Fanatic Avocados

Beauty

2011-10-15T14:09:00.001-07:00

The Insatiate Asophist

2011-10-08T22:09:00.001-07:00

In which I try to understand why I don't understand now that I'm older

Gradetwelve is seen as a milestone, a landmark year in which the transition betweenthe structured life of a child and the “free” life of an adult occurs. Up until now, most of my life has been spentin schools and classrooms, learning and listening. I bear no ill will towards schools because ofthis; on the contrary, had I been given the option to abstain from school, I stillwould’ve attended regularly. This isbecause I have always been profoundly fascinated with the world around me; understandinghow it works and why it works is an obsession of mine. It is with this in mind that I approached Gr.12, having hoped that this would be the year in which all the issues in which Ifind myself currently embroiled would be resolved, the secrets I had soughtwould be laid bare, and I would make an obvious transition from life as a childto life as an adult. As an adult, I wascertain, I would no longer have to grapple with concepts and ideas, but to havethe ability to look at them and understand. I could move beyond the conscious effort of understanding and be able toprogram knowledge deep inside my cerebellum so it could be accessed and appliedat will. Having reached grade twelve andfinding myself lacking in these abilities used to be galling, but I have begunto realize that my continued confusion is not a deficit to be overcome, but a stateof mind in which to revel.

My delight at confusion in arisesfrom the fact that my state of bewilderment is effected by my continuouslearning. I have maintained a level ofconfusion, yet I am continuing to gain more knowledge. Therefore, I must beunderstanding previous topics and moving on to more advanced ones. With every assimilated topic, I branch outfurther into realms of unknown ideas and incomprehensible theories. Every facet of information I glean is anotherrung on a long, forking ladder that stretches away to infinity. What is both terrifying and exhilaratingsimultaneously is the fact that as my ability to understand expands so does therange of things which I can be puzzled about. Back at age six I lacked even theability to be puzzled by things such as bifurcation theory – discovering howplanes stayed up was all I could handle at that age. Now at seventeen, I am utterly andfrustratingly baffled by bifurcation. Theworld of possibilities has grown to encompass me as I progress further alongthe tree of knowledge. It is simply staggering at how much there is in ourworld to explore and learn. The sense ofawe one feels at a new discovery is remarkable because it can occur perpetuallyas long as one is willing to be confused. Confusion is the price that must be paid in order to feel the sense ofwonder once the discovery has been made. I have dedicated my life so far to a crusade in search of knowledge, butit is not purely for the sake of knowing that I search. I truly search for the sense of majesty oneis overcome with when you realize the potentials in the world around you. I seek to emerge from Plato’s cave and be struckin awe at the myriad of forms the world presents. The light will be hard on the eyes, and canlead to titanic headaches, but existence in the light is much more fulfillingthan a life spent in the clarity of the shadows.

Instead of a flaw that causes dailyconsternation, my confusion is a source of pride, for it proves to me that I amcontinuing to learn and discover the world. Life to me means the quest for experiences –to traverse every mountain range and pore through as many books as I can findthe time to read. Confusion, therefore,is then the natural state of being for a pilgrim such as me, who seeks to liveas fully as possible. Pilgrimages arenot made to be easy; they are made to be difficult. The reward is equal to the energy expended,so one must expend more energy if they desire the fullest reward possible. This is who I want to become: a pilgrim oflife. I do not understand now that I amolder because I have chosen not to understand. I have chosen the path ofdiscovery rather than the path of complacency. I have chosen awe instead of apathy. I have chosen to live.

Malthus

2011-08-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

Given the recent economic predicaments of countries such as Greece (in the shitter) Italy (lagging behind Greece as usual) Spain (known worldwide for bull runs, which is surprisingly helping them not one whit economically) Portugal (no Portugal puns coming to mind) and Ireland (too many Ireland puns coming to mind to pick one) I'm pretty confident that you know what happens when a country has to come to grips with the fact that it cannot support unlimited growth. In Greece's case, you should now know that paying people for 14 months a year (2 bonus months of pay for those of you who don't do math in the summer) leads to serious issues. And angry German people, and nobody wants that.

Okay, so we get the point. The economies of lots of places are in trouble, mainly due to overspending and massive increases in debt. However, both of these problems can be traced back to other issues, namely, bailout spending. The recession of 2008 prompted 4.9 trillion dollars worldwide in bailouts and stimulus and the like, all meant to push the economy higher and higher. Now, as a general rule, I don't object to the government messing about with the economy, and the same rings true here. I don't object to the government trying to stimulate the economy because I think deficit spending is a bad idea, but neither do I think stimulating the economy through any of the other options discussed (or suggested) is a good idea.. I object to the idea that the economy needs to be stimulated at all.

Now, just to clarify, because the last sentence seems to ring of denial, that I don't think the economy needs stimulus because the economy is just fine thank-you. Humans have no impact on global climate. Obama was clearly not born in the States. Or any other of various denials that have happened throughout history (there's no way they have a second bomb). I object to trying to always have a growing economy, because it's simply not feasible. Nothing is infinite (don't you dare quote Einstein to me). But we seem to have it in our heads that we can simply pump money into the economy whenever it seems in trouble. Notice how the stimulus never seems to have any lasting effect, and despite short-term growth, the economy starts to crumble again. Clearly there is a larger issue that is not being addressed, and simply band-aiding the economy everytime it starts showing signs of a problem won't deal with the gangrenous foundation it's built on.

Africa has been having serious problems for quite a while. Everyone is well aware of the numerous issues facing Africa, so I feel no pressing need to list there here for you now. One supposed "hope" for Africa is that with a booming population, it will stimulate the African economy and propel them out of the Third World (or Developing World, or whatever term is in vogue right now) and into the First - or hopefully just below. In fact, the whole world is experiencing rapid population growth on an unprecedented scale. Economists and politicians alike are rejoicing over the fact that the increase in people means that there will be more consumers to sell stuff to, more workers to make stuff, and a general ability to make the economy grow. The only issue with this is what Thomas Malthus predicted back in 1798 is that population growth is quadratic (really fast) compared to a linear growth in food supply. In other words, the more people you have, the harder it becomes to support them. But no one took much notice (besides thinking types - serious thinking types, and those types never seem to go into business or politics) because the disparity between population and economy only becomes apparent as the population becomes massive. With an input of three, the population is 9, while the economy has a value of 3. Only a difference of 6, and 1/3 the required amount of food, shleter, water, etc. for each person. Compare that to a value of 100 say (or even 7 billion) and the difference in population and economy becomes 9900, giving each person 1/100 of their required resources. We're only now reaching the point that the disparity is becoming enough of a problem to notice. That means we have ages to go become it becomes enough of a problem to actually do something about.

The really scary things about all of this population growth is that population growth is sigmoid. That means that while is appears quadratic (and it is, to a point) eventually it slows and levels out. The really ominous conclusion that can be drawn from sigmoid population growth is that population growth is the highest when there is half of the total number of people that can be supported. That means that if growth reaches its highest (as it is now) at ~7 billion humans, we can expect the total number of humans able to be supported by the Earth to be around 14 billion. And seeing the problems we have with feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating 7 billion people, let alone making sure no one fights which each other, can you imagine the problems we'll have with double the current number of people.

A sigmoid function

Now imagine that looking like the graph above

But say we manage to reach this point relatively problem free, but imagine that we try to maintain the same level of economic growth as when our population was rapidly expanding. You can create new jobs and try to expand your business, but eventually you will run out of people to a) sell your stuff to; and b) to make your stuff for you. Assuming that we level off, there will come a point where there are no more people coming - everyone who retires will be replaced by those growing up, and there will be no way to hire a surplus of workers because they won't exist. The global economy will enter a holding a pattern for as long as the population remains stable. But the world will have long fallen if we can't adjust to the idea of an economy that doesn't exhibit continuous growth (thanks to Malthus for that). And seeing how hard we struggle with the concept of a stable economy, can you imagine the hell we will enter if the population starts to drop? Forgive me if it sounds like I'm invoking my Jenga metaphor again, but I am rather fond of it. Looks like a fun future. If austere is your definition of fun.

Ivan and Pyotr II

2011-08-02T18:35:00.000-07:00

Pyotr and Ivan are once again sitting on the bench outside of their homes.

"Thank you for explaining telephones Ivan. But what I really don't understand is television. I watch the hockey games and the news every day - but how is it possible to send colour pictures from one end of the country to the other, and without wires?"

Ivan thinks for a bit and then replies: "And with wires you'd understand?"

Ivan and Pyotr

2011-08-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

Two elderly Russian men, Ivan and Pyotr, and watching the installation of a telephone line near their homes.

"These modern gadgets," sighed Pyotr. "I can never understand how they work."

"But it's so simple," replied Ivan. "Imagine a very long dachshund. You twist his tail, and he barks in the middle of the city."

"Ah," said Pyotr. "So that's how telephones work. But, Pyotr, what about radio?"

"Radio is exactly the same, but without the dachshund."

Dreaming of Rome

2011-07-23T21:56:00.000-07:00

Rome is not a matter of geography; Rome is not defined by rivers, or mountains, or even seas; Rome is not a question of blood, or race, or religion; Rome is an ideal.

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

We've never really gotten over Rome. Sure, claim that it fell due to the fact that they had slavery and persecuted Christians and were nasty people who - among other things - crucified people and threw people to lions, whatever, that's not the point. We're still completely allured by Rome as an idea: of a civilization too great to fall.

We are addicted, make no mistake. Where do you think Hitler got his salute, or his eagles? Benito and the whole idea of Fascism? Czar? Kaiser? Heck, even the Americans adopted the Roman salute for a time, until Hitler forever linked it with the Holocaust.

Ave indeed

We still say "By Jove!" as an expression. Well, some people do. Jove is of course Jupiter, a god who hasn't been worshiped in 1500-odd years. And we still take his name in vain. You want more proof? No? Well piss off it's my blog. The entire Renaissance, all of it, was purely to go back to "the glory of Rome."

And rightly we should be allured. Rome is possibly the greatest myth of our species; a giant empire slowly rotting and crumbling into decay.

We love it because it is the total opposite of what we want, while at the same time being a microcosm of all we can actually create.

We, as a species, hate transience. We hate things that change from what we know and understand into things that we don't understand. The only time we accept change is when it is predicted and prescribed down to the iota. We also, as a general rule, like large stuff. The economy should always be growing. A larger car is always a better car. My 50 foot statue of myself in gold is only surpassed by my 60 foot statue of myself in gold. You get the picture. Rome appeals very strongly to us because it fits nicely between both of these ideas. Rome grows outwards, and it - minus a little thing called Caesar's Civil War - was practically unchanged in its mindset and methods from its inception to its demise. Albeit some things such as Christianity got chucked in there along the way, but Rome was always about expansion. At the heart of it, humans always want to be expanding, growing, discovering, conquering. If there is a mountain put in front of us we will climb it. Rome represents humanities desire to conquer; to become the master of all it can survey.

On the flip side, Rome also represents how very flawed our notions of grandeur are. Rome was completely unsustainable one it stopped acquiring new territory. With a kleptocratic economy that just smashed and grabbed all it could and crated it back home, there wasn't any real business going on. Cash came in through conquest (causing runaway inflation and other horrors) that was held by the group at the top while the group at the bottom slaved away. There was no pun intended in the previous sentence. There was no middle class to purchase goods, and neither was there any real material exports. Rome's economy was nothing more than an elaborate Ponzi scheme. It was destined to fail. In this, Rome illuminates one of our great human flaws that we choose pointedly to ignore: we, as a species, are destined to failure. Failure being defined, in human terms, as the total extinction of the race. Humanity itself is simply an elaborate Ponzi scheme. We will proliferate for a time certainly, we already are, then start to falter, and eventually crumble.

Rome is more than just a dogma on which to hang the collected goals of our society. Rome is the prophecy of all humankind. But like all good prophecies, we don't know exactly what caused Rome to fail.

Thespians and Theists

2011-07-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

To act is, at its most fundamental, to tell a story, and, when it comes down to it, all religions have their basis in stories. Understandably, who should be the ones who tell these stories but the ones who do it really really well. Lively-told stories are much more likely to be repeated that a dull one. Therefore, you need actors to make sure your stories prosper. After a while of course, you can give up on the whole "oral tradition" shtick and just put all of the stories in a book. Whatever else they may be besides, the Bible, the Qur'an, etc. are all collections of stories. They have morals undoubtedly as well, but that's just a bonus. The real reason they are written down is that they are interesting enough to have been repeated. To be a good storyteller, you need to be a good actor, and vice versa. And the conviction and compulsion to listen to a story comes from belief; you have to believe in the story that the person is telling you. It doesn't mean that you have to accept that the story is true in the "real" world (as loath as I am to use that phrase) but that you are willing to accept the story within the guidelines of the story itself. To bring this about, the actor needs to believe in what the story is, and when they do so they stop acting and simply start being the characters in the story. If they don't have the belief, or are skeptical in any way about the story or the character they are portraying, then the scene deflates and it simply becomes a person trying to convey a message with lots of hand waving. Theists are much more likely to possess an ability to believe than their Atheist counterparts, and, by extension, are much more likely to make good actors. I've yet to meet a professional actor who doesn't have some sort of superstitions or beliefs regarding theatre, and I doubt I ever will. One reason for this is you don't meet a lot of professional actors to ask, the other being that all the non-superstitious actors were long ago killed in a series of terribly random, unfortunate accidents.

Ford

2011-07-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

A Texan was driving in the Israeli desert. He was feeling thirsty, and he noticed a tiny house in the distance, so he drove up and knocked on the door. The owner, a wrinkled old man, let him in and gave him a glass of water.
"Do you own this place?" asked the Texan, making polite conversation.
"Yes."
"Why do you live out here in the desert?"
"I raise chickens."
The Texan looked around. "How big is this place anyway?"
"Hmmm - it must be about twenty yards at the front. And at the back it's maybe sixty! Well, fifty at least.
The Texan grinned. "Back in the States," he said, "I own a ranch just outside Dallas. I get up at dawn, and I get in my car and drive. I keep driving all day, right into the evening. And I still don't reach the boundary of my ranch.
"Oh dear," said the old man, "I once had a car like that."

Ode to an Imbecile

2011-07-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

Thank God for idiots. True, they are irritating to have an enlightening conversation with, but they fulfill many essential niches in society. Tabulated for your pleasure, I present a list of the many uses of the idiot in today's society.

Menial Labour: The idiot is adept at performing tasks that require little to no actual talent or brainpower, but still provide a necessary service/produce a necessary product. Thanks to the fools of the world, I can safely pursue an intellectually stimulating, high-paying, fast-paced corporate career along with other intelligent, ambitious, fast-paced people without having to worry that I will be forced to work an assembly line for 16 hours a day screwing toothpaste lids on toothpaste. If all 6.93 billion humans on Earth we as smart or smarter than myself, there would be rather a lot of competition. Luckily, only a small fraction are actually intelligent, and of that fraction, an even smaller fraction have the opportunity to compete with me. With a nice supply of idiocy, all mindless tasks can be performed without anyone useful actually having to waste their time doing it, and since a slave caste is taboo, idiots are the next best suited for these tasks.
Innuendo: Innuendo is only really funny when not everyone gets it. Some people hear one things, and other people see beyond your actual words to the hidden meaning. Innuendo loses all of its humour when there's no one left outside of the joke, and no one is entertaining the notion that the "bruised plums" are actual pieces of damaged fruit. Thanks to idiots, the slightly more intelligent conversationalist can feel superior when they notice that the plums are not actually fruit, but merely an innuendo used to represent...well, if I tell you it rather spoils the point.
Marketing: Now, as much as I deplore marketing and marketers and - to a lesser extent - markets, I understand that they have a place in the world, because people have to sell things so that people have jobs, make money, exploit workers...come to think of it, I don't understand why they have a place in the world, but I can recognize that they do. And advertising is remarkable impotent against intelligent, informed, cynical people. However it is remarkable potent against idiots. And seeing as we need people to buy things, for reasons I don't quite agree with or understand, and the vast majority of people are idiots, it's rather lucky for all of us that advertising works quite as well as it does. Lord knows we wouldn't want these people deciding what they actually want to buy for themselves. On a side note, we also don't want these people voting on who gets to run the country based solely on the advertising put out by either party (to be honest, I don't really want them to be voting at all) but I'll just have to suck it up.

Compliments

2011-06-27T16:46:00.002-07:00

Wasted Time

2011-06-26T18:43:00.002-07:00

Go Forth and Kill

Heaven and Inception

2011-05-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

What would be in your heaven?

"Your" because heaven would have to tailor itself to the individual who inhabited it, because there's no way that one heaven cold possibly be paradise for everyone. There are too many different views on what paradise would be to make it feasible.

So we can pretty safely assume that you get an individually tailored heaven upon your arrival; St. Peter is less of a gatekeeper and more of a bellhop who checks you into your room. But what would you fill it with? I'm certain near to the top of most people's lists would be friends and family. Certainly seems likely, given that many people will talk of "seeing someone again" once they're both in heaven.

But here's the rub: if you ask to have your heaven filled with the people you loved in life, will that request be granted? Because there might exist a situation in which one of the people you rather want to have in your heaven doesn't particularly want you in theirs. Also, which heaven would you both be residing in? I'm certain at some point you would have to disagree, at which point the heaven's would have to diverge. So it seems likely that the heavens just remain likely. There exist solutions, as I see it. One would be to have the inhabiter of their heaven (called the occupant) to populate it with whomever they wish, but these people are not people, per se, but simply analogues of the people wished by the occupant to exist in his/her heaven. They're just illusions, that hear and smell and act as the real person would, but without any of that messy conflict business. This way everyone gets a heaven, and everyone can fill it with whomever they like. The only problem with this is that there would be a whole bunch of identical people running about who can't argue with the occupant. Seems like rather dull company, seeing as they can't violate the fundamental "paradise" clause that heaven lays out. Also, you, the occupant, would know that the people inhabiting your heaven were not the real things. Certainly they look like it, but you know that they aren't the real people. Imagine living in a world in which no one disagrees or puts up a fight, in which people act in ways you know they never would have acted simply to carry out their mandate of your happiness. Imagine knowing that you are the only person with a mind, a true solipsist with no hope for anything to fight back. Everyone is simply a projection of who you wished that person would be. Give it a few months and you would be sick to death of such company.

