In Which I ♥ Richard Feynman

If it's wet and cold outside, an enjoyable way to pass some hours is to watch Feynman videos. He's got to be one of my heroes - smart, funny, and full of exuberance. I love the above video because not only does it show his quirkiness, it shows how a trained scientific mind works.

I'm still on my quantum mechanics kick. It's some seriously cool stuff, Maynard. I should have taken more physics as a university student. I'm now trying to wrap my head around Bell's Theorem, which (in a nutshell) states that either things don't have an objective existence when they're not interacting with other things, or faster than light interactions are possible. One of the two is truth, but not both, and it's been experimentally verified.

Einstein was horrified by the possibility of the latter (faster than light interactions), because of course it appears to contradict general relativity. It doesn't really, since no information can be transmitted -- but the very idea of faster than light quantum entanglement disturbed him. He called it spukhafte Fernwirkung, or spooky action at a distance.

The possibility of no objective existence bothered him even more. "I refuse to believe," he wrote, "that the moon does not exist when I am not looking at it." That's a simplification and exaggeration of the concept, but it demonstrates the weirdness of it.

Fallen

Fallen from Sascha Geddert on Vimeo.

One of my favorite little videos in a long time, that one.  As someone else put it, "When people ask me how I can be at peace without belief in god or an afterlife, now I can just show them Fallen and save myself a lot of time and effort."  I love the way the meteor shakes his little butt with anticipation when he first learns to have fun with his situation, just like Finn wiggles his butt before attacking a fake rattle-mouse on the floor.

I've been reading a lot of physics, lately, particularly quantum mechanics and the various interpretations.  The basic theory makes sense, but the interpretations seem to be stretching credulity.  For example, there's the Many Worlds interpretation of QM, which says that every time there's a quantum decision to be made, the universe splits in two.  Apparently Stephen Hawking believes in that one.

And then there's the Copenhagen Interpretation, which says that faster than light signaling is possible between entangled particles.  Niels Bohr (my personal hero) believed that one; in fact, he was its primary author.

I dunno, I think trying to interpret beyond what the simple equations are telling you is probably a futile exercise, unless there is something that you can actually experimentally verify, and for now there's nothing like that.  There is something to be said for not fighting the situation that you're in.

Fuck Me!

This has been making the rounds, it came to me courtesy of my lovely friend Maria the librarian:

ORLY?

I've been away, because I've gotten sucked back into IRC.  I never thought it could happen again, but it did.  And, well... there I am.  I have some amusing things to say about it all, which I will try to mention later. Among the most amusing is that I was made a channel op tonight, for no real reason other than that I seem to have a sense of humor that one of the other ops likes.  Granted, not on the most wild-western network, but still.

Finn Returns

Sleepy man in my office

Finn finally came home tonight, ten days after he'd left.  Today it had been overcast and raining for the first time in a month, and I'm guessing that that's what drove him back home.  He didn't appear to be hurt at all -- just missing his collar and quite a bit thinner than when he left, but otherwise obviously happy to be home: chatty and hungry.  He's purring on my leg at the moment.  His amazing new skill is the ability to fall into REM sleep after about 90 seconds of immobility, and to wake up to full alertness in about the same amount of time.

Laura said "I'm as happy now tonight as I was inconsolable last night."

Finn is now grounded.  As much as we believe in letting him live his life as he wants to, he's only a year old, and one day out of ten is not enough, especially if he's going to be losing a $20 collar and tag every time he goes on walkabout.

Ugh

Things that I'm up to tonight (or was):

1. Packaging the Cherokee Purple seeds from their fermentation.

2. Pondering one-way functions.

3. Shopping for a dream oscilloscope.

4. Starting to reread the classic of classics.

5. Comforting a very sad woman about the apparent loss of Finn.

6. Realizing how much unresolved shit I have in the back of my head that is holding me back from actually being a whole human being, still, even at this point in my life, and wondering what the hell I have to do to move past this.*

7. Laughing at how absurd that is.

8. Pouring a drink.

9. Understanding that that's not a long term solution, but telling the world to go fuck itself anyway.

10.  Big sigh.

*Crying women seem to stir shit up in me.

R.I.P. Zapho

Several years ago, back when I was struggling through graduate school, I lived in the basement of a very fine house owned by a good friend of mine.  His sister lived in the room next to mine.  The three of us (and later four, when a younger brother moved in) made a kind of impromptu family, and we all became very close.

Shortly before I graduated and moved out, the sister got a couple of small kittens.  Oh my god, they were adorable!  We played with them for hours and hours.

Time rolled on, and the kittens became cats.  She called the all-black one Alexander, for some reason, but the rest of us called him Zapho.  If you ever watched Sifl & Olly, that will make sense.  He was a good cat with a sweet personality -- he would friendly right up to you, given even half a chance.  Eventually the second brother would move in some other animals (a pit bull and a ferocious alley cat) who beat the living crap out of Zapho for several years, but that was after my time in that household.

Eventually, the sister moved out, and she took her cats with her.  By that time, Zapho was permanently traumatized by years of abuse from the other animals -- which was not her fault at all, since she couldn't afford to live anywhere else.  It was what it was.  He ate a lot, since it was his consolation.  But after a while, he gained a LOT of weight.  And today, she wrote me that his heavy weight had led to liver failure, and that she had put him down as a result.  She was really sad, and I can only imagine (from miles and miles and miles away) the tears she must have cried while writing to me.

As it turns out, I'm the only one with any pictures of Zapho.  And he looked a lot like Finn.  Who is still missing, and today was a week.

Young Zapho

The Nightshades

My tomatoes have begun to develop something that is either early blight, or else a magnesium deficiency.  It's too early to tell, but I've dosed them with dolomite lime and an epsom salt dilution, and I'm always regular about watering, so the next week or so should tell.  Here's the evidence:

Note the yellow tinges between the leaf veins.  Here's to hoping that it's not blight! I have a bit more evidence to support that it isn't, namely the upper leaf-curl:

That is definitely not a sign of blight, but it does speak to either another disease or to nutrient deficiencies.  Whoever said that tomatoes are the easiest garden plant to grow was an idiot.

