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Back in Berkeley

2006-09-05T20:17:00.000-07:00

I've been back in Berkeley since last Monday, but only now am I starting to feel re-adjusted to the time here. The jet-lag was hard to get over this time. Berkeley feels so very boring to me after having spent the last two weeks in Tokyo on vacation. There was always something interesting that I could do in Tokyo, but here in Berkeley when I think of the potential options I almost feel as though I'm living in the countryside. Things close too early here, and there are no interesting places to go in the evening after I'm done working. The one thing about Japan that I don't miss is the way that just about everybody smokes everwhere.

Now I'm trying to figure out the fastest way that I can make my way back to Japan, hopefully to stay for an extended period of time. I have several years to go in the Ph.D. program that I'm in, but I'm hoping that there may be some way that I could collaborate with somebody working in Japan, and have a nice excuse to go work there for a while, and at the same time work on finishing my Ph.D.. I'm taking Japanese again at Berkeley, and the class is a little bit harder than it was last year, of course probably due to the fact that it is a third year Japanese course. Sadly though, my speaking ability is still a little below par, though it improved a little bit during the two weeks I was in Tokyo. It really helps to be constantly surrounded by a language to learn it.

All I can think about is Japan. I'm probably literally obsessed with Japan, according to some psychological standard. When I go out with friends I quickly seek out the Japanese or Japanese American people in the crowd and talk with them for hours on end about the things that I like about Japan. It is kind of funny, because whenever I meet a Japanese person and they find out how much I'm interested in Japan, almost always their first question is "WHY?!?!?!" I guess to them Japan isn't very interesting at all, and they seem really surprised when a foreigner finds Japan so interesting. I have a couple of things that I say, and usually they end up agreeing with me in the end.

I am Kermit

2006-07-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

I just looked at 21st century Nancy Drew's blog, and was intrigued by the muppet personality test. I used to love the Muppets when I was a kid, so I took the personality test and got this result:

You Are Kermit

Hi, ho! Lovable and friendly, you get along well with everyone you know.
You're a big thinker, and sometimes you over think life's problems.
Don't worry - everyone know's it's not easy being green.
Just remember, time's fun when you're having flies!

The Muppet Personality Test

My favorite Muppets were Kermit, Gonzo, Rolph, and Animal. But while I was at it determining my Muppet personality, I also took a couple of other tests:

You Should Spend Your Summer at the Beach

You're a free spirit who is always thinking of new ways to have fun.
And you don't just love summer... you live for it.
So, you really should blow off your responsibilities and head to the beach!

Where Should You Spend Your Summer?

You Are 56% Control Freak

Generally, you are in control but not a control freak. Your life is usually in order.
However, sometimes you get too obsessed with making everything in your life picture perfect.

Are You A Control Freak?

Your 1950s Name is:

Francis Vincent

What's your 1950s Name?

Your Love Number is 4

You are a creative and expressive lover - a true romantic at heart.
An introspective soul, you know exactly how your ideal relationship should be.
But if you don't get that ideal, you tend to get a bit pouty and dramatic.
You need someone who can roll with the punches, that's for sure!

What Is Your Love Number?

Your Political Profile:

Overall: 30% Conservative, 70% Liberal

Social Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Ethics: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal

How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?

You Should Travel to Japan

From freak sightings in Harajuku to awesome sashimi, you'll love Japan.
And who knows? You might end up on Japanese TV!

What Asian Country Should You Visit?

This is really not too surprising. I'll be in Japan in fewer than two weeks now.

Your Brain is 73% Female, 27% Male

Your brain leans female
You think with your heart, not your head
Sweet and considerate, you are a giver
But you're tough enough not to let anyone take advantage of you!

What Gender Is Your Brain?

You Belong in Amsterdam

A little old fashioned, a little modern - you're the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam.
Whether you want to be a squatter graffiti artist or a great novelist, Amsterdam has all that you want in Europe (in one small city).

What European City Do You Belong In?

You're a Freaky Kisser

When you kiss, you want to experience something new
A new technique, a new partner, a new piercing...
And your own personal kissing style is very unpredictable
There's no saying where your tongue or hands will go

What Kind of Kisser Are You?

I don't know if that sounds very good...freaky kisser. Hmmm.

Your Ideal Relationship is Marriage

You've dated enough to know what you want.
And that's marriage - with the right person.
You're serious about settling down some time soon.
Even if you haven't met the person you want to get hitched to!

What's Your Ideal Relationship?

Hahaha, I'm getting older I guess.

Your Japanese Name Is...

Yoshiyuki Hayashi

What's your Japanese Name?

Bored

2006-05-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

Bored, bored, I have very little to do. I need to make more friends who I can hang out with, because I have too much time on my hands and too little to do with it. I'm finding myself going out to study for my classes next semester already simply because I don't have anything better to do. I have a month off, and I'm glad, but it would be nice to be able to fill that month with something even slightly more memorable than studying for classes that I won't begin for three months. Ugh, I need a girlfriend. It's been over a year, and I don't have school to take my mind off of it now.

Ok, I'm off to go study.

Passed

2006-05-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a little bit relieved, because yesterday I passed my Master's Exam, so I'm really almost done with the Master's Program. I still have lots of class work to finish to pass my classes this semester, but that will all be finished around the 16th. So I'm feeling happy that I'll have my Master's Degree this summer, and be able to begin the Ph.D..

The exam itself was oral. I had to choose three topics within statistics and write three five page (or in my case one 16 page) papers on the three topics. I chose Maximum Likelihood, The Gauss-Markov set up for linear regression, and the Bootstrap. I was surprised because most of the questions in the exam were not directed towards what I had written. I had to remember things that I had learned quite a while ago, and explain them (of course using a blackboard) in a good amount of detail. Overall it wasn't as bad as I had thought it might be, so I think in some sense that I over-prepared for it. I was so relieved at the end, after having asked me to step out for a short time while they discussed whether or not I passed, when they all said their congratulations and shook my hand. For me that really distilled the last two years into a moment that seemed to be the pinacle of my achievement in the master's program.

So perhaps due in part to the large amount of stress that I've been lately feeling, I woke up to a nice cold that I seem to have caught somewhere. And in no attempt to pun, the apartment this morning was also very cold. It seems the landlady has once again instituted her deplorable policy of turning off the heating once May begins. It creates the effect of actually feeling much colder in the "summer" than during the winter. I've written about it before. Those of you who know me know that I absolutely hate cold weather. I would rather sweat in blistering heat than to feel cold. So here I am, wearing thermal underwear, jeans, two shirts, a sweater, and my down jacket as I write this (sitting in my apartment on May 6). Yeah, it may sound excessive to you, but for me it is oh so necessary.

宮本武蔵の作文

2006-04-30T01:57:00.000-07:00

I had to write an essay in Japanese this semester, and I decided to write about 宮本武蔵. I'm not posting anything else because I'm too busy, but I thought it might be interesting for those of you who read Japanese to see how terrible my Japanese is. Have fun.

　宮本武蔵という侍は日本で有名な人物であるが、実はこの人について実際に何があったかという情報は少ない。また、情報の出典によって、情報は本当に違う。そして、英語では武蔵の情報は見つかりにくくて、正確な情報かどうかも分りにくいのではないだろうかと思う。それで、宮本武蔵という侍について面白い質問が一つある。武蔵とは実はだれであるのか。それに、私たちはこのような質問の答えは得ることができるか。武蔵の話は半分伝説で半分歴史なのではないだろうかと思う。この作文の中には起こり得た話を書いてみるつもりである。

　宮本武蔵は戦国時代に１５８４年美作国（岡山県）宮本村で生まれたと言われているが、正確な場所はだれもよく知らない。大人になる前武蔵の名前は宮本弁助だったけれど、子供時代は情報が少ないのである。武蔵はまだ十六歳なのに関ヶ原の戦いで豊臣秀吉のそばで戦った。それから、武者修行をして剣術を完成をさせて、国中を歩き回った。一生のうちに彼は六十の決闘をしたが、ずっと負けなかった。つまり、彼の剣術は本当に一流な剣術なわけである。１６０４年には武蔵は吉岡清十郎という周知の剣道の達人と木刀で決闘と戦って、勝った。

　１６１２年４月１４日に武蔵は佐々木小次郎という剣道の達人の侍と現代の巌流島（船島）で有名な決闘をした。佐々木小次郎は非常に熟練した剣道の達人で、異常に長い野太刀という刀を使用した。この決闘の約束の日に武蔵は遅く島に着いてきて、自分で長い櫂で作った木剣を持ってきた。小次郎は武蔵が遅れたので大変怒っていたが、真剣せずに木剣を使うのは失礼だと思ったようあった。しかしながら、多分武蔵はそんな反応を期待していたかもしれない。武蔵は時間をかけずに勝った。

　武蔵は剣道の達人で有名なだけではない。武蔵は芸術家でもあったし、哲学者でもあった。有名な「五輪之書」という本を書いている。その本は剣術について書いた本であるが、また武蔵の独自の世界観について書いた本でもある。彼の世界観は本当に面白くて、独特だと思う。彼のどりんぼというおじさんは僧で、どりんぼの影響を受けたため大人になった時武蔵の考え方は時々僧の考え方のようである。例えば武蔵は世の中のできるごとを経験することとか観測することなどは大切なことだと思っていた。武蔵は厳しい人であって、いつも自分のことでは高い規格に合うようにとがんばっていた。お金と贅沢は重要なことではないと思っていたのであろう。

　武蔵について知らないことは多いが、象徴として見ることができるであろう。武蔵は決断、高い規格、独立した世界観を象徴すると思う。面白いことに、武蔵の考え方は部分的に禅の考え方と似ている。例えば、武蔵の書いた本は剣術の本であるが、本当に哲学の本のようである。剣法を完成したがっていったが、また芸術と詩の重要性も理解していた。私には武蔵について一番面白いことは武蔵が一人で世の中で経験から学んで、自分の心の言っていることだけを聞いたことである。

whatever

2006-03-31T13:26:00.000-08:00

So after about two months here is yet another installment of the exciting literary achievement of the 21st century, my blog. I've been working so constantly over the past few months that I never feel like writing anything anymore. I'm so mentally tired all of the time that I don't want to have to exert myself in any way beyond what is required of me at school and work (which is also school).

I don't know if I've announced this earlier (there are still probably people who I haven't yet told) but I was accepted into the Biostatistics Ph.D. about a couple of months ago. So "I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the west, and remain Galadriel." All throughout Spring Break I've been studying for my Master's Exam, and for a midterm that I'll have next week. I'm so sick of always working all of the time. I think I'm going to end up dropping one of the classes that I'm taking. I've just felt like I'm under so much pressure lately. Trying to be good at everything that I do has tired me out. I wish I had a couple of more weeks where I could go run off to some far away country and disappear for a little while, relaxing and enjoying myself. I've been wanting to plan a trip to Japan this summer, but I'm not sure yet whether or not I'll be able to do it. I'm always so poor now. The common complaint of a gradute student.

Secularism in Europe

2006-02-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

There has been quite an uproar lately in the muslim world regarding a few cartoons published in a Danish newspaper (the Jyllands-Posten). What is so exciting muslims is that the cartoons were caricatures of the prophet Mohammed; something that is forbidden to do in muslim societies. What makes little sense to me is how muslims in the middle east can expect democratic and secular western countries to follow muslim religious practices. The Danish newspapers had and have every right to publish cartoons of Mohammed, or any other religious leader, for that matter. Secularism is one of the great strengths of western society, and is in fact one of the principles which help all within the west to enjoy greater religious freedom. In the middle east the governments are autocratic, dogmatic, and hypocritical, and because of this a number of them actually protested to the Danish government in an attempt to remove the cartoons from the press. They apparently did not understand that in democracies the government does not control what is printed in newspapers (at least not directly).

Today several European newspapers reprinted selections of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed (France Soir, Germany's Die Welt, La Stampa in Italy and El Periodico in Spain). I feel that this kind of response to the outrage in the Muslim world is completely appropriate, for it is an expression of the freedoms that secular democratic countries possess. It is regrettable that the cartoons may offend some people, but sometimes it is important to risk offending others in the expression of certain principles. Take inter-racial marriage for example. In the early part of the last century it truly offended a large section of the white population when they saw a white woman married to a black man (rare though it was). But it is and was important to risk the offense of such white people to protest against such racist and segregationist views.

The repression of religious autocracies is deplorable, and for me this is perhaps the strongest criticism that I can make of many of the current middle eastern countries. Secularism in government is a principle that I deeply believe in. I do find it interesting that they have not been reprinted in any US newspapers. Perhaps US society is not so secular as we think?

My Recent Life

2006-01-27T16:57:00.000-08:00

I usually like to have a central theme when I write something to post, but today I have no such theme. I’ve begun yet another semester, in fact the last one of my master’s program (assuming that is that I will pass the master’s oral exam in April). I’m still waiting to hear whether I will be accepted to the Ph.D. but I feel that I have a pretty good chance.

This semester I’m taking a course from one of the late John Wilder Tukey’s students. For those of you who don’t really know much about statistics, Tukey is the man who invented the words “bit,” and “software” as well as a multitude of statistical methods and concepts (boxplots, stem and leaf plots, the Fast Fourier Transform, etc.). In just about every lecture my professor mentions Tukey at least five times, and sometimes we are treated to a story about the man (for of course he passed away some years ago).

I’m also taking a course from one of the foremost biostatisticians in the country. He is very young, and he is quite an interesting character. He is very opinionated, yet nobody has the ability (nor the courage) to contradict some of his more sweeping generalizations (such as his general contempt for parametric models). In general his statistical philosophy seems to be rather agreeable to me, for he believes in making the fewest assumptions possible when analyzing data. In his way of speaking, reducing the number of assumptions (and restricting the scope of analysis to semi-parametric or non-parametric models) enables us to actually learn from the data, instead of simply playing a game with it (as one may be said to do if too restrictive assumptions are assumed).

I’m teaching again this semester, and it is becoming easier and easier to do. My preparation time has considerably decreased, and this makes me very happy. I still don’t have much of a social life, but I’m trying to arrange things this semester so that I can take maximum advantage of the few social opportunities that are open to me. It is much harder to make friends now than it was when I was still an undergraduate.

I’m continuing my Japanese studies this semester, and I’m thinking about enrolling in an intensive Japanese course in Japan during the summer to further improve my conversation skills. I’ve already invested so much damn time in trying to learn Japanese that I’ll be damned if I don’t do something with it in the future. I’m planning on trying to arrange some kind of a post-doctorate in Japan after I graduate.

The last few weekends I’ve been taking long walks by myself through San Francisco (about five hours worth of walking). The weather has been great, so I’ve been taking advantage of it, walking to the ocean. I’ve discovered a good number of interesting places to take people who are visiting San Francisco (for sightseeing purposes) or even on a date (though it would have to be an informal one). Oh man, and speaking of dates, I haven’t had one for too long now. The last time I went on a real date was probably last February. Oh crap, that sounds so bad as I write that, but it’s true. Well, actually, I went on this one double-date about three or four months ago, but it was so bad that I can’t really classify it as a real date. I don’t remember if I wrote anything about it. In short, the girl had already been going out with some other guy (something which I didn’t know at the time), and I spent about $100 on her without a single thank you thrown my way. Oh, and speaking of dates, I guess I actually went on another one about a month ago come to think of it, but again it was so terrible that I’ve tried to remove it from my memory. I won’t even describe that one. I seem to be incapable of meeting well-adjusted, educated (or at least intelligent), interesting girls.

Logical Foundations of Zoology and Vegetarianism

2005-12-29T18:31:00.000-08:00

Young scientists are frequently warned against anthropomorphization when they take courses where part of the study involves the observation of animals in their habitat. It is common to hear professors exhorting that one should not attempt to interpret any particular emotional states that any given animal may be in, regardless of how it may appear to the human observer. This has an important basis, for the object of much of such observation is to attempt to provide as objective an account as possible of what is being observed. If apparent emotional states were to be reported it could quickly engage the emotional faculties of the observer, and it could then be the case that the observations could be more easily due to subjective judgments, thereby giving more information about the observer than the observed.

There is a similar belief which is held often in concert with the above views; that we should not impute that animals even experience emotion or are subject to emotional states themselves. This I believe is really quite separate from the above view, for the one is a view about how we (as emotional creatures) should attempt impartial observation, and the other is a view about whether those targets of observation are capable of experiencing emotions themselves. In fact, the view that in observation of animals we should not attempt to interpret their actions with any emotional states is a normative view, by which I mean that we say that one should not interpret emotion (and not that it is in fact incorrect to do so). The view that animals experience emotional states is not a normative statement (about what should or shouldn’t be done), but rather it is a statement about what is or isn’t.

We do not find it difficult to assume that animals are capable of many of the same physical perceptions as we are, such as sight, hearing, taste, or touch, yet often we balk from assigning non-human animals the capability to feel emotions. This is really a very irrational view. We do understand that different animals may experience the world in a way quite different from how we do. For example, through scientific methods we have been able to determine that dogs can hear a different range of frequencies than we are capable of, and that they also have a more acute sense of smell than we humans have. Some animals can even see frequencies of light that we are incapable of seeing, and some have faculties of perception that we do not even possess (such as sharks or pigeons). Yet we do not balk from making statements about the fact that non-human animals can sense the world in much the same way as we do. We understand that other animals possess nervous systems that are in some way similar to our own, and that many actually possess very similar structures in their brains that we do. Why is it so difficult for us to believe that animals experience emotions as we do, or that they have thoughts which may be in some rough respects similar to our own?

I believe that the answer lies within the realm of psychology. It is psychologically easier for us to continue to eat animals, and to treat them in the ways that we do if we deny them the possibility of experiencing emotion; even the most basic forms of emotion. If animals were able to experience suffering as we do when we are subjected to pain, or to conditions such as close imprisonment, beatings, brandings, or separation from those we love, then we would have to face the fact that we behave in a way inconsistent with the morals in our society. We believe that it is evil to torture even the most awful of criminals, yet we subject so many non-human animals to torture without a second thought. People even use the argument that we are justified in doing so because “it is natural.” I often chuckle inside when I hear this excuse, for this is the same excuse that was used to justify slavery in those days when slavery was still practiced. Through much of human history the practice of slavery was believed to be natural, and as a result even people who were in many respects humane and moral people accepted its practice.

When people bring forward the argument that to eat animal flesh is natural I will advance the assertion that it may very well be natural in the sense that it is performed in the wild by non-human animals (and by humans who see no alternative), but that we modern humans have a choice in our actions, we can choose to kill and eat animals or not to according to what is most accommodating to our sense or what is right or moral. To me the question is not whether to kill animals is “natural” or not, but rather whether it is something which we feel is morally acceptable. To me this is related to the question of when it is morally acceptable to kill another human being, or to cause another human to suffer.

Returning to a theme touched on above, it is for psychological reasons that we deny that non-human animals experience emotion or are subject to emotional states in much the same way that humans are. It would be difficult to continue treating animals in the way that we currently do if it were accepted that non-human animals have thoughts, desires, and feelings that in some significant way resemble those that humans experience. But logically, there is as much justification in assuming that animals possess the faculties of sense perception that are similar to human perceptions as there is in assuming that non-human animals experience many basic emotions and thoughts that humans do. I will certainly grant that we should not expect them to be exactly like human thoughts and emotions, but there are certain levels of emotions that are primitive in humans; emotions such as fear, desire, anger, and even love very probably do exist in non-human animals to varying degrees. Sceptics argue that we have no means of testing the emotional states of animals, and thus such assumptions have no firm epistemological foundations, but the evidence that we can use to indirectly support such assumptions is located in the very nervous systems of non-human animals. The problem that we now face is that we do not yet understand the biological (neurological) foundations of our own emotions, thus we find it difficult to find them in non-human animals as well.

Regardless of the difficulties in interpreting the neurological basis of emotion, I believe that animals do experience emotions, and that they are in fact similar in many respects to the emotions that we possess. I have two reasons for holding such a belief. First, it is well known that there are great similarities between humans and many non-human animals, and due to this biological similarity it is rational to assume that each of the characteristics that humans possess as a species may be present in varying degrees within non-human species (especially those species most similar to humans such as great apes). In other words, humans evolved from non-human animals, thus every aspect of our biology must have been derived from what exists in non-human animals. Though it is true that we are unique animals, this can be said about all animals. I do not believe that human emotions are unique in nature. Secondly, through my own observation of various species of animals I have noted behaviour which I was able to interpret as reflecting emotion. I do not expect this personal observation to be very convincing to the sceptic. When dogs or horses break their legs they scream and whine in much the same way a human would if he or she were in pain. When a dog sees his or her owner after a period of absence the dog exhibits actions which appear very similar to happiness. Why is it so difficult to believe that these expressions which so resemble emotions in humans are reflective of very much the same emotions within the non-human animal? Why is the mere suggestion that it may be the case so quickly and summarily rejected when there is a rational basis for such beliefs?

The end of the semester

2005-12-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve been so swamped with things in the past several months that it has been a major effort to do anything even remotely unrelated to school. I feel as though I’ve been in a time warp. This week I applied to the Berkeley Ph.D. program in biostatistics. I felt immediately better afterwards. My course is now set; alea jacta est, as Caesar said. I may spend the next four years here in Berkeley working towards a doctorate. This is really truly amazing to me. It was not long ago that I had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in math, not knowing what the heck I was going to do.

Perhaps because of the fact that I had been spending so very many of my waking hours working for school, this semester has been quite an emotional rollercoaster for me. Oh, nothing dramatic has happened, but I’ve gone through an entire gamut of emotions regarding school. For certain weeks it was probably literally the only thing that seemed to matter to me in the world. If I made a mistake, no matter how small, I would immediately feel as though I was an idiot. Then came the inevitable feeling of isolation in those days where I would speak to almost nobody. I started feeling like a monk or a hermit. I did derive some satisfaction from doing things well, though. But no matter how much you learn there is always so much more to know.

There was a 10 year high school reunion that I missed last weekend. I wanted to go, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go. I mildly regret not having gone, but I really don’t think I would have gotten much out of it anyways. I never liked high school while I was there, and I doubt many of the people even remember me.

There are still two weeks left in the semester, so I’m not really off of the hook yet, but I’m feeling a lessening of the pressure that I was putting myself under. I’ve been taking more time off lately in an attempt to keep myself from going insane. I’ve been working way too hard lately, though I find it kind of scary that it seems most of the people around me are working just as hard (if not harder). I haven’t had time to hang out with friends. I want to spend more time hanging out with friends.

Intelligent Design is Ridiculous

2005-11-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve been really annoyed lately at the apparent increase in the popularity of the intelligent design argument for the existence of God. Its supporters attempt to present it as a rival theory to Evolution, and this always frustrates me to no end. In every single newspaper article that I’ve recently read it is never mentioned that intelligent design is not a scientific theory at all and can never be. I think that this is the first thing that should be mentioned.

So what is this fundamental difference between Evolution and intelligent design? First we should describe what a scientific theory is and what it is not. There are several basic requirements for a group of statements, explanations, or predictions to be classed as a scientific theory, and the most fundamental is that it is testable. What this means is that any assertion that cannot be tested cannot be a scientific theory. So, you ask, what exactly do you mean by testable? Well, what I mean is that there must be an experiment that you can perform that could show that what the “theory asserts is in fact not the case.” This is called falsifiability, and ever since Karl Popper this has been a fundamental criterion used in determining exactly what statements can be regarded as scientific and which cannot. The kinds of statements which do not fulfill this basic criterion are relegated to the area of belief (meaning that we cannot claim to have knowledge regarding such statements). The scientific method is the best method that we have in generating knowledge about the world in which we live.

Perhaps you can already understand from what I’ve said above the difference between Evolution and intelligent design. Evolution (which is actually a complex grouping of theories) is a bonafide scientific theory due to the fact that there are numerous experiments which can and have been done that could have shown conclusively that it is wrong. The theory of Evolution is falsifiable (but it has not been shown to be false, which is precisely why it is still around). Now intelligent design on the other hand is not falsifiable. There is no experiment that can be designed which can test the assertions or predictions that are made by intelligent design. Believing in intelligent design is just that, a belief and nothing more. In fact, intelligent design has been around for a long time, since at least the 17^th century. Religious people (hence people who assumed what it was they tried to prove-the fallacy of assuming the consequent) tried to use various arguments to “prove” the existence of God throughout the centuries. One argument that was used for a while went along the following lines. Watches are complex devices with component parts that interact precisely, and which must be carefully designed and constructed for them to function. We know that people make watches, therefore anything else that is complex and requires precise interaction must also me made by somebody or something. The Universe and the people in it are complex, and interact at multiple levels in very precise ways. Therefore something must have made the Universe. That “creator” must be God. Therefore God exists because things are complex. That is essentially the argument of intelligent design.

