Beany Connection

Faith statements about the bible

2011-11-16T08:59:00.000-08:00

That the Bible is a factually correct account of the events recorded is intrinsically a statement of faith, not a statement of any objective knowledge anyone can have. It is not a thing anyone can know. Lets take the best possible case from an objective point of view - if all the accounts of events of the Bible were backed up by piles of independent, contemporary accounts* all you can say is that the Bible gives a consistent account along with contemporary sources. That's it.

What can we say about the Bible? If I had it my way, nothing - I'm not really into ancient mythos, even if it is culturally significant. I'd rather take my high culture via Holst. But if I'm backed into a corner - we can't say "it's reliable", this is in the same way a statement of faith, something we cannot know.

It can be said that "it is our interpretation that it is internally consistent". This is a difficult one, because internal consistency like this relies on some sort of system of interpreting what it is written. The most straight forward one is read what is written and take the words at face value. People who say that the Bible is internally consistent do not do this, they look at these apparent inconsistencies and apply different interpretations, they sometimes refer to these things as "theology". Is as good a label as any, if you like calling things "-ologies". That said, from a straight forwards reading there are a number of apparent inconsistencies and contradictions, people make lists of these things. But I don't really want to reduce to spamming links, we're all capable of googling ourselves.

We can say "we think it's reliable factual account", if we do think that, "it is a reliable factual account" is a statement of faith, as above. There is a lot of people who will argue that the Bible is verified by other historical account and archaeologists, even though the broad body of expert opinion, from where the evidence comes, is that the Bible is only somewhat reliable as a factual account. This does seem to be cherry-picking, a sort of confirmation bias - take what they produce when it agrees with them and discard it if it doesn't.

But this isn't the major issue at least for me. In this case saying "we think it's a reliable factual account" is also a statement of faith, because the Bible reports miracles, and to say "I think it's a reliable account" is saying that you think miracles happened. This is a statement of faith - miracles do not happen nowadays, if you try to look for them in any objective way; they require faith to even see them.

It goes the other way - saying "the Bible is wrong" is a statement of faith, saying "the evidence suggests the Bible is not a factual account and it has, from a straight forwards reading, many internal inconsistencies" isn't.

I think what I'm getting at here is that if we have to have a conversation about what the Bible is, and how we think about historical evidence, then it is obvious and vital to understand that some things are a statement of faith. The Bible being a highest authority is one, the Bible being a factual account of history is one, the Bible being internally consistent is one, the Bible being a fraud is one. We cannot say that the Bible is absolutely anything, from the available evidence. Even beyond the "I think therefore I am" type thing to the more sensible way of looking at it, the evidence base just isn't there for any of these absolute statements.

I'm not saying we shouldn't make statements of faith, day to day life is full of them. But it is important to know what are statements of faith and what is available as objective evidence, it can irritate and make people look needlessly silly and closed minded, especially if you're going to cajole unwilling a-religious folk into talking about it even though the subject is deathly dull. (And it really is, no-one has said anything significantly new and accessible to me about it since Darwinism rocked up).

*They're not - for example, King David, who is the subject of a good chunk of the Bible - the Books of Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles has 1 possibly independent account - someone dug up some stones, which had King David mentioned on them. The stones are probably considered reliable because other stones at the same place contradict accounts of the bible, which isn't something Christian forgers are considered likely to have done. There is another book which mentions him, but it's not generally considered certain. Wiki here.

Nature, nurture, genetics, upbringing. Matt Ridley confuses the issue. By bring more information to the party

2011-08-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading a massively interesting book about the brain, in the context of Evolutionary Psychology, "the Agile Gene". It also has some biochemistry in it, but it's worth the struggle. I quite like evolutionary psychology - not sure why, perhaps it's how the ideas are strung together, I enjoy Psychology and the evolutionary aspect of it is interesting. It really complicates ideas, though - as with most people, I had a fairly "nature" "nurture" style separation in my head, not thinking it was really one or another but a combination of both. But it is actually a lot more complicated than that - an example is people who grew in the womb in the third trimester in a famine. Shortly after they were born the famine ended and they have a significantly higher chance of diabetes when they get older. A working hypothesis seems to be that the child is constructed in the womb in reaction to the external famine, but then afterwards when it finds ample food due to the difference between the design and what was there.

Both nature and nurture, a seriously complicated interplay between environment and genes, an environmental effect during gestation that played out in the end of life.

But this famine seems to have a second generation effect - the children who were in gestation during the first 6 months were small children, but grew up normally. They also have small children themselves. It's not unprecedented in animals, locusts take a few generations to switch from quite, reticent animals to eat-everything-around. But second generation influences? Environmental components of who we are are taken somehow directly from our grandparents' environment? So not only is nature and nurture a false dichotomy, they actually play with each other - nature and nurture influencing genetic responses, but grandparents environment effecting the way we grow.

I think what is getting me, and that I'm not expressing it well, is that nurture implies some sort of choice, training, but actually nurture, environmental interplays, can be as dictatorial as genetic expressions. Homosexuality has a component of environmental factors about it - for each older brother a boy has, the boy is around a third more likely to be gay. So is it the parents' fault a child is gay? Well, sort of.*

Also, how much stuff they know about the brain is immense. They did some experiments on mice, blindfolded them from birth, and found if they were blindfolded for 2 weeks, they could see, if they were blindfolded for 3 weeks they were blind. Fairly astounding itself, but they actually went in and found the chemicals that did that. It also has a human component, and a rather tragic one. Occasionally children are born with cataracts over both eyes and initially the standard practice was not to remove them until the child was 10. Those children never really learnt to see.

This is all in context of imprinting, which is a fascinating subject itself - how humans imprint, how some parts of our "personality"** are mailable but once set become set in stone.

Sometimes I think the reason I started all this reading about psychology was to see how much we can dictate who we are - can we decide to be different to what we are? How much can I decide to be different? And the question still stands, sort of - I want to know what is stuck and what can shift, what we can choose to change. There are ideas that we are stuck as we are, ever destined to repeat the same cycles, and then there's the more optimistic "we can be whoever we want to be", or as the NLP people put it - if any human can be something, then so can I.*** And it's after reading things like this that I realise I'm probably not asking the right question. The problem is, I'm not really sure what the right question ought to be.

*Also, my little brother is 1/3 more gay than me, proven by science.

**Personality is a little awkward a word - I wouldn't usually use it in the context of sexual preference, for example. I would usually put something in like "self" but given I've been talking about development of bodies I didn't want the mistake of people thinking I was talking about anything other than brain-related activity.

***Neither of those are true, by the way. We are limited, but only somewhat. And being different is a trick.

You don't have to...

2010-12-08T01:22:00.001-08:00

...but it's better if you do

Hoarder

2010-11-21T13:27:00.001-08:00

I just realised I am totally a hoarder. Not in terms of items that ought to be thrown out, but ideas and phrases, ways of explaining and understanding. Fill my head with them, get irritated when I can't remember them, chase after them when they're fleeting.

Eat them up and make them my own. But never really.

Ah, we're all composites anyways.

Words that taste good

2010-11-21T13:24:00.000-08:00

"...which do nothing but witlessly fool those eager to believe." - Derren Brown, Confessions of a Conjouror

The hypothesis of God

2010-11-13T11:33:00.000-08:00

It is not just that in the ever-expanding realm of scientific knowledge the hypothesis of god has not been required to explain anything, ever. It is also that in every case where design seems apparent - and to our human eyes, design appears everywhere - natural processes, alone and unaided, have been shown to be sufficient.

It is not just a god is and gods are not needed, it's that, as an explanation, they are replaced.

Expecting this to continue, after so long and so much knowledge gained, is a reasonable, sensible and conservative position to hold.

This is done as a slight extension of something I wrote last month, as a response to people taking issue with the then widely reported comments by Stephen Hawkings about god. It was done after having some conversations about faith and listening to Carl Sagan talk about how the Universe is not made for us.

The Christian God, from the top

2010-11-13T01:24:00.000-08:00

Christians say their God says he will do something. I come along and see if it happens. It does not, they say their God does not lie, so I discount their idea of God.

(I looked for myself, reached my own conclusions, then went and read studies, they mostly didn't contradict what I saw. There were some subtleties I'd missed.)

They then ask me about it, I explain and they attack me for doing this. It's wrong to expect a god who apparently says he doesn't lie to not lie.

I do not care if the Bible contradicts itself or historical record, anymore than any other ancient book. In places it does, in places it doesn't. I don't care about the philosophical arguments for the existence of a god - even if a god existed, you'd still have to show it was yours.

I will examine this god hypothesis in more detail when the predictions made happen. They do not, so I don't have to look at anything else because it has been shown to be wrong. False. Incorrect.

Just to be very clear, this is what happens:

Christians say God will do something. These things do not happen. So I think the Christians are wrong about God.

So, what is Fusion

2010-10-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

Turns out starting a series of blog entries when I'm moving a few hundred miles away and starting at a new Institution is not massively conducive to actually carrying on. I forgot moving was stressful.*

I've sold some snake oil in the entry before this. I've called this thing "Fusion Power" and said that, if we invest lots of money in it, there's a reasonable chance it'll solve all the worlds energy problems. So what is Fusion? How is it used to make power?

It is the fusion of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, to make a helium atom with the release of power.† That probably doesn't mean much to sensible people, so here's it long-form.

In order to get power out a system, you need something with stored energy at the start - the fuel, a reaction to release this energy that then can be converted to a form that can be used. Coal is set alight, it's used to heat water which spins a turbine to make electricity. Also petrol in a car engine, set fire to it, drives a piston, does magic, spins a wheel.

This is the fuel for a fusion power plant; many Deuterium atoms (D) and Tritium atoms (T). The red circles are protons, the white circles neutrons and the blue circles electrons. (Deut, two nucleons; a proton and a neutron. Trit, 3 nucleons. See?)**

These combine to form a Helium atom (He), the reaction releasing a lot of energy through the spare neutron. This neutron is captured, the energy used to boil water, spins a turbine, out comes electricity.

So, electricity, no real waste, job done. Except it's not that easy. Atoms in general dislike combining, they will really avoid it. Of all the atoms, D and T are the most inclined to combine but the most is... Well, it's like this. To make 2 atoms combine, they have to be moving fast enough to overcome the forces keeping them apart. Going back to secondary school chemistry (it's a stretch, I know) heat is just atoms moving around, something is hotter, the atoms are moving more quickly. In order to get D and T moving fast enough to combine, they need to be heated up to around 800 million Kelvin. To give this some context, the core of the Sun is 13 million Kelvin.

So very hot.

And entirely doable. It takes a lot of power to heat up the fuel to that temperature, but once it gets up to that temperature it self heats; it pulls itself up by its bootstraps. If you can keep everything close together and behaving nicely, the neutrons escape to heat the water with 4/5s of the energy, but 1/5 of the energy goes into the helium, which doesn't escape, it goes back into the fuel, heating it up to temperature and causing more fusion.

Easy as pie. So what can we use to heat things up to a lot hotter than the temperature of the Sun? Well, there are 2 main methods currently pursued for getting the fuel this hot. One is putting the fuel in a magnetic bottle and driving an electric current through it, called Magnetic Confinement Fusion (or MCF). This is the one that involves sacrificing baby goats, Latin and dark robes.‡

The one I'm working on, in my own little way, involves over a hundred of the Worlds Most Powerful Lazers all shining at a point the size of a small ball bearing, ramming it up to over a thousand times its original density and then heating it up to the really hot temperatures, have it explode, catch the energy and then repeat with another ball. About 20 times a second.

Which is the next thing I'll write about - why we're making it so dense, why we have to do that before its hot, how this is difficult, why we have to do it so often and what this means, in terms of a power plant. Unavoidably this is going to require some maths, but only a little bit.

(My PhD is at the end of this long road, I promise)

*One of the odd things about life is that I deal with various situations, look back at them and think, "I would have done this differently". I didn't do anything wrong, I just didn't react as well as I could have.

Could do better, then. All in all though, this year has started brilliantly, mostly better than I expected, just I don't usually take things that have gone well and pick them apart. Well, I do, just not as much - cognitive bias :) Imperial is, as the kids say, a complete sausage fest though.

†Actually not, but for the purposes of my case it'll do

**A representation of a deuterium atoms, nucleons and atoms don't have colour as colour is a macroscopic quality, electrons are way further away, they'd all have blury boundaries not solid ones, etc etc... On the other hand, protons are red, neutrons are hard to see and electrons are blue, unless they're being very mathematical and then they're brown, because Feynmann said they are. I get slightly put off if anyone says any different - some people think protons are pale yellow, which is just silly. They're red.

‡They don't deny it.

Crazy Crystal Lady

2010-10-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

So, I went out last night. Invited to 3 different things, I chose a physics party and then drinks with a couple of friends of mine and some of their friends, finance types. We all got on well, they seemed like decent guys, dealt with me teasing them well, so was alright.

There was a crystal lady. Or a lady who used mystic crystals as a conversation point. I can deal with this entirely vacuous bullshit, but not if someone starts pulling out "evidence" - she was saying things like "I'm from MIT" and "I used MIT science". Firstly, nullius in verba, bitch. And it's "the scientific method", preceeds MIT by a few hundred years. Enlightenment values, use the brain you were born with. I lasted about 20 seconds before I had a go at the person who had started this and retreated. I had no way of redeeming the situation - I couldn't lie and pretend like she wasn't bullshitting, and I couldn't criticise and rip her to shreds because I was new to the group. I suppose I should have deflected, which is what I would have done had my friend, who is more confrontational than I am, not started demanding empirical evidence.

The problem with using language like that with people who don't understand what empirical evidence is is that they'll start giving you something else. The questions to ask are things like "how often are you wrong?", "can you see auras through obstacles?", "With what success rate?" If, on the other hand, they start giving cargo-cult science, then I'm past what I know how to politely deal with. It's like going up to a Christian and saying "I'm believe in Jesus, he wasn't God though. He was gay and he slept with Mary Magdalen and had a whole bunch of kids, escaped from the cross and lived the rest of his live in a cave as a cult leader". People genuinely believe things like that, but how on earth do you deal?

Although I do need to figure it out, invariably I'm going to come across situations like this and I need to be able to do them. The nice thing about most religious people, mainstream at least, is they know that people will often view their faith as kooky and for the sake of social lubricant don't bring it up. And that is the kind of religious faith that is fine.

So today's job - figure out ways that might work to defuse situations like the above. I sometimes wish I was one of those people who had these sorts of social skills automatically. I suspect though, that doesn't often happen. Hard earned is usually the way.

Why Fusion power is important

2010-09-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

The brief case for power generation using Fusion

My PhD is in Fusion. Fusion has the potential to be a long-term, low environmental cost and locally generated supply of electricity. This is important - fuel is running out. For a very brief period in human history, we have been consuming fossil fuels to generate power. Fossil fuels are a finite resource and if we are to continue to generate power, an essential utility for nearly everything we do in this modern world, we're going to have to find alternatives. Even nuclear fission has a very limited fuel supply; if all the electricity in the world were to switch to nuclear and energy use stopped expanding, we'd have, at absolute best, 200 years worth of fuel. It's arguable when fossil fuels will run out but they certainly will.

It is also essential that power generation doesn't continue to pollute the environment. Power generation is more important to us than the pollution, but it will cost. Everyone knows the environmental costs of our current behaviour to some extent, so I won't dwell.

There is the less mentioned but ever prevalent energy security issue. The western world is dependent on politically unstable regions for our fuel. Russia turns off its pipelines for political gain, America goes to war over oil in the middle east. It might be a cost that is necessary - perpetual and increasing dependency on foreign states for power - but it is unpalatable.

There are 2 viable technologies that can potentially supply the world demand for power, solar power and fusion, and both are non-ideal. Solar power does not answer the difficulty of locally generated power supply - mass solar generation would have to be done in hot places with lots of space not used for other things. Deserts. And an infrastructure for long distance transmission of this power would have to be set up, through many other 3rd world states. Very similar to the political and security issues we have at the moment with oil and other fuels.

Fusion, on the other hand, doesn't work and won't work for at least another 40 years. It is difficult, much more difficult than could have been envisioned when it was first discovered. The physics is working, more or less, and 2 proof of concept of concept facilities, NIF and ITER, are coming online and will be working within the decade, likely sooner. There is a truck load of engineering to be done - it seems more likely than not that the difficulties will be overcome, but they are not trivial.

My PhD relates to a possible answer to one of those questions, a slight increment to making Fusion power a reality.

Next the plan in this explanation is to jump into some physics to explain what Fusion is so that I can explain what my PhD relates to specifically.

My PhD, an introduction

2010-09-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

My PhD

So, lots of people know I'm about to embark on a PhD*. If they know that they also know I'm doing it in Physics, my thing, and they might know I'm doing a computational/theoretical project. I don't always say the last one, as saying “I'm doing a PhD in theoretical/computational Physics” is enough to get anyone, even physicists, looking at you in a really strange way. It's a “so are you about to disintegrate me with your brain?” sort of look. Uncomfortable for everyone there, really best to be avoided if at all possible.

I thought I would explain what I was doing and why it's important. Not straight from nothing - I actually wrote a rather long essay on the subject a few months ago titled “Something meaningful only to those in the field” but could have also been titled “Why my PhD is really important.” For a few blog entries, I will attempt to translate it from the arcane runes of physics into something intelligible. Or I'll get bored and forget, I won't put money on which it'll end up being.

Initially I'll put my PhD in some context, introducing why Fusion is important and then what it is. I'll then explain my variety of Fusion and the subject I'm involved in, then what my project is and why it's important.

I will also need to reference this all, but that's for later.

*26 seems a bit late for that sort of thing. I was distracted. Yes, for 6 years. Well for my whole life prior to about a year and half ago actually, but I've got my focus on now. Mostly ;)

Conversations with a loud, poorly informed religious person leading to interesting thoughts

2010-09-21T03:41:00.000-07:00

So a religious person I knew from back when I was still living with my parents and still religious got announced his irritation with Stephen Hawking's recent statements about God being not necessary, on his facebook status. I defended the idea - it's not a new one, but it's worth saying: at no point in the ever expanding scheme of scientific understanding of the universe has god as a hypothesis been required to explain anything. Ever. And that trend now seems to be continuing into the theories that are behind the big bang - it would be surprising if it was otherwise given how much has been learnt over the last few hundred years without using God.

This is a curious milestone, though - the big bang has been for quite a few years a starting point in popular culture. And as humans we need something to put before the big bang in our minds eye. If "strings" (or anything) produce a theory that perpetuates through time and predicts the universe, then where is God for believers of science and religion? Well, exactly the same place he's been since we knew about the big bang for all practical purposes. A deist god. Same old same old said by someone famous.

But a different person who also objected to an areligious view on life took the conversation to what he viewed as the central aspect of an atheist view on human life (a different topic, but one I like) and said something along the lines of "atheists think all humans are good for are eating and shagging". I replied, saying something like that insulting belief statements with a trivialising misrepresentation is a fairly odious habit and that I don't really want a conversation involving things like that*. I've not read the replies, on account of the whole not wanting that conversation.

The thing with the shagging and eating is that it's not just insulting, it's obviously wrong and lacks creativity. 2 out of the 3 I can deal with - insulting and wrong, if it's creative, great, and the same for the other combinations really. But all 3 and it gets fairly dull. Also he was arguing in the guise of his proselytising belief system, which I'm confident in taking as a proselytising fail.

I do wonder what goes through peoples heads - "atheists think that humans are just about shagging, we're obviously about more than shagging, so atheists are wrong." Do they not think that perhaps there have been intelligent people considering the theory before that, seen the difficulty and explained it? A damn sad lack of thought and curiosity really.

