiments underlying my philosophical opinions. I like to be able to write long blog posts about my motivations, you know?

I started to find a way out of this conundrum when I started to imagine what life would be like with this button. Eventually, even with the button, I would get hungry or thirsty. Happy people still need these vital biological inputs, after all. Like it or not, you’re made out of meat. Does the button remove the desire for food and water? If yes, then it will eventually kill me, and I have a very good reason not to press it. If no, then it can’t necessarily keep me happy; eventually, I will become unhappy with having not eaten, etc. And, when I go to find food, I’ll need to either hunt and gather for it or participate in the modern economy, which requires that I work. (Or, it requires that someone else work on my behalf—which is unsustainable enough to mount a moral argument against the button.) In other words, a being bounded by physical limitations simply cannot both survive and be happy all the time. Some thought experiments rely on simplifications, but we can see that this one actually has faulty premises which lead to a contradiction.

In the end, this was a pretty stupid thing to think about. Did I really just conclude that I shouldn’t use the happiness button because there can be no such thing? Why not stipulate away the issues, like I did at the beginning? To answer this, let’s look carefully at the original question: “Why should you do anything besides push the button?” My question was, given bountiful happiness for low effort, are there reasonable grounds to do something else? The limiting case of this argument is limitless happiness and no effort—and what we discovered is that there are still human needs left over. I used hunger and thirst, but humans have plenty of other desires—for risk, for freedom, for goodness, etc. Being happy may mean that you don’t want to act on those desires, but it doesn’t remove those desires.

So yes, there is an excellent reason to do something besides be happy: we, as human beings, want more out of life than happiness. In fact, I never wondered about the morality of using the button at all. A properly balanced person can seek out their moments of happiness and truly enjoy them—while the hedonist can’t, because their happiness is self-limiting. In the end, without all the unhappy parts of life, we’re left without any context or substance to fill our moments of happiness with.

Myers-Briggs and Me

A few weeks back I was talking to a friend of mine (yo Madeline) and she brought up the Myers-Briggs personality test, which is an innocuous enough topic to bring up. I remember taking it—years ago—and being interested in the results. I read over the different categories, thought it was interesting, felt that it described me. But when Madeline brought it up, I had a different emotional reaction than the default I strive for, which is enthusiastic engagement. For reasons I didn’t really understand at the time, I said “Ehhhh. It’s kinda bullshit.”

Alright, so, why did I say that? Do I have a problem with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), on psychological grounds? I’m not a psychologist, not by a long shot. I do have a few objections on purely systematic grounds. Let’s say we test four people for a trait, and give them a percentile score. This trait could one of the four MBTI variables, or in reality it could be pretty much anything. Anyway, everyone with a 50% or below, we are going to put in group A, and we will call them Type A people. Everyone above that threshold will be Type B people. Our four subjects score a 5%, a 45%, a 55%, and a 95%. That makes sense. For most traits, people will fall into a normal Gaussian distribution, a bell curve. We expect most people should be in the middle of the scale, because that’s what the middle of the scale means. However, because of the way we bin our results, Mr 5% and Mrs 45% are treated identically by our test. In fact, Mrs 45% is more like Mr 55%, yet they belong to two different types—and in Myers-Briggs, these types are supposed to form a binary opposition! In addition, if the standard deviation of the distribution is too low—that is, if people are really clustered around 50%--then most people will be just a few percent off, which is probably within the error of the test. If your test grade is +/- 5%, and you score 46%, Myers-Briggs has wholly failed to sort you into a category, despite the fact that these categories are defined to be essentially bipolar.

That’s a pretty real objection, but it doesn’t address the issue much. After all, just because the bins are too large doesn’t invalidate the idea of the bins. In addition, it may be that people aren’t actually normally distributed in the Myers-Briggs traits. (Although you can check the Wikipedia page; they are.) I also strongly suspect the feeling of “oh yes, this is me” that people (including yours truly) get from the descriptions. I just took a Myers-Briggs test, and got INTJ (but with only “slight” preference on the last two, so, that illustrates my above point). INTJ is a pretty classically “nerdy” type, and it is what I usually score. I think I’ve also gotten INFJ or INTP or something before, but that’s not really important. Let’s look at the first paragraph of the description:

To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know.

This boils down to “INTJs are smart at particular things, but not at everything. They have an accurate self-image of how much they know.” The first is pretty much universal, while the second is the sort of thing that everyone would like to believe about themselves, which to me smacks of the empty vagaries of newspaper horoscopes. . The description goes on to be more specific, of course, and in many respects it does seem to describe me (“Typical INTJ career choices are in the sciences and engineering”). However, it also identifies me as Ensign Ro from The Next Generation, and I never liked Ro. So, I have to object on Star Trek grounds.

So, I took another test. This time I got INFP, with both of those last ones fairly strong. Reading the INFP, I’m struck by how well this one describes me as well (“never lose their sense of wonder” “switch from fantasy to reality and back” “like Dr Bashir from Deep Space 9, isn’t he the greatest”). Interestingly, it does so by talking orthogonally to INTJ. That is, whereas INTJ focused on things like, how I go about doing work and how I formulate problems, the INFP description focuses on my moral sense and my attitude towards the universe. These don’t contradict at all. But if I can be –FP and –TJ at the same time, how are we placing these in binary opposition? Again, it’s a test that seems to describe me, but I’m not convinced that their classification is actually revealing anything.

At this point I’m being overly harsh, just like I was in my conversation with Madeline earlier. Certainly it gets enough aspects right that my knee-jerk dislike for it isn’t really justified. So what, exactly, is behind this emotional reaction? To tell the truth, I have a philosophical objection to the whole enterprise. You see, I really hate the idea that a personality could be determined by four parameters, each of which has two possible values. That a person’s attitude towards life, relationships, and work can be stored in a four-bit string. Obviously, this isn’t an unreasonable position to take—the unreasonable part is me putting Myers-Briggs up as something that claims this. I don’t think anyone claims that there is a personality test or type that would fully encapsulate who we are.  

Still, humans have this terrible instinct to put people into boxes and act as if that box contains them. We hear jokes about people planning love lives based on astrology or the like, but the fact is that people do that. (To clarify, I think Myers-Briggs is a good deal better than astrology, being based on some semblance of reality. Astrology serves to get us out of the specifics of the problem and demonstrate my general boxing issue, though.) Of course, throughout history we’ve come up with ways to do this. We do it with race—how many different ethnicities are covered in “black”?  We do it with gender, and only recently is our society starting to untangle that particular pair of boxes.

I identify as a humanist. “Humanist” is not a code word for “atheist” for me. It’s not a way to dodge accusations of ideological servitude to Richard Dawkins.  I am a humanist, with atheism as an aspect of that.  I am a humanist because, truth be told, I love people. I love it when they build things and care about things and when they tell stories. I love it when they set out to discover more than they know. I love the look in a person’s eye when they get excited. I love the acts of kindness we hear about, however rarely we hear of them. (I suspect what’s rare is the hearing.) People are fascinating—really, every single one of them. I know people who have spent their whole lives growing up in the same rural region of Oklahoma. You know what? They’re full of stories. They know so much about the land and the people around them. It’s wonderful. They’re not well-traveled, but they don’t need to be.

I have experienced only a narrow, infinitesimal slice of humanity. There are types of music I have never heard or dreamed of. There is art that would make me weep, from cultures I never knew existed. Yet even the half-dozen or so people I would consider close friends represent tremendous differences in personality. I’m like them, in many ways. But in many ways—arguably, many important ones—I’m not. Somehow that makes things better between us, because all these differences add to our relationship.

That’s the sort of spiritual reverence I have for humanity, for the “miracle of human consciousness.” I accept that mental phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena somehow. (From a Buddhist point of view, I’ll add “and vice versa” but that’s not relevant.) Obviously there is some finite amount of information that would represent my personality. But the practice of putting people into boxes or bins—whether by star sign, or Myers-Briggs type, or college major—seems to me to cheapen not just my own uniqueness, but the stunning beauty that is human society. An irrational response, I admit, one founded in sentimentalism and my own secular quasi-religious feelings.   It’s as if, instead of the Mona Lisa, you looked at a Polaroid photo of it. In a more modern analogy, think extremely low quality bitmap image. True, this representation doesn’t remove the original—people still have complex inner lives and the painting is still hanging in Paris, regardless of how we communicate it to people. Yet, if I showed you a blurry, pixilated image and said “this is the Mona Lisa,” wouldn’t you feel a little cheated?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Myers-Briggs than is dreamt of in your psychology.