In other news, I dumped one of the 30-gallon potato pots today.  It had been ravaged by deer and was not doing well, so I put it out of its misery.  Here are before, during, and after shots:

Before, with tarp at the ready to catch the dirt

Right after dumping the pot -- you can see some potatoes peeking out

The tiny harvest

These were german butterballs again.  The harvest was far below what I expect out of a 30-gallon pot: only about 3-4 lbs of potatoes.  Normally there should be more like 10.  But the deer really cut this pot's season short -- the other pots have at least another month, maybe two, of good tuber growing.

Finn is still gone.  My neighbor tonight said that he saw a coyote in his yard early one  morning recently.  Things are not looking good for the little man.  Laura is making "lost cat" flyers to put in our neighbors' mailboxes.  But it's been a week now, and I'm starting to think that the little dude is really gone.

Godless Heathens Muster

Pharyngula readers meetup, Pike Brewery, Seattle, 7/27/2010

So, we ended up heading down to Seattle to meet PZ Meyers, principal over at pharyngula, and a fine time was had by all.  PZ is the fella in the green shirt on the left, about 2nd or 3rd from the far end of the table.  He is much the way I expected him to be: gracious and down to earth, but clearly nobody's fool.  The rest of the folks were an amusing mix of overeducated scientists (an epidemiologist sat across from me, and a university professor beside me), geeks & nerds, free spirited near-hippies, and young radicals with agendas.  In short, my kinda people.  And everyone was friendly and garrulous.  I quickly got locked into a fascinating conversation with a biology grad student, the epidemiologist, and the professor, and the four of us ended up talking animatedly for two and a half hours.  Partway through, PZ came around and introduced himself, and stayed to chat for 30 minutes or so, before moving on around the table to talk to the rest.  Also about that time, a UW undergraduate appeared who had the biggest smile I think I've ever seen on a human being that was not the result of Photoshop manipulation, and he turned out to be an extremely thoughtful and good-natured guy who jumped right in to the debate over how to define ourselves ("atheist? nontheist?  empiricist? agnostic?").  

All in all, a very good evening, and it makes me want to find a local skeptics group.  Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking and didn't get a picture of the Lyndon LaRouche supporters outside the pub holding signs of the president and shouting "IMPEACH THE ONE!".... sigh.  I love visiting Seattle.  The Crazy™ there is palpable.  Here in Bellingham the best that we can really muster is the guy looking like a santa-in-flannel who walks up and down Railroad Ave. with an eye patch and a parrot on his shoulder, but that's just endearing, not truly loony.

In the end, we all exchanged business cards with emails and phone numbers, and I might actually keep in touch with some of these folks, since they all actually live within a couple hours' drive of me.

I will end with a shout-out to the wait staff at the Pike Brewery: those folks were awesome.  Professional, fast, courteous, and cheery, even after it got FRICKIN' CROWDED.  I can't recommend the beer in general (although the stout is passable and the Monk's Uncle Trippel is, as I mentioned, stellar), but the wait staff make it a worthy destination.

Monday LOLcat

Laura may kill me if she sees this, but it's hilarious.  Zooey jumped up on the roof and couldn't figure out how to get back down.  Life is made up of small moments, mostly.  NB: Zooey normally never meows.  To get a meow out of her means that something is important.  To get repeated meows like this means that she is FREAKED OUT.

Please ignore my talk-to-Zooey voice because yes, I know that I sound like an idiot.



(I got her down just fine. She retreated to my office and stretched out like a tube.)

On Facebook and the Paradigm of Social Networking

Besides the truly horrible privacy issues* (or lack-of-privacy, that is), this perfectly summarizes why I no longer use facebook.  I have long disliked it, and a couple of months ago I locked down my facebook account and stopped posting to it or logging in to read updates from anyone else, but I didn't really bother to analyze why beyond citing my usual knee-jerk introversion complaints.  Just something about it vaguely bothered me.  But that article really seems to have resonated with me.

This line of thought is interesting because I had thought that my aversion was to facebook, not to social networking in general.  In fact, I had been looking forward to the release of the diaspora project because its premise seemed completely at odds with the facebook approach, which I appreciated.   But so now, it seems that for me, at least, the problem is bigger than a particular software system.

I've been struggling to live my life more consciously, so perhaps that has something to do with it.  To know where the food I eat comes from, and how it was grown.  To patronize local merchants.  To identify and codify the principles by which I live my life, or want to live my life, and to stick by those principles, rather than letting life happen to me. To treat people with at least the respect that they are due, and hopefully more.  To value each personal relationship as a thing unique, worthy of my time and atttention.  To sideline distractions and to silence my inner dialogue.  To appreciate the moment.  To portray myself in an honest way, without bragging or hiding.  To celebrate my friends' and family members' successes, and downplay the occasional failure.

Facebook seems to provide a platform for behaviors and attitudes that I don't want to have in my life anymore, even if it doesn't encourage them.   A close friend of mine called me one day and asked, "what's the deal with you and Laura?  Neither one of you has the other listed as even 'in a relationship' on facebook."  I was really at a loss for words.  Are we to broadcast every intimate detail of our lives now?  Apparently so.  And even worse, when those details are shattered -- say, by a breakup or divorce -- now all of our facebook friends can comment on the event with their personal point of view, and it can turn into a dicussion, and even a debate.  That sort of thing is hard enough for an adult to handle; I can only imagine the impact on, say, a high school student.

At least here, I can say as little or as much as I want about myself.  Blogging is (for me) a socially introspective activity whose great value comes from the fact not only that we can work through ideas, but also form connections with truly like-minded people.  Who may remain forever anonymous.  Or not.  But we get to choose.

I still have a facebook account and occasionally I log in to it to contact those people I know who seem to only be reachable that way, like the personal trainer with whom I work out.  He never answers his phone, and his email is a black hole -- but send him a facebook message and he'll answer within an hour.  And, as it turns out, you can't actually delete your facebook profile: all the data you've ever uploaded is retained forever, awaiting your inevitable return and reactivation.  You can deactivate your profile, but you can never remove it, and you can never wipe yourself from the facebook servers.

*Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old child-CEO of facebook, is on record as having stated that he believes the future of online social interaction to be more sharing, not less.  As in, less privacy, by default.  And in fact the evolution of privacy settings on facebook has demonstrated that he is putting that philosophy into action.  Given that not many people bother to change defaults, this is troubling, to say the least.  A network intrusion specialist who is a friend of mine "in real life" has stated: be afraid of facebook -- very afraid.

Sunday Night in the Garden

Finn is still AWOL, but not for want of my presence outside to trigger his chuminess instinct.  I went into the forest this morning to look for him, and walked a few miles in either direction up and down the closest trail, but there was no sign of him.  Water still running in the creek, lots of little critters, and warm temperatures, so I'm still holding out hope that he's just on walkabout and is taking care of himself just fine.

Anyway, as I hinted, I spent the day in the garden.  Here are the fruits of today's efforts:

New 4'x4' raised garden bed

A new garden bed!  I spent the day today sawing out the notches by hand, and then drilling holes to accomodate 3/8" rebar that I will hammer down on the corners to hold it all together.  This is the first of many that I am going to put in place along the south side of the house, which I have identified as being the primo garden real estate on my lot.  Here's how it looks now:

 The barren waste land

As you can see, I haven't done much with that side of the house.  That's compost that I'm starting to spread out over the clay, and I do have a row of various plants along the house proper, and they're doing quite well.  Which is how I know that this strip of land is the best that I have for gardening, because I come out in the early morning to water and there is already beaming sunshine all along there.  The reason I haven't done much with it is because, in the dark of winter, I mistakenly thought that my main back yard area would be the best -- and it is, but only for things that need shade.  Anyway, along the house I have:

Vigorous tomato plants (this one is 5.5' tall)

The variety that I planted this year is Early Girl, an F1 hybrid.   I didn't want to go with hybrids, but this being the first year that I tried gardening for real, I figured that I should go with something straightforward.  And man, are they growing like crazy.  There are about 30 young tomatoes getting bigger on the vines, and the vines themselves grow 3-4" every day.

Slicer Cucumbers

The cucumbers got off to a slow start, but they are now growing like crazy in the 75ºF days.  As small as those guys are, there are about 25-30 little cucumbers growing on them, already.  I'm weaving them through the tines of a trellis that I've got leaning up against the house.

A tiny ear of corn (you can see the tassels!)

I decided to try my hand at sweet corn, too.  Hell, I planted about one of everything, to see how it would go.  The corn is really doing well, with big, beautiful, strong plants, and now finally some ears starting to develop.  About two months behind the rest of the country, but hey, that's the pacific northwest for you.

Russian Mammoth sunflowers

I've always loved sunflowers.  I love the way that they follow the sun -- I remember taking the commuter train to Munich in the morning and passing fields of sunflowers, their heads all facing east, and coming back in the evening and seeing the same flowers looking in the opposite direction.  Mine do the same thing, although they have yet to flower.  Those glacier wands (the sticks with the orange flags) are there to give the flowers support when it gets windy -- the flower on the left was 3" shorter than the top of the wand that it is tied to, only four days ago.  It's growing like mad!  Also, around the bases of the flowers are my patented (well, not really) slug deterents.  Anyone who has ever tried to grow sunflowers in slug country knows how much slugs love to devour small sunflower seedlings.  But not with my system!  (Basically just a liter soda bottle with top and bottom cut off.)

Anyway, these babies are supposed to grow to 9' tall, with enormous seed heads.  In their own way, they're my favorite plants in the garden.  I am happily anticipating some beautiful flowers.

Here's a sample of what's going on in the "main" part of the garden:

Thirty-gallon potato pots getting close to harvest

Everyone laughs at me for growing potatoes here, because you can buy a metric ton of potatoes for less than what it costs to drive them back home, it seems.  But you can't buy the varieties that I'm growing.  German Butterball alone is so very much worth the effort -- an amazing potato, delicious and buttery, but delicate.  It wouldn't hold up well to commercial production.

Tender lettuce heads

I seeded these guys a while back and I totally forget what they are, but I need to remember because they are vigorous and the slugs don't seem to like them.  All I remember is that the seeds came from Uprising Seeds, inc.

Black Beans!

Seriously, life would not be worth living if it were not for black beans.  I adore them.  So I planted a handful, and look'it'em go.  That giant lettuce in the background is one that I'm letting go to seed, just to see if it produces anything worth propogating.

Anyway.  There are a ton of things happening right now that make me not so happy, not the least of which is Finn being gone for nearly a week, so I'm glad that I have this little oasis of mine to tend.  Who knows, maybe he'll come back soon.  Maybe some favorite voices that have gone quiet will  be heard again.  Maybe my sister's marriage won't fall apart.  Maybe all the other ridiculous things that seem to be off the rails at the moment will right themselves.  But, well, if they don't, at least I'll have a lot of beans.

UPDATE: PZ Meyers of Pharyngula is going to be in Seattle at the Pike Brewing Company on tuesday!  I am sorely tempted to take the day off and drive down there to buy him a beer.  In case you don't know, I am a big fan of PZ.  He is a take-no-prisoners empiricist, which I admire, for I am not of the Dawkins breed of empiricists; no, I tend to be rather vehement, like PZ.  But I don't have his fortitude under fire.  I try for a while to keep up pointing out logical fallacies, but after a while a sustained approach of ad hominem attacks will beat me down.  Not PZ, though. 

And, I love the Pike Trippel, for it is one fine, fine beer.  Finally, to complete the trifecta, I have been telling my friends for what seems like forever that I need to go visit the Pike brewery.

Friday Night Music: John Barleycorn

I've listened to Traffic for years and years and.. years. This old folk tune adaptation of theirs has always appealed to me. It is a metaphor of learning to grow, and to brew.

