Comparative Advantage for the Meek

Often I feel (*cough* KNOW *cough*) as if there are people who vastly, vastly outperform and there's a sort of existential "What's the use?"-moment.

The Law of Comparative Advantage is useful for such moments.  I'm nowhere near being a competent mathematician, but there are still opportunities.

The other thing that I find encouraging is that mathematics is not an ever expanding sphere where the discoveries take place at the edge.

It's more like swiss cheese:  there are little holes left all around to fill in.

Characterization in Stories: Fruits Basket v. Maria-sama Ga Miteru

Ugh, I'm going to talk about anime.  MY APOLOGIES.

I was talking to a friend about character-driven stories.  And, I think there are two main differentiating components: the first is 2D v. 3D 'fullness', and the second element is maturity of the characters.  You can have one and not the other, but they are neither supplementary nor complementary.  I have seen stories that only got the character 'fullness' right, but still had a good story.  And I've seen stories that got the 'maturity' right, but I wouldn't consider their characters to be 'full'.

Maria-sama Ga Miteru would be an example of an anime that I would say the maturity outmatched the 'fullness'.  The characters are...simple...at least in the sense of the sort of things that this show is concerned about.  Seriously, dear lord, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an episode about "The Horror of the Tea Kettle That Wouldn't Heat Up!"  And they would devolve into ridiculous and inane banter about the first world problem of their tea not being properly heated.

You think I'm exaggerating.  Watch the show and tell me I'm exaggerating.  If anything I think I'm understating it.

Either way, the kind of trivializing details that they deal with makes the characters highly unbelievable to myself.  However, the protagonist does definitely grow (not physically, of course).  There wasn't one point in the series where you could point at, where the character gives some dramatic speech like in most 2D characterizations found in some animes, and then they're all of sudden a 'better person'.  This was a tad more realistic, and you could see, over time, that she had mellowed and became quite the lady.  Maison Ikkoku did a great job of this as well.  In order to do something like that, you need to have--and Maria-sama did have--great characterization.  It was a character-driven story and the maturation element was done superbly (even if I do still think the characters at any one instance were somewhat flat).

Fruits Basket I would characterize in the opposite way.  I wouldn't say that their characters were more 'full' than Maria-sama (because the maturation does make characters more 'full'), but the 'fullness' of their characters was much more than the 'maturation' of their characters.  Mainly because characters matured when Tohru would play her junior psychoanalyst role for the episode and change one of the other characters in the course of a single episode.  This is what I mean by the maturation being 'unrealistic'.  However, the loving character of Tohru did, I think, make her 'more full'.

If this makes any sense...

Rocking Chair Test.....Fallacy

{How the "Rocking Chair Test" ends up as a failure w/me due to vidya.}

As I've mentioned here, there's something I find uneasy in the rocking chair test...pun unintended.  I guess the ultimate argument for the rocking chair test is some sort of performative contradiction argument.  Something like saying, "Well, if you feel uneasy about it, that's regret, and also just confirms the Rocking Chair Test."  But, something about this doesn't feel quite right.  When I think about my vidya past, while I'm thinking about it, it is pleasurable, there is no tinge of regret.

To me, the real problem with this conflation is what really is 'happiness'.

Applied v. Pure mathematics

I used to be having this huge internal battle between whether I wanted to do pure or applied Mathematics.  And, a long while back I met a while by the name of Robert with whom I discussed this at length.  And, I gave a lot of arguments that Hardy would've been proud of, but in the end, he ended up convincing me by noting that, "All applied Mathematics today is pretty pure, anyways."

And given a lot of the theoretical considerations that goes on, and the historical fact that a lot of Mathematics comes from Physics, and not the other way around as mathematicians would have you believe, gives some credence to this idea.

Plus, I did read Hardy's "Apology for the Mathematician".  He makes a lot of good points intellectual curiosity, professional pride, ambition are the dominant incentives (but no mention of Poincaré's dictum, "Mathematics for Mathematics sake", or of Turán's motto, "Mathematics is a strong fortress.").  The majority of his points on the aesthetics of Mathematics relate to an analogy to the arts:  Artists -> patterns, Painter -> shapes, Poet -> words, Mathematician -> ideas (Hardy holds a very Platonic view of the world, things are of ideal forms, and uses this as a huge justification throughout the entire essay).  However, this does not seem to deny the capability of applied mathematicians.  Moreover, and finally, my main point of contention is Hardy famously saying pure Mathematics is 'useless'.  This to me seems to be the crux of the matter between pure and applied Mathematics.  In particular, Hardy uses this as justification that Mathematics can 'do no harm'.  And uses the Mathematics of number theory and relativity not yet having uses for warfare as examples.

Which, we all know what happened to those two examples (HINT:  CRYPTOGRAPHY AND THE ATOM BOMB GUISE).....

Logic/(video?) Games: Do they have a cognitive effect?

Somewhere in this interview:

The guy mentions how just doing simple arithmetic problems influences depression rates.

I was wondering about the influence of logic games in general.  Since--as I noted in my bs knowledge of neuroscience back here--how the neocortex overlays all of the behaviorist bs.  The idea would be that logic games enhance the PFC, and that in turn enhances executive control and a whole host of other functions.

Which leads to another idea I'm kind of apprehensive to...do videogames have a cognitive effect?

I mean, in general, the people I know who play shittons of videogames...tend to not be altogether dumb people.

BS Attempt at Neuroscience

ARE YOU READY FOR ME STEALING STUFF FROM STUFF I'VE WRITTEN ELSEWHERE?

Anyways, this will hopefully fit into my next post...

I was into behaviorism for a long time, and I would use it quite often for self-motivational schemes (get myself to do exercises or read or etc.). But then I realized the hard way about the behaviorist regression problem (if X reinforces Y, and you use X to do Y, then problem is the same: you now have to reinforce X instead of Y (or if it naturally reinforcing, have some other scheme Z to keep X in check, and then Z has to be properly reinforced)). I realized it really wasn't working, although I might have had short term successes, it was no different than the yoyoing short term successes I had before implementing ridiculous behaviorist schemes.