And it's wrong. The statement, though I'm not fantastic about these things, would be something relating to the successful propagation of genes. And then it gets really fascinating, massively, because from this simple very reductionist argument comes, readily understandable through common sense and logic, an explanation for lots of stuff. It explains the curious colony behaviour of ants and bees, the colour changing behaviour of bottom dwelling river fish, the oddness of peacocks and other loudly displaying animals (those tails are a huge survival disadvantage and there are lots of similar less well know examples), why animals take so much care over their offspring, the tameness of dogs (weirdly, the floppy ear look of tame dogs is intimately related to their tameness - example of a gene having multiple effects) and many other things, those are the examples I can remember off the top of my head.

If you extend it to evolutionary psychology it explains huge amounts of human behaviour. Our tendency to form groups, our tendency to demonise other groups (and through that go to war), explains us taking care of our children, willingness to sacrifice ourselves for others, altruism, our inclination to seek wealth and status, the tendency to cuckold each other, that we specialise in tasks and trade between groups, that we try to exploit those who let us and that we won't exploit those who don't let us. As a start, there's more.

This is a fascinating subject, well worth reading about if you have any curiosity about why humans behave as they do - makes so much so clear from such a simple starting argument. The reasoning is sometimes tough but almost universally understandable with a smidgen of effort. The Origins of Virtue and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins** are all great books around the subject of what it means to have genes that propagate.

And bringing it back to the start, yes it does also explain why we seek to shag and eat, obviously.

The final comment of said poorly informed religious person was along the lines of "you cannot know anything without God." This struck me as stupid, I clearly know things, so I asked one of my intelligent friends† who studied philosophy. She explained he's using a variant of "justified, true belief" in that you know something if you believe it and if it is true, which I'd come across, but with that statement you also add in revealed by God as the same thing as true.‡

This is amusing. He clearly didn't have any clue about what it means to think evolution is the mechanism behind human development. Apparently I can't know things because I don't believe in God. He doesn't know things because he doesn't care to learn. I know which I prefer.

*in my first reply I did the same back, under the guise of a worked example. But I was being rude, deleted the comment and apologised. The delete key is a wonderful thing, an easy test of sincerity of apologies. Of course if someone has already replied then it gets more complicated, removing the context of the conversation. Though the trivialising is easy, it you don't mind insults against Jesus, Zombie Jesus is a good and different example. I like this one because it's pretty funny. It is also fairly offensive and representative of how you can trivialise Christianity through partial misrepresentation.

**he does biology very well, irrespective of his angry old man appearance

†Also good looking. Socially able, too, for a foreigner in the UK.

‡ Wiki:

In psychiatry, the term neologism is used to describe the use of words that only have meaning to the person who uses them, independent of their common meaning. This is considered normal in children, but a symptom of thought disorder (indicative of a psychotic mental illness, such as schizophrenia) in adults

The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law

2010-09-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

This stuff is fascinating, international commercial law evolved not from state regulation but from the human inclination to trade.

The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law

Abstract

Section I distinguishes custom from authority in the context of an examination of the spontaneous evolution of customary commercial law in early medieval Europe, a period when authority had virtually no influence. Since then, however , the evolution of commercial law has generally invlved an interplay between custom and authoritarian legislation by kings, parliaments, and courts. Section II explores evolutionary consequences of authoritarian influences on European and especially English commercial law.

Oddities about measuring things

2010-08-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

So I was talking about how we measure the economic growth of a country, and that under labour, compared to similar countries, we did pretty much the same. And I suggested that politicians probably do very little to really influence these things, because if they did you'd expect a measurable jump in behaviour from one set of politicians to another, and it doesn't really happen.

And at that comment, a barrage of remarks came, initially that the long term good of labour will come in it's investments in things like primary schools and the NHS, and you can't measure things like how happy someone is.

Well if we can't measure it, what the hell are we doing? We ought to stop spending money, give people back taxes and do nothing by that count. There's no way to tell if it's a good or bad thing.

It's quite frustrating for me, especially as things like that come from professional scientists. Our scientific predecessors remade the human experience, changed it beyond imagination to what it is today, and no small part through finding interesting, reliable and reproducible ways of measuring things.

And also, you can measure it - waiting lists, life expectancy, infection rate in hospitals, mortality rate in hospitals, ambulance waiting times, customer satisfaction surveys. Which to choose, and how to combine them, is harder, but it's foolish to say we can't.

(Haven't seen any measure that says the NHS is much better after labour. Which is confusing - they had something like a 20% of GDP per person increase on what was spent, and I can't really see shit is better. And primary schools? While a little important, surely the issue is a lot bigger than that? But my "why labour were rubbish" post is in the future, when I have a little more time. Couple of weeks)

Edit: It was just the one guy, btw, just said a lot of things quickly

Poverty in the UK

2010-08-16T03:14:00.000-07:00

There are sometimes claims made by politicians that they want to eliminate child poverty* - often by labour, and it was a feature of their early years, the linked article saying it was mentioned as early as 1999. Laudable goals, of course, but it's important to understand what people mean when they say "poverty". Going by the dictionary, which is fairly close to what people mean when they discuss it;

pov·er·ty

–noun
1.
the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor; indigence.
2.
deficiency of necessary or desirable ingredients, qualities, etc.: poverty of the soil.
3.
scantiness; insufficiency: Their efforts to stamp out disease were hampered by a poverty of Medical supplies

And of course, no one would wish that on children. Poverty is a strong, emotive word. It is also not the technical definition. One of the technical definitions of poverty in the UK (perhaps the most usual one) is taken to those living bellow a certain percentage of the average** income, 60%.

I live in poverty, and have done so for my entire student career. Amusing and more than slightly absurd that a well fed, nicely housed white middle class male often living in a white, middle class environment falls below "poverty", and it feels slightly patronising too. This is "relative poverty". There's also "social exclusion" which is perhaps a better definition to use, which labour moved onto - talking about areas with chronic unemployment, high crime, low standards of health, that sort of thing.

Absolute poverty doesn't exist in the UK. By the day to day language poverty doesn't exist in the UK***, and hasn't for generations, ever since social housing, I'd guess. Not really anything we can credit the current generation of politicians in the UK who would all be considered socialist by the standards back then. But if you go out and say things like "relative child poverty needs to be eliminated" people will not respond as well to that as to if you exclude the relative.

The problem with this relative poverty is that you will never eliminate child poverty, short of supplementing the income of all parents of children up to £16,000 a year†. Nice idea, if everyone was inclined to work hard but I can't see myself doing a £12,000 job a year if I was guaranteed income, especially given the shit tasks you would potentially have to do for a job that payed that. Shop front, maybe, but box packing or cleaning? Nope, I'd rather do nothing. It's understandable, but I don't think it's a way you'd want your country to go.

And even if you did supply this money, you'd raise the median income, and thus have to pay more until the weight of single or childless poor held the line. It wouldn't go up forever, but I suspect the amount of people having kids earlier would increase, leaving only those utterly unable to have kids; gays, infertile, socially non-functional, to do the jobs others won't. Suppose it might raise their wages.

Essentially, you can't eliminate child poverty. And thus Labour were either lying or had a complete misunderstanding of basic stats. I'd guess the latter, they never really seemed inclined to any systematic assessment of evidence.

Having established that it's not viable to eliminate "poverty", it gets me thinking about what is the responsibility of the more affluent in society to those who are less affluent. Because essentially that's what it is - those who earn more than the average wage contribute more to the same services than those who earn less than the average. I'd say the opportunity to exceed what they were born into, by merit, or to allow everyone the same basic opportunities.

This is distinct from saying that all children, irrespective of background, will end up in the same place. That will never happen, for social factors and simple genetics. Rich people will try to ensure their children are rich, hard working people are more likely to have hard working children, clever people are more likely to have clever children, socially able people are more likely to have socially able children attractive people attractive children, tall people tall children. That's why we try to pick the best partner available, they will inherit those traits.

So giving people opportunities based on merit. Health care, yeah, make sure everyone has the opportunity to be healthy otherwise they'll find it really hard to take opportunities, education, given smart people from less privileged backgrounds to opportunity to go to University. Universal crime enforcement, advice on jobs, an equal justice system, the capacity to vote their rulers in or out. Ensure everyone has a house to live in and food to eat. But what beyond that? At what point do we say "we have given everyone enough of a chance to show their worth" and then let people be with what they've chosen? I don't know, but it does seem that no politicians ever talk about that, although that line is clearly there, the limit of the financial resources we're willing to spend.

Maybe if we defined that point, measured the most effective way of enabling people to progress using correctly formulated statistics and then accepted that there are just people who won't do work (and there are) we could progress in a more sensible and effective manner.

* I know, a negative article. I find it hard to find positive articles on labours record in those departments.

** median, if you're curious

***Homelessness is another, separate issue. There are people who are unable to keep a house, but it's not due to lack of opportunities. It's a very unfortunate thing and ought to be addressed by government

†Or take money from the rich and give it directly to the poor, resulting in ambitious people leaving the UK, those who generate ideas and wealth

Ethics, debate on the virtues of Catholicism and me avoidably going to hell

2010-08-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

I sometimes feel sorry for religious people when it comes to making choices about ethics and morality. All I have to do is ask “which course of action seems to lead to the least pain or most benefit?” whereas religious people have to engage in a course of attempting to recall the appropriate components of an often long, not hugely well indexed or chaptered religious text (wouldn't it be good if the Bible had a book entitled “the end line on morals” explaining what is bad and good and why. I know it's not like that, and I'm sure the editorial decision was made for a reason but it'd clear stuff up). Once the textual search is done, no small amount of prayer must be undertaken, especially for hard decisions. Then they have to ask their pastors or priests or generic religious leader what their interpretation is. If none of those satisfy, they then have to ask the question I do. In fairness in hard decisions I ask advice also, normally of people whose judgement I trust and I know well enough that they'll listen, consider and understand.

For religious people though, their source of advice is divinely ordained, so it's harder to ignore. Also the whole issue of prayer; the answer turns up there, spontaneously formed in your head as if by magic and that's good enough to go on? But that is a whole separate issue, and one that even when I was religious I struggled – how do you tell the difference between God and strong desires? But the plus side it means that people don't have to take as much responsibility for their actions, it's nice to have someone to blame when it all goes wrong, and someone who says they'll make it all work out for the best, even if it is after you're buried.

I do wonder how religious people resolve the conflict between something being forbidden by their church and it appearing to not actually harm anyone by any reasonable measure. The clearest example of this is homosexuality, which in a faithful, monogamous relationship is near enough as safe as heterosexuality, and even if it isn't, both parties are consenting and know the risks. Oddly, I can't remember how I resolved it. Probably by not thinking too hard, but that doesn't sound like me. Perhaps it never seemed that important, I never quite got past basics in my head - the concept of hell, which I'll come back to, but seemed rather unnecessary for doing what I could really relate to and not believing the whole thing, given the evidence is based on revealed truth which seems fairly close to “trusting your gut”. Doesn't work a lot of the time, the gut gets it wrong.

Of course, the whole “least harm, most benefit” one is a difficult one. Even least harm, the golden rule, is difficult – someone is acting in a way that harms their self. You inform the person of this, and they continue. Perhaps stop them once, but they perpetuate in the action. Stop them again? Or allow them the suffering that will hopefully stop the action from repeating? Negative feedback is a good way of breaking a loop in many cases. A similar example of this difficulty I can across; there was a guy, severely disabled, who was forcing himself on a social group I was part of. The problem was that the disability was an intellectual one, one aspect being he had no idea about social mores, when he was irritating people or being offensive, he seemed utterly unreceptive to social feedback changing his actions. And because of this he was really offensive and irritating. Someone lacking the disability, you'd just tell to leave (though probably in harsher or less harsh words), but because of his disability, the dominant characters in the group allowed him to continue, including him in the group.

But they all strongly disliked him and held very little respect for him. It seemly patronising and deceitful, sourced from a compassion. This wasn't a guy that seemed amenable to positive or negative feedback changing his behaviour, it really seemed like a medical thing was needed – a clever psychologist explaining how to interact with people using intellect to observe negative and positive feedback instead of instinct, which was really beyond my (or their) skill or responsibility. It irritated me too much so much I hung out with different people, but I'm still unsure as to the correct action. Compassion verses honesty, perhaps – I suspect religious thought would have encouraged compassion and long suffering. I was never really good at the latter, I like things getting done and often have the attention span of a small child. Maybe that's why I get on with them.

This thinking things through is also a hindrance – I have been known to take no action because there were too many factors on the balance of things I couldn't see with any certainty who would be harmed or by how much, and I wasn't sure others involved in my choices knew about and understood the associated risks and problems. I suspect some of that is cowardice, although you could reframe it as sensible caution – clearly the overall likely costs and benefits are low enough that action or inaction isn't the end of the world, so throw caution to the wind! Or maybe the payoff is large but the likelihood of it working so low that it isn't worth the likely small damage.

And doing the most benefit is a bitch, because I really don't. I probably shouldn't be sitting here of an evening typing in a room all on my own listening to recordings of the proms, I should be going out administering first aid or learning to be a doctor. And I picked my career because I didn't want to have to learn totally new skills, I knew I'd enjoy it and do it well and it's likely to kick me out in a strong position in the job market in 3 years time. Any goodness or otherwise was largely ancillary.

It's also about the person, though. I like thinking these things through, it's a hobby I enjoy; understanding things, having the shape and reason in my head. Which inclines me to trying to figure out what I think is right or wrong in a situation by understanding and applying the arguments, however well. I also get this isn't everybody's favourite way of passing the time. And it's also probably a bit of a straw man I started with – no religious person really does all that. We all do the same thing, look up some reference memory, make an on-the-fly decision and justify it or apologise afterwards with more or less understanding of why we did it.

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What brought this all up was watching the full IQ debate on “the Catholic Church is a force for good”, in which the guys against it basically stood up and read a list of all the bad stuff the Catholic Church does and perpetuates in. The strong implication, and often said, was that there were much better ways to respond and the Catholic Church took a seriously damaging way. Anne Widdecombe was on the supporting side and said things like “what would happen if the Catholic Church wasn't supplying aid to Africa and developing it?” I don't know, if you taught everyone to assess evidence they might be doing better, perhaps? It might be worse, might be better, that's an argument in itself. Apparently they (the priests) didn't use their influence in Rwanda to stop the genocide, in the run up to it reinforced the social divides and hatreds from the pulpit. Don't know if it's true, Stephen Fry is usually good at fact checking, but it sounds insane. Unfortunately, well within my experience and knowledge of religious people.

Anne Widdecombe also complained that it always came back to sex. Well, yes. Every major religious body and lots of wider world views make offers of salvation, most people share the basic tenants of morality; don't steal, murder, rape, commit adultery, the golden rule, do have loyalty, honesty, faithfulness, integrity, be forgiving, patient, and many more. In fact, the common ground on morality is staggering and the church has no patent on that. The main differences are sexual, and many of worst offences of Church, or at least the most publicised ones, are related to frankly odd views of sex.

------------------------

All this talk of morality and my past religious belief reminds me of something that periodically came up in talking about belief. People would often ask that if they were going to loose their faith, that God would “take them home” (murder is okay if it's God?). Was a sensible choice in the context of their beliefs – slightly less time on earth versus an eternity in heaven, or more time on earth and endless torture.

I mention this because I used to be religious. If the God-botherers are right, then I have not just been condemned to an eternity in hell, but I've also been condemned because God couldn't be bothered to top me when I still made the grade. Which seems rather harsh of him, given his infinite resources. I get that I'm one in a few billion and a tiny rock in the arse end of the universe, but infinite is really big. Maybe Gods infinite is fairly close to the infinite of the universe, so he's stretching himself to take it all in.

Or maybe God is a logarithmic or linear infinity and it's been recently shown the universe is accelerating, which means God, although infinite, is having his resources stretched already. Which would explain the difference in attention he pays to the human race and the apparent decrease since the garden of eden. 1 on 1 contact, running with everyone, doing miracles, scattering people, running with the Jews, doing miracles, helping them out, then Jesus came and outsourced all the proof to the church.

(I was never very good at being religious. And this has been a really long post on religion. I have another one brewing about what I use science for, it might get written up)

Dear sales people

2010-06-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

It is not, per se, what you believe that concerns me, nor your justifications or defences for that, unless they are original, having met a huge range of very interesting ideas already.

What is of more interest, and perhaps importance, is why you believe it. What tools of judgement do you use? Which ones do you choose to leave by the wayside? How did you decide which tools to pick? The problem with those questions is fairly simple – people usually do not know the answers to them or how to discuss or explain them in an accessible way. If someone is willing to converse for a time, it can usually be figured out. Time and energy for solving difficult problems is a limited resource, and if I understood I'd then feel obliged to explain, again intensive.

And even, after all that, it wouldn't be enlightening; there are only a handful of reasons why people believe anything. And given what it is you are claiming faith in, it knocks quite a few off list already. This is actually where it gets interesting, potentially – if I seek an investment in you, then understanding the spectrum of reasonings you employ is rewarding, the weightings attached to each and the reasons and experiences that led to those weightings.

But again, time intensive and then wanders into the ever changing and difficult arena of forming relationships – what exactly is it that I look for to invest? Do I correspond to the same in you? Enough to justify the time required? How long will it take to find out? How shall we communicate? All in all very subjective and difficult questions, which take time and effort to answer.

So, to bring it back to the start, unless you have a sound statistical analysis of your belief system and a good understanding of the limitations of said statistical analysis, stop trying to convert me.

How to build a fusion power plant in a week

2010-01-17T14:01:00.000-08:00

So I had a week long intensive last week, all about fusion technology. My brain is still a bit overwhelmed with information, and it's quite complicated stuff. A whole bunch of images, not all of them in a sensible order. I wouldn't say I yet know how to build a tokamak, but I now am a lot closer. Have a pretty good schematic in my head right now.

A couple of things stuck in my head. Mainly, that they could probably build a fusion plant right now, if you didn't mind too much about making a massive pile of highly radioactive waste and build a conventional nuclear reactor with the purpose of making tritium.

It also wouldn't be hugely efficient, but it could be built really big, which would probably get round that. It wouldn't even have an explosion risk, because fusion plants are inherently safe. Just it'd be an unfortunate radiation hazard, a sink hole that'd have to be left alone for 1000s of years afterwards.

So they've set themselves a huge task - not only do they want abundant and safe power, they want it without any radioactive risk, and make it self-sustaining in terms of fuel cycle. And it seems like it's doable, but the aspects that are difficult are really difficult - the structure has to survive years of bombardment with high energy neutrons, which is reasonably easy, but also has to not turn radioactive, which is the really hard part. Also, it has to produce it's own Tritium, the difficult bit of the fuel to find, unless one happens to have access to a nearby nuclear reactor.

One day I might get round to explaining in a noddy way how a fusion plant would work, in a noddy way that's similar to the noddy way I understand it. Is all dead interesting stuff. You never know, we might help save the world. You should see the fusion group at our university; nerds in Lycra.

Stepping back, taking in the view

2009-11-23T00:53:00.001-08:00

So I'm reading a book called "The Compassionate Mind". It really is a bit hippyish and lacks practical applications for me, but it's still an interesting read. Sorta got a "let's modify Buddhism with the scientific method" vibe going on, which still feels odd, 100 pages in. He's currently doing a "evolution of humanity in 6 pages" which is always fun, and he, on the same page, talks about how compelled we are to be involved in social structures - family, community, social and religious groups (to be fair, it has been a theme). He then ends the sub-section with a phrase along the lines of "let's step back from these archetypes".

If it's so inbuilt in us to be part of these "archetypes" then to what extent can we step back from them? Is it even desireable to try to do so, given that there's clearly a point of us being in them? I mean, I'm all up for trying to spot these things, observe the patterns, but we're stuck within them and that's the context we have to work from. Could go up a hill, but I'd still be there with me, and it's hard to do stats without an internet connection.

