Sex Sells (your product)?

Its long been known that sex appeal in marketing materials is an effective tactic to get people to look at the material, but I wonder how effective it is at actually moving more product?

The poser over at NewsTarget has just put up an interesting new rant^H^H^H^Harticle about how advertising treats people like lab animals. His observation is that advertisers use the media to build an association in the consumers mind between a product like softdrinks and sex so that the consumer will be more likely to buy the softdrink. This is reinforced by the spike of carbs delivered by the drink.

Naturally he hasn't done any acutal research, and his site is little more than a crappy blog dressed up as a news site (what do you expect from a spammer and shyster?), but he does come up with some entertaining and thought provoking stuff on occasion (the rest of the time its fun to just laugh at him).

So I was thinking, I wonder how hard it would be to find a research group of men with very low sex hormone levels, such that they had low or no sex drive. It would be interesting to use a large group of these men along with a control group of typical men to study the effectivness of the 'Sex Sells' idea. Do men with very low sexual drive respond differently to sex-based advertising?

What other interesting sex-related studies might such a group be good for? Do they tend to pay female employees more? Do they promote them faster and give them better work assignments? Are they more productive in business environments because they don't constantly think evil things about their female coworkers? Are they just boring and deprived?

So many mysteries of the mind and body, so litte actual knowledge.

A Blog Thing

Here's one of those oh-so-popular blog thingies.

I think people should be responsible for their own actions, and as much as practical, observe the "golden rule".

Companies should be focused on making a profit for their shareholders, but, being made of people, a companies actions should be tempered by how those actions will effect people.

The environment effects everyone, and there is mounting evidence that we're farking it up beyond repair, therefore, we should be taking extraordinary measures to protect it (but we won't, kind of like the Titanic, Snowball-Earth, dead-ahead! ).

Your Political Profile

Overall: 45% Conservative, 55% Liberal

Social Issues: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal

Ethics: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

How Liberal / Conservative Are You?

Oops!

Ok, so maybe it really is too late.

It seems that a massive peat bog (thousands of square miles) in nothern Siberia is melting for the first time in 11,000 years, an event which could release massive amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

I've got this mental image of mankind balanced at the top of a slippery slope, arms windmilling, attempting to not start the uncontrolled slide when along comes a bog mummy and gives mankind a big shove in the back.

Bummer dude.

The powers that be in Kansas have recently decided to de-emphasize the role of evolution in education. While this debate has been going on for a number of years, I still find it interesting to watch. It's a little dishearting to see modern people rejecting the findings of science in favor of faith, not because I believe that the findings of scientific findings are inherently better than religious beliefs (I do believe that, but it is not what concerns me), but because I think that they are not proposing the right solutions.

The basic problem is that these people want a religious based education for their children, and our public school system is incapable of providing this (because of the principle of seperation of church and state, which IMO ought to be maintained). There are many ways to solve this (vouchers for transfering the public funds for the education of each child to a private school, church-funded classes that are overseen and accredited by the local public school system, etc), but focusing on the ape-to-man-is-a-theory-not-a-fact argument is really not a good path, it solves the wrong problem.

Anyone who teachs that man evolved from apes is a fact doesn't understand science. While evolution itself is fact, it does not follow that man evolved from apes. Evolution is a fact because we can observe and demonstrate that self-replicating things change over time (this is, in a nutshell, the definition of evolution). This is a very basic thing and it is easily demonstrated. We frequently see micro-evolution in microbes. We see macro-evolution in computer models of self-replicating things, and we can see that the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution is really just a difference in the time scale. However, it can be difficult to convince some people that macro-evolution occurs in nature. The evidence tends to be buried and incomplete and extracting information from it requires a great deal of background knowledge about the field. Convincing people who lack that background, or who lack a concept of the depth of knowledge required to see the connections can be very difficult. Particularly when they are confortable with a much simpler idea that explains the matter within their framework of knowledge (e.g., 'God exists, and is very powerful. Men don't look or act like apes, and I think too highly of myself to believe that my great*300,000 grandma could have been an ape, so it is clear that God created Man just as he appears now').

No one who knows anything about science should have any objection to telling people that the evolutionary theory of the orgin of species (man in particular) is 'just' a theory. Thats exactly what it is. Richard Feynman, a particularly gifted and insightful man once said "science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves." This is the most important thing that anyone should understand about 'science'. Science is not a belief system or a way of finding truth. It's the methods we've found that help us to eliminate ideas that are wrong from ideas that might be right.