Fun and relevant quotes:

"It's like, that people … well, that everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds … not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe." -- Neil Gaiman, A Game of You

"What is sacred to Bokonists?" I asked after a while.

"Not even God, as near as I can tell."

"Nothing?"

"Just one thing."

I made some guesses. "The ocean? The sun?"

"Man," said Frank. "That's all. Just man."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

In this Post, Nuclear Weapons Make Me Sad

As those of you who know me at all are aware, I'm pretty pro-science. It has been suggested that if science were anthropomorphic and female we would probably be like, married by now. That said, there's one subject--and really pretty much just this one--that makes me almost question the entire enterprise, and that's nuclear weapons. (This post is inspired by me reading the first few chapters of Richard Rhodes's "The Arsenals of Folly", but see also Feynman's comments on the matter, and see also Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle".)

You might think that, since nuclear weapons have only been deployed twice, and there is an argument to be made that those were justified--I'm not convinced, but I can see the point of view--you might think that while dangerous, nuclear weapons are not the worst scientific sin. What about the Tuskegee Experiment, or Nazi eugenics, or DDT, or the Industrial Revolution? Right, well. Obviously I'm not ok with those. But to me those have always been human faults, expressed in the scientific realm, you know? They occurred in the presence of science and technology, but there was nothing unique about them that required that presence. They could have happened--and indeed, things just as bad HAVE happened--for the sake of ideological or religious fundamentalism. 

Not nuclear weapons. See, the thing that gets me is the inevitability: You're investigating electricity. That's a good thing! It's useful. It's important to our civilization. I think everyone would agree that we are glad electricity was investigated. But, of course, if you investigate electricity, you inevitably discover the electron. Suddenly, you've stumbled right into the structure of matter. That's a fascinating question. And clearly, a very important one; it's something mankind has worried about since the ancient Greeks.

You probe a little more, and you discover that these electrons are actually incredibly light--nearly all the mass of an atom is contained in its very center, in a bundle of particles you name a "nucleus." At first you suppose that these nuclei are particles themselves, but you then discover that they are made of smaller pieces, protons and neutrons. That's cool! You have a positive, a negative, and a neutral particle discovered. It's also fantastically useful. This theory can explain pretty much all of chemistry, after all, from a few simple principles. You explore a little more, because you'd like to understand how all these different elements came to be--imagine the excitement, finally being able to understand the diverse forms matter takes and why it does that. You discover something about the nucleus: it's incredibly tightly bound together. It must be, to hold all the positive charges together. Furthermore, certain nuclei are more tightly bound than others--the larger ones are naturally a little less stable than the smaller ones. (And the really small ones are less stable than the larger ones, actually--the peak is at Iron-56.) So if you take a large nuclei and split it apart, you get two smaller, each at a lower energy state. And then there's extra energy released, in the form of kinetic energy/heat. Fascinating!

Wait, shit. Ok. Wait. Suppose we had a large sample of fairly unstable atoms. Suppose then that we started them splitting. Would the first one to start splitting be able to use that excess energy to trigger another split? I want to note here that it's not inevitable that this would be possible. At least, I can imagine in my mind a world where there was no substance that this was possible in. That's not the way the universe works though, and at this point "all" you have to do is to do the math and show that. And there it is, it's possible.

Until this point we've been entirely curiosity-driven, but actually a few sentences into that last paragraph the motivations shifted entirely. As soon as the question, "is a chain reaction possible?" is properly formulated, it becomes vitally important that we answer it. Because if it is possible, and someone else does it first, we may be screwed. Suddenly, scientific curiosity isn't running the show. Suddenly, it's the cold logic of game theory guiding our hand irrevocably. We have to investigate fission, and we have to confirm that it is possible.

I think there's actually another equilibrium here--the equilibrium where nobody has nuclear weapons and nobody has the infrastructure to make them. It's such a huge effort that you can't reliably create them in secret, and so you and everyone else can happily sit around not having them, secure in the knowledge that if anyone tries, you can either get up to speed just as quickly as them, or you can take military action to stop them. I think this is the ideal equilibrium in a disarmed world, and arguably the one that kinda-sorta exists in the Middle East. (EVERYONE KNOWS, Israel.)

That's not the equilibrium we have though. Because of the circumstances of its invention, because of the timeline history happened to take, we built bombs. And so, they built bombs. They had to, really. So we built bigger, and more bombs. They replied in kind, again, because that was the game theory-mandated course of action. 

Imagine that a nuclear attack was launched, once the arms race was well and truly under way. We see the nukes coming. We know that we are all dead. America's cities are minutes from turning into hellish fireballs, flash-incinerated. If you don't live in a city, chances are you too close from one to escape the radiation--even if your dose isn't that bad, the infrastructure to treat you is going to be gone. The absolute logic of MAD demands that we counterattack. Not just their military--after all, the first strike is already out, we are not winning this war. No, we have to fire on enemy population centers. It is important that we launch a counter-genocide. Because if we didn't, if we weren't willing to carry out the logic to its fatal conclusion, then the whole structure wouldn't work.

This isn't science's fault, really. At some point, we fell into the prisoner's dilemma, and it was a matter of logic and sociology and politics. But that's how we got here. We asked questions about the natural world. We didn't do anything malicious, we didn't break any ethical rules--we just wondered, and we followed our curiosity. All my life, I've held that emotion in the highest regard, and thought it one of humanity's greatest traits. I am studying physics because I want to understand the world. But...was it worth it? We sought to understand the world and in doing so we discovered a way to end it. And it's not like we directed research towards it--we were well out of the curiosity regime by the time the Manhattan Project was formed. Simple questions, experiments--the natural flow of our desire for knowledge endowed us with powers to murder on a scale previously thought unthinkable. It led us to a situation in which we were required to develop ever-greater destructive capabilities. How many nuclear weapons are pointed at New York? How many guns do we have to the head of Washington D.C.? Moscow, Pyongyang, Beijing, Havana, Tehran? 

I didn't do this. And maybe it's not fair to say that physics did this, either. The possibilities we discovered are a part of the laws of physics. They're the same laws that led to us being formed, the same rules that allow stars to forge hydrogen into heavier elements that make life possible. The same structure that allows us to arise from stardust, allows us to return to dust should we so choose. Still, it chills me to the bone to realize that the warm, wondrous view of the universe I hold can be so easily married to a cold logic of death. 

The question becomes: is it worth the risk? Is it worth it to wonder and to discover, if there is some chance you might discover Armageddon? I suspect there's no good answer to this. I suspect that any answer to this will be entirely emotional and essentially a leap of faith. Scientists, it seems, are not immune to great questions of conscience.

Of course, I myself hold that it is worth it. The desire to explore something is tied up in who we are, as humans. We explore the world around us through science, we explore ourselves through art, and we explore each other through love and friendships. None of them are risk-free scenarios. None of them are all that safe and many of them are discomforting, sometimes over and over again. But we keep trying--because if we didn't, we may as well die. So I intend to keep exploring. I'm not sure I have a choice.

Don't Go Asking a Scientist

My dear friend Jacob has a YouTube Channel, where he’s decided to start answering people’s questions. This week, he addressed that age-old memetic question: How do magnets work? Not bad, Jacob. But, as a physics major, I can’t really let it stand without comment. 

There are a few points that ought to be clarified, but let’s take a step back for a moment. The question at hand here is, basically, the structure of matter. Jacob speaks about negatively charged electrons repelling each other, and correctly notes that this is what makes an object “solid” despite being mostly empty space. His mistake comes when he asserts that magnetism essentially works on the same principle. To which I can only say, “Eh…not really…” Those are electrostatic properties, produced by 

charges at rest. Magnetism is…weirder.

Again, the problem is the structure of matter. Jacob claims the electrons orb it the nucleus like a planet orbits a star, which is a very classical viewpoint. By “classical” I mean “wrong.” You see, we’ve known for some time that this doesn’t make any sense. If electrons are being pulled towards the nucleus then they would fall in unless they were moving. So they must be moving, and if they’re at a stable point then they must be moving in an orbit. Fine. But because they’re in an orbit, they are constantly changing their direction of motion—that is, constantly accelerating (experiencing a change in velocity). And that is extremely bad news.

See, we know that moving electrical charges or changing electric fields produce magnetic fields. We also know that changing magnetic fields produce electric fields. (We would like to find magnetic “charges” to make that a more symmetrical statement buuuuuut it’s looking like they don’t exist.) So, in Jacob’s atomic model, we have moving electrons which constantly change direction, therefore constantly change magnetic field, so that will produce an electric field that’s constantly changing, so that will produce…and we have an electromagnetic wave radiating out of our orbiting electron. The trouble comes because that wave carries energy, and if that wave carries energy, the electron loses energy—and slows down, crashing into the nucleus. Notice the problem? The solar-system model of matter is unstable. If it were true, there wouldn’t be any atoms at all.