So then I got off my high horse thinking the cognitive revolution was a bunch of bs and that Skinner was a God and started reading Chomsky's critique of Verbal Behavior, finally understood why the cognitive revolution took place and why all this fuzzy therapeutic nonsense is actually beneficial because...

The key idea I form around all of this is the triune model of the brain. To some extent, I already alluded to this in a previous long post. And I'll be brief because I know you're all a pretty smart crowd here, so this is more for my own benefit but...you have the brain stem-cerebellum which regulates hormones and base instincts/pleasures like eating and sex and what-not. The limbic system is the next layer on top of this, and for my purposes of thought here, regulates emotions, and reinforcement schedules, and basic learning and what-not. The neocortex is on top of that and controls our rational thought and interpretation of events and language and what-not.

The way I think of it now, is that the Behaviorist model hooks up with the brain-stem/limbic system. And the reason it can't explain where certain other reinforcement comes from--or the inability of it to explain cognitive reframing (a.k.a. "being positive")--is in part what I described of part of the problem with the regression problem above.

Therefore, there's actually something to be said about the importance of interpretation in motivating one self and all these 'fuzzy' sort of concepts (which is why I was so apprehensive to them, and I'll get back to this IN MORE DETAIL IN LATER POSTS (aside from what I've already said in that old post)).

Marriage

I was reading Strang's Applied Mathematics the other day.  He got into talking about the "Wedding Problem".  Right before this, he was talking about another problem you can apply some game theory to called "Escape".  He then likened the winning strategy of the "Wedding Problem" to the winning strategy to "Escape".

Conclusion?  I shall directly quote from Strang, I swear to you, no joke, this is printed in the Applied Mathematics book, I am not paraphrasing it, this is verbatim:

"Inside the wedding game, the real game is Escape."

Genius.  This guy is fucking genius.

Dealing with Anxiety: Seneca and Adam Savage

One of the better ideas I've gotten from Alain de Botton is his description of Seneca's guide to anger:

As with most of the videos in this series, I find their most applicable use in areas other than their target.  Here, instead of appreciating this as a guide to anger, I see it better as a guide to anxiety.  To wit:

When you feel panicked and want to do something else, look and create a plan (either 'plan' in remaining mentally prepared or 'plan' as in actually do have an alternative) for the worst likely outcome.  Often, you will come to terms with it and realize that it's not so bad, and therefore fear does not overtake your decision-making process.

I've done this quite a bit in my past.  In particular, I think this is how I got through most of uni.  I started with the thought that, "Well, if I fail my first year, then I'll use my anosmia to my advantage and get a decent job somewhere," and shot for my minor.  Once I had that, and had a minor in both Physics and Math by then, I did have a bit of a crisis, and ended up switching majors from Physics to Math; and then thought, "Well, if this shits up, I at least have the equivalent of an associate's to back up on."  I then plowed on.  Whenever I felt exam anxiety, I would be reminded of the fact that--in a sense--failure is just another form of freedom.

The best Senecan I've come across, comes from a story from Adam Savage:

Because of this, I have come up with the ultimate Senecan.

No, Adam Savage has GONE THROUGH the ultimate Senecan.

Whenever I've felt some extreme anxiety, I've imagined the above following scenario.  Whenever I am anxious about something, I imagine "The Adam Savage Senecan".  Wherein I imagine the person that I have some obligation that I am feeling anxious for, responds the same way Adam's boss did.

The crucial part is what I imagine I would do immediately after the chastisement ends, and I am alone in that 'warehouse', what would I do or where I would go from there.  Usually, it simply involves me realizing that...on the flipside, I don't have to talk to them anymore, and I am usually psychically set on simply moving to a different place.

Once I am good with this.  I typically have no more anxiety.

Is Meditation Bogus?

How trustworthy _is_ this neurological research?

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/acad/psyb/2010/00000050/F0020003/art00007 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation gives an idea of how large the corpus of research is now) (Most of my knowledge about meditation research, though, came from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tRdDqXgsJ0).

Is working memory research purely a Hawthorne effect?

Is the research on meditation complete bogus and motivated completely from a desire to back up Buddhist meditation (look at who funds most of these studies...)?

I tried meditation for a month about a year back. I noticed no effect, but I don't know if it's because I wasn't doing it right, it did have an effect but I didn't notice, or if these studies really are bogus (it's not like I can have my own fMRI machine).

Another possible explanation, given the link you provided, is that most of the research is done on pathological cases. Knock on wood, I'm pretty sure I'm not one of those cases. Therefore, it could be the case that the marginal effect provided by meditation is so much significantly smaller for myself as it is for someone with ADHD that I get very little cognitive benefit (the same way that athletes hit plateaus in their training).

.....

I'm also tempted to link to the Skeptic's Dictionary's page on Transcendental Meditation here...(http://www.skepdic.com/tm.html)

Aristotle II: "Happiness"

As I mentioned before, my first beef with Aristotle is promoting this fallacy of false compromise throughout all of Western thought.  The second idea is the absolute infallibility of happiness.

I've talked before about my multiple criticisms of happiness as a good that we should all try to achieve.  My next criticism, and this sidles in with Aristotle, is what even is happiness?  The definition that Aristotle gives for happiness--eudaimonia--is not what people think of when they think of happiness.  Even when they agree that they wouldn't want to pump themselves full of heroin, and then smugly sit back in the comfort that they are going after eudaimonia, in my experience they still are going after happiness in the hedonistic sense.  Granted, it's more of an "arbitrary exception hedonia", but really under what I see, I see no difference between this and what is essentially hedonia.