Finn has been gone now for three days. If he doesn't come back soon, I will be hitting the wares of J. Barleycorn, I think.

BONUS! Arctic Monkeys!

She walked away, well her shoes were untied,
And the eyes were all red,
You could see that we've cried, and I watched and I waited,
'Till she was inside, forcing a smile and waving goodbye

A Moment in Time

Zooey helps me harvest in the garden for the evening's scalloped potatoes.

Sometimes it's nicer to be alone, though, in a secluded spot.

Later, homemade corn tortillas for fish tacos, in the tortilla warmer.

Tuesday Insomniac Quote

“Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.” 

— Arthur C. Clarke

I'm sitting here tonight eating an enormous pile of sugar snap peas from my CSA share and feeling rather happy about my new alpine rock garden, which is entering its final stages of completeness:

If you click on that image, you'll spy down on the right-hand side a little example of artemesia absinthium.  That's right, the hallucinogenic plant that was used to make Absinthe, which is now banned in the USA.  I'm rather proud of that, because I grew it from seed.  Neighborhood covenants are stupid things, and so although I am forced to comply with them, I'll do it my own way.  Like, by planting psychoactive plants in my garden, for example.

At any rate, this rock garden is kind of cracking me up.  Time was a few years ago that I was constantly driving myself to climb harder, and bigger, and more often.  If I didn't get on a 6000m+ peak twice a year with numerous smaller training climbs added in, I considered the year to be a loss, and I still have many friends who think that way.  One of them wrote to me recently to see what was up, and asked if I would be interested in a pedestrian climb, like maybe Mt. Adams.  I laughed and told him that I wasn't sure that I remembered which end of the rope is the sharp end, anymore.  And now my token bit of alpinism in this home are a few pictures of former-me in some daredevil situation, and a pretty alpine rock garden.

I've been systematically getting rid of arbitrary goals in my life, like those aforementioned climbing goals.  So what if I don't climb a lot anymore?  I like my rock garden.  I like playing guitar in the evening.  So that's what I do now.  Some of my friends are beating themselves to pieces, thinking that they MUST be pushing new routes, climbing harder, being more whatever, and I think: would you feel this way if you were all alone, cast away on an island?  Because so much of that stuff is ego, and just fuel for conversation.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I sure do love that exhilaration of thousands of feet of exposure, of sunrise high up on a truly high peak, of doing something that is right off the pages of national geographic.  But I don't like the inevitable sickness in the camps; nor the machismo of people (men and women both) who are driven to one-up each other, daily; nor the overall senselessness of a life in which one is always looking for the next thing.  There are a lot of good things to be said for sitting in one's garden, planted and tended with one's own labor, as the sun sets.

Which is not to say that I won't climb and adventure again.  Just that the focus on arbitrary isn't something that I think I'll care much about, anymore.

Thursday Poetry Quote

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind

Tuesday Music

It's been a long day and I need to relax, what between a stressed-out Laura, a feuding family, and work that is making me want to bite things, I just want some alone-time.

Look right.

Look left.

RAWRRRR!

Monday Night Geekazoid Bullets

Some things that research in theoretical computer science teaches you:

• To escape a garden maze, always turn left at any intersection.  (Also known as depth-first search.)
• Being a good Tetris player is exactly as hard as finding the shortest tour of a group of cities that visits each city exactly once.  Well, in an asymptotic sense, anyway.
• There is no such thing as intelligence, at least the way we commonly think of it.  Over forty years ago, researchers wrote a computer program that arguably passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence, at least back then.  Interestingly, that same program probably would not pass today, in our more machine-enlightened society.   Besides factual knowledge, intelligence is also fundamentally biased by emotion and perception: there are varieties of intelligence, from bean counting to empathy, none of which is lesser than another.  Most people have intuitively known this in some form for a long time, but it is starting to become formalized.  This has deep implications for, e.g., communication with dolphins (who are possibly just as "intelligent" in some sense as we are).
• Observations on the random motions of miniscule tea leaves led to the basis of modern financial market analysis.  Not really computer science, per se, but we got our fingers in that pie in the end, and pretty deeply at that.
• We can be paid to think about marriage, at least insofar as it is just a metaphor for scientifically interesting abstractions.  Which is not to say that real human marriage doesn't fall in that category somewhere, just that computer science theorists wouldn't touch that reality with a million-foot pole.  That's sociology.
• An individual person can never comprehend all comprehensible scientific problems, but a group distributed over an infinite period of time can.  Social cooperation, which seems to be encoded into our behavior, is the basis for all success.  The question now becomes: is time infinite?
• There exist infinitely many incomprehensible scientific problems.  This is neither a refutation of science nor a support of mysticism, it is simply a numerical reality in the sense that neither an individual nor a group can survive for an uncountably infinite period of time since both are countable.
• DNA is just a formal language.  Its expression therefore becomes a computational problem, and so, say, the possible cure of all possible genetic diseases nothing more than a matter of computer time, at least in theory.  And yet the bulk of our computer power is reserved for the NSA: breaking codes.  One wonders if we 21st century humans are really that far removed from our ancestors in 10,000 BCE.

These are the things that I think about on a monday night.  Perhaps we should have made fish tacos again, instead of turkey burgers; I have always found turkeys to be problematic animals.  Anything that makes a loud noise directly before settling in for the night seems to me to be troubling in some sense.

And It's Cold in the Water Tonight

Tonight I spent hours talking with my oldest sister, just the two of us on the patio as the sun set.  "Hey, do you remember that time that that kid tried to beat you up?"  "I remember once, you gave me some caramels when I was in kindergarten, and I was so proud of them, but the teacher took them."  "Remember how mom and dad used to argue downstairs but we could hear them through the vents?"  "Haha, yeah, I do, and remember the day that dad drove home his Scout for the first time?"  "Oh, do I!  He was so proud of it.  Do you remember the trip that we had to do in it after that?"  "OMG, yes!"

