Intelligent and Unintelligent Design
Posted 12.08.11 at 06:31 PM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

I pulled out two gnarly whiskers this morning, as I am paying the price for doing the electric shave in the car yesterday. They were those defective ones where multiple whiskers grow together in a triple helix-type pattern. You might somewhat harshly consider that to be a defective genetic feature of the face, but the fact that a snafu like that doesn't just cause your face to permanently mar itself or something is another small little TMI miracle for the day.

We need a Christmas tree; the "wrapped gift bedroom floor space" and "unwrapped gift chair" are quickly filling up, and it's the smallest chair in the living room. Christmas or not, the bigger chairs are for lounging.

The Best Buy commercials where the woman heckles Santa are only marginally better than the ones from years past where a slave-driving Santa makes the elves work holidays and weekends.

I saw my first "dad of the house was smart" commercials in a long time. The doofus guy from the "doublemyspeed.com" ad now has a second scenario where he takes the information previously gifted to him by his wife and has a nice father-daughter moment on the couch fixing her college PC. The daughter was either grateful for the help or silently disgusted that he had rooted out her hustle to get an Apple laptop as a replacement. Either way, he was victorious, saved money, looked like the big man of the house, and didn't take guff from anybody.

... Unlike that poor sap who gets berated in his wife's greenhouse for saving money on a phone plan. That one is awful. My devious side always wants him to just go nuts, smashing her windows, maybe getting the kids (who I'm sure are on his side due to the new unlimited mobile plan) to destroy all her plants. Salt the soil so nothing else will ever grow. That type of thing. Maybe the new trend is that commercial dads are reserved while the women are more, well, evil and aggressive.

AT&T was again rated the worst mobile provider. Knock on formica, but we haven't had a lot of issues. You occasionally have to wave a dead chicken over Kristin's iPhone to make an outbound call, and sans MicroCell we get one bar at the house when we're not standing askew a brick wall, but otherwise quite good. Much fewer dropped calls, but that's a city-to-city thing they're working on.

I always enjoy those kind of "First World Problems" Amazon reviews, like where they say a box of Christmas cookies is "inedible." We watch our fair share (yeah, Obama) of chef shows on TV, and it's pretty funny to see some portly snob stare down a well-cooked slice of veal and say, "this is inedible." These are probably people who think tap water is "undrinkable," and we've seen people refuse to cook with canned beans.

Not related, but when boiling water I still think of the poor moron on Hell's Kitchen who thought cold water boiled faster.

Flash Lob
Posted 10.31.11 at 04:35 AM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

I don't like Mitt Romney.

That is all. Good night.

False Alarm
Posted 09.30.11 at 03:39 PM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

The person who replaced me in Turkey sent me a birthday e-mail entitled "GSAP ALLOCATION ISSUE." They just wanted to spook me. Ha ha.

Odds and Ends
Posted 09.27.11 at 06:34 PM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

It's been a pretty "hectic" few days recently. I put hectic in quotes because it's not in so much a busy way as a preoccupied way. Anyway, a few little seeds that might have grown into blog entries in more fertile times...

Mainstream introductory Biology as taught in schools is not a science. Microbiology? Science. Neurobiology? Science.

Science is a "how," philosophy is a "why," but the "what" is just knowledge. Memorizing animal and muscle names is not science. Understanding and theorizing on how the animals grow or the muscles work, that's science.

We have a lot of liberal arts majors writing science stories right now entitled, "Was Einstein wrong?" Unless you forget to carry an x somewhere, you can't be wrong in Physics (then you're wrong in Math, actually). Your theory just fails to be predictive over a range of values. Newton wasn't wrong in Physics terms once Einstein came along. We still teach his theories because they are predictive over a vast range of useful circumstances.

Now, in metaphysical or philosophical terms, the worldview prompted by Newton's theory was less than accurate. But that doesn't make his equations any less "correct," except when they are proved not to be predictive (photons, black holes, etc.).

You have the same thing with Einstein. Unless our measurement instruments are proven systematically wrong, nothing will ever make Relativity less predictive where it has shown itself to be predictive.

If you say, "Nothing can travel faster than light," and then something travels faster than light, you have found a limitation to the applicability of your theory. Quantum Mechanics contradicts Relativity all over the place. Einstein died still trying to reconcile them, as far as I recall.