(but then again, I've already gone into my beef with "happiness")

The problem, I think, comes in how Aristotle defined happiness:

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” -Aristotle

How do most people really define happiness?  Probably like so:

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory." -Albert Schweitzer

Say a person decides his goal in life is to study Platypuses. So, he goes through a lot of pain studying and making and compiling this humongous tome on platypuses. After 10 years he is finally finished. It gets a few reviews that say it's alright, and immediately after the man dies. The apparent paradox is that in one sense the man lived a horrible life suffering in the Australian savannah. However, the Aristotelian notion says that he is happy.

Simply creating a new definition for happiness, and then claiming that you should follow happiness, to get out of the logical v. emotional conflicts is a nice intellectual trick--if it weren't downright fucking dishonest.

Moreover, this definition of happiness leads to circular reasoning.  According to my rendition of Aristotle, virtuous thought supposes that a virtuous persons has a fairly explicit conception of "happiness" or eudaimonia. Thus a person can use that to create virtuous thought and thus virtuous action to produce a good, or eudaimonia.

Aristotle I: "Balance"

I told you I'd come back to this topic.

I really, really hate how people use the word 'balance' as a pretense for pragmatism (when it's decidedly not pragmatic, "Our country uses 60 Hz current, our country uses 120 Hz--let's compromise and use 80, that's pragmatic!") and thereby a rationalization for pretty much any action.   Yet, despite I find other "intellectually immature" (did I ever mention that I think someone should make a T-shirt that says, "I am a member of a moronic cult"?  I'm sick of people throwing around that ad hominem...except, of course, when I do it :p.) people who agree with me, try searching around for "criticisms of the Aristotelian Mean".  They are actually suspiciously rare.  So, I will do so here.

One obvious theoretical criticism is that the Aristotelian Mean presents a false dichotomy in the sense that there is a "scale", and only between two extremes, of two different values (as the old joke goes, Congress usually compromises--somewhere between stupid and evil).  The other criticism is that it feels like a straw man.  After all, the name-calling argument is that we shouldn't be "extreme".  Why not?  Is it suddenly considered reprehensible to endeavor to be as consistent as you can be?  Is it suddenly reprehensible to actually have some damn principles?  (see what I did there?  I criticized the Golden Mean for being a straw man, and then in the very next few sentences I presented a straw man.  Either way, I hope the reader understands what I am at least getting at here)

It is, really, just a thinly veiled disguise of false compromise.  Usually performed by individuals who feel that "everything is relative", and are afraid of upsetting anyone (although, really, if you wanted to make sure not to upset anyone, you wouldn't talk at all).

Yet what I find even more troubling is how, essentially, such a typically emotionally acceptable theory (due to its social acceptability because, as I said, it doesn't "rock the boat") unusually forms a solid of Aristotelian ethics.  I've heard plenty of criticisms of Aristotelian ethics, but unfortunately, I don't think this has really been focused on by any other source, so I supposed that I might as well go ahead and do this here.

Next I'll go into my thoughts w.r.t. Aristotle on "Happiness".

Romance of the Programmer

This was something I wrote a long time ago, that I still somewhat agree with.

After the break :U.

I love Megaman

18:10 (actually, 19:45-20:45)

When I saw that the main boss was a balance, I thought that this was going to be yet another, "We should strive for balance in our lives" 'moral lesson' episode.  Instead, I ended up fighting it (literally).

When we give up our philosophy for balance and pragmatism, we become complete moral relativists and lose our sense of identity.

In retrospect this was sooooo cheesy, but...I like it.


...more on my thoughts regarding 'balance' later.

Log

Things that bother me about the log function.

I was just going to focus on "What base do people mean?" until I realized that there's a lot of ambiguous things about this function.

The first is..."What base do people mean?"  Generally, you have to take it by context of the person you're talking to.  If I'm talking to a computer scientist, it's base 2.  If I'm talking to an engineer, it's base 10.  If I'm talking to a mathematician, it's base e.  We all just say 'log' though.

Next up is, "What's the branch cut?"  Generally, people mean the $-\pi$ branch cut, where log of negative numbers is undefined.  However, over the complex plane, we could mean different possible branch cuts.  Moreover, depending on the surface you're considering the log function over, different things happen, which brings me to...

"What's the domain?"  If it's over $\mathbb{C}$, it makes sense to even ask the previous question.  If it's over $\Re$, then _really_ you're considering the domain $\Re^+$, the positive real axis.  Although, you _could_ define a log function over the negative real axis and leave the positive real axis undefined.  Moreover, there's a particular kind of Riemann surface (in fact, it's _constructed_ so that the following happens) where the log function over _it_ is defined _everywhere_.  Moreover, the question of which domain you're considering is important to answer the question...

"What's the derivative?"  I remember hearing this story of a Physics professor docking points off of a student for drawing the graph of the log function's derivative as being $1/x$, but only on the _positive_ part of the axis.  Technically, the student was 100% correct.  The derivative of $log(x)$ is $1/x$ only on the positive real axis because $log(x)$ itself is only _defined_ on the positive real axis.  Because of this, depending on where the branch cut, domain, and even _base_ you're considering, the derivative will be different!

However, we usually don't clarify these things.  All of this information about the log function is usually easily taken up according to the context of the discussion.

Universal Responses

I think we should term the following universal responses (responses that can be used as a reply for anything), as "Passive Aggressive Diversions":

"My mother died."

"I did it for a poem."

"My mother died."

"We all have Lewis Carroll to thank."

"My mother died."

"Yeah, I'm not really into Pokemon."

The Social Effects of Social Effects

I've have been reading this book off and on for the past few months.  A while back I read the book "How They Succeeded" (": The Secret to Success" or some such subtitle) by Orison Swett Marden (I would be remiss if I didn't say that I saw a review by someone saying, "The secret is in the author's middle name.").  I wish to discuss this book a little bit, and then go on to a key point regarding the social lives I saw of a lot of the individuals involved in that book.