If you look closely at this weak argument for the existence of God you will see that assumptions are introduced haphazardly, and that there are very few valid logical connections between the various assertions. Several of the key components of the arguments are not falsifiable, hence the entire argument is not falsifiable (in a chain of reasoning the lack of falsifiablilty at any step makes the entire argument not falsifiable). A concrete example of a statement that is not falsifiable is: God exists. This is the simplest, and the weakest link in the argument for intelligent design. The difficulty is in realizing that the people who make the arguments for intelligent design have already implicitly assumed it. So the assertion “God exists” is not falsifiable, and hence can not be a scientific statement (nor can any line of reasoning be which assumes it). But to point out further flaws in intelligent design, we can point out that the argument “complex things must have a creator” is falsifiable (barring assumptions which are not falsifiable, such as the existence of God), and in fact is easily shown to be false (for example, a snowflake is a complex, highly ordered object, yet there is no intelligent creator or snowflakes-apart from the “laws” of physics). Thus not only does intelligent design assume things that it purports to prove (which are incidentally not falsifiable and thus not scientific), but it makes claims which are falsifiable and which can be shown to be false through experimentation (not all complex phenomena are created by “an intelligence”).

The reason this should be mentioned in the current debate on whether or not intelligent design should be taught to children as an alternative theory to Evolution is because it simply is not an alternative. Intelligent design is as much a belief as is the belief of the existence of God. Whatever one may believe regarding that, we all understand that it is simply a belief. We need to recognize that intelligent design is as well. It can be argued that Evolution is a theory which has not been proven to be true, thus it is a belief as well, on the same level as the belief in God; however, this is again a fallacious argument. It is the case that absolutely no theory can ever be proven to be true. Thus all “knowledge” is at some fundamental level not knowledge at all, but simply a belief. However, there are differing types of what epistemologists classify as knowledge. We must first make several assumptions such as the fact that there is a “real” world, and that we can make observations of it. We must assume that there is an order that we can understand (at least potentially). Thus any kind of true knowledge is derived from experience. These are fundamental assumptions of science, without which science would be impossible as a means of collecting knowledge. Experimentation is the keystone of science, and without it we could not have knowledge. Experimentation is not only important because it allows us to observe patterns in which we attempt to discover order, but it also allows us to throw out assertions that conflict with what we observe. In other words, not only must we observe something to have knowledge of it, we must in principle be able to observe something that could tell us that what we believe about it is in fact erroneous. Wittgenstein said, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Beliefs shouldn’t be classified as knowledge unless they are either verifiable by experience or at the very least falsifiable. Otherwise they are merely beliefs, and should not be masqueraded as anything other than that. Of course, though, if one doesn’t believe in the several key assumptions that are made in science, then none of this really matters anyways.

Quotes Again

2005-10-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

What is this? A center for ants!?...How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read if they can't even fit inside the building?!...I don't want to hear your excuses! The center has to be at least...three time bigger than this!!

--Ben Stiller in Zoolander

Shut up! Enough already Ballstein, who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look for Christ's sake! Blue Steel, Ferrari, Le Tigre? They're the same face! Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!! I invented the piano-key necktie, I invented it!

--Will Ferrell in Zoolander

Not so fast you ingrates. Public News Team is taking a break from its pledge drive to kick some ass. No commercials, no mercy!

--Tim Robbins in Anchorman

If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

--Bertrand Russell

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

--Albert Einstein

What do I want to do???

2005-09-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

I’m coming to the point where I will need to seriously think about what I want to be doing in the future. Graduate school applications are due in a couple of months, and so are other applications that I’m thinking about (such as the JET Program). Right now my biggest dilemma is whether to apply to the Biostatistics Ph.D. (which I have a good chance of getting into) or to apply to get a Ph.D in History (with an intended focus on Japanese History). The one is very practical, shorter, easier to get into for me, and something that I’ve been trained to be ready for. The other is impractical, takes longer, is harder to get into, I have little experience in, but I find nevertheless very interesting.

With graduation approaching again, I’m beginning to worry about what I’m going to do in the future. Over the summer while I was relaxing and enjoying life in general I made the decision that I couldn’t continue in Biostatistics, that I need a more creative, more literary outlet. I read books for fun in a matter of a day or two that would have taken me more than a month during school time. I was able to walk around and think about things again instead of always having to worry about being able to understand something, or if I’ve finished something that is due soon. I’m planning on applying to the JET program to teach English in Japan, but I find that idea both exciting and frightening at the same time. I’ll have to decide at some point whether or not I would choose a Ph.D. program over the JET program (or vice versa), and before that, which Ph.D. program I’d like to apply to in the first place. I’ve talked to multiple people concerning my dilemma, but everybody tells me something different with the end result that I’m even more confused about what it is that I want to do than I was before. And to make it worse, I have much less time to think about it than I did over the summer.

How am I going to decide? Do I want to get a Ph.D. just to have a Ph.D. or do I really want to study something. What is the likely alternative if I don’t get a Ph.D.? Is having a master's degree enough for what I might want to do? I have a few goals concerning the future, but they are vague in general, and aren’t helping much in determining my decision. I’d like to live in Japan for a certain length of time (at least a year), I’d like to learn to speak Japanese, I’d like to continue studying at a University. I don’t want to go anywhere in the US away from the Bay Area, so going to other schools (in the US other than Berkeley) isn’t an option that excites me very much at all. Working seems pretty terrifying to me. I have almost no desire to try to work for some corrupt, capitalist, company. I don’t want to join the dark side and subordinate my values to the values of the company.

Reflecting on the summer - Part 1

2005-09-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have so much to write about, and so little time in which to write. I'll begin by saying that this summer was great. It was the first time in about five years that I had been able to take off the entire summer without working or going to school. It was a luxury that I'm glad I allowed myself to indulge in. I spent the first two months relaxing, reading, doing yoga, and generally enjoying myself. If only everyday life could be like that I would be the happiest man alive. In late July I flew to Germany with my best friend from Berkeley (who as luck would have it is from Germany), and he and I stayed at his mother's place. My German had somehow improved since the last time that I was there (which is actually kind of strange because I did nothing for that to happen), so I was able to understand things much better though my speaking abillity remains at the post-infant level. It was very comfortable being back in Germany, though the weather wasn't much different from how Berkeley winters are. It was grey and rainy for much of the time that I was there. I still enjoyed going places such as the North Sea (Nordsee), where I walked out about three miles from the beach to where the water finally began (when the tide is out it is wayyyyy out!).

The highlight of the European part of my vacation was going to Rome. We were in Rome for about 6 days (counting the days arriving and leaving), and it was certainly a great experience for someone interested in ancient history. I walked around Rome everyday for quite a few hours, searching out all of the historically famous spots that I could find. I have a few pictures that I could show to interested people. In the evenings we would eat at Trastevere, a nice middle-class area with fewer tourists and great pizza restaurants. I discovered a love for Bruschetta Fagioli there. I loved walking along the Circus Maximus, looking towards the Palatine Hill, trying to imagine what it was like when the Caesars lived there. Due to a fascination with Julius Caesar I found the temple that marks the spot where he was burned (after he was assasinated by Brutus and company) very interesting even though there is very little left of it. I unfortunately did not learn very much Italian, though I do know how some words should be pronounced now (I laughed a lot in the airport when I saw Bagaglia, thinking the g's are hard). I also learned that trying to use Spanish in Italy doesn't help you very much; especially if you already speak English because most people seem to speak that better than they do Spanish. Not being a religious person, I wasn't all that impressed with the St. Peter's and the Vatican. The architecture was nice, and things were pretty, but a lot of fuss is made over things that aren't all that spectacular. I liked the museums though (especially the Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek, and old Roman stuff).

So that is a short account of the European part of my vacation. I don't have the time now, but when I do I'll write a part on the Asian part of my vacation (it features me alone in Tokyo for a week and a half). And I have every intention of getting back to those of you who read this who have been waiting for some kind of communication from me. Soon....

日本語のポースト

2005-07-17T23:15:00.000-07:00

来月、東京に行くので、私はさいきん毎日、日本語を勉強している。まだ上手じゃなくて、もっと練習しなければだめだ。来週ドイツに行くので、今週はとてもいそがしかった。サンフランシースコで買い物に行った。くつとシャツとパンツを買った。一番好きなデパートがバナリパ(Banana Republic)だから、そのデパートでたくさん服を買ってしまった。サンフランシースコの日本町の紀伊国屋にも行って、日本語の本を買った。昨日、十二時まで八時から漢字を覚えて見て、日本語の文法を勉強してしまった。今４５０ぐらい漢字を覚えられる。日本語の文法はちょう難しいから、まだあまり日本語ができない。昨日の夜は友達といっしょうにインド食のレストランへ食べに行った。それから映画を見た。

Ok, we'll see if the Kanji come out when I post this. This has been a good practice excercise for me. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to write just a few lines, and still my grammar is still probably awful. Soon I'm off to Europe, and after that Japan. More posts will follow.

Three Continents in as Many Days

2005-06-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

This has been a productive last few weeks. All of this free time that I've been enjoying has been giving me time to think about the future. While in school I almost feel as though I'm in stasis, and foolishly it is difficult for me to think about what lies after school. I've had time to consider things lately.

So a day ago I was checking plane tickets to Japan, and they were cheaper than I thought they would be so I impulsively bought a round trip ticket to Tokyo for August. I will come back from Europe, have one day to rest and prepare, and then I will be off to Tokyo for 11 days. I'll get back on the weekend before school starts again. So I will be going to both Europe and Asia this summer.

I've decided some more things as well. I'm definitely applying to the JET programme this winter. I will also apply to the Ph.D. program, but I've decided that if I get into the JET programme I will do that (and it would be great if I could defer my acceptance into the Ph.D. program so I could at least keep my options open). What this means is that I will be taking Japanese next semester (and the semester after that). I have an idea of the people who I could ask for a recommendation as well. I've been wondering if I really want to get a Ph.D. after all, and I've pretty much figured out that my biggest motivation was so that I'd have a Ph.D.. Not because I want to definitely spend my life doing statistics, but simply to have the degree. I don't think that is a very good idea. But I've recently discovered that I really actually enjoy teaching, and I've been wanting to live in another country for a while now anyways. I would have the opportunity to become a proficient speaker of Japanese. It all sounds so exciting to me. I will at least have a master's degree, so I could get many other jobs as well. But another thing I've been considering is a career as an author. Oh boy, it's the story of my life. I have too many wide-spread interests and I can never seem to choose just one. That's what makes me happy though.

On the girl front, I have to say that I rang a false alarm. Oh well, it's not so bad being single in many ways. At least I'm free and can do whatever I want to whenever I want. It's probably worth it to wait a while until somebody who I really like comes along (assuming that will ever happen).

The Love of Christ

2005-06-20T13:05:00.000-07:00

For those of you who think that crucifixion is a thing of the past, think again. A trainee nun at a monastery (eastern orthodox) in Eastern Romania was crucified last week for being suspected of being possesed by the devil. She was tied to a cross, gagged, and not given food or water until she died. The priest who ordered the crucifixion made the excuse that it was part of the exorcisation ritual necessary to make the devil leave the poor trainee nun. This reminds me of the way people used to "test" people if they were witches: throw them in some water and if they float then they're a witch so they get burned, but if they sink then they're normal, but dead. It turns out that the nun, who was in her early twenties and who grew up in an orphanage, was actually suffering from schizophrenia. Check out the BBC news website at BBC Europe for more info.

What I've been up to lately

2005-06-20T00:52:00.000-07:00

So, I suppose I'll write a little update of the events which have occurred in the last few weeks or so. As usual I've been sleeping in late, exercising, and studying, but I've also been able to keep myself busy with other things as well. Actually, I hurt my neck Monday night doing wrestler's bridges (yeah, it sounds pretty stupid...that's because it was). Monday night I went over to a friend's house ("L") with about three of my other friends, and "L" made us all food (and made us drink entirely too much wine). It as a great deal of fun, but after I came back home I was all happy and tipsy, so I decided to work out a little bit. So there I was at midnight, pretty tipsy, doing push-ups and sit-ups and what not. I decided to do some wrestler's bridges because I've been wanting to strengthen my neck (I had injured it before about two years ago) and all of a sudden I heard two grinding pops in my neck and the muscles in the back of my neck immediately tensed up. Owww, it was so painful that I could barely move my head at all. My neck still hurts, though it is not nearly as bad as it was. I did manage to continue most of my exercise regimen this week (including yoga, which has been interesting...I'm not sure if I'll keep it up yet) but I haven't been able to do some things as easily.

I met a new person last weekend too. We met up at a cafe, but decided to walk around the campus for a while. I won't write much about her to preserve her privacy, but I can say that I'm glad that I met her. I felt strangely as though I had known her before. She reminds me of somebody who I used to have a crush on back when I lived in Sacramento so I felt like a high school boy again while I was around her. I was still a little nervous around her like the big dork that I am, but I'm hoping that if I see her again I'll be a little more natural. Sometimes I don't talk very much about myself, but for some reason I was spewing all sorts of information about myself to her. I guess I felt comfortable with her in a way that I don't feel comfortable with everybody. One of my friends ("K") was trying to set me up with one of his friends ("L") who is also single and looking for a boyfriend, but I haven't done anything about that because I like the girl that I met last week more. "L" is very pretty, and is fun to hang out with, but I like the other girl's personality more (and she's cute too) and I see better potential with her. I thought it was pretty cool when she told me that she had taken latin in school, and that she liked Roman history and the like. I've liked Greek and Roman history for a long time. We have some stuff in common with each other, and I even felt interested in the things that I'm not normally as interested in when she talked about them. She's a sports fan, and admittedly I know almost nothing about sports, but when she talked about going to a Giant's game I actually felt like I'd like to go to one. I just have to find out if she's interested in me at all. Wish me luck.

So, my statistics studying hasn't been going as well in the last couple of weeks. I've been enjoying reading for fun so much more. I've been practicing Spansish more lately: todavia tengo que practicar mucho mas para poder hablar con fluidez. Debo platicar con hispano hablantes, pero me da verguenza porque siempre trauduzco de inglez directamente al espanol, y siento que mi vocabulario no es bastante grande. Pienso que solo necesito unos meses en un pais donde hablan espanol para mejorar mi espanol, sin embargo, no parece que voy a tener la posibilidad de estar en tal pais. It would be cool if I could make it to Spain this summer, but I'm already spending enough money that I don't have, and I guess if we do end up going to Rome then that will have to be enough. I've never studied Italian before though. I'm getting through a book on Roman history right now to refresh my knowledge so that if I make it to Rome I'll have a better idea of the significance of everything that I see. When I was in Germany I probably drove everybody nuts by always wanting to see old buildings; in Rome I'll be able to see some very, very old buildings!

My good friend ("O") has been trying to get me to read some Milan Kundera lately. He let me borrow this book called Laughable Loves that is a collection of short stories, and I've read some of them and I really like them. Even though much of it strikes me as misogynistic, I'm drawn to the way that he describes interactions between people (especially men and women). He has these characters who are absolute women-chasers, who strike me as utterly pathetic and admirable at the same time. I'm considering giving The Unbearable Lightness of Being a read because a few people (including "O") have recommended it to me. I want to read as many books for fun as I can before the summer is over, because when the semester begins I know I'm going to only have time to study statistics. It's going to be a hard semester, a GSI and taking some classes that are considered pretty difficult. Ugh, one of the classes I'm going to take is a course on theoretical statistics, and the text that is used in the class is not very good; unfortunately it was written by the professor who is going to teach the class, so there is no use in hoping for another text.

I've been having those awful doubts about school and work again, wondering if I'm really doing the best thing with my life. Once I took some kind of a personality test given by some mentor guy, and he made a big deal out of the fact that I didn't seem like a math major (as I was at the time) and that I don't have the personality of people who are interested in math. He was saying that he thought I might be happiest in a job as a: journalist, architect, or something along those lines. I've always had this secret desire to write books, and not math or statistics books either, but I've enjoyed studying math and science for a long time now. It would be pretty stupid to get advanced degrees in statistics, and then become a novelist wouldn't it? Though I do feel better when I think of Issac Asimov, who used his Ph.D. in Chemistry to interesting use in his novels. This last Saturday I went to see a french movie ("A Tout de Suite") with some friends and one of the Biostatistics professors, and afterwards we were all talking about work a bit. I said something about how I thought that working for eight hours a day seems unnatural in some way to me (of course dumb me says this because I'm on vacation now). She laughed and said that eight hours isn't very much, and I remembered where I am and who I'm talking to suddenly. Nobody at Berkeley works fewer than eight hours per day, so of course people are going to laugh when I say something like that. What I really mean though, is that it would be nice to actually live my life instead of spending most if it devoted to something that I feel isn't important. I want to eventually have a family and be able to spend time with it. I don't want to be one of those fathers who never really spends time with his kids. I know what it is like to not have a father, and I want to really be one if I ever am one in the future.

Poetry

2005-06-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

I feel pretty reckless right now, so I'm posting some poetry that I've written. Things I've written for myself, not intending to show to others, but I don't really care right now.

We are Stars

How lonely are the stars that sit in the darkness
forever surrounded and eternally alone
burning without sound, dying as they live
There are so many in the sky
when one small star fades away
nobody can tell the difference
Space is cold and empty
the void unfillable
and nobody cares

Tongue Tied

To tell you how I feel when I don’t know myself is impossible.
I am ashamed of silence and unable to speak,
but I know what I want to say,
just not how I should say it.
That makes all the difference
in a world filled with time.
A few minutes shouldn’t make such a difference,
but in one or two seconds your life may change
and no amount of time will bring you back

Leaving You

Blow your breath on me
like the wind in summer,
hot and dry.
Come closer and tell me
broad winter stories and speak me to sleep.
Time passes as time always does,
and knowledge fades like sun bleached sand,
and is carried away, floating in the air
watching from above.
Can I read in the grammar of your lips
the sadness in your soul, or is that merely
my own reflection in your eyes?
A broken mirror slicing me to bloody bits.

Untitled

You ask me how I know that I love you,
for love is a hard companion to keep.
You are not perfect, and neither am I,
but seeking perfection is an endless task.
Love is a word I hardly understand,
though I feel it screaming in my head,
every time I see you smile.
I ache to touch you and hear you laugh,
and feel you breathe along my neck.
I know I love you though not through these things,
for words are not love and love is not a word.
I feel I am you and you are me,
and if that is not love then love is just a word.

Saturday Prose

2005-06-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

I once thought that time was more an illusion than a real thing, and that I need not worry about what it might bring me to. Foolish optimism best characterized my habitual outlook on my life and my future, and as a result, no matter how stupidly irresponsible I was I had no fear as to the favorability of the eventual outcome. What I mean is that I always figured that no matter what dumb things I did, that everything would turn out just fine. I don’t think that way anymore though. My daily existence is punctuated by moments of intense anxiety as I worry over what will next be confronting me. My future now appears as if it were some twisty short road which leads into the trees just up ahead. I can’t see very far into the future, and now instead of an impetuously optimistic feeling I have only a dull sensation of confusion and anxiety. The strange thing, I’ll have to admit, is that the life I now find myself in is actually not bad at all. I feel a strange paradox, for it would almost seem that my previous cavalier attitude toward the future is retrospectively justified. Everything has worked out pretty well in spite of my past excesses and foolishnesses.

I’ve spent Saturdays in the past walking down nearly empty streets, looking for some profundity that I might glimpse out in the open air. I’ve felt as though the very trees and blades of grass could somehow teach me something valuable. I’ve watched the squirrels and the dogs playing, eating, and making mischief, and all along I’ve felt that if I only looked hard enough, and hoped hard enough, that I would discover something important. But apart from the usual platitudes which one spouts while observing nature, I feel that I rarely discovered anything of note. Nevertheless, I’ve frequently enjoyed those outdoor excursions. And to be honest, the nature that I’ve mostly observed is the nature that one finds in suburbs and their like; not exactly the nature of the Taoist and Buddhist monks, and not exactly the nature of a hermit like Thoreau.

The more that I learn about things, the more I feel as though knowledge is truly impossible. This sounds as though I am contradicting myself, but I’m really only implicitly equivocating. I naively believed in my early youth that the world worked by a very definite set of rules. I viewed people as operating by a set of rules as well, and found myself consistently mystified by the strangeness which I witnessed, because as is now common sense as I recognize it, people do not act rationally (or act as though they follow a set of rules at all). As I grew older I’ve become more and more accustomed to the pain associated with the disappointment that is felt when people do not turn out to be as you’d assumed they were. Surely this feeling is my own fault, for in having projected a set of admittedly arbitrary rules and having expected a given person to follow them I have committed a certain fallacy of thought (more specifically that I’ve assumed knowledge about a person that I did not have). But still, no matter how many times I’ve disappointed myself with false expectations, I maintain that stubborn pattern of thought like some frustratingly predictable computer which manages to display an error message after every tenth operation.

To tell you the full truth, my entire life I’ve been absolutely terrified of other people. I learned at an early age that the most painful and hurtful thing in the universe is another human. Ever since then I’ve been struggling to make sense of things; to understand humanity in the greater context of the universe that we live in, and this has had mixed results. In spite of the fear that I have of other people, I have an intense attraction to them. It is very comparable to a moth which is inexorably drawn to a burning hot light-bulb destined to destroy it. The other moth carcasses surrounding the light do not dissuade the moth from its curious attempt to get closer to the light, but even as the moth becomes closer to the light it burns itself until it finally dies. The analogy is certainly not perfect, but it is instructive in some manner. Though people are terrifying, and they predictably will cause me pain, I am drawn to them.

Maybe I’ve disingenuously oversimplified things. Actually it is not truly the other people who cause me pain, but in fact it is me causing the pain for myself. I feel like I’m walking in a circle now, because first I say that it is other people that cause pain, and then I admit that it is really myself who causes the pain. What I mean is that I cause myself pain by my expectations of how the other person should be. I feel that the other person shouldn’t strike me with that doubled up belt, and when he does I am shocked because I feel that I do not deserve it. If I felt that it was absolutely necessary to be struck with the belt then perhaps the pain would transform into something closer to a learning experience, a cathartic moment of self-reflection that would enable a greater understanding of the world. When your girlfriend cheats on you, it is not she who causes the pain, but rather the pain that you experience is caused by your expectation that she would (or should) not cheat on you. It is in that way that I say that it is really me causing the pain to myself, and not other people.

It is strange, but the most beautiful and interesting things that I’ve ever experienced in the world have been people (or maybe simply my ideas about them); and as I admitted above, the most terrifying and painful things to me are also people. When the sky rains, or the wind blows a mote of dust into the eye it is difficult to feel anger or true emotional pain because we know that there was no maliciousness involved; the sky cannot be blamed for raining, and the wind did not purposely propel the dust into the eye. But when a person does a thing we are prone to interpret their action with a certain amount of meaning attached. We ask, “why did so and so do such a thing?” We become so concerned with the reasons behind actions, that we no longer are as concerned by the action as we are about the reason the action was committed. The fact that one’s girlfriend cheats on one is not painful in itself for it is a banal and ephemeral physical action; it is the “trust” that we have which we feel is betrayed that causes the most pain; it is the reason (or reasons) behind the action and their implications about her feelings which creates the true anguish. People are precisely so painful because of our own expectations of them.

I wonder if there is really anything truly profound in this world. Perhaps this idea is simply a trap of language as Wittgenstein would have us believe. Perhaps we are trapped in a world of tautologies; confined there by our very language. How do we even know what something “profound” would be? Is the answer that one must simply “feel” that something is profound, or should there be some objective definition? In the first case I assert that if we are simply to “feel” that something is profound, that we are in essence just arbitrarily defining profound to be whatever it is we “feel” it is. In the second instance we must have some definition, and like most metaphysical terminology (such as “love” or “happiness”) we are hard pressed to find any natural definition. I ask if then there is anything that is actually profound, and if so what it is. From the root of the word it would correspond to something which is “deep,” but that is really more of a physical notion, and it is hard to put any precision to its metaphorical sense.

Nevertheless, I occasionally feel as though there are profound things in the world. Usually the things that I find profound are ideas with regard to how people or the universe work. It is the daytime or nighttime strolls that I engage in, and that I enjoy so much, which seem to generate thoughts that appear profound to me at the time. I have sudden realizations about things or about myself; these realizations are usually things which I’ve known before, but for some reason I see yet another dimension to them or understand yet another way in which they are true or applicable. I am at heart an empiricist, yet at the same time I feel a great use in the knowledge gained through careful introspection. Knowledge of the self it is often called, yet in my way of thinking about it I would call it something more along the lines of “consideration of experiences with the aim of synthesizing them into a consistent structure of knowledge.” That is not really self knowledge, yet it is a refinement of the paradigm which we hold of ourselves and the world in which we inhabit.

