Post-it Notes on my Brain

Weej

2012-01-31T13:40:00.000-08:00

They say only the good die young. Well that's shit, but I wish it were true.

Weej was brilliant, and wicked, and magnificent, and big-hearted, and conniving, and mischievous, and brilliant. And never in his life was he anything as bland and pedestrian as merely "good". Oatmeal is "good". Weej was chipotle-marinated spare ribs with garlic-truffle-oil potato mash, a glass of Shiraz, and a double espresso to follow. And probably one of those horrible smoke-sticks of his too. Weej could fill an empty room with a grin.

I read about other people dealing with death, and many say they find comfort in the idea of a god. I'd never dream of taking away anyone's solace at a time like this even if I could - so I'll hide this self-absorbed rant away on this backwater blog where it won't bother anyone. But I've got to get it out. I want to scream it from a rooftop. How could this make you want to worship a god? I want to _invent_ one, just so I can hunt the fucker down and kick his lily-white arse! If I actually believed one was real I'm not sure I could stop myself from writing "Yeah? Well Fuck You Too!" on the side of a mountain in 40-foot letters made of burning bibles. Keep your fucker of a god; I want my friend back.

Bike gear ratios

2011-08-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'd been idly wondering for awhile now about two things:

1) How far my bike commute to and from work really is.
2) How the different gear combinations on my bike compare to each other.

So a week or so ago I worked it out:

Number of teeth on each of my front three gears: 22, 32, 42
Number of teeth on my back 8 gears: 11, 13, 15, 18, 21, 24, 28, 32
Gear ratios, in descending order:
3/8 3.8181818182
3/7 3.2307692308
2/8 2.9090909091
3/6 2.8
2/7 2.4615384615
3/5 2.3333333333
2/6 2.1333333333
3/4 2
1/8 2
2/5 1.7777777778
3/3 1.75
1/7 1.6923076923
2/4 1.5238095238
3/2 1.5
1/6 1.4666666667
2/3 1.3333333333
3/1 1.3125
1/5 1.2222222222
2/2 1.1428571429
1/4 1.0476190476
2/1 1
1/3 0.9166666667
1/2 0.7857142857
1/1 0.6875

So for all intents and purposes, shifting the front gear changes the effective ratio by about 2 "notches": 1 and 8 is about the same as 2 and 6 is about the same as 3 and 4.

Having worked that out, I measured the outer diameter of my bike tire - 82.5 inches - and worked out that if I leave it in 3/6 (which is around where I generally ride) and never backpedal, it takes about 69 turns of the crank to go a quarter mile:

5280 ft/mile * 12 in/ft / 82.5 inches/wheel = 768.0 wheels/mile
768.0 wheels/mile / 2.8 wheels/pedal = 274.3 pedals/mile
274.3 / 4 = 68.6 pedals in a quarter mile.

Then I rode home by my usual route, without changing gears and without backpedalling (which is surprisingly hard) and it comes out very close to three and a quarter miles. Which is pretty darn close to what Google Maps comes up with, even though it doesn't let me trace my actual route, which winds in and out of some back alleys and such.

I can't really imagine why I'd want to know this again later, but I haven't really got anywhere else to put it at the moment...

Of Balloons and Bridges

2011-01-07T17:29:00.000-08:00

The religious zealot who denies science - and yes, I'm looking at you, Creationists - sees science as just another belief system. Since their religion is based on belief, not fact, questioning any part of it is to question the whole. To disprove any part of it would be to bring the entire edifice of faith tumbling down. Its not supported from the outside, like a bridge; it supports itself, like a balloon. Even a small hole is bad for a balloon.

These people expect science to behave the same way. So when they find a gap which the current scientific theory fails to explain, or prove one of its predictions wrong, or read about some scientist caught fudging their data, they clap their hands and say "Ha! Told you so!" as if the entire discussion were now over, and they'd been proven right. Scientists and skeptics then go into conniptions about the religious folk being disingenuous because proving one thing wrong doesn't necessarily prove anything else in particular to be right, but I think many of the zealots are genuinely confused by such arguments. Obviously, they've already proved your belief system to be false; why is the discussion still going on? They've poked a hole in your balloon - have the decency to fall. Meanwhile the true scientist looks at the gap, or the error, or the fraud, and simply nods and says "Yep; thats how science works." And then gets to work making the next revision better.