Basically, instead of reading a bunch of autobios and trying to find their secrets implicitly, it turns out this guy walked about and talked to these made and wrote a book that is exactly that.

Tl;dr, this book is cliff notes of many autobios summarized with the information _I_ want.

Tl;dr^2 this book is win.

Either way my notes follow and are not made in the normal fashion.  This is because of the organization of the book being so different as to most other books I have read.  Most other books have a few clear points and go about them in a linear fashion.  This book is essentially a collection of interviews.  So for a change of pace, I decided to just read through it and see what sticks.  The idea being that, what sticks would be points common to most of these fairly successful people.   I suppose I should also mention the people he interviews:  basically everyone who was important in the U.S. in 1900.  The author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic", Rockefeller, Carnegie, Edison, Wannamaker, and...really an impressive list.  They all sat down with this guy and gave them their (as the author put it) "advice to young men".

I understand most of these points are trite, but either way I will state them as they had been stated.

Without further ado about nothing (with a tl;dr^2 afterwards bottom):

-Perseverance.  I do not think there was a single person in this vast, vast list that did not mention this.  Even if Orison did not bring it up intentionally in the interview, this trait would always, always come up.  And there was a great amount of attention with everyone to also include a remark disparaging that their success was by chance.  Some said that perseverance simple made them ready for the chances that appeared.
--Really, ALL OF THEM said this.  Keep in mind, that's about thirty some odd rich authors/musicians/scientists/

businessmen and from all walks of life saying the same thing over and over and over again.
-Work hard.
-Do one thing.  Particularly, in what you're good at.  There's a lot of examples of people who persevere, but in many thing.  There was also an implicit lesson in that even if the one thing you specialized in becomes obsolete, it either:  isn't _really_ obsolete and there are a lot of opportunities still available in the area especially since many people will become discouraged, or you pull an "animal husbandry" trick (this is a joke from D&D, supposedly a player put all of his ranks into animal husbandry and was able to get out of every possible situation by clever use or interpretation of what the skill meant) and realize that the large tent of skills your specialization provides or areas it allows access into that may not yet be obsolete or even new.
-Accounting.  Surprisingly, a lot of the great businessmen always talk about some connection or want of first-class [mark the adjective] bookkeepers.  Most either started off as clerks or bookkeepers or really understand the importance of them.  Rockefeller was fond enough of it that he kept his first ledger as Scrooge McDuck kept his Number One Dime, that is, even though it was full he kept it with him.
-----I would be remiss if I did not put a small remark of how I think this backs up my thoughts of the importance of logging here...
-Of all the individuals that highly valued education, they did not start off with free education or being given scholarships into schools.  They started off as child laborers.  In fact, there was one individual who started off with an enormous amount of opportunity (as his father was rich); but he sucked at school and kept flunking all over the place.  Then only when his father kicked him out and he started working did he recognize the values of certain kinds of education.  Actually, his story is not alone in the book...
--But, just like perseverance above, they all mention "study".
-There's a crapload of religious people, and almost all the businessmen speak of philanthropy (even in small amounts) heavily.  Honestly, it seems more like they use religion and philanthropy as a means for business connections and cheap advertisement.

Tl;dr^2:
-Keep at it.
-Work Hard.
-Study.
-One Thing.
-Logging.
-Accounting.
-Applying social reinforcement beneficially is easy.

That last one I want to expound on.

Go check out Hamming's article "You and Your Research".  I want to focus on the 'closed v. open doors' part of that speech for a little bit before going into another example.

Perhaps the closed v open doors thing that Hamming talked about wasn't just about efficacy in individuals' research.  There seems to be this positive reinforcement coupled to the social aspects of talking about mathematics to others.

Conferences -> Social reinforcement coupled to math -> More math

I remembered someone asking me whether I got social needs/crap from talking about math randomly to people in the department.  I answered "NO" out of a sense of wanting to appear tough (perhaps?  I don't know).  But now, knowing what I know about behaviorism, I am not so sure...maybe I do?  Maybe this is the reason that math people do math?  And they appear anti-social because they only stick with people who talk about math, which by definition is not the majority?  I'm just brainstorming thoughts here...YOU MIGHT NOTICE THIS BECAUSE OF THE PROPENSITY OF THE QUESTION MARKS.

I mean, my other thoughts are:

-Again, as above in "How They Succeeded", a lot of the people either blatantly suggested talking about your goals and plans with as many people as possible, or implicitly suggested this (by showing in their own lifes how doing this positively reinforced their actions).
-At least when I talk about the problems I'm thinking about, I'm typically actively solving items in front of the person I'm talking to.
-If not, they're talking about things that I put in juxtaposition to what I'm talking about, and lets me think continuously more creatively than by myself.
-It's really cheap, easy, and passive positive reinforcement (the holy grail of reinforcement strategies).

Perhaps mathematicians aren't anti-social, it's just that the things they talk about can not be conversed with the typical person in public on a useful or reinforcing level so that to outsiders they appear anti-social, but to their clique they are not.

For what it's worth, this is also backed up in a lot of the biographies in found in E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics.  When they were not in isolation, LETTERS EVERYWHERE.  OHDEARLORD SO MUCH CORRESPONDENCE (I WARNED YOU BRO, I WARNED YOU ABOUT THE CORRESPONDENCE!).  MATH WAS DONE EVERYWHERE.  Again, I'm going to emphasize this, and I doublechecked it.  If you look at a lot of mathematician's collected works (I looked at Jacobi's in particular), a vast majority is correspondence.  Even Archimedes had a lot of correspondence (it's surprising that it was able to last so long through history).  Also, whenever conversation strayed from maths, apparently Lagrange started spewing "I don't know" every three seconds.  Furthermore, the only exception to this is Galois.  I used to think his life story was "Oh I have an idea!  Oh hey girls!  Oh hey I'mma gonna die because of girl-feuds!  Oh hey last thesis I just did in a day kthxbai!"  Whereas his life was CONTINUALLY TRYING TO GET INTO THE MATH CLUB and the math club being all "wtfno" EVERY SINGLE TIME.  But then again, I'm not sure how much of an exception this is, since Galois didn't do any other maths other than his one sketch of an idea.