But I do feel like far too much of an engineer when reading these texts. Come, let us build together :)

Reading body language

2009-10-11T04:14:00.000-07:00

I have, in the last few months, read a lot about reading body language and hence learnt a lot. A book fully dedicated to such techniques is arriving in a few days - I'm going to have you pegged. All of you. Ha!

*please read body language responsibly*

Quotes

2009-10-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow
Thomas Paine
We have it in out power to begin the world over again
Thomas Paine

Statistical “sexism”

2009-09-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the idea of cheaper car insurance for women was brought up at work. It does seem to be sexist – women will get cheaper car insurance than men, if everything else is equal (especially true in the 18-25 age range). It seems to be socially acceptable, perhaps based on a purely mathematical thing, or that the reasoning is obvious and seemingly within the experience of many people – men, especially young ones, tend to drive a lot faster and more aggressively, so their accidents tend to be a lot worse (more expensive) than women's.

At the other end of the scale, in terms of legality when talking about stats, is that it would be illegal to not give a job to an equally or more qualified woman than a man because she is more likely to become pregnant and take the 36 weeks maternity leave she has available in law. And although that could be a purely statistical decision, it would not only be illegal but also would seem to be viewed as quite immoral.

So it got me thinking about other examples of sexism that seem to be mostly or purely statistical, and for the examples I can come up with, it doesn't seem to be illegal most of the time. Going back to insurance and linking in with pregnancy, women will have higher health insurance costs because of the risks associated with pregnancy, which is interesting because it seems roughly equivalent to the job thing but more minor. Women get lower incomes from their pension schemes because in general they live longer than men. There are more male fire-fighters in the UK than women and I think I'm right in saying that's an active selection process – women have, in general, lower lung capacities than men, and therefore would find it more problematic in smoke-filled environments. The whole women not allowed in many positions in the army because they are, generally, less physically strong than men*. There is also the whole thing about women and men having separate sports competitions because, similarly to the army situation, men generally have stronger muscles than women.

So it does seem that in the examples I can think of “sexism” (or to use a less loaded term but with more words, selection based on sex) for purely statistical reasons isn't viewed as something immoral or that ought to be any other way. I does make me think a bit about what we mean when we say sexist, though; it seems more subtle today than yesterday morning.

Conversation about hypnosis

2009-07-16T01:47:00.000-07:00

So I was chatting to a friend of mine who gets dead nervous about presentations, and I, mostly joking, said I could hypnotise that out of him. He responded in a very interesting way, which I'd not thought about before - he expressed the opinion that hypnosis was along similar lines to drinking to relax before presentations.

Expressing hypnosis as a parallel to drinking, or more generally equivalent to mind altering drugs, is never a way I've thought about it. Truth be told, I've never really thought about it much before, the only time it ever really came up was in an Evangelical religious context - it involves deamons and such and is evil and should be avoided. Fair, enough, I guess, but those ideas aren't really predictive and such loose points in the "any sort of use" field of play. Outside of that context, it's been a cool thing done by tv show guys, something that seems to help people get thin, and at the moment it feels very much like refined normal living; we use body language, suggestion, relaxed states, all the time when dealing with people, and it just seems to be creating a reliable way of doing that time and time again for fixed results, though that's something else to talk about.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that I view it as part of the internal process of the human mind, or at least the inter-personal processes of the human mind. Whereas I view controlled chemical changes very much as something outside of the mind coming in and altering the states. Which isn't always a bad thing - anti-depressants rock for many folk, opiates are probably okay even recreationally if people don't use them too much, lots of alcohol is good for evening once in a while, that sort of thing.

But I just can't really view hypnosis as in that sort of spectrum. On the outside, a little, perhaps - you have an issue, fear, you apply solution, either hypnosis or alcohol, and then you function with said issue being less of an issue for a short time. But then you could draw a parallel between alcohol and breathing exercises before performance, or between alcohol and having a lucky handkerchief, to exactly the same effect. Which most people, I think, would call unfair.

I didn't get to finish the conversation, I really must try, as he had more important things to do than indulge my desire for other people's opinions on odd subjects. But it did get me thinking.

To think about

2009-07-15T14:21:00.001-07:00

barnum statements

Odd thing

2009-07-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

So wandering my way through this guided tour of all things hynosis, I've come across an interesting point. I used to be dead religious, and I could, reasonably easily, enter a meditative state and stick there for half an hour, hour at a time. I can't do that anymore - a couple of reasons, not least being totally out of practice. But I can still get there, even if I can only hold it for 5 or 10 minutes at best.

Now this isn't, per-se, the interesting thing. Turns out that if I go to that place, with only 20 seconds or so of prep, and to get into it properly it takes much longer, I can hold my breath for over twice as long as I usually can. I'm not really sure what use it is, but when I was doing that I realised that when I can't sleep, it's a very similar thing I do to force myself to sleep.

More often than not works, if I'm having difficulty sleeping.

So hey, even when I'm ill and I'm not properly studying, I still learn things. Been learning more things, but I left my notepad somewhere else, so I've not been writing them up. Will correct in a couple of days, hopefully. Also, my first attempt at hypnosis this weekend, I think :D Nothing too audacious, but you never know, I might be hypnotising people to be stuck to bars in no time.

Conversations about DB

2009-07-12T04:09:00.000-07:00

So I was explaining to someone I know about Derren Brown and why he's so very fascinating to me. I was going into some detail about the ventriloquist act - how Derren, over the course of a few days, gradually pushes the idea that his subject is a ventriloquists' dummy, culminating in a ventriloquist show where he started being the dummy, in a very strange sort of way. It was truely bizarre, a little bit freaky and all in all, dead fun.

She said to me that she wouldn't ever let anyone have that sort of control over her.

Which struck me as a very strange thing to say. All day, every day, we let people have control over us, our thoughts, and our actions. What we choose to listen to on the radio, figures of authority in our lives, but most of all our friends and family. For most of us, and she's no exception, our own well being, internal thought lives, our behaviours depend massively on those around us. While it's not control, mostly, in the sense of the other party making deliberate choices, and mostly it's a reciprocal arrangements, there is a huge level of influence and I'm not certain people are willing to choose to ignore it many cases, and mostly, it probably wouldn't be sensible to move away from influence.

But regardless of all of that, her behaviours and internal life is massively influenced by the people around her. It's not quite the same as deliberate hypnosis, but this idea that she's in control is quite probably an illusion.

Mr Brown, I presume (no, not THAT one)

2009-07-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this on facebook, I've probably said a lot more that didn't get RSSed through. Clickty on the link to go to the main place.

I adore watching Derren Brown. I'm currently watching his "Trick of the Mind" show; so far, he's hypnotised someone, then, in their unconcious state, shipped them out of the UK and put them in Morocco, he's convinced someone else they're a ventriloquists dummy; not through outright hypnosis, but a series of prompts throughout the days prior. This latest one he taught an OAP to out play a whole bunch of professional poker players, seriously good ones.

His shows are amazing, every time I watch them it's as if a rug has been pulled from under my feet - the idea of human ability, personality, confidence, they're all so massively fluid if the right things are said in the right way, the right buttons are pushed. It's good, though, because he reforms these ideas into much more interesting things - that the whole process can be controlled, can be regulated, and it... well, it's a rule changer. Instead of playing within the standard constraints of social rules, they are understood and manipulated.

I'm not talking about straight up hypnotising people. He does that a lot. But he helps people themselves behave and react in much more effective manner, unlocking and expanding on things people could do already, but didn't know about.

There seems to be an important distinction - the act of improving ones own memory, or making them more confident or more able to read body language, and then actively and deliberatly altering someone elses state to get an advantage over them. Because the hypnosis tricks could be used for either, really, but somehow, changing ones own behaviour to get people to react differently is more acceptable, to me at least, than directly chaning the behaviour of the other people. Which is odd, because it's very close to being the same thing, but one feels more ethical than the other.

So yeah, I've been reading quite a bit of pop psychology recently, and am looking at books on hypnosis. I've not done any practice yet, though I have been employing memory techniques Derren Brown explained in his book, Tricks of the Mind. It's strange, the techniques themselves are very useful (I've been using them with reasonable sucess to memorise things) but even the act of thinking about how I remember things seems to be improving how I remember things. Maybe I should try hypnotising myself, to motivate myself to read more about hypnosis ;)

So these are my first impressions, if I continue down this little road of psychological curiosities, I'll share some more stuff here. Definatly going to write down if I start hypnotising people, that's something to look forwards to right there :)

For those of you UK-side, the channel 4 website has a whole ton of his shows, so you can share the love. Otherwise, he has a whole load of amazing stuff on youtube (in the proper use of amazing).

quotes

2009-04-18T05:46:00.001-07:00

Just recording them 'cause I'm cleaning out my papers

"in the time honoured fashion, steal it from Scott"

"we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don't make mistakes"

"well done, I can see you worked hard"

Oil

2009-02-18T10:49:00.001-08:00

It's not going to run out. I sort of forget that that's advertised in the world around, that somehow our supply of oil is going to suddenly disappear.

It won't, though, it'll just get more and more expensive, to buy and drill, the allowed uses of oil will be increasing legislated, and, if things go really well, only rich hobbyists will drive petrol cars. And we'll all be viewed as short-sighted criminals who lived amazingly luxurious lives at above cost; had a large amount of ingenuity and intelligence, but ultimately wallowed in our own self-interest for too long.

A bit like we view slavery, the pre-women's/black rights world or the world run by religion just a few generations ago.

But quite a bit worse.

I'll even put £5 on it.

What are prisons for?

2009-02-12T11:27:00.000-08:00

So I've been wandering 'round asking people I don't know that well what they think prisons are for. Mostly I get deterant, occasionally it's a more complicated answer than that, and once, I got punishment. Which is fair enough, probably fitted her personality well.

>:>

Don't often get rehabilitation as an answer. But it really seems the only useful thing to come of it. As a deterrent, it doesn't seem to work too well, and to be honest, there are better ways of deterring people. Somehow, prison is "acceptable", like attempting to cause long term pain to someone because they wronged you is better than short term pain of waterboarding. As a punishment, it's rubbish for the same reasons, it's got to be naff for some people to be away from their family for so long, but really? Protecting society. Well, yes, it's effective at that, but equally so would a program dedicated to full rehabilitation in most statistically effective manner.

Punishment seems pointless to me, I just don't get it, really and it seems an ineffectual deterrent. Sure, these guys do bad things, but if they can be stopped from doing bad things, become useful tax paying people, what difference is it if they're been stuck in a room for 2 years or not?

I suppose I ought to say a bit more about punishment. If an action has a useful outcome, then it's worthwhile. Punishment for punishment's sake doesn't seem to have a useful outcome. People have done bad things, to people I know, and to people I care about. Sometimes, I'd like vengeance, or to punish them. But often, there's no point, and actually, through the sort of actions people like that do, very often they end up miserable themselves.

And honestly, if I could stop them behaving like that, which would probably make them happier, I would. I mean, within limits, they have to want to. Although with one caveat - I'd neuter the bastards (in a reversible fashion) to stop them having kids until they grew up, but hey, can't be all loving.

Societies progress technologically

2009-02-01T03:18:00.000-08:00

All I know about this is mostly from reading Guns, Germs and Steel. So I'm commenting far outside any expertise or experience, but I also want to remember a conversation I had and quite enjoyed at said conference, and also to switch away from the religious stuff (having been brought up in a religious environment, I find it quite easy to write about and talk about, though fortunately less easy than I used to; I get tongue tied and a bit confused about the ideas because I don't consider them very often).

We were chatting about genius, and the progression of ideas. The idea was proposed that individual genius was responsible for much of the development of thought, and I've never liked that idea. Ideas aren't formed in a vacuum. The lightbulb was refined by Edison, and his version dominated, but he wasn't the first to try it, or even succeed. His lightbulb was the one that was successful, and had someone else managed it before or after, the nature of the lightbulb might have been different, but it seems, given that there are usually considered around 22 inventors or the thing, that it was pretty likely to happen, in one form or another, Edison or not, at some point. Given how useful the thing is, too.

Another example was Einstein. He was a genius, and his ideas revolutionary. But they were ideas in the right time. The underlying concept that takes special relativity away from Newtonian mechanics, that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant and that light is self-propagating through a vacuum (there is no substance filling space for light to "wave" in), was about to arrive independantly of Einstein. The concept of relativity, that there are no special reference frames, was already pretty strongly held in physics. Given those ideas and time, it seems that special relativity, in one form or another, would appear. And general relativity is special relativity applied to gravity; that the accerlation in pushing things around is the same as the acceleration from gravity.

Which seems obvious, but given a strong knowledge of mathematics, special relativity, and lagrangian dynamics people say that knowing that will lead to General Relativity, in some form or another.* Would just have taken time, and perhaps more people.

Revolutionary ideas are always based in a context or technological progression. In the context that we were discussing it, the idea was then passed around that technology is a gradual and continual upwards progression.

Which is also inacurate, but better than saying technological progression is based around individual geniuses, in my view.

There have been examples where societies have fully abandoned their own technological advances and regressed. I think an example of this is easter islanders - they had a complex society, with advanced stone working, but it all fell apart due to ecological sucicide - they chopped down all their trees. Another is Egypt - a massively complex, powerful and, for the time, technologically advanced society, but it collapsed and dissapeared itself.

A similar example is to do with being scientifically advanced, but then loosing that position due to sociological changes - once China, with gunpowder, and the Islamic world, mathematics, medicine and philosophy, were at the forefront of science and technology, but then, for whatever reason, stopped being an aminable environment for scientific advances, and the position of most advanced gradually shifted to Europe.

An interesting addition to this is the wheel. In the early americas, examples of toys with wheels have been found, but no evidence that the wheel was used more widely. This could be because the wheel is most useful in combination with beasts of burden, which weren't around then.

To counter this, though, there are lots of ideas of technologies that have appeared only once and survived - a strong one being the phonetic character representation system, in the modern world the alphabet, which, as far as is known, only appeared once and all similar systems came from one original source. Another is any given staple crop, which was only selectively bred once and then spread, much easier than reinventing it.

So coming back to where I started, neither individual genius nor continual development is sufficient explination for scientific progress, but I've not proposed a counter hypothesis, though I might understand it a bit better. So this, for now, is what I think; it's complicated.

I do think more, which has ideas about patents, individual rewards, free time, climate as a motivation, wars, socities receptivness, religious. But it's complicated is actually more useful ;) It can then be equated to being quite random, and then ignored. Which is perhaps cheating, but I've said what I want to :D

*I once understood how to derive basic SR (but not in the sense of rotations in space-time), and given a run up I could probably do it in a few months because I've seen it before and remember the ideas, but I never quite got there with GR. I just about had the maths, but didn't have a complete enough understanding of either SR or lagrangian dynamics. Hence in my GR course I only got 64% (the best uk pass is above 70%, a fail is below 40%), and considering how awful I found the paper, the bell shaped curve must have been rubbish.

Bringing up your kid religious

2009-02-01T02:40:00.000-08:00

So I was away at a conference. These things happen, is a day out of the office. And I had a conversation about religious things. 2 actually, I don't know why that happens, and I know I'm talking a lot about religious things lately. I'll switch back to more realistic things in a bit, I do have to get on with reading the selfish gene.

And there was this one woman I was chatting to, and she was very adamant that bringing up children to hold theistic beliefs is brainwashing, and that they should be brought up with a questioning mind set and allowed to make their own decision. There are lots of things I've heard like this, and more extreme examples include comparing it to child abuse, which might be implicit in the phrase brainwashing.

I object to this sort of thing on a number of grounds. One is to do with language - it's like the abortion debate, were people use emotive words for effect - murder, for one. Well, no, not murder unless the embryo has personhood, which is perhaps the point. The word here is "brainwashing" when "indoctrination" is more accurate, appropriate and is less emotive. I'm usually for clear, less emotive language, it means debates can be carried on with more civility and, at least, a common understanding is more likely to be found.

Another is pragmatism. If religious people are allowed to breed, what else are they going to do? The centre of their intellectual belief system is not questioning, but conforming to the social norms in which they live, which is holding onto to the belief system that has lasted centuries. If it has lasted that long, it is likely a component of that will be passing it onto the kiddies. It seems unreasonable to expect that if people are allowed to hold diverse belief systems, that passing it onto the kids won't happen, or at least try to.

But another thing is a lack of understanding. It seems to purvey through these debates - that people consider the other side to be wrong is a given, because people believe exclusive things. Going around accusing people of indoctrinating their children is harsh. It might be true, but it's not going to win any friends. And being friends with people, engaging them so they feel that you at least understand their way of thinking means they are far more likely to listen. Yes, bringing up children in a religious way is indoctrination, but so is bringing up children in an atmosphere that rejects non-empirical belief systems. It might be a lesser form of indoctrination, less ideas pushed across, but there is some there.

I guess I'm quite long term in my outlook. Organised religious belief is waning in the western world, it has been for decades and it seems it'll carry on like that for a while. It is in the states, in Europe, all over the place. Sure, if fundis try to push their belief systems into science schooling, legal frameworks, oppose that strongly; I hope I would, though it's not an issue in this country. But if people want to believe stuff and bring their kids up like that, it's going to happen. If we engage people, it seems more likely that they'll pass on a more liberal view to their kids, and a certain percentage of those will be at least less religious, if not completely areligious.

Continuation of last post

2009-02-01T01:38:00.000-08:00

I was chatting with a good friend of mine, Ash, about the doubting stuff, and the conversation led me to another thing I remember. For a while, I kept track of the prophesies people would bring. Prophesies = future sight for Christians, they were brought because they were given from god, in the theology of the branch of christianity I was in.

And there were a number of rather interesting things I spotted. Firstly, a lot like astronomy and psychics, the prophesies were very vague. And another thing was that week in, week out, over the weeks I did it, the people who brought prophesies, they were all very similar. Not just in content, but almost word-perfect repetitions. (Unrelated, but if you listen to people repeating stories on various occasions, it is surprising how very nearly word-perfect similar the tellings are, at least I find).

But the crucial things about these prophesies was that they didn't much come true. And that's not really up up to scratch, if a prophet in the OT got the prophesies wrong, they were definitely for the stones. And that isn't "mostly got them right, but missed on the odd one or two" it was a "you get one wrong, and you're going to splatted".

In the context that these prophesies were brought, they were meant to be Divine future sight interpreted through human mouths. Fair enough, a noobie might get it wrong a couple of times, but the people who had been doing it for years, had lots of practice, I expect of an all-knowing, all-powerful god to be up in the 98% at least of getting things right. Often, the best was around 70% right. Which would be astounding, if they were detailed; "your aunt mable will get lost at 9am in orange street on tuesday, and she'll have forgotten her phone. Go pick her up, tell her god told you on sunday, and also write it down, post it 2nd class on monday so she'll at least have some proof. Because, although she'll thank you, saying the voices in someones head told you where she'd be sounds a little bit like you're going for mayor of crazy town."

But they're not like that. They were closer along the lines of X person is unhappy, and god wants them to be happy. Lo and behold, a few weeks later X person is happy, and god wins.

Or reading body language and inevitable mood swings, either works. Which can be achieved without god, so appeal to Occams Razor much?

(yay Occams' Razor, I am much a fan, being a physicist and hence a reductionist.)

And I think that's all for that for now.

Remembering doubting

2009-01-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

I was reading something-or-other about a famous religious guy, and it got me to thinking about other famous religious people. And I realised that one of the first real major disbeliefs I can remembering holding onto as a younger person in the whole religion thing was when there were a couple of travelling preachers wandering around saying they could heal folk, but the guy still had to wear glasses. Now, I know it's not a major thing, but if he's that up with god, and god does all heal-y type magic tricks, then surely it wouldn't be much effort to say, "heal his eyes".

