a defence of organic milk and eggs

So I buy organic milk and eggs. I'm generally skeptical of organic stuff, I don't think the label means a whole lot. However, for some reason organic milk and eggs don't go bad for like a month and a half. It's crazy. Now some people may be like: "So what, I always use the milk and eggs before they're bad". Well, in that case, good for you, buy the cheapest milk you can find, however I use very little milk. It's a total waste for me to buy conventional milk, it always goes bad before I've had half of it. Eggs I can sometimes get away with, but sometimes I don't feel like eating a bunch of eggs, so organics give me a nice little time buffer.

I'm convinced I save money by buying organic milk and eggs. But I haven't run the budget. I'm too damn lazy.

thoughts on the president's health care plan

It falls almost exactly in the point where I'm not sure if I like it or not. It has a public option, but a very weak one. It is almost certainly better than what we have now, but I'm not sure if it will help or hinder future legislation to strengthen the public option and improve health care more. I think that the one thing that would dramatically improve the plan is just to make the public option available to everyone, why should it be arbitrarily restricted to protect insurance company profits? Perhaps tactically the best thing to do is to pass this bill, create a weak public option and expand it's coverage over time, as conservatives see it's not evil. I'll have to learn more about the proposal to decide whether I think it's worth it, see what all of the implications are, and if there is a chance of passing a better plan.

The Atheism and Science Wars: It's good to be Strident

Recently there has been a lot of discussion atheist scientists and their role in public outreach of science, largely catalyzed by a new book by Mooney and Kirshenbaum. Now besides the pointless trashing of PZ Myers the thesis of the book seems to be (and I have not read it) that scientists do a piss-poor job out public outreach and need to be more respectful of religion. Now, since I haven't read the book, I'm not going to talk about it specifically, but the idea that scientists who don't make nice to religion will lead to the mainstream religious throwing away science. I think this is a dumb idea on a number of levels:

• 
  The mainstream of religion largely does throw away inconvenient facts from science.
  
• 
  Compromising science to appease religion is a seriously bad idea (I know that few specifically argue for this, though some do, but many proposals do this in practice)
  
• 
  Even religions that are not explicitly anti-science usually only give lip service to science (for example the catholic church's silly standards for miracles)
  

All of these ideas have been played out before, but my own contribution is this thought: in the modern media cycle interesting debates and ideas are much more powerful than bland ones. People live for arguments, it's the entire reason for existence of reality tv. This is not always a good thing (the entire history of the Republican party after Nixon is based on the idea of interesting but bad ideas), but it is a fact. An exciting debate between science and religion is going to get a lot more attention, and probably people interested in science, than mealy-mouthed accommodation. Now, this will certainly lead to a lot of people coming down against science, but I view it as similar to the story of the civil rights movement (and gay rights movement): there was a lot of abstract argument about equality and justice, but there was very little progress in the public realm until there were those who were unafraid of being called strident or militant (and came out of the closet).

Now, science outreach is a very different thing from the (gay) civil rights, so I could be totally wrong about this, there probably is no research on it. But I do tend to think that it's impossible to make much progress on an issue without a strong viewpoint. People may be ignorant, but they are smart enough to tell when you are pandering to them, and they don't like it.

Movin'

So I moved into a new apartment over the weekend. Compared to previous times I've moved, the lack of internet at home isn't too bad at all due to several factors:

1. Internet at work
2. Googlephone with internet
3. Maybe I'm just less addicted (not likely)

Anyways, I'm enjoying my new bachelor pad. As is traditional the only things in the fridge at the moment are beer, pizza, and condiments.

Finally I can say "I liked them before they were cool"

Some people are saying that the chiptune band Anamanaguchi is going to get big and escape the chiptune scene ghetto. This would, I think, be pretty great. Not only do I like chiptunes in general, but Anamanaguchi is clearly one of the best chip groups out there. As mentioned int he first linked article, chiptunes really make people strip the song down to it's bare essentials, and the most popular soundchips (those that were in the NES and Gameboy) also need very short songs, so the best chiptunes end up being 2 minute explosions of pure melody. As also mentioned, chiptunes are one of the easiest genres of music to get involved with: you can use a free program like FamiTracker to write songs. You don't need expensive instruments, or sample libraries (though those help).