So, you might say Einstein's conclusions are wrong, that he stretched his theory out farther than it ended up being valid, but that doesn't do anything to his theory but put a warning label on its usability at a certain point.

People seem to think that God has his calculator out figuring out gravitational forces based on equations developed during the last millenium. These formulas are nothing but descriptors of the magic that is life. Those frictional "angels" in pre-Newtonian Physics could be pushing away on the planets and airplanes and photons as we speak. We don't know. All we know is that we have a handful of equations that can predict how those angels will operate under given conditions.

This, I believe, is the fundamental arrogance and oversight in "scientific atheism," we might say. The idea that we can truly explain things is hogwash; we can only do our best to predict.

"Wealth" is the height of the water in the bathtub. "Income" is the flow out of the spout. Taxing wealth is hard, so we just leap over that and assume high-income people are wealthy, and that wealthy people are high-income. Like above, you might have a strong correlation, but the angels will do what they do.

When you raise the tax rate, you might or might not increase "revenue." Saying you are "increasing revenue" is, therefore, a statement of faith rather than fact. Even if you levy a fixed-value "citizenship fee" shakedown on the public, you might actually lose revenue with administration costs and people renouncing their citizenship. Angels again, or maybe just the Invisible Hand.

Believing in "settled science" is a very bad religion. Science is a process that starts with a question. If you stifle questions, you no longer want answers. You will find yourself in a new Dark Age prompted by your own religion, not that of those clinging to their guns.

If you want to be an atheist, do it on philosophical terms. And don't evangelize or pontificate, for Pete's sake. It makes you look self-conscious. Wear your God-given free will with pride.

If you are an agnostic, be ever listening and rarely speaking. If we wanted to hear theories about uncertainty we would just ask an economist.

If you are an economist, it would be hard not to believe in some kind of god. You can't look at the way chaos working together makes something wholly different and useful without seeing some vision of a creator and a universally common spirit over it all.

More on That
Posted 09.16.11 at 02:57 AM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

I continued to think about my little idea, and it dawned on me that this is a similar concept to municipal bonds, which provide a tax break in order to provide an incentive to "invest" in schools and public works projects.

The difference is that with munis the local government is using the tax code to save itself money. This is, ultimately, a government expenditure at the federal level. Munis are issued to citizens by small shops within the larger government "family." The federal government is subsidizing their investments in the local public sector through decreased tax revenue.

In the case of my infrastructure scheme, you're actually seeking to manipulate the way social costs and benefits are distributed.

Programs like TARP were focused on bailouts, which are more accurately termed a "socialization of losses." If a bank makes a mistake we all suffer, not just the shareholders and debt holders of that company.

What hit me is that my scheme is actually the de-socialization of benefits.

Unless privately monetized by tolls, fees, or rents, infrastructure is a common good that benefits all but doesn't make sense as an investment for any one independent actor. Therefore, the government normally steps in to allow essentially a pooled fund of taxes to provide these assets to society. Society then shares in the dividends.

This scheme uses private capital but employs tax contributions to consolidate the broader social benefit into a return on investment for the private citizen or organization that contributes the capital.

Two Musings
Posted 04.16.11 at 04:12 PM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [1]

1. I am considering purchasing the antesoinc.org domain, so I can just push on through my frequent typo without worrying. I might also get a legal name change to Bradnon, so I can type above 50wpm and retain the correct name.

2. I can't quite find the correct news site.

realclearpolitics to me is one of the best, but as the name says it is mostly concerned with political issues. I like being able to read a Mother Jones and American Spectator article about the same subject using adjacent links. I just wish there could be some more standard news. realclearworld misses this mark as well, and realclearnews redirects to a cyber-squatter.

Reuters often takes a more subtle but similar approach to Fox Business when they report on disasters and the like, basically quoting changes to a fertilizer company's stock when a militia guy detonates a bomb. At least they don't change the S'es out for $'s in their headlines.

You have to change the CNN "edition" to International to avoid reading funny cat stories and iReport crowdsourcing all day, and then they force your sports section to cricket and "football" just to spite the Americans trying to find a decent news source. The Kate Middleton stories also become even more annoyingly omnipresent at this point.