I think that what supporters of theories (and I use that term very loosely here) like 'Intelligent Design' object to is not that their children are taught the evolutionary theory of the origin of man, but that they think (and are probably correct) that their children are being taught that the theory is fact instead of the best idea we've come up with that fits the observations and does not have the kinds of features that we've learned are typical when we are fooling ourselves.

Perhaps what our religious friends in Kansas should be pushing for is a better education about what science is and how it works. The fact that many people think that its a good idea to put a sticker on a science text book that warns that it is full of unproven theories points to a pretty serious and evidently widespread misconception of what science is.

How Old?

So, how old are you anyway? When asked of a person, the question really means "How long ago were you birthed?", but the question has some other interesting elements as well.

The essential 'me' might be considered to be my mind, and thats probably been around since not long after my birth, albeit in a more primitive form. But my mind is always changing. A mind is a river, changing in every instant, and yet recognizable through time.

But my mind is a part of my body; how old is that? Obviously some parts are new, the skin is renewed quite frequently for example, while others are mostly 'original equipment', the brain comes to mind, so to speak. But are those cells really new? The come directly from other cells, leading all the way back to a single cell with my genetic makeup. And even that cell, with the exception of half its instruction set, a fairly small part of its makeup, came from some other cell. So the cells making up my body have a lineage that extends all the way back, presumably, to not only some of the very first cells on Earth (and if you believe in panspermia, possibly even from Mars or another distant body), but to pre-cell formations. Somewhere in the distant past a few organic molecules came together in a configuration that happened to be self-replicating, and from that event an unbroken chain of replications hundreds of millions of years long leads to directly to me.

So how old am I? In a sense, I am new in every instant, and yet I am also hundreds of millions of years old.

Evolve or Die

It amuses me when I run across some peoples ideas about evolution. It seems that many people have some pretty grand ideas about evolution being some kind of progression toward perfection. As if nature 'wants' to cause changes that lead toward more ideal oganisims.

Nature doesn't 'want' anything. It just is. Life is just the stuff that tends to self-replicate and hasn't failed to do so. Yet. Evolution is just the (usually gradual) accumulation of errors in the replication. The errors that don't replicate as well tend to die off. Thats it, nothing grand about it.

Does it happen on other planets? Almost without a doubt. Does it always lead to the complexity we see here on Earth? Hard to say. Probably only in a narrow range of conditions. There is probably some horrendously complicated math that could accurately describe the probability of complex self-replication occuring under given conditions, but its likely beyond our current capacity to grok. Where it occurs, the vast majority of self-replication probably never progresses beyond simple cyclic chemical compounds. And there are probably places at the other end of the spectrum where changes are chaotic, and so complex replicators cannot develop. Somewhere inbetween is where we find ourselves. Just the right amount of energy and materials and time to allow for layer upon layer of anomalous copies to build up into things like ourselves.

Pretty remarkable from my prespective, I'm glad that it happens and that I have the capacity to appreciate it.

Mysteries of the Universe

Why do couches have a gap around the front edge? In many years I have not found any use for this gap. Well, ok, I did find one use. When I was about 14 I would come home from school, get a tray and load it up with bowls and utensils, then scarf down two or three bowls of breakfast ceral while rotting my brain in front of the after-school cartoons. Since I was not supposed to be eating all the ceral (it doesn't take long to go through the groceries when you eat 4 or 5 bowls a day), if anyone came home, I could quickly slide the tray, containing all the breakfast supplies, under the edge of the couch, where it would be safely concealed until I could finish it (or I forgot it until the next day, or worse, over the weekend).

But I'm quite sure that this is not the purpose that couch designers had in mind. At least, not in this universe. In my house, the only thing the gap under the couch serves is to suck in every cheerio, M&M, gummy bear, snack wrapper, hot-wheel, board-book, penny, and DVD case that appears in the vicinity. I believe that the gap may actually cause a slight warping of space-time within a radius of about 30 feet. In this way all the cheerios, M&Ms, gummy bears, snack wrappers, hot-wheels, board-books, pennies, and DVD cases that are left in the room gradually make their way toward the couch, no doubt gleeful in their escape from the roving Roomba or toddler, whichever is worse.

The Mind

When I speak of the mind I refer to the upper level of our consciousness, where we spend most of our awareness. There are lower level functions of our brains involved in perception of the world and synthesis of those perceptions into a mental representation that operate at a level below that of the mind, although both upper and lower level functions operate biologically in similar ways (both are functions of the chemical and electrical (and possibly other) behaviors of neurons). In a normal brain the mind is not aware of these functions, only their effect, which is a consistant, stable and well integrated representation of the world.