It just occurred to me, aside from possibly the Mersenne circle, the majority of social reinforcement was _correspondence_.  E.g., letters.  Thus, this gives me the idea that instead of going down a few floors each time I have an idea in X, I could just _WRITE A ****ING LETTER_.

....if I could find more people than myself, my advisor and the one (or two) other person (people?) in my department who know anything about my field :|...

Contra Leisure

http://davidkanigan.com/2011/11/19/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/

What I got out of the article was more of a message of, "Don't forget efficacy."  As opposed to lax-times.

O.K., WHY AM I SO MUCH AGAINST LAX TIMES?
AGAIN, I'M GOING TO BE SAYING SOME PRETTY SEVERE THINGS HERE.  HOLD YOUR GLARES.

I want to give a defense for attacking leisure and supporting work.

First of all, I admit the vagueness in the term.  If I describe leisure as 'doing what one likes', then this includes things that may not be 'leisure'.  In fact, if one defines 'doing what one likes' as leisure, then it seems to me that the ideal solution would be to construct all 'work' in such a way that it is 'leisure'.  I can not say that 'leisure' is the complement of the set of the things that increase the skillset that you have determined to amplify.  Because this would include trivialities such as 'doing the laundry' as 'leisure', and this doesn't quite match up with the common sense definition of the word.  I'm not quite sure how to go about this.

Second of all, I admit I fall into patterns of leisure myself.  From my perspective, it is a fault to correct.

With this said, my first of two basic arguments is the same reason that one might be against using the word 'miracle' is very similar to why I'm against the preconception of leisure being necessary.  If we allow the label of 'miracle' over certain phenomena, it dissuades us from trying to figure out what is occurring with those phenomena.

Similarly, if we say that leisure is necessary, then it dissuades us from trying to figure out how we might use that time to better ourselves instead.

The other reason is behavioral, and is similar to the reason why so many determinists are compatibilists.  The reason, I believe, that some determinists accept compatabilism (that is that ethics and norms exist despite our not being able to choose to follow or not follow a given ethics or norm), is behavioral:  that is that the very fact that we believe in those norms increases are chance that we follow those norms, and this is beneficial in a survival or utilitarian sense.

Similarly, if I say that leisure is necessary, it provides an outlet for rationalization to such a behavior, and thus increases the chance that I do it far beyond what may be argued as 'psychologically necessary' (if such an argument like that exists).

Applications of Graph Theory

Random thought:

All organizational problems are graph ordering problems.

Example:

I was thinking about how to organize a personal wiki of mine into a little commonplace book of sorts.  The problem is organizational.  How do I take my wiki which has a graph that looks more-or-less like a tree, and organize it linearly?  Well, if I can assign a number to each page, the problem is solved.  In other words, applying a graph ordering to the graph structure of my personal wiki allows me to organize it as a book.

Likewise, time management issues?  The solution is to choose an appropriate ordering of the weighted graph of your preferences.

I think an argument could be made that all organizational problems are graph theory problems.

Charity and Kiva.org

FYI, kiva.org is not a bad site.

That is all.

Contra Happiness

I would like to suggest that, to the contrary of public opinion, happiness is not all that important.

First there is the question of what I mean when I say 'happiness'.  I mean that hedonistic sense of happiness, the 'opposite of what I feel when I'm depressed' happiness.  I do not mean the vaguely defined Aristotlean 'eudaimonia'.

I have five loosely related arguments against happiness that I would like to present:

-Nozick's Experience Machine
-The Rocking Chair Test
-Choice Experiments
-Happiness' Running Average
-Marginal Utility
-Personal Growth

I will not present a clear-cut argument.  At most, these are just running hunches that I think could be expounded into a deeper argument somewhere in the future.

=Nozick's Experience Machine=

Nozick's famous thought experiment goes something like this:

1-Happiness is all that's important.
2-Suppose there is a giant box (a la Matrix) that will make you feel enumerable pleasure so long as you are hooked up to it.
3-By 1 and 2, you should just sit in the box and do nothing else and enjoy the rest of your life.

And the conclusion is something along the lines of, "Something doesn't feel right about this conclusion."  That's really all there is to this argument (I admit it is rather weak).

I've noticed that this argument is rather hit or miss.  Some people (a lot of people, in my experience) agree with me and say that surely this isn't _all_ there is to life.  However, some others (you might be one of them) say that, indeed, this is all there is to life.  To these people I would suggest you pull out as many loads as you can, go to the Projects in Chicago, buy as much heroin as you possibly can, and enjoy your though-box induced pleasure-coma (just time your supply right so you can die of an overdose right when your supply runs out).  (or, alternatively, read on to see if some other argument in this article catches your fancy)

I can give a rather personal account of this.  There was a Spring Break a long time back where I gathered all of my videogames and my internet, piled my pillows in a corner, and did not leave that spot.  I felt great.  I felt a hedonistic sense of pleasure and when I was done I was quite the opposite of depressed--but something else felt negative about the experience.

=The Rocking Chair Test=

Some people might counter, "Well, you're only considering pleasure in the short-term, because our interests change/etc., you need to take a longer view of happiness."  Aside from me arguing that technically the experience machine (by virtue of the fact that it gives 'experiences' and by what the word 'experience' entails) already covers this, I'd like to give a different personal account of how this might go wrong.

The rocking chair test asks us to view ourselves far in the future in a rocking chair--what will we think about what we are doing now?

I posit, despite my youth and naivety, that I have to some extent undergone this test.  Recalling back on my early childhood I have lots of memories--playing Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana.  All videogames, and all give me a sense of 'pleasure' in reminiscing on them.