Now time does not seem to be as much an illusion as it once seemed, but rather it seems to be a ghost (and though I don't really believe in ghosts, time seems to be one in which I can believe); I am unable to touch it or to feel it, but I “know” it is there. Time is like air that I breathe every day; I never see the air that I breathe, and I hardly feel it, but nevertheless it is there, and I possess some faculty of experiencing it. Time is like something in a dream, it is a context that we find ourselves within that we cannot alter; time is very much like a river covered with white foam which draws us along. We cannot easily see the banks of the river, and neither can we see the rocks below, but we feel that they are there when they strike us suddenly. In a dream we find ourselves drifting from event to event, and time does the same thing in our waking lives. What else can we do but accept what we encounter along the way, because we are surely not strong enough to fight against its current?

Summer has Arrived

2005-06-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

I've been having a very good time lately: going out with friends and professors alike, getting as much sleep as I want, exercising to my heart's content, and I've been spending entirely too much money on things. Last Saturday I went to Cesar's with some friends and one of my professors from last semester. Afterwards we went to go see a french movie called "Look at Me." After that we went to Becketts (minus the professor) and I introduced everybody to Irish Car Bombs, which nobody really liked apart from myself. I guess the world is not filled with Guiness drinkers.

Yesterday was a very good day. I woke up, and had a lunch date at La Note with one of my old GSIs who just finished her Ph.D. in history, and we talked for about two hours. She's pretty cool. She's going to be going to Harvard for a year long post-doc at the end of the summer, but until then she'll be abroad visiting her family. She has a lot of good advice about grad school and how to arrange an academic career. After lunch I went to campus to pick up a DVD of "Spellbound" (the Hitchcock movie) from the professor that I had gone with to Cesar's and the movie. On the way out of her office I met a person from my old work and we talked about random stuff for about twenty minutes. I then went out to go buy a card and a small present for a friend's birthday. For the first time in a long time I actually enjoyed picking out a card and a present. I went with a green theme; everything that I bought had some green in it. I even bought light green tissue paper and a dark green ribbon. The present that I got wasn't anything very special, just a small green address book with a nice cloth binding. The card that I bought had an interesting green cake on the cover. I know that sounds weird, but I thought it actually looked pretty nice. After that I bought a bottle of my favorite wine: Machiavelli Chianti Classico Riserva.

In the early evening I went running for three miles, came back, took a shower, and made my way to a friend's house (he was hosting the birthday party for the friend that I'd bought the present for). It was the first time that I'd been to his house and it was very nice and had a very homey feeling. He had pictures of his family and from when he used to live in Japan. His wife (who is Japanese) made a while bunch of food; it was an awesome feast and we ate for about three hours straight, talking and laughing. We were mostly eating temakizushi, but there was also miso soup and nimono (which was really very good). There was natto, cucumbers, spinach, shiso, eggs, kampyo, umeboshi, these thin things that looked like carrots, and a bunch of seafood which I didn't eat. Afterwards there was cake and other good things. Lena (the birthday girl) made a kind of a fruit bowl dessert that was very good. It consisted of fruit (I forget all of the different types) and some kind of jelly (konten?) that was swimming in a kind of carbonated fruity drink. Kevin (the host) added some azuki beans to it. The cake was an orange and chocolate mousse. It was great fun.

Today I get to rest. I'll probably spend some time studying for next semester. The weather has been so perfect here, sunny and warm (but not hot), I have to spend some time outside.

The (limp) return to blogging

2005-05-14T23:56:00.000-07:00

So it has been a long time since my last post. I haven't been in the mood to write for a long time, and I haven't kept up with any blogs. I'm am behind and I shall have to read up.

I am nearly finished with the last few requirements of the Spring Semester here at Berkeley, and I am looking forward to enjoying my summer vacation. I do fear at the same time that I may not find enough interesting things to occupy me. I do fear being bored. I have my own study plans for the summer. I've been wanting to improve my analysis knowledge and become familiar with Lebesgue integration, so perhaps I'll work on that. In addition I should study some statistical topics that may come in useful next semester. I've been living in Berkeley for six years now, and in my current apartment for half of that time. I'm amazed at how rapidly time flies. It is really a little frightening at times. I'm already one year into the master's program; this time next year I'll have a master's degree, preparing to enter the Ph.D., or who knows what.

I have some semi-definite plans to return to Germany this summer, and there is even a possibility that we may drive down to Rome. But for the two months until that I will have to figure out some things to occupy myself with. I'm thinking of taking up Kung-Fu again. I'd like to get into better shape again, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Kung-Fu. The crazy thing is that it has been probably about 8 years since I practiced it regularly. I can barely believe that it was so long ago.

I've been wanting to write something lately. Not just write in a blog, but work on a short story or two. I have some ideas in my head, but the fear that I'd make crap keeps me from writing it all down. I do have a tendency in every thing that I do to wait until I am pretty sure that I am comfortable with the fundamentals before I push ahead into undiscovered territory. And here I go speaking in generalities again. I have this strange fear that I would be pulling things from my sub-conscious to plagiarize ideas without even realizing it. I want to interweave bits of my philosophy, my love of history, and strategy into a kind of pseudo-fantasy novel. I've come to the decision that it would a good idea to start small and write a short story to flesh out my ideas. Another fear that I have is that what I want to write about may not be popular. I would ideally want my stories to be enjoyable for people other than myself, but I wouldn't want to whore myself into writing about things that would be popular. If I feel like breaking literary traditions I'd like to do that. But here I am sounding as though I know what I'm talking about. I've had the opinion for a long time that art is best when there is a reason behind its creation. I worry that what I write may not be meaningful enough, and that prevents me from even trying. What am I talking about? Listen to me, bitching about writing. Perhaps this is yet another way to sabotage myself. Write about why I'm afraid to write so that I then feel better or justified in not writing. Hah, I need to get some sleep. Bis bald...bonsoir

All Statistics

2005-02-25T23:27:00.000-08:00

I was very busy this week. Two midterms: one in one of my classes, and one in the class that I help teach. I spent hours and hours going over a review sheet with my students, and then today I spent six hours grading their exams. My own classes have been on the back burner unfortunately, but I truthfully enjoy being a GSI. I do like helping them to understand the concepts in basic statistics. But tonight I am really tired and perhaps coming down with a cold. I've been getting sleep lately, but I've not been taking very good care of myself. Today I didn't eat until about 8:30 pm.

There was a pretty funny answer to a problem that was on the midterm that my students took today. In the problem an observational study was made of college students that found a negative correlation between the number of hours students spend going to parties and their GPA. One of the questions asked if it makes sense to tell somebody who spends many hours at parties per week to stop partying in order to raise his or her GPA (and if it does make sense, then by how much). Well, of course it doesn't make sense to tell somebody to party less to raise their GPA for a couple of reasons: no causation has been established between hours spent at parties and GPA (observational studies can never show anything other than association), there could be (and certainly are) other factors which directly affect GPA that may themselves have non-zero correlations with hours spent at parties (confounding variables). One of the students wrote as an answer something along the lines of: no it doesn't make sense to tell the person to spend fewer hours at parties to raise her GPA because she might just be stupid and maybe nothing that she could do would raise her GPA. We all laughed at that answer. It was perfectly correct, and even gave a good example of a confounding variable that could render the attempt to raise GPA by partying for fewer hours completely useless. What an interesting, though not politically correct way of elucidating that point.

In other statistics-related news, I finally understood this week what identifiability and saturated spaces are in the context of regression. All that it took was a couple of cups of coffee (something that I rarely drink) and a train ride that lasted just over an hour and a half. Suddenly I recalled things that I had learned previously in other contexts and began to understand them in a different light. In the context of linear regression models the objective is to attempt to find a function in some linear vector space that approximates the conditional expectation of one random variable with respect to another random variable. One has to choose a linear space that holds the function that will approximate the conditional expectation along certain criteria. In practice one has only a finite set of data that is used to estimate certain parameters of the distribution that the data is taken from; for example, we may only have d data points in the sample space. If the space of functions is chosen to be very large with respect to the number of data points that we have (the dimension of the space is greater than the number of data points) then it will be impossible to uniquely specify an arbitrary function within that linear space that approximates the conditional expectation of the data. An arbitrary function within the linear space can be represented as a linear combination of the basis functions of the linear space, and obviously when there are fewer data points than the number of parameters that need to be specified to determine the arbitrary function then the function cannot be uniquely determined in general. When that is the case the linear space is said to be unidentifiable with respect ot the particular data set (or set of design points in the terminology of the subject). Such a linear space is identifiable when there are enough data points to specify the parameters of the function (that is a linear combination of the basis functions) with respect to some kind of constraint which ensures a best fit to the conditional expectation of the response distribution. It makes sense, because as one would expect from the name identifiability refers to the idea of being able to find a unique function of the linear space. The space of functions that are used for the approximation is said to be saturated with respect to the set of data when it is possible to find some linear combination of the basis functions such that it passes through each of the possible values of response variable over each of the data points. Thus there is always an interpolating function in the linear space for the set of data. In this case the larger the linear space (the greater its dimension) with respect to the number of data points, the easier it is to find some combination of functions that passes through the given data points. A space is saturated when the dimension of the linear space is larger than or equal to the number of data points. It is said to be unsaturated when that is not the case, and then in general it is not possible to find some combination of the basis functions that will pass through all of the data points. Geometrically it would then appear as though there were gaps in the linear space with respect to the data points, that would not be covered by an arbitrary linear combination of the basis functions of that space. So only now do I understand intuitively what those concepts mean. I still have a long way to go before I really understand regression at a suffciently deep level.

Today I impulsively bought a book that I had wanted to buy for a while. There was absolutely no urgency or necessity for me to buy it, but I could not resist the temptation. It is called enumerative combinatorics, and as the title suggests it is about combinatorics. I've looked at it and it looks pretty interesting, though I probably won't have nearly enough time to read it in the way that I would like to. Oh well.

The Shadow

2005-02-10T01:14:00.000-08:00

Today was a great day, though I didn't really do very much out of the ordinary. I spent most of it on campus, having office hours, proctoring quizzes, or preparing for things I'd go over in the sections that I'm leading. Being a GSI is starting to grow on me. I was enthusiastic in the beginning, but I wondered if I had what it takes to be able to talk in front of a class of people for an hour at a time. I feel a little better now, and I am less nervous when I walk into the room. I feel as though I'm beginning to understand how to control a class full of people. I think I'm learning skills that are useful elsewhere in life as well.

For some strange reason, today as I was walking home from the last section that I led, I started thinking that being a teacher (not that I'm really a teacher now...and I'm not a parent either) is like being a parent in some ways. There are some skills that transfer from one situation to the other pretty well I think. You have to know when to be firm and when to let them have fun. You have to watch out for them and explain things to them that they don't understand, and all the while you have to be a figure that they can look up to. You are the one with the knowledge and the power, and it is up to you to guide them. I am still pretty young to be thinking such things, but I suddenly realized that it might actually be pretty cool to be a father in the future. That's the kind of thought that I would have just laughed at only two years ago, but now it doesn't seem so strange to me anymore. Come to think of it, though it doesn't sound really "manly" to me (when have I cared about being manly?), I think there must be few things that are more important than being a parent. The idea of protecting a small life who is just beginning to understand the world is pretty awesome.

So for some odd reason I started thinking about such things as I walked back to my apartment. I'm planning on carrying out a thorough cleaning of everything in my apartment before Saturday, so I started removing trash that was hanging out in my room when I came home. I called my mother and we talked about random things. I wanted her to tell me more about the kinds of things that Jung wrote about (throughout my childhood I remember seeing books by C.G. Jung strewn about my mother's room). It's pretty strange, mystical sounding stuff, but it is valuable to listen to. Some things that my mom talked about spurred some memories of things that she had told me before. One thing in particular that I liked was her explanation of the shadow. From what I understand, because Jung believed that we were all a part of some collective unconsciousness, that we were all connected in some strange way. If we encounter a person who we hate, then that person is our "shadow", a part of ourselves; looking at it in that way, one sees that in hating the other person we are in fact hating a part of ourselves. I don't really understand all of the implications and meanings of the shadow, but it is an interesting way to look at things. If more people thought of even those people whom they despise as a part of themselves perhaps it would be harder for them to hurt or destroy the other.

Parties

2005-02-06T13:28:00.000-08:00

I shouldn't be writing, because I have way too much work to be doing, but I haven't written for a while, and I could use a good excuse for procrastination. This weekend has been pretty packed with excitement for me. I have been much more social than I have been for a while. I went to two parties, one on Friday which was really crazy, and another last night. Last Thursday I went out for a get together that never really happened. The party on Friday was pretty cool. It was a Mardi Gras party, and I ended up drinking more than I have for several years. I can't even remember the end of the party very well. Last night was different. It was a pretty tame birthday party slash get together.

Germany

2005-01-12T20:20:00.000-08:00

Now it has been a while since I last wrote anything. The three weeks in northern Germany were wonderful, and I found myself very sad that I had to leave so soon. I saw the two largest cities in Germany (Berlin and Hamburg), and every large city in northern Germany. I fell in love with Berlin and spent several days there, even remaining there for the New Year. I really feel as though I want to someday live in Berlin. I learned much more German while I was there though I still have trouble actually speaking. I ended up responding in English most of the time. If I were there for three months I would come back being able to converse for real I'm sure. I liked Germany so much that my life feels empty back at home. I immediately felt at home there; perhaps even more at home in some ways than I feel here. The people that I met were really good people. They were honest and real, and they never failed to go out of their way to help others. I have a very good impression of Germany indeed after having been there for a few weeks. I could hardly believe the extent that the honor system is used in Germany. I felt safe there. The people there are not as violent as they are here, and I could feel that everywhere that I went.

I love Berlin. It was one of the coolest cities that I've ever been to, though I could imagine that it would be a little lonely there without knowing people who live there. You can walk around at four in the morning and still find cafes and restaurant that are open. The clubs don't close down until six in the morning. I like the fashions they have in Germany, and Berlin was at the forefront. I will return to Berlin someday, I promise.

I inevitably compared my trip to Germany with the one that I took to Japan three years ago, and I'd have to say that I felt more comfortable in Germany than I did in Japan. I love much about Japan, but I felt like an unwelcome foreigner for much of the time that I was there. The first night I arrived in Japan I even met a man who noticed that I could barely speak Japanese and who proceeded to make fun of me and call me stupid. In Japan I felt as though people were either extremely nice and friendly or quite rude and mean. Of course there were rude Germans (mostly waitresses...customer service is not the same there as it is here), but I always felt that people were simply expressing their true feelings and thoughts honestly instead of trying to make everything sunny and happy. They were real and honest.
I was sad to leave Germany, and I didn't want to even get on the plane to come back. I entertained fantasies of escaping into Germany and finding work and just living there for a while as an illegal alien. A few months after returning home from Japan, I realized that I had simply idealized it before and been disappointed by the reality that I saw. I had gone to Japan loving just about anything Japanese, but was confronted by people who disliked me simply because I was not Japanese. I was on the shitty end of rascism/nationalism for the first time in my life, and though the experience was valuable, it was not pleasant. In Germany I felt that if only I could speak German fluently I would fit right in without any trouble. In Germany people found it interesting that I was from California, and even though they might not have liked the politics in the US they did not judge me because of that. The worst thing about Germany is the fact that people are still allowed to smoke in public buildings, restaurants, cafes, etc. But that shows signs of changing. I spent most of the time in Niedersachsen, and a new law there has been passed to ban smoking in schools. Germany is moving in the right direction while the US is going in the wrong direction.

I've come back feeling somewhat changed from how I was before. There are two major changes which I won't write about here, but it is sufficient to say that I feel as though I've found something that was lost before. That is something that I love about traveling; you see the world in a different light than you usually do, and sometimes it becomes possible to break out of a mental loop that you didn't even know you were in. Life is not always as you think it is. Probably never actually.

First Final Down

2004-12-16T01:03:00.000-08:00

I have miraculously finished everything except for my last final which I will have on Friday. I still have some studying to do , but I feel much better now because the majority of my work is behind me now. I am now finished with three of the four classes that I took this semester. I had my first final today between 12:30 pm and 3:30 pm, and I have to say that I think I did pretty well. It is always hard to tell how well one does on such things, but I was able to give an answer for every problem, and feel pretty confident about most of the answers. After talking to others after the final it seems that I did everything as I should have. Considering that it was what I considered to be my most important class this semester I am quite satisfied. Until Friday (one day really now) I am going to study and try to accomplish some things that will need to be completed before I fly to Germany. I will get a haircut tomorrow (really just a trim to keep things neat), and I will probably do some cleaning around the house. I'm planning on defrosting the refrigerators in the apartment, and that might take a while. Ok, I guess that is all for now.

I Love San Francisco

2004-12-12T01:03:00.000-08:00

Today I spent a few hours in San Francisco shopping for some things that may come in handy while I'm in Germany. I bought a nice new jacket that is so warm I can barely wear it unless I am outside, a little knit cap to keep my head warm (needed due to the length that I keep my hair at), and a new pair of shoes that were on sale. I wish I could study both German and Japanese more seriously. I wish somebody would suddenly present me with a million dollars. I would use it to live in Japan or Germany for as long as it takes to become fluent. As far as languages go, I also learned a few new German words today: "ähnlich" for "similar," "vergiften" for "to poison," and "leisten" for "to do, or to perform."

This is the calm before the storm, because tomorrow I will have to study almost non-stop to finish some computer assignments that are due next week while at the same time manage to study enough to do reasonably well on the final exams that I will have on Wednesday and Friday. Und nachdem meine Prüfungen fliege ich nach Deutschland für drei Wochen. Ich kann nicht warten!

Women and Religion

2004-12-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

I found an interesting article which gives an interpretation of why Theodore Van Gough was killed recently. It argues that he was killed not only because he was an outspoken critic of Islam, but because he so effectively exposed the abuse of women that Islam advocates. I find the conjecture that Islam has become as popular as it is because of the way it teaches that women should be treated very compelling. The men of the world enjoy having at least some small sphere over which they can claim absolute rulership, and often the easiest (and most socially acceptable) way to gain such power is over women. Incidentally, this also explains why traditional/fundamentalist christians are usually not strong supporters of women's rights (most religions suffer from their common advocacy of the mistreatment of women). This brings up yet another reason why Atheism is more humane and progressive. Even buddhism, my most favored religion has an ingrained bias against women. How many female buddhist priests have you seen in temples? Not many.

News

2004-11-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

Some people are so ridiculous, I can barely believe it. A woman in Florida has managed to sell an old piece of toast for $28,000. She believed that the face of the virgin mary appeared after toasting it, and claims that it is ten years old (and that it is a miracle because it hasn't gotten mouldy). I don't know whether to think that she is an idiot, or that the people who bought it are idiots. It was bought by an internet casino (whatever that is) with the intended purpose of taking it on a world tour, and then selling it. It sounds like complete stupidity to me. How can people be so lunk-headed to believe that a piece of toast is in any way interesting enough to be brought "on a world tour". It's the same "face on Mars" phenomenon all over again. People like to see patterns in everything, and very often choose to see (whether sub-conciously or conciously) certain patterns preferentially. It is completely irrational to believe that the patterns have any meaning. I used to think that kind of silliness only happened in latin american countries where many people are uneducated and religious, but I see that I was wrong. In a country that would re-elect Bush, I can't be too surprised. I would bet money that there is a strong correlation between the people who voted for bush, and the people who find religious significance in a piece of toast.

There is other recent news that I have been upset about. An NBC cameraman filmed the apparent unprovoked shooting of a wounded Iraqi in Falluja. This happened days ago, and prompted only the smallest of stories in American newspapers (though it had much greater prominence in other countries newspapers). The most disgusting thing about the incident to me is that the soldier only expressed remorse after he found out that it had been videotaped. He wasn't sorry about murdering the wounded Iraqi, he was just sorry that it had been caught on film. How can those Republican types defend a soldier such as that. War may be terrible, but do all moral standards go completely out of the window to the point where it is considered acceptable to shoot unarmed and wounded Iraqis? I don't think that should be the case. I hope the soldier recieves real jail time, and is dishonorably discharged. That is what he deserves. A person like that brings a bad name to the entire American military, especially if he goes unpunished. Do they teach soldiers in boot camp to observe the proper rules of engagement only if they are being filmed? This kind of story is what fills me with disgust with the military, and those people who love it. I am waiting to see whether or not they give that soldier a slap on the wrist or a more significant punishment. The NBC reporter has already been branded as an anti-war demonstrator simply because he was there to tape the killing, and has recieved death threats from those who support the killing of unarmed Iraqis. He has a blog on which he tells the story himself.

Studying for my midterms

2004-11-14T01:15:00.000-08:00

This weekend I have planned on only studying for the midterms that I have next week, but I find myself drawn to other things. This has been a very busy semester for me, and as a result time has flown very rapidly, and I now find myself almost finished with classes. The class that I have enjoyed the most thus far is my probability class. The second midterm is on Tuesday, and I still have a great deal of studying to do. I am not clear enough on invertible transformations, multivariate normal distributions, multiple linear prediction, or poisson processes, and so all four subjects are receiving top billing this weekend. I love the way that invertible transformations in several variables correspond almost exactly to the single-variable case (with the exception of the absolute value of the jacobian in place of the absolute value of the derivative); conceptually the two are the same, as of course they must be. Understanding multivariate calculus, and the definition of a derivative in an arbitrary metric space is very useful in helping to see exactly what is going on with the multivariable invertible transformations of density functions. Without that knowledge, the way the textbook presents the material it would be too formulaic.

I've had to remember some linear algebra that I haven't really used for several years now once we started the sections on multiple linear prediction. I was never really very familiar with the cholesky decomposition (my linear algebra class covered the material from the point of view of linear transformations, in an abstract way, and there was not a great deal of time spent on topics that are useful in common applications). Now I understand the cholesky decomposition much better. It really is indispensible in understanding variance-covariance matrices, and their relationship to transformations of random vectors. I enjoyed reflecting on the geometrical aspects of the multiple linear prediction problem. It basically boils down to finding the projection of a vector in some vector space over a sub-space of that vector space. The simple statement that the covariance of the linear prediction and the difference of the true vector and the linear prediction must be zero has a neat geometrical interpretation that is easily understood. You have a best linear estimate when the estimate is orthogonal to the error vector. Pictorially you can represent it in 3-space as the orthogonal projection in a plane of some vector that does not lie in the plane (of course it is just an analogy to higher dimensional problems, but the intuition is the same).

Black Week

2004-11-05T01:22:00.000-08:00

I'm so depressed. I think this country is full of idiots and mindless christians. I'm angry with Ohio and its conservativism. That's yet another state I hope I never have to go to. Actually, pick any of the red states, and you know where I would loathe to visit. I'll stick with the blue states from now on. That and other countries. Europe is looking particularly nice to me now. I discovered that even a country such as Turkey has abolished the death penalty because it is trying to gain acceptance into the EU. Even Turkey, the former home of the Ottoman empire, and a country that instituted genocide against the Armenians in the 19th century, has abolished the death penalty. It is time to wake up and smell the excrement, because America is way behind civilized nations in its laws and moral values. America is no longer a civilized nation. The only place where America leads globally anymore is in the military and financial areas. Education is suffering, and the religious right is becoming a christian version of the Taliban. This country is simply the richest third world country in the world. This country is polluting more than it has for years, and with the choice of administration that the idiotic american people made (if indeed they did make it) will ensure that things don't get any better.

Walden O'Dell, a Republican fundraiser and the CEO of Diebold (the company making the electronic voting machines that have no paper trail), said before the election that he would deliver the state of Ohio to Bush. The Diebold voting machines were used in many counties of Ohio, especially those ones that contain larger numbers of Democrats. The exit polls in Ohio (and other states) painted a different picture than the eventual "outcome." It is certainly possible that the exit polls were conducted in such a way that there was a pro-Kerry bias, but if that is not the case, then they could be indicating that voter fraud could have taken place. As Andrew Tenenbaum says: "Switching 5 votes per machine is probably all it would take to throw an election and nobody would ever see it unless someone compares the computer totals and exit polls." It is possible that Bush was reelected due to voting machines that were designed to help him win, and not because the American people voted for him. It is easy to design an electronic voting machine that can combine the positive aspects of eletronic voting with the safety of a paper trail. ATMs give out printed receipts every day, and their failure rate is necessarily extremely low. It would be simple to design a machine that records votes electronically, but that prints one (or two) receipts that have machine readable codes of them, and that display how the person who voted actually voted. With such a system the voter could have a record of how he or she voted, and therefore could recognize any mistakes, and paper receipts could be deposited into a lockbox for storage to be used for recounts. Diebold purposely designed machines that can be used to cheat.