The entirety of what we precieve around us, as detected by our senses and reconstructed by the faculties of our brains, is a model of the real world, constructed and contained entirely within our minds. We normally operate within this model as if it were in fact the real world, but it is not. It is a highly filtered and processed view, with many assumptions so deeply ingrained that we no longer notice them. Some of the assumptions are things we learned as infants (i.e., the apparently Newtonian movement of a thrown object), others may be related to the way our brains develop physically (i.e., what kinds of stimuli produce a pleasure response).

We are probably born with most of the mental faculty required to build a mental model of the world around us, but I think that the details of that model are defined only after we gain some control of our senses and, as very small children, begin exploring the world and discovering relationships between objects and events. The innate abilities of our brains assemble our observations and experiences into a model with predictive powers. The accuracy of this model is limited in much the same way our senses are limited. We have difficulty conceiving of infrared or x-rays as 'colors' of light, because we cannot preceive them as such. We find the predictions of Einstein's theory of General Relativity under extreme conditions (the warping of space-time around massive objects for instance) counter-intuitive because our senses are only accurate enough to allow us to intuit a model with Newtonian physics.

It is important to realize that any reasoning we do is from the perspective of our mental model. An 'objective' or omniscent viewpoint, while a useful tool, is not truely objective. It is a model that we use to make predictions about what a hypothetical objective observer would believe. It should be obvious that the model of an objective observer is not really an objective observer, and will not make predictions that are completely consistant with an actual objective observer. Perception is inaccurate, therefore all models of things perceived are to some extent inaccurate, and so predictions made with them are inaccurate. To act otherwise is to deny our basic nature. Any proposition made on behalf of the objective observer must be credible when restated in the context of our own personal viewpoint, for the two are simply different facades upon the same knowledge.

Justified True Belief

In the early 20th century many philosophers believed that knowledge was 'justified true belief':
A person S can consider a proposition P to be knowledge if, and only if:

1. S believes that P is true
2. P is true
3. S is evidentially justified in believing that P is true

Not long after this definition was proposed Edmund Gettier poked it full of holes by providing counterexamples demonstrating conditions that satisfied the three conditions, but that could not be considered knowlede:

Smith enters a room and seems to see Jones. He immediately forms the justified belief that "Jones is in the room". In fact, Smith did not see Jones, but rather, a lifelike replica. However, as it happens, Jones is in the room, though Smith has not seen him yet.

Smith has a justified true belief that few observers would consider to be knowledge, although it does satisfy the conditions above. A number of modifications of the JTB scheme have been proposed, and yet none have really solved the problem. It remains one of the most important questions of modern philosophy.

The obvious problem with any variation on JTB is the 'T' part. Any evaluation of 'Truth' must be made from the point of few of an omniscent observer. This makes the scheme completely useless for me, as I am clearly not omniscent, and therefore I cannot evaluate the conditions. I could ask someone else who might know, but the problem remains, I have know way of knowing if they are mistaken (or willfully misleading me), or if my preception of their answer is correct.

Likewise, the 'J' part is difficult. Without the 'T', justification isn't absolute, its just 'probable'. So what we call 'knowledge' is reduced to things that I have some good reasons to believe. Clearly the reasons have to themselves have some good supporting reasons.

Circular, or more precisely, interwoven supporting reasons are the only way to avoid an infinite regression of reasons. Since such a network of supporting facts could be internally consistant and yet still be wrong, it is important to compare the system to observed reality. Those places where large areas of the system have no directly observable counterpart in reality should be questioned. Thats not to say one shouldn't make some guesses as to how things might link together, but such conjecture should be considered fiction until it can be supported via experimentation or direct observation.

In practice this is probably what most people actually do. The differences come about in what people consider valid support. For example, someone of faith might consider a particular feeling they experience when praying over a question to be valid, repeatable (more or less) empirical data that supports the idea that prayer is a valid method of gaining knowledge, and there there is an entity that delivers the answers. Someone like myself would consider that to be (exceedingly) weak evidence. It would be just as valid to conjecture that it is a method of making a random decison and feeling good about it.

The mind is, at this point in our science of the mind, too opaque to make strong statements about why we might feel one way or another when meditating/praying on a given question. This does not mean that the technique is not useful. Indeed, having a simple way to gain confidence and happiness without actually doing anything but sitting quietly for a while is a great thing.

Well, Duh?

In yet another stunning reversal, experts are now thinking that perhaps sun exposure isn't such a bad thing after all.

Ya think?

You'd figure that after 50,000 years in the sun the human body would have adapted to make sun exposure more useful than damaging.

Next maybe they'll figure out that people who get sunburned at the mere thought of venturing out into the 'real world' without an environmental suit are perhaps not getting the right nutrition.