I try CNNMoney, which gives another similar-to-Reuters feel at times (and is solely financial news, or whatever fresh dung they rake over from Fortune), and I also bear the cost of having to imagine bashing Paul LaMonica's face in with a croquet mallet, which can't be heart- or brain-healthy on a long-term basis.

FoxNews.com really seems alright, but, ironically, I try to shoot for a more balanced news slate. Not to say they don't basically report the straight news (especially online), but I would rather get my information from a place any hypothetical ideological opponents would not roll their eyes over.

Local news is awful...

Waning and Waxing
Posted 06.15.10 at 06:21 AM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [1]

As I heard Lady GaGa's far inferior work "Alejandro" in the cafe this morning, I realized that my folk revival is now basically depending on the next sub-generation to produce.

Given they grew into adolescence thinking Green Day's first album was American Idiot, my hopes aren't particularly high.

Of course, our sub-generation converted the tiring but still hopeful alternative movement to emo and cry-rock like Staind. So, we weren't exactly carrying the banner of righteousness ourselves.

As the record industry grapples with becoming an organizer of production rather than an integrated creative, manufacturing, and retail pan-oligopoly, I suppose the idea of a flag-carrying demographic will fade over time.

Everybody seems to think that we will get all our cues from social networking in the near future.

Never really thought about it before, but Google's name "Buzz" encapsulates this better than any other. MySpace was a holdover from the Geocities concept: any idiot can create a website. Facebook was the networking concept, which classed it up quite a bit until they sold out for some remote hope of profitability and sustainability via FarmVille.

Is Evony available on Facebook, m'lord?

While I love my low-hundreds of Facebook friends individually and dearly, I really couldn't care less about more than maybe thirty people's tastes and interests on a regular basis. And those are the people with whom I, surprise, generally have more communication than snooping on a wall post.

This may make me a minority in the social networking world, but I doubt I'm alone. Definitely a minority if I magically found myself within the junior high demographic. But as we get older, hew our own logs, and thatch our own roofs, I think the independent spirit that grows in us pushes this away.

I've found a lot of my dark horse music by chance, and with conversation. This passive communication idea, in my view, is just lazy marketers trying to find the next way to "crowd source" the hard work.

My marketing professor pointed out that people hate advertisements until they're in the market for what is being sold. For example, aside from enjoying hearing Frasier trying to sell me a car, Hyundai ads barely ever caught my attention in the past. But if I saw one now I would check it out, because I'm looking for reassurance that it would be a decent car to potentially replace the often whale-like Honda iterations. And shave some money off the price despite the superior warranty.

So, given this, the odds are that if I check in on a friend using Facebook, I'm not in a music-buying mood. I am in a music buying mood when I'm shopping for music, which means a well-placed, context-sensitive Amazon or iTunes embedded ad would be far more effective than encouraging me to parse through a friend's music list in search of peer pressure. And last.fm, while frustrating in many ways, is a great and subtle way to tie music shopping to music listening. With a touch of crowd-sourced social networking effect, I might add.

So, maybe it's "context-specific" that is the key concept here.

Which means we may be tracking back to a device-per-context philosophy. During the emergence of mature smart phones, backwards cranks like me were critical of the "one device with a small screen to do everything" philosophy. What we as a group didn't see was that phones were not destined to do everything, but they were going to take over quite a few extra jobs.

The iPad and the ensuing duplication panic demonstrate that people are ready to run a phone OS on a larger device to compensate for the bounded nature of phone capabilities.

So Facebook will probably have to discover its bounds, as well. Facebook can easily run on phones and replace Twitter with a richer experience. It can transmit LOLs at light speed, deliver FarmVille, and keep people connected, but it may just not be a music marketing tool.

Which is tough toenails for them, because it's a lot easier to extract commercial value from these focused activities than it is to insert themselves commercially between one friend and another.

Welcome Back, Me
Posted 06.11.10 at 11:11 PM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

I clearly have been watching more picture albums arrive on the blog page than my own writings recently. I haven't had a lot of chance for independent thought recently, and what I do generate normally comes on my walk to work and is either promptly forgotten or not particularly significant in a lasting way.

I did have quite a bit of trouble reading this article with my eyes rolled all the way up into my forehead. It took them halfway down the page, from a grocery store spokeswoman for goodness' sake, to utter the word "commodity."