Admittedly, I had wanted god to heal my shortsightedness for ages. I mean, if he could, and it wasn't too much bother, because it's really irritating and I couldn't see what benefit it has.

Another was when I realised that the amount of holy-spirit in my church was linked to who was playing on stage. But then I realised it wasn't on or off, and as I observed it over a few weeks it gradually dawned on me that at my home church, the amount of holy spirit in a place was very strongly related to how in tune the band were. And, as the band warmed up and moved into tune, that was when everyone else warmed up into the holy spirit.

Also, I can proudly say that for all my religious, believing that my one branch of faith was correct, the j-man was the dude for everything and everyone, I never quite managed to convince myself of hell. Another interesting little thought thing I came up with as a kid - the folks around me claimed a very strong belief in hell, but they had lots of unbelieving friends, that they didn't constantly preach to. Just a strong belief in heaven might lead to occasional preaching, as I did, but a belief in hell and not preaching about it - well, that would make them all complete bastards. "You're going to burn forever but I'm not going to do my upmost to prevent it". Feel the love!

The alternative was that they didn't quite believe in hell as strongly as they said.

Heh. That can perhaps be seen as the root of one of my more prevelant mindsets - that people lie a lot, especially religious people. In terms of what they want to believe about themselves - the only people who have said "I'll be there for you" were people who really never were. The people who always were there, they wouldn't say it because it wasn't part of how they thought. Like truely driven people don't see it, because that's just what they do. And the only people I actually know who really love & loved me I don't think have ever said it to me, with the exception of perhaps one person.

I think I've reached the end of my current batch of "unusual things I realised when I was a Christian about Christianity". I mean, I have a whole host of things I realised afterwards, and those are fun for arguments and annecdotes and such, but not what I was going for here.

Criteria for getting into heaven

2008-12-28T01:23:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about Jesus' criteria for letting people into heaven. It's nice, and all, and pretty easy - all you have to do is believe. But it doesn't seem a very sensible way of doing it. Any tool or halfwit could believe and get into heaven that way, and really, who would want to spend all eternity with a whole lot of the people who go to churches?

For me it would be something along the lines of - you a fan of Avril Lavigene (or generation specific bad music)? Nope, can't come in.

So I figure either god made a really naff calculation at one point, or there's "Heaven" and then there's "Heaven". One were all people who believe go, there's a few nibble about, some piped music and god/jesus/holy spirit once in a while walks round, gives a few autographs, has a couple of photos taken. And then down the street, there's a door with a couple of bouncers on it and a guest list, and inside there's pole dancers, lots of beer and the bunch of people g really wants to hang out with.

Hero of Canton

2008-12-12T01:20:00.000-08:00

Jayne!
The Man they call Jayne!

Oh, He robbed from the rich
and he gave to the poor.
Stood up to the man
and he gave him what for.
Our love for him now
ain't hard to explain.
The hero of Canton
the man they call Jayne.

Our Jayne saw the mudders' backs breakin'.
He saw the mudders' lament.
And he saw the Magistrate takin'
every dollar and leavin' five cents.
So he said: "You can't do that to my people."
said "You can't crush them under your heel."
So Jayne strapped on his hat
and in 5 seconds flat
stole everythin' Boss Higgins had to steal.

Oh, He robbed from the rich
and he gave to the poor.
Stood up to the man
and he gave him what for.
Our love for him now
ain't hard to explain.
The hero of Canton
the man they call Jayne.

Now here is what separates heroes
from common folk like you and I.
The man they call Jayne
he turned 'round his plane
and let that money hit sky.

He dropped it onto our houses
he dropped it into our yards.
The man they called Jayne
he stole away our pain
and headed out for the stars!

(Here we go!)

Oh, He robbed from the rich
and he gave to the poor.
Stood up to the man
and he gave him what for.
Our love for him now
ain't hard to explain.
The hero of Canton
the man they call Jayne.

From: http://www.fireflywiki.org/Firefly/JaynesTheme

River Dolphins

2008-12-07T08:17:00.001-08:00

I want to see some river dolphins. Anyone up for a trip to the amazon, southeastern South America, the Ganges, Brahmaputra or Indus?

It'd be awesome.

So...

2008-11-25T07:32:00.001-08:00

Through my job I get to know the basic science behind weapons. It's not directly related to my job, but sometimes I come across. And I get really odd looks if someone is talking about guns and I suddenly make a bit of a complicated statement about them. It's not the same odd look as when I start talking about human relationships in terms of probability densities.

Also, if I never have kids, I don't really mind too much. Not so much a failure of me as a failure of the mutual effort my genes, which are the ones who are really trying to procreate.

I have been reading a book on homeopathy & alternative medicines, Snake Oil and other preoccupations, by John Diamond (or the first 6 chapters of a book, the author died before he could write any more, which gave me a very strange sense of loss at the end of the 6th chapter). And there's a statement by a kinesiology practicioner. The statement was after a medical test of kinesiology, and he says 'You see, this is why we never do double-blind testing any more. It never works!', and a statement by Hyman (the author of the quote); "Since he 'knew' that applied kinesiology works, and the best scientific method shows it does not, then - in his mind - there must be something wrong with the scientific method."

And that seemed to relate with me to a certain extent to how religious people deal with logic, or statistics, that contradict with their belief systems. There must be something wrong with the logic or stats, some other variable that has not been taken into account, that is wrong. And actually, this is a fair enough response, for a similar reason why the author of Johnny D stopped debating alternative medicine practicioners.

"But in asking him to consider the arguments against homeopathy I was asking him to consider that which he possibly couldn't consider. I was asking him to say... 'Everything I've devoted my professional life to for past eighteen years was based on a series of false premises and fallacies.'"

This isn't that deep or new - the people have vested interests in the knowledge they hold, and attacking the very validity of that knowledge, especially in terms that work, is asking them to choose between their vested interests and a series of coherant arguements, what's going to win? Vested interests, in the short term, everytime.

Also, the author had a very interesting idea, that I've not heard before. And although I'm not sure I agree with it, it is an interesting one; The early sucesses in modern medicine, like wiping out smallpox, nigh-on wiping out TB, making us live hugely longer, gave a huge sense of optimism. That we would be able to, at some point, wipe out all ailments that harm humanity - pills not just for our physical complaints, but also pills for happiness, drive and enthusiasm, in a similar way that modern politics has more or less removed the risk of homelessness and poverty for those of us living in the western world.

But it hasn't happened, and actually, only 50% of people are cured of cancer in the western world, up 30% from the 20% it was previously, which is fantastic, but there is an expectation that it should be beaten. And, as the argument goes, that into the vacuum of percieved failure, alternative medicine arises to offer to forefil the promises othodox medicine has not yet.

I don't think I agree - I'd suspect it's more of a combination of wealth + lack of cynicism = people willing to spend money on empty hope, but then I might be a little bit cynical, and I like an interesting idea :)

One of the the things that has stuck me most in recent times about alternative medicine is a little complicated to explain, so I'll tell the story. I was listening to the Radio 2 lunchtime "debate"*, and a herbalist comes on. They were discussing a herbal treatment, but there was one herb that the herbalist was very against. And after a while of listening, as far as I could tell, it was because there was an active, measureable ingredient (oestrogen, or something close, as it turned out). So it seemed that the entire thing had turned on it's head - from the main criticism of these alternative medicines, that they don't actually do anything, seems to have become the way they define themselves - if a medicine has an active ingredient that causes a measureable effect, then it isn't appropriate for herbalist use.

So extremism in alternative medicines? Something like that. Anyways, it seemed like a profoundly odd developement.

*for as long as I can. The "debate" listeners phone in with their opinions, and while some of them are thoughtful and considered, a lot of them are just inane and reactionary, and I get really wound up by the lack of thought these people engage in before joining in the discussion, so I switch over to Radio 1 which is at least honestly inane, which is fine, I can enjoy that :P

Funny thing

2008-10-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've meant to write about this for a while, but just remembered when near a computer now. Ever since joining the world of work, where people have a really strong common knowledge base, there is this pattern of information exchange I've seen quite a few times, and it's fascinating. St John's ambulance is a great example; they will be talking about a technique that they use in first aid, and one person will describe it. Another person will have a different method, and then describe theirs. They will then discuss the criteria behind their techniques - who it has been designed for (the paramedic techniques tend to be viewed as the most valuable), when it has been introduced (the more modern techniques tend to override the older ones) seem to be the main two. After discusing these criteria, they then redescribe both their procedures, and talk briefly about the differences. Then the superior technique is brought up again (based on the above criteria), and described by both parties (I suspect to ensure they are in agreement about how it goes). Once this procedure has taken place, they then go and talk about other things.

They seem to do it about a different technique every meeting or so, it's a fascinating thing to watch and hear. I've also seem a very similar pattern when the more engineery types at work discuss explosives, comparing different techniques for doing things, though it's not as common, perhaps because the criteria for assessing which technique to use is often more complicated.

And when watching this at St. Johns, I can almost see a small tribe gathering and comparing which berries are edible and how best to track animals, but I might be being hideously silly there.

Stats on the tellybox

2008-09-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

So, I was curious about a tv show, something like "The Sex Education Show", and it's premise was that it's educating us Brits about sex because we're more ignorant than we should be. Fair enough.

One of the very first things it says is that the average number of people women have slept with is 10 and the average number men have slept with is 16.

*bangs head on table*

And they want me to be educated by these folks? I did go do something else after that.

(I am aware that they may mean one of the other averages, median or modal*. It is unlikely, though, generally people mean mean and if they mean otherwise, it's really a requirement to specify. So either they're stupid one way or stupid another)

I do admit that there are slightly more gay men than women, but at around 3% of the population, they'd have to be having a lot of sex with a lot of men to make that much difference. And that probably ought to be mentioned in the stats, something like "the reason men have so many more partners is they tend to sleep with each other, and when they do that they really put out".

So they might not be as dumb as they appear. But...

*Median would be an odd comparison, and would probably mean that there are a relatively few women who sleep with a relatively large amount of men, but I'm not sure what good that stat would do. I'm also not sure what good a modal average would do in this case, either.

Memory Palace

2008-08-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

I am building a memory palace. The bits of it based on real places are fine, but the hallways which are pure imginations seem to have Zombie hordes and penguin flocks in it. Which is odd, but probably inevitable given it's my brain.

Also, when zombies turn up I get guns :D

I suppose

2008-08-24T05:57:00.000-07:00

I suppose that if you make the supposition of a destination, then many paths is likely.

Sounds mostly like bollox to me, though, no evidence for any particular destination at all, except universal heat death, and any path does lead to that.

I BELIEVE! HALELUJAH!

Dr Who, saviour of chavs

2008-07-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

A lot of Dr. Who can be viewed in a very religious sense - in what the doctor says, that he is the final & highest authority, that he can see everything, in his actions - a benevolant saviour, who acts on humanity's behalf, there's even the feeling of the Doctor's redemption in the first series, from this angry warrior to acting for the good again. He's actually the sort of god you'd really want - he acts for humanity, without ever really asking them to be anything, without desiring praise or worship, fully satisfied with saving and actually prefering not to be noticed. There's also the idea of the otherness of him, that because of who he is, humans cannot relate to him or truely connect to him, the he is unknowable.

But there's another interesting parallel. Christians, at least in the UK, when they convert people tend to convert them into middle class people. Make them have superficial opinions about how life works, draws them away from reality TV to things like meditiation and prayer, encourages them to be politically active and careful with money. And Dr. Who does the same sort of thing. In 2 cases he's taken chavs and turned them into middle class folk, with interest and concern in the greater universe, and looking far outside themselves and considering "reality", forcing them to become more than what they were, concerning them with forfilling their potential in their service of him.

And that's quite an odd parallel, really, that I hadn't noticed until he turned Donna back into a chav at the end of the latest season.

Useful ideas 1, 2 & 3

2008-07-20T10:51:00.000-07:00

Costly Signaling

Costly Signaling Theory says that although costly, altruistic acts may benefit the altruist indirectly, by establishing a ‘reputation’. By demonstrating the sincerity of one's good intentions, costly signalling encourages others to engage in reciprocal altruism. Since a costly act shows ability and access to plentiful resources it may also give advantage as regards mate selection. Smith and Bird state that for behaviour to count as constly signalling, it must be:

1.Beneficial to others
2.Observable by others
3.Costly to the signaller in ways that can't be reciprocated
4.Associated with some strength or fitness of the signaller

Frequently cited examples of costly signals are drawn from human hunter gatherer societies, for example the laying on of public feasts or other elaborate public displays. This is sometimes mentioned in connection with philanthropy as "competitive altruism". As forms of public display go, this is socially far more positive than wasteful signalling methods such as Veblen's "Conspicuous consumption".

From http://www.altruists.org/about/altruism/evolution/costly_signalling/

Such as helping the Grandparents out, perhaps?

Reciprocal Altruism

In evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, reciprocal altruism is a form of altruism in which one organism provides a benefit to another without expecting any immediate payment or compensation.

From here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism

Enlighted Self-Interest

Enlightened self-interest is a philosophy in ethics which states that persons who act to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong), ultimately serve their own self-interest.

From here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-interest

I might write something about someone who said he was arguing for Enlightened Self-Interest, was in fact arguing for the philosophy of "do whatever selfish desire you have so long as it doesn't harm other people, too much". I would say more, but he might read this some day, on account of me quoting his idea.

Also,

Humans are not rational creatures. They are rationalizing

People also say what they think you want to hear, a lot of the time

Those are good and useful ideas, but probably not profound enough to justify being put in the title ;)

Difficulties

2008-07-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

So, I had a conundrum*. A friend of mine, who I don't know very well but e-mail quite regularly, changed her relationship status with her boyfriend to "it's complicated", which is never a good sign. I wanted to express concern for how she was feeling, but without it looking like I'm try to hit on her while she was having a hard time with her bloke, because that's really not the guy I want to be - the one who sleazes all over a woman when she's having difficulties with her man and needs some "comfort" (we all know someone who would, and really, do we think highly of that person?). But equally, I didn't want to say nothing because even the awareness that someone else gives a damn is quite often a good thing when things are hard.

This is slightly more difficult because she's hot, and smart, and knows about having things difficult and accepts that some things are. All things equal, I would quite like to hit on her. By the way she reacts to me, she probably wouldn't mind, but there's a rather long list of blokes who would try it on. Measuring her reactions to them and me when we're in similar places at similar times, I'm not bottom of the list, but there's at least 1 single guy higher than me who'd jump at the chance, and a taken guy who I'd give a reasonable chance to dump his current woman the second she gave him a look. And those are just the pool I'm aware of.

So I did the typical me thing - when in doubt, express concern and then throw in a few jokes to distance myself from the situation, while still being able to fall back on "well, I was just trying to cheer you up, even if it was for a second" line, should all go to shit. Not that it will, but having a fallback always helps :P

Yes, I analyse things too much, think about them far too much and the little voice my head that says for other people "you probably shouldn't have drink number 8" seems to have a life and naration of it's own. And really, I quite enjoy overanalysing, and am also aware that I'm probably talking a load of b*ll*cks.

*co·nun·drum

kəˈnʌndrəm/ Pronunciation Key - [kuh-nuhn-druhm]

–noun
1.
a riddle, the answer to which involves a pun or play on words, as What is black and white and read all over? A newspaper.
2.
anything that puzzles.

Didn't know the top one.

All that you can't leave behind

2008-05-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

An idea I've been thinking about recently is that there are things that people just can't live without. It's not a thing for all people, not like food or water, but sometimes there are people, I'd imagine mostly people, that if they are removed or lost, then it becomes almost impossible for the individual to continue. So much of life, the understanding of the world, relating to it, is wrapped up in the idea, the knowledge of that person, that without the person there, the world looses meaning.

I'm not quite getting this right. It's not that there are 2 different items; these people, or person, and life and what it means to be alive. I think that's closer to it - the very being of alive, of existance, is the same as this having this person around. Through the experience of them inside our heads, we experience the world.

It's similar to shared experience, but every experience is shared, or every experience that matters. That the way of interacting the world, and of understanding it, is developed by the same prompts, by the same experiences, by the same things being done, at the same sort of time in growing minds and confrontations.

This other, that is so part of the life and the world, that without them is not just unthinkable, but the world without them just isn't. Life does not exist if that person is not around, because without them it just doesn't mean the same, and it's cold and still and doesn't make sense. Life cannot go on without them, because life isn't if they're not. Without them doesn't make sense, it's not an idea that can be processed, because they are so much the same as life.

Can't leave 'em behind, because they are it.

If the oil reserves are limited...

2008-04-24T15:09:00.000-07:00

Does it make a difference how quickly we use them? I mean, we're going to use them all, so does it matter if we cut down or not, from an environmental perspective?

I've got a longer post in the pipeline, but I'm tired, so I'm going to sleep :D

Proof by contradiction

2008-04-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

"A implies B. Not B. Therefore, not A."

Gotta love logical falacies. Even if Hitler (lunatic) created Nazism based on Evolution, it does not mean Evolution is untrue.

For the extended version of this, go here.

Work

2008-04-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not too chuffed with my work. Mainly, they don't give me anything to do. I'm not one of those workaholoics types, I tend to be - leave at 5:00, unless it's important that I don't. And by important, it can't get to regular habits of staying past 5:00. Even if I choose to waste my time feeling sorry for myself, playing computer games, bitching about life, or if I choose to be proactive, visiting friends, improving my fitness and mental health (and I need the last one), however I choose to spend my free time, it is my free time to spend.

Anyways, this no work would be okay if it was early on in my time there, but I've been there 3 months and at least 2/3s of my time has been sitting at my desk doing nothing. I hate that, and I hate that I've got exceptionally good at Sudoku, that I now know the basics of Game Theory, and that I've started to improve my french. Because in the course of things, I wouldn't be, because I'd be doing work. I'm actually pining for my data entry days, and when that happens, I know my work life has reached a new low. I also don't have a project to book to, so I'm currently sitting at my desk doing little, getting bored, and potentially making huge problems for myself when people start checking my hours.

There is another problem, that isn't new, but has become accentuated. I went to a conference, entitled "A meeting of people who blow stuff up for a living, or have something to do with blowing stuff up". Well, it wasn't, but I'm not actually giving the real title, it would be silly. So yeah, I blow stuff up for a living, I work in what is euphmistically called "the defense industry". I'm not on the side of the industry that tries to kill people, I'm on the side that tries to stop people getting killed. But listening to the conference, and I realise that the two things are very similar - the age old story of people making weapons, others defeating those, so people come up with better weapons, which in turn get defeated... And so on and so on.

It's an old argument, but I didn't feel it so personally until recently, and I didn't realise, that because of this intimacy, and almost this inevitability, makes it just one process. I mean, what I do is probably better than making stuff to kill people, on account of my stuff doesn't kill people, but I'm not sure how different one is from the other. I cannot look down on what the other people do, because it's all so intimately related.

Of course, I'm not anti-weapons, per-se. At least intellectually - I know arguments can be made for nuclear weapons, and I think it would be foolish to get rid of them. Once the cat is out of the bag, and all that. And I can see how people can argue for armed forces, and I probably think that they're necessary at some level. Given the tech of weapons nowadays, a popular militia would be utterly ineffective against a reasonably organised and financed foe. But equally, I'm not sure I want to be making weapons - in a poncy sense, I would rather build up than destroy, and in a practical sense, I don't want stuff I made killing folks, in general. Probably makes me a hypocrite, unwilling to get my hands dirty but thinking that others probably should, but I'm human, and I contradict.