For all our skill with technology, we sure have a darth of deep knowledge about how living things work.

Where There's Smoke, There's Fun

With the Independence Day celibration coming up, I thought I'd see if I could find something that would be fun for the kids. I had some potassium nitrate lying around, so I figured I'd see if I could find a nice smokebomb recipe. Naturally that was an easy thing to find on the internet, so I mixed up a batch real quick.

The instructions mentioned that the mixture could be used as a powder, but was generally better when bonded, so I decided to do a test without bonding it. That was a bad idea, if it isn't compacted, it burns very quickly and doesn't make much smoke. Its more like rocket fuel really, and its good for scorching the hair off of ones knuckles.

For the next attempt I mixed up a smaller batch and went ahead and bonded it into a solid mass. I rolled it a bit and gave it a fuse. Heres the result.



The foil was there as an experiment, I wasn't sure if containment would make any difference in smoke production. I don't think it does. The fuse is a bit of paper coated in the smoke material. It burns at a nice reliable rate, and gives plenty of time to get ones hand out of the way of the higher rate burn (which is pretty impressive).

Unfortunately it was pretty windy today, so the test was less than awe-inspiring. It made a good trail of smoke, but not a huge cloud. It really did a nice job though, much better than commercial toy smoke bombs, although the smoke wasn't quite as dense.

I did a little bit of research into colored smoke, but that requires a bunch of other exotic chems that I don't have and don't really want to mess with, so I'm sticking with the old stand-by. It's quick and easy to make, and requires only two ingredents, both of which can be procured locally. Most drug stores carry potassium nitrate for around $5 for a 100g bottle. I have no idea what kind of affliction one would treat with it, but it is a convienant, although expensive, source.

For the second test I decided I'd need to go bigger to get a reasonable result on this blustery day. I used the remainder of my 100g bottle and mixed up what turned out to be about a 150g smoker. Here it is:



What a beauty, eh? It's about the size I was looking for, but quite a bit smaller than what I'm hoping to make for the 4th. The test was impressive. It burned completely in about 30-45 seconds, and even in the light wind made a huge cloud of smoke. I lit one of the commercial giant smoke bombs just before it as a comparison, and while the dense purple smoke was pretty, it wasn't very impressive because of the light wind. My smoker produced such a huge volume of smoke that even with the wind it completely obscured the street while it burned.

For the 4th I'd like to make one about 10 times this size. I'd like it to burn about 3 times as long, and produce more smoke. I'm looking forward to it.

Quantum Accounting

An interesting article was linked from Slashdot this evening. It seems that some guys with some background in quantum physics have come up with a possible way around the grandfather paradox. In the article it is reported that they think that since the math seems to indicate that time travel is possible (under some pretty extreme conditions), there must be a solution to the grandfather paradox. Because quantum mechanics deals with probabilities, they are proposing that anything that has a probability of one when you leave will be something your presence in the 'past', for instance, you won't be able to prevent your own conception by killing your grandfather before you or your father is born.

This idea has a cool feel to it. It gives me the impression that time and thus causality as we see it isn't what we think. That time is not an immutable march forward, and that maybe everything, past and future, is really all the same thing, linked in a way we don't see because of the way we exist.

It has been proposed that the reason all atomic particles appear to be identical is because they are in fact the same particle, interacting with itself along a time-like dimension. When traveling in one direction through this dimension we see the particle as normal matter, when traveling in the other direction we see it as antimatter. This doesn't explain why antimatter seems less robust than normal matter, but its still an intesting idea, and fun to consider. If the idea has any truth to it, its probably at a much more fundamental level than we currently understand. For example, I'd expect that it would have to explain how virtual particle flux comes about, why there are so many kinds of quarks (I really expect that if there is a 'fundamental' particle, there is only one kind, all these different kinds of quarks doesn't seem very elegent to me. Maybe we're just looking at them the wrong way).

Its kind of sad to know that we'll never know for sure. I surely hope that the 'everlasting life' folks are right, but thats not where my money is laid.

Mmm, beeer...

Some creative sole came up with this amusment:

TOP 10 REASONS WHY BEER IS BETTER THAN RELIGION!

10. No one will kill you for not drinking beer
9. Beer doesn't tell you how to have sex.
8. Beer has never caused a major war.
7. They don't force beer on minors who can't think for themselves.
6. When you have beer, you don't knock on people's doors trying to give it away.
5. Nobody has ever been burned at the stake, hanged or tortured over their brand of beer.
4. You don't have to wait more than 2000 years for a second beer.
3. There are laws saying that beer labels can't lie to you.
2. You can prove you have a beer.
1. If you've devoted your life to beer, there are groups to help you stop.