But again, something feels off--something doesn't feel quite right in the same way that something doesn't feel quite right in Nozick's thought experiment--and I hope to get to what this may be near the end of this article.

=Choice Experiments=

There is a TED speaker who has done some experiments on choice (citation needed).  In particular, one of her surveys with people who have lost loved ones interests me.  Because of some weird legal differences, in one country a medical decision was chosen by the doctors, and in the other by the loved ones.  In the country where the individual died and the loved ones had no choice in the matter, they reported that they were happy about the decision.  In the other country, they were upset by the decision and felt less happy _but would rather have made the decision anyways_.  This to me seems to be indicative that something else more important than just blanket happiness is occurring here.

=Happiness' Running Average=

There is another fairly famous study (citation needed) about paraplegics and lottery winners.  A few months after they surveyed how happy they were and the results were as you might expect.  Paraplegics reported depression and lottery winners reported being on top of the world.  However, a few years afterwards, they base-lined.  The paraplegics and lottery winners were about the same.

Similar studies have been done and they seem to report the same thing:  you can't be permanently happy, you'll always baseline.

(aside:  there are some interesting and decent methodological holes in these papers that have not been filled that one could reasonably bring up, and I admit that these translate as holes in my argument as well.  For example, one possible explanation is that an _absolute_ metric of happiness might catch that lottery winners end up permanently being happier; and that the problem with the study was that the people in the study in essence created a new higher standard baseline for happiness, so that their reported _relative_ happiness base-lined.  I have doubts about this explanation, but admit that it's a methodological hole.)

This means, even if I were wrong and happiness qua happiness were important, because I can't really be happy in the long-run anyways, there would be no major change in my behavior, in fact...

=Marginal Utility=

The optimal strategy would be to stay slightly depressed.

If it is the case that happiness runs under some running average metric, then a goal would be to avoid major depressive downswings.  All other strategies wouldn't make any major difference in overall long-run happiness (barring my math colleagues giving me some pathological function with higher-than average area).  If one were to stay slightly happy for a long-period of time, then eventually one would either end up depressed for a long-period of time, or go through a dramatic and possibly catastrophic depressive episode.  As such, it would make sense (again, only if the previous section is indeed true) to stay slightly depressed so that the only possible mood swings are positive ones, and so that you become somewhat acclimated to the average state.

=Growth=

All of the above are really just clues.  So far I've stated that there is something other than just blanket happiness that seems to be important, but have not given any example of what this may be.  Now, this is not a logical necessity.  I could express doubt at the hypothesis that pleasure qua pleasure is all that is important; and it would be up to the dissenter to provide evidence to the contrary.  That is, saying, "Well, what else could it be?"  Is not a valid argument (it is a logical fallacy, at most).

As such, even though I will present something (which you might have guessed given the title of this section), that doesn't mean that _this_ either is all inclusive.  That is, I will not claim that pleasure and this conclusive cover all areas.  Just that this is an important area that pleasure overlooks.

Moreover, my argument remains fairly weak.  I will point out the hole, but keep in mind that this too is just ultimately another hunch.

Using an argument by performative contradiction, one could argue against what I would nomer as 'total atrophins'.  That is, one can not say that one should atrophy in all possible senses, since in doing so one would indubitably have to be dead, and thus would not be able to make an argument for 'total atrophins'.  As such, one should not engage in 'total atrophy'.

Now, it is a fallacy for me to thereby form the opposite of this, and say "Therefore, one should strive for 'total growth'."  However, in the same way that correlation does not imply causation; but gives a rather good hint, I think that this argument gives a fairly good hunch that such a statement might not be far off.  Even though, at this point, I can't rigorously show such a statement.

Tadeusz Kosciuszko

So, it's the Fourth of July.  I suppose in honor of that, I want to point out this guy:

This is Tadeusz Kosciuszko.  He wasn't born in the New World.  He was a citizen of Poland.

Pretty much all my knowledge of him comes from this comic.

To sum it up:

• Fought in the Revolutionary War
• Fought to free Poland
• Tried to persuade Jefferson to stop his slavery nonsense

Cool dude.

Arithmetic

Quick side-note.

I've been wanting to get this book.  For the following reason:  I'd have it on my shelf and if someone came over and asked, "Are there any books here I can understand?"  I'd, like an ass, point to that book.  There'd be a double whammy, when they'd look at me with a "I understand f****** arithmetic" look, and when they look inside to see it's not what people think of when they think of arithmetic.

Trains

I really like trains.  I don't know how to explain it, this incredible fascination with trains.  Passenger trains in particular.

With this said, I have ridden on Amtrak quite a few times.  The only complaint--which is perennial--is that they're slow.  Of course they're slow, they share the line with freight and can only go about as fast as a car on the highway.  If you wanted to get somewhere fast, take a plane.

Either way, something I've noticed which is a pullback from the days when Amtrak was privatized, is that everything has awesome names.  You can tell very easily if a transportation service either used to be private or is private by the names.  For example, when I ride the bus it's the "1B Line", but when I take Amtrak to Osceola it's the mf'ing "California Zephyr".  Yeah, I know it might be slightly more confusing, but I'll take that trade for a slight amount more awesome.

Either way, I rode first class once.  At the time there was a deal that made it cost about as much as if I paid for gas when I drove.  They served champagne and grilled salmon and I had my own private room.

Tl;dr, play Simutrans.

North Korea

I've been curious about North Korea recently.  So, I went over to Google Earth and started scoping around.

Here's a picture I found I particularly like:

They're painting the end rows!  A neat trick if you want the town to look alright on a budget.

Some other pictures:

39.822298,124.204128

Probably hay fields I'm guessing.  Although the pock-marked holes looked odd at first, until I reasoned that they were probably shadows.

 

42.239607,129.258649

Probably a coal mine.  Although you can see it from space.  It is pretty friggin' large.

42.961479,129.993771

I'm guessing this is just tilled land, and they left the land farther out untilled or just didn't get to it yet maybe?