Noone really seriously bothers to expose gaps, or contradictions, or frauds in religion, except possibly as a form of entertainment. There wouldn't be anything left.

Emergent Religion

2008-05-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

I woke up in the middle of the night awhile back with this running through my head, and my brain refused to shut up about it til I'd written it down. Didn't have anywhere to put it then, so its just been languishing in a text file on my desktop. Its not terribly ground-breaking or original, but - though I was reading Richard Dawkins at the time - I should point out that it came to me before I got more than a chapter or two into The God Delusion, and he hadn't got around to talking about the origins of religion yet.

-----

Belief as an emergent property of intellignce and communication.

Belief acts as a saftey-valve; it stops over-thinking from getting in the way of survival.

Belief systems are built up around things analysed by intelligence to allow re-use of applied intelligence. Thus, I _believe_ that this ball will fall back down if I throw it up, because a collection of previous experiences and the application of my intelligence at an earlier time tells me that it is so, but I don't actually work it out every time - I just believe it. Its belief based on a solid basis of logic and analysis, but once we've done the maths once, it falls back on belief to avoid having to do it again.

Also, belief in combination with the human knack for communication allows transfer of belief systems to others / offspring. So the children who believe their parents when they say its not safe to leave the cave and Smilodons are afraid of fire are more likely to survive. And once we have transfer, natural selection applies as to what belief systems survive, and we have memes. And in that case the usual rules apply for the evolution of a fertile platform for the memes; a certain amount of mutation (new ideas) is good, but too much is actually bad, and a certain amount of inherent resistance to mutation is also good. So people have actually evolved to naturally accept the memes they have created or had transferred to them from trusted sources, and to resist questioning them by reapplying intelligence or logic. This is mostly natural and good - it allows the re-use case to function. Only a few people - or more people under limited circumstances - will break this mold by re-visiting the underlying thought.

So we were pretty much doomed to a planet full of unthinking unquestioning automatons from day 1 at "bang the rocks together".

Of course two of the most successful types of memes are:

1) the sort which allow you to accurately predict the world around you - symbiotic memes which help the host survive. I shall call these predictive memes "science".

and 2) memes which cause the host to actively spread the meme (proselytize), create a social hierarchy in which those who spread them most actively are granted special status, and cause the hosts to attack hosts infected with competing memes in the same niche. These parasitic memes primarily look out for themselves, and any benefit they bring to the individual host brain appears to be largely circumstantial. I shall call this last category "religion"... though "nationalism" would work just as well.

(Though there is a case to be made for specific religions creating a social structure which advances the survival of the individual member... particularly in an environment full of hostile competing religions. Obviously a meme of this sort will only survive if its hosts survive long enough to pass on the meme - which is why suicide cults don't tend to last long. But as it is this category of meme which creates the hostile environment in the first place, its difficult to go overboard with the survival value of the meme to the host; prolific breeding and the indoctrination of children is good for both the religion and the host, but religious wars, prejudice, and self-sacrifice are good for the religion at the _expense_ of the survival of the individual host.)

Post-it Notes on my Brain

2008-05-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

For Battle is great for hanging out and chatting around the campfire, but occasionally I get the craving for someplace a little more self-indulgently rant-able. Either stuff that just pops into my head that I feel like writing down somewhere, or else a place for those conversations at parties where 95% of folks catch a sentence or two and back slowly away without making eye contact, but the other 5% dive right in. So its not that I'm trying to keep this private, its just that I want to give people the choice to back away or not - posting it on For Battle seemed a bit too in-your-face. Possibly I'll email folks who I think would be interested in individual conversations, or post a link on For Battle or something; I haven't decided yet. Most likely I'll end up posting to this twice a year in any case...