I'd add:
You can switch beers any time and nobody cares.
Nobody thinks you are strange when they see you without beer.

Mind Body

There is no mind-body problem any more than there is a program-computer or software-hardware problem. The original mind-body problem was that of early philosophers inability to reconcile the apparent immaterial nature of the mind with the physical nature of the body.

Now we 'know' that, like computer software, there are different ways to view the same thing. Software running on a computer can be though of either the way we programmers usually think of it, just as a running program 'in' the computer, or as electrons running around transistor gates on a chip.

For evidence of this nature consider the various methods of brain scanning that indicate that different specific areas of the physical brain are active during specific kinds of activities. This indicates that particular activities by the so-called nonphysical mind have a predictable (to a degree) and repeatable effects on the brain.

In the reverse direction, there are many methods of brain stimulation (ranging from transcrainial magnetic to direct, open-skull electrical and chemical stimulation) that have repeatble and (somewhat) predictable effects on both the body and the mind of the subject.

One could postulate that there is some unknown mechanism that forms a link between the substance of the brain and the 'nonphysical' mind, and that this mechanism translates causes between the two seperate entities, however, there isn't any experimental evidence that leads us to that conclusion. Our experiments pretty clearly point to the brain being, in part, the physical substrait of the mind, in the same sense that a computer chip can be the physical substrait of a computer program.

This is not to say that we understand in detail how what we call the 'self' arises from the activity of the brain, or even that we know most of the details about how the physical processes in the brain function. Just that there is evidence that the 'mind' is one aspect of the functions the brain provides.

On Religion, Part the First

As an atheist and minor philosopher, I occasionally find myself defending or explaining my belief system to others. Recently I've undertaken a background task of writing up a document explaining in detail my position and belief system. In it I will attempt to address all major questions and attacks against my position. Currently the major focus is religion, since most of the major discussions I find myself in are in regards to why I do not believe that gods exist. Part of the reason for this document is simply to be sure that my reasoning is sound. I can ensure that I understand the subject by exploring it in depth in this way.

I try not to hold a position simply because I believe it to be right, I want to hold a position because I have good reasons for it. I believe that 'having faith' in something should be limited to the smallest possible subset of ideas, similar to the concept of axioms in the field of mathematics. I also try to avoid contradictions and inconsistancies. While I recognize that it is valid to choose to allow contradiction and inconsistancy in one's personal philosophy, my personality requires that I choose to eliminate these things to the extent that I am able to do so. I don't mean to indicate that all of life can be reduced to cold logic, just that it is the basic tool of reason, and that reason is one of my goals.

The following is an excerpt from my paper, currently titled simply "On Religion". It is a statement of my position in regard to religious beliefs. What I ask of the reader (indeed, if there are any), is to read the excerpt and report to me if it makes sense; is it a clear and understandable statement of position?

My belief, and the position I am defending is that of the 'weak atheist'. The term 'weak' in this context does not refer to the strength of my conviction, but rather to the type of claim I am making. Atheism is literally 'without belief in gods'. The people who fall into this category fall into two camps, those like myself who are simply without belief in gods, 'weak' atheists, and those who, in addition to not having a belief in gods, also make the claim that gods do not or cannot exist. The latter is the 'strong' position. The term 'agnostic' refers to people who believe that we do not or cannot have knowledge necessary to know if gods do or do not exist. I am agnostic in that I do not believe that the existence or non existence of gods can be proven.

At first one might think that it does not make sense to call oneself both agnostic and atheist. However, the two terms are not at odds. Agnostisism tells us what someone believes about the 'provability' of the existance of gods, not about which belief he holds about the existance of gods. A claim of theism or atheism tells us that someone does or does not have a belief in the existance of gods. A strong atheist cannot be agnostic, as he claims to know that gods do n0t exist. A weak atheist may or may not be an agnostic. One could not have a belief in gods (weak atheist), and also believe that the existance of gods is provable (not agnostic), or that the existance of gods is not provable (agnostic). Of course, one who is agnostic does not have to be an atheist, he may believe that gods exist, and simply believe that they cannot be proven to exist; this would be an agnostic theist. I would suppose that many theists fall into this category, if god could be proven to exist then what need would there be for faith?

There it is. Comments? Note that this document is not intended to follow any rigorous format. The intention is strictly to communicate my thoughts on the matter in a comprehensible way, so its likely I will get off on tangents when explaining points.