 

Another funny thing is how all of the fields suddenly get green and start looking a lot better the closer you get to the border.

 

Troll Math

I hate these kinds of problems.

Movies and Vidya

[some language towards the end]

I was thinking about the plots of movies I've seen v. the plots of videogames I've played.

...

I've been thinking about the plots of movies v. the plots of ANYTHING ELSE.

Is it just me...or does nearly every single movie plot either suck or is a repeat of some rehashed plot?  And, whenever Hollywood 'gets it', and creates an original plot (a.k.a., steals an original plot from a book), everybody loves it and it gets raves reviews.  So, what happens next year?  A focus on originality and none of the same mass produced T.V. drama shit? No.  Fuck that.  Sequels off of the good stuff.

I'm going to describe some archetypes over the next few posts, and you're going to know exactly what I mean.  First up is the "Old Team Reunion".  This is me copypasta'ing stuff I've wrote before to fill up the blog--BUT I DON'T CARE:

The Soviet scientists that made the unmanned Luna rovers were later called upon in their retirement to help out during the Chernobyl crisis.  They retrofitted a bunch of bulldozers as unmanned machines to help with the clean-up.

You know those "Old Team Reunion" movies?  The kind where, some disaster strikes, and the government sets out to recruit the leading experts in the field, of which there are only 4 or 5 and they're all in retirement now?  And they have a short recruitment montage for each of the experts, and of course one of the experts has fallen to the wayside over the past few years, and it takes their old leader to give him a pep-talk to join the team?  Then the rest of the movie is Apollo 13-ish drama?

But I'd like to see a good old cheesy "Old Time Reunion" movie with the scientists from the Lunakhod program building bulldozers for the Chernobyl crisis.  The KGB would go to the leader first, and he'd say something like, "I'm sorry comrades, but those glory days are long behind me.  I've completely forgotten how to build a Luna rover."  And then the KGB agent would reveal himself as the former leader of the Soviet space program, pull out a picture of his dead wife, and say, "Are you going to live in her shadow forever?"  They leave him with the picture, and the next day he calls up the director and says, "I'm in."

The rest of the montage would show the former Lunakhod leader going to all of his former teammates.  Of course the first one he goes to is the 'buddy'-stereotype.  The guy he used to be good friends with but lost contact.  And of course, this usually happens with the 'buddy' stereotype, he's also a danger-junkie.  And he's now no longer doing radio telemetry; but doing something insane like base-jumping.  And the old leader catches him in the act.  They start having small talk and catching up, until the 'buddy' finally says, "Alright, spit it out, why are you here?"  And after the old Lunakhod leader says that he's trying to recruit the old team members to clean up the Chernobyl radiation, the 'buddy' spins his back to him with a disgusted look on his face, starts to walk away...before he dramatically (and cheesily) spins around and says, "You bet I'm in!"

The rest of the recruitment goes fine until they (of course, man, so many cliches with this kind of movie) meet the team member who has fallen by the way side, but has some obscure knowledge that no one else has that makes him absolutely necessary.  He has started drinking and let himself go.  Eventually, the old team leader pins him up against the wall and says, "Dammit Breznokovsky!  Are you just going to let it end like this?  Living alone in some little tenement in Moscow, decaying until the end of your days?!  I know you've still got the brains, and you still got the guts!"  He looks away sullenly before saying that he'll do it...for old times sake.

Then they actually get to work, meeting up at the site, and start requisitioning supplies.  Only, they find that the supplies are either non-existent or will get there too late.  At a late night meeting they start to get frustrated, someone mentions something about the old leader's dead wife, which causes him to blow up in front of everyone and storm out.  The old 'buddy' goes out to talk to him and help him face his past.  After this they start walking about, thinking about what they can do without any equipment, when they notice a bunch of unused bulldozers used for the construction of the radio tower next to Privayt.  They rush back to the meeting room, where almost everyone else has fallen asleep and after waking them up begin talking about whether they can retrofit the bulldozers.

Someone brings up a crucial technical question that makes everyone second-guess whether the idea is even possible.  They all look at the obscure expert since only he has the knowledge that would make it possible to overcome such a technicality.  Everyone stares at him as he dramatically pauses and rubs his chin, mulling it over.  The camera scans over the sweat-stained faces of the other men in the room.  Breznokovsky stands up and beings to pace around, talking to himself.  Then, he stops, and falls silent.  After a long pause the leader tentatively questions him again on whether or not it's possible, in a much softer and less confident voice.  Breznokovsky then dramatically turns around and says, "Yes.  Yes I think it just might work."  Everyone looks at each other, smiles and high-fives abound.

Then starts the construction montage.  Complete with 80's music.  Add in some laugh track clip of someone holding a blueprint upsidedown.

Finally, they begin using the machines to enter the worksite.  There is some tension as they get closer to the reactor as the technicality earlier mentioned is brought up again.  They ask Brez. whether or not he wants to stop, "Dammit!  It's too late to turn back now!"  The entire team is on edge.  Suddenly, there's a collapse in the reactor wall that damages some of the relay equipment on the bulldozer.  If they can't move it, then the bulldozer has effectively blocked a crucial entrance and threatens to let out a large radioactive pocket for some reason.  The team starts to break down as everyone begins yelling at each other and blaming each other for various parts in the project.  Then, Brez. yells, "Switch the rotor to AUX" (a reference to an obscure command that someone in Mission Control during Apollo 12 yelled out that saved the mission).  At first, no one even knows what this means, and after Brez. explains the 'buddy' immediately mentions how risky this is.  The room goes silent as leader and Brez. look at each other with cold glances.  Brez. gives the leader a steely nod, to which he replies in kind and then gives the order to switch to AUX.

There is a long, tense pause as the camera pans over each of the team members during the long radio silence after the switch.  The bulldozer is able to complete its mission.

Fade to credits.  Bring up more 80's music.