The other solution is simply to have everyone be alone in their heavens, without any disorder or potential for anything less than harmonious and paradisaical to occur. No company, no human contact, and forget about animals - they don't have souls and fail the entrance exam. Billions upon billions of people in their own individual cells, tailored to their every need, with not even suicide as an escape. Seems like a pretty nice place to live for all eternity. If I was a sadistic God I certainly know what I would do with heaven.

Your choice, if you even get to make the decision. More like than not it has already been determined for you.

The Church and Magic

2011-05-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

Why is it that the church is incredibly against magic?

You think that they'd be natural allies, seeing as they both attempt to explain natural phenomena by using some sort of an over-riding, invisible force that rules the universe. They, as a general rule, believe that if certain procedures are carried out - prayer or spells - then the laws of nature can be subverted. The church seems to spend a lot of time denying that magicians and spells and such have any power and are simply tricks (which, to be honest, they are but that's not the point) while the miracles priests and the like perform hold actual value. You think that the church and magic would make natural allies against a world that is increasingly empirical and scientific. Rather than denying that magicians possess any real ability and that only prayer actually works, why not just acknowledge magic as simply the power of God in flashier form? It would certainly help sway the whole "would like some more tangible proof of this whole deity shebang" group. It might offend the actual priests and such who get by on things such as faith healings and the like, but seeing as how neither group is willing to admit that both of their talents (magic or faith healing) occur by either misdirection or placebo, it would seem like a logical course of action to make a common cause and unite against a hostile world. Then again, I don't want to give them any ideas, divide and conquer and all that.

Nature vs. Nurture

2011-04-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

One of the questions that everyone has tried to answer since we first began questioning was "Are we a product of our genetics or of our environment?" (I realize that genes were not exactly common knowledge in classical antiquity, but the essence of the question was the same) Is who we are determined by our experiences in life, or by a collected stream of blueprints that has been passed down to us generation by generation? Do our experiences matter or is who we are predetermined?

Science has proven that, most likely, genes is the likely answer. Tabulae Rasa are most likely not what our minds are like. Genes account for probably 90% of our personality and physiology.

But it's a stupid question when you realize what it is you're actually deciding between.

My genes have been field tested for success for generations. They are the product of thousands and millions of individuals (and some animals, and some slimy proto-fish things) who succeeded in life and passed on their successful genes. Nowhere in my genetic code are the genes of failure. So genes, are, by definition, a blueprint that have been generated by interacting with one's environment. The same environment that I am now living in. Genetics may determine 90% of who I am, but those genes were generated by the environment. We're all products of our environment, and whether those results are seen genetically or cognitively simply depends on what aspect of who we are is in question. My immense dislike of avocado was not genetic. My immense dislike of the smell of rotten flesh was. Genes are just environment by another name.

My Journey around the Political Horseshoe

2011-04-05T20:44:00.000-07:00

"Counselor asks my direction, 'left or right where do you lean son?'
Round and round is how I go, frivolous like the swirling snow"

I have recently discovered that I'm not nearly as left wing as I had previously thought. I am also shocked to discover that I believe less and less in a powerful government, and seem to be leaning more and more towards a night-watchmen state as ideal.

I used to believe in "for the greater good" and the society in which all contribute according to their ability and all receive according to their need. In a world with a nice big government that watches over things and makes sure nothing goes askew and generally keeps things running smoothly. An economy which is heavily influenced by the government to make sure that no ambitious money-making businessmen exploit and become filthy rich because of it. Medical care should be free and universal. Same goes for eduction. No one is offended by abortions, same sex marriages, or atheists.

But - and this is a rather serious but.

The words "for the greater good" have inspired more horrors than any self-absorbed individual on a reckless, ambitious, destructive, hedonistic crusade for personal gain. Communism has a death toll of just over 100 million. I'm unwilling to invest my political ideas in something with such an awful track record. Also, fundamentally, while "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" is a great idea, collectivism doesn't work. On an empirical, real-life level, and on a philosophical level. Because the only thing that man has is his mind. He has no claws, no fangs, no wings, no opposable toes, no compound eyes; he has nothing to offer but his mind. Animals obtain food by force. Man possesses no biological tools that allow him to do this, and must either hunt or plant for food. To hunt, man needs tools, which require thought to create. To plant and farm also requires a thought process. Everything that man is and everything he has comes from the product of his reasoning mind. And minds are an attribute of an individual. There is no such thing as a collective mind. There is no collective thought. Every group decision is the product of multiple individual minds that then all present their individual findings, and then a compromise is reached. So, collectivism, left-wing socialism, communism, and unions and the like are, on a certain philosophical level, fundamentally flawed. To band together is to deny that which makes us uniquely human.

The Binary World

2011-03-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

We love to categorize our world. Nothing makes us happier than when we can pin something down as definitively under a certain label. No ifs, no buts, no provisos. And we, as a species, whether it's us fed by the media, or the media fed by us, seem to be on a mission to divide the world into two. We seem to want to categorize everything as god or evil. Mother Teresa is good, while Hitler and the Cat-Bin Lady are evil. And everything that is natural is good and healthy - ignoring the fact that "natural" includes things such as arsenic and poo and shark attacks. Nothing healthy about shark attacks. And everything that is chemical is evil - ignoring of course that...everything is chemical. But life's not like that; nothing is ever definitively one-sided.

For example, picture the Dalai Lama, who is world-renowned for his pacifist outlook towards rebellion and for his non-violence shtick. He can also pull off a rather shocking orange like no one else - with the possible exception of Dutch football fans. But the Dalai Lama isn't quite the paragon of peace that we make him out to be. For hundreds of years, Buddhist monks in Tibet have, well, been total dicks to the poor folk living in Tibet. But a theocratic rule is useful in that your words come not from you - a simple Earthly being with no ore clout than the next Earthly being - but from a higher, divine power. Reincarnation is a powerful tool to prevent the people from rising up. If people believe that there is a higher power with the ability - and inclination - to punish or reward them based on their moral choices, and suffering silently is the way to earn some serious brownie points, then people are going to suffer silently. Chock one up for sneaky oppression. The Dalai Lama also preaches how a life of poverty is good for the soul, and rising up and gaining wealth is bad. Of course, he's rich now, so the wealth = sin rule doesn't apply to him (actually, he recently said that he was giving up the rule of Tibet, even though he's not technically in power). Now, don't think that I'm anti-Dalai Lama - I'm all for the peaceful protest, although when Muammar needs to be shown what's what then rise up all you want (except the self-immolation business; it just robs the protesters of another pair of hands) - because I'm not saying that the Dalai Lama is evil. Conversely, I'm not saying he's amazing either. No one is purely black or white (if you take that out of context as a racial slur...) we're all shades of grey. Or in the case of our Tibetan fried, a lovely shade of orange.

You are presented with two cups, one containing Pepsi, the other, Coca-Cola. You are asked to make a decision. Well, you think, let's break this down a little; Pepsi's owner has written a book detailing how the owner of Coca-Cola is a moron - counterpoint: Coca-Cola has done the opposite in reverse. Pepsi is sponsored by Aretha Franklin, however, Coca-Cola is does have some snappy advertisements. Hmm, not enough to make a decision, and anyways, both taste like malted battery acid. The above is a simple example of information paralysis, a condition in which the more information you gather to make an informed decision, the harder it becomes to actually make one. You become - in effect - paralyzed by your own knowledge. Yet, knowing that being informed on a subject makes it difficult to take a particular viewpoint, we revile those who have no strong opinions, and idolize/loathe those who do not - the attitude expressed towards that person being dependent on whether their opinion corresponds with our own.We are led by people who make ill-informed, snap decision; we are firmly on one end of the spectrum. Yes, a spectrum, despite how much we may wish it otherwise, all opinions are on a spectrum. We would, however, much prefer life to be instead composed of three islands: one at either pole, and one for those still sitting on the fence. And while we may hate the people on our opposing island, our true disgust is reserved for those on the fence, those individuals who lack enough of a spine to declare for one side or the other. But what's so wrong with the fence? To be on the fence means you have either learned too much to make a decision, or not enough, and are in the process of accumulating enough knowledge to be soundly paralyzed. And the people on the fence have one great advantage. Remember the adage "the grass is always greener on the other side"? Chances are neither side is greener, but you can only see one side at a time if your on the ground, but from the fence, you can see both sides at once.

It's now that we can finally reveal who inspired this whole false dichotomy bashing shebang. Aristotle, who is considered, and rightly, to be one of the greatest polymaths of all time. And his Magnum Opus was the concept of "The Golden Mean." The Golden Mean is the point of balance between the opposite ends of the spectrum. To be neither in excess nor in deficit. To not be frenetic nor listless, but rather to be energized. To Aristotle there were no polar opposites; there were fundamental qualities upon which a variety of levels existed. Truths and lies are the same thing: one is an excess of truthfulness, the other a deficit. It was not, to Aristotle, a sin to be undecided at the centre of things, but rather the objective. The goal of Aristotelean philosophy was to find the perfect point of balance. To be a man perfectly balanced was to be a man possessing magnanimity, a greatness of character. But the real secret of a magnanimous man was not that fact that he did not approach either end of the spectrum, but rather the ability to travel both paths in either measure. To optimize one';s potential so that one can exist in any manner of one;s choosing. To be, in essence, a man of such black and white possibility that it is impossible to tell one from the other, and so that grey becomes an average term that is the only one applicable. That is life; not being of a white, grey, or black nature, but being a blend of all possibilities so that one can become one of any actualities.

Evolutionary Enigmas - Sucker Footed Bat vs. Star-Nosed Mole

2011-03-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

Here's a pair of very, very odd animals.

Yup, it's hanging from a pair of suction cups. The bat possess them on both its front and back legs, which it uses to stick to and climb along surfaces. It doesn't, however, use the pads for suction, but instead secretes body fluid that helps it adhere. It also has two very large ears, and weighs in at a remarkable 0.02 pounds. The bats are native to Madagascar

And as weird as suction cups are, the next animal possesses something much weirder.

This is a star-nosed mole, who is named for the 22 tentacle-like protuberances from its face. These sense organs (known as Eimer's Organs) have the ability to feel, smell, and taste potential meals. The star-nosed mole holds the record as "Fastest Eater" as the highly advanced sensory cells can quickly (8 ms) identify the object touching them as food and then the claws are used to grab and the work, grub, or bug is consumed in no more than 200 ms. Due to the usefulness of the Eimer's organs, and the fact that moles live underground, the star-nosed mole is blind. It is also able to smell underwater, which is achieved by exhaling bubbles onto an object or a scent trail and then inhaling the bubbles past the Eimer's Organs.

So, as cool as suction cups are, and the unlikelyhood of finding them in nature, I'm rather inclined to go with the mole that has tentacles on its nose

Hating on Wikipedia

2011-03-07T10:36:00.001-08:00

It's widely known (or, at least, it should be) that I am in love with Wikipedia, that great internet god that will provide you with more information than can be accessed in a lifetime. Unfortunately, some people have become somewhat disillusioned with the mighty information bank, claiming that it is flawed, subjective, and cannot be used as proof or as a basis for information. I am not saying that Wikipedia the gospel truth (then again, I don't even say that the gospel truth is gospel truth, so take that as you will).

Information, however, is subjective to the person who is recording it. Any and all events look different depending on where you stand on the issue, and how you managed to observe it. A man in a parade will remember it as different from a man watching on his balcony. There is no objectivity to knowledge, because it has to pass through subjective filters (people) before it reaches us.

Claiming that the information on Wikipedia is subjective and therefore not valid is absurd. One valid concern is that information on Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and they may deliberately publish false information. To that I have this: if you are talking to a person or reading information from a book, that information has only passed through 1 person (possibly 2 or 3) and is therefore exclusively biased towards that person's viewpoints. Information on Wikipedia, however, is faced with scrutiny of the entire world so that it will eventually reach a balance between opposing views because people from all viewpoints will adjust and edit the information until it reaches an acceptable middle ground. The subjectivity of the information is now not of one person - who may be highly biased and therefore an unacceptable source - but of many, who, individually, may all have extreme biases, but together they will balance towards the middle.

The only problem with this is that if you can convince enough people of something, it becomes fact. Far from George Orwell's 1984 whereby through Totalitarianism, 2+2 became equal to 5, on Wikipedia 2+2 = 5 through consensus of the people. We have brought democracy to knowledge, and in the name of free speech, have allowed only those previously without a voice to speak.

Infinity Has No Rulebook

2011-03-01T17:48:00.071-08:00

Think back to the Chinese Room that was laid out in a previous post. There was a man possessing a rulebook with which he manipulated incoming symbols. Now, imagine if the man did not possess a rule book, per se, but instead simply had a table of all possible inputs and the corresponding table of all possible outputs. It would certainly take much longer to look up the correct entry, but at least he would be assured of the correct answer, while with a rulebook he could suffer from a deficiency in his rules.

So the question I pose is, are you better served by having all the knowledge you need, or the ability to get that knowledge should you need it?

There is a variety of methods of storing the rules you require to manipulate incoming symbols. The simplest one is simply a table of all possible inputs and the corresponding table of all possible outputs. The drawback to this method, that, while you are ensured the correct response, it would take a dreadfully long time to search through the table for the right entry.

If we go a level up, complexity wise, we make it to a rulebook that possesses a series of rules for manipulating the symbols. Thus, certain patterns that repeat can be grouped together to save time. The drawback to this method being that the quality of your responses depends solely on the quality of your rulebook. You would either need to possess all of the knowledge required to write such a rulebook - and if you possessed all of this knowledge then the rulebook becomes redundant - or you would need to know someone with the knowledge who would write the book for you - and if he has all of the knowledge then why isn't he in the stupid room?

Both pf the previous methods suffer from an overabundance of information. There is simply too much to have to cram into the rulebook that it becomes unwieldy. You would need something that cuts down on the size of the rulebook, but still has a comparable level of accuracy.

How about a self-generating rulebook? One that contains nothing but blank pages - to start. You are given one symbol (start off small) and, of course, you don't know what to do with it, so you check your rulebook for the answer. Unfortunately it's blank, so you just hazard a guess at what the correct response might be. Judging by the fact that the next symbol arrives on time, and no electric shock is administered, you assume that the response you gave was acceptable. You jot down the rule you just generated in your rulebook. Now, should you require to manipulate that symbol again, you have a rule that tells you what to do. But, for arguments sake, let's say that the symbol you gave back fell below the standard expected. An electric shock is administered or whatever form of punishment you wish. What do you do? You don't record that in the rulebook. Now you have a rulebook full of the symbols which most commonly appear, instead of a rulebook which contains every possible answer. You have something that generates itself - without any rules telling it how to do so. It generates the rules that govern its own existence.

The densest packing of 23 different sized squares

It's all about efficiency. The entire universe operates on the principle of maximum packing.

And in case you missed it, this entire post is an allegory.

Interlocked.

2011-02-21T20:18:00.002-08:00

Rather fun.
http://armorgames.com/play/10591/interlocked

Does This Bother Anyone Else?

2011-02-19T21:13:00.000-08:00

Solids are nice, tangible things. They won't flow over your desk and spill onto everything. They can be trusted to just sit and stay, like a dog, which conveniently is a solid.

Liquids are tricky, but are dependable if you understand the nuances. They can be trusted to nicely settle into any container you give them. Pour a liquid into a cup and it stays. Liquids are not as dependable as solids, but decently dependable.

Gases are devilishly unreliable sons of bitches. They go whizzing away off into the wilderness at a moment's notice. Most of the time you can't even see them either. The only way to keep a gas under wraps is to completely seal it in a solid, and in that case you might as well just go with the solid.

But the real reason I hate gases are the fact that they're not really there. Well, they are, but they're also not at the same time. Because gases are made up of atoms (just like everything else) but gases are made up of really spread out atoms (unlike our friendly solids and apathetic liquids). So now we have a whole bunch of spread out atoms that make up this gas. But what fills in the gaps? Nothing. Yet that region of nothing is still considered part of the gas, even though IT DOESN'T EXIST. In calculations, the mass of the gas can be given a number. That number is an approximate, and the mass of the individual particles that compose that gas are not considered. How can the mass of anything be greater than that of the particles it is composed of? Better yet, how can a gas have mass if we are ignoring the mass of what makes up the gas? At moments like that when I realize that the air I am breathing is really not there, I panic and try not to imagine a moment when I unluckily breathe in a part of the "air" that is particularly sparse of atoms.

Then again, if I have issues with gases, atoms are a heck of a lot worse. A tiny little speck of mass surrounded by probable and improbable electrons that probably don't exist some places and probably do others. And there's nothing in between. Yet somehow everything looks nice and solid, even though most of it isn't there. We're living in a universe that is 99% empty space (space being a nice large vacuum and all) and the 1% that is something is also 99% not actually something. And of the 0.01% of stuff that actually actually exists, 75% of it is Hydrogen.

Evolutionary Enigmas - Ajolote vs Giant Salamander

2011-02-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

So, this animal tries to neatly avoid being put into any sort of category. It's a reptile, but it looks like a snake. Well, except for the fact that it has two legs. Yeah, it's a weird little bugger. It's also nocturnal.
Yeah, so the ajolote kind of boggles our minds to. The two legs are used to burrow into the ground, where the ajolote lives most of the time. It only comes out in the dark, and the wet. It lives in Mexico though, so the odds of seeing it are rare unless you happen to be in Mexico at midnight during a monsoon.

The other one is also a rarity, so your odds of seeing either of these in the wild is next to none.

The Giant Salamander is the largest known amphibian. Growing up to 1.8m in length, these giants inhabit rivers in China and Japan. They are covered in folds of skin to hep them absorb oxygen from the water. For some odd reason, they possess both juvenile gills and adult lungs, due to incomplete metamorphosis from their larval stage. Their main quirk is the fact that their main sense is a series of nodes along the body that detect water pressure (and by extent, prey). When threatened, they can release a thick, milky substance that smells strongly of pepper. They are also the longest living amphibian, clicking in at around 80 years.

This is a tough one, but we're probably going to have to go with the two funny little legs.

Pride and Prejudice

2011-02-01T09:27:00.002-08:00

There are, at the most fundamental level, four types of people who inhabit the world.

There are two different criteria, each of which have either a yea or a nay response, that lead us to the four potential options.

The two criteria (or qualities) are ability, the total sum of one's competence, skills, intelligence, etc. and realism, or the ability to correctly make judgements about their own and other's levels of ability.

So, if we draw this into a grid, with ability along the top, and realism along the side, we get a grid, with which four options are presented. These are the four types as previously alluded to.