8 Minutes to.. well, Something

I stopped by the library this weekend and checked out the 8 Minute Meditation
book that my many (har) readers may recall me mentioning in an earlier entry. While I was at the library I took about 5 minutes to skim about 80% of the book, and it seemed promising. Last night before bed I read the whole thing. I didn't get much more out of it than I got skimming it. The content is pretty spread out, lots of repetition. It advocates an 8 week program of daily 8 minute meditation sessions. Each week introduces a new technique.

I've been working on my meditation on and off for about 8 years, so I've pretty much mastered all the techniques in the book, but it does have some interesting ideas about active meditation. One suggestion is to wash a dish. Basicly each step of the process is done slowly and deliberately, while keeping a quite mind and just enjoying the here-and-now. I've done this in the past with many activities, often with vacuuming or when driving home from work. I didn't realize it was a well-known technique :)

Sometimes I'm not sure what I'm accomplishing when I meditate. Over the years my ADD-like mental behaviour has caused me to develop this idea that if I'm not actively thinking about something useful then I'm wasting time. I have a very hard time not doing anything. So if I just happen to veg on the couch for a while I sometimes feel like I'm wasting time that I could be using to doing something productive. It is for thise reason that I don't often get in long meditation practice. I generally use meditation as an aid for getting to sleep. When I lay down I clear my mind and 'just be'. Since I've been practicing this for many years I can generally fall asleep in less than a couple of minutes. Curiously, this hasn't affected my waking meditation, when I meditate I don't feel like its nap-time (as part of the structure I've set for myself, I treat the bed as the only place that I sleep, and I don't get in it unless I intend to sleep, which probably helps). I suppose I ought to start trying to set a time to do it properly every day to see if I can get some more out of it.

My Kingdom for a Cheap, Efficent Vehicle

As a terminal Do-It-Yourselfer and sustainable living advocate (I'm not one of those earthy-crunchy people, but I think we should strive for steady-state existence), it frustrates me that its so difficult to live both economically and ecologically frugal manner. I've been slowly switching over to compact flourescent light bulbs to save electrical power (my electric clothes dryer isn't helping with that project), but its hard to find other places to conserve.

The engine in one of my cars seized recently (a seal I put in poorly last time I did a repair failed and dumped the oil), so I'm considering riding my bicycle to work. Its only 7 miles, which is within my physical capability (and with gasoline pushing 2.50 a gallon even the 28mpg the other car gets commuting is getting pricy), but unfortunately the roads that go where I need to go are under construction. Granted, my bicycle is a nice 21-speed mountain bike with front and rear shocks, so it can handle the lack of road sholders on which to ride, but off-roading would be a bit too much work before work. No showers available and all that. What ever happend to putting sidewalks in a city?

I'd like to reduce the costs for keeping the house cool, but it seems that people who design houses don't live in houses. Lighting is poor, air circulation is nearly impossible, no thought is given to appliance placement (ok, washer/dryer are upstairs, but who's idea is it to put something that uses water by carpet without including a floor drain? And what idiot thought that running a narrow pipe through the wall for the dryer vent? How are you supposed to clean that when it gets all coated in lint? That thing should be removable for cleaning). For a high-tech society we sure have a lot of crappy stuff.

I'm a liberal kinda guy, I think the government ought to provide a few essential services, but mostly concern itself with staying out of the way. But for some important things, it needs to take a much stronger stance. I'd sure like to get a nice, eco-friendly car, but it would cost me tens of thousands of dollars, plus more than a hundred bucks monthly for insurance. I can buy a piece of crap car for 200 bucks plus 30 bucks monthly for insurance. Until gasoline hits about 15 bucks a gallon it'll be a better deal to go with used cars and continue to dump formerly-sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere. I think lots of people are in the same position. There are so many cars already on the road that it will take many, many decades to get them off the road. What we need is not new electric vehicles. What we need is stuff like bio-diesel, fuel thats made from carbon thats already in the biosphere. We'll be dumping it back into the atmosphere, but at least it won't be adding to the problem while we do make the slow switch to more efficent vehicles.

Why can't I get an ultra-cheap, efficent commuter vehicle? I just need to get to work every day in a reasonable amount of time, without being exposed to the weather all the time. I don't need a 3000 pound, 150 horsepower beast to get me there. I little motorcycle would be great, except it would suck in the rain and snow. And besides that, they don't call them "donor-cycles" for nothing.

We've all been hearing how we're ruining the environment. Most of us would be happy to use more efficent stuff, if only we could get hold of it without having to take out loans. We get a little legislation once in a while, but corporate lobbiests usually neuter it before it gets very far. We need some real leadership. Laws with teeth. It would be expensive, but I'll take economic slowdowns if it gets us real environmental reform.