And I'm not making weapons. I'm one step removed from that. But now I'm in the middle of it, I'm not sure one step is removed enough. I feel connected to the process that kills people, quite intimatly, and I don't like it. Even my department at work, there's the "we buy stuff to kill people more effectively" section (probably called procurement, or some such).

Of course, as I'm not actually doing any work, I could make myself out to be a saboteur, but that'd be a lie.

I do wonder how this'll all pan out, though. Years of religious training and... other things... have meant that I have a bit of an over-active conscience, and I'll have to be careful. Though if I don't have any work coming up soon, I'll quit, so it'll all be a null-point. It would be nice, though, if I could say I quit for the right reasons, that I did so because of conviction. Somehow, I don't see myself as that good a person. Maybe I'll surprise myself, though I don't know what my convictions are at the moment.

Another difficulty about being ex-religious, I have to figure out my own convictions. Okay, I'm cheating, half the time I didn't pay attention to religion and decided on convictions on my own, but that's more complicated and probably worth a blog post on it's own.

Funny

2008-04-10T12:16:00.000-07:00

So I Rickrolld my lil brother today. It's funny, ish, and I'm allowed to be immature if I so desire. He then Rickrolld a girl, who didn't know about rickrolling and thought he was hitting on her.

LOL!

OWND!

Only my lil bro could accidentally hit on a girl using the wonderful music of Mr Astley, or however we spell his name.

In other news, my job is rubbish (on account of they seem unable to give me work), my room is full of light so I can't sleep, and both of those things have meant that most of my energy is spent persuading myself to get off my ass and go to work. I would sort my life out, but don't really know where to start.

I Ain't Dead

2008-01-30T11:29:00.000-08:00

I was just getting into this, and a Bad Thing happened. Acutally, a Very Bad Thing, and I don't want to talk about it. On the scale of bad things though, it's one that really changes things.

If I think intelligent things again, I might write again. At the moment, though, I'm thinking intelligent things about work, and I'm not allowed to talk about work. It's 'cause of where I work, which I also don't think I should talk about.

So there you go, none-the-wiser :D

I thought about going on youtube

2007-12-06T06:07:00.000-08:00

but then I realised I'm no where near extrovert enough for that. I mean, what if people started watching me? Yuk yuk yuk

Set theory - gotta love it

2007-11-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

One of my Uni friends, Ben, was much better at this sort of thing than I was, he could talk very enthusiastically about why people introduced set theory at all (it was something like a rigerous approach to mathematics a few decades ago, when previously mathematicians had been more like physicists, "it works, it's good enough).

Anyways, set theory is way of representing maths, but not in the most intuative ways. They don't define how to do a function, such as addition, they define it's relationship. Why I like it is that it's logically sound, but a very counter intuative way of looking at maths. For example, addition

Addition: Addition is a function from a pair of numbers to a number. So it's a set of ordered pairs, whose first element is an ordered pair. So it's a set of pairs of the form {((x,y),z) where:

if x=0, then z = y
if y=0, then z=x
otherwise, let x' = successor(x) and let y' = predecessor(y) then z = Add(x',y').

This statement, by the relationship between z, x' & y' defines the function that gives z from x & y, which can be done because all numbers have known predecessors and successors (numbers were defined earlier, in similar ways). So it fully defines addition - if you think about it, which is probably worth some thought.

Of course, if this was just a counter intuative way of solving maths, then it'd be a bit silly (well, in my opinion), but the way of defining these fuctions and sets is really powerful - if applied to physics, things like rotations in Newtonian space and quantum mechanics all relate to each really impressivly, if I can't quite remember how.

Learning it for Undergrad was bizarre, fun and challenging. Utterly impratical, but it was good :)

Autoignition temperature

2007-11-12T13:32:00.000-08:00

This is how to calculate the time it will take for a substance to autoignite (from wiki, where else?)

Of course, this doesn't tell how Tig is calculated, which is perhaps a pity - as it says in the article, it depends on a bunch of factors, including the oxygen content of the air around, the thickness, what else has been done to the material, surface area to density. I suspect that this time calcualted is under the same conditions which autoignition temperature is calculated at, though I may think about the k, rho, and c, because it seems a little odd to have those things wandering around. The T at the steady state, and the form of answer seems to imply an integral, but which one... I need to think some more about this, I reckon it should be pretty obvious. But not at 10 in the evening, that seems like hassel.

edit: Of course I don't recognise the formula - if it's derived from other systems, it's non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which I never studdied. Now I'm not sure if it's worth me examining it. Still might be worth a trip to the British Library to look up the referenced text, though.

Do they not watch movies?

2007-11-11T04:48:00.000-08:00

Well, they're launching satellites again. They've called it "Skynet". Terminator, anyone? Seems like it's asking for trouble to me.

Cultural views of women

2007-11-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

I have sometimes been known to react in a negative fashion to the writings of people who think that it is still sensible, in a primarily skills & knowledge based economy, as opposed to manual labour, to view women as subordinate to men. What I only just realised was I writing from a very British point of view and also from the point of view of a scientist. Thinking about it now, the culture of in the United States in general does seem to view women as generally subordinate, much more so than British society. I hadn't realised that, consciously at least, up until just a few minutes ago. I always knew that in religious groups, women tend to be viewed as below men in the heirarchy, but it's always been implicit that in the wider culture that women are, mostly, recognised as as intrinsically qualified as men for any particular task required nowadays.

But in the US, "wider culture" is, generally, the traditional religious one. Not in my experience - living in northern California, near San Francisco, silicone valley way, almost 100% knowledge driven, all a lot more liberal than the rest of it. So I will have to adjust my thinking a little on that and related subjects, so I can understand the points of view more accuratly.

Nothing particularly significant, but there are some interesting statistics about the decreasing influence of christianity in the US that I might write about. And yes, I am having a bit of an America-orientated thinking time - spent the last few weeks reading a book on the abuses of science by Republicans, big business and religion, which was astounding. I'm sure I'll get over it now I've finished the book

topher

2007-11-01T16:12:00.001-07:00

So I systematically remove what I think is all references to that nickname from all these blogs, and it turns out it's still the nickname that appeared on comments.

I must do more careful work. And actually read the screen in front of me as opposed to skimming over. Or at least do a better job of selecting the important information.

Is it me, or is the modern Christian God quiet deistic?

2007-11-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's been a while. Over a year in fact, but I quite like this blog.

Someone was posting on a discussion board, "Prove that God doesn't exist?". I read down for a little while, and it struck me that no-one was asking "which God?" Because to disprove a deist god is a bitch of a task, on account of it doesn't do very much, but, on the other end of the scale, to disprove the God of creationists is dead easy, because either (a) it didn't happen like that, so they're wrong, or (b) their God is a decietful git who made the world look like it's really old, but it isn't, which makes their God internally inconsistent (the assumption that God isn't internally inconsistent is made, which is perhaps a risky one).

And this led me on to thinking about a claim Dawkins made in one of his books, that if God existed you would be able to see consequences of His existance (for example, if He was good, the world wouldn't have such a capacity for bitchiness. There are other ways one could concieve of having the world which would significantly reduce it's nastiness, which one would hope would be an aim of a Good God). The theological counter to this is that such things are not required, that the way God works is via people, and it is only required that God is internally consistent, any of his external effects, the stuff that would be empirically observable, can be written off to natural causes, because that's how God does it.

That is almost identical statement to believing in a deistic God - that the God is there, but he doesn't do anything significant (that we can understand of percieve), is very distant, and lets the world work out on it's own.

What seems to be the significant difference is that the Christian God then goes on and interacts with people on an individual level, which is very observable for the individual, but not really very observable for anyone else (quite a lot experiential, and having an intrinsic knowledge of God's existance). So both the deistic God and the Christian God let the world run according to the natural order of things, but then the Christian God has a capacity for interacting with individuals.

Therefore, Christian God = deistic God + personal interaction.

Which is interesting - the modern Christian God works on the very broadest scale of establishing the rules of the universe and insuring it runs, and then on the scale of the person, but not at all in between. He used to - He seemed quite interested in politics and theocracies and things like that, but going by what Christians so, not so much anymore.

Okay, by working with a person, and those people interact, He would be effecting large groups of people, but it seems to be a round about way of going about things.

Things are changing

2006-11-22T05:04:00.000-08:00

There was a reason, long ago, that I switched from talking about religious philosophy and physics to pure physics. But lots of those reasons are now mitigated, and I find myself a little more confused about physics. For example, if I were to write an entry about, say, my lectures, it would be along the lines of "aaaaaarggggg". Similar, would be entries about my project (which I can do, but currently don't have enough time to, so the next 3 weeks of my life will probably consist of solving algebra in a complicated and difficult fashion.

So, this all has lead me to think - I'm going to change this blog. There are lots of religious-philosophical things I can write about, as well as my forays into logical falacies, which are interesting and important when debating. So I'm going to start with a topic that covers quite a few topics.

Frictionless things

2006-10-05T03:30:00.000-07:00

Superfluids are interesting things. They move without friction. This is a... strange concept, especially in the world we live in - everything, at some point, moves with friction; something falling from the sky experiences air resistance, anything moving on a surface experiences friction, all movement we engage in, more or less, involves the friction between us and the thing we've pushing against. But we also have the capability to imagine its' non-existance; we have experiences of weak friction, in the form of fluids spreading across surfaces, slipping and falling, sliding things along a frozen path. So we can at least understand somethings about a frictionless substance.

For instance, if you had big drop of frictionless liquid hit a flat surface, it would spread. But when would it stop? If it was water, it would form a puddle (imagine water on a flat, marble surface, so it doesn't drain away). Is that due to friction? At some point, the friction between the water and the surface becomes greater than whatever force is pulling it apart (the water seeking to go to it's lowest point - water flows downhill, in the direction of gravity)? If that's the case, in a frictionless liquid, would it ever form a puddle? Or would it continue to spread until it covered the entire surface in a very thin film. It's the later - it continues to spread, at least until it reaches such a thin film that the internal forces start to play a part.

But what if you put this same drop of frictionless liquid in a cup? It climbs up walls. This seems daft, but it's climbing the walls of the glass because there's nothing to stop it doing so. Sure, gravity acts on it, but imagine a skateboarder in a frictionless u-pipe. He goes up and down forever, to exactly the same height. Add another skateboarder. They collide, but they are also frictionless skateboarders. So the only place the energy can go is into each other - one gains more, the other gains less. So one skateboarder is going higher than the other. Add lots and lots of skateboarders, and eventually, you'll have skateboarders flying up and over the edge of the U-pipe, just because of an uneven spread of energy. They'll never really fly, if you assume that in each collision not much energy is changed (imagine a skateboarder at the top of our chaotic pile of skateboarders - another one hits him, but if they are bother quite high, then only a small amount of energy will switch between them).

It's a bit of a limited analogy, but it sort of fits. But if you put a frictionless liquid in a semi-spherical container, hold it above the ground, then the frictionless liquid will flow up the sides of the container, and then down the outside, to the very bottom of the container, and then drip off. Sort of like water on a window - if you have a drop on water and a ball on a horizontal glass surface, and rotate the surface so it's vertical, then the droplet and the ball slide down. But if you continue to rotate it, the ball would fall to the ground, but the droplet wouldn't fall off, at least straight away - it would slide down the surface of the glass, even though the most direct way of going down would be going straight down, as the ball does.

So these sorts of things are imaginable, if rather counter intuative. But they're also a lot of fun, and the properties of them can be explained through one of my favourite branches of physics, statistical mechanics.

So it's fun to think about superfluids, and, by extension, superconductors. And once "fun" is added, in whatever means, the whole process of learning becomes a pleasure.

Need to remember the fun.

Perhaps I'm in trouble...

2006-09-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

I just realised about an hour ago that I've forgotten the formula for SHM, and how to derive it, in the main. So I've just been teaching myself that. It's worrying - this stuff is rather basic :S

The Anthropic Principle

2006-09-22T00:36:00.000-07:00

The Anthropic Principle is interesting. Not so much in itself, it's just an idea. There are 2 grades of it (the 3rd doesn't really count), the weak and the strong. The Weak Anthropic Principle is that because the universe is as it is, we can observe it. The Strong is that because we can observe it, the universe is as it is.

Where the Anthropic princple stems from, at least in my understanding of it, is the orderedness of the Universe. From a phyicists point of view, it's a way to start explaining why the Universe is governed by mathematical principles. That is, everything seems to run on and can be explained by mathematical methods and statistical reasoning, to a very deep extent. It has patterns, and orders, and understandable and observable principles. There is no reason in physics as to why the universe should run in such a precise way, muchless why humans are able to figure these things out (to some extent, at least), and no reason why we should appear in it. If left unchecked, the human tendancy to look for a creator in order starts, and ideas like "God" come up. And really, theism is... well, theism, and not governed by scientific method.

Scientists don't like "don't know". And such a question - "why is the universe like it is?", or, a suposedly easier one, "why can we observe the universe in this way?" and "why are we here?", the second related to all the constants in the universe that seem almost welcoming to us. And so scientist came up with the answer, "we can observe the universe because it is the way it is".

This is a bit stating the obvious, because if things in the universe, the physical laws and constants, were different, then we, as we are, would not be here. But it is also a bit deeper than that; it's about saying that we evolved in a universe governed by these laws, so it has to seem friendly to us. If we appeared in a universe with unfriendly laws, that killed us or caused us to cease to exist, by definition, we wouldn't be there. And if it was only a bit different, it would still seem quite hospitable to us, and so the question would remain "why is the universe so hospitable?" Because we evolved here, under these laws, it appears very friendly to us, and could not appear to be unfriendly, because of the nature of these laws (organisms evolve and adapt to their surroundings - we evolved and adapted to fit into ours).

The Anthropic Principle is an answer of sorts, at least the weak is. And it's also a way of arguing against theists, when they (we?) start listing all the very odd things about the universe, that are seemingly coincidence but imply deeper order, like the ratio pi appearing in flowers and shells of animals and in the size of rivers and lots of things like that.

(when I call pi a ratio, I know it's a number, but it's a pure number - in order to get it out of reality, two quanities, like radius and circumference of a circle, with the same units, must be devided by each other. So it is a pure number, but it comes from two comparable quantities devided by each other, thus removing the units, and it is therefore a ratio and a number, which perhaps is the same thing...)

I sometimes think the Anthropic principle is used a little unfairly like that, actually. It's a very interesting thing, because you can ask "why is the Anthropic principle valid?", which is a valid question, and can lead to interesting discussions about multiple universes, theories of everything, chance and forking in time (for every possibility, there may be a separate universe). It can even lead to questions about, gasp, "God". It's a deep idea, which is sometimes done injustice by being used as an intellectual method of saying "I've already decided about this topic".

One thing that the Anthropic Principle must not be mistaken for is science, though. Which is a trap lots of people fall into. It doesn't make predictions, and it is unlikely it ever will (beyond, "we predict the universe will be like it is. It is, so we win! Huzzah!"), it isn't really falisfiable (Equally, unless you can observe the universe being other than what it is), it's not verifiable, either. It is philosophy. Philosophy with a scientific slant, but philosophy through and through.

Not that that's a bad thing, but it's just a thing. Philosophy is a good thing, it deals with questions that humans pose that can't be answered by scientific method. At least at the moment :D

What are the odds of that happening?

2006-08-14T04:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know, and I think it depends on your perspective. For example, what are odds of me sitting here, typing this? Well, right here and now, I'd give it about a 1:1, so long as we consider our senses reliable. But how about, say this morning?

I was going to work, which I'd been planing before that. I'd also run out of work, so I had time to type things on the internet. Also, I'd have to get here, and be able to get everything to work and not be inundated with work. All quite probable, from looking at previous days of work. Then I'd have to get here, and then be promted to write about this subject. The actual content of this post, if not the exact expression, has wandered round my thoughts for a good 6 or 7 years, so it was just a prompting. That was caused by reading the "talk origins" website, about how if you have a set of parts, put them together randomly, more than one combination will do the the job of another. Then I'd have to actually open the browser, go to this blog, and write up the entry, which I've done before this week, so it's still pretty likely.

So, although I wasn't aware of it, waking up this morning, there was a good, even odds on, chance that I'd make it here and be writing this.

So lets try last friday. It gets a bit more dodgey, but not much. The exact time might be more difficult to say, because I still had my Ipod in stevenage, which would be distracting me if it was still here and not in my room in manc. But the other things were still true, last day at work, little work, at the same place reading through the talk origins archive. But would I be thinking in this way? Perhaps I'd get a different idea, or something would happen which would cause me to do something else. I sure as heck wasn't planning to do this. Perhaps the odds of me writing this, here and now, from last friday, are less than even. I don't think that would be an exageration.

A week ago - well, I'd not run out of work, and there would be not real way of telling, at least from my point of view, how much work I had. Although I was reading the talk origins archives, I hadn't started doing it in earnest, so it would be difficult to say that I would be reading it now, if ever. Of course, a different path may have bought me to this blog entry, but really, probably not, as it is the only time in my life I've written this entry or anything like it. So a week ago, taking all factors into account, really, really bad odds of me writing this. But I'd still probably be at this computer, little chance I would be doing this.

A month ago - actually, not much difference from a week ago, really, except there's a greater chance of random incidence keeping me from work (sickness, coming into huge amounts of money).

A year ago. Well, that's interesting. I did have this job a year ago, but I swearing that I would never come back to Stevenage for a prolonged period, and I was half interested in a German girl, and if that had worked out, I could have ended up anywhere this summer. Even so, there's a good chance I would come back, but no way of knowing beyhond the very outlines exactly what I'd be doing.

10 years ago, I think I was in Caifornia, so no way of knowing where I'd be living, which country (although one of two is likely), what I'd be studying (I was a very good all rounder, with a pencant for art and english), although it's relatively likely, even then, that I'd be at University (both my parents went). Back then, what would you be doing in ten years was speculative, for me more than most. The odds of me being here and now, from back then? Just 10 years ago; bordering on a possiblity, but nothing worth speaking of.

A hundred years ago? Our culture was around, and the foundations of it, but no real way of knowing what the future would be, that the nature of war, technology and weapons would change the way we act and think. And me existing, let alone being here and now? Next to nothing.

Thousand years ago - no way of telling what sort of civilisation, no science, no history, at least as we have it now. Predictions of the future would quite possiblly involve it ending, depending on who you chatted to. So of there even being anything like here and now, well, that's close to zero - put me into that, and it is zero, or round about.

Ten thousand years ago was, from this point of view, a lot like a thousand years ago. Perhaps a little less sophisticated, but mostly, the same, buildings and the such like, kings kicking each other. Maybe not philosophy as we think of it, but even then... similar.

One hundred thousand years back, and homo-sapien had just wandered out of the jungles in Africa, using tools, hunting, living to around 30 and having a grand old time of putting together speach and drawing pictures on walls. Were a lot like us today, though. Considering nowadays back then... Well, the human race isn't even mildly dominant, and could be wiped out and it wouldn't be noticed by much anything.

A million years and Homo-erectus, our hairy great grandads, were wondering around, being quite clever, probably, having dark hair. Generally being a bit smarter than the rest of the animals around them, but not by much. Back then, if the question could have been asked, our very race had a pretty poor chance of existing.

Ten million years ago. Apes, monkies, and the such like. Well, sort of, anyway, our common ancestor. So anything like us was pretty much inconcieveable.

A hunderd million years, the closest thing to us is a small mammel. Fingers, toes, hair but really, to look at it wouldn't result in an automatic "mummy" reaction. From here looking forwards? Well, nothing if the big old dinosaurs don't get out of the way.

A billion years ago, and multicelular organisms were... Well, not doing that much, but equally, doing a lot more than anything that had come before. Complex animals, perhaps a chance of existing, but not really.