I pretty much didn't know what I was doing or where I was going after college, and a long time thereafter.  What direction I have now, I credit my family to giving me.  Not because they told me anything, or directed me anywhere, but just because they were there and constant and always willing to have me back when I returned from whatever crazy notion I'd adopted.  Like a frame of reference, an anchor when all else seems lost.  And adulthood is basically an extended narrative of loss, in many ways.

I'm lucky to have a sister -- not just one, but two.

Best Movie Finale Ever

I've probably posted this in the past -- I am a forgetful creature of habit, after all -- but TGTB&TU is one of my favorite films, and very much a cinema classic, and I have it playing in the background, so I'm thinking of it.  My dad and I would watch it, and he could name the make and model of every gun in use in the film -- usually pointing out how they got the year wrong, or the gun wrong, or something.  Dad was a geek, only from a different time.



Amusingly, one of my coworkers looks exactly like Tuco (the Ugly). I call him that on a regular basis. He is not amused.

More Music

I spent the afternoon cursing deer, and the evening chatting with Laura.  Here's a favorite of mine for you.

Two AM and I'm awake? Seriously?

Insomnia really sucks.  I didn't deal with this in the past when I led a lifestyle that involved a lot of exercise, but now I'm in suckville.  Perhaps it's time to reconsider lifestyles.

On another note, I've been debating probability again tonight. (Yeah, I know, I should go to bed.)  Probability is so weird.  Like this: say I flip a fair coin ten times, and it comes up HTHHTTHHTT.  What are the odds of that sequence?  Exactly the same as getting heads ten times in a row.  About one out of 1024, to be exact.

Am I branded with the mark of the geek that I know all the powers of 2 up to 16?  And does that age me?

Two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, ....

My research advisor of old would be proud to see that I wrote all the numbers under "10" in english, I'm sure.  She sure docked me on that point a lot, back in the day.  But bless her for her it.  To this day I still get compliments on my proposal documents for clarity and style, thanks to her.  Although I'm not certain that it works in this context.

Sigh.

On Chaos

Postulate a model of a population of creatures that live a year,  a model that could be used to predict what the population of those creatures will be next year, given this year's population and some lumped parameter that captures the combination of their ability to reproduce and the predatory influence upon them. One such model is:

x_n+1 = rx_n(1-x_n)

Here, x_n is the population at year n (ranging between 0, or no individuals, to 1, or the maximum number that the habitat can support), and r is that lumped parameter.  This particular model has been used for (among other things) predicting populations of temperate latitude insects such as univoltine lepidoptera,
whose adults emerge in the spring, mate, lay their eggs, and die. The eggs in their turn hatch into caterpillars that feed during the summer and overwinter as pupae. Come the following spring, the cycle repeats.

This type of equation is called a map.  This one in particular is called the logistic map.  What this map basically says is: next year's population is proportional to three things, (1) the reproduction/predation constant for this year, (2) the current population, and (3) the remaining empty carrying capacity of the habitat to support new individuals.  (Here a low value for r means that predation is high and reproduction low.)

Here's what the map looks like, when plotted in cartesian coordinates:

Simple, eh?  A concave-down parabola.  The maximum is at r/4, by the way.  This is all pretty simple stuff -- basic first year algebra, the kind of stuff that we took in high school.  But it starts to get interesting if you start putting real numbers into that map.  Say you start with some value, x₁, and you crank through the map and compute x₂ (having chosen some arbitrary value for r). Now say you keep going, computing successively more iterations. What happens? Well, maybe this:

A bit of explanation. You see on the right the concave-down parabola, but there's also a diagonal line.  This line is the line x_n+1 = x_n.  That is, it's where the x-axis equals the y-axis: 1=1, 2=2, etc.  The reason it's there is because this is a map: we choose an x₁, which maps to a point on the parabola, and that point becomes x₂, which maps to a new point on the parabola, ad infinitum.  So the diagram on the right is showing this successive series of steps, in what is called a Cobweb Diagram.  (The graph on the left is just illustrating the yearly change in population, how much x_n+1 differs from x_n.)

Why do we care about this?  Well, if you look carefully, you can see that iterating this map with these values is causing it to collapse to a single point -- the very point where the diagonal line intercepts the parabola.  If you enter that value into the map, you'll get the same value back out.  In mathematical terms, this is called a stable attractor, and in biological terms, it means that the population has reached homeostatis -- predators and environment and reproduction are at a point of equalization, with the population regenerating itself each year (neither growing nor declining).

Now, here's the thing: if there are stable attractors, then there are also unstable attractors.  Populations that grow and dwindle regularly.  A boom, a bust, a boom, a bust, etc.

Nonlinear dynamicists such as myself call that sort of behavior a 2-cycle: there is a single attractor, with two orbits around it.  Boom, bust, boom, bust.  But there is nothing magical about the number two; the Logistic Map can exhibit 4-cycles, too.  And 8-cycles.  And 3-cycles: it doesn't have to be even.  But here's the thing: as you change "r," the cycle changes happen regularly.  First there's a single orbit.  Then two.  Then four. Then eight.  In fact, it's so regular that you can even plot it the number of orbits as a function of "r," and it looks like this:

If you've read this far, then at this point, if I were you, I would be saying WHAT. THE. FUCK.  Because, seriously, what the hell is that diagram, and how did it come from the simplest possible conic section formula known to mankind?  As in, a parabola?  The simplest thing that we learn in algebra?  In HIGH SCHOOL?

Brief explanation: at approximately r=3.0, the Logistic Map enters a 2-cycle.  Hence the branch there, and the two paths.  At about r=3.45, it enters a 4-cycle.  And so on.  The interesting bits are the busy dark areas: that is Chaos.

In the simplest, we find the most complex.

Focus on what is important

Zooey is our calico.  Or, should I say, Laura's calico.  But I've kind of claimed her as mine, too, since we have become boon companions.  She tours the garden with me when I go outside, she sleeps on a cushion in my office when I work, and she grumbles and growls at me when I don't pay her enough attention.