Read about and download their music, and that of other chiptune artists, at 8bitpeoples. Be sure to checkout nullsleep and Random if you head over there too.

And I thought it seemed so immature

I am highly amused. This blog has been declared "Adult" by my work's filter. Reminds me I need to post here more often. Now that I have googlephone perhaps I'll look into posting via phone...

Newsflash: economists have seriously fucked up

This is interesting, especially in light of reading The Shock Doctrine. One of the things that keeps coming up in The Shock Doctrine is how free market fundamentalist economists (called the Chicago School after where Milton Friedman taught) always claim that their economic prescriptions are purely scientific in an effort to justify putting in place their programs over objections and without political controls. There are several problems with this (I, for one, always thought that science did not tell us what to do, only what is, and we can use this knowledge to help us get the results we want. In other words science never tells you to cut taxes, it can only say what will happen if you cut taxes.) but it seems that the biggest problem is that it was bad science. Results from models mostly untouched by empirical results are not science, but philosophy. Now economic systems are hard to test in a controlled manner, so a certain amount of reliance on theory and models is perhaps understandable, but all models need to be tested, and it seems that many economists have just assumed their models work for the last ~30 years and proceeded to calibrate their models.

So read that paper, they have many problems with modern academic economics, but the one that I, as someone with a background in physics, found most telling was the lack of empirical support for their assertions.

Music reviews: Blood Ceremony

Hey, I'm actually busy with job interviews this week so... I thought I'd review an interesting album I found online. Now I usually don't bother with reviewing well know stuff because I rarely have anything to add to something everyone has heard, but I'd never heard of this band before s I figured I might have something to say.

So the band is Blood Ceremony and this is their first, self-titled album. They are extremely old-school. The inevitable references are Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull, the Tull reference is mainly because they've got a flute player, and the guitar sound like it was ripped out of a Sabbath record. At first I thought that the singer sounded like Neal Peart (of Rush) before I realized it was a woman, she doesn't sound like Neal for most of this album, just the first song. Everything about this album is retro, including the cover art and the synthesizers, which I think works well for this band. Retro revivals are happening all over the place, but this is a new take on an old sound.

So how's the music? It's basic sound is moody early 70's metal, but it keeps things pretty varied throughout. It may be metal, but it doesn't have the overwhelming distortion that dominates that genre nowadays. As a matter of fact the sound is pretty clean, sometimes even folksy. The lyrics are pretty ridiculous, but I don't listen for the lyrics. Take a look at these lyrics off of the song "Return to Forever":

The master magician tunes a casket-shaped lung
In his ritual chamber they pray to the dawn

Sipping cosmic nectar
hearing Magus lecture

Now Astaroth's ship sets sail across the sky
Through Saturn's yawning hail, and into the eye
Black magic rites profane
Wizards are oft' to blame

Unless you're at a D&D session or a Pagan ritual these are just a little silly. There is nothing here that hasn't been done before musically, but it's of consistently high quality. The one bad point is that there's really only one tempo for the entire album, but there are a number of different sounds and textures, the main one being the Sabbathean hard rock, but also relatively light-hearted folkish songs and and at one point sounding like a Gypsy dance song (the intro to Hop Toad). I'm guessing that this will be a big hit with the stoner crowd, it's good even without chemical enhancement.

So a word about the rating system I use: I like the one from Sound Opinions. The ratings are buy it (if you like this genre of music, you will definitely enjoy it), burn it (try before you buy), and trash it (don't even bother). I'm going to give this a buy it: if you like hard rock/metal, especially from the 1970's, you will enjoy this. The only people who may be disappointed are hardcore doom metallers, since this is classified as doom metal, but sounds nothing like the usual doom metal album (which is a lot slower, louder, and more distorted). I mean, top 40 types won't like it, but they're not going to expect to like it.

Saddlebacking defined

Saddlebacking: sad•dle•back•ing \ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities

After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she’s saving herself for marriage.