There are the vain, who are unable, but believe themselves to be.

There are the temperate, who are able, and correctly believe themselves to be unable.

There are the humble, who are able, but believe themselves to be unable.

And then there are the proud, who are able, and knowledgeable of this.

Which of these four do we hold in the highest esteem? Most likely humility, followed by temperance, then pride, and finally vanity. This seems strange however, because we are placing temperate people, who lack ability, above proud people, who are able. So let's rearrange this ranking, placing pride above temperance. But now we have another issue, because we have proud people, who can make an accurate decision about their abilities, below humble people, who are unable to make a correct decision about their abilities. Again, let's fix this. We now have pride, followed by humility, temperance, and finally vanity.

But wait, we now have a sin as the most esteemed personality type? Yes, yes we do.

So, rather than assume our previous reasoning has been incorrect, let's instead assume that our definition of "sin" is a little flawed. Is it a sin to be competent? Obviously not, in fact, it is worse to be unable than to be able. And is it a sin to be able to make a correct judgement? Again, the answer has to be no; in the words of Sun Tzu, "the general who can form an accurate judgement about his own and his enemy's forces will be victorious." So, neither of Pride's constituent parts is a sin, therefore we should be able to conclude that the whole is not sinful.

So let's look at our final order, and notice how we have ranked them. The lowest two positions, temperance and vanity, belong to those who are unable. Oppositely, the highest two positions are of those who have ability. Now, within these two sub-groupings, a pattern will arise. Temperance is placed higher than vanity, and pride is higher than humility. Temperance and Pride, the higher of the two, do not share either believed superiority or believed inferiority. What they do share, however, is the correct belief about their abilities. Referring again to the Sun Tzu quote above, we will place higher those who can make a correct assessment of their own abilities. This assessment is not ranked higher than the actual ability itself, but it further divides the able from the unable.

Now, pride itself is subject to a poor history of mistranslation and false dichotomizing. Pride is different from hubris. The man who is thought to be proud is one who thinks himself worthy of great things, and being worthy of great things, does them; for he who does so beyond his abilities is a fool, and no virtuous man is foolish. The man who possesses hubris is one of overweening pride, one who causes shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to himself, nor because anything has happened to him, but merely for his own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; that is revenge. Hubris is the belief that by ill-treating others you make your own superiority the greater.

Pride is even found to be a virtue by some philosophies, and not only a virtue, but the king of the virtues. Aristotle defined pride as "a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them more powerful, and it is not found without them. Therefore it is hard to be truly proud; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character."

Pride: the possessing of skill and the knowledge of one's possession, is the highest level of character one can possess.

Klüver, Death, and Geometry

2011-01-28T10:29:00.058-08:00

We're all well acquainted with the concept of a near death experience (NDE from now on). Tunnels with lights at the end, a sense of extreme alm and relaxation, potentially even an out-of-body experience. Now, one of the theories out there attempts to explain NDE's by saying that an NDE is the soul (or mind, or immaterial self, or whatever you desire to call it) is separating from the body and going wherever it goes when it separates (down the tunnel presumably). But for some reason it doesn't make it all the way, and returns to the body, hence the "near death" and not "actual death".

People experiencing NDE's will almost always report hallucinations of some sort of tunnel, or some other sort of geometric pattern. But more on that later.

One of the common features of these NDE's is that they almost always occur when the person is in/has some sort of medical complication that will most likely lead to death, such as a coma, heart attack, asphyxia, etc. Pay attention to that last example, and this other word, hypoxia, meaning a lack of oxygen in the body (specifically, the brain).

We all hallucinate, to some degree or another, in the normal course of our lives. I'm going to focus specifically on visual hallucinations for the sake of this post, but there are other types as well. For the most part, these hallucinations occur just as someone is about to fall asleep, when their eyes are closed and they are relaxed. Note: the eyes are closed, this means that no light is entering the eyes (also, the lights in the room are off, as you're trying to sleep) so there is no "actual" visual information. All sight that occurs during this point are strictly hallucinatory. Now, you may think that these hallucinations vary greatly from individual to individual, but in fact, the same hallucinations occur. These are called form constants.

A selection of form constants

Lattices, spirals, and tunnels occur in almost all individuals who hallucinate - which would be everybody. Now, why is it that these specific patterns arise in individuals who often have no relation culturally, ethnically, or philosophically to the other individuals who experience them? Because these pattens are an artifact of deep brain structure - the parts of the brain that have remained untouched for millennia. So, genetically, we all have these patterns built into our heads from the day we were born They arise out of the rules that we use to interpret information on the eyes as vision. In normal sight, concentric circles are interpreted as parallel lines. However, when one is hallucinating the eye is interpreting the circles on the eye as circles in real life. These concentric circles lead to the illusion of depth, and the common tunnel hallucination is born.

These patterns can be seen even without any visual stimulation, even congenitally blind people see them. One example is a phenomena known as the Prisoner's Cinema: people trapped in lightless situations for an extended period of time will experience flashes of light and colour. These visions are not due to light reaching the eyes, but by phosphene. Phosphene is an entoptic phenomena in which an experience of light occurs even when no light actually reaches the eye. You can experience this by pressing on your eye (when its closed obviously) and see flashes of colour. Now, that's not the only way that phosphenes can occur. Situations in which one is deprived of light for an extended period of time (namely, the Prisoner's Cinema) can also cause the effect, or a situation in which one is deprived of oxygen.

Interesting, a lack of oxygen can cause the effect even if there is no visual stimulation. So, it follows that it would work if there was visual stimulation. Well, yes, it does work, and this is one of the causes of visual hallucinations: a lack of oxygen in the brain, which leads to an incorrect interpretation of visual stimuli, which leads to a consistent set of hallucinations.

Hmm, also interesting that tunnel hallucinations are common in people experiencing NDE's. And NDE's usually involve a lack of oxygen to the brain...

Well, you can draw your own conclusion from that, all of the evidence is there.

The Irrationale of Rationality

2011-01-19T10:57:00.001-08:00

We like to think that we are clever, observant individuals. However, we are much more likely to make incorrect decisions about the world around us than we are to make correct decisions. Our brains are even designed to contribute to this: our entire mental framework of decision making is built off of assumptions and heuristics. We sacrifice accuracy in order to make decisions quickly (i.e. the Travelling Salesman Problem) As a general rule, it is a good thing that we do make speedier decisions: the time it would take to always make a completely accurate decision would bog our mental processes down unimaginably. The only problem that this leads us to is that we can be fooled if some key assumptions are played on to generate an incorrect response. Take the photo to the right as an example. We know that the structure is impossible, know it for a fact, yet we are unable to get over the fact that the structure looks like any other building. Either we focus on the two tower, and ignore the water going between them, so that the towers look correct; or we focus on the waterfall and the water, ignoring the towers, and still the image will look fine. Our brains cleverly designed rules for interpreting buildings have no trouble creating the illusion that this is in fact a complete building. Only by paying very close attention can we know that this building is impossible. Our brains are fooled by their rules - rules that have never failed it in the past, so they must work for all things in the future.

Take this photo to the left as another example. It looks as though there is a chunk of pavement missing to reveal a city street beneath. That's what you see, and no matter how hard you try to, it is virtually impossible to see it as anything other than a gaping whole in the city's street. But the image is simply chalk painted to give the illusion of depth. You brain's internal rules that allow it to recognize shading and brightness and interpret them as depth are fooled into thinking that this (rather clever) drawing has depth. The brain makes guesses and takes stabs at the truth in order to function at any sort of speed that is practical. Also, it probably lacks to processing power to fully analyze everything that is going on, and has to make do with a pigdin version.

The brain can also be suggested to do things. Subtly, so that it's not even aware it is being told to do something, but unerringly, it will still do the thing it is told to do. Look at the graph below (it expands if clicked).

Along the bottom are a selection of European countries, and along the left is the percentage of people who are organ donors in that country. Notice how two countries that ar every similar culturally, i.e. the Netherlands and Belgium, and notice the difference in organ donors in those countries. Around a 70% difference. Why is this? As mentioned earlier, these are two very similar counties, so its nothing cultural. There is only one difference between the two countries in this case, and it appears on the organ donor forms. On the Dutch form, it has a box labeled: "tick if you WISH to be an organ donor". The Belgian form has a box labeled: "tick if you DO NOT WISH to be an organ donor". That's the only difference, and it accounts for a 70% difference in organ donors. When presented with a decision that has no rules or basis upon which to make its guess, the brain simply shuts down. It has nothing to base its decision upon, so it simply takes the option that is presented to it as the more common option (namely, not ticking the box, as ticking the box requires extra effort, and therefore would only be for people differing from the common selection). The brain is not so much lazy, and therefor unwilling to tick the box, but it simply doesn't have any rule for making this decision, so it is unable to make one. Without our rules, we cannot function, but with our rules, we can be easily fooled if those rules are used to incorrectly interpret the world around us.

Machine ex Machina

2011-01-15T16:53:00.003-08:00

You are sitting in a room. There are no windows or doors, and the only features on the wall are a small slit similar to mail slot and a ceiling light. Sitting beside you is a pen and a book. The book contains a series of scribbles and other nonsensical symbols. After poring over the tome for some time, you notice that it is a series of instructions on how to manipulate the symbols, and how to change from one symbol to another. At that moment, a piece of paper is passed through the slot, and on it is one of the symbols from the book. Eagerly, you take the book, look up the correct symbol, and then read the instructions on what the symbol should be turned into. You copy that symbol from the book onto the sheet of paper with the pen, and slide it back through the mail slot. Another symbol appears, and you repeat the process. Eventually, two symbols appear, and you look deeper in the book for what to do. Again, you end up writing a reply to the symbols presented to you which you pass back through the slot. After some time, you have worked your way up to pages and pages worth of symbols which you are converting and replying to. Imagine now that you are informed that these symbols are in fact letters to a language. They just happen to be symbols to a language you don't speak. You could not, at any point say that you have understood what the symbols mean. You can manipulate them with unerring accuracy and speed, but you have not one inkling as to what these symbols mean, and what kind of conversation you have been carrying on with the person on the other side of the wall.

You in your room

Now picture a computer placed in the same room as you, and containing an identical book of rules in its memory banks, except this time they are the rules for conversing in English. You are to hold a conversation with this computer, and are asked to see if it is intelligent. Carrying on your conversation with the computer, you notice its replies are full of errors, poorly worded, and often make no logical sense. You reply that the computer lacks intelligence. Then, you are asked to repeat the experiment. This time, the replies are well structured, logical, and imply a high level of intelligence. You conclude that the computer this time is intelligent. To which you are given the response, "what computer?" and the wall between you and the "computer" is removed, revealing a man (let's call him Turing) a pen, and a two books.

You are informed that turing speaks only Chinese, so it is useless to try and converse with him. You ask if Turing was responsible for both sets of replies - both intelligent and unintelligent, and you are told that he was. You ask what was changed between the two experiments, and are told that he used a different book of rules for each one. One book contains impeccable rules for grammar and intelligent responses, the other contains only a pigdin. You are forced to conclude that it is impossible to tell whether or not Turing is intelligent, as the intelligence of his responses depended only on the set of rules he was given to work with.

Okay, after what was probably the longest anecdote in Fanatic Avocados' history, we can now discuss the significance of what we just read above.

We all contain the rule book in our heads. This is what tells us to remove our hand should we put it into a fire, or to respond "you're welcome" when the input "thank-you" is given. And, as in the case above, the intelligence of our responses to the input depends solely on our rulebook and our ability to correctly interpret said rulebook. We are, as humans, rule based, and the more rules we contain the more complex we are - the more "intelligent."

Now, imagine for a second that we do actually place a computer in the room with a rulebook. Do you think that you could outperform it? Could you, with all of you vast mental power, most of it dedicated to pattern matching, respond any faster or more intelligently than a computer. As for intelligence, we can rule that as a criteria out, for we have already determined that the intelligence of a reply depends solely on the intelligence of the rulebook that one is using to manipulate the inputs. Speed then. Luckily, this is a simply quality to measure. With an identical rulebook, a human being would have no hope of outperforming even the simplest of computer's. Proof: math equations. A similar premise, taking rules (add two numbers that are joined by a "+" symbol, etc.) and outputting responses (2+2 = 4). There is a reason we use calculators, and that is because as soon as the math reaches any sort of complexity, the human mind is simply too slow to perform adequately. Hence the prevalence of calculators.

I think it is pretty safe at this point to draw the parallel between a human and a computer: we both intake our stimuli, modify them based on rules (either gained from experience, for humans, or programmed in, for machines) and output the result. We can also pretty safely assume that no human could ever outperform a computer if they were both given the same rulebook. Luckily for us (and unfortunately for those of us who are still holding out for a robot apocalypse) no machine has ever been handed a complicated enough rulebook.

Except in the human brain.

Hold up. Did you just say that there is a machine in the human brain? After all of this comparison drawing about how we're so inferior and the only reason we're not all dead is computer programmers haven't been able to work out a complicated enough rule book. Well, yes, yes I did. Because it's there. Nestled deep in the ancient parts of the brain that have remained unchanged for millennia. There's a reason that those bits haven't changed: they are fast, and they work well. It's just that most of the time they are sitting back, letting our half-assed inefficient manipulators fiddle around with the paperwork and amuse themselves. But, should any danger actually arise, that ancient brain clicks into action, hijacking the body and getting it out of danger before your conscious manipulator has even opened his rulebook. Ever put your hand into a fire, only to pull it back without even consciously ordering your hand to move? Pain also, is delayed by a couple of seconds. This is the delay between the man and the machine. While the machine has already located the danger, made a judgment, and eliminated the threat, the man is still puzzling over the series of symbols he has just received.

Symbols, yes, we're still calling them symbol, because that's all they are really. For there is another machine in the brain, one that is much more powerful. It's job is to convert the incoming stimuli into something that the human can actually understand. It's not as though a man would have any idea how to convert a series of pulsing electric flashes that pass for vision, hearing, and all the other senses. This machine is completely unnecessary - it's only purpose is to allow the human mind to not be totally confused. It gives the man a sense of purpose, as he sits in his lonely room parsing symbols. It is the babysitter of the mind, and had it not evolved then human's as a species would have has little chance of surviving once the conscious mind evolved. At first we were machine's. Then, we evolved minds, and to compensate, we needed to evolve another machine - hence the title of the post.

We don't have conscious access to the rules that govern the structure of our brain mechanics. We don't know what to do with a series of electrical pulses or how those can possibly represent vision. But something in there does, and it is generous enough to let us see what it knows. We are never taught these rules, implying that they have been passed on over the eons of evolution because they work. They are the remnants of the ancient mammalian brain, whose structures have remained unaltered for millennia, because messing with something so successful is incredibly risky.

Intelligence is, then, impossible to properly measure, because we all contain a much faster (and arguably) a much more intelligent part that is so far beyond our dim understanding of the world that it doesn't even bother itself with trivial tasks such as IQ tests. That it leaves to the little kid of the mind, the conscious part, while it waits in the dusty corners, ready to pull the conscious self out of trouble should the need arise.

Machiavellian Logos

2011-01-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

Which virtue should we prize above all others?

Is it courage, leadership, humility, strength, intelligence, humour, empathy, honour, or any other number of the myriad of virtues?

No

Prudence is the prime virtue, and as such should take precedence ahead of all others.

A clear, rational mind that can quickly and accurately take stock of a situation and respond in the best manner is the most useful tool one can posess.

This view was probably first expounded by Aristotle. He called this virtue Phronesis, or practical wisdom.

But is it always ethical to be prudent? If presented with any number of dilemma's, can a prudent mind triumph over the ethical mind?

Imagine that there are two children strapped to a railroad track. A train is approaching, and you are near enough to save one of the children. You have enough time to rescue one child, but not enough time to rescue them both. However, if you attempt to save one child, you will be ethically compelled to try and rescue the other, although both you and the child will be struck by the train and killed. So the question that exists is do you free one child, dooming both yourself and the other child; or do you leave both children to die, preserving yourself?

For the ethical person, there can be no victory, because either option will end with two deaths and one survivor. This survivor though, will either be haunted by the fact they just let two children die, or will probably get tied to the railroad tracks again (seeing as there is no one around to protect them).

But for the prudent person, a much better alternative exists. The prudent person can free one person and then safely leave, knowing that they will be killed should they attempt to save the other person. This scenario leaves 2 alive and one dead. And while an ethical person would be tormented over the fact that they just stood by and watched a child be killed by a train, a prudent person will know that they have made the best of a terrible situation, and they will be pleased.

A prudent person will always favour the survival of the self over the survival or anyone else, as the self is the only thing that allows the prudent person to exist. You can live lacking all of the virtues above; you can be cowardly, vain, and an oath-breaker, but if you are prudent than you will have made the best of your situation. If you still manage to perform the best and end up as a cowardly vain oath-breaker, then the dice have been heavily weighted against you. It is not essential to live a life free from vice, lies, et. but to appear as though as one has lived a life free of them.

It is prized to live while keeping one's word, but it is equally prized to live a life in which the illusion of maintaining one's word is preserved. If no one can tell the difference, then they are identical paths. This allows you the flexibility to choose either to lie or to tell the truth, as both will end up with you being believed to be honourable. You should therefore, then, keep your word only when it suits you, but also strive to maintain the illusion of honour, even if you are to lie.

A rigid code of ethics will quickly find itself trapped into a situation in which it cannot win (as above with the trains). Therefore a rigid code of ethics cannot succeed. Instead a flexible one will win out; one that will suit itself best in any of the circumstances in which it might find itself. Having a rigid code will force one to make incorrect decisions in order to avoid violation of the code, but a flexible code will allow one to always make the best - or most profitable - decision at any given occasion. This will, however, make one appear as though one is dishonourable, weak, indecisive and flimsy. This is not so, but the distinction will not be apparent to those who observe your actions. As above, it is crucial to maintain the illusion that one has the rigid code that is so prized by people. So, prudence, combined with clever rationalizing and some brilliant PR, is the virtue most valuable to any person.

Personality Feedback Loops

2011-01-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

You are not who you are.

You are instead what you are believed to be.