I don’t blame Jacob for this. The “it’s like a solar system” model is still taught in schools, after all. It’s inaccurate in lots of other ways, of course—electrons are not really tiny balls, and they can only occupy discrete orbits. We, as a civilization, need to sit down and think of a better metaphor to teach our children.  In reality, electrons don’t move in orbits because they aren’t really moving. They have a certain amount of energy that causes them to assume a certain distance from the nucleus, and then they occupy a particular shape of orbital, which don’t look like planetary orbits at all, in general. 

Each suborbital fits two electrons, which posed quite a problem in the early 20^th century. You see, it was known that no two electrons could occupy the same quantum state, as then they’d be the same electron. So to have two electrons in one orbital, there was another “quantum number”, which has a value of plus or minus one-half. It was eventually discovered that this corresponded to what is known as “spin.” Now, since electrons are totally featureless, it doesn’t make any sense for one to spin the way you spin a basketball. But it shares many properties with rotational momentum, so we have spin-up and spin-down electrons nonetheless. 

Which brings us, finally, to magnetism. Spin-up and spin-down electrons react differently to magnetic fields—spray them into a magnetic field oriented correctly and you can separate them into those categories. Most atoms are spin-neutral, as each spin-up has a corresponding spin-down in its suborbital. Sometimes, though, due to an odd number of electrons or the way in which the orbitals fill up, unpaired electrons are left over, giving the atom a net magnetic moment. Even so, in most materials, these moments are pointed in all different directions, resulting in, again, no magnetic susceptibility. But apply a magnetic field to these materials, and the spins of electrons and directions of atoms are aligned with it, and when the magnetic field is removed, this net magnetism remains. Hence, a paperclip, once stuck to a magnet, still retains some magnetism.

Jacob’s statement that magnetism is caused by “all the electrons moving in the same direction” could be argued to be essentially correct, after all, didn’t I just say that all the electrons were spinning in the same direction? I did, but it’s important to note what models we’re talking about. To speak about this subject correctly, we have to note that electrons can’t actually spin, rather, they have an attached number that behaves like a spin. We also have to note that the electrons themselves aren’t actually moving, they’re just left unpaired in their atoms. Jacob’s explanation is very classical, very rooted in the idea of electrons as tiny billiard balls rotating about central particles. That makes it easier to understand, yes, but in the process he loses much of the subtlety and much of the beauty of how the universe works on subatomic scales—where it is truly, fantastically, beautifully weird, and worthy of close inspection.

One more thing! He promised he’d include Richard Feynman but he missed this absolutely perfect clip of Richard Feynman talking about talking about magnets. Rectified below. 

Science and the Concerned Voter

(NOTE: This was, at one point, a  letter I wrote to my representative. In blogging it I'm cleaning it up a bit and maybe going into more detail since, well, I am not as worried if you decide it's too long and don't read.)

Congressman,

 I am writing to express my concern that, as we look for ways to cut down on spending and increase revenue, scientific endeavors may suffer unjustly. Recently I learned that many programs, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, may suffer drastic cuts in funding.

Even as a researcher, I realize that science, especially fields like astronomy, often seems distantly related to the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, but I mean to demonstrate here that they are not. In fact, the pursuit of science is one of our most important activities, not just as a nation, but as a species.

First, let us consider the purely economic side of the issue. Investment in science pays off. Consider that I send this to you over the World Wide Web, an infrastructure created by physicists at CERN in Switzerland to share information amongst each other. I ordered a package from Amazon the other day; thanks to RFID tags and other sophisticated measures I can track it in real time as it journeys to me. And how much do we all benefit from the metallurgical and engineering studies that allowed us to build one of the best air-travel networks in the world? I could go on and on about electronics, chemistry, and that wouldn't even touch on the biological sciences, which are important because we are, after all, biological beings.

Obviously fields like material science and engineering have immediate, obvious applications, which is why industry so often backs these. But we must also recognize that science that seems entirely dependent on curiosity nonetheless frequently yields exceptionally important results. Arcane scientific theories and models can and do yield economic benefits, sometimes decades after their discovery, and investigations into the world around us often provide valuable insight into our problems.

-Atomic theory was invented by the Greek Democritus around 300 BC. Only after many centuries did we turn it into modern chemistry. Certainly, others helped along the way, transforming atomism from philosophy to science, but this may be the most triumphant example of science paying off only after long term development.

-Quantum theory describes the very small and very light elements of the world in terms of waves and probabilities. Famously, it involves such odd effects as matter waves, the uncertainty principle, and "spooky action at a distance"--Einstein hated it. It was developed first to explain why hot objects glowed the way they did, to explain why light could sometimes produce a voltage, and why hydrogen emitted and absorbed light at particular frequencies. Today it underlies our most successful theories of the universe and all of the electronics industry.

-General relativity is a complicated theory of gravity whose first application was correctly calculating the orbit of Mercury by imagining that gravity is actually the effect of warped space-time, which allows us to better handle accelerating reference frames. Difficult, complicated, not applicable to everyday life--but the Global Positioning System relies entirely on general relativity and its corrections for the flow of time due to gravity.

-The study of particle physics led to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) tests to determine chemical composition, which in turn developed into modern medical MRI scans. Particle physics, of course, also gave us--and continues to give us--radiation treatments for cancer, nuclear power plants, and perhaps someday fusion power.

I started talking about the James Webb Space Telescope. Let me continue on the line of astronomy. Astronomers tend to define themselves according to the scale they work on. Some astronomers worry about our solar system, which is critical if we are to continue expanding outward into space, or to keep track of the many potentially hazardous asteroids that speed through the interplanetary void. Others observe other solar systems, trying to understand other planets and why Earth supports life so well. In an age of increasing ecological awareness, it's important that we recognize the observation of other planets helps us understand our own. For example, the greenhouse effect of CO2 is well demonstrated by gazing at Venus, a hot and inhospitable world. Even the study of galactic events like cosmic rays can yield important insights: cosmic rays may spur cloud formation and lightning storms as well as interfere with electronics.

In many ways it might seem ludicrous to spend much money gazing out into the universe. I wish to point out, however, that by looking out into the universe, we are also looking backwards in time (because if an object is far away, the light reaching us now was emitted long ago). This makes the JWST a way to probe the past and the beginnings of the universe. It may not be a purely economic reason, but I would hope you agree that this is a field of study that matters to every human being who wishes to understand the world they find themselves in.

"Every human being", of course, leads me to a more ideological stance. Science is more than an economic tool. To those of us who practice it--and to many interested laypeople--it stands as one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. It is an institution founded on open communication, friendly cooperation, and honest curiosity. Science and its discoveries benefit us all practically, but there is something in science that speaks to our souls. Cutting funding for scientific endeavors doesn't protect America. It doesn't protect us economically or militarily, certainly. Cutting funding for science is cutting funding for the future--for when we imagine the future in our stories and dreams we imagine what new technologies we will be capable of, what new surprises we will have stumbled onto, and what old surprises we will have explained. If any country wants to remain as forward-looking as America wants to remain, we cannot retreat back from our frontiers of knowledge, but rather must press onward boldly and with commitment.

I can't overstate the value of scientific endeavor. In fact, I can't make any statement concerning the worth of any particular experiment before it runs, because that is by definition impossible. If we knew what the results beforehand it wouldn't be science. In science we pursue the questions that have, as yet, no answer. We not know what we will find, but instead live by the words of the Nobel winner Richard Feynman, "I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough"

My Absolutes (Having a Takei Old Time)

I should probably write a paragraph about apologies for not posting. Fuck it. You know.

I once wrote a post about how uncertain I felt about certain beliefs, mostly political ones. (Also, philosophical issues that get sufficiently abstract, because I find philosophical reasoning very weird and easy to agree with, because it has a tendency toward good-sounding generalizations. Anyway!) I'm a very liberal person, but I do engage sometimes in quick dips into a more libertarian bent, and I sometimes worry that the fact that I always come back to my viewpoint is more born of intellectual stubbornness than it is my own accuracy.

Another, weirder instance comes when I read conspiracy theorists and the like. Here it's usually a matter of sources. For the most part, I trust the mainstream media, in that I don't expect them to deliberately lie, although I suspect that they are often incomplete and probably mildly slanted. The point is that I wouldn't suspect them of a cover-up, or accuse them of selectively burying stories about UFOs or whatever. When I see people claim that there's any sort of widespread attempts to hide a truth, I usually dismiss, but I can't help but wonder if that's just making me part of the whole cover-up, whether I'm just falling for it. (In reality this doesn't happen with UFOs because, dude, UFOs. I have an emotional "yes" reaction to "drug companies are covering up..."-type statements, though.)