From http://www.saddlebacking.com/

Sex, Women, and Perversity

So it's been a while since I posted, but I saw this article and had to post on it. Short summary for those who can't get through the NYT paywall: sex researchers are finally doing research on women, when for a long time it was all about men. There are some interesting results and some hypotheses to try to explain them.

Empirical findings:

1. Men's physical response to sexual images (aka an erection) matches their psychological response pretty closely, whereas womens did not match very well
2. Men tended to have a response very similar to their stated orientation (straight men were turned on by women, and gay men by men), but women were all over the map. I'll quote here:
   

   All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph [device to measure physical sexual response] and the keypad [to rate their subjective response] weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

Interesting, no? Well there are a few ideas to explain these findings:

1. Women become wet in any sexual situation to avoid suffering physical damage from sex to their vaginas.
2. Women are turned on by someone being attracted to them, not another person in of themselves

Now the first hypothesis makes some sense, evolution would tend to work that way (though it does not explain the high response to women with women), but it does not explain why their physical and mental responses to sexual imagery are so different. hypothesis 2 seems to me like someone talking out their ass. Everyone is turned on by someone being attracted to them, that isn't something that can explain the difference between men and women's sexuality.

There are several ways to explain the differences that I can think of. First of all, are the differences biological or cultural? The article touches on how hard those things are to separate. We really don't know the answers to this one yet, but it is probably some sort of combination of the two, it's just a question of how much of each. Now if it's primarily biological (aka men and women are fundamentally different sexually) then we basically know why: it evolved that way, we just don't know why it evolved that way, and I don't think anyone can seriously present a good idea why it evolved that way at this point while we are still trying to decide what exactly "natural" sexuality is. Now if it's primarily cultural (aka men and women are essentially the same) then we can go two ways: either men are repressing physical responses that don't fit their psychological makeup, or women getting wet for things that don't actually turn them on.

There is another interesting possibility that I favor; Women and men could have fundamentally different physical sexual responses, but women have been forced by culture to fit into the male sexuality boxes. I certainly think that the language used to describe sexuality is very male centric. Men are usually either basically straight or basically gay (though the boundaries are to some extend fluid), whereas women have basically fluid sexuality (though they do have to some extent a sexual orientation). As a science nerd the best way to illustrate this is with a graph.

Ok, so I'm not good at making fake graphs. But the point is: in my experience women who have sort of thrown out societies expectations of them match their states desires very well with the physical one in the study. Which, in a totally unscientific manner, says to me that women are naturally* something along the lines of pansexual and it's our society that has forced them into straight or gay.

* by natually I mean that if all there was was biology. I'm a great advocate of natural != good, and the other thing is that that this is all based on distributions of people with many outliers.

Some thoughts on free will

I'm still reading the Einstein biography (I read another book in the middle of it), and one thing it discussed was Einstein's beliefs about free will. This got me to thinking, I don't think I've ever seen my exact beliefs published anywhere (though some have similar ones), so I figure I'll lay them out here. I think it nicely balances scientific evidence with philosophy, as well as practical considerations, though I don't make any particular claims of perfection.

I've got a few assumptions I start from:

1. The universe is fundamentally stochastic (probability of events can be predicted deterministically, but not events themselves) on a small scale, but acts mostly determinisically at normal scales.
2. Specifically the human brain is mostly deterministic, and the nondeterministic elements are not particularly coordinated (meaning no quantum computer in the brain, not that that would alter my conclusions much)
3. The mind exists totally within the brain (I don't believe in a soul for example)
   
4. Free Will means one thing in philosophy and another in normal language.
   

So, what do we mean by free will? Philosophically it can be defined in many ways (and usually the views of philosophers depend on their definitions is my impression), but they all get at the idea of making a decision independent of outside influence. This idea has some problems: for one thing, we know that outside influences can affect decisions, and not just by altering the consequences of actions either, for example people act differently under the effect of drugs than normally. My assumptions above force me to take the position that free will does not really exist in the philosophical sense.