I am nearly fed up with this country. There is much that I like about the US (it is my home and place of birth), but I am increasingly feeling as though I am a foreigner in my own country. I do not share the values and beliefs of so many ridiculous Americans. I feel much greater kinship to Europeans who are on average much more reasonable and liberal. It is really sad that I feel so estranged in my own country. The only place I can stand being is in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that is probably the most liberal place in the US.

Muslim Extremists

2004-10-31T10:06:00.001-08:00

I hate seeing those pictures of poor people catptured in Iraq, only to be beheaded for no reason. It makes me so angry that there are people in that country (or any other country) who think that is a reasonable way to push a political agenda. They beheaded a young Japanese backpacker who entered Iraq for the sightseeing. Now they are threatening to behead a Polish woman. They have already beheaded several American and British people. It seems to me as though the middle east has not progressed for several thousand years, still being a place where people find such behaviour acceptable. Do they actually think that behaving in such a way will have a positive effect in the end for themselves? I think the people who do that are so terribly stupid and horrible. If they had half a brain they would realize that they are actually making it harder on themselves, and making it less likely that American troops will leave Iraq sooner rather than later. They are not giving people outside of Iraq much sympathy for their cause. They do not appear to be suffering under an unjust rule, they simply appear as an organization of the worst crimminals imaginable, killing innocent people they find on the streets. I am completely opposed to Bush's foreign and domestic policy, and I wish that America had never invaded Iraq, but when I see photos of innocent people who get their heads sawed off with knives I feel positively awful. I want American troops to be pulled out of Iraq as soon as possible, but learning that the beheaders want that too I begin feeling like the troops should stay longer in Iraq to rid the country of their evil. It is completely irrational, but that's how I feel sometimes. It is hard to see those people as anything other than animals. Decent human beings simply do not murder innocent people in such gruseome and unnecessary ways.

I'm sorry about the anger in this post. I just woke up to news that talked about those mass murderers, and it made me very angry. It makes me sad that people treat other people so cruelly. My own anger makes me realize how easy it is for people to totally lose their rationality when emotion takes them over. I hate living in such a world where people treat each other in such ways. Life is so short, and so precious; I wish we could all live in peace. This world is rapidly becoming scarier and scarier. I find myself wondering whether or not it has always been so terrible, but looking at history it seems that it has been much worse. It would be so simple and easy for people to treat one another with the respect and dignity that they deserve, yet it is so seldom done. It is difficult to remain an optimist in such a world.

Exhaustion

2004-10-30T23:03:00.000-07:00

Here I am again, back from a long period of no writing. Tonight I am trying to relax and feel like a normal person again. I have been studying a little too hard lately I think. I was invited to a Halloween party tonight, which is actually in progress as I write this, but I declined to go because I have too much work to do. Today I finished the homeworks that are due next week, and I'm planning on working more tonight and tomorrow on some programming assignments that I am certainly behind on. I have midterms coming up in just over two weeks, and so the pressure is going to increase very soon. That's why I have to use every minute now to try to get ahead. The only problem is that I'm pushing myself a little too hard, because every night now I have dreams about doing statistics or probability problems. Last night I had a dream that I was looking through a book of mine that my roommate borrowed from me (it is about algorithms), and I was really excited to look through it. It is a weird thing when one dreams of studying and solving problems in one's dreams. I have had a one-subject mind for the last few weeks, and I can only break out of the study mold to follow the news or politics. I think I'm suffering from eye strain, because I've been getting headaches that last for a long time, and my vision is not as good as it normally is. Man, listen to me...I need to get some sleep.

American Nazism

2004-10-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

I have no time to do anything anymore, but I thought I'd spend some time that I don't have to write a little something. Since it has been over two weeks since the last posting I feel it is about time for me to get some new material out there. I am very close to buying tickets to Germany, and I am quite excited. Unfortunately one of my classes just happens to have a final exam that makes it impossible for me to buy any reasonably priced tickets, but what can I do about that? Well, you might think that most professors would be understanding, and offer to give me an early final, but for this particular class he made it known at the beginning that if one couldn't make it to the final exam on the stated day, then one shouldn't take the course. So I will be forced to fly to Deutschland alone, without my friend who is from there to help me find my way. And I may be flying in and traveling around for a while before I get to his home. I am quite excited though, because this will be my first trip to Europe, let alone Germany, which is one of the countries that I've always had a fascination with (the other being Japan of course). The main negative is that I will be there during the winter, which is certainly my least favorite season. But one takes what one can get. Maybe I'll go to Japan again in the summer. I should be practicing my German.

On another note, I am very glad to see that Kerry has been able to push ahead in consolidating some gains that he made after his wonderfully executed debates. I have been addicted to this website, which shows the latest poll results (from almost all polls unlike many other websites), and shows the situation as regards electoral votes. Kerry can certainly win if those of us who support him and understand that another Bush presidency would be horrible can manage to make our voices heard by voting. I'm sick of the lazy, apathetic people who say that both candidates are similar. They are about as similar as Mussolini is to John F. Kennedy. Bush is a fascist, arrogant assmuncher; he is the disease, and Kerry is the cure (what movie from the 80's is that reference from?). I suppose I'm spouting some hyperbolic rhetoric, but how much harm can that do? My true feelings are similar. I don't really hate Bush, but I think he is genuinely wrong for our country. He may mean well (and I'm not really convinced that he does), but he is encouraging the decline of this country into fascism. I really feel that way. I've had an interest in history for quite a while, and I see this country slowly taking steps that were taken in the early periods before Nazism in Germany, and Fascism in Italy. Bush says things like:

For those who worry about how I say things, my attitude is, 'Too bad.'

or:

If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.

-George W. Bush, December 18, 2000

Sometimes things that Bush says and does reminds me of one of our more "honest" presidents of the past:

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

People react to fear, not love - they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

-Richard Nixon

Another sad thing regarding this administration is its fervent support of business to the exclusion of all else. Yes, we all believe that it is important for America to remain competitive in the world, but allowing businesses that only exist to make greater profit to control U.S. policy is not the way to make America strong. This administration consistently ignores scientific advice and rational discourse, using arbitrary and irrational (often pocketbook-driven) means to realize its ideologically driven policies. When Kerry speaks about health care companies, or Bush's subservience to big business I am reminded of things said by my favorite president ever:

We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the business man is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging and excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors of getting unfair advantages over business rivals.

Government organized by money is just as bad as government by organized mob.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

This administration uses anything that it can to remain in power. This is much more like a dictatorship than a democracy. I feel that this administration has taken these words (from a man who knew something about propaganda) to heart:

Why of course the people don't want war... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whenever it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliment, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

-Hermann Goering, Nazi General of the Luftwaffe, during the Nuremberg Trials after WWII

The policies of this administration reflect this advice from the Nazi party direct to the Republicans of this weakening country. Immediately after September 11, this kind of mentality was pressed so strongly that those people who wanted to speak against the invasion of Iraq were afraid to. People were shouted off the stage for even questioning the policies of the Bush administration, and even now many of Bush's press conferences are very tightly arranged affairs, with reporters only able to ask prearranged questions. If Bush is asked a question that he doesn't like he will refuse to answer it. This president does not like to be questioned. He is arrogant, and over-confident. He blunders because of his ineptitude and stupidity, and then he refuses to acknowledge his errors. He is not a worthy president. The media has conformed to this administration's strong-arm policies, and the scary thing is that very few people are brave enough to dissent. There were many people in Nazi Germany who have been criticized for not speaking up when they knew that things were going in the wrong direction, but this is exactly how it began. In the beginning most people thought that the Nazi party was composed of mere ruffians who enjoyed momentary popularity. Their outrageous antics and take no prisoners policies (similar to the Republican mode of operation) captured the respect of those people who admire power and audacity. They gained power by blaming everyone's problems on marginalized groups of society, and if anyone came to their defense they were immediately labeled as unpatriotic, and against positive change. It eventually came to pass that the Nazi party gained enough power to begin to be able to dictate what the country as a whole did. And whenever someone opposed the Nazi party that person was vigorously defamed and attacked, and often painted literally as a sympathizer with the enemy (whoever that was). In the same way, the Republicans denounce anybody who dares to oppose the view that our country is in a war. Our country is NOT in a war. This war on terrorism is bogus, because it does not satisfy the semantic requirements to be called a war. It is like calling Iraq a peaceful country. We were attacked many times before by "terrorists," and people did not jump to calling it a war. I assert that this administration only clings to calling the "fight against terror" as a war because of the psychological effects such a name has on the people of this country, and to further tighten its grip on power. When are we going to break out of the fever that has gripped us for the last three years? I hope it will be on November 2. Please Vote!

Anything French is Wonderful

2004-10-04T11:36:00.007-07:00

I am tired today, and my time is completely planned. I probably shouldn't be writing now, but I have twenty minutes to spare that I didn't think that I would have due to a work meeting being moved back about 30 minutes. I had an interesting weekend. On Friday night my friend and I went to Davis to go to the party of a friend who used to live in Berkeley several years ago. Everybody there was a little older than me and my friend, but that didn't really bother me. What did bother me a little bit was that some of them were kind of yuppie, conservative types. The hostess of the party (not the friend from Berkeley) was showing us the Hors D' Oeuvres that she had made and the fancy cheeses, and she proudly commented on how she tried never to buy anything French. I couldn't believe that she was one of those "Freedom Fries," kinds of people, and I said in response that I love anything if it is French, just to let her know that I didn't fall into the category of people with ridiculous, misplaced "patriotism." I could write more about that party, but it would be a waste of effort.

My friend and I returned to Berkeley on Saturday afternoon, and I spent the rest of the day hanging out with another friend of mine who is leaving for New York in a week. Then finally on Sunday I studied for a midterm that I'm going to have tomorrow. I have been caught up with the class, but I still need to work to make sure that I don't blank while I stare at the test tomorrow. I ended up studying for about 9 or 10 hours yesterday, and after school today I will be studying some more just to make sure that I don't screw up too badly. And then Tuesday I will have to spend all night working on a lab that is due in another class on Wednesday. Then Wednesday and Thursday will have to be spent doing homework for the class that I'm having a midterm in tomorrow, and studying for a midterm that I have on Friday. I've also got to work on yet another lab in another class that is due next week, and then I have to finish a programming assignment before too much longer. I can only fit school into my head right now, but I have to say that I am ecstatic that Kerry did as well as he did on the debates. I really feel like he can win now. I was becoming demoralized for a while, thinking that everybody in this country must be an idiot, but I am very happy to be given evidence that there are people that value clear-thinking, authority over issues, and knowledge over stupidity, arrogance, and closed-mindedness. I cannot wait until Kerry spanks Bush's ass in November.

Logical Positivism, Fallacies, and Errors of Reasoning

2004-09-26T01:32:00.000-07:00

I've been randomly searching the web looking for random things of interest to me and I came across a couple of websites of interest. These two list common logical fallacies, and informal logical fallacies, which are really the same thing. Another interesting webpage is a general description of informal logic. I constantly find it amazing how common such fallacies and errors are in everyday life. Awful arguments are given by politicians, lawyers, doctors, and other people whose judgment we normally trust. I really think that more time should be used beginning in elementary school, and not ceasing until Universtity education, to teach people to recognize and attempt to avoid such reasoning errors. The propensity of the masses to accept the most ridiculous and weak of arguments is actually quite terrifying.

I also spent some time tonight reading about my favorite philosophical movement of the 20th century, the logical positivist movement. It depresses me to understand that all of my old heroes are dead and gone with no one to replace them. So what if they were unable to produce an acceptable principle of verification, I think that they certainly had some very strong points. The main problem from my point of view was that they could not figure out how to rigorously prove many of their statements, and thus they were left upon the same ground as the branch of philosophy they were trying to kill: metaphysics. I don't think that it was their fault that they couldn't prove certain beliefs of theirs, because I believe that all knowledge is only possible if we make assumptions first, and the necessity of those assumptions makes any rigorous proof ultimately impossible. The important thing is to choose those assumptions judiciously. I think that one must accept as an assumption the idea that statements are meaningful only if they are either analytic (logically true, or tautologies) or verifiable by experience. I believe that our language can trick us into the devious idea that certain things exist that don't in reality exist. My favorite example is of the pink elephant. There are things in "reality" that we can describe as pink, and things which we call elephants, but there are no things that we can call pink elephants. Any attempt at arguing that pink elephants exist have to do with ways of arbitrarily assigning meaning where it does not exist naturally (for example redefining the word elephant to admit plastic representations of elephants to the meaning of the word "elephant"). The imprecision of our language leads to profound imprecision of our thought, and we become very confused thinking about what things like pink elephants can possibly refer to. The aim of the logical positivists was to clear as much as possible from philosophical and scientific discourse the reliance on undefined and badly matched terms. What the heck does something like "the Nothing nihilates," actually mean? The answer from the logical positivists is that it has no meaning (aside from a possible emotive significance).

There are those who argue that emotions have meaning of their own apart from rational concerns, and I reject that idea on the basis that the word "meaning" in that instance is being twisted. When a person says that emotions are meaningful, he or she really means to say that emotions are important to him or her, and that they don't want to have to ignore them. I certainly don't argue that emotions should be thrown into the garbage heap, but rather that they are usually completely irrational and must be recognized as such. Errors of reasoning are very commonly introduced when emotions are invloved, and that is precisely the reason why they must be carefully recognized as what they are.

People like metaphysics because they like the emotions that the metaphysical statements produce in them, and not because they have any concrete or real meaning. It is precisely the emotive character of metaphysics that makes it so difficult to combat. I so wish there were another Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, or A.J. Ayer in the world. The religionism, emotionalism, and irrationalism of this world is frightening, and I fear we are slipping back into the dark ages. There are too many totalitarian, neo-platonists in the world, reverting to Hegelian worldviews. There are too many authors jumbling their statements together in a kind of newspeak (reference to 1984) and proceeding as if the obfuscation in their prose is proportional to its profundity. Hahaha, how would Orwell have liked that sentence? I dislike the common attitude which says that if something is hard to understand then it must be meaningful at a deep level. That is an assumption I am not willing to make. If I cannot see the meaning relatively easily, I blame the expositor for his or her opacity. I feel sad because liberalism and rationalism are under attack and there are very few people left who seem strong enough to fight back. This whole country has been pushed towards reactionism by a few hijacked airplanes, and a short-sighted, strong-arm leadership.

Relevant and Interesting Quotes

2004-09-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

-Bertrand Russell

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

-Albert Einstein

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it.

-Karl Popper

If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

-Stephen Jay Gould

Catching up

2004-09-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Time is sure passing very rapidly for me these days. I'm surprised that there is only one week left in September already. Day after day of school, work, and study have left me in a bit of a haze. Today, Thursday, is the only day in the week when I can sleep in and take my time in getting to work. I used to love to sleep in, but for some reason these days I cannot seem to sleep past 9:30 am anymore, even if I don't get to bed until pretty late at night. I feel like my mother who would always complain of not being able to sleep in the morning, although her case was worse than mine because she would wake up around 5:00 or 6:00 am. That is still much too crazy early for me. I have changed my lifestyle quite dramatically since I graduated from University as an undergraduate. Even though now I am in grad school my schedule is more similar to a work schedule (of course I actually do have a work schedule though it is only half time) and less like what I always in the past planned my school schedules to be. I remember planning things so that my first classes of the day began at noon so that I could potentially stay up until about 4:00 am every night. I loved not having to work, so my pattern consisted of waking up, going to school, coming home and relaxing for a couple of hours, hanging out with friends until the late hours, and then sleeping. Studying was only done when it was strictly necessary. Things are different now.

I worked from 4:00 pm to around midnight yesterday trying to finish homeworks that are due next week in my statistics classes. I finished one of them and I am just over halfway finished with the other one. I hope to finish it today so that I can work on doing other slightly less urgent things such as working on one of my programming assignments that isn't due for a couple of weeks. I will have about two other labs to complete (using R) by the end of next week too. I've also got to study for my first midterm this semester in the probability class that I'm taking. So many things to do.

I've tried meditating lately as a way of clearing my mind. It has seemed to work, but I haven't done it for a while because I've felt too busy. I know It shouldn't take such a long time, and I could probably do it during the time it takes me to write this, but it is truly hard to sit and relax knowing that there are twenty other things that I need to be doing. I guess that is the point though.

Logic, Communication, and Art

2004-09-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I last wrote anything here. Beginning school again and having a good deal of pressure put on me at work at the same time hasn't given me much time or inclination to write anything. I spent all of last week trying to figure out which classes that I wanted to keep and which ones I wanted to drop. I began the week with eight classes (including wait-listed classes) and I ended the week with four. I have settled on taking courses on: probability, statistics, statistical computing, and Splus or R (which are both statistical programming packages). Does anybody sense a general theme? I was surprised at how my ideas changed regarding the classes that I was planning on taking. Some of the ones that sounded pretty interesting to me before I had seen the professors, and figured out how the classes worked ended up seming like awful wastes of time.

I was a math major while I was an undergraduate, and I think that it is still difficult for me to sit in a class where there is not a determination to be as rigorous as possible. I didn't really like the touchy-feely natures of some of the classes that I had expected to be more rigorous. I was thinking about taking a sampling and survey class, but it ended up being "an applied sampling class," which basically meant that all of the sampling examples were going to be in human populations, and as little math as possible was going to be used. The professor even seemed to possess a certain disdain for the mathematical treatment of the subject. I could tell that the class would provide an easy A, but I just wouldn't have been able to maintain the interest due to the lack of emphasis on theory. I've never really enjoyed sitting in a class while some person drones on about a subject if they aren't at least following the pedagogical style that is so common in math classes. I have found that I really enjoy a precise logical formulation of the material to be taught in class, and that people who were trained in a liberal arts method tend to appear very random and unorganized to me. I love it when a professor starts the day with a few "Definition:" lines and then proceeds to present a "Theorem:" and finish that up with a well crafted "Proof." I think that method could also be used to a large degree in humanities type classes as well, and in fact, those humanities classes that I have enjoyed the most have done just that. Now of course I don't mean to imply that the issues that humanities people deal with can be reduced down to a set of axioms from which all of our knowledge can be derived, but I think a more logical presentation would be very helpful. I have seen that type of method before in history classes that I have taken, and I found it to be very interesting.

I have come to realize again why it was that I chose to be a math major in undergrad. In classes where all you do is write papers I never really felt as though I was learning very much of importance. Everything always seemed to be so tied to normative judgments, and as a result simply a matter of opinion. Everything always seemed so arbitrary to me, and from my point of view it is horribly boring and pointless to learn about arbitrary things. It would bother me when a professor would express one view as the "right" view, because to me it seemed to be ultimately arbitrary and subject to one's assumptions. In high school I actually wanted to be an english major. When I started college (actually in junior college) I took some English classes, and one of them had a section on poetry. Now I don't consider myself to be anti-poetry, but I had a hell of a time in that class. I remember some assignments where we were graded on our interpretations of poetry, and I usually didn't do very well on them. My view was that there was no one right way to interpret the poetry, but the teacher had a somewhat divergent view. I remember some people giving their interpretations to the class and the teacher saying things like, "that's exactly right." I thought that perhaps I was just lacking in some area; that I just didn't think in the way that was required to understand the poetry, but I now think I have an idea of what the difficulty was for me. Poetry cannot really be analyzed using standard methods, unless you are content with analyzing technical aspects such as meter, syntax, diction, etc. But even those things can be subject to opinion, especially when it comes to determining why they are significant in particular instances. Poetry is essentially something which people have to point at and say, "hey, can't you see what that person is trying to do," but you can never be sure that the significance that you see in any given aspect of poetry is really significant. I find the same problem with poetry that I find with much of art: the meaning that people get out of it does not correspond to the meaning that the artist or the poet tried to impart. I grew up knowing some artists, and I saw first hand how they may start by making something, and only after the fact try to explain the meaning or significance of its contents. I feel like for the meaning that I see in the work of art to be significant it must be non-arbitrary. For some unknown reason it bothers me to think that what I think the statement of the artist was does not have to correspond to his intended meaning. It frustrates me. I find myself questioning what art is then for if it is not to communicate feelings or ideas. For communication to be good communication to me it must strive for unambiguousness, and poetry and art seem to ignore that sentiment. There is a counter-argument that says it is not necessary and in fact too constraining to require clarity, because it would somehow destroy the mysterious spirit of the art or poetry, and make it in some way less universal or more subject to smaller-mindedness. I don't agree with that.

I was just told by my housemate that he thinks that art in its purest form is intended only as a means of expressing something by the artist, and not with the intent to communicate with any audience. I find that a very interesting idea because I have always had the idea that art should be intended for communication. If that is so then I suppose I have to say that I no longer have any frustrations with art. Maybe what I really dislike is not the art, or how or why it is created, but actually those people who position themselves as the arbiters of meaning, or of significance. I surely am turned off by those types of people who pretentiously speak of works of art as though they are not open to differing points of view.

INTP

2004-08-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

Today, or rather tonight, I will break from my run of seriousness to write something a little more lighthearted. I recently began to search the web for online tests that I could take that could somehow shed light on who I am, and what strange psychological problems that I suffer from. Of course, none of them told me anything of importance, but it was fun seeing how accurate (or inaccurate) they were. I've taken tests such as the Myers Briggs test before, and every time I take them I get pretty much the same result (I only alternate between introvert and extrovert). Now it is impossible for a complex human being to fit nicely into one of only sixteen artificially created categories, and I truly question the usefulness of such a system, but it is interesting to me that reading the description of the personality type that I "have" seems to actually fit me better than any of the other sixteen do. To relieve the suspense you may be feeling, I pretty consistently get the INTP personality type: I for introvert, N for intuitive, T for thinking, and P for perceptive. I have recieved the ENTP type once, but I think that the INTP decription fits me better.

What is the INTP description you ask? Well, here is a long one that I found somewhere on the web:

Profile by Sandra Krebs Hirsch and Jean Kummerow
INTPs are known for their quest for logical purity, which motivates them to examine universal truths and principles. They are constantly asking themselves and others the questions 'Why?' and 'Why not?' Clear and quick thinkers, they are able to focus with great intensity on their interests. They appreciate elegance and efficiency in thought processes and require them, even more so, in their own communications. They may be seen as unwilling to accept what everyone else regards as truth. While often low key in outward appearance and approach, the INTP is 'hard as nails' when challenging a truth. INTPs do not like to deal with the obvious. They are at their best in building conceptual models and developing unusual and complex ideas.

Living
As children, INTPs are inwardly focused, often enjoying their own thoughts more than the company of others. They are full of questions, sometimes voiced, most often not. INTP children often challenge and even stump their elders. They enjoy fantasy, mysteries, inventing, thinking and doing things that may be somewhat atypical for other children of their age, and they sense their uniqueness early on. If INTPs are fond of books or games, it is likely that their choices will be the current rage. If an INTP is fond of music, it is likely to be of and unusual sort.
INTPs tend to either respect and go along with society's rules, or to question and rebel against them. Their response to these rules depends on how the rules might affect them. When INTPs do not like the rules, they are quick to find the flaws in the rule makers' thinking, regardless of their status, position in the hierarchy, or renown.
As young adults choosing careers, INTPs either set a course and work toward it quietly yet forcefully or continue to resist and rebel against society's expectations and irrational rules. They may either focus in depth on a major interest or move from one interest to another without showing others - friends, colleagues, and bosses - their reasons why. It is the process, the quest, that has been most interesting to them. Once they have found the answer, they do not often share it because the answer is obvious, and documenting the obvious is redundant. This attitude includes a tendency not to respond or speak up in groups, because the INTP feels that what he or she was going to say seems so obvious that no one would want to hear it. As INTPs mature, they continue their quest for logical purity, but now it includes more balance in their activities.