Let me explain. There is a classic device known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. This is used extensively in literature, but also happens on a much more real level. However, we can use the literary examples to explain and model the real-world applications. In Greek myth, there was a titan by the name of Cronus. Now, Cronus was the current ruler of Olympus, having recently deposed his own father. There came about to be a prophecy which foretold that Cronus would be cast down by his own son. Wishing to avoid this, he ate all of his children - except for one. That one was Zeus, who escaped being swallowed because his mother, Rhea, gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling as opposed to a child (Cronus apparently being not too bright). Zeus then was informed of his sibling's incarceration, and seeking revenge, went and deposed Cronus. The reason that Zeus fulfilled the prophecy was because of Cronus's actions to prevent the prophecy from occurring. Hence the self-fulfilling (by attempting to prevent you actually cause what you sought to prevent).

Let's take this a step further now. Imagine that you are seen as a funny person. Knowing that you are expected to be humourous, you act accordingly - making jokes, etc. This in turn causes you to become the funny person that people originally believed you to be. You can apply this to virtually any trait. And it works, which is the scary thing.

Another example. There exists a sports team, on which there is one player whom the coach thinks is the star. He then proceeds to treat the player like the star athlete that they believe them to be, giving them more playing time, more advice, etc. This player will then develop into the star athlete originally conceived.

We fit into the roles that are prescribed to us. We do not seek to overstep our boundaries, for we are aware (dimly) of our limits and of our place. Little jigsaw pieces that exert influence on the pieces around them.

Evolutionary Enigma's - King of Herring vs. Thorny Devil

2011-01-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since one of these, but we can always use a couple of odd creatures every now and then.

Looks decently sized for a fish I'd say. But, that's actually a rather small one. King of Herring (or Giant Oarfish) can grow up to 17m. That's good enough to make it the longest bony fish in the world. It generally inhabits water from the 300m - 1000m range. It also doesn't have scales, which is kind of odd, instead being covered by a tough skin. One of it's odder behaviors is that it will hang straight down - no one's really sure why. Sure, there's some theories about feeding and light and some other nonsense, but they don't seem all that likely.

Ah, the Thorny Devil. Equipped with an array of spines and a large bump behind it's head (a false head, to trick predator of course, although, why being bitten in the neck is any less fatal than being bitten in the head I have no idea) this is an anti-predator machine. Throw in the fact that it lives in central Australia, probably one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth, and you have a very hardy creature. Probably the best adaptation it possesses, however, is the fact that the spines on its back are arranged in such a manner as to create a series of grooves and channels along the devil's back that allow water to be reached from any location on its body. It can literally suck water off of its own back, simply by channeling the water to its mouth. The number of tries that must've taken to great right (evolutionarily of course) is probably staggering.

Compared to everything that the Thorny Devil brings, just size won't be enough for the King. Thorny Devil gets the nod.

Anti-Turing

2011-01-01T14:19:00.001-08:00

I'm decently certain that most of you have heard of a Turing test. If not, I'll run a quick overview by you.

Basically, the test is attempting to measure an artificial intelligences intelligence. What you do is isolate three subjects: one will be an average human, one will be the adjudicator, and one will be the AI in question. Now the adjudicator asks questions and attempts to determine which participant is the computer and which is the person - based solely on their answers. Generally these questions are administered by use of a keyboard. One of the twists is that the adjudicator is not aware that one of the participants is a computer. They will simply be told they are interviewing two people, similar to a job interview, and it is only at the end that they are asked to identify the intelligence between the two responders.

Standard Turing Test

More detailed information on Turing Tests.

But this test assumes that a computer is less intelligent than a human and so to correctly imitate a human and convince the adjudicator that the AI is one requires a level of intelligence higher than that of most machines. But, what happens if we ignore that assumption, and instead assume that computers are more intelligent than people. In this Reverse Turing Test, a human and a computer both attempt to convince a computer that they are an AI.

Do you think you could pass? If you do, then it just confirms what we originally suspected: humans are intelligent, enough so that they can convince a computer that they are a computer. But, if you fail, then does that mean you are not intelligent? No. What it means is something much worse. It means that you are not even artificially intelligent, because an artificial intelligence was not fooled by your (apparent) intelligence. You cannot even perform as a computer, so what makes you think your intelligence is able to allow you to perform as a human?

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh

2010-12-18T21:49:00.000-08:00

I am not that which I shall be.

My future self does not exist, so it cannot be who I am.

My future self also cannot influence that which I am.

I am not that which I was.

I am not the same as I was when I used to be.

Who I was influences who I am, but it is not me.

I have died a thousand deaths to become that which I am now, and every self prior has existed and died in a heartbeat.

I am not whom I was when I began this post.

Nor will I be whom I was when this post was finished.

I am not that which I was, or have the potential to be.

I am simply that which I am.

The Rationale of Irrationality

2010-12-11T14:48:00.002-08:00

People are often said to be irrational: making irrational decisions, doing illogical things, and drawing unreasonable conclusions.

However, irrationality seems to be a very subjective concept, and rather woolly.

Let's do some shearing. Agreed? Excellent.

We all make decisions in our lives, constantly in fact. Whether or not to have raspberry or strawberry jam on our toast each morning, or whether or not to wear pants on Thursday. Some of these decisions are simple (such as the toast) but some are much more complicated - I probably don't need to list any examples, we've all gone through the process of making a difficult decision.

But what thinking goes into making these decisions. As a massive generalization, we make the decision that will give us the most benefits with the fewest drawbacks. For the toast, I prefer raspberry jam, therefore I will decide to eat it. As for the pants, while it would be deeply entertaining to, social dignity would probably step in and say wearing the pants is a good idea. Some of these decisions can become incredibly difficult, and many different factors will have to weighed in before a final decision is reached. But, usually we will unerringly come to the decision that gives us the most gain, and what seems to be the "correct" decision.

But there are some people who don't make rational decisions.

Take this little girl in the video as an example:

She knows that the two glasses have the same amount of liquid to begin with. She knows that no liquid is added or taken away from the initial amount, and yet she still makes the wrong decision. Same again with the quarters and the graham crackers. But it's not as though she's unintelligent. To the contrary, she seems like a perfectly normal and alert child. So why is she making the wrong choice even though to all of us the correct answer is obvious? Simply put, its because the answers she is making seem just as obvious to her as the "correct" answers seem to us. Her mental logic and all of her processes that lead her through the decision making process are just as fully functioning as in any other person, they just lead her to a different answer. Her brain obeys different logic than our brains do. Albeit, her logic is less sophisticated, and leads her to a wrong answer, but she is convinced that the taller glass holds more liquid because it is taller, and that one line holds more quarters than the other simply because it is longer. Not to worry though, she will grow up and her mental rules will evolve - just as ours all did.

Using this as an example, we can see that there are no truly "irrational decision" - irrational in that they disobey the laws of logic and reason. These decisions surely baffle our own logic, and make no sense (hence their irrationality) but that doesn't mean that the decisions are illogical to the person making them. On some level, the decisions that are being made have to make sense, otherwise the individual would not choose that option. "Insane" people, and other people who make irrational decisions do not make them because they have abandoned reason and logic, but because their reasoning is no longer following the same set of rules as before. Their logic isn't broken, it's simply using a poorly constructed set of processes. The brain is a rule-based computer, it isn't able to draw incorrect conclusion by using correct rules. It is, however, perfectly capable of drawing incorrect conclusions with incorrect rules.

Just for Old Times Sake

2010-12-07T18:01:00.001-08:00

I do love riddles, and have been a little sad after the end of puzzle month.

So I have found another good riddle to share with you.

The Family and the River

A family is attempting to cross a very wide, very deep river. There is the father, the mother, the son, and the old grandfather. The father takes 1 minute to row across the river. The son take 2 minutes. The mother takes 5 minutes, and the grandfather takes 10 minutes. There is only 1 boat, only 2 people can be in the boat at any time, and someone always has to be rowing the boat. But because of some strange tradition, the person who can row the slower of the two is always the person to row the boat. What is the least time that it will take for the entire family to make it across the river? (you will also have to explain how you got the answer, don't just throw out random numbers)

The Ugly Man and the Matchmaker

2010-11-26T20:44:00.001-08:00

A very ugly and conceited young man, wanting to get married, went to a matchmaker and asked for help in finding a wife.

"I want someone utterly beautiful and totally exceptional"

"I have just the girl," said the matchmaker. "She's rich, intelligent, and absolutely stunning."

"Hold it," said the young man, suddenly suspicious. "Why is it that she is still single?"

"I admit", said that matchmaker, "that she has one tiny problem,"

"I thought so."

"No, it's nothing terrible. It's just that - well, one day every year, she goes a little bit crazy. Doesn't cause any trouble, just a bit weird. After it's over, she's fine for an entire year."

"I can live with that," said the young man. "Where is she?"

"Not right now," said the matchmaker. "If you want her to marry you, you'll have to wait a bit."

"Until when?" the ugly and conceited young man asked eagerly.

"Until the day that she goes crazy"

A Salesman Went Travelling

2010-11-21T21:26:00.002-08:00

Imagine that you are a salesman. You have to go door to door to sell your product. You sell Giraffes. No one's really sure why, but you do. There are 15 different cities that you need to visit and subsequently to whom you can sell your Giraffes (note that these are Giraffes, not giraffes). Now, with briefcase in hand and Giraffes in tow, you set out to the first city. The only question you ask yourself is: which city do I visit first? Then you ask yourself, which city do I visit next? So on and so forth, until you have your whole route planned out. Now, time is money, so you want to visit the cities in such a way that you travel the least amount of distance. So you sit down in your naivety and say "how many routes could there possibly be?" 1 307 674 368 000. That's how many. Needless to say that there's a lot more than you could possibly solve with your handy-dandy piece of paper and pencil. So you borrow a computer from a friend and punch in the co-ordinates to the Travelling Salesman problem program and sit back and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

22.6 years later the fastest route pops out. Not exactly efficient.

So you think, how could I possibly have come up with the answer any faster?

To do that, let's look at how the computer program found the most efficient route. Yes, it did it exactly how a 3rd grader would do it: it mapped out every single possible route and then calculated the distance of every one, and then gave you the shortest one. Clearly our 3rd grade computer needs a bit of an upgrade.

So, we plug in what we know about evolution, and sit back and watch how the program handles it.

The program now takes 2 routes selected at random, smashes them together, and finds the best parts of each one. Maybe route one has a shorter route for a stretch but route two is shorter in other stretches. It combines the two routes and breeds a couple of routes that combine the best bits of the two. Then it eliminates the longer offspring and retains the shorter offspring. Then it grabs another random route and smashes it against one of the offspring routes. After a much shorter time than before the computer spits out a route that is, while not the most efficient, is very very close. However, it more than makes back its efficiency when you compare the difference in the routes (hours) to the difference in the times of the calculation of those routes (years).

Let's move this post from the analogy to the application now, while we wait for our Giraffe delivery to arrive.

DNA is a very fancy thing. Fancy, but also relatively simple in its construction. Its only composed of four different bases. Now, these bases just happen to be mixed up in such a way to produce the diversity we see in living organisms. Pretty neat that we can do that with only four starting bases. Another cool thing is that DNA codes for amino acids. It does this by having sections three bases long (called codons) that tell the cell which amino acid to produce when a certain sequence of bases is received. Pay close attention that it is simply the sequence, not the structure that is important. Now, with four bases, and sections three bases long, you have a potential for 64 different permutations. For reasons (which are mathematical and complex and don't need mentioning here) there are only twenty possible amino acids. Like the bases of DNA, amino acids are built into proteins, and are arranged in a specific sequence. However, unlike DNA, the shape of the protein is essential.

Proteins

The role of most proteins is to manipulate molecules, and they do so using a lock-and-key method. Namely the molecule binds to the protein's exact nooks and crannies. So, the shape of the protein is critical in its proper functioning. Now, getting the protein to fold up somehow is easy. Getting it to fold up exactly how you want it is much, much harder. Most scientists believe that the molecule adopts the configuration with the least energy requirements. Which would make sense, except that it is impossible to calculate the minimal energy configuration for even a very small protein (imagine the salesman problem in three dimensions with over a thousand nodes. Yikes). These protein folding problems are called NP-Complete, which just means really, really, really hard. But somehow, the organisms folding these proteins can do it all in under a second. How? Easy. The organisms don't find the exact lowest energy configuration, but they find one that's good enough to fool the scientists looking at it into thinking that's what's going on. Think back to our evolutionary problem solving computer above, it uses guesswork and heuristics to find a quick-and-dirty solution to an otherwise impossible problem.

You may think, wait a second, it's a living organism, that means that genes are at work here. Maybe the organism has been genetically programmed how to assemble proteins. That makes sense, after all, genes do everything.

If you did think that, I'd like to gently enlighten you on the subject. If that fails, a crowbar will do nicely.

Take a Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Basically it's a coil of RNA with a coil of proteins wrapped around it. Now, some scientists were working with it, and they wondered how hard it would be to build a mosaic virus from scratch.

Tobacco Mosaic Virus

They then set about breaking the virus into all of its constituent parts. That's right, down to the molecule. They then left it in a petri dish, and mixed up all of the parts to make it more fun. When they sat down again, though, they found that the virus had reassembled itself. It spontaneously formed the helical structure of a mosaic virus, even though nothing had told it to (it couldn't have, the RNA itself was lying in so many molecular chunks). That's right, the protein assembled itself, not needing any help from either Genetics or God.

For Lack of Better Posts

2010-11-18T20:52:00.004-08:00

Seeing as I'm running a little slowly on ideas, I think I'm just going to fill space with a couple poems.
Be very clear here, these are not my poems. I probably am not legally allowed to post them, but seeing as I'm not doing it for profit and I'm acknowledging the writer, I'm hopefully okay.

"Exultation is the going"

EXULTATION is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,-

Past the houses, past the headlands,

Into deep eternity!

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

- Emily Dickinson

Frolicking amongst the Gravestones

2010-11-15T20:41:00.000-08:00

After having recently attended two Remembrance Day ceremonies, I was shocked at the differences between the them. For some back-story, one ceremony (titled a "celebration" - the warning bells should be sounding about now) was held at my school, whilst the other was the local community one held at the local cenotaph.

For the school "celebration" (as it will henceforth be known) the act of remembrance was carried out by: interpretive dance, recitation of war-poetry, mime, an indeterminate amount of comparatively quiet time, a Coldplay medley, a poorly done "Last Post", and laying a wreath.

By comparison, the ceremony consisted of simply a parade of veterans, a moment of silence, a prayer, Last Post, followed by the laying of the wreaths.

Something was missing in the school's celebration, and that was solemnity. The school celebration was just that: a celebration of student's talents that could be vaguely extrapolated to remembrance. The poets got to wheel out some of their darker verses, the dancers can jump about and wear white, the singer could do a heart-wrenching number (could, not did. The execution was rather lacking) and the mimes could...well, do whatever mimes do. The point is is that the whole affair was not just upbeat but downright frivolous. They may think that they are "honouring the soldiers" by reading or singing or dancing (or miming) but it's simply mockery. By comparison, the "official" ceremony was solemn, simple, and actually focused on the people that were to be honoured and remembered. They paraded actual veterans, not in a Fourth of July spectacle but rather a parade of quiet acknowledgement.

As a small, nagging thing as well, the school was unable to properly sing the national anthem. A travesty to say the least.

In Memoria Glorificus Mortuus

6 Degrees of Crustacean

2010-10-23T16:10:00.003-07:00

There are some very peculiar disorders of the brain.

Cotard Delusion: An incredibly rare disorder in which the subject believes themselves to be dead (either literally or figuratively) non-existent, or to be rotting. The fact that they can still communicate even though they "don't exist" seems to not be a problem for them. Logic and reasoning hold no sway. Often people with this disorder will ask to be buried, as they think that stench from their putrefaction might be offensive to those around them. Most likely occurs due to damage of the brain in the area that recognizes faces (and familiar things) The brain cannot recognize itself, thus leading it to conclude that it has died.

Anosognosia: A disorder in which a person will deny having any sort of disability or impairment (even those such as blindness or paralysis). This is actually quite common after brain injuries (such as strokes) occurring in around 15% of all patients.

Anton-Babinski Syndrome: A type of Anosognosia in which a person who is cortically blind (their optic nerve is no longer connected to the brain) but will affirm that they can see perfectly well. They dismiss the fact that they are unable to see with ludicrous explanations, but they cannot be convinced of their blindness.

Somatoparaphrenia: A disorder in which a person will claim that part of their body (such as an arm) belongs to another person. A patient will claim that the arm will belong to the doctor, or perhaps another patient left it behind.

Capgras Delusion: The delusion that a friend or close relative has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor. The subject can usually identify other people, but only will fail to recognize one person as their actual self, and will instead see them as an impostor.

Agnosia: Covers a wide range of disorders in which a person fails to recognize objects, people, sounds, words, shapes, or smells while the relative sense has suffered no damage. This covers things such as visual agnosia, where a person will not see an object presented to them not because their eyes or visual cortex cannot "see" the object, but because the association areas of the brain do not recognize the object, and therefor believe that it does not exist.

You may have noticed that all of these conditions have one thing in common: they are not due to a failure in the sensation of reality, but instead due to a failure to correctly interpret reality. There are gauges in the brain that are used to interpret everything. That's how the brain operates. It isn't able to actually know that the timed pulses of electrons arriving are vision, but it knows that it can turn those pulses into vision with a couple simple rules.

The brain is in effect, a digital system, meaning that rather than gauging the intensity of a string pulses it instead gauges the frequency of the pulses. Every neuron can either be seen as on or off. Binary operates on the same principle, where 0 is off, and 1 is on. Depending on the combination of ones and zeroes a meaningful pattern will arise. That is the genius of the brain: it is able to turn a long string of meaningless electrical pulses and turn them into meaningful sensory information. So if the signals come in and the brain reads them wrong, it can think it can't see, even when it can. Or maybe it can think it can see, even if it can't. The brain can even think that it's dead, even if it isn't. The brain just fills our heads with whatever reality it interprets out of the streams of electrons flowing in and out of its networks. Our conscious selves see only this interpretation of reality, constantly refreshed by the senses. But what happens when the rules we use to interpret those senses no longer work? What happens when those senses go dark, and the energy stops coming in, but the senses fail to refresh? How long do we stare at the old data, frantically trying to make it work, trapped in a last spasm of desperate denial? How long until we realize that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit; that we are blind?

We have to take it on faith that the world we see and hear and smell is the same as the world that objectively exists. We cannot remove ourselves from the system to observe it from the outside to see what it actually looks like. In the same way memory is subjective, so too is experience. We can think that we can see things that are not actually there (psychosis) or maybe we believe that we can hear voices that no one else can (paracusia) but these events are not actually occurring in the outside world. They are occurring entirely within our minds as we misinterpret the electron streams flowing from our eyes and ears. Somewhere along the way we fail to correctly interpret the data, and the world we see becomes other than that which we inhabit.