So can we make choices in my view? Well, it all comes down to definitions. I would say that our actions are determined by both internal and external states of the universe, so a choice in the usual sense is impossible, but the sensation of choice corresponds with a state transition in the higher functioning parts of the brain. When I say "I want to do X", I mean "my memories, beliefs, values, and reasoning ability inclines me to actions that I believe will lead to X", and when I say "I chose to do X" I mean "I did X because of a variety of reasons, mainly because of my memories, beliefs, values and ability to reason, as opposed to instinct, outside chemicals or orders".

In everyday life free will means something more like the idea of actions being endogenous (coming from internal states of the brain, rather than direct outside influence). An easy way to see how this differs from philosophy would be the case of a drunk driver: they would normally know not to drive drunk, but once drunk, and knowing they are drunk, drive nonetheless with no other outside influence on them to drive other than alcohol. If you accept my premises above that the brain is the seat of all human consciousness and is (mostly) deterministic, then clearly the alcohol caused the drunk driver to drive. In an everyday sense, even if you believe that I do, most people would hold the drunk driver responsible if he hit anyone. This bring me to a good way to sum up the common sense idea of free will (at least as I see it): responsibility. People are responsible for their actions even if there are outside influences on them.

Most people view strict determinism (or even my "everything on the scale of daily life is deterministic for the most part") as morally repugnant because they feel that people are not responsible for their actions in such as worldview. This is not necessarily the case, we can hold people responsible for their actions if we like, no matter our philosophical views. I would hold everybody responsible for their actions, and then we as society can choose what actions we want to support, and which to punish.

Some argue that in a deterministic (or mostly deterministic) world there is no place for ethics. This seems like a poorly thought out objection to me, if outside influences affect people's actions than surely ethics and laws affect people's actions, in a way that we want.

Well looking over Wikipedia's Compatibilism article, it seems I'm on well treaded ground; this is not particularly surprising, but I nonetheless like my views as recorded here. I will note that my view are somewhat different from compatibilism in that I believe that we don't have free will but that are nonetheless responsible for our actions, but in the end that becomes a matter of definition and language.

News to me

Apparently I am a woman.

Despite what you hear on the internet circumcision is not the Holocaust

So PalMD of Denialism blog riled up the hardcore anti-circumcision types with a post about why male circumcision and female genital mutilation (FGM, aka female circumcision) are not equivalent, as any right thinking person can see (at least the form of circumcision practiced today is different from FGM as practiced today, some of the historical forms of circumcision were if not equivalent, at least of similar severity). I would like to make a broader point: those who think circumcision is some great terrible crime are dumb. Sure there are arguments against it (if I had a son I would probably not get him circumcised), but the anti-circ militia are just making stupid, provably false arguments. What I want to know is how does this become such a huge issue for them? I was circumcised and I may (or may not) have lost some minor feeling. This is not a big deal, I can (and do) still enjoy sex-- and the best parts aren't the raw physical sensations (why do people seek out a partner, the sensations aren't much different for solo and partnered sex? Hint: the brain is the main sexual organ of the body). So maybe it is a tradition that we should drop, but making the argument for that by comparing a relatively harmless procedure to one in which people die every year, and the ones who don't are often unable to feel any sexual pleasure, is just absurd.

A few thoughts on intelligence

So I read Gino Segre's book Faust in Copenhagen (which I quite like) a while back, and now I'm reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein. Both are about the doings of geniuses, Einstain being the obvious one, but Faust in Copenhagen is about people almost as revered in physics: Bohr, Pauli, Dirac, Heisenberg and Schrödinger among others. What separates these people from regular folks like me? I'm pretty smart, but by no means a genius. Obviously these people have accomplished far more than I probably ever will (at least in terms of physics), but what traits did they have that made these advances possible? Obviously a large amount of intelligence, but what is intelligence? Many people (and almost all game designers) think of intelligence as a single value, measured by IQ, and known by some social science researchers as "g" (for general intelligence). What is this "g", however? What traits do people with high "g" have? I've made a list of ones I can think of right now (it's by no means exhaustive). Also note that not everyone with a high intelligence has all of these traits (as a hint to where I'm going, I'm trying to figure out what one of these traits all geniuses have, and is in some sense true intelligence).