Learning and Working
The INTP is a relentless learner in areas that hold his or her interest. They often seem 'lost in thought,' and this characteristic appears very early. INTPs enjoy the life of the mind and the learning process, regardless of whether that process takes place in a formal sense. They are often characterized as life-long learners.
In school, well-rounded INTPs work on their assignments with a great deal of inward energy and interest that is usually not apparent to others. They tend to connect unrelated thoughts. As learners, they are able to find logical flaws in the thinking of others. They analyze these flaws and find ideas for further study. They go to great depths in their analysis.
In taking exams, they prefer theoretical questions. When INTPs view a test, teachers, or subjects as irrelevant, they may respond as follows: 'I know what I need to know about this topic; I may even know more than my teacher. The teacher made this test, and this test is dumb. Therefore, my teacher is dumb, and I will not do the test.' Because of such reactions, the INTP's academic record may include successes or may be filled with failures.
INTPs contribute a logical, system-building approach to their work. They like being the architect of a plan, because of the scheming and thinking involved, far more than being the implementer of that plan. Implementation tends to be drudgery. They are content to sit back and think about what might work, given their view of the situation. INTPs may ignore standard operating procedures. The hours that they spend are not what is important to them, but rather the completion of their thought process. When their projects are of interest to them, they can become mesmerized and may even work through the night. When their projects are not intriguing, their work is considered drudgery, and the INTP finds it difficult to stay motivated.
INTPs usually find a place in their work for using their logical and structured thinking. They enjoy work that allows them to abstract, to generalize beyond the data, and to build models. Flexibility is desired because INTPs like to 'do the job when they want to do it and as they want to do it.' They also prefer occupations in which the hierarchy is minimal and not important. This attitude seems from their firm belief that, to be legitimate, a hierarchy should be built on the competency of individuals who are logically placed according to their talents.
Some occupations seem to be more attractive to INTPs: biologist, chemist, computer programmer, computer system analyst, lawyer, photographer, psychologist, researcher, surveyor, writer and other occupations that allow them to use their logical thinking in appropriate ways.

Loving
For the INTP, love has three distinct phases: falling in, staying in, and getting out. These phases relate to their thinking preference and its need for order and sequence.
An INTP characterized falling in love as a stage of complete loss of rationality that may last a year or less. When an INTP falls in love, he or she falls hard - an all or nothing phenomenon. At this stage, INTPs are likely to be very lively, almost giddy, in their new love. The experience rushes over them and carries them along. They do not structure or control it but simply enjoy and experience it. They do many loving things and they are curious about their loved one and are able to overlook his or her flaws. They may bravely ignore the realities of distance, weather, and time to be with the loved one.
As relationships progress to the staying-in-love phase, INTPs begin to evaluate their structure and form. They may withdraw at this point because they are moving toward their more customary inward style. Outward demonstrations of affection lessen, and the giddy state changes. Interactions are more matter of fact, perhaps even impersonal. INTPs take their commitments to their partner seriously; however, they may not discuss these commitments at any length with their partner or with other people, because their commitments seem so obvious to them.
Falling out of love, which may not always occur, results from an analysis of the real expectations and needs of the relationship. Often an undefined line is crossed that neither partner knows about ahead of time. However, the INTP knows after the line has been crossed, and then the relationship deteriorates or ends. If INTPs recognize their emotions and needs as valid, they are able to sever relationship ties fairly cleanly. However, if they misjudge their own needs and those of their partner, the breakup can be messy, perhaps affecting other aspects of their lives for a long time. If the INTP shares some common interests with the former loved one, the relationship continues but on a different level. When INTPs have a reason to continue relationships, they do.

Profile by David Keirsey
INTPs exhibit the greatest precision in thought and language of all the types; they tend to see distinctions and inconsistencies in thought and language instantaneously. The one word which captures the unique style of INTPs is architect-the architect of ideas and systems as well as the architect of edifices. This type is found in only 1 percent of the population and therefore is not encountered as frequently as some of the other types.
INTPs detect contradictions in statements no matter how distant in space or time the contradictory statements were produced. The intellectual scanning of INTPs has a principled quality; that is, INTPs search for whatever is relevant and pertinent to the issue at hand. Consequently, INTPs can concentrate better than any other type.
Authority derived from office, position, or wide acceptance does not impress INTPs. Only statements that are logical and coherent carry weight. External authority per se is irrelevant. INTPs abhor redundancy and incoherence. Possessing a desire to understand the universe, an INTP is constantly looking for natural law. Curiosity concerning these keys to the universe is a driving force in this type.
INTPs prize intelligence in themselves and in others, but can become intellectual dilettantes as a result of their need to amass ideas, principles, or understanding of behavior. And once they know something, it is remembered. INTPs can become obsessed with analysis. Once caught up in a thought process, that thought process seems to have a will of its own for INTPs, and they persevere until the issue is comprehended in all its complexity. They can be intellectual snobs and may show impatience at times with others less endowed intellectually. This quality, INTPs find, generates hostility and defensive behavior on the part of others, who may describe an INTP as arrogant.
For INTPs, the world exists primarily to be understood. Reality is trivial, a mere arena for proving ideas. It is essential that the universe is understood and that whatever is stated about the universe is stated correctly, with coherence and without redundancy. This is the INTPs final purpose. It matters not whether others understand or accept his or her truths.

Career
The INTP is the logician, the mathematician, the philosopher, the scientist; any pursuit requiring architecture of ideas intrigues this type. INTP's should not, however, be asked to work out the implementation or application of their models to the real world.
The INTP is the architect of a system and leaves it to others to be the builder and the applicator. Very often therefore, the INTP's work is not credited to him or her. The builder and the applier gain fame and fortune, while the INTP's name remains obscure. Appreciation of an INTP's theoretical work frequently comes posthumously-or the work may never be removed from library shelves at all and thus lost.
INTP's tend not to be writers or to go into sales work. They are, however, often excellent teachers, particularly for advanced students, although INTP's do not always enjoy much popularity, for they can be hard taskmasters. They are not good at clerical tasks and are impatient with routine details. They prefer to work quietly, without interruption, and often alone. If an organization is to use the talents of an INTP appropriately, the INTP must be given an efficient support staff who can capture ideas as they emerge and before the INTP loses interest and turns to another idea.
Our "architect" is not merely a designer of buildings. There is the architect of ideas (the philosopher), the architect of number systems (the mathematician), the architect of computer languages (the programmer), and on and on. In short, abstract design is the forte of the architect and coherence is the primary issue.

Home
INTP's take their mating relationship seriously and usually are faithful and devoted-albeit preoccupied at times. They are not likely to welcome constant social activity or disorganization in the home. In all probability, the mate of an INTP will initiate and manage the social life. If left to his or her own devices the INTP mate will retreat into the world of books and emerge only when physical needs become imperative. INTP's are, however, willing, compliant, and easy to live with, although somewhat forgetful of appointments, anniversaries, and rituals of daily living unless reminded. They may have difficulty expressing their emotions verbally, and the mate of an INTP may believe that he/she is somewhat taken for granted. As a parent, the INTP is devoted; they enjoy children, and are serious about their upbringing. The home of an INTP parent is usually calm, low-key in discipline, but well run and ordered.
INTP's deal with the environment primarily through intuition, and their strongest quality, the thinking function, remains relatively hidden except in close associations. Therefore, INTP's are often misunderstood, seen as difficult to know, and seldom perceived at their true level of competency. They are inclined to be shy except when with close friends, and their reserve is difficult to penetrate. They are very adaptable until one of their principles is violated. Then INTP's are not adaptable at all! They may have difficulty in being understood by others because they tend to think in a complicated fashion and want to be precise, never redundant in their communications. Because their feeling qualities may be underdeveloped, they may be insensitive to the wants and wishes of others, often unaware of the existence of these wants and wishes.

Midlife
At midlife the INTP might do well to work on increasing awareness of emotional responses, responding to the value preferences of others, and verbalizing to others the INTP's awareness of these values. At midlife one of the tasks of the INTP is to develop an ability to play for play's sake; not to learn something or to somehow improve a skill. Working on the sensual side of his or her nature may provide a source of new pleasure and excitement.

Mates
Why would this abstractionist find the ESFJ "seller" attractive? Think broadly of selling. This amounts to persuading another to receive something of value to the receiver. The seller is essentially caring for the receiver (quite apart from the fact that the receiver pays). This is the essential attitude of the ESFJ seller, and this attitude is perceptible to the receiver (buyer); he feels this nourishing approach. That is what is attractive to the INTP architect-philosopher-the nourishment which anchors him to the real world.
What attracts the ESFJ "seller"? Here is a person who, like a balloon filled with hydrogen, is likely to escape the earth (in his abstract attitude). He needs to have a string attached so that he can be hauled down to earth now and then. In a sense, he needs to be "sold on reality," so indifferent is he to it.
The INTP also has a second likely target to attract him: the ENFJ "pedagogue." What is a pedagogue? A catalyst of the growth process, someone who has that uncanny ability to "bring out" the other, to activate the differentiation or "unfolding" process in the learner. All NFs seem to have this capability in some degree and the accompanying desire to exercise it, but the ENFJ seems to have it in abundance. This relationship-the ENFJ-INTP-can be "deep and meaningful" for the former and anchoring in a charismatic way for the latter.

The part about not remembering "appointments, anniversaries, and rituals of daily living" describes me exactly. One year I even forgot my mother's birthday, and she called me a couple of days later asking me if I was angry with her. I find it very interesting that the description of my personality type seems to fit me in as many ways as it does. In each paragraph I can find sentences that make me laugh because of how well I think it describes me. It almost makes me wish that I could give all of the people that I have dated (and perhaps more interestingly, those who I may date in the future) the Myers Briggs test, and see if I can recognize any patterns. I know that one of my best friends is an INFJ, but I don't know the personality type of any others. There are no places on the web that give free Myers Briggs tests, but there is one that gives results very close to a real Myers Briggs test. What do you get?

I also recently took the personality disorder test which I noticed when taking the Dante's Inferno test. I only recieved two high classifications: one in Narcissism, and the other in Obsessive-Compulsive. I don't like to think of myself as Narcissistic (though who would), but I would have guessed that I would be rated as Obsessive-Compulsive.

More Reasons to be Atheist

2004-08-21T00:41:00.000-07:00

I came home tonight from hanging out with a new friend, and I thought I'd check e-mail and look at some people's blogs when I began reading about the Summit Ministries here. I began to comment and could feel a full-fledged blog coming on, so I thought I'd finish the thought I began in the comment here where I have full reign to be as long-winded as I damn well please.

Ok, I feel utterly opposed to groups that teach impressionable kids how to combat the "negative effects" of free thought by pounding their soft minds with ridiculous ideas designed to sound rational. They begin by giving a defense of the "Christian worldview," which to me simply sounds as though they are trying to set a few emotive or irrational standards with which they can compare the following different "worldviews" such as: Biblical Christianity, Secular Humanism, Marxism/Leninism, Cosmic Humanism (New Age), and Postmodernism. I am sure that they attempt to appear rational and even-handed in their so-called analysis, but their purpose is of course to provide a boot camp for Christians, and so I truly doubt their intellectual honesty. I am sure that they "analyze" the different worldviews according to their own conveniently crafted criteria (which were surely created with the answer they desire to come up with in mind). I wonder what dangers to young Christians they see in secular humanism or postmodernism.

They talk about biblical ethics and specifically about abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, and moral relativism. I love the fact that they include moral relativism in their discussion of biblical ethics. I suppose they mean by moral relativism the idea that things are not always black and white; surely what they want to say is that things are either good or bad but not both, so that they can then make sweeping statements which will then be swallowed more easily by the indoctrinated. Those who see the world only in terms of good and evil (such as our crappy president) have a much easier time when condemming others because they don't have to worry about mitigating factors; people either go to hell or they don't, right? A perfect example of that is the lady I met in Santa Monica: according to her, being an atheist means you go to hell, no ifs ands or buts about it. It would be too complicated for the "believers" to have to worry about other things that could perhaps save sinners and atheists from eternal damnation. And it surely makes people who are chronically in fear have a compelling reason to induce themselves to believe everything the "believers" shovel into their guillible throats. What a problem the "believers" would have if they had to suddenly give justifications for why one thing is good or evil without relying on the static Judeo-Christian morality that they hold so dear.

They like to paint a picture of what moral relativism is, and then equivocate in an attempt to show its shortcomings. Here is an example:

In describing her view on morality, the President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America once stated, "teaching morality doesn't mean imposing my moral values on others. It means sharing wisdom, giving reasons for believing as I do - and then trusting others to think and judge for themselves." She claims to be morally neutral, yet her message is clearly intended to influence the thinking of others… an intention that is not, in fact, neutral.

Those who attack moral relativism usually end up attacking the principle of tolerance rather than moral relativism itself. The issue is not whether or not she is trying to influence people, it is whether or not it is valid to assert that things aren't objectively good or bad, and that it depends upon circumstances and even preferences of individuals. Moral relativism does not mean that the moralist is not trying to affect the opinion of the listener, it is a simple recognition of the fact that different people in different situations see different things in different ways. I think that a better criticism of moral relativism is that in extreme cases it can lead to a kind of moral anarchy in which it could be difficult to create laws and social norms that are just and fair. But what critics fail to notice all too often is that the practical matter of creating good laws, contracts which help bring stability to human society, is completely unaffected by recognizing that not everybody thinks that the same things are good or evil. For example, it is a practical reality that there are people who believe that homosexuality is a good thing, and there are those who disagree. The problem of creating a fair law regarding homosexuality does not have anything to do with the belief that homosexuality is not objectively good or bad, because that is a moot point given that there are already people with such opposing opinions. Laws are not moral judgments, they are attempts at practically ensuring social cohesion, and at finding a stable happiness equilibrium (whereby I mean maximizing an abstract happiness average). Thus I argue that the belief in the principle of moral relativity does not entail chaos any more than the belief in Judeo-Christian morality does.

What the Christians really fear is tolerance, for it nullifies many of their attempts to inculcate values and belief systems that enable them to control the flock. How can they control your mind if you are tolerant of viewpoints that are opposite to what they tell you. If your pastor tells you that homosexual people are sinners, and are doomed to hell, but you have the view that they aren't actually bad people at all, then you might start questioning why they should be going to hell, and you might start questioning other things that your pastor says. Tolerance can breed understanding, but it makes it hard for you to accept the message of hate that your pastor gives. Those kinds of Christians are masters in the kind of verbal obfuscation that Orwell wrote of in his essay "Politics and the English Language." They like to interpret biblical passages according to their advantage, and profess that their interpretations are objectively true beyond doubt. Sometimes it can be evil to follow dogma without critical examination. They say they are speaking of love, and in the same sentence spout hateful dogma.

I've always enjoyed a story I heard that was originally told by Japanese Buddhist monks, and which made its way into a Japanese history class that I took at Berkeley. There were two monks traveling through a forest, walking down a dirt path towards a river. One of the monks was a novice, and the other monk was quite experienced, and had been a monk for a long time. Both monks had taken vows to refrain from interacting with women, for it was thought that they represented a danger to spiritual concentration. They were not supposed to talk with or in any way touch any woman. As they approached the river they saw an older woman halfway across the river, floundering and crying out for help. She begged the two monks for help, but the young novice, remembering his vow, made his way across the river without helping the poor woman. When he had reached the far side of the river he turned and saw the woman on the back of the senior monk. At the other side of the river the senior monk placed her on the ground carefully, and she thanked him profusely for his help. The two monks then went on their way again down a dirt path in silent contemplation. Finally the young monk could stand it no longer, and he asked the senior monk why in the world he had broken his vow and picked up the older woman. He felt betrayed by the senior monk's infidelity. The senior monk was silent for a short while, but he finally spoke and said, "The intention behind our vows is to remind us to act in a good and right way. The main purpose is goodness. To blindly follow the words of the vows regardless of the situation is to forget to do good. I perceived that it would be an evil thing to remain faithful to my vow when it could lead to the death of a human. In that situation my vow was evil, and so I broke it."

They even attack what they call radical feminism. I'm sure that a traditionally patriarchal religion does not feel comfortable with the idea that women should be spiritual equals to men. How many versions of Christianity allow women to become priests (in that case priestesses)? I'm sure there are some here in the Bay Area, but as a general rule I believe they are few and far between. Christians do not like the idea that women should be equal to men in the eyes of god because it would then follow that all of the positions of power which men inhabit should then also be open to women, and they can't have women having equal power now can they? Christians like the traditional role of the woman as dutiful wife, babymaker, and homemaker. They don't like the idea that women might like to think for themselves once and a while, especially when it comes to religion. How about this, I'll call myself Catholic once they elect a gay black woman as pope.

There is a "former evolutionist who carefully studied the scientific issues and by the power of the Holy Spirit became convinced of the truth of creation," in the so-called faculty of the Summit Ministries. I'm sure he must have studied the scientific issues very studiously for the "Holy Spirit" to inspire him to the "truth" of creation. Perhaps that and a little acid while he was studying because the last time I checked there was no "Holy Spirit" in any scientific issues that I have ever come across. The scientific method is a process, one could even call it an algorithm, by which one interprets empirical data collected about the real world. Simply, one finds something to study, makes hypotheses regarding it that are practically testable (meaning falsifiable), runs the pre-designed tests, examines the results of the tests, and then either rejects, accepts, or modifies the original hypothesis in a way consistent with the output of the experiement. Unless you define the term "Holy Spirit" to mean something like "LSD," there are no experiments that can be carried out that have the possibility of falsifying any statement made regarding this "Holy Spirit." Because no such experiments are possible then any assertions having to do with the "Holy Spirit" are completely unscientific, and even as a matter of practical reality non-empirical. That's a long way of saying that the reason a "former evolutionist" would repudiate his or her belief in evolution can have nothing to do with any "scientific" data or arguments that in any way invlove the "Holy Spirit." In fact, I take it to mean that such a repudiation is tantamount to rejecting the scientific method as a means of providing knowledge. I have heard no good scientific arguments, nor been exposed to any empirical data that are capable of demolishing the theory of evolution. Rejecting evolution on a non-scientific basis is the next best thing to rejecting the scientific method. Once that is done you can no longer call yourself a scientist, for mystic is a much better fitting term.

I don't necessarily believe that science and religion are opposed to one another, but there are certain beliefs that are not capable of being held together consistently. A belief in the usefulness of science in providing knowledge requires certain assumptions that do not fit very consistently with some religious beliefs. For example, the idea that humans can obtain knowledge about the nature of reality from empirical data can conflict with some religious notions that knowledge is granted by god, or that god somehow fudges empirical data in such a way that we cannot really ever make science work for us. Some religious people like to hold the view that what we "know" through science was given to us by god; that kind of view makes it much easier to reject bits of scientific knowledge that they dislike. It removes the assumption that we can understand the world, and creates a fictional basis by which we obtain information. My point is that adding god into the set of assumptions behind science seriously weakens the consistency of scientific interpretation. For example, if god provides us with information, then because the term "god" is not empirical (it is a metaphysical, or fictional entity) we are admitting into the most fundamental assumptions behind the scientific method a belief that is not only uneeded, but lacking in any kind of explanatory power. If one believes that all knowledge is obtained through experience, and that god provides all experiences, then because the very existence of god is an assumption, that theory of knowledge is immediately weakened. It is logically the same, and more elegant to simply remove the unecessary assumption of god; just remove the assumption stating that god provides all experiences.

Encounter with a Fascist

2004-08-15T01:38:00.000-07:00

I was in LA for part of the last week, staying in Pasadena at the house of a friend of a friend. He is only 26 and he already owns a very nice house in a nice neighborhood in Pasadena only about 10 or 15 minutes from Caltech. He is in a Ph.D. program there and his fiancee is an assistant professor there; they both are in the Chemical Engineering/Biochemistry field.

I only stayed in the LA area for a few days altogether, but it reminded me why I like the Bay Area as much as I do. I must say that there are some things that I like about the LA area, but most of them are only superficial (as are most things in SoCal) such as the way some girls dress, and the pedestrian precincts (I learned that term from my friend; I think it is really only used in Britain). Anyhow, though the weather was superb summer weather, the smog was simply awful. I felt as though I was walking through a brushfire everywhere I went, and I could feel my throat thicken due to the brown goo that surely lined my esophagus. People act differently in SoCal, and I noticed a great deal more posturing, and attempting to fit into an image that is carefully being projected. I made a funny observation this time that I hadn't really noticed before, but there seem to be more fat people in LA than there are in the Bay Area, and that includes the younger people. I think it is perhaps because people in SoCal are lazy and like to drive their cars everywhere instead of walking. Perhaps the exercise fad has gone out of fashion. Many girls seemed to have pretty large breasts, but I think it was probably due to their extra chubbiness and perhaps even due to plastic surgery.

Anyways, I spent part of the time down south hiking in the Angeles National Forest and boogie boarding in Santa Monica. My friend and I were walking down the 3rd street promenade in Santa Monica when we had an interesting experience. A plump African-American woman strolled up to my friend and me, holding a clipboard with a sheet of yellow paper attached to it and asked us if we could spare some money for a donation to some cause that I forgot about the instant after she mentioned it. The friend that I was with can be pretty blunt sometimes (even to strangers), and he asked her if the charity "was a Christian thing," because he had noticed something about Christianity on the piece of paper attached to her clipboard. She responded sweetly, "why yes, this charity has ...blah blah... to do with some church." Though I identify myself as an atheist, I would not have said so directly to a Christian because I know how touchy they can be about such things, but my friend had no such compunction. He responded, "I don't believe in that stuff," and he and I continued to walk away from her. She immediately rejoined with, "then you and your friend are going to go to hell!" Her attitude had suddenly changed from bogus friendliness to downright judgemental hostility, and as we continued to walk away from her she loudly repeated that we were doomed to burn in hell, and that we were bad people. I was not only embarrassed, but pretty angry as well, because I have had numerous similar experiences with shitty Christians such as her. I find it interesting that she was only nice to us as long as she believed that she could get something out of us, and the instant my friend declined and said that he didn't believe in Christianity her ugly judgemental, proselytizing side was quickly revealed.

I find few things as offensive as people like her who profess to know everything about what there is, and who are trained to hate and verbally attack (like a trained attack dog) anyone who does not believe what she does. So she believes that people go to hell if they don't believe what she does. How convenient for her. You could get people to go along with anything with that kind of totalitarian, NAZI-like mentality. She must be pretty close friends with her god for her to be so sure that is the way things are. I say, fuck any god who would send people to hell simply because they don't believe in him (or her). I don't need your stinking religion of hate and discrimination. She is a perfect example of the most common variety of nauseous Christians who litter this country like so much refuse. I truly hate that way of looking at the world; that kind of attitude is one of the reasons that I am so vehemently and abrasively atheist. People like that debase belief, turning it into a terrible kind of elitist club, one in which the members see the non-members as immoral and doomed. It is a naked display of an attempt at crude mind control, and the amazing thing to me is that more people don't see it that way. People aren't trained to think in this country, they are trained to "believe," and to believe whatever they are told to believe without question by the appropriate authority. Promulgating such unquestioning attitudes is the height of folly as far as I'm concerned, because that is exactly the kind of thing that led to such things as Nazism in Germany. Perhaps that is why we have a president who is so equally offensive, and who believes that the status of president entitles him to expect explanations from others, but not give them for his own actions.

If there is a god who would damn people for no better reason than that they did not believe in his existence, or the teachings of some arbitrary sect of religion, then fuck that god. I don't believe in authoritarian theology, and if there were any old testament style god of vengeance, then fuck him too, because I think that treating people like that is evil, however much power you wield. If there were any kind of god worth his name, then why would he (or she) permit so much horrible suffering in the world? Some people say that you shouldn't question such a powerful being as god, but that not only presupposes his existence, but it once again assumes an authoritarian view of god that is simply offensive to me. Sounds more like a dictator than a benefactor to me. If this god willingly allows human suffering then I think he is malicious and evil, and is no better than the popular conception of the devil. I think though, that things are more easily explained by the assertion that no god exists. I never responded to what the obnoxious Christian said, apart from laughing, but I wish that I could have somehow transmitted to her what I've just written. It would probably not have changed anything however, because I'm sure that her beliefs are irrational and emotional, and my meanings would remain opaque to her. At least I was able to express my feelings here.

Simple Thoughts

2004-08-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the world is so beautiful that it hurts. I love the aloneness and the uncaring bare reality of it all. It simply is, and doesn’t ask permission for what it does. All can be still, but suddenly when you least expect it a storm breaks and destroys everything. It is good to leave people behind every so often and walk off into a place that is what the world used to be like before cars, cell phones, and skyscrapers. It doesn’t matter what kinds of clothes you wear, what school you went to, or how much knowledge you have about some small abstruse aspect of an academic pursuit. The only thing that matters is that you have water, food, and shelter from heat or cold. The rocks are bare and unadorned with ornaments, the trees simply stand in the ground, waiting. Life simply is, and there are no expectations. Things happen, the wind blows, rain falls, and another day dawns. I feel so sad when I think about people and their thoughts, beliefs, and expectations.

There is so much useless suffering and pain in the world. I feel like we are all children without parents, racing around in the dark, alternately manic and depressed. As in William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies,” we children are sometimes so out of control that we turn on one another for no good reason. We crave power over one another, form factions and tribes which we exalt even as we disparage those people who are not members of our tribes and factions. What is good? What is evil? Such amorphous terms as those can never really describe anything very well, but we always try anew to give them meaning. I wish there was more love in the world, and that people weren’t so afraid to even use that word. Imagine how life would be if strangers could feel a genuine feeling of love and compassion for each other. Imagine a world where guns, war, fighting, rape, pain, killing, and hate were not objects of entertainment but rather recognized as the horrible things that they are. Imagine people helping one another simply because they enjoy the feeling they get when they make another person happier than they were before. Imagine a society where one is not measured by one’s accomplishments, but by the warmth of one’s heart.