P.S. The title again will make no sense to you dear readers, but it's my blog so I can title posts as I damn well like.

Memento Mori

2010-10-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

It is with great sadness that I report the passing of Benoit Mandelbrot. I was intending this to be a completed post about fractals, but that was not to be. Hopefully that post shows up at some point.

Benoit Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 - 14 October 2010) ad perpetuam memoriam.

Evolutionary Enigma's - Goblin Shark vs. Hagfish

2010-10-11T16:16:00.007-07:00

We got a pair of ugly ones for this round.

We'll start with the not-so slimy one first.

Sadly that's one of the more attractive photos of this feller.

Anyhoo, some details on the goblin shark. He weighs in at around 160kg and is 3.3m long. Instead of pointed fins (like the classic shark dorsal fin above the water) it has stubby rounded fins. The tail is similar to a thresher shark's in that the upper lobe is considerably longer than the bottom lobe. They are also pale pink (it doesn't come across well in this photo) because of their transparent skin which easily shows the blood vessels beneath. The long "nose" is used to detect electrical signals from prey. The deep water that the shark inhabits is too dark for eyes to be reliable enough to find prey, so electrical pulses are the replacement. Another strange thing about the shark is that it can retract its jaws, pulling them almost into the head, or extend them to catch prey. No one is really sure what purpose this serves.

Here's the slimy one.

He's a hagfish, and is basically an eel (not a fish). He does have a skull, but no vertebrae, which is veyry unusual (so unusual that he's the only animal with a skull but no vertebrae). Hagfish grow to about a half metre, although specimens over a metre have been reported. Their claim to fame is the fact that when irritated, hagfish will "slime", exuding a substance that traps water molecules in micro-filaments, and expands and clogs the surrounding water in a gelatinous mess. Disgusting, but deadly if you are a fish, because the slimed water will clog your gills, and with clogged gills, you die. To remove the slime from its body, the hagfish will tie itself in a knot, and scrape the slime off by undoing itself. An adult hagfish can produce enough slime to fill a 20L tank in about 2 minutes.

A quick video demonstrating hagfish slime.

Yeah, I think the slime takes the cake too.

Glass Ceilings

2010-10-02T19:53:00.004-07:00

What is consciousness?

Is it the rules that our body understands and obeys?

It is without a doubt an emergent property that somehow arises from the interaction of neurons in the brain, but just how much synapsing is done without consciousness?

Is breathing, eating, sleeping, and reproducing conscious? We would naturally assume that they are; we are aware of the actions taking place after all. But we are not always sure why they occur, or how we make them occur. This is not consciousness, because most of the time we are unaware of the rules that govern how we behave. There is no conscious decision on our parts to keep our hearts beating, or to perform any of the number of tasks which we do on a day to day basis with no thought whatsoever. Without any conscious effort, we can perform a plethora of tasks which are necessary to sustain life, simply by following hard-wired rules in our subconscious. We can, in effect, live perfectly functional lives without ever needing to have consciousness.

That's what an AI is: an intelligence which only responds based on a set pattern of rules and algorithms depending on the situation it is presented with. The more situations the rules can cope with, the more "intelligent" the AI is said to be. And if an AI has a set of rules which can cover any possible situation, it is at the very least intelligent, if not more intelligent than we are, but it has no consciousness. It cannot understand what it is doing, or decide upon what it is doing. Simply stated, it follows the rules it is given, as the situations are presented to it. It is a philosophical zombie (or a Chinese Room), something that responds as any conscious being would, but has no conscious experience of that event. If you stabbed it with a knife, it would say "ouch" and express pain and hurt through body language and behavior, but would not actually be aware of any sensation of pain. If you were using behavior to study mental processes, then behavior alone should be proof of a mental process occurring. But if no mental process occurs and the behavior is consistent with someone who is making the mental processes, then the behavior is not necessarily an indicator of the mental processes occurring. Something completely without thought can behave identically to something with thought, so why would thought exist if no-thought works just as well?

So it begs the question, what is consciousness actually good for? If we can live completely functional lives (every other animal species, as far as we know, has been doing it for millenniums) without consciousness, why would nature favour animals that can identify themselves more reliably in a mirror?

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brain - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursions and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persist and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.
- Peter Watts, Blindsight

Our bodies do not need consciousness to function, whether performing an essential life task, or doing something we would assume has to be a conscious action. We are simply carried along for the ride by our unconscious mind. It lets us pretend that we are in control, when all we are is locked in our gilded cells.

Here's proof: Consciously move your hand to your forehead.

Too late! The nerve impulses have already been sent from your brain before "you" could even process the instruction. The unconscious mind sent instructions to move your hand, and the hand moved before you could even comprehend the words that were written. As an afterthought, it decided to send your conscious mind a memo about the action. The conscious mind read the memo, and concluded that a hand had moved, and since it was in control of the hand, then it must have made the hand move. Your entire brain is in denial about its existence. Consciousness is slow and cumbersome, that's why when in you are in danger, reflexes take over. It limits you in ways you can't even perceive. Consciousness is the glass ceiling, you are pressed up against it, but you can't see what it is. Also, nerve endings in your arm can learn independently of your mind. That's how many prodigies and virtuosos perform so fantastically. They simply let their fingers play the music on their own, without thinking "place a finger here, then here, raise finger one, etc.." Your conscious mind is unable to handle that many simultaneous thoughts. So, as cumbersome and useless as it is, how could consciousness have evolved? The Evolutionary Enigmas posts are attempting to find the most extreme form of evolution; how that animal could possible have evolved, it seems so useless and odd. But we have the clear winner in front of us.

It's a pity that consciously you only figured it out now.

Your mind has known since it was born.

Evolutionary Enigmas - Leafy Sea Dragon vs. Pygmy Marmoset

2010-09-18T12:03:00.001-07:00

These are two of the cutest animals ever.

Yes, that is a monkey the size of your index finger. The world's smallest true monkey, the pygmy marmoset is around 15cm long (with a 20cm tail) and weighs approximately 130g. It has a highly complicated range of trills and whistles that are used to communicate with other marmosets. Also, despite the name, pygmy marmosets are rather different from other marmosets, and have their own genus (cebuella).

Just to clarify, that thing in the picture is indeed an animal. The - rather aptly - named leafy sea dragon is similar to a seahorse, except that it swims parallel to the ocean floor. Those leafy protuberances are used purely for camouflage, all of the propulsion is done with the dorsal fin. Oddly, it lacks teeth, yet feeds on shrimp and small fish. As in seahorses, the males care for the eggs. Unlike seahorses, sea dragons cannot curl their tails around seaweed, and are often washed ashore (and eaten) during storms.

As cute as the tiny monkey may be, the sea dragon is moving on.

Jigsaw Horrors (The Anti-Solipsist 3)

2010-09-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, but I think I can return to the Anti-Solipsist finally.

As stated in the previous Solipsist, the world is built up of many pieces, which in turn can be used to define yourself. That would be assuming of course, that you are one piece that fits nicely in the space dictated for you.

However, you are made of many different parts, which in turn are put together to form the final "piece" that can be placed in the jigsaw. Think of fractals, that they are composed of many composite parts which reflect the whole. You are a puzzle piece which is constructed out of smaller puzzle pieces. Pretty, no?

And of those parts, the only one with any real significance is the mind, it being the instrument which can perceive, and subsequently "create" everything that exists - including itself.

And, to add another confusing layer, the mind itself is built up of many parts. Parts to take information in, parts to analyze the information taken in, parts to decide what should be kept and what is discarded, parts that store the information, parts to recall the information. It's almost like a well-oiled assembly line, or possibly a machine. (hint hint).

This is where we roll around to the connection with the Helmet of Horror 2, which is most obviously a mind. There are structures for memory, structures to create images in your head (which are viewed by someone wearing a helmet, which is subsequently created inside the helmet itself...ad infinitum) and parts to reflect upon what has been seen.

Now here's the real kicker.

I am a part of your mind, just as you are a part of mine.

Purely by existing in the world, by affecting any number of a series of factors, you have altered the information and experiences that I have received, which in turn leads to a different processing of that information than if you did not exist. These things that affect you - that you use to glean experience from - are what sets out the mold for the pieces of your mind to fill. Things that affect you more directly will lead to a sharper, finer prediction, while less affecting factors (such as the fact there are 1.3 billion people in China) will only give you the haziest inkling of form. It is these factors, from the chaotic fog to the refined edges, which dictate and shape your mind.

But don't feel manipulated, for you are paying them back in turn - except for the factors that affect you without minds to mess with.

But above all, don't feel bad about this, because, after all, you created it.

Honeycombs Part II

2010-09-12T19:41:00.001-07:00

Last post I went in-depth on how mathematics shapes the form of organisms (as opposed to DNA telling the organism what form to assume). With this post I wanted to focus more on the behavior of organisms (with 2 more examples on form). So without any further ado, I'll introduce you a perfect example of an organism shaped by mathematics.

A classic Icosahedral Virus

Yes, as the caption says, it's a virus. But notice the head, more specifically, the nice geometry of the head. It is a (more or less) perfect icosahedron. This is not random, nor is it programmed into the viruses genes. remember that nature is all about efficiency. Well it just so happens that of the regular polyhedra the icosahedron comes closest to being a sphere (optimum efficiency). Well why doesn't it just become a sphere then? Simply because it's not structurally sound as a sphere, and is prone to contort, deform, or simply pop. So it comes close enough with an icosahedron (as close as possible to maximum efficiency without falling apart).

Moving on to the second example.

An assortment of snowflakes. All of them are unique, but their share one very important characteristic in common. They all exhibit hexagonal symmetry (3 lines of symmetry passing through the centre). Why is this? Again, optimum packing and some mathematics are the answer, and in this example, there are none of those pesky genes to cloud the issue. Imagine you are a molecule of water, so you are spherical (or close enough as to make no difference). You need to pack closely with the other molecules (let's say there are 6 of them).
Try in with pennies. Try to pack 7 pennies as close as possible (without stacking). Unerringly, you create a hexagon. You know why this is by now. That's exactly what happens to snowflakes. The variety of forms occurs due to changing conditions of wind, humidity, etc. but the basic form is the same.

Now onto my original reason for writing this/these post/posts before I became sidetracked. Honeybees make combs of beeswax in which they store their honey and larvae. They are in a distinctive hexagonal pattern (foreshadowing). Now, the gene-oriented person would think (selfishly) that the genes of a honeybee tell it to make a hexagon shaped cell, and that shape must have arisen as a cause of natural selection. Not so! What a bee is actually told to do is spit out wax as it rotates around a point, making a circle. This is much simpler to program, and genes are tight for space as it is. However, the circle is not as efficient at packing when there are multiple cells, but nature has provided a means to get around this as well. Simply put, beeswax is soft, and when multiple cells bump into each other, they form the hexagons that pack so nicely. The genes piggy-back off of the underlying physics of the universe to create the pattern, which is much easier than programming bees to create such perfect shapes. If the rules already exist, the clever genes feel no need to waste space on instructions that are much easier if just left to the mathematics that govern the universe.

A Honeycomb

Honeycombs Part I

2010-09-11T14:11:00.004-07:00

In today's biology, we seem to focus - to the point of obsession - on DNA as the key to life and all it's mysteries. However, a considerable amount of evidence presents the idea that DNA is not the most critical factor in determining an organisms characteristics. It is certainly important, but has been given more attention that perhaps it warrants, overshadowing another key feature in determining life's characteristics.

The Double-Helix of DNA

That other factor is of course, mathematics.

Examples of these are plants, and specifically, flowers. Now, to understand this, you must have a basic understanding of Fibonacci numbers.

Up to speed?

Excellent. Now, flowers almost always (except in very rare cases) have a number of petals that are Fibonacci numbers. That is, Daisies will almost always have either 34, 55, or 89 petals. Sunflowers almost always have 21 or 34 petals. This is why it's so difficult to find a four-leaf clover: four is not a Fibonacci number.

Now, the Fibonacci sequence is also important to flowers when it comes to packing florets efficiently. If you look at the sunflower below, you will see spirals appear in the florets. Namely there are two spirals, one clockwise, one counterclockwise. There are 13 florets in clockwise spirals, and 21 florets in counter-clockwise spirals.

Sunflower head exhibiting Fibonacci spirals

Why is this important? It comes down to the principle of efficient packing. A flower wants to have the maximum number of florets that it can fit onto itself so it can pollinate/attract bees more efficiently. It turns out that each floret is separated from it's most immediate radial neighbour (that is, the floret that is next farthest away from the centre of the flower) by ~ 137.5 degrees. How is this number important? Take two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, say 34 and 55. Divide them, and multiply the result by 360 degrees. The resulting number is 222.5. Subtract this number form 360 (because you can measure angles either internally or externally) and you arrive at 137.5. Still, how does this amount to anything more than an amusing anomally? For one, you can do it with any two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, and the larger the number are, the closer the number becomes to 137.51...which is named the "Golden Angle." For two, and this is the big reason, that two co-existing spirals will not occur unless the angle separating the florets is 137.5. If the angle is even slightly larger (137.6 say) then only the counterclockwise spiral will appear, making it much less efficient. the same goes for any smaller angles, except that only the clockwise spiral exists in that case.

The spirals on the left and right are formed by angles of 135.6 and 135.7 respectively, while the middle spiral is at 137.5

Plants will naturally gravitate towards this angle to get the most out of their flowers. But this is not genetic. Genes do not have the space to program all of this unnecessary information about flower shape when mathematics will shape the flower into this form naturally. Genes simply tell the flower to start growing florets, and they will arrange themselves like this. The manner in which they arrange themselves is the optimum packing for florets. Each successive floret will move into the largest gap available as it grows, creating the remarkable spirals. To prove this the following experiment was carried out by Stephane Douady and Yves Couder. Drops of charged oil were released into a small dish, and they repelled from each other in perfect (or close enough that it made no difference) Fibonacci spirals.

Genes are very clever, but also very lazy. They will not program the organism to do things when the organism can get free instructions from the intrinsic mathematics of the universe. This is a long enough post already, so I will end off, but expect a very swift continuation, in which the title of the post is explained, and we get to meet some very industrious friends of mine.

2+2 = 5

2010-09-08T21:58:00.001-07:00

One of the more disturbing music videos I've seen. Rather brilliant though.
So, as to what all this is really about...

If I believe that the Earth is flat, and no evidence to the contrary can convince me that the Earth is round, then the Earth is flat. To you (you smart person you) the Earth is clearly round. This is of course the same Earth we are both living in currently, but it is now both flat and curved depending on who you ask. But what happens if I convince everyone else that the Earth is flat. Now you seem to be the crazy one, who believes in a round Earth even though everyone else believes you to be wrong.

Remember...the majority is always the sane party.

Evolutionary Enigmas - Axolotl vs. Purple Frog

2010-09-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Perhaps only the axolotl truly sums up the word enigma in an evolutionary sense.

This is due to the fact that axolotl exhibit a property called neotony, in which the organism does not undergo metamorphosis to become an adult. Unlike just about every other amphibian (along with most insects and bony fish) a juvenile axolotl is identical to an adult one except for a slight difference in size. For example, a frog begins as an egg, then proceeds to be a tadpole, until finally reaching sexual maturity as an adult frog. The axolotl undergoes no such change, owing to a deficiency in their thyroid gland. The really crazy thing is, is that they can be induced to metamorphosis with an injection of iodine, and become what resembles a Tiger Salamander. However, once an axolotl has undergone metamorphosis, it drastically reduces it's lifespan (from 15-20 years to <5). The axolotl reaches a maximum length of 30cm, and is critically endangered due to pollution around Mexico City.

The Purple Frog was discovered only recently (2003) owing to it's tendency to hide underground for it's entire lifetime, except when it emerges for about a 2 week period to mate. It has a peculiar snout, and is found only in the Western Ghats of India.

Sorry froggy, but you get a shorter write-up not only because not much is known about you, but also because I favour the axolotl in this one.

Evolutionary Enigma's - Rosy-Lipped Batfish vs. Egyptian Jerboa

2010-08-27T21:14:00.002-07:00

Pucker up

Yup, that is it's mouth. He is a Batfish, which is distantly related to angler fish, except that instead of light, their lures secrete chemicals that attract prey. They do stand on those "legs" that can be seen, and swim with a distinctive back-and-forth motion of the tail and body. No one has any idea what the lips do.

I'm attaching a skeleton of this one simply because it is slightly more ridiculous this way. The Egyptian Jerboa is also ridiculous in the fact that it doesn't drink, it only subsists on the water from the food it eats. Oh, and it lives in the hottest desert on Earth. Standing only a couple inches tall, the Jerboa hops much like a kangaroo, but usually in a zig-zag pattern (like an antelope).

We're going with the lips on this one. Silly looking thing it is too.

1984

2010-08-27T15:11:00.001-07:00

Do you know what Tim is singing about?

If

2010-08-20T16:45:00.001-07:00

Not sure if this infringes on copyrights at all, but this is a rather brilliant piece of writing, so I felt like I needed to share.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

–Rudyard Kipling

Memoirs of a Homunculus

2010-08-19T18:53:00.004-07:00

Where do you live?

I don't mean in a "1253 Queens Blvd" sort of manner.

Rather, where does the consciousness that associates itself with your body, where does it reside?

We do not live in a leg or arm, for if we cut those off we cease to associate with the severed limb.

Many people believe that we live in our eyes, as that is the perspective what where you see the world, but if you remove your eyes, you become blind, and no longer connected to the eyeballs which now serve no purpose: to potentially house your consciousness or to provide vision.

So, you could say, do we live in our essential parts - our organs? When we remain living after the removed part has died, we must live in the parts that we cannot remove and remain alive. Those that cause our demise must in some way be connected to our consciousness.

But, you can lose a kidney and live. You can even lose both, as long as you are connected to a dialysis machine to filter your blood. Same goes for the lungs. And the heart. The liver, the intestines, stomach, muscles, skin, fascia - the same applies to all the above organs.

So we must surely live in the brain, as of course, you probably guessed from the very beginning.

And with that, the jaws of the trap snap neatly shut.

Because cannot the brain too be replaced without causing death? If you simply and slowly replaced every synapse with a wire that feeds into a (rather large it must be said) computer, could the brain too not be replaced? But sadly, poof goes your consciousness (Brain in a Vat, reverse logic, think it through, QED).