• Education: This is more than knowing just a lot of facts, but understanding what they mean.
• Memory: ability to learn quickly.
• Computational ability: ability to do mental computations quickly. This mostly means math, but can also include other types of computation like finding anagrams, etc.
• Creativity: ability to come up with new ideas.
• Mental Quickness: ability to think on one's feet.
• Mental Clarity: ability to reduce a problem to it's essentials, as well as to separate what one wants to be true, from what is true.

All of these are parts of intelligence. I would say that computation and memory are becoming less important as computers get more ubiquitous and powerful. Mental quickness is helpful in many situations, but not for making true breakthroughs. Of the remaining three Education is necessary but not sufficient: a thorough understanding of the topic is important to advancing it, but many people understand things and are not geniuses, also education is not inherent to a person and does not correspond to what we often think of as intelligence. It seems that a combination of creativity and mental clarity is the key condition of genius. Someone who is otherwise intelligent and is creative, but not mentally clear will become a crank. Someone who is mentally clear, but not creative would make a good critic or regular working person in their field, but not a genius. The combination is what makes genius.

Now different geniuses have had different relative strengths: for example Einstein is almost the poster by for creativity above all, whereas Pauli was known as the Scourge of God because he was able to see the flaws in an idea so quickly and is the perfect example of Mental Clarity.

I voted

It was pretty easy, there were almost no people at the voting place, but then I am living in a quite well off area full of white people. Hopefully things aren't crazy in, say, Philadelphia.

NANOWRIMO

So I always get excited by National novel writing month even though I never seem to get it together to do it. I'll try it again this year, and to help encourage me, I'll have a progress widget on the side of my blog.

Also, I've got several books I want to post reviews of, I'll do that before too long.

Why I am unsatisfied by job search websites

So, I'm currently unemployed. The current economy being totally shit does not help this matter, but I am not here to discuss that today. Rather I am here to trash all the job search sites I have used. Specifically I am going to say how bad the sites that are only job search fail at their tasks. I will discuss the sites I have used one by one.

1. Craigslist: This site actually works well for what it is. It does not claim to be a full featured job search site, it is free, you don't need an account, there is no screening of employers or prospective employees. The search actually works well, it's easy to check different locations, job types, and narrow the search. Unfortunately there is no saved search or anything like that (it would actually be pretty useful for craigslist as a whole), but for doing period searches by hand it is pretty good.
2. Monster.com: This site is a dedicated job search site, and to apply for a job you have to sign up for the site. However, rather than being more convenient than say, craigslist, it is much less. There are a great variety of annoyances, but the one that impacts my finding a job the most is that the search function is terrible. It has a bad interface, and once you spend 10 minutes configuring it right it does not save properly. I graduated from college in June, and it keeps sending me senior developer positions. There are also a lot of adds, including obtrusive ones for the university of phoenix (I've got a BS, I don't need another). Overall the site feels like it was written in '98 and could seriously use a refresh.
3. Career builder: This place is on average about the same as Monster.com, but has different annoynaces. The save search still is crap, but there is a "jobs similar to ones you have applied for" search that works decently. On the other hand it was a huge pain to sign up for, I had to put in my info at least 3 times because it kept going to the next page of questions before I was done, and then when I went back to edit it everything was wiped out.
4. Usajobs: This is the official US government job search site. It works ok it's self, but the jobs are posted here in a very annoying way. Not only is the language of the posting strange government legalese, but there are huge numbers of the same posting repeated again and again. Also to apply to many of these you have to go to another site which brings me to my next section...
5. Company or agency specific sites: These are by nature hugely varied. The worst are government sites, one of these I could literally find no way to apply. Boeing has a good one (the saved search actually works).

Someone should make a website that aggregates the search results from a variety of sources and consolidates them so that you don't need to sign up for all of these places just to search, and also so they can have better search features. Maybe I should...