That said, there are a few issues that I feel totally sure on, such that when I'm exposed to the opposite viewpoint I have to stop and remind myself that people do, in fact, think that way. I was a debater in high school, so I'm used to recognizing the logical trains of thought that lead to positions opposed to mind. The systems of thought that seem to lead to those positions are so alien to me that I can't do that.

The main one I can think of is GLBT rights. To me, calling them rights seems natural because I'm so fully in agreement with the idea that these rights--from gay marriage to adoption--are, in fact, basic rights. I could rattle off some reasoning if I needed. It doesn't hurt anyone, who are we to legislate the rights and wrongs of love, everyone has the freedom to choose these things...you get the idea. But I think it's fair to say that in most of my actual thoughts I'm willing to accept the validity and worth of GLBT people and couples axiomatically.

Of course, when you actually believe these things and express them, you occasionally find yourself encountering the opposing viewpoint. When I encounter homophobia and the like, I get a little shaken up. It's actually intellectually disturbing to me that those views still exist. (Please understand that I recognize that this reaction is a flaw, and I ought to be better-equipped to handle opposing viewpoints.) I try to break down the series of premises that I'm breaking down in understanding. In this, I'm dealing mostly with religious-based homophobia. I'm not aware of much in the way of purely secular homophobia that doesn't derive from the religious variation.

1) The belief that there exists a universal moral order independent of causes or reason.
-Divine command theory. I made one of the first posts on this blog about how incompatible it is with humanist ethics. To me, I look at LGBT issues and see only harm in our current policy, with nothing in the way of benefit. But someone with this premise can see a moral benefit in anti-LGBT policy where I can't, and see a harm in pro-LGBT policy that I can't.

2)The belief that the order in premise #1 is known to us. (Or at least to a small group.)
-Even presupposing the existence of #1, we have to proceed to wonder whether or not we know the universal moral order. I'm not aware of any moral order that isn't derived from assumptions required to keep society together--that is, everyone agrees that there exists such a thing as a right not to be murdered for no good reason, and most societies have some idea of property. But I recognize that these are concepts inherent in a society, for without them no society can function. Natural selection is at work here, and it's interesting to note that throughout history many cultures have seen that moral protection end at their own borders. Outsiders and victims of conquest were fair game. Past those basics, cultures vary so much that I have a hard time believing mankind is aware of that order outside of specific religious revelation--that is, outside of the point where anti-LGBT groups start quoting Leviticus. Since I don't believe in the source of that morality, and looking at that general moral system I find it unsuitable, I can't respect this idea.

3)The belief that possessing a particular vision of the order in premise #1 entitles one to legislate it.
-So you have a particular vision of morality. Of course, you also have to recognize that there exist thousands of different visions. In our pluralistic democracy, you would expect to recognize that none of these can claim total dominance, as we have no real way to judge among these systems of morality. Anti-LGBT action, however, is founded deep down on the idea that, possessing a claimed universal system of morality, certain groups have a right to legislate it.

You might think there's another premise here--that the universal morality contains commandments against LGBT behavior. But, actually, I can understand that, granted the other premises. I don't agree with it, but the thought of a divinely revealed universal morality is so ridiculous to me that the details are irrelevant to its credibility.

This extends beyond legislation, really. I was eating with a few friends once, discussing something--I don't remember what, possibly homosexual adoption--when one of them said something like "Kids shouldn't be learning about gay people and lesbians that early." That was the sort of thought I wasn't really able to properly process. Why shouldn't they? Is there something wrong about gays and lesbians that we ought to keep secret? How is introducing a child to the concept of a homosexual couple worse than introducing them to the concept of a heterosexual couple? I was so far off of the premises my friend was speaking from that I couldn't relate to what he said.

I see a lot of this accommodationist-style rhetoric here in Oklahoma among even the more liberal sections. It manifests itself mainly in the general format of "I support X, but Y..." "I support civil unions, but they shouldn't be called marriage" "I'm not a homophobe, but gay people shouldn't be holding hands in public." etc. Many of them accept on some intellectual level that they ought to support LGBT rights, but their system of thought is still thoroughly tied down in the premises of anti-LGBT ideas. We have a long way to go.

Addendum, explaining the title: This post was inspired by a post by George Takei, lately one of my favorite people. Explanations can be found in the following video.

N64ostalgia

I've deleted the last post, because I felt it was of an overly personal nature. AH WELL.

Apparently it's the Legend of Zelda's 25th Birthday. This means that I played up to the first temple in Majora's Mask before someone kicked me off to play Wind Waker. I think they're trying to beat it today. They just finished the second dungeon, so I don't know if they'll make it. (I've never played Wind Waker.) Best of luck to them, though, eh?

I've been playing a lot of old video games lately, because my dorm's TV lounge now has an N64. In a way, I've learned a lot of fairly disappointing truths, things I didn't remember from my childhood:

-Who the hell approved the N64 controller? People do not have three hands. Nobody has ever, to my knowledge, had three working hands. I am, however, willing to admit my personal lack of knowledge in this area. It's possible that someone has had three hands, thus making full use of all the potential places to hold an N64 controller. If so, I have to wonder whether Nintendo chose the right target market in that guy.

-Mario Kart 64 is such bullshit. Multiplayer, racing against friends, is only mildly bullshit. (I say this because fucking blue shells.) Single player, though. Single player is some incredible bullshit. The computer goes exactly as fast, not to beat you, but as fast as it has to go to make you feel bad about yourself. Nearly at the finish line, in second place, barely behind, with a golden mushroom? Go ahead. Tap Z like you're a methhead playing a tiny drum. I will bet large sums of money that you will not catch up. I speak from experience, an experience that concluded with me shouting "FUCKING YOSHIIIII." The other night I was trying to beat Star Cup on Extra, and had to beat Yoshi in Bowser's Castle to win. That's it. And I spent an hour on it. Some losses were legitimate; many were bullshit. Then I had it pointed out that players won point ties, so even though Yoshi beat me, I had still won. I slinked off to bed and cried myself to sleep.

-Pokemon, types, etc. This rant has already been published.

That said, these games are good. I really enjoy them, and I have fun playing them. In many cases, I'd rather play Mario Kart 64 than Mario Kart Wii. It's simple, I know it better, and in that respect it's more fun. At the same time, I recognize that newer games are sometimes strictly better. I'd never rather play Super Smash Bros. on the N64 than the Wii. So, nostalgia: not always the best indicator of quality.

Rant (Not Very Effective...)

I promised on Twitter to rant about Pokemon, and so I shall.

My relationship with Pokemon has, admittedly, been on the rocks. I think I last played Pokemon in about fourth grade. I played Yellow and Silver, although at this point I don't remember many Pokemon beyond the first-generation group. In the past few years, however, there's been a revival of sorts of Pokemon among my peers, and coming to college means I'm surrounded by Pokemon yet again. If I had a DS, I'd probably join them.

Of course, they'd likely destroy me. I'm rapidly realizing that I wasn't playing Pokemon the way Pokemon is played by people who know their stuff. For example, it was only recently that I realized that, say, a Rock-type move is Rock-type no matter what Pokemon uses it. Somehow, I had always assumed that Pokemon attacking had some role in the elemental rock-paper-scissors of its attacks. This is untrue, and I am stupid. But I'm also rapidly relearning things and realizing how many things I ought to have complained about back then.

I mean, look at this, I'm playing Super Smash Bros. as Kirby. I b-down onto Pikachu, and crush him like the rock I am. He tries to thunder, of course, but as I proclaim "Yeah, electric on rock? Not going to work." Someone tells me, "Oh, no, Zach. Only ground is immune to electric."

Ok. First of all, I forgot that ground and rock were even different types. That bothers me, for a reason I can't really define. I wish I could articulate why I feel like "earth" ought to be a single type. I'll just cite Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind: "Sand is overrated. It's just tiny rocks." But let's ignore that. Instead, let me point out that if how affected a type is by electric is somehow proportional to conductivity (hey, water) then rock and ground are equally bad at conducting electricity. Or do the Pokemon creators think that "ground" as in "grounded" somehow protects you from electrical shock? Because that's, uh, not really how it works. And why exactly does electricity effect flying so well? Do pigeons in Japan not sit on power lines?

The longer I spend looking at this type chart I looked up to ensure I wasn't saying wrong things, the angrier I become. Fighting is super effective against steel, but not very effective against bug? Let's play a game. Get a caterpillar. Get a steel...block...or whatever. Try to punch both of them. Now do you see what's wrong with this?