So, our consciousness is housed in our brains, from where it receives sensory output from all of those useful bits (eyes, ears, etc.) which create the world around us. To say our consciousness is a little man in a room watching a movie being played out on the screen in front of him. Aromas - pleasant and not - are blasted through the room. This is how we live, little men in our little cave of wonders. Sadly we want for AC, but the room does come with a vending machine.

A Cartesian Theatre, complete with surround sound

Let's use an example that's easier to grasp. In a game of chess, the players are given 'rules'to follow that allow them to play the game. So: who uses these rules? The answer is self-evident: the players of the game use the rules: it's not the case that the rules themselves play chess. The rules themselves are merely inert marks on paper until a human being reads, understands and uses them. But what about the 'rules' that are, inside our brain? The simple algorithms that say "when stomach capacity < 10% -> eat". Who reads, understands and uses them? Again, the implicit answer is a little man who reads the rules of the world and then gives orders to the body to act on them.

The thing is, if it takes another person to live inside our brains and watch a video of the sensory signals from our eyes, how can this smaller person create an image to see in their minds eye? Do they too have a small man inside their mind, and so on ad infinitum?

So, who actually lives behind our eyes?

Stop Motion Mammalians

2010-08-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

To all of you naysayers who are unhappy with my "brain predicts what it wants to see" schtick (see the following posts 1 2 3) I have finally discovered irrevocable proof that the brain predicts what it expects to see, and that is how it creates it images.

The eye is without a doubt the most astonishing miracle of evolution. It works (very simplified here) by having light focused on the retina, which is composed of rods and cones, which detect changes in light, that then sends a signal to the brain to produce an image. Now, rods and cones only detect changes in lighting, so if you continued to stare at something for a period of time, then the image would fade away as the rods and cones would stop detecting light (because the light levels are not changing). To compensate, the eye has what's known as saccades, tiny vibrations that serve as refreshers for the the eye - continually stimulating the cones and rods. Now, the curious bit is that if the eye is constantly moving, there is no way it can possibly make a focused image, it should be completely blurred, right? Absolutely correct. The moving retina prevents a clear image from forming. So how come we can see in focus? Because the brain is smart enough to compensate for these saccades, and it shuts down the optical nerve when it's moving, and reactivates when it stops, taking a small freeze-frame of the world. Then it stitches all the freeze-frames together to get the moving picture you see in your head. Okay, next question now, why don't we see the world as jerky, strobing motion, as it's really just a flow of pictures? Because the brain again, fills in the gaps, predicts what happened between the frames, and fills in the pictures between. The brain makes some very big assumptions about what happened in-between those pictures (albeit their taken about every 0.3 - 0.7 ms). It anticipates what is going to happen before the next picture arrives, and extrapolates based on previous information, then the image comes in to verify, and repeat.

Proof of the above phenomenon is this picture:

The circles appear to rotate. This is caused by the slight shift that the eye makes - each frame is taken from an almost imperceptibly different angle - and the brain compensates, assuming the discs moved ever-so-slightly. You can also notice that if you defocus your eyes, the motion stops. This is because the brain doesn't care about filling in things it deems unimportant. Peripheral vision is mostly just guesswork by the brain based on previous gazes on those locations. It can only form a proper image of the thing you are currently focused on. Even then it's not so reliable.

Tests have been done where someone will be asked for directions by a stranger. When they go to look at a map or away (which they invariably do) the stranger is replaced by another person, and the original stranger leaves. The person being asked the directions only notices that a switch has occurred 50% of the time! That number is at about 35% if the person's gender changes, but still. The brain deems it unimportant who the person actually is, and basically ignores them. Albeit, this has little to do with the point made at the beginning of the post, but I found it an interesting fact nonetheless.

Evolutionary Enigmas - Blobfish vs. Tarsier

2010-08-15T16:27:00.002-07:00

The first animal is possibly the silliest looking creature ever evolved.

Meet the Blobfish, a deep sea fish related closely to sculpins. It lives deep in the ocean where pressures are such that gas bladders are inefficient, so it is instead mainly composed of gelatinous flesh with a slightly lower density than water, allowing it to float above the ocean floor. Unfortunately, this means that it lacks enough muscle to sustain swimming and can only eat prey that is unfortunate enough to float by it. If something manages to get caught by a Blobfish, it deserves to be eaten. As a side note, the Blobfish is endangered (no prizes for guessing why).

Downright cuddly he is. Behold the Tarsier, the oldest continuously existing primate (they date back some 45 million years). Named for their exceptionally long tarsus bones (in the feet) the Tarsier has back legs double the length of its front legs which are used to leap from tree to tree. So precise and powerful are these jumps that the Tarsier can bring down birds in flight. Mainly subsisting on small insects and mammals, the Tarsier will go for birds if necessary. They are also known for their incredibly large and sensitive eyes.

Well, an animal that lacks virtually any ability to move is a much less plausible step than the highly successful Tarsier. Chock up one for the fatty lump of meat.

Evolutionary Enigmas - Dumbo Squid vs. Candiru

2010-07-30T13:07:00.001-07:00

Just a slight disclaimer guys, this next animal will make you squirm.

It doesn't look like much does it. But it has a history of swimming into certain parts of the body that are generally not meant to have fish in them. Yup, the Candiru has been recorded to swim up the trail of urine and lodge itself inside...and then inflate. Cue squirming. Besides that, it is just like any other fish. Yeah, try to get that image out of your head.

This next one is just silly looking.

Named the Dumbo Squid due to its ridiculous-looking ear flaps (which serve no purpose that we know of) this little guy floats in the dark depths of the ocean searching for small shrimp and other small fish for food. Tragically, that's about all we know about the things, so for pure lack of information - along with squirm factor, the Candiru carries the day

Evolutionary Enigmas - Glass Frog vs. Coconut Crab

2010-07-24T14:06:00.001-07:00

The Glass frog is named because of the fact it's see-though. Yeah, you can see it's insides from outside. Pretty freaky. Like this one here:

Yup, those are indeed it's innards, along with a clutch of eggs. The glass frog is one of the smallest competitors, weighing in at 15-25g and being around 5cm in length. They spend most of their lives in trees, although they descend to riverbeds to breed. All glass frogs occur in South and Central America, particularly present in the cloud forests of Venezuela.

In the other corner is the largest living arthropod, the Coconut Crab - shown here with a garbage can for scale.

Yes, it's not a hoax, there really are crabs that huge. The crab is present on most of the islands of South East Asia, mainly concentrated in Polynesia and Micronesia. The average crab weighs around 5kg, and has a leg span of 1m. However, crab's as large as 1.8m across and weighing 14kg have been recorded. The crab cannot swim, and is entirely land dwelling, possessing a Branchiostegal Lung to breathe (a cross between lungs and gills). The crab also possesses a highly tuned sense of smell.

Well, as gosh darn cool as a see through frog is, the fact that an animal as highly developed as the Coconut Crab is able to survive considering the energy it must take to sustain itself, I think that it is much harder to understand how it could have ever possibly evolved without quickly dying off.

Evolutionary Enigmas - Hooded Seal vs. Naked Mole Rat

2010-07-17T11:22:00.001-07:00

Creepy little thing isn't he?

The naked mole rat is a small rodent native to East Africa, measuring 3-4 inches in length, and weighing 30 - 35 grams. Their eyes are highly underdeveloped, rendering them nearly blind. They also have no fur, and only a sparse covering of hairs (hence the "naked"). Their metabolism is quite low for an animal of their size, and here's the really weird thing - they can't feel pain in their skin. Yup, they are completely devoid of something called Substance P, which is the transmitter for sending pain signals in mammals. You can dig these little things in acid and they'll feel no pain.

Compared to his competitor he's downright cute. This is the Hooded Seal, so named for that large bulge on it's head, which inflates and makes irritating noises which somehow attract females (I'll repeat that for emphasis: Annoying noises attract females). Males are 2.5m long, weighing in at just over 400kg, while females are only 2m and 300kg. Here he is with his head inflated:

Well, I think the clear winner is the mole rat here. A lack of hair combined with the ability to not feel pain tops inflatable noggins any day. (sorry Mr. Seal, but you're just full of hot air after all).

Suicide

2010-07-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

Re-reading Gates of Fire, simply because it is one of the most amazing books ever, no question about it.

Anyhoo, this is not terribly original as posts go, but seeing as I love the binary opposition in life, it's always a good fall back when in a creative slump.

A brief disclaimer, I do not believe in the existence of a soul, but if it helps you picture the mind as mentioned above, feel free.

There are - no prizes for guessing - 2 parts to a person: A person is composed of both animal and sentient. We choose to express the animal side of our minds, demagoguery, mob rule, Alpha politics, etc. We led the herd animal - because that's what we are when you get down to it - rule our minds. While we express our sentient side in our bodies, ascetism, puritanism, and celibacy. The body is not meant for these things, it is a part of the physical world, and it should be treated as such. We are fundamentally backwards.

Short preachy part over.
There is a reason that we honor people who sacrifice themselves, who quell their desire for self-preservation.

"For what could be more noble than to slay oneself?"

Not literally to end your life, but to defeat the selfish self within. To not fight for your own skin's preservation, nor for glory, but to fight for those around you. When you have such contempt for death that your own death is meaningless compared to that of those around you. It is this contempt for death that we respect, to see someone who can conquer this fear of death, that is bred into our very flesh and blood.

Evolutionary Enigmas

2010-07-13T10:50:00.025-07:00

Since the natural world is astounding and amazing, I have gathered a list of some of the strangest and evolutionarily perplexing animals on Earth. Then, as per the Civilization Playoffs, we (or I really) will pit them against each other to find out which animal evolution played the biggest joke on. Also, any animals you feel should be included you can comment and I will add them. You have until the end of round 1 to add any animals.

Preliminary Contestants
Naked Mole Rat
Hooded Seal
Glass Frog
Coconut Crab
Dumbo Squid
Candiru
Blobfish
Tarsier
Rosy-lipped Batfish
Egyptian Jerboa
Axolotl
Purple Frog
Sea Dragon
Pygmey Marmoset
Goblin Shark
Hagfish
King of Herring
Thorny Devil
Giant Salamander
Ajolote
Megamouth Shark
Cave Weta
Sucker-Foot Bat
Star-Nosed Mole
Saiga Antelope
Ocean Sunfish
Yeti Crab
Pangolin
Fairy Armadillo
Vampire Squid
Sloth Bear
Platypus
Wolf Fish
Barreleye Fish
Frilled Shark

Untitled01

2010-07-12T22:28:00.001-07:00

It is impossible to escape sound. There is nowhere on Earth that is totally, completely silent (yes, in space there is no sound, but you're dying too quickly to appreciate it). There is always a mechanical whine; or refrigerator hum; or even when your out in the wilderness, the scratch of your sleeping bag, birdsong, or water rippling. There is nowhere to be completely silent. It is the most alien of feelings, to be completely isolated from any sound at all. Deaf people can still feel the vibrations of sound, but to be in full ability of hearing, and to hear nothing, that would be something.

Untitled00

2010-07-12T19:18:00.000-07:00

In protest over the complaints about the titles of my posts, I'm just leaving this one untitled. Not so cocky now are we my commenting brood.

Now, I wanted this post to be complex and difficult, but now it's time for some straight talking.

Correction, yesterday was time for straight talking, today is for plain speaking.

And plainly, there is a good deal too much small talking for anyone's liking. As my dad always used to say until he was hit by a blimp and had a Damascus road conversion, "small talking is like talking about arachnids, don't do it."

An arachnid, don't set up metaphors with them.

So, besides my Dad's deep wisdom, small talk and deep talk is what the remainder of this post concerns itself with.

Tricky to put a number to it, but I suppose that at least 95% of our daily conversations are composed of small talking. The weather, local sports teams losing streaks (cough), what people on television are wearing, etc. Tings that people really shouldn't - and don't - care about. But people still converse about them just to fill the silence. People are just unable to appreciate a good silence (more on this later). And what's weird is that people hate making small talk. They find it stressful and difficult to find a short topic with which to fill the 5 minutes you spend with someone in grocery-store line-ups. They most likely have a billion ideas running around their head on what they could - and would want to - talk about, but they repress those ideas and only come up with one that fits certain "small talk criteria." It has to be concise, interesting - but not too interesting - polite, not too personal, on and on, until what is supposed to be easy, everyday talking has become more regimented than the formal language that it replaced.

On the opposite end of the horseshoe, is that form of deep conversation where every idea is discussed and shared. No idea is repressed for fear of mockery/awkward pauses. We go into this strange, actively-pondering mode, where we just sit and think and talk, but we do not think about our talking, we think about what we are talking about. A careful distinction to make, as in small talk, you are more concerned with the delivery of the conversation than the conversation itself.

Chivalry

2010-07-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

Why do people still interest themselves in the ancient world?

It is not more advanced or technologically astounding than the futuristic world. This is why books and media that portray future events are popular. However, people do not like the ancient world because it is simpler and that they are unable to handle more complexity.

It does not have the ability for people to relate and connect to it. That is why book and media that portray current events are popular. However, people do not like the ancient world for its surreal perspective and feel.

However, I'm pretty certain I could find a sizable list of people who would happily trade their lives for that of someone in ancient times. Deep down (very deep for some) there is a part of us that wants to be a peasant labourer working in the fields endlessly, even if only once. People just want to experience everything possible, and despite the massive amounts of information we can gather on the ancient world, we can't live it, which is what our true desire is. We want to live back then - for the experience - but this very irritating thing called "no time travel" prevents us from doing it properly, so we make do with what we have. Hence the prevalence of Ancient World video games, movies, and books.

Beekeeping

2010-06-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

After watching a brilliant interview of John Cleese, here is a good metaphor for today's youth:

Today's youth are like parrots, while they can accurately and precisely repeat words on cue, and of their own free will, they lack any understanding of what those words actually mean.

And since this post seems a little empty, here is a picture of a parrot.

Bushido

2010-06-17T21:56:00.001-07:00

I recently had a strange romantic epiphany. Not as in the cheap romance novel that lonely young women read romantic, but in the Age of Enlightenment sort of Romanticism. This, combined with a lovely long discussion on auras led to this post.

I'll begin with the conversation I had about psychics. Friends/work colleagues/people-I-had-never-met-and-had-no-real-bearing-on-my-life-whatsoever of my dad's were over at out place for a dinner. Conversation was kept uninteresting and minimal until - after some witty intellectual comment by my dad - one woman said: "but science doesn't explain things like auras, or the nature of a soul. How can a man-made thing possibly compete with the unknowable, 'higher mysteries' of god?" After biting back several scathing remarks, I sat back and listened to the next comment she made, which was: "you can't truly appreciate things (this in reference to another one of the people at the table) with your analytical logical brain. You can't begin to understand higher mysteries, which are more than just what this world offers. Logic will only carry you so far." It was at this point that I jumped in - eager to defend my logical mind - but also to defend the Earth, which had just received a serious beating in my opinion.

So, I will now open up my response into the remainder of the posting. The point being brought up here was that there is something more mysterious and wonderful out there than the Earth that we cannot understand purely through logic (the implied method of interpretation here was religion, not exactly sure how they got invited to our house for dinner but there you are). But isn't this Earth enough? Isn't this delightfully unfathomable complicated, messed-up world enough that we don't have to invent things and pretend that there are more complicated things out there? There may be things more complicated out there, but seeing as we can't handle this one Earth, isn't its beauty enough?

Fibonacci Spirals in a Sunflower

So, you may think that I'm close-minded, because I'm not willing to believe in supernatural things, like ghosts, or souls, or psychics. I don't view myself as much of a cynic, or that I'm a pessimist about the supernatural. It's more that I am an optimist about the natural. Why do we need to hypothesize about things that we are yet to discover? How does this Earth so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with cheap, man-made myths and monsters? There are wonderful, brilliant natural ideas out there. Like natural selection, and the idea that the genetic coding in a creature contains the potential to make a species take a massive leap forward. Or the golden ratio, and Fibonacci and his spirals. So I have become a Romantic, and will happily sit back and let my awe of the natural world overtake me. To sum up, here is a quote from Shakespeare, with a Tim Minchin amendment:

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on the violet...is just f*cking silly.

Or something like that

The Importance of Words

2010-06-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

I have recently discovered (or re-discovered, or discovered the ability to discover, etc.) the beauty and power of words. Now, as you are probably fearing an anti-bullying post about how words hurt, don't you worry your pretty little heads, I am not nearly that out of ideas (I also like a good bit of verbal bandying). Anyhow, this is more of a post about the choice of words to use, and the laziness that appears therein.

Words are our (usual) method of expressing ourselves. People often say that they are unable to explain themselves properly, or that people don't understand them. This is not due to any poor understanding skills, or the inability to understand how you feel (usually) but rather bad explanation. For example: Meet me at the place at the time with the person but only after you do the things with the stuff. Brilliant, amazingly descriptive and accurate. But that's a bit of a blunt example. The difference between confused and disoriented. Or weird and strange; a run and a canter; malicious and cruel. All of these can lead to a misinterpretation.

Another problem is the shifted and blurred meanings between words. Slang is frustrating. When someone describes some as sick, you instantly think: "is that a good adjective...is that demeaning...maybe he's just actually sick...well, this is a conundrum."

Now, this is not to say you should use long complicated words. Not the case at all, never use a complicated word just to use a complicated word. Just make sure you use the right word.

Escalade

2010-06-10T20:56:00.002-07:00

Having recently participated in a climbing competition, I noticed its marked difference from many other sports, and in that, a good metaphor for life, but, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Repetitive actions are strange, as we know that it is the most easily adaptable that survives. It is not the animal that perfects a set given of action that is more successful, but rather the animal that is able to perform the largest range of actions. Except for perhaps sharks, which seem to have reached the pinnacle of their existence ages ago, every species alive today is here because it adapted after a large change.

How this applies is simple. Most sports involve the perfection of repetitive actions. Throwing, running, jumping, swimming, lifting, shooting, etc. Even "sports" such as dance involve the perfection of individual moves, that are then strung together into a series of moves. Climbing however, is much different, as, instead of perfecting repeating a series of moves, it is learning how to perform any such type of moves that may appear. It is reacting to the moves that appear to you on the route, just as life is reacting to things that appear to you on your journey. Well, you have to react, otherwise you fall - or die.

The Economics of Stupidity (with a video)

2010-06-08T07:02:00.003-07:00

Read The Economics of Stupidity.