Obama can't figure out whose ass he needs to kick, and on the way to the World Cup Biden reminds us how pissed his boss is. Power to Biden going to the World Cup. Better than just sitting around next to your bucket... trying to look mad. Go where you can help some Americans out and put a good face on for the world. Güle güle.

Much like the global economy, for which the post-FDR US Presidency now seems to imply Senior Mouseketeer-level leadership, a negative environmental event is just kind of a passive horror that only permits symbolic reaction.

But, unlike the economy's occasional boons from Lady Luck (Clinton's magic carpet ride across the dot-com bubble comes to mind), you really can't do a lot to take credit for environmental upsides. Hard to turn out a press release for flushing the toilet one less time this week (and we're at Peak Water, they say).

So anger now reigns supreme. But much like Yosemite Sam doggone'ing it in the wake of Bugs Bunny, anger is an expression of helplessness rather than strength.

We all need to be angry, apparently. We need to read New York Times articles to find out exactly how to kick BP in the nuts without compromising other key social grievances and sparing the fate of the Quik-E-Mart jobber.

We can vote, we can accept our 8% dividend yields from the stocks of actually well-maintained multinational oil companies, we can buy property with a reasonable assumption that it won't be expropriated, and we can buy the Monster Cables if we think the bits stay a bit sharper on the way through. What we can't do is address problems as they come our way. We can't accept downside risk.

The same conspiracy types who could probably tell you a lengthy fable about Goldman and their ties to the government are often the ones calling for their criminal prosecution and seizure of assets. People normally think of Big Brother as surveillance, but misuse of the criminal justice system and property rights are by far more disturbing to me.

What bugs me is the new solution mechanism for problems. We look to our President, whom the forefathers really didn't intend to empower that much, to kick the dirt and call meetings. If not, he doesn't care, and my would that be hurtful.

Then, we want to throw everybody in jail. Because that's just what freedom loving people do.

Then, let's have the government take over all those nasty oil wells and hire the same contractors to run them and blow them up at a rate defined by the calculated risk allowed by regulation/ethics and the market's tolerance for astronomical cost bases associated with extracting these valuable commodities safely.

We own the benefits, blame the negative externalities on the source, and look to the cops to save the day or at least yell at people until it works itself out. What a pathetic way to go about things.

I briefly feel like a tree-hugger here, but if anything binds us all together on this crazy world of ours, it's the world itself. We own it together, we delegate power to decide and enforce who owns each chunk to (hopefully) well-run entities, and we share the positive and negative outcomes with each other.

The gatekeepers do not bind us like the earth and air. But we see our gatekeepers (be it Chavez or the White House) as the landlords. And guess whose problem it is when the apartment fridge leaks coolant? We're not in a totalitarian government, or a communist government, or a fascist government, or a theocracy, or an anarchy, or an oligarchy, or a democracy for that matter.

We're sharecropping. This isn't right, because we own the land together.

We need to stop this. We're better than all of this.

This One May Be Weird
Posted 03.17.10 at 10:07 PM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

It's bedtime, so I'm not sure how kooky this might be.

Do you ever look at somebody and think, "Where did they get that sweater?" Not like in an Us magazine what-were-they-thinking fashion kind of way, but actually wondering about the story of the item?

Sometimes in strange moments I picture people sitting around with their families opening Christmas gifts (or Bayram gifts, or whatever), and pulling that sweater out of a gift box. Or did they just pick it up on some ordinary Saturday by themselves? Did their girlfriend pick it out?

Especially for guys, who don't generally need to have the turnover rate seen in the standard woman's wardrobe (and not as much of a will to shop, either), I think a lot of things have the potential to carry interesting stories.

Which makes it strangely personal, in a way, to encounter people wearing these goofy variations on standard things. I suppose like the arrangements of leopard spots or freckles, the mortal spirit needs to wrap itself up in these little pieces of uniqueness to reinforce its own vision of self.

Maybe this is why I generally dislike wearing overly distinctive or heavily branded items. To me, that's a lot like trying to tell a story you're not part of.

Macadamia Nuts
Posted 03.09.10 at 09:38 AM UTC
Tagged random | # | Comment [0]

You want an illustration of the benefits of portfolio diversification? Construct a building with only one men's bathroom stall on the whole floor, take off its door handle, and lock it. Right in between coffee time and lunch time.