The absurdities go on and on. Ghost is super-effective against itself. I'm really not sure what water does to a rock, exactly, unless Pokemon use some sort of super erosion? "Blastoise used Hydro Pump! It will be super effective if maintained for a thousand years!"Nor am I an in any way sure why psychic is so effective against poison, considering that poison really doesn't seem like something that would be easily neutralized by telekinesis. My current leading theory is that the Bene Gesserit eventually used their breeding program to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, and he was an Alakazam.

Which brings me to the bottom of the type chart, and my personal least favorite type: dragon. Dragons are different in Japan, I understand, but this is a type that's barely there. All we had was the Dragonite/Dratini/Dragon lines in first generation. Even since then, it's down there with ghost as being ridiculously uncommon, yet far less distinctive. There's like fifteen or so dragon type moves, and half of them are named "Dragon _____" because nobody knows what a dragon type move would look like, so you have to tell them.

In conclusion, I have written about an incredibly important issue today, and Charizard's relationship with the Dragon type bothers me most of all.

Valentine's Day (I'm Not Sickeningly Peppy In Real Life, You Know)

Sometimes I feel like this blog veers to the optimistic a bit too hard, just because that's kind of the point. In real life, I frequently say things like "people are crazy" or express disapproval at ideology or do a lot of other things that probably aren't strictly in the Geeky Humanist Pro-People Optimism Canon, you know? I have a problem with cynicism in general, but that doesn't mean I'm wholly cleansed of it.

I say these things because it's Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day is one of two things. Either you go out to dinner and buy chocolates and put your mouth on people, or you post passive-aggressive Facebook statuses where you rechristen it Single's Awareness Day or disparage it. The two groups generally don't intersect on any given Valentine's Day, but from year to year a lot of people will pass from one group into another and back, in a sine wave of periodic cynicism.

Honestly, I don't care about Valentine's Day. I say this as someone whose Valentine's Days are almost always spent single. (Although I should probably come out and say that this is not currently true. Maybe next year I'll make a blog post rebutting this one--though I hope not.) I never really had all that much trouble ignoring it. I hate to pull the "well, you only x because y" thing, but I can't help but feel like the Valentine's-haters are just a tad bitter. No offense, guys. Being single on Valentine's Day should be like being Jewish at Christmas--sure, you don't participate yourself, but (generally) you don't get all bent up about seeing trees everywhere. (I never made a War on Christmas post, but rest assured that this analogy doesn't imply I'm anti-Happy-Holidays. Man, this paragraph has a lot of parenthetical sentences.)

I also see a lot of accusation that Valentine's Day is a "manufactured" holiday. Guys? All holidays are manufactured. If there was a Jesus, he wasn't born on December 25, and he didn't die on the first Friday after the first full moon after the equinox or however that works. They're just days that happened to be picked out. Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc. At one point, maybe they were associated with particular times of the year or past events, but that doesn't make all subsequent days with the same calendar designation special. They're just days with a bit of mythology thrown in, and we build an edifice around them. Sure, greeting card companies fuel the process, but there was a holiday before them, and nobody makes you buy a greeting card. Personally, I made one out of a Dinosaur Comic. It's not wrong to participate in a social construct just because someone's profiting off of it.

So, in conclusion, if you're in a relationship, feel free to enjoy Valentine's Day. There's no shame in it. If you're not, then remember, you get Discount Chocolate Day, February 15th. To everyone who doesn't give a shit, feel free to not give a shit--but there's no need to let us know.

Egypt's Triumph

Eighteen days. Two and a half weeks. That's how long it took Egypt to transform itself—unthinkably sudden, certainly. It seems impossible, but my geeky pedantry points out that it is obviously possible. What were the chances? Apparently 1 in 1, but that doesn't detract from what happened.

I'll admit that, while I was aware that there were protests in Egypt, I hadn't paid close attention to it until the past few days. I sympathized with them, but I wasn't actively following the story. I think I was soured on the affair by Iran's Green Revolution, which didn't end up being the Twitter-fueled democratic emergence that I had hoped. But last night I see a television proclaiming that Mubarak would soon address the people of Egypt, and I realized history was happening. I watched, waited for some time. Multiple sources were telling CNN that he would be stepping down. I'm an ex-debater and competitive public speakers, so I like to imagine I can, in some way, read public relations situations like this, and understand how emotions interplay with speeches like that. (This is probably just arrogance on my part.) I said to the person next to me, “At this point, he has to step down. Those people are celebrating in anticipation of him stepping down. That much energy will turn very nasty very fast if he disappoints them.” And, well, he didn't step down. (I also commented, using a Super Smash Bros. Metaphor, that Mubarak was at 250% and waiting for someone to launch him. Which might be a bit more violent than what I actually meant.)

Although it wasn't very clear at first, he attempted to organize a power-sharing arrangement where his vice-president assumed most of his power. However, even if he had had no powers, he was still president, he was still there, a big unsightly lame duck. There was no possibility the protesters who had spent two and a half weeks attempting to oust him would accept this sort of faltering compromise, which still left him in power. They started to march, many leaving Tahrir Square, venturing towards state television and the presidential palace. I was a little scared—happiness had clearly transformed to rage. Thousands of angry people were now mobbing toward the person who made them angry. I went to bed certain that Mubarak wouldn't last, but not sure that the demonstrators would remain peaceful.

At about 10:30 this morning, I opened my laptop for note-taking and discovered that Mubarak had stepped down, his vice-president was going with him, and the military was taking over. I celebrated, but not very loudly because I was in class, and after class I found myself a television and let Anderson Cooper walk me through what was going on.

Honestly, the Egyptian Revolution is one of the most inspiring things I've seen in some time. As a humanist, I hold a lot of opinions that I admit are quite optimistic. I believe that people are basically good. I believe that nonviolence can be an effective response to oppression. I believe that, given enough support and a just cause, that an strong idea can overcome physical options. Idealistic, of course. But the beautiful thing about the Egyptian revolution is that it stood that test. A diverse uprising of people were able to, through beautifully nonviolent protest, remove from their country a parasitic dictator. Rarely do I find myself able to enjoy this clarity of vision, this empathetic joy for a people rising from their shackles.

Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others. This is true, but arguably it's the only really moral one. A king rules by birthright, a tyrant by threats, and a cleric by the faith of others. A president or prime minister rules, in a true democracy, by the will of the ruled. That will legitimizes government in the only possible way. It is the only way to deserve power. Egyptians are starting to realize this. That's why I'm hopeful of their new order. Currently, the military holds power. That worries me, as all people ought to be worried when the power of force is wedded so firmly to the power of politics. Yet the military is well-liked in Egypt, and the protesters cheer their assent to this new order. It's not democracy in the strictest sense, no, but this transitional regime still bears the stamp of popular sovereignty.

Optimism might be misplaced. A military regime could easily choose to delay election indefinitely and eventually become just as bad—or far worse—than Mubarak. But if this was an anti-Mubarak revolution, it was only anti-Mubarak in the sense that the Mubarak stood as an obstacle. These protests were pro-democracy. People aren't cheering and supporting the military because they've ousted Mubarak, but because they believe that the military takes power as a transitional government. People on the streets of Cairo talk about “the next six months”, ElBaradei on CNN stated that he thought it would be a year. There is a clear, unambiguous expectation that this is a temporary situation. Having seen the sort of political action the Egyptian people are capable of, I feel like generals would have to be crazy to risk its re-emergence.

America has been...an alright partner to their movement. Once the protests started we mostly sided with them, but multiple times we expressed a desire for reform within the Mubarak paradigm, or urged caution. Egypt was an ally, and I can understand that Obama didn't want to risk antagonizing a ruler who may have ended up holding onto power. But that risk is gone now. Now it is time to help them in their growth to democracy. If—and this might be a big if—we can help them, if we can lend them some way to run elections or anything to help them transition, we ought to. I'm told we have very good ties with the Egyptian military, and hopefully we can leverage that to help avoid abuses by the transitional government.

We witnessed a miracle in Egypt. We saw nonviolence succeed. We saw an idea spread across the populace like wildfire and drive them into an assertion of human dignity unprecedented in recent memory. Now that the protests are ostensibly over, what remains is potential. In the coming months we may see the rise of a beautiful democracy in the Middle East that will, with luck, serve as a beacon to many in that region. Potential, however, is only potential. It's currently Egypt's most valuable resource—but it will be the easiest to squander.

This Opinion Will Change Once Assange Finds My Porn

No post Wednesday? No problem, bitches. No problem at all. I just update extremely late Thursday instead, and I'll get you another tomorrow. I AM A KIND AND MERCIFUL BLOGGOD.