Ten billion, the universe existed, probably, and our solar galaxy was made. The bits of our solar system was around, but you wouldn't recognise it. Even the protons and electrons that make us were mostly in different orders. And that anything like it is now is an incredibally small chance, zero, let alone anything like us, or even life as it is now.

So what are the odds of that happening? Not so good, especially here and now, but it really depends how you look at it. 'Cos if the universe is going to be around for a while, then somewhere, something a bit like this might happen. And there clearly is a chance of it happening, however remote, because it is happening. So... unlikely things happens

:D

Scientific method in day to day lives

2006-08-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

Science rocks. It is hugely powerful, and has changed the way life is lived, in nearly every area of human activity. In some case, such a strong statement would need a lot of defending, or would be considered provocative – but with scientific development, it’s just manifestly true. Cars, the way we build houses, the way food is transported, produced and consumed, computers, TVs, clothes… The entire modern world, for better or worse, has been built by a combination science and engineering.
It’s also a powerful thing in relation to thinking. The things we know about the material world, how reliable things are, whether things work is all a form of scientific analysis, abit sometimes a less rigorous type than straight scientific analysis, humans aren’t entirely rational, after all.

Cooking a meal, for instance; a combination of ingredients, plied with certain tools in a certain order, produces a (hopefully) appetising edible product. But learning to cook a meal is a method, governed more or less, by scientific method; we form a hypothesis (following a certain recipe will produce a meal we desire to eat), we test the hypothesis by cooking the meal by following the recipe, observing the results by consuming them. So we have a testable hypothesis. If the test fails the hypothesis, we tend to disregard the hypothesis (or perhaps test it again, another time). But if the test meets the hypothesis, we will repeat the test, cooking the meal again. After a certain number of tests, the hypothesis, at least to us, becomes "true", or is elevated to a personal theory – that this recipe will produce a meal that is desirable. If, at this point, the theory fails, the first reaction is that the theory holds, and somewhere along the line the test has failed – forgot an ingredient, didn’t cook it for long enough.

And then the progression of cooking recipes is similar in nature to the progression of scientific ideas; have a set recipe and expand on that by adding different ingredients, then testing the hypothesis that it will produce a decent meal. Or trying ideas from that recipe in different recipes to see what effect it has.

This doesn’t just go for cooking – sitting on chairs; hypothesis – that sitting on chairs is something that can be done. Test – sitting on a chair. Repeat, hypothesis forms a theory. A theory, so strong, that when sitting on a chair fails the test, the chair breaks, or slips away, as opposed to the theory being wrong, it’s the chair that’s wrong. Or "not a chair", because the theory has become the means by which a chair is defined (but that’s a little abstract :P ). So strong, and so widely shared, that it’s sometimes used to make a point – if a chair gets broken because of the weight of the person sitting on it, they are excessively fat, or if a person cannot use a chair, they are very stupid.

If all of a sudden, all the chairs stopped working, eventually the theory would be disregarded, and people mostly wouldn’t sit on chairs anymore.

It doesn’t just extend to simple interactions with objects and nature, it also applies to interactions with people. We form a hypothesis – a person is trustworthy, for example, test it, by giving them something to be trusted with, and then seeing whether the hypothesis is validated or not. Even something like "compassion" is, often, subject to these measures – the state of having compassion has a number of expected actions associated with it, and, separate to the words that would express compassion; "I love you", "I miss you", "I care about you". The actions of a person are placed against the criteria of "compassion", the hypothesis "this person has compassion towards me" is formed, and whether or not the actions of the person meet those criteria often governs whether or not the hypothesis is accepted as true or false.

Of course, this is a massive simplification, and there are other factors as well; emotions, or previously established relationships, often changes the perception. But it does seem that in the long run, people look at such thing scientifically – they observe data, form hypotheses, and then verify or disregard those hypotheses.
Not only that, but falsifiability is also an issue in life. If someone states a something, and there is no way of proving it wrong, it is generally considered foolish, especially if it has a negative consequence – as an example, the person who states the someone loves them, but nothing can prove that wrong, shown by that other person hurting them.

Which is perhaps reason why science is so powerful when it comes to people’s thoughts, not only does it so obviously work, but people think in a scientific way whenever they are confronted with new situations. Automatically, we understand scientific method at least, the other mechanisms of science; peer review, absolute integrity in the publishing, set up of experiments, the language, is less intuitive, but the principles behind it are ones which are incredibly important in governing our lives.

And that is one of the reasons I think dismissing science in any are which it has comment is unadviseable.

1/(x+a)

2006-06-22T04:23:00.000-07:00

I integrated 1/(x+a) wrt to x, a being a positive constant (less than one, as it turns out) to avoid divergence. Turns out, although the line converges towards infinity, the area under the line diverges.

Which feels a little bit strange to me. I might ask someone clever than I am about it.

Why I was thinking about this little question is also interesting, but that'll have to be explained another day

The greater the pressure, the slower the universe will go

2006-05-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

Pressure, P, is generally known as the Force applied per unit area (why pushing a thumb tack into a surface tends to be more successful, penetrating the surface, than pushing, say... a brick). Interestingly (which they didn't tell me at school, at least) if you multiply the top and bottom by a length, if becomes Energy per unit volume, or energy density.

This in itself is passingly interesting, but only in an incredibally nerdy, physicsy way, which is fine with me - I at least somewhat physicsy. But, as most people know,

Which is true so long as things are moving so slowly that we don't notice. Which most things, nowadays, are doing. If you weren't, then you'd be in trouble. And nothing would work properly, and it'd be all an unbound mess... Not so much fun as pretty much sitting still.

So, mix them all together, and oddly enough;

Where ρ is the density. Actually, it's true except for the speed of light, which, if you're a particle physicist, you can set to one anyways :D

That's amazing, although it makes sense, sort of... Well, okay, not very much to my intuition, so I may have to think about it some more. Anyways, there it is in it's mathematical glory. This probably still leads to a bit of a "so what" statement.

Well, if you increase the density of the universe, the gravitational attraction increases.

That's assuming the universe is spherical, which it... well, sort of is. It's complicated. It goes on forever, but em radiation tends to go outwards, oft from a point. Think that's it. So, if you increase the pressure of the universe, the acceleration due to gravity increases, and so the expansion of the universe decreases. Which is, at first counter-intuative - greater pressure, slows down the expansion...

But there you have it, in mathsy ways, showing that you increase the pressure of the universe, it'll slow down. It's all linked the pressure not actually pushing on anything :)

And I find that all very interesting.

Flat Earth Society

2006-04-30T02:37:00.000-07:00

If someone came up to me with a survey that asks "Do you think that; (a) the Earth rotates around the Sun, or (b) the Sun rotates around the Earth", I know which one I would pick.

I really think anyone who asks questions like that, in a survey, is asking for it.

Perhaps it's not so much of a problem, people professing belief in geocentricism...

I know I've been a bit absent from the whole blogging scene, at least here. My motivation for physics has completly broke. I would appologise, but I don't know if I am actually sorry. So if I start writing stuff here more regularly, you'll know I am. If so, consider this a retroactive apology. Or something

Pictures and symbols

2006-03-22T08:51:00.000-08:00

e. That's little 'e', so long as there's not auto correct function on publishing this entry. It's not E. That, depending on who you are, means a lot of things. Mostly a relatively addictive stimulant (I think), or, if you’re physics-y, it might mean energy, but not of any defined type. e is significant. It’s a number, but I don’t think of it like that. Because it’s a very special number. It’s irrational. It’s also known as the “exponential”. The derivative of e^x is simply e^x (where e is e and x is a variable) . And the derivative of e^ax is ae^ax (where e and x are as before, and a is a constant), and that’s important for a whole lot of physics.

(derivative – if you plot a function that depends on x, often refered to as y (y = e^x, for example), against x, and the derivative is the definition of the gradient for any value of x. Dictionary.com, if you’re still lost.)

You stick a complex number ((-1)^1/2, or “THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS 1”, and yes, it does deserve the caps) next to the x, sum it with another, except with a negative sign in there next to the (-1)^1/2, and, except for a couple of constants, you have a sine curve. Or a cosine, depends of the sign in the summation. So there is this number, e, that when mixed with THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS 1 is a sine/cosine curve.

And then, if to the e and THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS 1 mix, you add another irrational number, pi (another of my favourites) you get minus one out. So that's 2 irrational numbers and another number that doesn't technically exist, and out pops minus one. A very real and rational number.

It's pretty central to quantum mechanics, you just can't do without it. It's used for defining, well, exponentials – exponential growth, decay, etc. It makes maths easier (if you can use it). e^x goes to positive infinity as x goes to infinity, but at a rate faster than x does. It only goes to zero at infinity, but after a long enough time you can ignore it. Okay, with those last 2 points, I’m cheating, a little, as any number bigger than 1 does the former, and any number bigger than zero will do the latter. But e is still special, as it’s the only one that keeps itself as its' own gradient. It's a very independent number (okay, so 1 and 0 both keep themselves as their gradient, but 0 doesn't count 'cause it doesn't do anything and everyone knows how important 1 is anyways).

e. Better, in my opinion, than E.

I miss lab

2006-03-17T05:16:00.000-08:00

I actually have a few entries to write in here. To tell the truth, I can only remember what one of them is, and that's me visualising quantum mechanics. It's more about BEC and the difficulties I have forming a mental image of superconducting metals (mainly due to trying to combine an inacurate mental picture of the conduction of electrons in a metal, to a less (but still rather (braket in bracket in bracket :p )) inaccurate view of (pure, at least) BEC). There were other ones, about the various anthropic principles. But apart from actually writing what they are (which I might) I can't remember what I thought about them.

But I bored of Physics. Inspite of having difficulties with the various people in lab, the experiment itself was interesting and fun. And all I have now is sitting around and learning stuff. I'm bored of learning like this - I've been doing it for, well, as long as I can remember. I don't mind if it's mixed in with me actually doing things, like experiments (heck, even shelf stacking) but on it's own... Nah, it 5uX50r5. I just can't bring myself right now to face another fiddly usage of snells' law, or figuring out what the boundary conditions are for some particular wave equation (I figured it out during my Solid State lecture - it needs to be zero at both ends, which was... well, obvious when I'm feeling clever).

So I'll leave you with this question I got on a general paper practice (Paraphrased)

There is an empty, cube room, 50m^3 in volume, with acoustically reflective walls. How many resonant frequencies are the between 4000Hz and 5600Hz?

My answer: None, the room is empty and therefore there is no medium for sound waves to be transfered through.

(I know it's not what they're looking for, but I'm feeling very beligerant at the moment. Not as beligerant as Sir Alan Sugar, mind, but still very)

An unfortunate ephitath to a lab would should have rocked

2006-03-11T04:15:00.000-08:00

It looks like we'll get a first, in spite of everything. Which I was really happy about yesterday (a first is the highest mark you can get), but today, I've been thinking about it, and actually, this project, especially the latter half of it, sucked.

I don't normally complain about things like this, but I've been blogging about my entire project, so it seems right that I give a sort of synopsis. Unfortunatley, it's gonna have to be a bad one.

It seems like a fantastic project - I had good equipment, pleasant and knowledgeable demonstrators, me and my lab partner had an appropriate mix of skills in order to make the gear work, fun people working opposite me, even, as it turns out, decent results, sort of. And it looks like, in spite of the presentation being a farce, making one of the demonstrators angry, our results often trending in the wrong direction, we're coming out with a first.

But it's a really, really bad project as well. I became friendly with my lab partner. Normally, that's a good thing, being friends is better, but this time round, it was a really, really bad idea. Because last semester, while we were unfriendly, I could more easily get my way. This time, I've not at all.

If I was wrong, then that would have been okay. But I wasn't, I was just ignored. Damn irritating, when what I suggested would have cut out half the problems encountered. The accuracy of the gear was too low sometimes, and we needed to improve it. It wouldn't have been hard - we needed to plug in an extra multimeter, which was pretty much sitting there in front of us. So when I was recording the readings (writing down what the equipment was reading out, in effect), I did pretty much that (I actually made sure the gear we were given was showing good readings, but it had the same effect). And all my curves are beautiful, showed all the information we wanted. And when it wasn't me recording the readings... Some of the lines are good, and gave reasonable results. But about half to 2 thirds of them are shocking. And those were the important ones, I was just taking the test measurements.

And I was pretty sure it would be a good idea to plot the final results, even if they were (in effect) completly random. But it didn't happen. (The lab demonstrators agreed with me, the absence was a major point of making the demonstrator angry.)

So onto our actual results. We've, more or less, gardened (gardening is, in effect, selecting the results to use for no real reason except to see what is wanted). I hate gardening, I've never had to do it before. All my results have been well within the bounds of 'good', I've never had an experiment score less than a 2:1 (except, maybe once, but it wasn't so much an experiment, it was a competition to see how fast we could make circuit boards with mostly broken equipment); they've mostly been firsts. But in this case, the zero of the graph has been shifted (a little justifiable, but not as much as we have), threw out a lot of the most deviant results, and after all that, the final result is still appalling, considering what other people have managed. We're out by lots and lots, from at least 50% to 200%, and often going the trend goes in completly the wrong direction - up instead of down. I don't mind that, but the thing is, that the demonstrator has convinced himself the results are fine.

And, most of all, even after getting a second chance, I didn't insist on error bars. Which were completly justifable - there was a significant error in the reading off the equipment, simply because we were using .01 mV increments, on apparatus that read .01 mV as the smallest unit. The range of readings we were taken were thus from .005 above and .005 below, 50% of our lowest readings. Important, significant and true.

I'm also a little hacked off that I was ignored about the extra junctions we'd created. I don't care what they say - it's true! We used an old piece of copper circuit board. You could see it was oxidised (rusted, for layman), the copper was dull! (new copper is shiney and bright) In only a few months copper to oxidises, and odds on that happened in our case (the labs will store stuff for years, and ours was part of the experiment, which hadn't been touched for at least a year). And we put indium on top of it. And then reduced it below the idium superconducting level. It wouldn't explain everything, but basically; for each carefully prepared bridge, vital for this experiment, there were 2 really, really crappy bridges. It's going to throw the results, possibly spectacularly. And it seems that, at least to me, that the results are spectularly pants, comparing ours to others.

But even with all that, my strongest argument is to common sense - identical equipment, for everyone before us, gave good results. For us, even after signifant editing, the results were around 200% bigger from what everyone else agreed. The only other difference is the people making it, so assuming (a big one) our technique wasn't in some way hugely flawed, there are only 2 realistic possiblities - that the changes we made to the gear was throwing it off, or the metals we were measuaring contained sufficient impurities to make them have these major differences. The lab demonstrators have gone for impurities, I'd go for our changes, and my lab partner... Well, he just decided I was wrong without making any decent suggestions otherwise.

That's a little unfair. He did say that it's likely our high temperature readings were wrong (oddly enough, aruging too high error, which is a little inconsistent, considering earlier), and our low temperature readings were wrong due to electronics, despite there being no noise on the graphs to indicate that, which is what the others who had done it before said was the noise was the problem and the equipment giving other people fine readings.

All in all, I feel irritated. But, oddly enough, not at anyone except myself. In the end, people didn't listen to me. But I didn't make them listen to me, which was the complete problem. I need to be able to project supreme self confidence, just so that when I'm around people who are inclined to ignore me, I can throw my wieght around. I know I'm not the easiest guy to work with, for a billion different reasons, but I'm not an idiot, and I'm often good at the stuff I do. And I need to be more sure of that. But it's difficult, sometimes, because crossing the line to arrogance where I don't hear other people's suggestions would be a million times worse.

It's a tough balancing act.

Figured out what is wrong

2006-03-09T14:37:00.000-08:00

Okay, if you've been following my blog, which, by the numbers of comments I get, you haven't (I write this for my own sake, Ha! Well, more like for the sake of the people I hang with, because I really started to monolouge about physics before I got this blog. Where were we... Oh yeah; if you've been following...) I've been sandwiching an oxide layer between 2 metals, getting one to super conduct and the other to regularly conduct, and observing the features. The should be a definate trend, as described by... Someone or other... Giaver and Mergerl, but I've mispelt that... anyways, there should be this trend. And our results are, well, more or less, random. We see superconductivity, but the band gaps are all to heck wrong. They get bigger at lower temperatures, they dance, they're twice as big as they're meant to be. Just never sit on the line.

And then my lab partner suggested that the indium solder we were using was superconducting. This would be sensible, as we're well within the indium superconductivity band, even if the critical temperature for superconductivity for bulk substances is different for thin films. But this technique, our equipment, has worked before and observed this behaviour before.

And then I realised, that's not true. This equipment hasn't worked before. Right at the very start, we said we modded it. What we did was put induim solder on a copper circuit board, to make connecting the wires easier. Maybe you've twigged now.

Dirty, old circuit board. In normal temperatures, would add some resistance. But if we have a copper-copper oxide-indium sandwich, or even a copper-dirt-indium sandwich, there's gonna be some crazy band gap behaviour.

I don't have time to test if this is true or not - we ran out of time yesterday. But it's sure as heck credible - our technique is identical, more or less, to other people, our equipment has produced the results before. It's the most significant variable, we stuck in extra junctions.

And this is possibly the story of how Dave and Chris saved the lab project, flew home with style and then did a happy dance.

I hope I hope I hope.

Pwned

2006-03-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

My lab results were all wrong.

We have had to set up again, and redo them. For Friday.

They look like they're going well now, though.

The moral of this story - analyse the results as I go along. Noob mistake...

Finding things that may, or may not, be there. But hopefully are. And if they are, they're everywhere.

2006-03-06T03:28:00.000-08:00

In todays Cosmology lecture, the guy was nattering on about "Dark Matter" (we've not quite reached "Dark Energy", that's at the end of the course). Apparently, supersymmetry says that there should be fermionic equivalents for every Boson (and perhaps Bosonic equivalents for every fermion, but he didn't chat about that). It's got me thinking about quarks and the such like, but that's more supersymmetry, and it's pretty safe to so I know nearly nothing about that.

So we have Dark Matter. It's weakly interacting, so it's a complete nightmare to detect. It could be (and by the percentages and experiments hopefully is) passing through us, a rather massive flux, every moment. And it accounts for 25% of the matter in the entire universe.

So what do we, as people, do when we're looking for something that is everywhere, but really difficult to see? Well, as people, we do a lot of things, but as physicists, they go down really big holes in the ground, put up big walls of concrete and lead around some detector they built, and hope to detect the particles colliding. Which involves lots of waiting, and a lot of trying to refine the sensitivity of the equipment. It's what happened with nutrinos, or at least solar ones, and now they're trying to build "neutrino telescopes", which seems quite an effort, given how dang hard they are to see.

I'm not all scientist. There's also a part of me that mainly likes stuffed animals, sugar, saturday morning cartoons and hugs. This part of me has seemed to have aquired the impression that, as everytime something is really difficult to find, physicists go down really deep holes in the ground to look for it, these weakly interacting particles are in fact so hard to find because they're hiding down said deeps holes in an effort not to be found.

Which is completly inaccurate. But oddly perceptive, in that a lot of particle physics does seem to be a giant game of hide and go-seek with various different "building blocks of the universe". The latest guy to be found is the Higgs' Boson, which is the mass interaction particle. Higgs' pretty good at not being found, but it seems that the particle guys have got Higgs' cornered in a quite small energy range, and they should find Higgs' next time the LHC (or whatever acronym is being used nowadays) is bought on line, or soon after.

Of course, another candidate for this big old game of hide and go-seek, which isn't strictly particle physics, are the ever ellusive (in more ways than this) strings. They're, or so the stringy guys tell us, everywhere, but in general are a bit too small for us to see right now. But sometimes, apparently, they'll be so big they'll be really, really hard to miss, but those types are rarer and they haven't found any of those yet, either.