Tonight, I just finished practicing some songs, and she came in the room to say this:

After she made herself known like this and was satisfied that she was the center of attention, she proceeded to deal with pressing cleanliness matters:

That being done, she wrote in that all was cool and I was free to do my thing, and that she would stretch herself out as a compliment to whatever the hell useless work it was that I was doing:

What really matters?

Nothing to see here, move along

I took today off, which combined with the US holiday on monday gives me a four day weekend. Yup.

What to do on a gloriously sunny day off in the pacific northwest? Well, I met up with my buddy Jaime and we cycled down the Interurban Trail to Larrabee State Park. It's pretty great, and long enough so that the casual walker is left behind.  Came home, watered the garden, ate dinner, watched Friday Night Lights and and episode of The Wire with Laura, and now I'm winding down for bed.

Tomorrow: U-pick strawberries (nearly the end of the season!), offload a financial monkey from my back, and then get stuff from Lowe's to deal with my rapidly deteriorating garden paths.  I have beans and lettuces growing like mad, and even one small tomato!  I know, everyone else is harvesting tomatoes now.  But this is the pacific northwest.  And I have eight sunflowers growing strong, despite the slugs.

Blueberry season starts soon, and I don't even bother with raspberries.  There are just too many of them.  But then comes blackberry season.... NOM. NOM. NOM.  Wish that I could grow peppers.

Oh FFS!

When I lived in Germany, I paid $80/year for health insurance. It sucked, sure: when I got sick, I had to wait in line at a local clinic starting at, like, 6:30am, in order to make sure that I was seen by a doctor before they closed at 1:00pm. But then, Germany's health care system is a real piece of work -- in the crap sense.

But now I'm back in the States, and for fuck's sake, can't we just have single payer already? Come on, Canadians, tell me it's worth it. You folks in BC: what do you think? I'm paying $300/mo now for the privilege of dealing with broken websites, piles of paperwork, and basically not getting my job (which I love) done.

All I know is that I've spent AN ENTIRE WORK DAY trying to weed through paperwork from my new employer about health plans in order to figure out the right plan, and this is just for me. FSM only knows what hell I'd be in if I had a wife and kids.

Oh, and I get to do this again in two months. Why? Because when you work for a company that hires an independent HR firm to run their payroll, you basically work for that HR firm. And when their fiscal year starts in September, you get to redo all the paperwork in September.

Jesus H. on a raft, sometimes I wonder how americans manage to put their goddamn pants on in the morning.

Wednesday Night Music

More Tarrega tonight.  I actually spent a good amount of time looking for the best version of this tango, and the one I finally found was the first one that I saw.  And it's not bad at all, although the user's name is... questionable:



But I kinda like how the dude is wearing a sport coat.

In other news, I have tomatoes growing, finally, and black beans too. Finn is chasing Zooey up and down the hallway as I write this, and Laura laughed and smiled as she went to bed.

True Love

(Original here)

sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY

Here it is, sunday and I should have been out mowing lawns or weeding potatoes, or something, but I've been inside playing guitar all day long.  What I'm working on right now is a famous piece by a famous man, the Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega.  Never heard of it?  Or him?  Yeah, I know.  But he's famous in the tight little circle that is classical guitar, and that waltz is famous there, too -- because it's fun to play, and has a catchy tune.

How catchy, you ask?  Well, listen for yourself:

Did you hear it? At about 0:15?  Here it is played on a piano.  Recognize it now?*

Okay, to be fair, that snippet is just three measures out of Tárrega's whole waltz -- but it is still heard approximately 20,000 times a second, worldwide.  Which makes Tárrega, at least in some small way, the most popular classical composer in all of history.

And it cracks me up.  I used to play this waltz 15 years ago, and am now relearning it.  Every time I get to those three measures, I smile a bit.

*Of course, Nokia left off the octave harmonic at the end, which is a shame.

On Atheism and the Acceptance of Religion (In Some Sense)

I used to date a woman who was a devout catholic.  Every day, come rain or shine, she attended mass.  I went with her many times, because I was fascinated by the homilies.  If you're not catholic, the homily is a commentary given by the priest after a reading of a bibilical passage -- an interpretation and explanation, if you will.  I liked to hear the statement on morality, and then the priest's explanation, because it's really useful to hear this stuff.  How else do you know what you believe, if you don't hear what is possible, and decide how you feel about it?

I laugh a bit now, when I think of her.  We had sex, she wore leather, and she was an ardent supporter of the death penalty.  And yet, she parroted the catholic teachings of abstinence-only education, she claimed to be a vegetarian, and she was a strong supporter of "life" in the sense of "abolition of abortion."  I kind of wonder why I was ever with her, now. 

Not that I demand absolute consistency from my friends and lovers, because I don't.  Expecting that kind of thing out of a human would be setting oneself up for disappointment.  But I do wonder how someone can espouse a philosophy publicly, and deny it privately, at least in some sense.  I may be many things, but at least the face that I reveal publicly (in terms of my life philosophy) is the same one that I show to my closest friends and relatives.  I wonder: how can one decry the use of animals for food, but yet wear leather pumps?  It's okay to kill an animal for its skin, but not for its flesh?  How can one tell teenagers to practice abstinence in public, but fuck like a bunny in private?  Weird.

Finn didn't come back from the forest last night.  He goes out almost every day, and spends hours in the woods before coming back, happily meowing, to chomp at his food bowl and then sleep in a tight curl at our feet.  It's been predictable and familiar, all spring and summer long so far.  But last night he didn't come back.  We shook the treat jars outside, trying to call him back, over and over, until far after dark.  At midnight it became apparent that he was not coming back that night, and my imagination turned towards the worst.

I woke up with the realization that I really had become attached to that small animal, and the thought of his permanent absence gave me pause.  I woke up at 9:00am, somewhat depressed.  I went through the motions of the day, going to the store and doing chores, but I just kept thinking: Finn, where are you?

Finally, I decided this: it was a great pleasure to have known that small animal.  We gave him a good life, and he enjoyed his time in the forest to the fullest.  I had no regrets about letting him roam free, even if it had ultimately resulted in him getting caught and eaten by some predator.  He would have hated a life cooped up inside.