Don't even get me started on nuclear power.

Bonk! Karol? Karol? Karol?

Well, seems like everywhere I turn lately its news about the Pope. It's kinda weird, having something like that come to an end after so long. As an athiest I don't have any particular affinity for the man, so I can only imagine how this affects many Catholics.

Since I don't pay much attention to the Church and its activities, nor much to political activities or recent European history, I didn't really have much of an idea of how Pope John Paul II had affected the world. Obviously any pope is important and in a powerful position, but in order to expand my horizons I watched a few of the specials that are playing on the cable channels. Turns out this guy was pretty remarkable. Regardless of what one thinks of his beliefs (obviously at odds with my own), he certainly had a large impact on the political world. Who knows where Poland and Germany would be if he'd hidden away in the Vatican like some other Popes.

Sure, he made some dumb mistakes (birth control, woman priests, poor handling of abuse issues, etc), but I guess when you work big, sometimes ya gotta fail big too.

Maybe the next guy is will be more of an organizer. Evidently John Paul II was a performer, knew how to play the political games and how to get people to react. But he wasn't so good at managing a large organization, and the Church has suffered for it. Thirty percent fewer men are entering the priesthood, causing availability problems, and yet women are still denied access. On the other hand, they money is still pouring in, so I guess they're still doing something right.

It would be great if the church would reverse its stance on birth control and women priests. Both because those things are right for todays society IMO, and because I hope that major changes in church position like that might encourage believers to see that its not a god thats handing down the rules, but a man. Sure, it can be explained away just like anything else (God will make the policy changes that are right for His Plan when it is time to do so, regardless of wether or not we mere men can understand), but maybe the more cynical of them will see it as a clue.

Not that I think my path of rationality is the only way; how boring would the world be if there were only one belief system? But it sure would be nice if more people would adhere to a more social beneficial ethical system (not to mention more environmentally friendly ).

I'm rambling, its late, and I don't think I'm making sense anymore. Presuming I started out making sense. Eh. Thats all I got.

Fools and Their Money

Some days all it takes to restores one's faith in the entrepreneur in the more creative of us is a quick visit to Ebay.

For example, this incredible 3 generation stone is fetching quite a price.

The item description says "this stone will bring peace to all parts of your life". If it doesn't, perhaps something like this would come in handy.

Some day I aspire to extract money from fools as well as some of the artists one encounters on Ebay.

Here it comes.

It is my believe that its too late.

Its not that we don't have the technological ability.

Its not that we don't have the economic ability.

Its just that we who care are too few, too late.

One fine summer day in the midwest when I was a child of about 10 a friend and I were walking down the street near my house when I saw that a man tending lawns had parked his truck and neglected to set the parking break. While the road was mostly flat, the very slight slope had allowed the vehicle to begin very slowly rolling backwards down the street, toward some unsuspecting trashbags on the curb. The owner of the vehicle was running a string trimmer and was oblivious to the situation as he could not hear my warning cries. I went to the slowly moving truck and mustered all the strength in my then-85lb frame in a futile attempt to slow its course. I was, of course, bowled aside, slowly. I then stood sheepisly by and watched as the truck continued on its way toward the hapless trashbags. A few moments before the collision, which was now as obvious as it had been inevitable, the owner of the truck came dashing down the street in a desperate attempt to stop his lethargicly rampaging equipment. Although he made a valiant attempt, sprinting through the late summer afternoon, he was simply too late. The vehicle collided with the turgid white bags, goring them with a sooty exaust pipe, slowly stretching and tearing asunder their filmy skins before dragging their distorted forms along the cooling black asphault, leaving behind a gory trail of damp coffee grounds and greasy black banana peels

The report.

If you don't feel like reading any of the 2500 pages of the report, which was compiled by 1300 researchers from 92 nations, don't feel bad. Nobody else will either.

A New Season

So, its almost Easter again. As an athiest the Christian celebration of Easter doesn't mean much to me, but as a cultural point of reference it feels like something that I should be a part of. I've decided that from now on I'll treat it as a celebration of the changing of the seaons. Sometimes I wish I lived close to a place where those tree-hugging, earthy-crunchy people live, they usually have nice fresh perspectives on celebrations like this. So I think I'll starting having a small party at the times of the solstice and equinox. We'll offer burnt animal sacrifice, burn pungent incense and consume lots of beer. Yah, right, IOW, grill some steak, have some good cigars and drink beer.

Today was uneventful, but good. I played video games with the kids, took them to the library, skimmed through a book called '8 minute meditation' or something similar, colored Easter.. er, I mean, Vernal Equinox eegs with colored pencils and dye, printed some photos from Christmas.. er, I mean Winter Solstice vacation (I can see that this is going to take some getting used to), and made a short entry on this blog thing. As if anyone besides myself cares. But thats not really the point.