There's a paralell of this in my life, in that my Physics career seem often to be searching for things which should be there, but don't seem to be; like the answers to my examples sheet questions, two bonus peaks in the dI/dV against V spectrum for superconductivity of tin on aluminium, or, most recently, the entire of my nuclear physics notes for this semester. Which, oddly enough, might be found by decending down a giant hole, specifically the box I use for storing paper for recycling.

Although that's perhaps not as useful in terms of original research for the physics world, it's much more useful for me, in terms of passing exams.

Changed my profile

2006-03-06T03:09:00.000-08:00

Because, all in all, my Christianity has little to do with my thoughts as a Scientist, and nothing to do with what I write this blog about (most of the time :) ). It might effect the way I behave as one, but not how I think as one, at least directly. And if this section of my blog is about Physics, then the fact that I'm a theist doesn't come into it, so much. It's not like I put "I'm a Christian" on the top of my CV. I don't get rid of it entirely, I write that I've been involved with Church activities, use it as an example of how I can communicate and am comfortable with a whole bunch of people. But in the end, it's not what this blog is about, in the same way as my CV isn't about that, either.

So there you go, reforming my identity. Which is what I seem to spend quite some time doing at the moment :D

It's over

2006-03-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

Well, my physics experiment for this semester is over. It was great. Me and my lab partner got to break things, modify the equipment (nothing major, just making it all a little more efficient for us), help the machinist mod the equipment (okay, he did it all... our designs wouldn't have worked, but we got him to do it, which is the main thing. And we have a machinist :D), and get a decent set of results, even if we failed to observe one particular phenomenon, the double-bandgap when both metals superconduct.

It was a bit rougher than all the experiments we'd done before. They had all very clear directions, this one, we could pick and choose many more things, decide how best to get the results. It was... Well, it was pretty dang fun, actually, and I'd like to have worked on it for a longer time.

It felt a bit like research. It was after a fashion - we were the first people to have tried it. I'm not sure how good it will be for others, though; me and my lab partner were uniquely qualified. I have vacuum plated things before, and he's soldered. And he's tall and strong, so able to lift the high bits of the equipment, and we're both pretty good at lab, and we only managed to just get it done in time. So... Well, unless they make it considerably easier, I can't imagine people who aren't as great as us getting it done. But that's okay, they'll learn :p

It's a general rule of thumb, that if everything goes pretty straight forward, it should get done in half the time. It's not really going to happen with this one, methinks.

So I need to write this up as a lab report and present it next friday. I also had another physics-y related entry to write, but can't remember what it was going to be about. So maybe another day.

Who you gonna call?

2006-02-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

I was remembering today, and I recalled that a leader at an old Church of mine once told an intelligent friend of mine that he was possesed by a "Daemon of Theology" (or "Spirit of Theology", probably that one, given the language trends of the time). Had he given them the chance ("run a mile" wouldn't be far wrong in describing his actual reaction) the probably would have called on the name of Jesus to deliever him from this evil. That got me thinking...

Who else could you call?

1) "Things are getting strange, I'm starting to worry, this could be a case for Mulder and Scully" - fictitious and silly solution for corresponding problem

2) Queer Eye For the Straight Daemon - This spirit clearly has issues, it's picked such a... positive, and God-related idea to have as it's descriptive subject. A couple of new shirts, a spangly new 'do, and we have remade in the positive light "The Demon of Industrial Waste", or to give his full title; "The Deamon of the Economic Benefits of Industrial Waste and related Health, Environment and Safety Issues". Could make a whole department out of that.

3) "Who you gonna call? Ghost Busters!" As 1, except prefer 80s cheese to 90s sheeke.

4) The medical professionals - the voices are talking to someone around here, and it doesn't seem to be the accused.

5) The local newspaper. "Local Priest set upon by waves of fear and paranoia" - more exciting that most of the local news.

6) A taxi. Religious nuts...

7) The daemon dipository; if deamons make him that good at theology, I want one for quantum physics.

8) My Shrink - the imaginary religious leaders have been up to their old tricks.

(if you notice in this entry I told 5 jokes, and repeated 2 of them twice, one of them 3 times. This is because I'm running out of inspiration for what should be a very ammusing little sideline)

Dr Pablo Moresco, Maths Cowboy!

2006-02-17T04:42:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a course on Electron Dynamics at the moment. I slept through the last lecture (at home, it was 3 in the afternoon, I was quite impressed. I've missed 2 lectures so far this semester, but were that afternoon), and so I came to this lecture, and he was solving equations in various 3D coordinates; r, theta and phi/z, with different degrees of symmetry. The standard thing - it resulted in Legandre Polynominals, Bessel functions, spherical harmonics. I wasn't really sure why, though. Turns out they can help in answering EM questions as well, but not any of the type I'd seen in the past.

So, Doc Pablo writes on the board something like; a^2 + b^2 + g^2 = 0. Then he writes later g = (a^2 + b^2)^(1/2). That is, for most people I think, missing an i out at the front there. And someone asks Doc Pablo about this, and he says "it depends what they are", effectivly dismissing him, and continues. Later on, he writes a formula, Anr^l + Bn/r^(l-1), then sticks it next to another function, and changes them to Anmr^l + Bnm/r^(l-1). When questioned about this, what it comes down to I think is that the function has a constant dependant containing m in it, and he couldn't be bothered to change the labling. Which is fair enough, really.

But I was a little bored, so I drew a picture of him wearing a cowboy hat, and now, in my mind at least, he shall forever be "Doc Pablo, Maths Cowboy!" due to his maths antics in that lecture. That and the guy who was correcting him really is a bit of a pedantic git, who always seems to have the answers to questions before I even have time to read the blackboard and sort out what the question is asking. But never answers any in larger lectures. So dismissing him twice in one lecture earns points with me, simply because I'm a little jealous.

So this Bud's for you, Doc Pablo, Maths Cowboy!, in showing how maths really should be done.

On using the cosmos to believe in God

2006-02-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

By now, everyone (in one of those physics approximations. A ball is a sphere, an egg is a sphere, a turkey is a sphere. Things actually move in SHM, those sorts) knows the watchmaker argument. You find a watch, it is complicated, with many clockwork bits. By it's very nature it infers a maker, even if you don't know what a watch is, what it does, if it's broken or has functions you're unaware of. Therefore, the Universe is complicated and so God exists.

Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that - nature is complicated, this infers a maker, and this maker, we'll call 'God'.

This argument used to be used a lot in terms of biology. It's younger brother, irreducable complexity, is still with us in creationist/intelligent design arguments. But then Darwin came along, and all of a sudden, there is a mechanism by which things can become complicated. Thus God doesn't exist.

Or at least isn't required for the process.

But it has come back into fashion a bit recently, because the Universe is really big and really complicated, and we can use maths to explain it (this is assuming maths is something, and not just a model created by our minds to explain the universe. I think maths is something, and in fact r0x50r5 most incredibally). Which, because it's complicated and ordered, this infers that something must have created it.

I'm not going to go into whether this argument is valid or not - to tell the truth, it has been such a long time since I argued about it I don't know if I think it is or not. I don't think I think it is valid, I wouldn't have used it myself, in my remembering. What was interesting is that in a book I was reading, it was talking about what we could learn about God through this argument, even it's valid.

It boils down to; all we could learn about God is that He makes stuff, He can be described as a creator. It's not the Christian God - while the Christian God is a creator, He is also infinite, which cannot be shown using a finite universe, above and outside of time and space, which cannot be shown with the references of time and space, all-present, which also couldn't be shown in a universe in which 'all' cannot be seen, the benevolance/goodness of God couldn't be shown. So whatever creator is derived using this argument is at most a diest view - that God started it all but isn't involved in any meaningful way - but bares very little resembalance to the God I believe in.

Which I thought was an interesting slant. I'm unfortunatly all out of time, so I'll leave my entry on considering why we respond to pictures of cosmic phenomena with a general 'isn't that pretty' point of view. Or lots of people do, anyways. Thinking about that was what kept me from sleeping last night.

The moral of this story - don't read philosophy books before bed.

So much to say, so little time...

2006-02-16T11:09:00.000-08:00

Well, I have to go to TKD. But I also have to at least start this entry, otherwise it may never get written. For today is a most monumental day - I observed superconductivity! Well, at least the voltage-current behaviour associated with the band gap caused by super conductivity, which is nearly as good :P

But we managed it. After 3 weeks of something going wrong with every piece of equipment it could have, we got it working. There was a final hiccup in which lab partner Dave decided that resistances can never exceed 200ohms, but we'll forgive him that :P

We also managed to get quite a lot of water in our cryostat. Some water, from condensation, is expected. But this was many tens of millileters, in the nytrogen-in. It froze, froze everything in the vicinity. I partially saved the day with nimble fingers (from my trumpet playing days) and scooping out many large chunks of ice, but even my fingers aren't nimble enough to fit down a quarter inch tube. Bring back child labour!

But we, unfortunatly, have a large amount of debris in the bottom of our cryostat (lost screws, lost slides, wires, pieces of ice. And that's just what we know of). Part of the day was speant (by me at least) devising ways of getting it out (ranging from the almost sensible - magnet on a string - to the workable but bizarre - trained abseiling mouse wearing a jumper - to the impossible - replace mouse with knome in the last one). The lab tech spoiled my fun by being intelligent and effcient and decided on taking it apart on friday and cleaning it properly. So no trained rats for me.

Just as a sort of relavant thing, I was chatting to Dave about what him and his girlfriend will be doing for valantines day (they postponed it, very sensible, and depending on how well Dave does it, not loosing too much on the romance scale) and I felt a slight twinge of sadness about how I've not got anyone special to waste time and money on like that :P Of course, I'm not actually upset enough to go and do anything about it. It's kinda nice to know that there is a part of me that regrets not, sometimes it feels a bit like the entire wanting a girlfriend side of my brain is shut down.

And now, after inane ramblings of only semi-physics-related variety, onto some philosophy, which is also only semi-physics related.

Something as annoying as loosing a minus sign

2006-02-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

I've found something new to irritate me in maths - I managed to find an answer that's one over what it's meant to be.

I'm complaining again... Must think positivly. I had my allowed "I hate the world day" yesterday, so it's not allowed today.

The previous question was interesting. And it showed me how to use a new section of physics. And I can do time dialation/length contraction with the best of them now. I just can't seem to get my head around "and they sent Bob off to space at good percent of the speed of light, and now, due to some flicking between reference frames and that age suddenly depends on distance travelled in a certain direction, he's still young and everyone else is old." I think it's time to revisit "Al's relativity site".

I wish I had worked harder in the first year... I would have understood all this the first time round. But at least newtonian dynamics and relativity are understandable, to a certain extent. Quantum mechanics seems a lot to be "maths and pray". Or at least for me it is, my atheist physics buddies probably do it all properly :)

So the moral of this story - if you're lazy and messed up, get over it as soon as possible, if you're going to, because when you do, you'll have a lot of catching up to do.

Of course, a good proportion of my maths woes may be something to do with it being 10:06 pm and I've only just stopped trying to solve relativity for the evening.

General Physics

2006-02-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been practicing some general physics. It turns out, that after spending 2.5 hours on a question, I couldn't have solved it on account of not know this very important equation, Bernoulli's law;

Also, it turns out that at high enough speeds, this is also true;

I'll have to look at the derivations for those ones, but that'll be at some other point. Right now, I'm gonna go home, eat, and then do some relativity questions. I wasn't expecting to hit this problem - I was meant to go shopping this evening, but I won't if I want to get any of my work done... Hopefully there's going too be some quite points in lab tomorrow, and then I can work on it, too. Also got gravity questions to do. Dang it all, I had enough time when I set out...

Lab Pictures

2006-02-11T09:15:00.000-08:00

This is the gear I use to get to 1.05 degrees above absolute zero. It is indeed super-cool!

It wasn't me, it's the gremlin of Bad Puns that has infested my blog.

These are the slides I created. In that rather hideous day last week. I totalled more lab gear that day than ever.

This is the giant thermos flask that makes it all possible. Energy radiates at T to the fourth, thus there is a liquid nitrogen layer between atmosphere and helium, and vacuum between all of those. Apparently nowadays the nitrogen isn't need as much, but this gear is a bit 780s, really. I think it's fantastic, though.

This is actually Chris and Liz' pump (the peeps who lab behind me and Dave). Ours is twice as big and the wrong way round, so any picture of it would be a grey sheet. Admittedly, I might waste my time with that, but I'm not quite that bored yet.

And this is the oil pressure guage. Vacuum on one side, helium on the other, and using a carefully tabulated table we convert pressure to temperature. Until we get lazy and use the digital thermometer provided, but it's the retro-ness that counts.

This is the rod we put the sample into the helium. Also, in the top left hand corner is Liz and Chris. Liz is the one in the blue sparkly jumper - I don't think there's male camp enough in the entire department to wear blue sparkly things. Maybe I should start....

This one is quite interesting - we put a sawtooth signal into the lock in amp, and plotted current against the derivate of the line. I'm not really sure what is going on - I suppose I'd have to find the magnitude of the instantaneous change in direction in order to. Or at least think some about it. Anyways, the lines inside never exceeded the lines outside, but moved with a different phase. It seems that it might be quite an interesting example of phase and group velocity, but that's not so much the experiment were're doing now. I might fiddle with the maths a little, if I have some spare time (unlikely, though. Or at least not have enough spare time where I wouldn't rather be doing something else. I pay for the privalige of playing with this gear, don't forget. The taxpayer pays more, but I'll be one of those at some point too. Hopefully)

So that is the highlights of the cooling section of my experiment. I like it.

Murphey's Law, and how today, it worked in fantastic fashion

2006-02-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Firstly, reading the Onion, and I found this

Aquarius January 20 - February 18
The stars understand that faith is difficult in the modern world, but trust them when they tell you that the derivative of a constant is always zero.

And I laughed far too hard. I really am a complete geek.

Onto other news. I have had the most heinious lab day - murphey's law coming into play. The "Everything that can go wrong will go wrong at some point". Some of it is me being dumb. I should explain what my lab project is, because it is fascinating - I'm examing the band gap behaviour of superconductors by making electrons tunnel through them. It has many parts, and one of the is making the slides, with an aluminium - aluminium oxide - material x sandwhich, a current through the aluminium, the electrons tunnel through the aluminium oxicide and carry on. And by the tunneling events, one can examine the behaviour of the band gaps.

The entire process of making slides take between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on how much attention is paid to exactly when all the movements can occur, the quality of vacuum desired and so forth.

So, I got into lab, start pumping down my evaporation chamber, and realised I hadn't actually put anything in it. So I let the air in, wieghed out the material, put it in the chamber, and started pumping again. And I hadn't put the slides in I was exapourating to. So I put the slides in, pumped down, and evapourated the aluminium onto the slide. Left it for 10 minutes for the oxide layer to form, but realised I hadn't got the ideal filament for lead, the material X in this run. But, so the sheet said, tunsten should be okay, and I only had a few minutes, so I went for it.

So I pumped down, and started evapourating the lead. It formed into a ball and fell through the filament. This meant I had to start again, as the oxide layer would have (probably) become too thick in the meantime. So I wieghed out some aluminium, prepared some new slides, started pumping down. And the aluminium fell off the filament. So, reset the equipment, put the aluminium back on, and started up. I even shook the machine to make sure it wasn't going to fall off. It fell off.

So I let the air back in, put the Al back on the filament again, in a very secure location, and started the pumping down. Started the second, more sensitive pumping and went to lunch. Came back, started evaporation. This is done by cranking a the current through the filament, the filament gets hot, and the material heats up, melts and evapourates due to being hot and the low-pressure nearly-vacuum. The filament shorted itself. Past the bit where my Al was. But there was heat transferance - not enough to evapourate, but enough to melt. Thereby owning the filament and the Al. Start again.

New filament, new Al, started the run. It fell off. Twice, if I recall. So, started the final run, evapourated the Al, kept in under vacuum to stop the oxidisation, got the filament ideal for lead (managed to wipe a bit of lead in my eye - yay!), opened up the system, switched filaments, put the lead on, evapourated the lead, producing 1 high quality board and one dodgey one that would have done the job.

It was 3:15 by the time we got back to low-temperature teaching lab. It takes about an hour to get the helium up and the jewer down to temperature, if everything goes well. And we haven't actually managed to do a real run of it, so that would have left us with 45 minutes to fill, for the first time, get the experiment going and take readings. So we gave up and went home.

Unless stored in a high vacuum and low temperature, the plates deteriorate. There isn't really a way to persuade the physics tech staff to store stuff over the weekend in those conditions, and have them readily avaliable. So I spent all day making 2 slides, which are useless.

On the other hand, I think I did everything I could wrong, destroyed about 4 slides, hurt my eye, totalled a filament and generally got irritated. Coupled with me completly owning a bell jar last week (it probably would have imploded really, really badly, except I stopped to go home), I think it's been the most destructive & least productive lab I've been involved with.

Which is great. I love that I do a job where you can work hard all day and destroy stuff, be unproductive through no real fault of anything, and not feel too bad about it. In all the other jobs I have done, it is all so sterile - productivity is guarenteed, because the tasks are so well defined. In this, the tasks are well defined, but not for me, because I've not done them before. I think lab work is fantastic.

And this is a really bad day. Just so long as I don't have too many of them :)

Imperial Units, we love thee

2006-02-08T04:02:00.000-08:00

I have some pictures of various stages of the lab project. Not uploaded yet, unfortuantely, but I got the oscilloscope to do some rather bizarre things.

In the subbasement, they use psi. I think 1 bar is about 15 psi, so I can convert, if I want to. But seriously, anything higher than about 30 psi falls into the 'pretty high pressure' section of my head. I don't really have any intuition for that sort of thing.

But it did get me thinking on imperial units. For example, length;

It starts with the inch, 12 inches make a foot. 3 feet (foots? I don't think so...) make a yard. 5.5 yards make a pole, rod or perch. 4 poles make a chain, while 10 chains form 1 furlong. And then 8 furlong make 1 mile, and 3 miles make a leauge. Also, there is the 'link', but it's even less tidy that those - it falls between the inch and the foot, it's 100/792 inches, apparently, or 1/100th of a chain.

And measures of area are lengths squared, but also there are special ones, 1 rood is 1 furlong by 1 rod, and a acre is a furlong by a chain.

And now onto Volume - "The Imperial gallon was based on the volume of 10 lb of distilled water weighed in air with brass weights with the barometer standing at 30 in and at a temperature of 62 °F"

And now we have that defined, lets go from the bottom up. Starting with the fluid ounce. 5 fluid onces is a gill, 4 gills a pint, a quart is 2 pints and a quarter of a gallon, 2 gallons become a peck, 2 pecks a kenning (or bucket. But a pretty big bucket.) . A bushel is 2 kennings/buckets, a strike 2 bushels, a quarter (not quart, mind. Also called the pail) is 8 bushels. A quarter of what? Well, a chaldon. A last is 2.5 chaldons.

But that's not the last, in fact, that's just the start of it, because those measures are 'dry' measures. Apparently, volume for breweries ('wet' things, I imagine) are different. But I'm getting bored of this game. A slightly more interesting one, though, is "apothecaries' measures" (apothecary = medicine dispenser? I think so...), only because they're small. From a fluid ounce down: Divide a fluid once by 8, get a dram, a fluid dram or fluidram, chop that into 3, get a fluid scruple (scruple, scruples?) and a factor of 20 less than that is the minim. Which I don't think is the same as the music one.