I feel sick when I realize that I am entertained by watching people in the midst of a struggle for their lives. We rationalize the satisfaction we feel when we see a man destroy another by labeling one as good and the other as evil. In the real world no person is fully good or fully evil. Violence is never good, even if it is used to prevent a so-called greater evil, and it should never be glorified and used carelessly. War is never ever a good thing, and it is truly sad that there are people who use it as an extension of political policy and then claim it to be good. Killing will never make one’s enemies respect anyone. You can force people to do as you wish while you put a gun to their heads, but the instant the gun is not aimed, they will do as they wish. The only way to achieve peace is to prepare for peace. To prepare for war is to invite its occurrence, for when we have finely honed weapons we are likely to use them even though we do not need to. Killing more breeds more killing. Fear should exist only to alert one to danger, and it should never be used to manipulate others for the purpose of propaganda.

I wish it were easier for us to love each other, because perhaps then we wouldn’t see as much terrible strife in the world. Why can we not see everyone as a sister or a brother? If we all thought of ourselves as a large family wouldn’t it be harder to hate each other? Wouldn’t it compel us to respect one another in a way that is impossible if we see ourselves so separately? Why does the color of our eyes, hair, or skin still matter so much? My mother has blue eyes and white skin, and my father has brown eyes and brown skin. I have two cousins who look Asian (each being half). For me it has always been easier to imagine that even though we all look very differently from one another we are still related to each other. Perhaps I wish we all saw ourselves as a part of a larger family because mine was always so small.

Staring into a group of trees being blown around by the wind one day not long ago I suddenly realized something that seemed very profound to me, for it forced me to re-evaluate some beliefs that I held up until then. I realized that a peaceful non-violent society is completely possible, it only requires that we all desire it to be. If everybody simply decides one day that fighting and killing should cease, they will. It forced me to realize that there are people, especially people in positions of leadership, who truly do not want peace and who desire to be able to kill on a whim. There are many who still believe that if enough people want to kill somebody that they should have the right to do it. I have formerly believed that peace could be created at the end of a war in a way analogous to what happened in Germany and Japan after World War 2. I no longer believe that war can bring peace in any lasting way because for true peace to exist everybody must agree to have peace. I feel sad though, because I feel that practically, real peace will never occur. I think each person would need a planet to him or herself for that to happen, because then nobody is superior or inferior, no power relations or inequalities will drive others to abuse their skills and abilities to the detriment of others. I think the reason that I feel such peace when walking through uninhabited wilderness is that it becomes easy to forget about all of the nutty people in the world. All that remains is me and the rocks, trees, and dirt. The simplicity and beauty of it all is awe-inspiring.

Cousin

2004-08-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

Last night I met one of my cousins for the first time. She flew into SFO and I met my uncle (and his girlfriend) there to meet her as she arrived from the Philippines. I've only seen pictures of her when she was a baby, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw her, but I could see some resemblances to my uncle in her face. While my uncle was in the Navy he spent some time in the Philippines, and he ended up marrying a Philippina woman. He has two kids, a girl and a boy, but so far I've only met the girl. I was surprised at how friendly she was, and I thought that when she gets a little older she's going to be chased after by a million guys because she is very pretty too. She is seventeen and she has already graduated from high school. We were only able to talk for a couple of hours, so I wasn't able to find out very much about her, but I had a feeling that she and I would get along pretty well. Now I want to meet my other cousin, her brother.

Her flight came in around 8:00 p.m., but she didn't get out of customs until after 9:00 p.m.. I had to take the BART to get to the airport, which was pretty easy as I found out, but it took over an hour due to frequent unscheduled stops. I didn't get home until just after one in the morning. I'm pretty happy to have met my cousin. I've always had a very small family, or at least a pretty distant family, and it is nice to meet some of my relatives who are closer to my age. She can speak three languages fluently: English, Tagalog, and Cebuano. She is going to live in Oregon with her father, and I don't get up there very often, but I'd like to visit more now. It sucks ass getting there without a car though.

Belief and Dissent

2004-07-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

Today I’m feeling like getting a little political. I have an orkut account, just as I have a friendster account, and I noticed yesterday that somebody had sent a mass e-mail to an orkut group that I am in (AnyoneButBush in2004) that said the following:

IF you don't like what we have in america MOVE. If you think you can do a better job then run.

Now even though that e-mail was pretty lame in its argumentative power, and was obviously written by someone less than eloquent, it upset me and I felt an immediate need to send a response. My response was not well thought out, for there was a little bit of adrenaline in my fingers as they glided over the keyboard, but this is what I wrote in reply (and sent to the entire group AnyoneButBush in2004):

So you're one of those "love it or leave it" types are you? That is honestly one of the most "unamerican" and bigoted attitudes. The whole point of democracy is to allow and even encourage dissent. Our president is not a ruler by divine right, and we all have a right to disagree with his policies and indeed to do anything within the law to see that he is not re-elected. Bush is one of the dumbest, most inept presidents that the US has had, and he is pursuing reactionary policies that only benefit the rich. Another thing, saying that if we don't like the way that things are then we should run for office is also a pretty ridiculous thing to say. We don't need to run for office to change things. The point of a representative democracy is for those of us who do not desire a political life, yet have an opinion and desire to express it, to make changes by VOTING. When John Kerry kicks Bush's ass in November perhaps you might think of moving out of the country to rid us of your "love it or leave it attitude." Go to a dictatorship, the kind of state where people think as you do.

I feel kind of bad now because I think I went a little overboard with my response, but that is only because I feel so strongly about what it was that I was writing about. I think that her stance is an example of one of the most insidious characteristics of the mental disease that has swept this country after the terrorist attacks in September of 2001. All of a sudden it became taboo to criticize the president or any of his administration’s policies. Look where that got us: another Vietnam-like war in Iraq, weakened relations with traditional allies, a weakened United Nations, a so-called patriot act that eats away at all of our civil liberties, tax breaks that barely help people that need it but that give wads of money to those who don’t, and a popularization of the totalitarian mindset which states that if one doesn’t agree with those who are in power then one should leave the country. I really wonder what it is that encourages people to think that criticizing the president, or the government for that matter, should not be done. I do not advocate anarchy, and I would not recommend attempting to change anything about the government by force; I think that as long as one acts in a way that is not directly harmful to others, then it is healthy to criticize and give vent to dissatisfactions. As Thoreau said in his essay on “Civil Disobediance”:

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts—a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be

"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried."

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

We all need to understand that diversity, especially including diversity of opinion, is something which is good and healthy. There should be no one way seeing how things are or should be, though I believe there can exist better interpretations. We need to all listen to each others’ arguments about what should be, and not take the stance that if you don’t agree with me then get away from me. I admit that in my reply I used a rhetorical method by which I shot back using a similar argument to what I was reacting against when I said that she should move to another country if Kerry won, but that was not an argument expressing my own true sentiments, but rather a somewhat tongue in cheek way of showing her what it would be like to have that same argument used against her. Of course I really don’t believe that she should leave the country, even though I find her attitude offensive. I want her to examine why it is that she thinks that way, and whether or not it is really consistent with other beliefs that she holds. Perhaps she was raised in a family where questioning the authority figures was not tolerated, and she has extended that principle more generally.

I myself am strongly opinionated, but I do not consider myself closed-minded, for there is a big difference between holding an opinion passionately and firmly, and refusing to change one’s opinion. If one is closed-minded then one holds opinions strongly, but without regard to evidence or reason; closed-minded people will simply not deign to even listen to an opposing argument, and do not bother themselves with giving an explanation of why they believe or disbelieve something. Likewise, open-mindedness is not characterized by switching opinions easily and quickly, but rather by being receptive to new and different arguments and ways of seeing things; open-minded people care about why they believe what it is they believe, and that is precisely why they are prepared to change their beliefs or opinions when a good reason is given to do so. A person is not open-minded simply because they hear a new interpretation or statement of belief and immediately accept it, for that is characteristic of gullibility, lack of confidence in one’s own ability to find truth, impressionability, or plain simple-mindedness. Feeling strongly about one’s beliefs can certainly contribute to a desire to not discard them for another, and in that respect people who hold strong opinions are often mistaken for those who are closed-minded. Those with strong opinions just require stronger arguments to compel a change of belief, and cannot be too affected by facile arguments, but if those strong arguments are given, then open-minded people who possess strong opinions will gladly revise their beliefs whereas closed-minded people will not. That is the distinction that I see between being closed-minded and being opinionated, and that is the basis by which I feel proud to call myself opinionated (in the sense of one who holds strong opinions) and open-minded.

We people of the United States need to constantly fight to ensure that tolerance, equality, and personal freedoms are enjoyed by all. Fight against the “love it or leave it” mentality, and keep the US from becoming a totalitarian state. Germany fell into totalitarianism precisely because the attitude that one should not criticize the ruler or government became popularized, and eventually enforced. Germany had an enemy on which it could pin many of its problems, and now we have the so-called war on terror which allows politicians to argue for weakening our rights and freedoms. We can choose to elect the military as the solution to problems in international relations and move closer and closer to an old imperialism and feudalism, or we can choose to address international problems diplomatically and through organizations of law such as the United Nations. We can allow the economic concerns of large businesses and corporations to dictate environmental and general economic policy, or we can choose to do what is best for all people as a whole and not just what is best for a small percentage of them. To everyone who reads this blog, please vote for Kerry in November and remove the man who believes that the military is the solution to all of our problems, and that what is good for big business is good for us all.

Finding a Dentist

2004-07-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was reminded how very fun it can be to seek medical help of any kind. In this country of HMO oriented medical care, where to get any kind of satisfying personal interaction you must have wads of money, before you can even think about talking about the problem that is bringing you seek help you first have to square away bureaucratic requirements. I just wanted to see a dentist, but quickly it turned into a four hour long search. The first place that I called was a dentist’s office, and they tried to tell me that I needed to call my insurance company first before I could even think about making an appointment. Now, I don’t want this to sound bad, but when the receptionist answered and had a very thick Chinese accent combined with a very curt, busy-Chinese-restaurant-like-attitude, I immediately didn’t feel like calling back. It turned out that she didn’t know what she was talking about anyways, so I scratched them off of my list. I actually called Kaiser next to see if they could just prescribe me some antibiotics, because being the astute pseudo-doctor that I am (this is sarcasm) I have already determined that I have a gum infection around my wisdom teeth. But as I thought, they wanted me to have an appointment with a dentist before they could prescribe me any antibiotics. I really can’t blame them, because I certainly know that antibiotics are really over-prescribed (too many people don’t even take them as they should). So the next place that I called was my dental insurance, and they were nice enough to tell me that I really didn’t need to talk to them at all actually, and that I can go to any dentist that I want to, and all the dentist needs to know is my group number.

Ok, so then I started calling dentists again, and instead of randomly choosing this time I tried calling dentists that friends and friends of friends had recommended to me. One of the places that I called didn’t have work hours during Monday, and the second strangely enough turned out to be pretty good. I was surprised by the fact that the person on the other end of the phone was actually friendly and seemed to know what he was talking about. Ahhh, finally an appointment was in sight. But it turned out that the dentist that I was recommended to was booked until the 6^thof August. He has a partner however who had an appointment on Friday, so I ended up signing up for that one. Finally I may have a dentist. For the past week and a half I’ve been feeling pretty run-down, and my energy level hasn’t been very good. I finally thought that it would be a good idea to try to get this gum thing taken care of. I tend to wait until problems become so large that I can’t ignore them anymore because I hate dealing with all of the doctor-type crap.

Knowledge in a World of Chaos

2004-07-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

Everything in this world is so chaotic. Sometimes I feel as though any order that is apparent is not actually order, but merely a semblance of order. Perhaps our perception sometimes constructs an image of order when order does not actually exist, like looking through thick, coke-bottle glasses which distort everything to make it look nearly indistinguishable. It looks like there is order because all of the crazy random crap is smushed into the same warped image to create a semblance of solidity or order. It could even be compared with a resolution problem: when we look at a jar filled with lake water we see only brown or green tinted water which appears very homogenous, but as we view it closer and closer we see that there is actually a flurry of activity; animals scooting left and right, which end up feeding on yet smaller forms of life. But then again, no matter how far down you go, there remains a strange balance of order and chaos. Looking at the crystals of a metal at an atomic level could convince you that as you look closer and closer there is in fact more and more order, but if you look beyond the rough atomic exterior and track the constituents the picture becomes so much harder to understand with the multitudes of electrons flitting about, following Heisenberg’s uncertainty. We cannot even conceptualize a path that an electron follows, and indeed it is only represented probabilistically.

Perhaps our minds in their childlike simplicity can only provide an approximation of the external world, providing us with apparent order even as chaos is all that exists. We constantly place our stupid rules on things which perhaps no rule can ever be placed. How can we know that these cavalier intentions can ever succeed? We cannot. I am conflicted by a conviction that the only way to proceed in life is through the path of experience, and the belief that any knowledge is ultimately impossible. There is no such thing as a priori knowledge, and those people who say there is or even can be ascribe supernatural powers to the mind that I find no evidence for. All things that humans have discovered or thought of have been suggested, or even ripped directly from the world of experience. Some mathematicians like to assert that a priori knowledge is possible in mathematics, but the very origin of mathematics came about through an attempted analogy of the world of number. Our psychological perception of number led to the first investigations of mathematics, and all subsequent researches have been guided, or supported by material drawn initially, perhaps even subconsciously, from the world of experience.

Everything that we know, or think that we know, has come from our experience in the world. Any knowledge that we can possibly have can only be obtained from experience. Yet we will never know whether or not any of this supposed knowledge is actually knowledge (in the sense of objective truth) or an illusion present only in our minds. So at the base of everything knowledge is ultimately impossible, and yet I believe that some kind of knowledge, however flimsy and imperfect, is possible if we only observe the chaotic patterns and impose order upon them. But these impositions of order could lead us further away from the truth, if it exists, and yet they are necessary for us to function in this chaos. Animal instinct is merely a hard-wired version of knowledge gained by experience, and though it is also gained through experience, it is the experiences of those countless ancestors which came before us which have shaped those instincts. In that sense even our irrational biological impulses have been shaped by the ages of chaotic reality, and in some very fundamental sense are based completely upon empirical data, and in no way upon anything which is a priori, or anything which is through some stretch of the imagination removed from the world of reality. So everything that we are, even those things that we cannot even explain about ourselves, is derived from experience with that which is.

One of the hardest things to accustom oneself to is the knowledge that no matter what we do, no matter how we try or think, we will never ever be able to verify any of our hypotheses about the nature of reality. We will never ever come to a solution of anything of which we can be sure beyond any possibility of contradiction. We will never be able to verify anything. Coming to that realization is similar to having the ground beneath one’s feet suddenly ripped away as though a chasm is suddenly opening underfoot in the middle of an earthquake. Is there anything that we can hold on to anymore? But that feeling of non-solidity in the end is only a manifestation of anxiety, for though we felt the earth shake we remain standing in the same place we were before. We find that after all we can rely on many of our assumptions and hypotheses, and that in fact some of them never seem to be contradicted. Thus, even though we cannot be certain of their absolute truth, we can nevertheless rely on them practically as guides through life. And as long as we do not ask whether or not our assumptions are correct, or probe the depths of our foundations, we shall be able to more or less sail comfortably through life.

But too much reliance upon our inferences and hypotheses about reality can at times bring us to the brink of evil or death. Racism, for example, is caused by an overgeneralization that tends to lump very different individuals into one category that has been created to describe only a minority of individuals. Perhaps certain experiences can create a frame of racism, but the extension of such a model can lead to great injustices. Errors of judgment can result also in loss of life, for incorrectly perceiving the world that we inhabit can cause us to act under erroneous assumptions. As a simple example, if you see a truck moving slowly down the street, you may decide that it is safe for you to cross, but perhaps that truck is in truth moving very rapidly straight at you, and as you step into the intersection it smashes you into the ground. We often are victims of our own misperceptions, misconceptions, and self-constructed illusions. One of the important skills to master in life is the art of judgment. Not moral judgment, for that is mere reconciliation of action with cultural or social norms, but judgment about what is real, and most likely to be true. It is an art because at the base there must be unfounded assumptions before any method can be created, and thus even science, which I believe is perhaps the most excellent method for uncovering any small amount of truth, is based upon beliefs and assumptions which are unverified.

Here Today Gone Tomorrow

2004-07-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

How will we work through today? Why not ask, how will we work through any day, for essentially, how is any other day different from today? Oh, but there are particulars that you could refer to as making each day totally distinguishable and even unique, so you could argue. But I am thinking on a slightly more abstract level, a level where I am trying to determine what it is that is really important in life. Each day we do such similar things, even if the particulars are usually pretty different, and my question is how we can go through life without feeling as though we’ve wasted most of it on things that in the end we don’t care about. Well, I guess some things could be thought to contribute to a kind of maintenance of life such as eating, cleaning, sex, and other basic processes, and without those things we would cease to exist both as individuals and as a greater society and culture of people.

There are things that we must do every day or we will perish much sooner than we otherwise could. Those things wouldn’t necessarily cause us much feeling that we’ve wasted our lives at the end because they were so very necessary to keep us alive up to that point, and if we enjoyed them to the fullest, then we could claim to have had the basic elements of a good life I think. Perhaps that is so, but aren’t there other things that we feel that we need before we can say that we were truly satisfied? Because moving away from those things that are necessary for daily life we travel to those things that are necessary to maintain life in the long run, and even eventually to those things that we feel we couldn’t live a fulfilling life without. For example, if one were to stay in prison one’s entire life, having only four concrete walls, but were given all of those things necessary to maintain life indefinitely, but only those things, would that person be happy? Perhaps if that person didn’t know what it was that he or she was missing outside of the prison he or she wouldn’t have such a sense of loss. Perhaps then even somebody living in a prison could be happy in some way, but wouldn’t it follow from that reasoning that if that person were to find out what is possible outside of the prison, blue skies, the smell of the earth after it rains, or being able to run as fast as one can through long grass, that it would produce immediately a feeling that he or she was not living his or her life in the way that he or she could be? It would be that knowledge of what is possible, but is not at present possible, that would cause a feeling of discontent. So one could argue then that to be happy we must be ignorant of what is possible in life, and we must keep our heads down and only think about those things that have been sanctioned in some way or another by whatever group (such as a church) or individual (spiritual leader-a.k.a. charlatan) that it is we choose to follow. That argument would stress that to be happy we would need to hold ourselves back from imagining the possibilities that life presents us with, and to be content with what we feel is most within our reach. But we are not prisoners in life, are we? Can we really transfer the logic of a prisoner to the logic of our daily lives? I believe that we cannot do so as simply as one might think.

There are things in life that keep us healthy and happy that we may never possess or experience apart from in our imaginations, and it is when we give up on such things that we truly begin to decay and to lose vitality. One is a sense of hope that things will be better in the future than they are now. We have ideas about how life and love should be, and as long as we remain idealistic everything is constantly exciting; it is only when we come to the point where we believe we know how things actually are that we lose the old excitement and energy that we had when we were less jaded. Experience brings some very positive benefits, but at the same time it has the tendency to solidify our thoughts and opinions in such a way that we believe we know things that we may in reality not actually know. In fact, the very idea that we know anything absolutely is most certainly false. So perhaps one of the keys to remaining happy is not to cut ourselves off from imagining what we could have, and what is possible, but rather to simply maintain hope of improvement.

I suppose there are points in time where we could say that we are happy, and that it has little to do with any sense of hope. So many things have the potential to cause that kind of happiness, and strangely enough it is very difficult to predict what will cause that happiness in a longer term sense. If we were to suddenly win 50 million dollars, I think it is safe to say that most of us would be immediately happy, for we will feel that we are receiving a great fortune. We imagine all of the things that we have been hoping for in the future, but that we weren’t able to do, or wouldn’t have been able to do without such resources. That is related to the happiness of the prisoner who realizes what lies outside of his prison, and who is told that he or she will be set free. But later, when the money is actually used, often times it is the case that the person who thought that their life would be a utopia soon realizes that they still catch colds, people still treat them the same, and some of the things they wanted to spend their money on aren’t so great after all. Life is still, after all, life.

There is something else that is necessary to maintain a longer lasting feeling of happiness. Many people describe it as spiritual, and think that it can be found in religion, and accordingly they look for it there. Others try to find it in something else, whatever it may be, and some may even determine that it lies nowhere else but within ourselves the entire time, under our noses. I cannot tell you what it is that can make you happy, and to tell you the truth I am having difficulty determining what it is that makes me happy, but I have this sneaking suspicion that we all have something within ourselves that we can follow to achieve an amount of happiness.

Happiness is in internal, mental thing. It is not something that can be conjured from without, from the external world. That should give us a clue where to look to find it. There are things, such as a beautiful sunset or the taste of blueberry pancakes, that are not necessary for life, and are not even necessary for happiness, but that do contribute to happiness in a way that is very hard to characterize. I think that a characteristic of sadness, an opposing emotion to happiness, can be fought off by even such simple pleasures as are given above. All hell may be breaking loose in one’s life, but sometimes the right blueberry pancake at the right time can work wonders and remind one of how good life can be. Perhaps one of the keys to finding happiness is being able to remain open to such pleasures, and being able to find new ones in an ever changing world.

Heraclitus spoke of a never ending flux, and truly that seems to be a fairly accurate description of this universe. It then follows that it is necessary to be able to adapt to change, and to never settle upon one way of seeing the world or the various things within it. When I was a child I used to hate eating certain types of foods, and many of those things that I love eating now are things that I once disliked. Has the world changed, or have I? I think we both have changed, but the point here is that what makes us happy now is not necessarily what will make us happy in the future, or what once made us happy in the past. Ichi go ichi e. Every experience that we have is unique, and will never happen again. Maybe that’s another reason it is so damned difficult to figure out what it is we like and dislike. We are trying to find correlations that don’t necessarily exist, or rather assuming that relations exist where they do not. In any case, perhaps the best thing to do in the end is to listen to that internal voice which pipes up now and again, trying to tell us something. Can all of this consideration have simply boiled down to the somewhat trite expression: follow your instincts? Well,I think it’s not such a bad idea actually. Perhaps we simply need to practice listening to them more.

Daily Life

2004-07-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a pretty good day, though I got a little sunburned. I went to a picnic slash barbecue in Tilden park right next to lake Anza with some friends of a friend. Afterwords I came home and did laundry for several hours, including handwashing my keikogi and hakama, because they were getting to the point where they needed a good washing. Later on in the night I watched Japanese television on channel 8. If I keep up watching Japanese tv every weekend I think my listening skills will get much better. I really need to take a class, but I won't be able to take one next semester because I'll have too many classes that I have to take. I'll be taking two harder classes; the first class is on graduate level introductory probability; the second class is on computational methods in biostatistics, and sounds a little more advanced. The other two classes that I'll be taking are less worrisome because they both are essentially programming classes, and neither have midterms or finals. The thing that will complicate matters the most will be the fact that I'll be working for 20 hours a week while I'm taking those four classes.

I remember as an undergraduate taking sometimes only three classes in a semester (during my more lazy semesters) and not having to work at all. I still felt overwhelmed sometimes, though I'm sure it was mainly because the classes I was taking were not exactly what one might consider easy-pass-classes. I always thought that it was insane to take more than two math classes per semester because there was always homework each week, and it would often take me around two days to finish even one homework. With other classes as well, especially classes where they make you read page after page of ridiculousness, it could be quite stressful. The classes in graduate school are somewhat less stressful, though I'm sure I'll hit a point next semester where I wish I could just run away for a week or two to get away from the constant heavy work load. I'm not the kind of person who thrives on being loaded down with things to do all of the time. I truly enjoy my leisure time, and I want to maximize it. Besides, it has been well demonstrated that stress is most certainly a risk factor for poor health, and many diseases in general.

I'm at work right now, and I just got a call from my roommate (more precisely housemate since we don't share the same room, but housemate sounds strange to me sometimes) and before he returns a car that he rented over the weekend he wants to take a trip over to Berkeley Bowl and he invited me to come along on my lunch hour. I didn't really eat breakfast yet, and I'm hungry for lunch, so I'll probably get some goodies there. Anyways, I should probably end this mundane blogging session now to get some work done before going to lunch. Until next time...