Then watch this video.
(yes, there will be some swears)

One Year

2010-06-02T10:42:00.013-07:00

Happy Birthday Fanatic Avocados, you've turned one year old today.

As of right now, this site has been visited by 215 different people.
They have visited the site 891 times.
The posts contained within have been read 2,397 times.
There have been visits from the following countries:
Canada
United States
Australia
South Africa
Brazil
United Kingdom
Croatia
Slovenia
India
Ukraine
France
Romania
Ireland
Greece
Russia
Belgium
United Arab Emirates
Malaysia
Singapore
South Korea

Onwards to another great year!

The Economics of Stupidity

2010-05-27T07:22:00.027-07:00

After being repeatedly called by people canvassing for money (Cancer, diabetes, 3rd world children, the usual) I became rather irritated. Not because I feel these are unworthy causes (something does need to be done about this) but rather because the canvassers are going about it the wrong way. So, after telling them that the occupant of the house had recently been killed in a freak blimp accident, I decided to write this post.

There are two ways to go about solving any problem. the hard way, namely getting up and solving said problem, or the usual way, which is ignoring it and hoping it goes away, because solution 1 sounds like work. But wait! A magic, third method is now here, and has the best of both methods. You still don't need to expend any effort, and it does make the problem go away (sort of). All you need to do is throw money at the problem. Money will certainly fix whatever problem you have. Starvation you say? Buy some food, eat it, done. Diseases you say? Buy some drugs, take them, done. Backwards economy and ruled by a corrupt dictator? No problem, just buy off the dictator and throw the excess money at the economy, surely that;ll fix it. Bottom line is: If you spend, you no longer need to worry about all those problems, they'll just fix themselves if you give them some cash.

Hopefully that bitterly sarcastic tone came across.
Money on its own does not solve problems (i.e. a certain 700 billion).
Money just replaces that guilty feeling you think of how privileged you are.

Most of these canvassers use guilt to get money from you. You feel guilty that you are so rich/privileged/alive that you feel the need to give away some of your good fortune to help the less fortunate. The problem is, is that this does't solve anyone's problems. Money alone will not cut it, you need ingenuity, hard-work, a plan, prevention of a relapse, and sometimes, a bit of luck. We can not afford to simply throw money at things that don't work and expect them to fix themselves.

Flash in the Pan

2010-05-12T22:05:00.001-07:00

Life was much better back in the days of black and white movies. Or even before movies. Back before humans needed such stimulating entertainment, and had to make do with bits of string, megaphones and squirrels.

Why? Why was it better back when everything was dull and boring?

Nowadays, all of our entertainment is of a vapid sort. TV is garbage, with characters that only have a few witty lines, senseless dialogue, and meaningless interaction. Books are being churned out at a phenomenal rate, mainly by hacks of authors, and the only books that achieve any sort of attention are those least deserving of praise (I am looking at you teenage girls). Film has now just turned into a competition for 3D and special effects, or a large explosion and chase scene. What ever happened to meaningful things?

Yes, I've gone a bit soft (retroactively I may berate myself for such a slip) but I am simply appalled at our meaningless our entertainment has become. Gone are the days of looking at the shapes of clouds (for those of you who rarely venture outside, they are those large white things suspended in the air), tossing a ball around, or just lying in the grass for multiple hours doing nothing at all.

Nothing. We have eliminated nothing. (so, did we eliminate nothingness, or have we just failed in our attempt to eliminate boredom, oho!

Rest times, time to sit and do nothing, to wallow in your total inactivity. With productivity and efficiency as the calling cards of today's society, sitting around doing nothing is a cardinal sin (well, it was anyways...). People also try to multi-task, reading AND watching TV, and end up not doing either very well (failing to absorb information, as previously stated sometime ago).

The Not-So In-Superiority of the Male Race

2010-05-09T20:36:00.000-07:00

The male gender has had a bit of a superiority complex throughout history. Albeit, this was probably warranted as they did most of the action/decision making/just about anything that shaped history until the 18th century. Now, they liked it that way, and prevented other people - namely those of the opposite gender - from encroaching on their territory. In recent years however, woman has become the leading force, perhaps not in politics and business (although there has been a considerable surge) in the classroom.

For example, out of three student addresses over the course of the year, they were: 1) Drunk driving, 2) Psychosis Awareness, and 3) Why Girls are Superior to Boys (or as we liked to title it, why the male race failed in so many ways). I would like to draw your attention to number 3 (not that the other two are lesser or in any way to be ignored, it's just they are not nearly as amusing). Now, reasons that pointed to why guys were falling off the totem pole were facts such as the amount of video-games and TV watched compared to girls (much more) the amount of studying (much less) underage drinking (much more) teenage pregnancy (got a little carried away there). Girls look much superior on paper, better grades, better lives, better all around. But, the modern female may not in fact be the superior gender, or if they are, not by much.

Girls are anxious by nature (genetics, don't hate) and everything, from grades to how much they ate are reasons to crank up the stress level. Now, as much as I am a firm believer in the healthiness of a little stress, this much stress causes people to crack. By cracking, I mean that 1 in 10 teenage girls cut themselves, while 1 in 4 is likely to abuse alcohol. Now, guys on the other hand don't cut themselves (anywhere close to 1 in 10) but are still just as likely to abuse alcohol. Now you ask why this presents such a high risk for girls? They are on par with the boys, and they are not doing as well? No, they're not. Guys can eat a whole pizza for dinner, sleep in late, fail a math test, and be perfectly happy as his social life involves nothing more than a video-game and hanging out with other guys just like him (confirmed fact). Girls on the other hand will panic about their weight, whether the test will prevent them from getting into the university they want, the sleep deprivation will destroy their mood, and well...girls don't play video-games (to any scale that guys do) so that point is moot (don't know what you're missing). So while guys may still lead empty lives, we do not have to take such single-minded, targeted abuse for our failings. We revel in our mediocrity, we really don't need much purpose at all to be happy (backed up biologically at least, we really just have to reproduce, then we are done, just empty living after that). Girls on the other hand are the ones who are in trouble, or at least, more trouble than their male counterparts.

Jigsaw Labyrinth

2010-05-04T06:31:00.015-07:00

Picture a Labyrinth (familiar?)

It looks confusing, swirling and intricate, easy to get lost in, but look more carefully. There is in fact only one path that leads to the centre, so there is no way to get lost at all. You are drawn inexorably to the centre, no matter what turns you are supposedly taking. So really, your choices do not matter (inevitably) because the path and journey are the same, and lead to the same path. That being true, then the labyrinth is actually straight. If at any given point the path is straight, and it is straight at all points, then it is straight throughout. So you are really just walking down a long narrow road.

Kind of like life, no?

You think you have free will, but you go to the same spot no matter what turns you take. Life is like falling off a cliff. Can you stop on the way? No. Can you turn back? No. Can you fly off sideways? Yes, but it doesn't take you any farther away from the ground nor slow your descent in any fashion. All free will is the choice to fart in mid-air or wait until you hit the ground. And that is what all the philosophers argue about.

Deus Ex Machina

2010-04-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

The story is more interesting than the game-play itself, but you have to play it through to the final level, even if you don't beat it.

Viricide

An Equal Right to be Unequal

2010-04-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

Canada is a bilingual country, with both English and French having equal respect/rights in law, business, etc.
However, only 20% of the population can speak both to a degree of proficiency to be considered bilingual.
But to become a member of any public-sector job in Quebec, Ontario, or New Brunswick, you need to be able to speak both languages fluently. Or if you wanted to say, become a member of parliament. Even if you were trying to get elected in a region where exclusively English or French was spoken (or Inuktitut, which is cool too). So in being tolerant and accepting of equality, we seem to hypocritically contradict ourselves by excluding people who don't apply to the sum of all possible exclusives. It's totally fine to be Jewish, Arab, gay, or like to marmalade your lawn on Thursdays (maybe that's just me...) but if you do ALL OF THEM AT ONCE then you much superior to people who only belong to one group. Lord knows what we'd do if you fit into three categories...

Sames and Opposites

2010-04-27T15:53:00.006-07:00

Kind of the epitome of my blog.
And my level of mental health.

Information Blender

2010-04-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

While marking a student's paper, I re-discovered why most of the population is unintelligent. Now, a few things to bear in mind as I state this, that one: I do not mean unintelligent in the way you might expect after reading only the one sentence, as the person did in fact receive 100% on their paper, and two: The paper required you to answer in full sentences. The second statement is probably receiving a few derisive thoughts, but I apologize for my apparent digression.

The reason the full sentences were important was the cut-and-paste answering done by the student mangled any possible hope of th sentence's comprehension. When asked the question (for example) "Where do monarch butterflies migrate to in winter?" The student would reply: "Monarch butterflies migrate to in winter Mexico." If you need multiple times to make sense of the sentence, you're not alone. After recovering from the laughing fit induced by the student's failure of an answer, I marked the question incorrect. Why? Even if all the parts to a right answer were there, they were not assembled correctly, nor did the student (when later asked) have any idea what the answer was. (The mark was later appealed and given to the student, as were all other questions marked incorrectly. Needless to say I was in an unforgiving mood).

The reason this is important enough to have a post on it is because it is a brilliant example of the total and utter lack of comprehension in today's society. From a young age, people are not taught to create or explore, but rather to fill in pre-arranged worksheets in a pre-arranged manner, which leads to the disjointed answer above. A vital skill seems to be to find information and express it. Not, as one would expect, to discover any new information, or make conclusions based on information given, but to instead cut and paste an answer that fits. Understanding the question, let alone the answer, is entirely superfluous. People cannot - to an alarming degree - analyze information. Certainly they can memorize the answer and replicate it on the appropriate dotted line, but in no way whatsoever can they explain the underlying thought process or method taken to reach such a conclusion. They have perfected reading texts and finding the answer not because they have realized that this answer logically fits the question, but because the answer should appear at this point in the text, and they copy the answer out, as too avoid any possible complications.

Back to why full sentences are so important, is because it (vaguely) stops the disjointed cut and paste answers. Essay questions likewise, as opposed to the multiple-choice so prevalent nowadays. Because multiple-choice is incredibly unrealistic: choice is infinite in its option, so only a) b) c) and d) do not cut it.

I'll leave you with this parting image. Imagine a test with 10 question, but where you also have the answer key. Now, you will cut out each of the answers to this answer key, and without reading them, you will then draw the answers out of a hat, and assign each answer to a question. The odds of getting an even respectable score is very low. This is where knowledge is going, where all we can do is cut other people's words up and hope we have the right answer.

Consciousness Limit

2010-04-13T17:08:00.000-07:00

Being a conscious being, I can consciously make decisions, analyze information, and do all sorts of groovy stuff that conscious people do. But I can only consciously do one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is non-existent, it is just switching between two things rapidly. Sitting in sort of a passive state, a series of ideas can flow and move through my head, but only one can enter my consciousness at any given point. All those other ephemeral ideas just go poof, and I focus in on that one idea. So at what point does consciousness become the limiting factor on how much thinking we can do?

Necropolis

2010-04-12T21:53:00.007-07:00

We are a society built on death. It scare us, unsettles us, yet we are still drawn inexorably toward it. We have become fascinated with death; we reverse and worship it in all the many forms it reveals itself in. Its existence is the defining feature of our lives, and every facet of our society reverberates with this truth.

Civilization, that great achievement of man - raising himself above all other animals - is possibly the paramount god of our idolatry. We respect and fear other nations, learn from and dissect fallen nations, and in the back of our minds dream of nations yet to come. In doing so, we worship death. For death is the mother of nations, every nation that has existed was built on the ashes of its fallen brethren. The shining jewel that was Rome could not have existed were it not for Greece, the neighbour that it destroyed and consumed. It plundered Greece’s art, culture, language, and society, and used them as the building blocks for its great empire. Rome too then fell, as did the nations that destroyed it. On through the annals of history the rise and fall of nations is recorded, even through to the modern day. In civilization, death is the essential aspect, for without the death of one nation, there can be no rise of another.

In seeing this, we recognize that progress and advancement are not infinite. There cannot be any gains without any loss. Death reigns in this as well, for progress is our attempted escape from Death’s embrace. Progress sates our nagging doubts, those devils of an idle mind – whether we have done all we could, whether our lives were worthwhile. It is the sauce we spoon over our fears and insecurities. But progress proves to be a poor means to hide from death’s gaze. If progress inherently contains death, are we not protecting ourselves with that which we are attempting to flee from? We are constantly “advancing” upwards, ever higher, ever fleeing, but at what cost? The sea of death is a maelstrom beneath us, constantly threatening to swamp our lives. So we have risen high above it, building a tower under us to flee. That tower is technology, it is medicine, it is every advancement that we have ever made as a race. But we have reached a limit, a breaking point. We still need to build higher, but we cannot engineer progress out of thin air, it has to come from somewhere. So we begin to pull out the foundations of the tower to raise it even higher. And as each passing brick is laid, the more unstable our tower becomes, and the greater our chances of crumbling and washing into the sea become.

To some degree, we recognize the inevitability of our death, so we also prepare ourselves for it. Out of this was born religion, a means to prepare ourselves for death. But in our frenzied panic, we have taken this preparation to an extreme. We prepare ourselves so well that we have no purpose but to die. Our lives have become a series of menial tasks, until we eventually break down and die. Our life is a conveyor belt, where we are inspected, injected, and dissected constantly. Our lives follow a simple, organized routine: be born, learn, work, retire, and finally die. Everything pre-fabricated and ready, all you have to do is assemble the parts in turn. We see only the bright light at the end of the tunnel, not realizing that it is a lure until the jaws of the anglerfish consume us.

We are running from death in everything we do, in every action we perform. Progress has become our escape route of choice, but by progressing, we seal our own fates. All our lives we are reconciling ourselves with death, right until we reach the final end. In our efforts to escape death, we use the twin poisons of progress and religion: one to escape, the other to soothe once escape is impossible. The bitter irony is that in doing so, the purpose of our lives has become not to live, but to die.

You're all just little boxes, little boxes all the same.

The Winner of Puzzle Month

2010-04-11T12:09:00.001-07:00

As per the title, we have a winner.

A hard fought battle, coming down to a tiebreaker, and then, coming down to a single point.

Torwch answered within an hour of the questions being posted, and got 9 correct. Sophie waited until the last possible hour, and answered 8 of the 13 questions correctly, so...

Torwch is the puzzle master.

I would offer a monetary reward, but I am currently massively in debt, so that is not an option. You'll just have to make do with bragging rights for now.

The answers to the questions are as follows

1. The gold weighs more. It is measured in Troy ounces (due to it being a precious metal) whilst the lead would be measured in avoirdupois ounces. The Troy ounce is slightly heavier.

2. You have a 1 in 3 chance of drawing 2 identical cards.

3. You will be over top of the Pacific Ocean

4. A whip (or the tip of a whip if we're getting picky) was the first man-made object to break the sound barrier

5. The moon

6. Facetiously or Abstemiously

7. They all are on Voyager I's golden record.

8. The sound would be processed first. The bullet would strike your foot in 0.3 seconds, but the pain signals would take 0.15 seconds to make it to your brain, while the sound would only take 0.41 seconds to be recognized. You'd be shot either way however.

9. Byzantium (not Constantinople, Constantine wasn't born for another 500 years.

10. Surprisingly, the ball that is dropped from the tower would hit the ground first. The Earth would curve away from the fired ball, so it would hit the ground slightly after the dropped ball. (Don't try this in physics class, they always assume that the Earth is flat)

11. Contrary to urban myth, no man made objects on Earth can be seen from the moon. Neil would have seen the lander he just stepped out of. (Or his spacesuit, whichever)

12. The hole would get larger

13. Stranger

Not So Friendly Reminder

2010-04-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

You have 5 and a half hours remaining to answer Sophie.

Friendly Reminder

2010-04-09T18:08:00.001-07:00

30 Hour Warning Sophie

Jigsaw Consciousness (The Anti-Solipsist 2)

2010-04-06T21:52:00.005-07:00

As I said last time, the world exists only as you do. The only problem being, you don't exist.

To prove this, attempt to define yourself. Go on. Here is a simple example, I am a male human. Brilliant, and not any of that proves I exist. Man? What is man without woman, and if only I (a man) exist, there can be no woman to compare against, therefore I cannot be a man. I am a human, but again, I would only know I am human if there are other humans I can say are like me, but they do not exist if I do not perceive them, so I cannot be human. I am now only defined as not being something, which is not a definition at all, therefore I do not exist. QED.

However, the fallacy here is glaring. Of course I exist, otherwise I would not be able to write this post. So instead, let us say that I only exist based on the things which exist around me, which only exist as I perceive them. So really, I exist if I perceive myself. And I perceive myself based on the things around me.

If I've totally lost you (stop pinching yourself to prove that you exist) then picture this. You are a puzzle piece, and everyone else is another piece. They all build a large jigsaw puzzle. If none of the pieces are filled in, we have no idea what any individual piece inside the jigsaw will look like. We exist as the piece, so we cannot see ourselves and we can only see the pieces around us. However, by looking at the pieces around us, we can see what our shape is. Yes, your entire self has been reduced to a small piece of cardboard.

Example to the above theory: Social classes. The way we see ourselves within society dictates how we act and who we are. Society sets out a place for you, with predetermined values, customs, etc. and all you do is step right in and fill the gap.

Just try looking at an ordinary jigsaw the same way again.

Take off the Training Wheels

2010-04-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

Taking off the training wheels, and why we need to stay in Afghanistan.

Originally, Canadian troops went to Afghanistan to remove the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. (or, peace-keep in the area, whatever politically correct term we want to use). They were running an oppressive regime, and being generally against all that sort of nonsense, we moved in. (why we don;t do anything about Sudan beats me). Now that the Taliban are mostly, and Al-Qaeda completely removed, people ask why we're still there.

To answer that question, lets go back to why Afghanistan had no proper government to speak of. The Soviets also invaded Afghanistan (at Afghanistan's government's request mind you) to fight against the Islamist Mujahideen Revolution. Then they left, leaving the revolution to run its course. This revolution was led by what would later become the Taliban, and regarding their poor governance, left Afghanistan with almost no government to speak of. It was anarchy for a period of about 3 years between the Soviet withdrawal and the Taliban cementing themselves in power. Not a good moment in history for Afghanistan.