So I drove back home, thinking about how a little creature like that can give such companionship and satisfaction to one of us lumbering primates, and felt better.  As I walked through the door later in the afternoon, the first thing that Laura said was:  Guess who came home.

Finn was sound asleep on the chair next to her.  He had apparently eaten a full bowl of food, and has now been sleeping on the spare chair in my office for close to nine hours, interrupted only by me or she as we come in to pet him and scold him for causing such worry.  No one knows what he had been up to all night and half the day, but he had come home tired and hungry and was happy to be back.

In a way, I guess that I can see how people turn to religion sometimes.  Feeling what I did about just a kitten, I can't imagine what it is like for someone to lose a child to a predator.  And in a way, everyday life is a kind of constant beat-down.  It makes sense that people turn to a source of hope like religion.  I may disagree with its precepts completely, but I cannot deny that solace.

I am glad that Finn has returned.  It means that I get to appreciate his company for a little while longer.  As an atheist, I know that that is valuable -- having him here, well, that's a just a brief moment in time, and I need to enjoy it.  But I also need to do right by him.  Finn would not love his life if he were locked inside -- he needs to be free.  So I will let him out into the forest again tomorrow.

One of my favorite composers of all time is Fernando Sor, an 18th century guitarist who is justly famous for (among other things) a set of guitar studies that remain part of the classical guitar canon to this day.  One of the reasons for that is because the studies not only vary in difficulty (as one would expect), but also because each of them is richly expressive.  That is, even the easiest one -- a piece that could be read and played by someone with, say, a month's experience on the classical guitar -- has been performed in concert, by professional guitarists.

I'm currently working on this one:

Sor's Andantino in B Minor, Op. 22, nº3

(I'm not much of a fan of that guy's playing. Very wooden.)

That's actually not a study, but rather a real concert piece.  It's got some tricky bits to it, so I've been preparing for it by reviewing some of Sor's studies, most notably "Study #5," an arpeggiated jewel in B minor.  Here'sa dude playing it (and very well, I might add):

The great thing about this piece is that it is incredibly simple, musically, but allows an enormous range of interpretation and expression. I found years ago that with the temp doubled, it really takes on an entirely different (but interesting) character.

Eventually, I want to get back to playing Bach, especially BWV 997 (or, at least, the prelude and Fugue). That one could occupy me for days at a time, several years ago. Here's another random youtube dude playing the 997 prelude:

He made a few mistakes, but otherwise played fluidly and well -- and lemme tell you, this piece is pretty seriously difficult.  Here's what appears to be a music recital with a fellow playing the fugue that follows the prelude, again very well:

I like one of the comments on that last one: "This is my favorite piece to play by Bach. If you haven't played it you can't fully appreciate it's richenss and density. I find most listeners eye's glaze over and are lost after the first 10 or so measures, which I don't mind cuz then I feel alone with the piece and enjoy it all the more. Again, great job, this one takes a lot of courage and force of will."  I could have written that comment myself!  (Although I haven't been able to play this for several years, since I laid down the guitar.)

Honestly, I love the fugue.  I think that maybe I should travel back to Bach's time.

Oh, did I mention that I'm about to buy a new guitar?  Yup.  It was either a trip to Nepal or a new guitar, and really, sleeping in tents is way over-rated.

Vacation Needed, Plz

So Laura is sitting in the kitchen, doing physics homework.  All I can think is, HFS am I glad that I am done with formal education.  I remember the hours and hours and hours of late night work, and the tests, and that was just classwork -- I think that my mind has blotted out the years of tedious lab work and fund proposals that comprised the rest of my graduate education.  And here she is, doing undergraduate prerequisites for med school.  Holy cow.  Anyway, she is stressed out and frazzled.

So I got out into the garden, to work and to think. Today I pulled some weeds out of my garden beds, and admired my garlic and potatoes.  They are very admirable, I must say.  Tall, big, strong, and (at least in the potatoes' case) about to bloom.   It was a better day than yesterday up to that point, because my birthday always kind of bums me out -- not because I've grown older, but just because it's a landmark and we tend to take stock at landmarks.  And I expect more from myself than I generally achieve.  Gah.  So now I'm pulling weeds and thinking about all the things that I haven't gotten done.  Stress on a stick.   I had promised to visit my mom today, so that seemed like a good time to go.

But, bopping down the road to see mom, all seemed well.  I set the cruise control to 60mph and just chilled out while the county cops pulled everyone else over.  I pulled into mom's driveway, feeling pretty good, and went upstairs, but found her tired and sad.  It appears that my sister is going to be divorced soon, and mom was worried and upset, as they had been emailing and calling back and forth for hours.  Apparently my brother in law is a jackass, or something.  (Duh.  I didn't like the guy from day one.  But no toldjaso's here.)

I seriously need a vacation from everyone in my life right now.  I think a 3-4 day solo backpack would really do the trick.  Get up into the high mountains, get AWAY from people, and just burn a lot of energy -- yeah, that would work.

Happy Birthday to Me

Wish me well, if you want.  I'm 44 years old today, and still don't really have much more of a clue than when I was 18.

In the words of one of my best friends, "if I'd known that I'd live this long, I would've taken a lot better care of myself."

Wednesday Night Music

One of my favorite bands tonight, Calexico.  I think that I must have some spanish genes hiding in my nordic/anglo bloodline, because this kind of stuff really turns my crank.  Give me hot sun, cicadas droning, hard liquor, burning hot sauce, and I'm a happy man.

There is a distinct thread of loneliness running through Calexico's music, or perhaps it is just wistful isolation.  I saw these guys in concert a couple of times -- although I hesitate to say "concert" since the first time was in a tiny bar that accommodated maybe 50 people (and it was not a busy night), and the second time was in a small theater that could accept all of 250.  They're not getting rich doing this.