So I want to talk about Wikileaks, because hey, I have a website, they've got a website. In general, I support Wikileaks. Their main mission is to promote truth and openness in government, which I respect. If, as our democratic philosophies hold, every country is ultimately ruled by its own people, then openness is simply delivering information to those who actually own it. I see Wikileaks's acts as fundamentally democratic.

It would be outrageously idealistic to accept the release of the diplomatic cables that started the latest and largest Wikileaks shitstorm without question. Sometimes, governments do need to keep secrets. Ideally, though, this should be for as short a time as possible, and it shouldn't be a big secret. Sure, publicizing your Kuwait liberation plans before you've even gotten your Gulf War on is a bad idea--but that was a while ago, and if you have files on (say) Gulf War Syndrome? We deserve to know that stuff. Wikileaks, however, hasn't revealed all their cables. They're doing it slowly, in batches, and only releasing the cables that they feel don't threaten security. I've yet to hear of an actual specific case someone can point to and say "Wikileaks caused this operational issue"--only generalities, which I distrust.

That said, they are admittedly somewhat radical. We don't usually expect this sort of truth-telling. Somewhat radical isn't necessarily a bad thing. The American (and French, and more recently Egyptian) revolutions were radical. The nature of society is change as new paradigms arrive, battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, and ultimately fall again. A radical idea is, in general, simply new. That's no reason to shun it.

In the past, ultimate and total access to government information simply wasn't possible. Now, with digital technology, it could be. The massive, truly unbelievable amount of information generated by a government could be available to nearly all of its citizens. Is that a right way to run a government? Fuck if I know. I suspect not, just like it's not a good idea to run a government on (total) majority rule, (total) individual liberties, or (total) centralized authority. At some point, realism starts to cancel out ideological advantages, but the key, the tricky part of governance, is finding a proper balance, finding how far you can push your ideology without being unable to run a country. But I contend that we ought to try. Where does the line between openness and practicality lie? I don't know, and nobody will ever know until we try.

Insisting on secrecy and freezing information in an age where information is the most fluid asset in the world is foolishness, as Wikileaks' continual ability to get its hands on lots and lots of data shows. Instead, we're going to have to adapt to a world where more information is available to everyone. This applies to politics, but it applies to a lot else--consider the practice of data mining. The old expectations of secrecy don't apply, and arguably they shouldn't. One interesting thing about the Internet and the hacker culture that underlies it is the success of open standards. We've seen projects like Wikipedia and Linux survive by a system of radical openness and a (dare I say) humanist trust in the ability of groups of people to leverage information when it's available to them. What stops a government from learning from that example?


(A side note about Julian Assange: If he is, in fact, guilty of sexual assault, he does deserve whatever penalties are mandated by law. That said, I find the charges against him pretty sketchy, especially their timing. He certainly doesn't deserved to be charged with a crime under American law.)

What a Dick Move, Groupon

In my opinion, ninety percent of all advertising is basically a dick move. The first priority of advertisement is not truth, but manipulation. An advertiser isn't making an argument, or conducting some sort of public economic discourse. Their job is to change your mind and overrule your own preferences. Now, at times, I don't mind this. Actually, I'll back farther off than that--I'll admit that advertising is necessary in a consumer society which, for better or worse, we are. At some point we have to pick our products, and the people making the products have a right to have their say. So, even though it drifts into all-pervasive paranoia-inducing mind control, it's a necessary evil.

That said, sometimes commercials cross over into sheer douchiness, and not just in the objectifying-women type of sense. (Note: not trivializing that.) Take, for example, this Super Bowl commercial.

Life in Tibet is hard. Thousands of them have been killed by the Chinese government. Their spiritual leader, the Dalai Llama, lives in exile--prayers mentioning him are best kept out of public. After riots in 2008, protesters were arrested and subject to treatments like food deprivation. So, yeah. That's bad. BUT HEY LOOK WHAT'S CHEAP.

The problem here should be obvious--the plight and suffering of Tibet is being exploited as a lead-in to an advertisement for a website. That said, I've seen several arguments defending them. I'd like to address those arguments.

The first, which I heard last night as this was unfolding on Twitter, was that Groupon was donating money to a pro-Tibet charity, which apparently makes it all right. I really don't think it does, though. You can't just buy off that sort of exploitation. I don't think the people of Tibet are alright with having their plight commercialized as long as they get paid a little bit. That's like a corporation defending their sweatshops by saying they fund a charity that builds schools in third-world countries. The first action is deplorable, the second laudable, but the two have no necessary connection. Groupon, if they really cared about Tibet, would have donated that money and then not made the ad, or made an ad actually about the problems in Tibet.

The next two arguments both came up as I typed this post, actually, with the people in the room around me. One guy didn't seem to see the big deal. He thought it was a work primarily parodying how Americans don't care about things. Alright, I'll admit the possibility. But if it is a parody, it should be noted that it doesn't show it. It looks exactly like a straight example of that not-caring would look. Poe's Law (it is impossible to tell the trolls from actual opinions) applies. If it was a parody--if they were aware of how ridiculous that juxtaposition is--then they did it poorly. Let's think about the good aspects of parody I just wrote about. I talked about how parody's great asset is that it helps us laugh at ourself. But this commercial doesn't really ask us to laugh at anyone, although it might be trying to milk humor from the transition. There's no indication that the narrator is at fault, nor does the commercial use the Tibetan tragedy as anything but a lead-in to their product. Sometimes we are able to transmute tragedy to comedy, true, but in this case the tragedy itself wasn't even relevant--just a discarded attention-grabber for an Internet coupon site.

At this point I laid out my position as plainly as it stands: "They're using human suffering to sell their product. That's wrong, no matter what else they do with respect to donations." I was told that lots of people do that in advertising. Maybe, maybe. Of course, that's just flat-out moral laziness, as far as arguments go. I don't watch a lot of TV, but when I watch it, I don't generally see anything quite this douchetastic. So, no, I think this is a pretty exceptional case, and worthy of attention. Fuck you, Groupon.

Immanuel Kant: World's Worst DM?

Immanuel Kant was a philosopher I wrote about back when I was more interested in doing lecture blog posts. You might recall (or you might already know) (or you might be about to learn) that Herr Kant didn't believe in moral contingencies, so to speak. If something was right (or wrong) then it was always, in all situations and regardless of any consequences, right (or wrong). Most famously, he held that it was immoral to ever tell a lie. The basic reasoning, without using terms specific to his philosophy, is that every time you tell a lie, you degrade the truth a little. You might spot some problems with this, the most common objection being the following hypothetical scenario:

You've got a houseful of Jews, just, you know, crammed in there. Tons of Jews. More Jews/m^2 than a synagogue selling kosher hot dogs with a Hannukah discount. Also, you're in WW2-Europe, so that's probably bad. You should move either to somewhere less war-torn or to the future. Anyway, your friendly neighborhood Gestapo officer comes by and says: "Herr Kant! [see that? foreshadowed.] Do you have any Jews?" and you reply...? Herr Kant replies "yeah, I've got a houseful." Most people think the right thing to do is say something more like "Nope. I don't have anywhere to put Jews, because all my spare bedrooms are filled with spare copies of Mein Kampf."  (Kant didn't have Nazis but addressed the same problem with a generic murderer.)

So yeah, let me get to the point here. Kant didn't lie, or claimed we shouldn't, George Washington-style. It is my contention that this would make him a terrible Dungeon Master. Let me enumerate all the things my players believe which are false. (If you're one of my players, don't read the below.)

--This story was planned out beforehand. Well, I mean, yeah, sort of. I mean, I put these monsters together so that they'd work correctly. And I do have an idea for an eventual plot, if we keep playing long enough that you guys find it. But, uh, I wasn't expecting the session to last that long, so I had to make up names for the last two NPCs you met and I'm generating this mossy cavern thing you're in as you insist on exploring further. That map I just drew with Vis-a-Vis is complete and total bullshit, I made it up as I was drawing it and I don't think it bears any resemblance to an actual room that anyone has ever built. I draw slanted lines on it and say "difficult terrain" solely so we're not playing on an infinite grid of squares.

 --Monsters are unchanging, immutable entities which don't change during combat. Sometimes their bonuses waver, sometimes a defense is a little lower. Sometimes, monsters suddenly have 3/4 the hp they had before because, damn, your damage per round is too low for me to sit through that shit.

--Your characters will be perfect counters to anything, ever. I will probably let you have one fun fight where your Avenger gets all radiant-vulnerable enemies. After you blow through that, afterwards it's not going to go that way. No matter how awesome you are under the right conditions, I am the conditions.