And now to mass, which the base unit is the pound. Devide the pound by 7000 and you get a grain, devide a grain by 20 (or a pound by 140,000) and get a mite. Or devide a pound by 16 and you get an ounce, and an ounce by 16 more and out comes a drachm (1/16 squared... well, a little sense, then). 14 pounds a stone, 2 stone a quarter (but a different quarter from the one above, degeneracy in definitions here), 4 quarters a hundred weight (nothing to do with the nice round number, 100, as far as I can see), and 1 ton is 20 hundred wieght.

So why am I writing this? No real reason, except physics in imperial would have been a complete nightmare - I can't imagine anyone, ever, used it. Maybe they did, but... Nah. Imagine trying to use the method of dimensions to solve this one. So I love decimal, and it's simplicity. Or at least the SI units... I won't get started on Farenhieght...

If I ever get to be a lecturer, I'm going to do a lecture entirely in Imperial Units, just... Well, because I can. And to make a point.

So when my Dad says that Imperial is superior, I can, with evidence, say that he is speaking complete dross. And that I should check his scruples, at least about spreading clearly false information.

Okay, it wasn't that good a pun, but at least I tried.

(All unit taken from wiki, all opinions stolen from other people, but I've forgotten who so I'll pretend they're mine. The pun was mine, since it was so poor)

Loosing minus signs and low temperature physics

2006-02-01T08:40:00.000-08:00

It's finally over, at least for another few months. The last piece of work in my exam-and-such-things period has been handed in, and I can breath a little easier. Of course, I now have a huge long list of things to do (tidy my physics notes up, establish the links on here again, mail my little sisters' razor back to her, send some info to the place I used to work). And my lab report wasn't the greatest thing ever, but it was okay. My titling of nearly everything sucked, and my diagram annotations left much to be desired.

I gave myself pleanty of time to finish, and then, reading through the instructions, realized I had to completly reformat the document, which lead to much hassel, resizing the pictures, loosing quality, and such things. It is a sign of desparation when the size of the page itself starts getting changed...

But anyways, loosing signs. I have been, for the last few days, trying to think of something in real life that's comparable, on the irriation scale, of running through a calculation, and realising all or (worse) some of it is positive when it's meant to be negative, or vise-versa. And then, redoing the calculation, and not finding it. It's just so irritating, it's untrue. In an exam, I just stick a few modulus signs around, and hope no-one notices. But worse when it's in example sheets - I've been known to spend half and hour staring at a calculation just trying to fix this very thing.

The problem is usually in squaring, where plus and minuses get lost all the time, or in integration, getting zero and infinity the wrong way round when dealing with inverse exponentials.

So I can't find anything comparable to that, at all. It's completly niggly, mindless, and so important for the whole thing to work properly :( The worst is when the minus sign turns up in a log. Except, at least then, it's a sure thing that I'm wrong.

My lab project this semester is observing tunneling in superconductors :D I get to play with gear that'll knock the temperature down to 1.05 above absolute zero. Which looks really interesting - the theory is funky, too, pseudo-Bose-Einstien Condensation in fermionic solids. The electrons and other things form pairs, which are semi-bosonic, thus allowing more energy states to be accessible. One of my current areas of interest, when I get round to reading about such things.

So this one should rock - got to plate some slides in a strip of aluminium, let it oxidise for a few minutes, then replate with either more Al or idium or tin. Which I already know how to do, and then we get to solder some connections on, run a tiny voltage and current through it, and plot them. The band gaps should clearly show up in the IV relationship, but failing that, they'll show in the first or second derivatives of it (we slightly oscillate the signal, and then look for the frequency changes, first derivative at the same frequency, second at double the frequency).

And the write up should be good - complicated as anything, mind, but pleanty to say, and lots of graphs and such.

I do like the maths and such, and I'm pretty good at it all (except keeping track of the ups and downs) , but I think, at heart, I'm an experimentalist. I just love all the gear too much. Boys and toys, I guess. Not as bad as my lab partner, though, who decided to come to manc and do phys-astro on account of Jodrell bank. Size matters :)

Correspondingly, he now wants to become a particle physicist and work at Cern in the LHC. There are bigger toys than that, but it's gotta be up there in the top few.

Pretty

2006-01-30T05:40:00.000-08:00

I've changed how my blog looks. It looks so very pretty, I was briefly considering moving back here from MSN spaces with all of the goodness associated with such a move.

But then I changed my mind. I also let anyone who wants to comment here. And I should have my lab report write up here wednesday, which may be followed by some other things. I just can't actually remember what they were right now.

Particle Physics (and why it's a little bit difficult to believe)

2006-01-26T03:44:00.000-08:00

We had a course last semester, entitled 'Not-quite-an-introduction-to-particle-physics-but-close'. We learnt all about the standard model, and how quarks and various particles ending in 'on' were discovered. It was quite a nice course, but the exam paper was a real nasty one; if I actually understood the course a little better, I might have done okay. But it was heinious, nothing like the few years before it. Which is what I had based my revision on. Something to learn there.

In it, we were introduced to various topics. But before I chat about that, I would like to explain what I mean by a 'deception meter' (okay, I actually call in a 'bullshit meter', because I think that term is far more expressive of how I feel about such things, but swearing's rude). It is what we use to measure how politicians are talking to us; "we plan to do exactly what will get us elected, even though it is, in fact, impossible" (eg, lift all children from below the poverty line. When the poverty line is defined as a quarter of the national average income...) will often pull quite a high reading on said meter. Whereas a bank letter saying there is no money left, for me at least, doesn't.

Back to the course. So we came to quarks (the level of building blocks of matter that are below protons and neutrons); there are no free quarks. They don't exist on their own. So they've not been seen, and to explain that, they actually created a means by which they can never be seen. Which is fair enough, if electrons are slamed hard enough into things, it is pretty obvious that quarks are there, they make a lot of sense mathematically, explain many hundreds of particles in a reliable fashion, and predicited others. So quarks are pretty good. Produce a little tremor on the bs meter, but most people with undergrad level physics have heard of them forever, so it's all good.

And then 'virtual particles' were introduced. In short, these are particles which carry force - electro-magnetism is carried by photons, gravity by gravitons, etc. These, by their nature, can never be seen. The decay before we can measure them, and even if they didn't do that, they can't be measured anyways, except by what they (sometimes) produce. At first glance, they look like a happy way to explain force, and nothing more. They make some sense - a photon hits metal, and an electron is given off, so photons are linked to electrons, which mostly work with electro-magnetism. And if they're drawn in Feynman diagrams, they help the word make sense. They also seem quite predictive, and coherant within their own rules. But then you have the 'we can never really see them', so all evidence is indirect.

This caused my bs meter to leap off the scale when I first heard the claim; these particles carry force, but we can't ever see them, so... yeah. Then it settled down.

Then we came to resonances. So, in these, a proton is fired at a plus-pion, and what comes out is a plus-pion and a proton. And because, after they interacted, they came off in different directions, they are actually a new proton and a new pion, and in the middle, for the briefest period of time, they created a new particle. This is what I saw (still, mostly, still see) proton + pion = proton + pion. No new particle. It still causes my bs meter to jump when I think about it. It almost broke when I first heard it; I was sitting there in the lecture and had to surpress a laugh when he said it.

But I think it's true. That there is a particle in between. Or maybe I don't, but I do think my lecturer does, who sets my exam, and that really is good enough for me. And also, other physicists, who tend to be a lot clever than I am, also think it's true. And with no real evidence to the contrary, except scepticism, I guess I'll tow the party line. I think I see why they say there is (it conserves momentum and energy - in that, they couldn't have scatter in those directions and speeds unless they did form a new particle, even if we can't see one.) It also forms the basis of lots of particle physics, is explained by the standard model, the decay times are right... It makes sense in it's own frame work. It's just hard to believe.

If a politician said described those particles, I'd just ignore him. Or laugh and try to figure out why he was trying to wind me up.

But then again, I had the hugest amount of problems with magic numbers... I mean, imaginary numbers... in the first semester, and now I pretty much think they rock, so it does take me a while to redjust to these things.

My seminal post in my redefined blog, and it's one about how I'm imersed in a lot of things I find quite hard to accept. That is a pretty good description of most things :)

New Blog

2006-01-23T22:59:00.000-08:00

I now have a new blog for day-to-day going ons. I think I'm going to keep this one, but I won't mention why right now - it may never become anything. As far as I can remember, only 3 people actually read this blog who don't know where my other one is.

So now you've been told.

I like the other one because I can be more whimsical on it; MSN is always open, and I feel like writing, it's just a click away. With this one, I have to go to the site, log on... Not really whimsy at all.

Well, that's my house keeping done and dusted. Hope to see you there. Or you see me, at least.

Also, you can RSS it to. If RSS is a verb, I don't know. It turns out that you can, on account of someone having RSSed my new blog already. I didn't know what an RSS was before that. I should probably spend less time looking at statistics.

2006-01-12T14:22:00.000-08:00

I was gonna rehash my links section, and then I realised I access a whole bunch of my blogs through MSN, which I don't have in Stevo-land. Well, a decent version that'll let me check such things. So I'm without my links. I suspect, though, I'm gonna move my journal yet again, this time to MSN. Sure, microsoft are taking over the world, but so are google, it's not much of a swap.

i=-1/i

2006-01-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

1/i = -i. Apparently. I'm gonna have to figure that out.

'Cause what I figured out was 1/i = i. I believe google. I used squaring, which is awful for loosing negatives.

Maths is well iritating, though. Because of that mistake, I spent an extra 20 minutes getting frustrated with a negative number in my maths homework.

Somehow, I don't think the same sort of things happen for other subjects.

Perhaps they do. So, a new question for me to ponder; "what is comparable in history to loosing a sign in an equation?"

Going home after Christmas

2006-01-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

Only 5 days until I get to come home.

It can't come fast enough.

And yet, it'll be really, really slow, too :(

Internal Memo

2006-01-06T00:16:00.000-08:00

From an internal memo, reminding employees of company medical policy;

"All dependent full-time students will be terminated on the last day of the month of their 24th birthday."

Glad to know the company cares.

Russian Brides

2005-12-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

Get married now!

Russian brides.

Truly the internet is greater than I ever knew.

Achem!

2005-12-24T12:31:00.000-08:00

*insert relavent seasonal greeting here*

Pink

2005-12-22T22:51:00.000-08:00

And I quote;

"There is a market for pink products, but... it is more likely to be among girls between 12 and 14 years old than a woman sitting in the boardroom."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4536386.stm

So, you have a thing about pink, or pink gadgets, and you're older than this,

GROW UP!

*I've just woken up and am a little bit grumpy*

Birthday

2005-11-30T02:22:00.000-08:00

I'm 22 now.

Go figure.

Me being religious

2005-11-28T06:40:00.000-08:00

I went to a Church service yesterday. It took a lot of effort, all things considered, but I got there.

It was good.

It's wasn't your standard sing-song and listen to someone talk, it was a wander round different rooms and interact with stuff. To be honest, I learnt more about the Bible and it was more interesting, and challenging, than most sermons I'd been to. It engaged my mind, which is nice.
They had a little meditation bit, where they had 2 things; a document on the wall describing what is meant by the word translated as "begotten", and the difference between "begotten", "made" and "created" . Made - to build, manufactuer. Something "made" is just an action, one can make a wall, a pile of stones. "Created" implies an art action of some kind, create a piece of art, create a building, create a dish. "Begot" is creation, but also imbuing one's nature onto the result. We "beget" children, the Father "begat" Jesus, His only begotten son.

Begotten, not made. In the nicean creed, and I hadn't thought about it. Or known about it; Begat is an old English word.

There was also a section where we meditated on "waiting". So waiting on waiting. It said stop here for a minute, and posed the question, "what are you waiting for?" and my first answer was "the minute to be up". Maybe you had to be there.

But I didn't realise the connotations waiting had - waiting implies external control of the next section of the process, which is, culturally, undesirable; we are told that we shouldn't wait for things, but actively seek them. And of course, does God wait? Because He is in ultimate control of all things, but often, the image of God that was projected to me from the Evangelical Church was of an inactive God, waiting for His people to get their minds in gear, so God could work with them.

I don't know, perhaps God does wait. Perhaps God does give people that control; perhaps He does, but that makes me a Deist. I would much rather believe in a God who doesn't wait, by His nature and His power He is constantly active, bringing about His will. We just can't see what that is.

Anyways, those are the sort of things I thought about. They didn't have any instruments to keep in tune, and they didn't have a sermon for me to disagree with, just the creed, some greek translations and some particular questions. It was nice to be encouraged to use my brain in Church. If I ever have been before, it was as a secondary issue to singing the songs and absorbing the truths from the talker.

So yes, they made me uncomfortable, because they challenged me and asked things of me in a way that a Church hasn't done before. By my very presence, I was almost required to participate and be engaged, not an optional extra to watching the band and the manager.
And we went out for a drink afterwards, which was enjoyable. Pretty nice people, they even had the obligitory crazy old man, even if he wasn't quite as crazy as in regular churches.

It impressed me, and I would like to go back. I think I will.

A thing that bugs me

2005-11-26T11:51:00.000-08:00

There is something that irritates me more than anything else, almost. It is definatly in my top 10 things that bug me, and it's when I arrange to do something with someone, and then I get in contact to make sure they still want to, and they cancel.

I don't mind people canceling on me; that's okay, not desirable. But I hate that there is so little care that not the tiniest amount of effort. All it takes is a text to cancel.

It just reeks to me of thoughtlessness, and absolute selfishness. Not to mention it makes them liars. And it's really humiliating.

Dear Friend

2005-11-20T03:31:00.000-08:00

Dear Friend,

I would like to thank you,
But in as possibly,
Non-cheesy style,
As possible.

Which may not be.

You never said,
“I’d be there for you”,
You never said,
“I’ll love you”,
You never said,
“I’ll help you find the way out”,
You never said,
“You can talk to me”.

It wouldn’t occur to you.
‘Cause you never needed to say it,
‘Cause, mostly, there wasn’t another way,
you’d be.

In the end,
What you did,
Was worth a million times more,
Than saying
you’ll do it.

And I trust you,
I trust you to tell me the truth,
mostly,
And to not tell me the truth,
And to lie to me,
sometimes,
And I’ll trust you with it.

I’ll trust you mostly to do what you say,
And also to tell me when you didn’t mean it,
Or made a mistake,
And trust you to not do what you said, too,

I’ll trust you to face me,
And challenge me,
And even if you are scared,
Or I’m scared,
You’ll do it anyways,
Or not,
And I’ll trust you,

I trust that you love me,
Not just the bits that anyone can see,
But the bits that you can see,
And the bits that you can’t see,
And don’t even know are there,
And pretend not to know are there,

Oddly enough,
I tend not to trust people now,
Who say they’ll love me,
Just ‘cause you,
Who most definitely have,
And will,
Knew enough,
To not say it,

And in all of this,
You’ve done me,
perhaps the best favour
In the entire world,
You teach me how to love,
And be loved,
And how to trust,
And be trustworthy,

You even have patience,
When I don’t understand it,
And dance with me,
When I finally twig.

There is hope for me,
And no small part of that hope,
Is you,

Always love, and trust,

Chris

Granddad, a recollection of sorts

2005-11-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

While I'm feeling able, I think I'll write a little about my Granddad.

Don't know where to start. My Mum was chatting to me about her Grandfather, and how she regretted seeing him dying, because now she can't remember him alive. I disagree. The predominant memory of my Granddad will always be of the last time I saw him; frail, ill and very much far away. He couldn't talk, sit up, eat, do anything. He waved about (I would say "thrashed", it had that feel, maybe, but he didn't have the strength). He had lost all his weight, thinner than I'd ever seen him.

But he calmed down if you hugged him or held his hand, and talked to him. I was explaining to him about Wikipedia, and cosmic ray particles attenuating in lead, among other things. But I think, in cases like these, it's not really the words that you actually say. Well, I really hope so It was the best I could think of.

The thing I will remember most, though, was his eyes. Sometimes, he'd look at me, and I'd raise my eyebrows and then he'd raise his back. Playful. And even in that state, about 15 hours before his body finally gave up, I could see that he cared. His eyes were very much alive. Kinda seems to be right.

So I'm glad I have that. Even if it obscures the rest a little.

It's difficult. In the last few years, characteristics that had held him fine when he was healthy gave him difficulty. The vicar was talking about how when he grew up, he, being the eldest, contributed money and to the running of the household, because they were very poor. And the vicar said he did this out of love, and I can very much believe him. 'Course, Granddad must have resented it at times, maybe not. But he did it, and I can't imagine him ever complaining or resenting that he had to do it.

He was in the Home Guard, bricklayers weren't called up to the army in WWII, but volunteered for the RAF and became a navigator. From this, I heard many stories; about how he accidentally dropped some high ranking secret agents in a paddy field, almost bombed an allied submarine during training, how he accidentally saw a Hindu friend drying his hair by a stream. Latterly, I also heard the story of Granddad snorting coke during the RAF years, which is fair enough. Although I suspect if he hadn't been on painkillers he wouldn't have said

He then became a school teacher. So from a bricklayer, to a navigator, to an entry level school teacher. I think primary school teachers often have a high degree of compassion, but I know this applied to Granddad. It also showed his ambition and commitment to succeed; while teaching, he became further qualified, and was eventually promoted to head teacher. He then moved to an inner-city school, full of students with hard backgrounds, very poor, and, crucially for Granddad, had not had the opportunity to hear about Jesus.

Because he did view his teaching as also part of his calling. And he did it, as far as properly. He acted with love, decency and communicated Jesus Christ to the kids; he refused to let assemblies be anything other than Christian, even under pressure to expand. I might not agree with that, but it was a different time and he did it out of love.

He was also a good father. You can see that in the security and faith my mother has. I didn't actually know the degree, I didn't think about it until the funeral, but he actively loved his children, positive parenting before it was a phrase and done motivated by creativity, compassion and a good upbringing; when his son Simon expressed an interest in animals and nature, he filled the house with pets and encouraged an almost lifelong interest, spent time with both children, including them in his life, taking Simon on trips to see the football, both ending up as season ticket holders and carrying on the weekly tradition until Granddad started getting ill coincided with Sheffield Wednesday starting to perform badly.

He had a very deep faith in Jesus, active in his local church, tending to find leading roles in wherever he ended up. I don't know so much about this aspect of his life, but it was testified to by the attendance of people from his Church at his funeral, even though he had been unable to attend for years.

And onto how I knew him. Well, someone who perhaps despaired a little of me; I refused to learn my times tables even when he tried to bribe me (incorruptible (lazy) even then ) and I often suspect he wished he could understand at least some of the things I was into; he never did quite get the hang of computers and computer games, and by the time other interests came to the fore, it was a little late.

He encouraged me. He loved that I did well in school. He tried to get me to learn He paid for my music lessons, which I probably should have thanked him for. I suspect he got far more reward when I finally made good and started playing in the wind band, and got to be first trumpet. Such a major part of my life, and it was down to him.

I remember the lunches he used to make, always had chicken drumsticks and chicken tika-something, sliced ham, tea, cheese, and bread, unbuttered, with margarine in the middle. I always liked his bread more than another, it was somehow more moist. Perhaps that's a secret that's gone with him. We'd all eat, me particularly quickly, make my excuses and run around in his fantastic well-kept garden, something he shared with his wife. Later years, I would stay and sip whatever juice I had (never got the hang of tea), and listen to his stories and conversations.

He was always strong, and the leader, even when his strength left him. I suspect in an older time, in which he was born, there would have been younger males to take up the role, near, but there wasn't really the chance. He did it all his life, it was really the only way he knew. And he had done it well for mostly, becoming a bit behind the times, but that's a privilege of age.

He was a good man; a good husband, father, member of the communities he was in. I am very glad I knew him, and that he was my Granddad. He was much loved. His passing is much mourned.