Anger at Religion

2004-07-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

Here we are again on a Friday, looking forward to the weekend which will begin after about 5:30 pm. I just had a short conversation with a friend regarding my least favorite topic, religion. I don't know why, but few things can bother me like religion. Perhaps part reflex and part genuine distaste for it governs the way I react towards it, but every time it enters discussion I get an adrenaline boost and immediately a small amount of anger. I should first say that I have had very many friends who are religious, so I do not immediately dislike people who are religious, but I really hate religion. It upsets me that people that I like can hold such ridiculous beliefs, but I do not think less of them because of it. I grew up surrounded by sheep who bleated religious aphorisms without ever understanding or feeling what it was they were saying or why they said it. Religious people say things not because they believe them (the use of the word believe in the form of "belief," is twisted by religious people, for they confuse it with the word faith) but because they were told that is a good thing to say by their religious leader or parent. Religious people are not critical of what they are being taught; they have a very unsettling tendency to accept religious statements at face value. Just because some words are in some old dusty bible religious people seem to think that they suddenly have greater validity than they would otherwise. I can not emphasize how very opposed to religion I am. It is an enemy to rational thought, and I have allied myself with rational thought, so by extension religion is my enemy. I hate all these stupid fucking christians that are in this country who believe that it is their right to tell you what to believe, and the horrible influence their stupid teachings and indoctrinations have on the vitality of thought of the people in this country. I have found that many of my closer friends (with one or two big exceptions) are actually foreigners, and they like me are not religious (though they are usually much less opposed to religion than I am). I like people from Germany and Japan because they usually seem to not be very religious, and therefore much more rational. I cannot stand, and I can be emphatic here, I CANNOT stand the propensity of religious people to defend beliefs that have absolutely no evidence in the real world that support them. Their whole system of belief rests upon foundations of air, of imagination. It is no wonder that they cling to horrible beliefs and archaic practices that existed thousands of years ago. I personally think that one of the main reasons that this country and so many others are as fucked up as they are is that too many people are religious, and therefore have not developed sufficient rationality to be able to examine what it is they do and why they do it. People in this country are certainly not critical enough of current practices and beliefs. I feel absolutely exasperated when I am arguing against religious people, telling them what I think, and they suddenly say that I am very closed-minded because I require that some better evidence be given for things other than that they are given in the bible, or that they simply believe them. Now who is the close-minded one there? The one who insists upon some measure of validity before accepting an idea or one who insists on believing it even though there is no good justification other than an emotive one? But because epistemologically we can never truly know anything with perfect certainty I cannot give an argument that is completely watertight. Always these religous people will be able to fight my arguments to some degree because experience and perception are flawed. They are flawed, but they provide a much better basis for accepting a belief than pulling it out of thin air or an old book. Why isn't it that people believe that what really happens in the world and our experiences of what happens can provide the only basis by which we can accept or reject beliefs? Why is it that even though a belief may run counter to all experience and perception that these people seem so inclined to accept it? Some will give arguments that are essentially appeals to authority: there was someone else who experienced this, and we are going to accept this belief because they experienced it, and thus we can admit it into the category of possible things. In the bible it talks of silly things such as burning bushes and voices coming from nowhere. Of course we know that bushes can burn, but is a forest fire and a hallucination really such a profound thing? Why should we have any reason to think that these events are anything other than madness in the mind of the perciever? I have never had any supernatural experience, and I am surprised when I tell this to other people and they seem surprised. "Oh, you haven't....I have..." Stupidity. Come on, your supposed supernatural experience was nothing other than a perceptual abberation. Either that or you were experiencing a real event but were interpreting it falsely. Others will say that my explanation is simply too facile for them in the way that it so easily explains away the supposed supernatural events, but all I can say is: Occam's Razor. Given all interpretations, the simplest one, and the one which conforms best to the rest of experience is the best one. Why is it also that religious people seem to make moral judgements based on other beliefs that have nothing to do with morality whatsoever? For example, there are religious people out there who think that I am terribly immoral because of my fervent hate of irrationality and religion. What does that have to do with morality? I think that I am more moral than most people who are religious. I believe that war, fighting, and violence can never benefit anybody; we are all losers in war (as said in the Cranberries song). How many stupid religious people are out there reading the new testament, saying they love Jesus and his teachings, just before they go off to war? How can that be? Didn't Jesus abhor degradation and violence? Why don't these religious people follow their own supposed beliefs? I don't even eat animals because I feel so terribly about taking the life of such beautiful creatures as I beleive animals are. I was struck very strongly by some of the arguments that Bertrand Russell gave in his book "Why I am not a Christian," and I agree with most of it, especially when he talks about how inconsistent religious people are with their own beliefs. They say one thing and do another. They make judgements on people, denouncing them as contemptible and then they turn around and do the same thing as the person that they were denouncing was doing. Religion does not foster free thinking, and it does not accept criticism or attempts to change its dogma. Wars have been fought over which interpretation of the bible should be believed in. People say that there are things that science and rationality cannot explain, and they assert that religion can explain them. Of course there are things that science and rationality cannot explain; rationality and science can never explain anything at a truly deep level. Explanations are not the point, the point is that there is absolutely no basis to beleive any of the teachings of religion because it does not conform to what we "know" about reality due to experience. I think that people who say that there are things that religion can explain but that science cannot are really saying that there are emotional needs that are met by believing in religion. They need comforting that they never recieved at home because their religious parents were so cold and inhuman to them. They are really saying that they don't like the idea of only looking for answers where we have a reason to believe that those answers are in any way plausible, accurate, and the least of all true. What answers can be found from religion that cannot be had from science and rationality? The answer to your existence? Isn't that something that we all decide for oursleves? Religion does not provide a blanket answer. Do people like religion because it helps them avoid any personal responsiblities for their own beliefs, thoughts, and actions? I think so. People don't like to take responsibility for their actions. It requires too much effort, and when it comes down to it, most people don't care enough to put forth the effort required to carefully choose their beliefs and actions wisely. Too many people are not willing to believe that their own beliefs are things that they choose to have. There are no absolute truths in this world, for all norms, morals, and conventions are created and maintained by people. The evil effects that our beliefs have on others can be mitigated if we change our beliefs to things that do not have such ill effects. If people suddenly realized that war is bad, and that killing people is evil, then wouldn't they make every effort to cease those things which contribute to them? I would hope so, but it seems that there are so many people in the world who are content with the idea that our moral systems were handed down by some god, and because of that we cannot make concious decisions to change them. That is yet another evil of religion. It creates unwillingness to correct harmful beliefs. For example, what did gay people ever do to the religious right-wingers? Why do they hate gay people so much that they wanted to change the constitution so that gay marriage is illegal? What is so very bad about somebody putting their penis into another persons ass? Does it kill people? No. Is it indicative of moral decline? No, and why would it be? What is the huge difference between putting a penis into a vagina and putting it into an anus? Does it suddenly make somebody a bad person? Hell no, and I reject the idea that gay people are immoral simply because they are sexually and emotionally attracted to people of their own sex. Believing crap like that reveals the attempt that religion makes to control the thoughts and actions of people under its umbrella. It is an attempt to manage societal control and harmony by rigidly providing a list of good and bad things. It is no different from a totalitarian state in the way that it operates. It does not trust people to be able to think for themselves. Why isn't it that religious people allow for changes in moral systems? Is it because it makes them question the validity of the rest of their beliefs, "if this is wrong then what about everything else?" Or perhaps it is because they are not actually concerned to be just, good, and moral? If the true goal were to be moral then it would be recognized that some modification and adjustment could be needed to create the best outcome. Perhaps people have different ideas of what morality is, and what its goal is? Most people probably do not envision a system of morals as something which even has a goal, they just believe blindly. Aren't morals things which are designed to promote social effects? If you aren't thinking about getting the key to heaven then isn't that the only other purpose that they could have. When did the observance of the rule become more important than the effect that the rule was supposed to produce? I love people who are struggling with finding truth in the world, and who are not blindly following everybody else. If there were a religion which promoted free thinking, self-discovery, and critical methods in determining beliefs perhaps I wouldn't be opposed to it at all. Especially if it embraced rationality. So far the closest that I've seen to that is Buddhism. Perhaps that is why I feel an affection for Buddhism that I certainly do not feel for other religions. Why aren't people more committed to rationality? Why do so many people steer clear of it? Shouldn't it be something that we strive for, though we may never achieve it? What is bad about rationality?

Bastille Day

2004-07-14T15:34:00.000-07:00

Today I went to La Note for lunch with my friend and co-worker. I love La Note breakfasts and lunches; usually I end up going during the weekend. Since today is Bastille Day they were giving free complimentary glasses of wine (red or white), and even though I make it normal practice never to drink before or during work, I gave in (my friend did as well so it was easier) and took the free glass of wine. I forget the brand, but it was a pretty good french wine. I have found that so far my favorite brand is Machiavelli Riserva, Chianti Classico.

Today I feel emptied

2004-07-10T03:11:00.000-07:00

How is it that each day can pass so uneventfully, and that we can allow this, always knowing that each day passed is one less left in life. I always say to myself that at some point in the future things will be better, and I'll finally get everything that it is that I want, and I'll be a better, more confident person. It seems as though that hypothetical future never materializes, for I'm always thinking that things will be better. I should say though, that things are actually going pretty well in my life; I'm just a very greedy perfectionist who is struggling with constant reminders that I am not perfect. I am not content with lukewarm feelings, yet at the same time I feel that our rationality is the only thing that has the potential to do good, and that can keep us sane in this messed up world. I try to distance myself from feelings even as I am hoping for stronger, more vital ones. I am like a stone attached to a rope, which is whirling in a circle; I am pushed by centrifugal and centripetal (I say this knowing that centrifugal forces are actually pseudo-forces in the analogy I am giving) forces. I will myself towards rationality, and non-emotionality, and yet I am always desiring stronger, more vital feelings. I want to love, and to have passion for things, but I am terrified of sadness, discontentment, and shame. I want to block the negative emotions without blocking the positive ones, but that does not always seem possible. I end up becoming erratic, having wild bursts of emotion punctuated by periods of placid calmness which is sometimes almost self-satisfied. I was always a Star Trek fan when I was growing up, and though I do not have much enthusiasm anymore for the shows or movies, I still have a soft spot in my heart for them. My favorite character was always Spock, the supremely logical half-vulcan, half-human. I wanted to be like him when I grew up. He appeared invincible to me; he always had the right answer, was not swayed by stupid emotionality, and he was physically very strong. I was so upset when they killed him in the third movie, and actually that moment, ridiculous and dorky as it may sound, has always stuck in the back of my mind, informing my sense of loyalty. I felt that he was the most noble person I had ever seen, and it made it very difficult for me to watch. When I was young I only vaguely understood what he meant when he said that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. That kind of self-sacrifice for the greater good seems so conspicuously absent to me in life. Spock was rational, but he was also perhaps the most moral of the entire rest of the crew. I have heard people say that they found him cold and robot-like, but I found the others on the show all too human, and accordingly disappointingly inconsistent. I liked Spock precisely because I could not imagine anybody like him in this world, though I think we would all be better off if that were not the case. I have not conciously tried to become Spock all of my life, and to tell the truth I have never really spent much time thinking about him apart from when I watched Star Trek, but I have for the last ten years been trying to stabilize myself emotionally, physically, and mentally in a Spock-like manner. I can almost liken my attempts to the building of foundations, pouring concrete, driving thick wooden beams deep into the ground so that at some point in the future I will be unshakeable. I want to always have the right answer, and to always be able to see a way through the bullshit of emotions, and I always want to be physically strong enough that I won't have to rely on anybody else. I want to be a solid, unwavering lodestone pointing north without fail. Every time that I lose control of my thoughts and emotions I feel such shame that I can barely communicate with other people. I have too much pride in my own very imperfect abillities, and I cannot stand to see my own imperfections let alone expose them to others. I so often feel that I wish that I could just turn into a powerful steel-cored stone; I want to be impenetrable, and immoveable. But aren't we all nothing more than ugly bags of mostly water? We are not constant by the very wiring of our brains, and the chemistry controlling our biology.

Jazz Dance

2004-07-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

Last night I did something that I don't normally do. I went to a Jazz dance class with my friend and roommate's girlfriend. I have done Kung-Fu in the past, and I'm still fairly flexible, so I thought it might not be too bad, but I felt pain that I haven't felt for a very long time. We had to do these bent-legged exercises that made my legs shake violently as they burned incessantly. It was the closest thing to torture that I've ever experienced, and the strangest thing about it is that I inflicted it upon myself. I didn't think it would be so hard. I am already very sore, and I have a Kendo class to go to tonight that I don't want to miss. I'm probably going to have a difficult class tonight too.

I know nothing

2004-06-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

Last night about a half hour after I laid down to sleep I had a weird experience (I would call it a dream, but I don't think I was fully asleep). I was lying in the dark, drifting in and out of conciousness, suffering from a headache brought on by excessive msg intake hours before, and around 1:00 am I slightly opened my eyes to look at the darkness washing the walls. I saw some long, spindly thing hanging over me off to the left a bit, it's joints and long legs glinting in the weak light filtering through the venetian blinds. It must have had legs that were nine inches long, and it was lowering itself on my bed. The next thing I knew I was yelling, and I jumped out of the bed and across the room to turn on the light. Of course there was nothing there when the light was on. I say it was an odd experience not because it was a nightmare, but because I wasn't able to tell the difference between when I was awake and sleeping. I think that I must have been mostly asleep when I thought I saw the spider thing, but I cannot tell when it was that I woke up. It was a continuous progression, for I was yelling and jumping up when I was still partly asleep I think, and part of the strangeness was that I was always aware of my surroundings even when I was still asleep. I once read a book called "The Chemistry of Concious States," and in it the author was saying that the mental state of someone with schizophrenia chemically resembles that of a sleeping person, except for the fact that the schizophreniac is awake. He went on talking about the dominant chemical systems of sleep and wakefulness, and spoke of experiences similar to mine that he himself had had. He was trying to make the reader understand what it might be like to be a schizophreniac; the experience of having schizophrenia is similar to being awake and aware of one's surroundings, yet still dreaming, and I suppose the converse is also true. All throughout growing up one of the things that scared me the most was the idea of losing my mind and no longer being in control of my thoughts or perceptions. I once saw an HBO special on schizophrenia and I was terrified to learn that it often is not manifested until young adulthood. Some people who had schizophrenia to varying degrees were interviewed, and they seemed so out of control, so involved in their own fantasy lands that they could barely function. I always want to be in control of myself, and that is one reason why I have always been terrified of drugs in general (though I allow alcohol). When people lose their minds they lose the very essence of who they are. It is true that we are constantly changing throughout our lives, and in a sense we are never exactly who we were at any time in the past, but there is something that provides a certain amount of continuity linking the past and the present, and that link is the mind. Our ability to remain who we have been is solely mediated by the brain, and once it is damaged so also is personal identity. We are shaped by the experiences that we have through the course of time, and our memories of those experiences control who we are. If the memory is not present, then we are not who we would otherwise have been. Sometimes I feel like I am asleep even though I am awake, though I have never had hallucinations and have never actually had any abnormal experiences in that regard, but in a philosophical kind of way I feel as though I am not sure what is real and what is not. In that sense we are all asleep, because we can never know anything really; blind reliance on sensory perception has been shown to be extremely flawed. The crazy thing is that we interact with the world through the senses that we have, and everything that we know about the world we have gleaned through imperfect information. It is thus possible, and in some cases probable, that some of the beliefs that we hold most dearly are fatally flawed and perhaps wholly inaccurate. We have built towers of stone on a foundation of quicksand, and constantly we run after mirages in the distance only to find hot, steaming earth when we draw near. Some people have put forth the interpretation that truth and reality are relative constructs, and that therefore each person has his or her own reality or truth that is valid. We cannot reliably determine whether there is or isn't any objective reality or truth, and so the relative interpretation cannot be challenged in therms of its veracity. However, we can attack it on other grounds because it promotes a world view that is certainly not conducive to having a smoothly operating society. For example, what would the result be if people started to believe that murder and cannibalism a la dahmer was a good thing. Relative truth promotes chaos and anarchy. But who chooses what is true if there is an objective truth? That is something which religious and political leaders have done throughout the millenia, and which is constanly recapitulated in small scale every day when somebody tells you something which you can choose to believe or not believe. How do we know what to believe? When do we trust ourselves and when do we trust others? If you were brought up religiously you probably have a greater capacity to trust what other people tell you because that is what religion trains you for. There is a very delicate balance that we must find to be able to function properly in this world. I have always had great respect for individualism, and for originality of thought, but of course limits must always be drawn, and those limits are so often arbitrary. How do we choose a set of principles that we want to structure our lives or society by? We can almost all agree that murder is a bad thing, and consequently we have minimized its incidence as much as we can in society. But we are not so clear on most other issues. In fact we are not so clear even on that issue, for there are those who believe in the death penalty (people who don't think that giving death is such a bad thing after all) and those who don't. We are all crazy animals, running around bumping into each other and accomplishing nothing that is lasting or important. We are like a big beaker full of chemicals in dynamic equilibrium, though sometimes it can hardly be said that we are in any kind of equilibrium at all. It is a miracle that we can find people with whom we can share our thoughts and feelings and have them be understood at some level (though we will never be understood at the deepest of levels). In Donnie Darko the crazy old lady says to him that "every living thing dies alone," and I can't help but think that is exactly the way things are. We are all so very alone, and we feel alone, and the only way that we can overcome that deep feeling of aloneness is to surround ourselves with friends, and to have relationships with other people. It makes us feel as though we are not the only person in the world. That is another motivation for religion in fact; the presence of a benevolent higher being makes us feel cared for and watched over as though we were children feeling comforted by the presence of our parents. We struggle with being alone, and most people do not even conciously realize it. We give it other names to make it more palatable, we deny the truth that we feel in our bones, and in the end we despair. I believe that one main reason that we are always looking for someone that we can love and who will love us in return is that we hope to feel as though we have a partner in life, somebody who is so close that they can understand us, and consequently remove the feelings of lonliness that we harbor within. People are not driven ultimately by rational concerns, but more certainly by our raw emotions. We are all ultimately selfish, and we are all interested in people who make us feel better about ourselves. We all want to be in control all of the time. Tears for Fears said it right when they made the song, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." The way I see it, people are trying to minimize their suffering by taking from other people, trying to find a path through life that hurts the least, and every once and a while they find a traveling companion who can help them out in a kind of a mutualistic relationship. There are parasites, symbiotes, carnivores, and herbivores: those who harm others without destroying them to make themselves feel better; those that benefit from others without giving or taking anything from them; those who feed on others as though they were meat, destroying lives as a matter of course; and those that try their hardest to remain independent of others, trying to find happiness through self-introspection and discipline. The greatest challenge that I face every day is to carry out the day in such a way that I feel as though I am doing something that matters, as though I am making progress, as though I am making myself a better person. However sad and depressing it is to consider the truth of the world there is still an important thing that we must hold on to if we are to keep on moving and not succumb to the weight of the pain of life, and that thing is the hope that things will be better. We need to believe that goodness exists, and that there are people who really care about us because they see things in us that are beautiful, and not simply because we do something for them. I think that just about the most noble kind of love is the kind that is nearest to admiration, because if it is true it is not about taking anything from another person or thing, but simply enjoying the fact that it exists. The endeavor to preserve something because you find it beautiful is one of the highest virtues. When I was younger I thought that I knew what love was, and I thought that it was something that was just supposed to happen in certain circumstances. I now think that I don't know anything about what love is. I feel that I know less and less the more I learn. This is not a hopeless situation though, because I believe that this is the way that things need to be. I believe that true education does not consist of cramming more and more facts (dogma that other people tell you to believe) into one's head, but rather it consists of learning that we don't really know anything; the existence of a "fact" is a fallacy, for everything is essentially an opinion. Learning is the process of determining how to think so that in the future one can find one's own truth instead of seaching after somebody else's. I have a good friend who always says that he thinks that stupid people are happy, and that smart people are not. I have disagreed with his assesment, but I think I have a theory that would fit with an observation that stupid people are happy and smart people are sad: stupid people don't know that they actually know nothing, and so are comforted by lies and misconceptions; smart people have an inkling of the fact that they don't actually know much about anything, or that it is not even possible to really know anything. I'd have to say though that I've met plenty of stupid people who were unhappy, and even those who seem happy on the surface I think are not happy deep inside. Smart people can be happy too, but I belive that when they are happy they do not lose sight of the pain and suffering that exists in life so their happiness seems more bittersweet, more fragile, and so much more precious. I also must say that generalizations cannot ever cover all of the special cases in the world, so any statements such as these are on some level just so much hot air, but a small defense of them is that to understand that the extreme complexity of the world can only be understood by idealizations, generalizations, and abstractions. How can people be classified in the first place into categories of stupid or smart? How can we even say for sure who is happy and who isn't? None of this is possible, but thinking about things in such a general framework gives us the possibility of understanding some, if not all, of the underlying structure of our reality. That is the idea at least; it has been used in physics as a way to find knowledge about the universe, and it provides us with a method, less trustworthy though it may be in a setting of lax or no rigor, of figuring things out in a more mundane setting. This world is so colossally sad and so magnificently beautiful.

Musical Interlude

2004-06-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

This weekend I was in San Francisco walking around downtown, and I spent a while in Virgin trying to listen to some new music. I was listening to one band whose cd I ended up buying when all of a sudden a live band started playing in Virgin. I was a little annoyed at first because I couldn't hear the music that I was listing to at the listening station that I was at, but when I gave up trying to listen to the cd that I was listening to and started listening to the band I was pleasantly surprised. They were a cool mix of what sounded to me like a cross between 80s punk and synth bands. There was a female lead singer with a kind of a punky, type A attitude, and I found her pretty sexy. There was another girl who played the guitar and synthesizers, and two guys who played a synthesizer and a guitar respectively. I instantly liked all of the songs that they played. I ended up doing just as Virgin wanted, and I bought their cd. The name of the band is The Fitness, and they're from Seattle. I've been feeling very disconnected from the whole new music scene for a long time now, so I'm really glad to find some stuff that I really like. I ended up buying another cd by another band that I've never heard of called Eighteen Visions: a typical recording studio band, overproduced, and with bad song range. I liked two of their songs though, and that was enough to make me shell out the $11 necessary to get it. It's one of those albums that I think I'll kind of wish that I hadn't bought once I get tired of the songs that I liked. I'd have to say that I think the entire album put out by The Fitness (Call Me For Together) is really good (and raw, which is a good thing if you're tired of that standard, tightly produced recording studio band crap). Maybe I'll go to Virgin more often. I like supporting Tower more, but the Tower in Berkeley just closed. I don't really like Rasputin or Amoeba: their staff are always curt, stupid, and annoying (too music snobbery for me). I became too tired of the whiny crap that was filling alternative radio stations, and of the light-headed stupid so-cal rock, so a couple of years ago I just gave up and stuck with all of the old stuff that I liked. What I'd really like to find is a band that reminds me of the early Smashing Pumpkins, or at least with some really good, innovative guitar driven stuff. I wouldn't mind finding some good techno/dance stuff kinda like of Orbital. I grew up listening to 80s new wave from Britain, and early on I had friends that introduced me to heavy metal. In high school it seemed to me that people were divided socially primarily based on what kind of music they liked, and I was always in the alternative group of people. I hung out with the people who had dyed hair, mowhawks, long-hair (I myself even had long hair until junior year when I shaved it really short). Most of my friends were some of the smarter people in my school, and like myself we weren't happy with being told how we should live our lives, so we adopted the anarchist-like punk kind of exterior as a means of trying to signal that we didn't want to be like the "normal" people were. I'm still pretty young now (26) but I feel like I was pretty immature back then. I wanted to rebel, to not do what I was told, but I didn't know what it was that I wanted; I ended up making things harder for myself, because when I finally figured out what it was that I wanted I had to work twice as hard for it as I would have otherwise. I still have an affinity for the rebels and misfits of the world, but I am no longer one of them. I'd like to think of myself as a non-conformist, and open-minded and accepting of difference, but I am no longer filled with anger, discontentment, and youthful angst. The funniest thing is that even though I wanted to rebel, and not be like the "normal" people, I wanted to fit in somewhere, and so I ended up changing to fit the punky rebel type. I never had it in my heart though, because I just couldn't be angry all of the time. I always wanted to be liked by everybody and still be the person who I was. I still think that punk girls (as long as they bathe and have good hygeine) are pretty hot, though I've never actually dated one; for some reason punk girls don't seem to be attracted by the nerdy math/science type that I've in part become. I suppose that because I was in the alternative group from a fairly early age that would explain why I'm not a big fan of rap. I feel like I just don't get it. Whenever I listen to rap it feels external; I can almost never relate to the things that they are saying, and the music just doesn't evoke any kind of emotional response. Sometimes when listening to a good song (for example, Silverfuck or Drown by the Smashing Pumpkins, or Let Down by Radiohead) I feel like the music is somehow expressing how I feel in sound; it is almost like looking in the mirror and seeing yourself reflected in it. I never have that experience with rap, and that's why it feels external to me. Actually, many of the rap songs that I have liked, I have liked because they have seemed more like comedy to me (how can anyone seriously talk about violence, crime, and sex like they do with a straight face) than like something that I could relate to. It just doesn't seem realistic or authentic to me. It just sounds like something made by someone with a huge, overblown ego and an agressive, alpha male attitude. Ok, this last thing is going to make me sound like a snob, (I don't mean it in a malicious way) but most rap artists' lyrics sound as though they don't even have a high school education. I certainly think that there is a place in the world for musicians who are not really well educated but nevertheless make great music, but if they are not able to leave the high school mentality behind I cannot relate to their music. Maybe I just need to meet someone who can help me understand rap. Maybe it's too late, and I can't relate to rap because I didn't experience the kind of life that rap artists did. Hell, I don't get the country thing either for many of the same reasons that I don't get rap music. However, I have an interest in understanding rap, whereas I have no interest in country music. I have a gut reaction against country music; the instant I hear the twangy accent and over-pronounced r I get an image in my head of a homophobic, racist, Bush-supporting, right-wing redneck. I have some friends who have pointed out to me that the Dixie Chicks got a lot of hell because they expressed dislike for some of Bush's policies (something which did warm my heart), and that it shows that not all country music people are the same. But the fact that they lost so much money and so much support of their old fan base helped underline the fact for me that most people who listen to country music are right-wingers: people I don't want to be associated with in any way, even implicitly. That's all for today.