And the biggest:

-- Dice don't lie. Sometimes, you get hit with 2d8 + 9, and I roll two eights. Even so, you're only going to take seventeen damage. On the other hand, sometimes you're a tank. Sometimes you've barely been hit all combat and are getting a little too cocky. You might suddenly develop a vulnerability to damage. Sometimes, crits just aren't as fun for me as they ought to be.

I often wonder how moral this is. I mean, I'm not Immanuel Kant, but still. My players are used to games on computers, mostly. They're used to cold equations and random number generators that, despite their mathematical imperfection, work impersonally. Should I be abusing that trust? I think so, and let me tell you why. A DM's job isn't to run the system or to write a story. After all, players could always run the system if they wanted. And there are lots of stories pre-written for D&D. A DM runs the game partially for narrative purposes--people don't want to know the story after all. However, we also need to keep the game working. It has to be fun, it has to be engaging, and it has to be a particular kind of fair that goes beyond strict balancing. That's what a person offers, and it's why I prefer tabletop RPGs to their electronic version. Computers can't lie. A DM can--and I think that's the best part.

But Black Dynamite! I Post Blogs to the Community!

Happy Groundhog's Day, everyone. The groundhog prediction for me appears to be "three days of no school" although if I get stuck in an infinite loop then it could be EVEN MORE.

So I saw Black Dynamite the other day, and now I can't stop selling drugs to the community quoting it. It's a really good movie. Apparently, it's a parody of blaxploitation films, but besides a vague awareness of what constitutes "blaxpoloitation", I've never seen any blaxploitation films. Nonetheless, I liked it a lot.

I really respect parody. I think it's because there's geekiness inherent in (good) parody, for certain values of geekiness. You couldn't make an action movie parody without being thoroughly familiar with Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. You couldn't make Galaxy Quest without going to at least a few Trek conventions. (I've been to one. Leonard Nimoy was there. It was amazing.) If geekiness is defined as an odd sort of obsession, so that a "computer geek" is someone who knows a lot about computers, then that sort of thing is absolutely critical to crafting a parody that actually manages to capture the essence of a work and present it as humorous.

Since you have to devote time, energy, and thought into really absorbing a genre, we end up in the situation where, to really parody a genre, you have to love it. That means that most parodies--at least, all the best parodies--are the affectionate ones, that showcase a love of a genre. Obviously there are other "parodies" that don't qualify as this--Disaster Movie, etc--but I did say "the best parodies." Shallow, unimaginative potshots at the pop-cultural representation of a work might make for cheap laughs, but in general they won't give you a good parody.

Let me give you a case, in Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and was, in general, damn awesome. H2G2 is, in many ways, a science fiction parody. It makes fun of ideas like time travel, faster-than-light drives, galactic civilizations, artificially intelligent robots, etc, etc. But Douglas Adams also wrote regular science fiction--in fact, he was a writer for Doctor Who, to the point that plot points from his Doctor Who scripts worked their way into the (far-too-rarely-known) later book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Despite writing dead serious stories and contributing to the tropes he parodied, Douglas Adams was able to recognize the absurdities that lurk in science fiction's traditional settings (as they lurk everywhere) and draw them out.

In many ways, parody is harder to do than a straight example of your parody-target. While watching Black Dynamite, I was amazed at how often a subtle mistake was used for comedy. An actor's expression is a bit too fierce, his line a little strangely given, a camera shot holds just a few seconds too long. A sweet spot exists among the bad elements of film. If a camera shot is held just a little too long, it might be disconcerting. If it's held for a very long time, it becomes boring or confusing. Somewhere in-between lies hilarity. A parodist walks a knife edge. Making a normal movie isn't his goal, but making a bad movie isn't either. It can't just be ridiculous--it has to be the right kind of ridiculous, and it has to have the right amount. Without that balance, you don't have a good work making fun of bad works--you just have a bad work.

Parody contains within it a wonderful contradiction. Most of us hate getting made fun of, and when we like a work or a genre, we dislike it getting made fun of as well. But a good parody enables us to laugh at our favorite works and, in that sense, laugh at ourself. It's good to laugh at ourselves. It keeps us from being too serious, and puts a vital limiting circuit on mankind's innate arrogance circuit. To make fun of anything you like, you have to make fun of yourself, and you can't make fun of yourselves without, obviously, making yourself a little more fun. In my mind, that makes parody important. Even in our art, sometimes we aspire a bit too hard for perfection. To take our pretentions and deflate them as expertly as good parody does is nothing short of public service.

Mines of Minecraft: The Burning Timesink

Blah blah blah apologies for last week. My workload went CRAZY. The good news is that (a) No class tomorrow and (b) I spent an hour and a half collecting signatures from deans/professors/advisors so I could switch calculus sections away from a professor causing that craziness. So from now I should be good.

Saturday or so I made a terrible decision, especially in light of the fact that at that point my possible workload was still at a level capable of making me explode. It may prove to be among the worst decisions of my academic career. I bought Minecraft.

While playing Minecraft, I had someone come up behind me and ask what the point of it was. I had trouble explaining it. As far as I can tell, mostly it's about me getting rid of gray blocks so I can find blocks with brown streaks in them. Brown-streak rocks are like gray blocks but they make me extremely excited as soon as they appear, so that's good. Sometimes, of course, I don't find any. Then I have to break more gray rocks in retribution.

Of course, there's more to Minecraft than just mining. Sometimes, for instance, you want to take your blocks and put them on top of each other to build some kind of house. If you're like me, this is an exciting enterprise, as it will allow you to be outside without being murdered by zombies, exploding zombies, cows, or exploding cows. So it's no surprise that once I had my walls up, I elected to stay behind in my house during the night. I would complete the ceiling while I lounged in safety behind my stone fortresses. Yet, it was only a few minutes after sunset when my screen flashed, and I turned around to find myself face to face with a zombie, thankfully a fairly non-volatile one. I pull out my stone sword and proceed to beat him to death. Turning the corner, I find a skeleton, armed with the science of projectile weapons far beyond my ken. Just like that one dude's monologue about bows and arrows in Iron Man, he kills me. (If I could find any goddamn iron, I'd craft an Iron Man suit.)

Respawning, I rush back to my house. Yet, it's clear the place is compromised. Despite my walls and my calculations, my stronghold had been penetrated. How could this happen? I decided that before retreating to my secure mine shaft, I would return to my house to gather my things and assess the weakness that opened it to intrusion. I run up to it, walk through the door--the door. The door. That door. The door that I didn't  bother opening because it was already, uh, ajar. Fully ajar. The door open.

Well. Fuck.

Other than that, Minecraft is fun. It's instilling in me a love of life's simple pleasures, like pieces of rock that aren't gray. It is also ruining my physics education. I am not sure that, in the real world, you can build a tower by jumping up in the air and putting things under you. In addition, I also don't think it would be a viable way to build an overnight shelter. On the other hand, I feel like I could successfully be a miner now. It is apparently not very hard--the main problem being that your pickaxes break down.But since I farm something like a hundred pickaxes' worth of stone for every stone pickax, I have a feeling I won't have any supply problems in a while.

I think I'm going to restart now--first of all so I can play on this Linux partition, and second because I got lost in my other game. I feel like I can easily get back to where I was--and rebuild that house. And then another house. And then a castle and a tower and soon Zachlavia, the greatest nation this world has ever known, and no man shall stand against my might. IT HAS BEGUN.

New Newsworthy News

One of the interesting consequences of the rise of the Internet is the death of the newspaper. The daily newspaper traditionally performed the following tasks:

First, they provided news. This function started to become obsolete not long after someone invented television/radio/telegraph, but now people read their news all kinds of places, like blogs or, more chillingly, the Fox news website. Say what you want about the relative merits of those things as news sources, but the fact is that from the point of view of someone choosing what media to consume, they're far more convenient (and, often, cheaper) than a newspaper. Of course, newspapers do offer something the Internet rarely does, which is local news. Unfortunately, local television stations generally cover large-scale local news. Local news in small towns such as my hometown usually makes its way via word of mouth, but I suppose there's still a market for poorly-formatted stories with bad spelling in those cases, if only because nobody else gives a shit. Much other local news, such as how Mr and Mrs Thaliomide have been knitting sweaters in the same shop for twenty years, is the kind of thing I'm OK with missing.

Second, they provided classifieds. If you wanted a job, you had Help Wanted. If you wanted to buy or sell something, you had classified ads. If you wanted to get it on, there were personals. Today, we have Craigslist for all three, not counting Monster or eBay or OkCupid. Really, the internet is mostly about either selling things or sex, and often it's about selling sex.