The ginger beer Chronicles

So I've been trying to make home made ginger beer. First I tried this recipe with added ginger, but it didn't ferment enough (probably my fault), and it just tasted like ginger ale. I was looking for a stronger flavor especially after trying some Jamaican style ginger beer. It was incredibly strong and spicy. So I looked around and formulated my own recipe:

• Ginger to taste, grated, juiced or sliced. I used most of one root
• 2 allspice berries
• 1 cassia (cinnamon) stick
• 1 star anise
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 cup brown sugar
• juice and zest of 1/2 lemon or whole lime
• 1/4 tsp bakers yeast
  
• 2 liters water (to fit the container, double the recipe for a gallon container )

From Ginger Beer Recipe 2

Put the ginger, sugar, and spices in a large pot

From Ginger Beer Recipe 2

Add water and boil. Let steep for ~10 min.

From Ginger Beer Recipe 2

Cool to prevent over-steeping. Add citrus.

From Ginger Beer Recipe 2

Put yeast in bottle and pour liquid into bottle.

Ferment for 24-48 hours until plastic bottle is firm when squeezed. Refrigerate to stop fermentation.

I accidentally watered it down a little when cooling it. On the plus side I now have 2 bottles of it. My initial taste says that it's tasty with spices, but is not particularly gingery. We'll see how it is when it's done.

Sara Palin: petty dictator

So according to FactCheck.org Sara Palin did not try to get books banned, but rather asked the librarian what she (the librarian) would do if asked to remove books, and then what she would do if there were pickets. This seems pretty threatening to me, and reveals that she is a petty dictator: the kind who has to constantly remind those under her that she has power over them. Of course this is only one of many situations where she has revealed that aspect of her personality.

as an aside, I would mention that everyone should visit factcheck.org to confirm your stuff before getting into a political debate, it's pretty reliable politics would be much better in this country if everybody had to stay within the bounds of facts.

Review of really old stuff: Neil Gaiman's Sandman

Inspired by Reading Comics, I decided to read some comics that I know are well thought of. One comic that even I've heard of is Sandman written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by a series of artists. Wikipedia has a good basic summary of the character and setting, but basically it follows the activities of Dream of the Endless, a group of beings that govern aspects of the natural world (they are, in order of oldest to youngest, Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delerium), aka Morpheus. The only other "mainstream" (meaning DC or Marvel) comic I have read is Watchmen (as I mentioned in the other review), and I think it would be useful to contrast the two:

• Watchmen is about superheros, even if they are unusual and fucked up superheros; Sandman is not about superheros (though they exist in the background and make a few cameos), it takes place in a fantasy world of Gaiman's design and is more strongly influenced by mythology than comics themselves
• Relatedly Watchmen is very meta, and is really about superhero stories specifically in the form of comics, Sandman is about more general metaphysical questions-- the one I really picked up on was how to deal with death and change. One of the things that comes up is can/if Morpheus has changed, and that really becomes central to the end of the series. Sandman does get meta, but about stories, not comics.
• Watchmen is action packed, full of violence and exciting activities; Sandman has almost no conventional action -- Morpheus is a force of nature, and after the first few issues he faces very few dangers he can fight. This leads to a very different sort of story, and often Morpheus does not seem to really be a major player, but the theme of dreams always comes through
• Finally there are a few format differences: Watchmen is very short, it essentially is a graphic novel, whereas Sandman is just to long to be a single body of work, but must be a series of some sort. There are also several artists who work with Neil Gaiman, and some of them I like more than others, whereas Watchmen has the same two people for the whole series, and the quality is always consistent.

What I really loved about Sandman is that it is so tied to mythology, it doesn't just use the characters' names and attributes, it uses the storytelling style of myth, and has many of the same characteristics. Neil Gaiman knows his mythology better than anyone else (that I know of) writing nowadays. The flaws are all in the use of comics as a medium, though they are mostly just not using it so perfectly well as Watchmen does (and I don't know if they could have kept that up for 75 issues), and my not liking the art style of a few of the comics. Definitely a good read, and one I would recommend for fans of fantasy, regardless of their thoughts on comics.