Monday, November 12, 2007

...but it probably never happened with Minneapolis and St. Paul

I wonder how many identical twins end up with the same name as the one they were assigned at birth. I know that if I had twins, at least some point in that first year I'd be giving the kids a bath and realize: "Aw crap, which one's Timmy again? Is he the one with the little freckle on his chin, or is that Jumaine? I've gotta figure this out before I put on their color-coded jammies. Eanie, meanie, miney, mo... Okay freckle-chin, looks like you're Jumaine. Let's get you into the blue shirt."

It must happen.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Commandement 6, article 13

Introduction
One major part of a person’s political philosophy is their view on murder and how it is defined. The Bible makes it seem pretty simple: Thou shalt not kill. However, throughout the years, this simple maxim has been challenged by one ambiguous example after another. Is abortion murder? Is capital punishment murder? In order to help you think through your feelings on death and responsibility, I encourage you to work your way through the following exercise....


Exercise
Each of the following examples presents one case in which a person dies. Please read each example and apply one of the following three responses:
A. This is immoral, and I am responsible.
B. This is immoral, but I am not personally responsible.
C. This is just the way the world works, and while it is sad, no one is personally responsible.


Example 1: You shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Example 2: You come home to find your spouse in bed with another person, and, in a fit of rage, grab a gun and kill them both.

Example 3: A person breaks into your house. You grab a gun, and shoot him as he is fleeing out the front door.

Example 4: You are mugged in a back alley, but manage to wrestle the attackers knife from him and kill the man with it.

Example 5: You forget to use contraception, and as a result you/your girlfriend gets pregnant. Raising a child does not fit with your life plan for the moment, and you have an abortion.

Example 6: You are a soldier in the army. You kill a soldier in an enemy army.

Example 7: You are a pilot in the Air Force. You are given a target upon which to drop your bombs. You ask no questions and complete the mission, but later learn that the target was mis-identified and was actually a school.

Example 8: You are a judge in Texas, and you are presiding over the case of a serial murderer. It’s your call whether he is executed or spends his life in jail, and you elect to execute the man.

Example 9: In a prenatal screening within the first trimester of pregnancy, you learn that your child will have Downs syndrome. You elect to have an abortion.

Example 10: You are a doctor. Your emergency room is suddenly flooded with patients, and you ignore several critical patients who will probably die regardless of treatment in order to tend to several other patients who you have a better chance to save.

Example 11: You are the head of a household, and you find yourself in this situation: you have limited resources and money, and can either pay for an expensive treatment that will keep an 85-old relative alive for another year, or for two treatments that will significantly improve the quality of life of two teenage relatives.

Example 12: Your spouse suffers a car accident and loses brain function. After several months on the respirator, you elect to pull the plug.

Example 13: A child dies in Africa from malnutrition. You were aware that this is going on and had the money to donate to the charity that could save this child, but you elected to purchase Netflix instead.



If you feel comfortable posting your results, please do. I a interested to know where other people fall on the spectrum.





Sorry for the recent scarcity of updates. It turns out that school is more time consuming than I’d remembered. To sate your appetite for semi-coherent bloggerel, I recommend: pedagogue-blog.blogspot.com, an account of one young man’s trials and tribulations as a fresh-out-of-college music teacher in a New York City charter school.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Deus Ex Magica

Along with much of the rest of the world, I have found myself captivated by a fictional teenage wizard for much of the last decade. Over the course of reading the Harry Potter series, however, I came to realize that there is a major risk in writing a magical fantasy novel. In creating a magical universe, the author is free to invent all sorts of awesome phenomena: love potions, healing charms, the Force, etc.

The potential problem with this is the use of one of these magical inventions work your way out of a corner. If one of your characters is falling into a pit of acid: no problem, you invent an incredible base charm which neutralizes the acid and saves the day. Heroine trapped by a herd of hungry dragons? No problem, a sudden bout of scale-leprosy appears to set things right.