But I worry a little bit about the loss of newspapers. Oh, not newspapers themselves. I don't read newspapers, though I do get the The Economist. I worry about our headlines. I mean, look at these. Good stuff, am I right? But as we start to transition into a world where space is no longer an issue, I fear we'll find ourselves in a world without pithy headlines like that. Luckily, I have a solution.

Eventually, it seems, we're not going to be able to rely on editors' headline abilities to pressure them into hilarity. Instead, we're going to have to make the source material great. This entire blog post comes from a thought I had last night--while I was going to sleep, so I have no idea of the surrounding mental context--that went something like "Man, what if I just tried to make everything I did crazy interesting enough that people would just say 'what'?" My thoughts, before they drifted into complete unconsciousness where I resumed work on my Inception sequel, were pretty favorable! For example, when I win a game of pool, traditionally, I would slap the loser. But, under this system, I would slap him. To death. Much better headline, right?

Coding (Not CODing, that's different, there are guns)

That assassins game I was posting about recently ended, which means that the winner--my roommate, which is cool--gets to put the game together again. What a pain. You have to draw circles and put people in order and stuff. So I made an offhand remark to the guy who had been putting it all together before my roommate, "You know, it seems like this shouldn't be too hard to automate."

He looked at me, wanting to be sure of what I was asking. "Well," I said, not yet realizing what was happening, "a computer could pretty easily do it all. You just need to take each name, randomly assign a target, then move onto the target and randomly assign their target, etc. Maybe it could then automatically email everyone or something, so that every person would be able to participate, and nobody has to worry about knowing too much or sitting out." He replied, "Hey. Do you have a new project for today? Looks like it."

Now, I wouldn't be able to lay claim to the sort of geekdom I do without at least dabbling in programming. A few years back I was pretty into it. Actually, it started when I was twelve, and webpages (such as they were in those long ago days) somehow hooked me up with QBASIC. I wrote calculators and games and nothing useful, but it was fun. I bought a couple books on C and C++ but I never really stuck with it. So I had some vague idea of what I needed--I was going to need for loops, uh. I would need...a...compiler. Right. Anyway, nowadays we had Google, so I surely I could work out the rest of it. I mean, it's just a programming language. It's not like...you know...an entirely new field of study for me.


Turns out Ubuntu comes with a compiler! Or at least, I downloaded one to install programs previously. So that part was easy. Let's see if I can still get my Hello World on. Terminal output suggests I can, indeed, get my Hello World on.

Key to this project is file input. I want to be able to take a list of names and assemble that in the program into a pairing of names and targets. So I write a program that reads off a file's contents, to familiarize myself with that process.
I quickly get lots of errors from g++, but it wasn't helpful, and I quickly realized that I needed not a compiler but an IDE. Some googling later, I was in NetBeans, and successfully made file operations work. In an ominous bit of foreshadowing, I fixed a segfault issue, but I don't remember how.

At this point I decided I would go for broke. I wrote pretty much the entirety of the program in one go, deciding that the bits I didn't remember how to do I'd look up as I went along and fix when I tried to compile, rather than program-by-program learn all these techniques. By programmer standards, it's not very big. It's about a hundred lines, and that's with a fair number of comments, and I'm sure I declared variables in weird places and did a million weird things to it. Still, I was proud. Of course, it didn't compile the first time. It never compiles the first time, it rarely compiles the tenth. It did compile eventually, though, after I chased down rogue initializations and stray commas and the inevitable missing semicolon. And once that was done, I was inexpressibly proud. I ran my program, and it came up:

>>How many players, shithead?
4
>>Nice. What's the file name for this crap?
roster.txt

Segmentation fault. Bitch.

(Neither my actual program nor my CLI are this rude, but this isn't the most interesting topic so I spiced it up a bit.)

So yeah. That's what's happened the last few days. (It also snowed but dammit who cares about outside.) For now, the voyage continues. If I can solve my segfaults I'll be really happy, and then the most bare-bones version of the program will be complete. I'd really like to put together the email part of things, but I worry that's going to get beyond me pretty quickly. Still, I'll probably try.

An Assassin's Tale

My target stepped out of the elevator, with me behind him. Had I already waited too long? Without the confined space, would I find time to strike? We walked side-by-side, he and I, talking like men not facing morality in that hardest of ways—by forcing it on others. As yet he showed no sign of suspicion. Was it not odd to him that I'd accepted his invitation so willingly? I rarely buy snacks from this convenience store. Surely he knew. Surely. We walk in. I pick up a juice. “100% Apple,” it advertises. I wonder briefly if that makes it more wholesome than me and my grisly deeds. He picks up something—candy? Chips?--somehow I'm past caring, but surely a man so near to his death deserves that attention. I can't give it to him. I glance at our third companion, another who volunteered to come along. What's his angle? Is he thirsty, caffeine-starved? Or is he after me? I stand with my back to a wall, hoping I don't cause suspicion. We meet friends there, by chance, and trade pleasantries. I worry that my anxiety shows as I pace a bit with my pretense of an apple juice. As we leave, Tyler—his name is, was Tyler—Tyler steps in front of me, and I realize that if I don't take my chance, no hope remains. He would do the same to me. Maybe he's planning to. I reach out, and grasp his shoulder—not hard enough to cause pain, but firmly enough that he's aware. I look into his eyes, filled with surprise and a growing dejection, and apologize.

Damn, I should skip the whole geek thing and just write melodrama. So, my floor's playing a game called Assassins, which many of you have probably experienced. For those who haven't, let me summarize: A group of people sign up. One person, in a game master role, places them in a circle-formation of targets. Each person is targeted by one other, and have one target themselves. Kills are scored in various ways—I've heard of squirt guns being used, as well as slitting throats with feathers. In some countries they use actual guns. Once you kill someone, you inherit their target. Usually some safe zones are implemented, which are especially necessary since we all live together. All public areas in our floor of the dorm are safe zones, but the rooms and bathrooms are not, which is yet another reason to lock your doors. (I would at this point also express concern about certain individuals climbing in your windows, snatching your people up, but our windows don't open and are ten floors above ground level. The way I see it, if anyone gets through the window, they deserve it.) We played one round the last two weeks of last semester, and another started as we arrived this semester. One of them went quite well for me, one ended early. I didn't win either, but let's explore these tales, because this game is crazy fun. You ever read a conspiracy theory and think it must be interesting to be paranoid? This is like that except that there really are people out to get you.

The first game, I received my first target—a man who, for anonymity purposes, will be called Jon. His real name's Jon, but we're still going to call him that. Not long after receiving this target, I see Jon and another friend of mine leave the part of our floor behind the key card swipe, which means they're in the elevator lobby. They're still safe there, but unless they're going to the girl's side of the floor, those elevators are about to turn fatal, I decide. I'll pretend I'm going somewhere innocent so I can catch an elevator and get them as they leave. I walk out, calm, collected, and hungry. For blood. As soon as I walk out, Jon calls to me, “Hey Zach,” he says unwittingly, “Want to come to Braum's with us?” I grin and reply wittingly, “Of course. Of course I want to come to Braum's with you.” (Note: Braum's is a fine establishment which serves hamburgers, fries, shakes, ice cream, and other food I don't care nearly as much about. Just so you know, there's no product placement deal.) (Note: Braum's executives: I would totally do a product placement deal.) We go, and I get a chocolate shake and drink it while Jon and [REDACTED] eat lunch. I watch them and try to think of something cool to say. Finally, we start to leave after someone buys milk. Before we walk out the door, I say to Jon, “Did you enjoy your meal?”

He gets a puzzled look on his face, and says “Yyyyes...?”

I say, “Good” and grab his arm before exclaiming “BECAUSE IT WAS YOUR LAST.” Oh hot damn. I am totally cut out for this business. Look at that! You think Lee Harvey Oswald had that sort of thing lined up? I doubt it. I bet he didn't even have a milkshake with JFK beforehand. (Booth, “sic semper tyrannis” is pretty good.)

I lasted until the final three, and when I and my target were having a staredown in the hallway, I slowly walked backwards into my room—and got tagged by the other guy. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But that's what happens when you play for keeps.

This time, well, I told you about Tyler already. Not long after, as people started arriving back from winter break, I stepped briefly into a friend's room to talk to him as he unpacked, and THE SAME GUY got me. The same way. Embarrassing. It would be like if, instead of ascending to heaven, Jesus just started walking around pissing off the government again. So it didn't last as long. That's fine, that's fine. Soon this round will end and a new one will begin. And you know? I think I'll be tearing shit up. Just watch.