Now, the original goal of Operation Enduring Freedom was to remove the Taliban from power. I'm not going to comment on whether the US has the right to do this, but they did, and the Taliban have been removed. The US (plus allies, such as Canada) has stuck around to train the Afghan military and police forced to help protect and govern themselves. The only problem with this is that all offensives are planned by coalition generals and executed by coalition soldiers, as Afghan forces look on. It's time to give the people of Afghanistan a little faith in themselves, take off the training wheels as it were, and let them combat their own problems themselves. But we cannot abandon them, we still need to look on, as a mother hen and her chicks, but we will eventually have to leave, and we need to prepare them for when we are gone.

My Falling out with Government

2010-04-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

When something goes wrong, invariably, we blame someone else. Who takes the lion's share of this abuse? The government. Every problem, from higher taxes (directly the governments fault) to a lack of jobs (shout out to all those unemployed slobs) is the government's fault. I too have issues with the government (not the current government, government in general) but not such petty ones. The government is flawed because people don't like not having control over themselves. Deep down, everyone just wants to be able to do whatever they want. This is not practical, so we generally stifle the urge.

People like to do what they want, but they are also incredibly lazy, and don't like to have to do things for themselves. This is where government comes in handy, it can tell people to do things. Albeit, if the people don't want to do these things (subject to doing whatever as stated before) then they ignore the government. So the government really has limited power to affect a change if the people don't want the change to occur. Some governments (I'm looking at you over there Fascism) don't like it when the people say no, and force them to do what they want. It leads to some pretty messy results. The point being, that change needs to come from the people, because if the people don't want something to happen, it's not going to happen.

So, people like freedom, so what if we jump to the opposite end of the spectrum from Fascism, Anarchy. In Anarchy nobody rules, so ultimate freedom, no? In Anarchy, no one rules anyone, including themselves, and they lose restraint, and will quickly destroy themselves in their Hedonism (not recommended). But if everyone works together, if in benefiting others they can also benefit themselves, would people not do that? Everyone equal and united and working towards their own greater good. If everyone is rules by themselves, and do what is best for society not because they are told to, but because it is the best option, then no government would be necessary. Sounds nice. Also sounds like Communism, where the "collective unity" idea is taken to an extreme. A one party, one state system could potentially work very well, despite it's poor track record. But look into that. Why does Communism have such a poor track record if it sound so good? Simple, because people don't like being equal. Everyone wants to be better paid, better looking, and more intelligent, so a government where everyone is perfectly equal is not in fact what we want. It also lends itself to laziness, because if you get paid the same amount as everyone else, no matter how hard you work, then why work hard at all? Communism falls pretty quickly after that, as it falls into Fascism or Socialism to force people to start working again.

Well then, that's a rather dismal look at government. But wait, we still have the crowning jewel of government left. Democracy has been heralded as the finest form of government there is (mainly by those who invented it) so let's see if it's up to snuff. Freedom, decent amounts, but still not perfect. You get to pick who rules you, but there we are again, you are still ruled by someone. Humans don't like that. But they also need to have someone to rule them, otherwise we just descend to our more animalistic selves. What we need, is a government, where the people don't know they are being governed. I know, start the criticism now, but hold a second. If you don't know you are being controlled, you are perfectly happy, and you live your life normally, the way you would anyways. If you start to get out of hand, maybe the "government" steps in and stops you from murdering/stealing/committing adultery/not wearing pants on Thursday. I don't mean some Matrix government where we all live a lie in a vat with some nerve stimulus. I mean a world like we live in now, but with a government like the brain of a jellyfish. No centralized system, but a network of neural pathways in every cell, so that every cell can operate both as it's own brain and as part of the entire network. Everyone both part and entire in one. I don't think this is going to happen mind you, but we always need some wishful thinking.

Puzzle Month Follow-up

2010-04-03T14:27:00.009-07:00

Puzzle Month has ended, and the results are in.

Only 3 people participated, which I actually though was a rather good turnout.

Final scores being

Torwch: 200
Sophie: 200
Claymore: 185

You, being an intelligent reader, have noticed that we have a tie.

To solve said tie-breaker, here is an assortment of puzzles (only 1 puzzle would not be fair, so here is a good mix)

I do not care who solves them the fastest, only who solves the most, regardless of their difficulty. All answers must be submitted at the same time, in one e-mail. All answers as before, e-mail to RudraighS@gmail.com. Torwch, Sophie, you have one week (April 10th, midnight) good luck to you both.

Here they are:

1) A thief sneaks into a museum to steal a 10 ounce gold bar, which is resting on a highly sensitive pressure plate. Previously, the thief has bought a 10 ounce lead bar to replace the gold bar with. He swaps the two perfectly, a la Indiana Jones, only to be startled by the alarm. Which weighs more, 10 ounces of gold or 10 ounces of lead?

2) 2 red cards and 2 black cards are shuffled and placed face down. What is the probability that you pick 2 of the same colour?

3) Fly due South from Ottawa until you reach the same latitude as Santiago, Chile. What body of water is underneath you?

4) What was the earliest man made object to break the sound barrier?

5) Which satellite has orbited the Earth for the most consecutive days?

6) What English word has all 6 vowels in alphabetical order?

7) What do the following have in common: "Johnny B. Goode", "Rite of Spring", "Beethoven's 5th", "Dark Was the Night" and "Melancholy Blues" (Yes, I know they're all music, thank you.)

8) An assassin with a high-powered rifle shoots you in the foot from 50 feet away. The bullet travels at 1300 feet per second. You and the assassin are at sea level. What will be the first evidence to you of the attack? (assuming the assassin is well hidden)

9) The city we call Istanbul was known by what name 2000 years ago?

10) During a war, along the border, a series of 100 meter high watch towers were erected for the purpose of defense. Atop each tower was a cannon and a guard. Toward the end of the war, atop one of the towers, a guard waited impatiently for signs of the enemy. The enemy had been pushed well back, so the chances of him seeing any action were slim. So he amused himself with thought puzzles. On this particular occasion, the puzzle he came up with was this: The cannon was exactly level with the ground below him. When fired, a 10 kilogram steel ball would leave the cannon at two hundred meters per second. What would happen, he wondered, if at the exact instant the cannon were fired, he dropped a cannon ball off the tower? Which ball would hit the ground first? Assume that the cannon balls were of equal mass, air resistance and drag were negligible, and there were no important geographic features in front of the cannon like mountains, valleys, or other watch towers.

11) What was the largest single man made object visible to Neil Armstrong when he first stepped onto the moons surface?

12) If a metal torus (doughnut) is heated, will the hole in the centre become larger or smaller?

13) What is the next element in this series: "sun", "new", "inactive", "hidden"...?

The End of Puzzle Month

2010-03-30T10:59:00.005-07:00

As Per the title, Puzzle Month will end on April 1st, 12:00 PM (noon)

Answers to all puzzles will be posted.

SPOILER ALERT

The Monkey and the Pulley - 5 feet

A Wise man and Some Camels - The man lends the brothers his camel, bringing the count to 18. 1/2 of 18 is 9, 1/3 is 6, and 1/9 is 2, which adds to 17 camels. The man then takes his camel back and leaves.

Tricksy - an eye

Vanity - an actor

Mary Ellen Carter - a seaman

Plato - Hemlock

57 to Nothing - 1) remove both matches from the "L", and place them so that the equation has: the square root of 1 minus 1. (awkward to render in text). 2) Once again remove both matches of the "L" and arrange them to that the word "NIL" is seen.

Moccasins - A Copperhead (a snake)

Slaver - A Cottonmouth (also a snake)

Quite Contrary - Tom is 7 while Mary is 13

The Ferryman - place the letter inside the safe, lock it, and send it across the river. Your friend then places his own lock on the safe (there now being 2 locks on the safe) and send the boat back. You remove your lock, send it over the river, where your friend removes his lock and retrieves the letter.

A Mad King: Man 1 sees a white hat and a black hat, which means he is not certain of the colour of his hat. Man 2 can see only a black hat on Man 3, but he realizes that man 1 does not have the answer (otherwise he would have spoken) so Man 2 must have a different hat than Man 3, and he states that his hat is white.

Dinner-party - grapes

Traveler - feet

Eggshells - it is easier to un-dish-cover the dish, it being an oyster.

A Wish is a Fish - He cannot name the answer to the riddle

A Wish is a Fish Clue

2010-03-30T10:57:00.001-07:00

A Clue for A Wish is A Fish

Forget about roses. Forget about rocks.
Forget about basilisks, candles, and locks.
Forget about those things like laughter, and pain.
One thing still I can't say, and that you must now name.

A Wish is a Fish

2010-03-26T12:08:00.004-07:00

A Wish is a Fish (80)

I can talk about roses. I can talk about rocks.
I can talk about basilisks, candles, and locks.
I can talk about most things like laughter, and pain.
The one thing I can't say, that you, sir, must name.

Eggshells

2010-03-26T12:07:00.001-07:00

Eggshells (80)

'First the fish must be caught.'
That is easy, a baby, I think, could have caught it.
'Next the fish must be bought.'
That is easy: a penny, I think, would have bought it.

'Now cook me the fish!'
That is easy and will not take more than a minute.
'Let it lie in a dish!'
That is easy, because it is already in it.

'Bring it here! Let me sup!'
It is easy to set such a dish on the table.
'Take the dish-cover up!'
Ah, that is so hard that I fear I'm unable!

'For it holds it like glue -
Holds the lid to the dish while it lies in the middle.'
Which is easiest to do,
Un-dish-cover the dish, or dishcover the riddle?

Dinner Party

2010-03-26T12:06:00.001-07:00

Dinner Party (35)

Crushed by a blow and laid with my brothers,
You've taken my blood and that of the others.
I was hung in the sun, I was happy and still,
Till you snuffed out my life for an ev'ning's brief thrill.

Traveller (35)

They wrap us in leather; they wrap us in cloth.
They stick us in water and wash the dirt off.
Our station's the lowest to have brought you so far.
If we hurt, you'll suffer. Now say who we are.

A Mad King

2010-03-14T11:44:00.001-07:00

A Mad King (60)

A king has brought forth four prisoners and offers them a challenge. He will place a hat on their head, and if they can correctly guess the colour of the hat on their head, they will be set free. If they are incorrect in their guess, they will be tortured for a hundred days, and then killed. If they remain silent they will be swiftly and painlessly executed. The men are compelled to look at a wall, and cannot move or communicate with the other prisoners in any way. The king orders the men like this, such that the first man can see the men 2 and 3, but not 4. Man 2 can see man 3, but not 1 or 4. Man 3 and Man 4 can only see the wall.

1 2 3 4
Black Hat - White Hat - Black Hat - Wall - White Hat

They prisoners are given ten minutes to think, and at the end of the ten minutes, one of the men states the colour of his hat correctly (without guessing, he is certain) and is set free. The remaining men are killed. Which man survives, and how does he know the colour of his hat?

The Ferryman

2010-03-14T11:38:00.001-07:00

The Ferryman (85)

There is a river 1km wide, and only a single boat that passes across it. You want to send a letter to your friend, who is on the other side. The only problem is that the ferryman is a kleptomaniac, and will steal whatever you give him to take across. Luckily the boat has a safe on it, which you will put your object inside. You can then put a combination lock with whatever combination you wish on it so the ferryman cannot steal your letter. The rub being that your friend is now unable to open the safe, as he doesn't know the combination. How can you successfully transport the letter to your friend without the ferryman stealing the letter? Note that you are unable to communicate with your friend IN ANY WAY, the ferryman is smart enough to find any clues you leave for your friend, and the ferryman is the only person allowed on the boat.

The Anti-Solipsist

2010-03-14T11:32:00.006-07:00

The physical world is composed of many things. But the basic four things are time, space, energy and matter. But really, at the bare bones, it's just space. Time is just a function of space, hence space-time. Energy is likewise just the interaction between space and time, and matter is formed as a function of energy (E=MC^2 and all that). All of this matter, energy, and time (if we go back far enough) all came into existence during a process that we know next to nothing about.

This process potentially happened during what the current wise guys call "the big bang" which was really REALLY big. Like, it created the universe in about 13.7 billion years (think about how big the earth is to us, and it's been around for a bout 4.3 billion years. Now think how big the universe is), so yeah, pretty huge. Anyway, this big bang event happened before time ever started, in fact, the universe itself was cocooned in the tiniest thing unimaginable, that is, a singularity, but again, we can imagine what a singularity is (it's the thing at the center of a black hole, which in itself is the gravitational field surrounding a super-dense particle about as small as an atom, but so dense that it causes things around it to get sucked into its gravity well and not get out, even light), but THIS singularity was smaller than the average run-of-the-mill singularity, and more dense, and infinitely more important. The reason for this is the aforementioned BANG! which would have been much smaller had the singularity been bigger. (it's like, putting something pretty much indestructible under a pretty much unlimited amount of pressure, when it is really really small, so that the pretty much unlimited amount of pressure can reach unlimited so that it can create something that is unlimited in size and scope. I.e: the universe). Ok, so, creation, check, big explosion, check, time and space, check. But wait, you ask, why can't we explain or know anything about the big bang when you yourself just explained it all? You might ask, and I would be glad you did, because that's a good point. The reason is this. The theory of relativity that Einstein proposed WAY back in the day cannot and does not work the nearer we get to the beginning of the universe (which is why for many years, the world thought that there was no absolute beginning of time), the calculations he created just don't work, they unravel and give numbers that don't make any sense. So, they instead use something else, called quantum mechanics, that works really really well for things that are really small but.... it also operates on a few different notions that basically say that everything cannot be calculated to absolute authenticity and truth and that chance and uncertainty are at the basis of physics.

Right, so that basically goes directly against relativity (which had the goal of making everything absolute and measurable to a certain degree of accuracy and no degree of uncertainty). But here's the funny thing, Einstein was an important figure in the development of QM, in fact, he developed many of the equations and theories which started the whole bloody thing. Of course, he still believed that "God does not play dice" and so the whole uncertainty principle thing was kinda not his thing. But anyway, just so I don't bore you, here's the simple explanations. Relativity= measures big things, like a planet. Quantum Mechanics= Small things and everything else that relativity can't work with. So Relativity + QM= Theory of Everything I.e. String theory.

So, here's what's been bugging me. In the beginning, there was supposedly nothing. There had to be, because the universe cannot have ALWAYS existed, it just isn't possible. There HAD to be a definitive start, and before that, there had to be nothing. And if that is true, then the big bang theory is completely busto.

Here's why. Try to imagine nothing. Got it yet. No? Keep trying. No? That's what I thought. It's impossible. For those of you who thought you imagined nothing, your outta luck my friend, because you forgot that "true" nothing has no time or space. So, if you imagined any dimension (which you have to, because the brain cannot imagine something without a dimension. Even if you imagine a blank image, it is still black or grey, and still is 2 or 1 dimensional) So, you can't imagine it. So, if there is nothing, which has no time, or space, or dimension of any kind. Then how then could space and time just have miraculously appeared into existence, CREATING existence, then sparking a big bang which created the universe, if something cannot exist from nothing.

Let me back up here. There are two very important laws that need to be addressed here. One, is the Second law of thermodynamics, which basically says A) You can't go back in time. And B) the universe is getting crazier by the second. And of course, the law that doesn't need a name SOMETHING CANNOT COME FROM ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! And absolutely nothing had to exist, because something cannot come out of nothing. Something cannot always exist, something has to make it exist. (And if someone argues God, then tell me, where does he exist exactly, where does his time and space begin? Where does that eternal loop start? And if you say "well he doesn't obey the laws of physics, he created physics, he also likes ponies" then I say "Then how could he have acted if physics don't apply to him?)

So what if (and remember this is just a theory), the universe begins when YOU do.

Think about it.

When you look at a circle, it has no beginning, it only has where you enter the circle, and that is the beginning. The point at which you leave the circle is the end.

Also, the universe as you know it would not exist without a very important thing called perception.

Now hold on a minute now. I am not saying that the universe revolves around you or any of that crap, all I'm saying is that it started with you, will end with you, and that's it. There is no existence without perception.

Scores for Puzzle Month

2010-03-01T19:30:00.009-08:00

A running tally of points for Puzzle month

Torwch: 200
Claymore: 185
Sophie: 200

Links to all of the available puzzles can also be found below

The Monkey and the Pulley*
A Wise man and some Camels*
Tricksy*
Vanity*
Mary Ellen Carter*
Plato*
An Ingenious match Puzzle
Quite Contrary*
Moccasins
Slaver*
The Ferryman
A Mad King*
Traveller*
Dinner Party*
Eggshells
A Wish is a Fish

*Indicates a solved puzzle

Age

2010-03-01T18:42:00.000-08:00

Quite Contrary (20)

Tom and Mary are brother and sister.
Tom's age plus the square of Mary's age is 176, while the square of Tom's age plus Mary's is 62.

How old are Tom and Mary?

Riddling

2010-03-01T18:34:00.001-08:00

Moccasins (50)

My first is a substance oft strung in a wire

My second contains my most precious part

But ever should I approach my entire

This world I shall most swiftly depart

Slaver (50)

My first is found on any one man

My second is the maw of a beast

But my entire is a slippery fellow

And if he met me, would call me a feast

57 to Nothing

2010-03-01T17:20:00.005-08:00

An Ingenious Match Puzzle (30)

There are 6 matches as shown, so as to represent the number 57. The puzzle is to remove and replace two matches to represent nothing (zero, 0). You can only move two matches. There are two solutions, both of which are worth 30 points.

L V II

The L being formed by a vertical and a horizontal match, and the V being two diagonal matches.

Plato

2010-02-26T08:43:00.002-08:00

Plato (40)

When my first is a task to a young girl of spirit,

And my second confines her to finish the piece,

How hard is her fate! but how great is her merit

If by taking my whole she effects her release!

Mary Ellen Carter

2010-02-26T08:43:00.000-08:00

Mary Ellen Carter (50)

"My first, tho’ water, cures no thirst,

My next alone has soul,

And when he lives upon my first,

He then is called my whole."

Vanity

2010-02-26T08:41:00.003-08:00

Vanity (30)

I talk, but I do not speak my mind

I hear words, but I do not listen to thoughts

When I wake, all see me

When I sleep, all hear me

Many heads are on my shoulders

Many hands are at my feet

The strongest steel cannot break my visage

But the softest whisper can destroy me

Dr. Seuss

2010-02-24T11:17:00.002-08:00

Tricksy (30)

Pronounced as one letter,
And written with three,
Two letters there are,
And two only in me.
I'm double, I'm single,
I'm black, blue, and gray,
I'm read from both ends,
And the same either way.
What am I?