The Box

2004-06-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

Today I'm feeling themeless. Sometimes themes are only boxes we step into to feel safe, and other times they provide necessary structure. I've always wanted to think "outside of the box," but what does that really mean? How do I know what is inside of that box? I've had teachers talk about this, and I've heard them explain thinking "inside the box" as linear thinking, and "outside the box" as non-linear. Having been educated in math these words mean very different things to me, and what I understand from them is that thinking "inside the box" equates to always following the same idea or method (any line is uniquely determined by only two points, thus if you know where you were on the line, and you know where you are now, then you know where you are going to be in the future...forever really). Thinking "outside the box" would then correspond to the willingness to change methods, paradigms, models, expectations, etc; in other words, it corresponds to open-mindedness of approach. Sometimes open-mindedness of approach can be effected by recognizing that the standard "linear" method is really the best way of solving the problem (whatever the problem is: expression, communication, a system of non-linear differential equations...). Other times "thinking outside of the box" means having the willingness to do what you think is right even while everybody is saying you're an idiot and you don't know what you're doing. Life is just one huge pattern, one great infinite dimensional array of signals. It is difficult sometimes figuring out what is white noise or interference, and what has meaning. What is meaning anyways? Does meaning exist in the absence of concious thought? To give a concrete example, if a random process (such as a monkey typing on a typewriter for billions of years) creates an object which is commonly thought to possess meaning (such as the works of Shakespeare) then does that object actually possess meaning, or is it an illusion? For instance, what if we had our monkey typing for 1e100 years, and he ended up writing every single word of Hamlet that Shakespeare wrote, would it have any meaning? What if Hamlet had never been seen before? Would we think that the monkey must understand english and thus that the process wasn't random after all, or would we throw it into the trash saying that it only appears to have meaning, but because it was randomly generated it is actually empty of meaning. Artists across the world have liked to give the interpretation that something has meaning if you think that it has meaning; in other words, that meaning is not objective, and is not a property of the thing, but rather a property of ourselves. Is communication possible under that interpretation? If you say something to me and I declare that it has no meaning, but you say that it does, then is it possible that we are both right? In this case I think the problem is the eternal metaphysical and epistemological problem of definition; meaning has not been well defined if it is possible for one thing to both have and to not have meaning. Meaning should not be allowed to be relative. Let's assume for now that there is some definition of meaning that enables an idea of absolute meaning (i.e. not relative meaning) to be established. Then the previous question about whether or not random signals can possess meaning takes on a new dimension because it is no longer dependent upon the viewer. It makes us question what the definition of a random signal is (what is randomness anyways?). Most often people think that randomness happens when we know that there will be some kind of an event (within some bounds of expectation) that we cannot predict deterministically (deductively). It is a lack of prediction that is implied, and not necessarily a lack of information. In that case a random process could conceivably convey information (if we know something about the distribution of a random variable we can inferentially convey or receive information). That's one of the ideas of hypothesis testing in statistics; using information about the distribution of a random variable to answer a question that we put forward about the random variable. So I think I'm ready to say that given the assumption that meaning can be objectively defined, then random processes (defined loosely as I have above) can conceivably convey information. Going back to the monkey and Shakespeare example, there is another thing that might bother us about the assertion that a randomly produced Hamlet has meaning: if the random Hamlet has meaning, then does that imply that some intelligent mind must have produced it? So the question then is whether or not randomly produced things that have meaning must have necessarily been created by the intention of some kind of an intelligence. But I think that this is really only true if we are talking about communication, because communication involves the transmission of meaning from one intelligent mind to another. Meaning by itself does not seem to require any kind of communication (unless it is part of the assumption necessary to incarnate it as an objective reality). But here if you say that communication is not part of the definition of meaning, then we run up against the idea that some things may have an objective meaning without having been created by some kind of intelligence. I find that idea very intriguing. If you admit the necessity of communication into the definition of absolute meaning, then you imply, with the monkey example, that either the monkey possesses some hidden intelligence (and knowledge of english), or that there is some mysterious, floating intelligence that guided the actions of the monkey. I reject that interpretation because it is not consistent with my other beliefs (atheism being one of them). So the difficulty of being alive boils down to finding meaning in the multitudes of signals inundating us. Some of us may choose to deal with this by withdrawing into the world of television and couch-potatoism, and by refelxively refraining from thinking about things that we don't immediately understand. Others like to dive into it all and become so confused they don't know which way is up anymore (or even what up is or why they might want to know anything about it). I suppose that there are still others who can make sense of it all through towering intellectual faculties. But anyways, the way I see it, "thinking outside of the box" in this context means having the willingness to face the unending stream of patterns and signals, and to attempt to deal with it all with whatever means available rather than hiding away and accepting without question the interpretations of the patterns that other people give (which to me is thinking "inside of the box"). It is better to question things, and try find one's own answers to questions, especially when we are supplied answers from others that are commonly (perhaps even universally) held. Thus, thinking "outside of the box," is actually an attempt at obtaining mental freedom (mental liberalism); it is a reflection of the ideal of free thought and belief, and in practice it is one of the highest regarded principles of problem solving. So if life can be reduced to discovering patterns and finding meaning in them, then life can be seen as a series of problems (not in the pejorative sense) which we try to solve. Whether or not we manage to solve them is another story, but if we can find delight in the process of solving these problems (enjoying the journey and not necessarily the destination; enjoying the way of getting to an answer rather than the answer itself) we can better enjoy life.

Misinformation

2004-06-24T16:14:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'm afraid I'm going to have to get a little political today. I was watching CNN while I was eating lunch (I like to walk home for lunch because I live only a block away from where I work, and that way I can eat my blueberry granola with vanilla yogurt) and they were talking about how in Iraq today around 100 people were killed in a huge wave of violence. And then some republican jack-off starts talking about how Bush handled things so well and so decisively by deciding to invade Iraq, and how much better off the american people are now that Saddam Hussein is in prison. I couldn't help but feel as though I was trapped inside 1984 (George Orwell) listening to big brother tell me how yesterday's enemy is actually now my friend, and we have never been enemies. Stupid republicans seem to like to propound a view of Bush and what he did in Iraq as such a wonderful strategic move, but somehow whenever they talk about particulars their grand ideology turns into a mystery of disconnected statements and ridiculous equivocations. Ok, first off, we would not have invaded Iraq if it hadn't been for the terrorist strike in September 2001, but that strike had nothing to do with Iraq other than the fact that the terrorists were muslim, and some of them were from the middle east. We invaded Afghanistan because Americans wanted a target to strike because we were so damn angry at the idea that they actually hit us on our own land (how disgustingly imperialistic a thought). Bush said that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but guess what, they haven't been found yet (as they never will be because they never were there). There are a few reasons why Iraq was attacked: Bush wanted to secure a place in the middle east where we could station enough american troops to be able to scare the surrounding muslim countries into falling into line with us (the saudis were seeming much less happy with the idea of maintaining our millitary bases in their land so we needed another place to go); Bush wanted to gain support with Israel so that we wouldn't have to give as much in other areas (the IDF feels much more secure now that the US military is on the other side of Jordan because if they are attacked by a mid-eastern country now that country will have to fight a losing two-front war); Bush wanted to ensure that we would be able to apply enough pressure on the oil producing nations such as saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, etc that we would not have to worry as much about arbitrary oil shortages caused by political factors; Bush wanted to take advantage of the Iraqi intelligence agencies files to get a better picture of what was and is going on in the surrounding countries (especially Iran); Bush wanted to scare Iran, and be able to exert a more credible deterrent against the further development of its nuclear weapons program (which has so far failed as far as I can tell); Bush wanted to satisfy the vendetta or grudge that he had with Saddam because he tried to have his daddy killed. But we did certainly not attack Iraq because of the presence of nuclear weapons, or because of the brutality of Saddam's regime, or even because Saddam had used biological weapons against fellow Iraqis. Those reasons were given to the public only because of the emotive effect that they engendered, and not because they were accurate in any way. If those were the real reasons that we invaded Iraq we would also be invading China right now, or North Korea, but those countries are too strong, and would have the potential of causing a crapload of damage to America. We would be invading countries all over the world if those emotive reasons were truly the reasons. No, it is pretty clear that we did not invade Iraq for the reasons the republicans gave. The republicans like to say that Bush acted decisively, and that qualifies him as a good leader, but the truth is that Bush just wanted to shed the blood of the people that he classed as "enemies of freedom," whatever the hell that stupid piece of propaganda means. Why should we praise him for wanting to go to war? Yes, he made a decision, maybe he acted decisively, but was it a good, well thought out decision? Hell no. Was it a good idea to act so arrogantly that we alienated our European and Asian friends? Again, hell no. Bush has acted decisively against laws that protect the environment, and the air and water that we breathe and drink. It was pretty decisive when he pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol (which was big news in countries like Japan, where I was when it happened, but made hardly any news at all here). It was pretty decisive of him to stand against gay marriages and uphold the US standard of bigotry. Once again it was decisive when he decided to enact restrictions on basic science, such as stem cell research, which have the potential of creating multitudes of medical therapies that could save millions of lives, because he likes to jerk off to the mantras of the christian right. Bush is one of the lousiest presidents the US has seen since the nineteenth century (and yes, though I hate Reagan and Nixon too, I think he is worse than either) and it is amazing to me that more people do not see this. The whole Bush administration likes to mix truth and lies in such a way that it is truly not easy to catch them red-handed; the administration likes to say the opposite of what it does like any self-respecting propagandaist does. Classic examples of doing one thing while saying that you are doing something else are: pacification (killing as many people as possible until they do not give you as much political trouble), giving Africans more money for AIDS programs than ever (giving more money in absolute terms when inflation and like factors are ignored, but the real value of the amount given is actually less than before), tax-break (giving big companies more money so they can create jobs in poor countries because americans are too expensive, while at the same time giving just enough to the people who actually need money to make them think that they're actually getting something instead of the pittiance that it is). There is nothing good that this president has done in his entire term. I was so sad the day that he was elected. I am now almost on the verge of wanting to move to another country because I cannot stand having him as our glorious leader. I feel so ashamed to call myself an american with someone like that at the helm.

The beheadings in Iraq piss me off so much I can barely contain my anger. But I don't think crap like that would be happening in Iraq if it wasn't for the glorious leader's decisive assault on the evil regime and the enemies of freedom. I hate the terrorist groups for their attacks on random innocents and gruesome, murderous ways, but I also hate Bush for putting US people and soldiers there for that to happen to them.

Discontent

2004-06-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish I had done something completely different with my life (though it is not as though it is too late I suppose to change directions). Sometimes I feel as though I just want something different to jolt me from the unstopping mundane monotony. Almost anything different would do, just something that could distract me for a while and make me think that I've got an exciting life. Or maybe this is just work talking. I've never gone sky-diving yet, I've never gone to Europe, and I've never done anything really important. I dislike the idea of being an excitement junkie, but some excitement is most definitely a good thing once and a while. Sometimes I'm so bored with reading and sitting in front of the computer I feel like I'm going to explode. I wish I could get up right now and hop on a flight to Hawaii and not come back for two months. I thought for a while after graduating from college about going to Japan to teach english, but I didn't do it because it would have hurt my chances of getting into grad school at Berkeley. Instead I got a job that helped put me on the path toward a Ph.D.. So now I am going to be living like I am for the next five or six years, and I won't be finished until I am in my early thirties. There will be few opportunities for me to go crazy and backpack through Europe for months or something equally interesting. The only way I can console myself is with the knowledge that I'll have better than average job prospects once I graduate. Education is one of the most important things a person can possess, and I fully believe that, but at the same time I can see that there are other important things that one may have to sacrifice to achieve it. I suppose part of the problem is my own damn fault. I have been so slow in getting through school because I'm the kind of person who likes to take his time. But there are so many things that I want to do. I want to learn to speak German and Japanese fluently. I want to travel all over the world and meet people who have experienced life in a completely different way than I have. I want to become a master in kendo, and be able to run a marathon at an olympic pace. I want to do something that makes a positive impact on the lives of millions of people. I'd like to be able to play the guitar, and then jam with Billy Corgan. I want to be able to cook so well that an Iron Chef couldn't beat me (if the show were still around). I don't want to be content with mediocrity. I don't want to do the same thing every day after work. I don't want to meet any more dumb and overly-opinionated people. I don't want to meet people who have sticks rammed into their black, gaping anuses. I don't want to meet arrogant, self-centered, childish, idiots.

Committing

2004-06-23T17:06:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but I've been having trouble getting enough sleep lately. Maybe it's because I hate going to bed at an hour that is conducive to obtaining a sufficient amount of sleep. That is probably the real reason, but I can't help wondering if there is a biologic factor that is contributing. I seem to go through periods when I don't require much sleep, but suddenly I need much more sleep than is considered reasonable. It reminds me of the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium; I'll go through a long time without needing much sleep, when all of a sudden I'll hit a rocky period where it is impossible for me to sleep properly. I can call it the theory of punctuated restorative sleep.

I've been a little restless lately. It is always weird getting used to being single again, even when it was one's own choice to become single. I have had a girlfriend almost non-stop for almost the past four years. After a breakup it has seemed to take me only a week or two, and then I'm back in the land of obligation. I have been wanting to remain single for a little while longer, but at the same time I am driven by a force (which is biological in large part) to constantly survey the potential pool of new girlfriends. I liked my last girlfriend, but we weren't really meant to be together; there was never a very good mental connection, which is maybe the most important ingredient in a happy relationship. I may be a little too picky in some areas, and perhaps not picky enough in others. Looks are only important initially, and in maintaining sufficient sexual desire, but it is the personality, and a certain mental x-factor which are the most important (in my experience). I'm finding out that the majority of my old friends from high school, and even elementary school are either married, seriously committed, or already have kids (these are not mutually exclusive categories). I still feel like I'm practically a teenager, and I can barely imagine how these guys and girls are able to step up to the plate and sign their lives away so easily. I mean, having a kid seems like a huge responsibility to me. If you do it when you're not ready you'll fuck up your own life as well as your poor, innocent kid's life. Then I start worrying about myself, a commonly heard anxiety: is there something wrong with me that makes me unable to commit to anybody? Aha! Commitment anxiety. But maybe it's not really that, but rather that I actually haven't met anybody worth spending my life with. I go back and forth between the two explanations. I was kind of happy with my last girlfriend; she was nice to me, and I had almost nothing to complain about, but I still wasn't happy. I never felt any emotional connection with her. I think I started noticing why one day while we were walking around Berkeley. I have a tendency to fall randomly into a pseudo-philosophical reverie every once an a while, so as we were walking I said something along the lines of, "life is such a strange thing, isn't it weird thinking about why all these people in the world do what it is that they do? What keeps all of this shit going?" She wasn't interested in this conversation at all, and cut the head off of it by saying "life is not strange, it is a beautiful, wonderful thing. How can you say that it is strange?" She woudn't go any further than that statement. Now, I wasn't expecting for her to suddenly transform herself into Kant, but I wanted to communicate a thought that I had, and that I would guess most other people would have. To me she seemed unable to understand why I was saying what I was saying. I think that she was hearing something like "I hate life, and I don't want to keep living." This is only an (admittedly lame) example of the main problem that I had with her. It was a fundamental inabillity to communicate certain ideas, thoughts, and feelings that are important to me in some way. It ended almost two weeks ago now. I'm thinking about remaining single for a little while longer, but I want to go out and meet people. I have become in the last few years much less social than I was a while back. I miss going out with people, drinking beers, and enjoying crazy times.

I think I need a time of reflection. The girlfriend before my last one really put me through the emotional wringer, and I can still feel some of the baggage from that one hanging around wanting to be picked up. Only now am I feeling somewhat recovered from that one. I think I shut off my feelings for a while to the point where I forgot that one is supposed to really care about one's girlfriend. That's not to say that I didn't care about the last one, but I never could summon the kind of emotional urgency that is required in a relationship. She could have suddenly walked up to me and told me that she hated me and that she wanted to break up with me and I would have shrugged my shoulders and said "do what you want." Now that isn't fair to her I think. So I told her how I was feeling and that was that. No more girlfriend. I'm sick of having girlfriends just because I want a girlfriend. I want sex, yes, that has certainly not disappeared, but I don't want to go out with anybody else who I don't really like enough to feel a sense of loss if she were gone. I think it would be better to simply date and be upfront with the fact that I'm just looking for friendship unless I meet somebody worth being with. Maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow.

Cold Morning

2004-06-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

I miss summers that are warm. I woke up freezing today because my landlady likes to turn off the heat during the summer because she thinks it is warm enough that we don't need heat. So on the morning of the second day of summer I wore a huge snowboarding jacket because it was so cold in my apartment. During the winter the heat is actually turned on in the morning, so I don't usually require more than a t-shirt to stay warm. There is something wrong about having to put more blankets on your bed during the summer than in the winter.

I had a nice night last night. I had dinner with a friend (and some friends of hers) at the Thai House in Berkeley, and afterwords some of us had some gelato. I unfortunately am a member of the minority of people who do not like thai food, and to make it worse I am a vegetarian, so the only thing I was able to eat was tofu tod (which actually tastes very good, but is meant as an appetizer). I don't eat oyster sauce or fish sauce unless I am in a very unique mood. I was asked last night (as I always am) why I chose to be a vegetarian (I think that it is a little odd that people feel so divided by eating habits). Did I become a vegetarian by choice, or was it dictated by medical concerns? Well, even though the atkins diet was created by the devil and is hard on both your heart and your kidneys, no I don't have any medical reason for being a vegetarian. I became a vegetarian about ten years ago while I was still in high school. I was always picky with meat, and I hated those little white bits of cartilage and the chewy, mushy strips of fat that my german grandmother would tell me to chew because it was supposedly good for me. Yuck. My grandparents owned a beef cattle ranch, and when I was small I would visit and see close up what it was that I was eating. I came to the informed decision that it is both sad and pretty disgusting to eat those poor, stupid, mooing creatures that amble so peacefully though the long grass. I've always had a very soft spot in my heart for animals (humans included, though they can be so mean sometimes) and I couldn't bear the idea of eating them anymore. I once went fishing and I was excited to catch a good sized leopard shark, but once it was reeled in the person who I was with, grandfather figure though he was, violently smashed its head in to stop it from squirming, and quickly decapitated it with a long knife. It was put headless into a bucket for me to carry, for I had caught it; it was one of the more sad memories that I have as a child. I felt guilty that I had caused its violent death, and suddenly its headless body jerked within the bucket that I was carrying. I was so frightened that I almost dropped the bucket on the ground. Another time I was at my grandparents' ranch walking with my grandfather, who always carried a colt .45 everywhere, when he saw some squirrels climbing on the side of the barn. My grandfather seemed to have an irrational hate of these squirrels, and to be completely honest, I think that he was somewhat emotionally disturbed. He pulled out his .45 and started shooting at the poor squirrels, spattering blood on the side of the grey wood siding of the barn. I was so mortified and upset that I ran back to the house. I could never understand why someone would have the desire to do something so unnecessarily cruel to something so helpless. He was in a tank company in Germany during world war 2, and he probably saw some crazy things that numbed him a bit, but I can not see that as a valid excuse. Now as a vegetarian I must confess that from time to time I will eat something that has some kind of meat product included (like Japanese food with dashi -- I really love Japanese food), but the times when that happens are few. Perhaps those stories can help you understand the impetus behind the decision for me to become a vegetarian.

So at the dinner last night, after I had explained in part why I had chosen the path of a vegetarian, I was asked it if bothered me that he was eating meat. Now I have to say that I am mildly disturbed by this question because of what it implies about how non-vegetarians think about vegetarians in general. I wouldn't want to pass judgement on anyone because they do something differently from how I do something, or have different beliefs. Of course it does not bother me that you are eating meat; I simply cannot make myself do it. I don't feel the need to push my feelings and thoughts on another person. I will share them, but not expect them to be held by others, and I must say that it really bothers me when other people do feel the need to push their practices on me. The attitude that some vegetarians have (imperious, superior, and condemning) makes me angry, because I don't want to be lumped into the same category that they are in. They are the missionary, proselytizing assholes of vegetarianism, and I wish they would all eat steak and die. My philosophy is to live and to let live. To express your opinion, but not impress it. To be welcoming to difference, and to teach not indoctrinate. So to shorten this lengthening story, no I do not care if you eat meat as long as you don't expect me to. Another thing, don't act like the only thing that vegetarians eat is roots and green leaves. I'm not a rabbit.

Initialization

2004-06-21T16:29:00.000-07:00

This is my first attempt at blogging. It has always seemed mildly useless to me, but I have some time to kill and this may be a different way to kill it. Most probably it will be the equivalent of writing graffiti on the walls of buildings in industrial areas: almost nobody will look at it, and those few who do will walk on by uninterestedly because they see this same kind of crap all of the time. But who cares anyways; what do I have to lose?

I always think too much about every little thing. I think that is one of my main weaknesses actually, because when you spend too much time thinking you spend less time doing, and in life it is the doing which is useful. Ok, ok, there is a necessary balance that should be maintained between thinking and doing, but that's not what I'm trying to get at here. I'll give an example. I went to some festival/block-party at a park this last Saturday with a friend who I hadn't seen since I graduated with my B.A. (which was about a year and a half ago). I forget what the park is named, but it is somewhere in North Beach (San Francisco). Anyways, I sat there watching all the drunk and dancing people, wondering what all the various things were that brought them there. I mean, some of them could have wanted to go for the music, and others because they wanted to drink and dance, and perhaps still others wanted to meet people. I was sitting there with my friend, and as we were talking I was thinking that most of these people looked and seemed like people who I could never understand nor get along with if I were to talk to therm. It made me feel like "what the hell am I doing here?" But then I thought that perhaps I was being too snobbish, and that many of the people could actually be pretty nice people if only I gave them the chance (probably closer to the truth). But I still thought that it would be difficult for me to figure that out unless I went up to them and talked to them; however, I'm not really the kind of person who feels comfortable walking up to a complete stranger and talking to them naturally. I began to wonder why it is that at a party put on by somebody that I know, that I can walk up to people, but I couldn't do that in the park. I suppose it has to do with the fact that we (me at least) feel that if our friend knows the people at the party they must more like the kind of people who we ourselves can get along with. I don't know, maybe sociologists would have a better explanation of that kind of phenomenon, but I was a math major, so I don't know much about that kind of thing (I like to use that as an excuse). Ok, I suppose my point in this example is that I spent so much time thinking about why it is that people act very differently in fairly similar situations that I couldn't even enjoy myself at the damn party thing. I couldn't let go, drink some beers, and feel natural in that kind of environment because I was too locked into my strange thinking/contemplating mode. I was talking with my friend, but during each lull in the conversation I was back full force thinking about why people act the way that they do. Maybe part of the problem is that people don't really act by rules. People are just bags of jelly that wiggle around randomly and do things irrationally, and for no apparent reason. In my universe everything works by a set of rules, and I think it is hard for me when the rules are either inconsistent, or just very complicated. That's perhaps one reason why I have such a hard time understanding people. I'm one of the people that I have a hard time understanding.