Laura is working hard tonight, linking vectors and taking cosines, and the kittens are lazy.  Finn caught a bird and another squirrel today and extracted a bit of flavor out of both, and Zooey is feeling like a homebody and not doing much to hang out.  So I'm on my own, more or less.  My brain is moosh from a full day of code analysis, and this vodka & tonic is not helping in terms of clarity, so I'm guessing that I won't be finishing any of my Evil Scientist circuit designs tonight, hence no world domination.

At this point, I'm thinking that it's going to have to be another episode of The Wire, and then falling asleep to the sound of the forest night. 

The sounds that come out of a pacific northwest forest at night are.. interesting.  This time of year, it's rushing water and frogs -- very calming.  Waking up is the same: birds calling and celebrating, the warm sun washing over the bed, and Zooey and Finn wrapped up together like the Yin/Yang symbol between the two of us, their eyes sleepy and throats purring.  I wake up, stretch with the cats, start a pot of coffee, and then step out into the cool dew-ey morning with a steaming cup, to see how many inches the potato plants have grown since yesterday, or how many strawberries are now ripe, or whether I need to don my SlugKiller hat.

And the birds sing on, and the birds sing on, and the birds sing on, and the birds sing on, and the birds sing on.

Oh god, here we go again

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able, and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able, nor willing? Then why call him God?

--Epicurus

Cool commentary on NPR tonight about the possibility of extraterrestrial life and its implications for terrestrial opinions.  I couldn't help but wonder if the vatican had long ago commissioned some supersecret commission of scarlet-garbed clerics to ponder the philosophical implications of what that would mean and how they would deal with it.

But that got me thinking.  Seriously, what would be the implications?  I'm a committed empiricist now (I don't like the term atheist so much, since it implies a certain level of activism), so were life to be discovered on, say, Mars, I would just be thrilled.  But what would it mean to Christianity?  Or Islam?  Or Judaism?

At least the latter doesn't have the notion of original sin and the fundamentally flawed nature of man (from what I have learned), since they don't put much stock in the Eden story.  But christianity certainly does -- one could even say that Genesis is the very basis of christian belief.  Without original sin, mankind doesn't need the sacrifice of the christ.  And given that, how else could one interpret the passage that "God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth" as a kind of limit on a christian's dominion -- what about cattle creeping about on mars?  And for that matter, does a christian have the right to step upon the "second light," the moon?

I'm sure that this kind of stuff was dispensed of long ago by religious academics.  You know, in the same way that catholics dispense with questions like "if two catholics are stranded in the desert but neither is a priest, how do they perform the mass" question.  I forget what the answer to that one is, but I do remember that it's a fairly stock question that has an easy answer.

Anyway.  I think I'll go pop "Inherit the Wind" into the DVD player and fall asleep to it.

Perspective

I was reading my blog archive from a couple of years ago, and man, yeah, things are a lot more interesting when life really fucking sucks.  Why is that?  Why do we connect to people so much when they are really hurting, but not so much when they're just okay or even happy?

I won't answer that now.  I installed a rain barrel next to my house, and Finn came back before sunset after we were worried that he was lost somewhere.  Progress and good news, then, for me.  Screw drama and craziness, I'll just be a boring blogger.  Now Zooey has walked into my office, growling and grumbling, and in a few minutes I'll go to bed to a warm woman who will sleepily wrap around me.

So no, I guess I won't be an interesting blogger anytime soon.  At least in a trainwreck sense.

Ringtones

I'm bored and making ringtones for my iPhone.  So far I've made one from the Python theme, the Planet Unicorn theme, and a random Bean Song.  What else should I make?  Oh, and does anyone have a special request?  I'm like a ringtone fountain of youth here.

Right now the Python theme is my active ringtone.  Heh.

By the way, that Rancho Gordo bean video was pretty much spot on, and we had a damn good bean dinner because of it.  Oh, and we were very jolly the entire time!  Amusingly, I was in another room trying to read when Laura fired up that you tube video, and all that I heard was the music.  I couldn't help thinking What In God's Name Is She Watching Out There?  A video about beans was probably the last thing that I would have guessed.

On Worry

Back in the day when this blog wasn't this blog and I was doing a lot more bitching than anything else, I used to quote the Hagakure a lot more than I do now, because it is a source of comfort.  I've realized that it is still so, now, even though I don't need comfort as much as I did then.  So I suppose I'll take that back up again (reading the Hagakure, not the bitching).  For even if all is well, we can all use some words to hold on to, and to ponder.  So here is one of my old favorites from the Hagakure.

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: ''Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.''  Master Ittei commented, ''Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.''  Among one's affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern.  If these are deliberated upon in ordinary times, they can be understood.  Thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the time comes is what this is all about.  To face an event and solve it lightly is difficult if you are not resolved beforehand, and there will always be uncertainty in hitting your mark.  However, if the foundation is laid previously, you can think of the saying, "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,'' as your own basis for action.

Monday night music

Julian Bream plays BWV 1000

I'm getting back into playing classical guitar, after a long hiatus, so I'm enjoying videos of great players. Here is Bream playing a rather difficult fugue, courtesy of Bach, of course. I love me some Bach. Years ago I played and recorded this on my answering machine:

These days I think that I'd be lucky to remember how to read the music. However, it is coming back relatively quickly -- those neurons may be out of use, but they're not completely gone yet. My girlfriend back then called me up recently to say that she'd heard this piece and was reminded of my answering-machine piece, and that really took me back.

I remember playing a lot of music when I lived in Germany, mostly because (1) living in Germany as an expatriot, without a job, is an extended lesson in Suck, and Suck is only really relieved by Art; and (2) it gave me a great excuse not to have to interact with people.

Meanwhile, back in this world, here is Finn being all cuddly and friendly next to my Bay Laurel tree seedling, wanting to get inside and have a snack:

And here is my proudest plant, an onion that was part of winter time salsa and whose foot got thrown out into the compost heap, only to come alive in the spring. I rescued it and gave it a place on the edge of the garden. It has now sprouted into a bunch of green onions, one of which is now sprouting a seed bulbil. I am just gonna let this little guy grow without interference, and maybe I'll get some seeds out of it!