Why is this a problem? In an ideal story (according to literary theory), the characters succeed or fail because of their own actions. Even the sort of story in which a character repeatedly gets the worst of it despite his/her virtue, it is still the relation between what s/he deserves and what s/he gets that is important. It is a failure of good story-telling when the two are unrelated.

This means that framework of the universe must be laid out in its entirety long before the climax of the story. Exposition is vital, there should be no magical interventions to save writers from there own poor planning. In fact, any magic in the final chapters should be well understood by the reader long before it happens.

I won't ruin any books for you by evaluating whether or not the author stays true to this rule, but keep this in mind the next time you open a fantasy book.

Monday, September 17, 2007

More handicapping

Likelihood to be supporting an expensive gambling/drug addiction by accepting any and every part offered him:

•Christopher Walken 3:2

•Ben Stiller 6:1

•Will Farrell 9:1

•Ben Affleck 12:1

•David Hasselhoff 13:1

•Chuck Norris 21:1

•Dustin Hoffman 34:1

Monday, September 10, 2007

Mix Master P

Probably the single greatest mixed-metaphor I ever heard came during a convocation address by Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. The Governor said:

When life throws you curveballs, embrace them.


Ouch. I'm not sure how many baseball players have ever actually tried to hug a curveball, but I think that most of them would agree that it's a bad idea. Not as painful as embracing a fastball, granted, but still a bad idea.

Friday, September 7, 2007

Dad-isms

If you think I have an opinion on everything, you should meet my father. He's got a one-liner for just about every subject imaginable. Here are just a few off the top of my head.
(Note: these opinions are my father's alone)

• Ever notice that you never see Darth Maul and Dennis Rodman at the same time? (also said about Jabba the Hut and our cat, Athena)

• In my opinion, you should be able to drink at 16, drive at 21, and you should have to apply for a license to have kids.

• If I had a button in front of me that would blow up every TV in the world, I'd push it in a second. (That might've been my uncle, but since they're identical twins they count as the same person.)

• Getting a shipment of lumber is a little bit like Christmas, and a little bit like getting [screwed]. (He's a carpenter).

• If something's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

• My feeling about the Second Amendment are the same as my feeling about the death penalty: I'm for it as long as I get to choose who it applies to.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Friday, August 17, 2007

Quotations

Sorry, I know that the updates have been few and far between lately. I'm home in the land of dial-up internet and ongoing farmwork for a few weeks. I'll tend to this patch of page much better starting in September.

For the meanwhile, here are a couple quotes that have struck me of late. I'm often skeptical of rigid quotations, because they frequently simplify a complicated problem, but these are working for me for whatever reason:

With or Without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steve Wienberg


I'm reading thrugh Grapes of Wrath right now, so I might amend "or money" to the end of that quote. But maybe that is a religion.

When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Sinclar Lewis


Before anyone takes offense: I sincerely believe that if everyone observed the rules that Christ or Mohammed or Whoever described, the world would be a better place. The problem is that religion in the great justifier of all otherwise unjustifiable acts.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Nothing new under the sun

I'd heard a lot of passing remarks on how bad of an idea it is to keep an army in Afghanistan, but this excerpt from a Kipling's "A Young British Soldier" really drives the point home:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Friday, August 3, 2007

Handicapping Evolution

Explanation
It's interesting to contemplate what animals would eventually rise to control the Earth is humans were to somehow disappear. Actually, it'd be pretty fun to bet on if you had a six pack of beer and a few eons with nothing to do. To that end, here are the odds of any current species (or group of species) on Earth eventually developing the intelligence and means to control the Earth's resources as humans do now.

Chimpanzee 5:1 odds
Chimpanzees share the closest common ancestor with humans of any other animal, and it stands to reason that they have the shortest genetic distance to travel to catch up with humans in terms of intelligence. Chimps already have demonstrated the ability to engage in cognition (figuring out problems in their head instead of through trial and error), can learn sign language, and appear to be aware of themselves (will try to wipe away a mark on their own face if they see themselves in a mirror). Furthermore, their opposable thumbs give them a big advantage over dolphins in the way of manipulating tools. This is pretty important in order to control resources; being able to harvest chemical energy, for example, would be difficult without hands to manipulate tools.