The meditation book was interesting. The author claims that the daily 8 minute meditation sessions he advocates are sufficent to achieve the 'be here now' state (for lack of a better term. This could probably also be described as the Clear Light or any number of other terms). He spends quite a bit of time on the initial stages, wherein one is attempting to clear one's mind of subvocalized thought. Fortunately my on-again-off-again meditation practices have made me quite proficent with this already. The book describes this in terms of 'catch and release', but I found more effective the Buddhist concept of picturing oneself as a mountain and the occasional thought as a small cloud scuttling by. The mountain is unaffected by and soon left behind by the cloud. The author goes on with several other meditation techniques, most of which I found farily intuitive, or designed to allow one to more effectively disregard physical discomfort. Unfortunately I didn't get to the last section of the book in which he describes some possibly interesting combinations of techinques. I'll skim that section next time I'm at the library.

A few months ago I stopped by a local spa and took a half-hour soak in their flotation tank. This is basicly a bathtub 4 feet wide and tall and 8 feet long, filled with 96degF water that has been saturated with an epsom or sea salt solution to increase bouyance. The inside of the tank is black and sealed against external light and sound. When immersed in the water one's body floats like a cork, with the ears just submerged. The conditions are highly effective at isolating one from sensory input. By remaining still with arms over the chest or above the head (if left at the sides the elbows tend to rise and twist out at an awkward angle that quicks makes the sholders unconfortable) I found that conditions were perfect for deep meditation. It was interesting that I found it difficult to meditate with eyes open, although it was just as dark outside as inside my eyelids. Near as I can tell my brain knows when my eyes are shut and when they are what I percieve as visual input switches from what my eyes see to some kind of internal screen. Its hard to describe. The blackness I see with eyes open in a dark place is different from that of closing my eyes. I suppose its common, so I expect the reader probably knows what I mean. Since I always practice my meditation with closed eyes I found it impossible to achieve a deep state of meditation with my eyes open, even in this very isolated place. Eventually I started to get board. I generally don't meditate longer than 15 or 20 minutes, so I'd guess that no more than 10 had passed before I started to get ansy. I found that the body seems to start to get starved for input after a while. Not anticipating this I figited enough to give it the necessary input. I believe that next time I'll have to exert better control and remain absolutely motionless. The isolation tank did not assist in bringing about an easier 'clear-light' state (a state I rarely reach in meditation, I think I've reached it maybe 4 times in several years). I think that with some practice with the tank it would be a fairly powerful meditation aid (not to mention being a highly effective relaxation device). With more time I'm quite certain one would start to see the hallucinations or visions often attributed to isolation tanks of this sort.

It concerns me when people who experiance hallucinations, be they induced by drugs or physical rigors or isolation, take their visions at face value. Rather than considering that their mind is 'playing tricks' or is simply not working as they are used to, people frequently will leap to what I consider to be unfounded conclusions. For example, experiances of perceiving a god-like being are not uncommon. Some people take this as evidence of the existence of such a being. However, the same individual will disregard similar induced effects, such as 'breathing' of walls or crawling of the grain patterns in wood. Why accept one as real and one as imagined? A sense of the profound is also very common. Often this sense is taken as evidence that one is seeing 'Truth' or the divine. I rather think that it is this sense that takes even the most mundane bits of existance and lends to them the sense of profound truth. Often as one returns to normalcy one can't remember exactly what it was that was so profound. I believe it is because nearly everything was, and so there was no one thing to recall, no special thing one can point to and say, 'there, that is the thing that holds the Truth of the universe'. For some, this might point to the idea that it is indeed everything that holds this truth. I rather believe that it is an artifact of our mental processes. Sometimes these experiances are called 'mind expanding'. But I wonder. Might it be instead that they are mind reducing? Our normal mental processes are capable of grasping an incredible amount of information with very little effort on our part. But if one were to reduce that capacity to the point where only one single, fundamental fact could be retained, what would that feel like? I think it would be a single spark of being that hung on to that one defining property: 'I Am'. Beyond that point lies only the unconscious mind, capable of action and reaction, but not of self-awareness. Balancing oneself on the edge of this abyss this one single idea, 'I Am' fills everything and would be quite profound. I wonder if we as infants experiance a transition from unthinking thing to self awareness at some point.

The Reason for Existence.

Well, that sounds very profound doesn't it?

The sole purpose for the existence of this blog is to allow me to post to other blogs that do not allow anonymous posts.