Dolphin 8:1
By some measurements, dolphins may be more intelligent than we are right now. Some scientists have begun gaging intelligence by the number of folds in the brain's frontal lobe, and dolphins have far more than we do. They clearly have a language and more computational brain power for language than we do: what might sound like several seconds of whistling could convey more data than hours of human conversation. They also appear to make art (blowing bubbles into vortexes of water), and thus appear to have creative thought. However, as stated in the chimpanzee section, dolphins are severely handicapped by not having appendages with which to easily manipulate tools. This casts doubt over their ability to control resources. Furthermore, living in an aquatic environment makes developing fire and electricity much more difficult or unlikely than on land.

Octopus 18:1
According to some theories, cephalopods were leading the race to higher intelligence when the took an evolutionary wrong turn: octopus and squid blood uses copper instead of iron to convey oxygen. The hemocyanin in their blood is less efficient than the hemoglobin in our own, and therefore cephalopods blood probably carries too little oxygen to support a big brain. If octopuses could get back n the right track or figure out some way around this problem, they could be well on their way towards supremacy. They are already extremely adept at problem solving and manipulating instruments with their tentacles. Furthermore, some octopuses have evolved to live in progressively shallower water, perhaps presaging a move up onto land.

Raven 40:1
Ravens are thought to be the most intelligent species of bird. Like chimpanzees, ravens have show signs of cognition: a raven that encounters a piece of meat hanging from a string will trap the string with one foot and slowly pull the meat up with the other. Ravens also use sticks as tools for grub-hunting. However, flight requires maximum weight efficiency (birds have only one ovary and kidney, for example). This makes a high brain mass to body mass ratio unlikely.

Termites 150:1
I've heard a scientist suggest that one of the massive colonies of millions of termites in Africa might be as intelligent as a 4-year-old. Could be: they've already invented agriculture through fungus farms, language through chemical messages, sophisticated air conditioning, architecture, and division of labor. It's not that much of a stretch to imagine an ant colony learning to cultivate and use fire, a short step away from mastery of chemical energy. However, one wonders about the inherent limits of the hive consciousness...

Frogs 20,000:1
Though they have appendages with digits capable of grasping, frogs and most other amphibeans have little computational brain power.

Snakes 45,000:1
The disadvantage of having no appendages whatsoever makes snakes a dark horse candidate in this race.

Cockroaches 150,000:1
Not a good chance, and thank God for that (even if I'll never be around to see it).
Update: Maybe I should adjust this one to be a little more probable. In the case of a nuclear holocaust, cockroaches would have very little standing in their way.


Betting on larger groups
Generic primate 3:1
With orangutans, gorillas, and bonobos included, this group merits a healthy third of the probability of coming out on top.

Generic mammal 7:3
Adding dolphins, apes, cats, dogs, and rodents together, there's almost a 50% chance you've got a winner.

Generic bird 35:1
In addition to the raven's brain we include the tool-mastery of finches, and the possibility that a flightless bird will eschew its weight efficiency for a more intelligent brain. Furthermore, it is possible that the sudden boom in human intelligence a few hundred thousand years ago was the result of sexual selection--suddenly it was cool to date nerds. Birds are especially prone to sexual selection as a method of picking mates, so it's possible that they could get going down the same road that humans did.

Generic invertebrate 15:1
For a big-paying yet plausible bet, put your money on the invertebrates and hope the cephalopods develop hemoglobin or the hive consciousnesses keep getting smarter.


No successor 5:1
It took a few billion years of life to get humanity up and running. The sun's still got a few billion years of juice remaining, so the odds that another species won't rise to dominance are slim, but certainly a possibility.



Please place your bets by the next milennia. No wagers will be accepted any later.