Likewise, every action movie follows along the same premise:

• Bad guy is a stereotypical drug dealer (or some criminal) who
• Kidnaps the guy's family (or threatens them, or he's fighting to see his family again, or has the girl of his dreams)
• Guy goes on a fucking rampage
• Tough guy kisses his wife/wife-to-be while explosions/ruins lie in the background

For example:

There are so many fucking movies like this I don't even know where to begin.  I don't think it'd be an exaggeration to say half of all movies are this one action movie.

Let's compare to some videogames.

Hell, let's compare these movies to SOME GODDAM CARTOONS.

Shit, how about some goddam T.V. DRAMAS.

MOVIES HAVE BILLION DOLLAR BUDGETS!

THEY SPEND YEARS IN PRODUCTION!

WHY THE FUCK CAN'T THEY COMPARE TO THIS SHIT?!

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know every once in a while they do, but for all the resources involved you'd think it'd be better than the piss-shot they have now-a-days!

'Trivial' trivialities

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that...mathematicians should really stop saying that things are 'trivial'.

As a cultural phenomena, it typically engenders some pretty bad actions--namely, continually negative self-talk and derision.  It is really more a source of punishment, although most people in mathematics, including myself, do it with good intentions by hoping that we are really conveying the message, "Don't worry, this isn't too bad."  If you constantly berate yourself and others that stuff is simple, then when you do find a beautiful--elegant--proof, it will initially be a source of great displeasure.

It also encourages fairly one-sided thinking.  I.e., the slick proofs are typically the proofs that show something in a few lines.  If someone mathematically matures with such proofs, and creating such proofs, they tend to think more like every other mathematician (i.e., it creates a lack of creativity), and the harder, longer proofs will be less frequently come by.

Think, for example, of Posa's Soup Proof.

That proof is absolutely trivial!  Why didn't the mathematical community do this?!  How could we be so stupid?!

^Tl;dr, the above is not helpful.

Mathematical notation....and mathematical NOTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATION

There's mathematical notation.

And then there's mathematical notaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaation.

'Mathematical notation' includes all kinds of notation.  '+' is a symbol to denote addition, or 'e_i' refers to basis vectors, or even the picky stuff like 'capital letters refer to matrices and lower case letters refer to scalars'.  And, unfortunately as I'll get into, the VAST vast VAST VAST...vast?...VAST VAST VAST majority of 'mathematical notation' is what kind of letters stand for what (f,g,h are typically reserved for function, x,y,z for variables, etc.).

But then...then there's notaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaation.

Notaaaaaaaaaaation is the really big, fundamental stuff.  It's when some mathematician realizes that when you write something in a different way, it completely changes your conception of the world.

Here is an example:

'x+y'

This is a standard, basic, operation.  But the point is that if this is the notation you have, while analysts can use it quite well and all, it is really suited more for algebraists.  However, rewrite the above as:

'+(x,y)'

And now just writing it so differently has changed the conception completely.  Now instead of thinking of it as an operator, it is a function.  It certainly made sense before to think of '+' as a function and to say it is continuous.  However, simply writing it in this form greatly pedagogically clarifies the matter.  The notation is reflecting the paradigm of thought.

When notation can do that, then it's notaaaaaaaaaaation.

But, then there's even bigger notaaaaaaaaaaation.  This is stuff like...the guy who first thought of writing:

A->>B

Meaning A maps surjectively into B.  Modern module theory would not have been possible had someone not thought of making these arrow-chasing diagrams of modules, with each arrow representing a different kind of map (surjective, injective, etc.).  Notaaaaaaaaaaaaaation also involves a way of just being able to even represent certain things.

To a certain extent, I suppose this is time dependent.  Whereas now-a-days saying 'x' stands for a variable is just notation, when the first mathematician thought of representing algebraic equations by x's and y's, that was first class notaaaaaaaaaation; although now-a-days it's rather taken for granted.

Often, I think now that mathematicians have a few stages:

-Average mathematicians slightly generalize a result, or show a certain, VERY specific counterexample.
-Good mathematicians create new results, or completely pathological counterexamples.
-Great mathematicians develop amazing notation and definitions.
(FWIW, I'm a bad mathematician :P)

I suppose for possibly this reason, I might controversially say that Leibnitz was a better mathematician than Newton.  He developed first-rate notation that enabled calculus to really get going.  (nonetheless, Newton was a great mathematician as well by this criteria, as he did invent some notation that caught on at least in physics (the dot notation)).

FWIW, I remember talking to Charles Von Loan, and he very much thought of tensors and tensor product as notaaaaaaaaaaation for the upcoming generation.

Halmos is Batman

I suppose you can find me saying something similar to this at amazon, but either way....

PRAISE FOR HALMOS.

Something I like about Halmos is that he actually details his FAILURES (gasp!).  He detailed when he failed from graduate school in philosophy, his hardship in becoming an assistant or getting a job. I certainly learned a lot from Halmos' successes, but I felt I learned a lot more in his detailing of his failures.
The reason I am pointing this out in such detail is because if you read other biographies of other famous scientists, you get the feeling that you have to have been doing hardcore science since you were 15, have excelled in every path you came across, and finished your PhD by your 21st birthday; and if you don't you're a miserable failure of a human being. Halmos is the antithesis of these stories. Halmos story shows that you can do math if you thunk around everywhere, so long as you keep your nose to the grindstone and like what you're doing, and gives valuable advice about HOW to do this. Halmos wasn't born with some superhero genetics or superpowers.

Halmos is the Batman.

Siesta

Argentina has this tradition of siestas.  The town closes down and everyone goes to bed in the middle of the day.

I love siestas.

The "Let's Have Fun" Urge

One more thought.

Connected with the experience of boredom, is a reaction to this experience--something which I like to call the "Let's Have Fun Urge".  Whereas boredom, in my experience, always comes before LHF, there are instances in which one can be bored and not have LHF.  Also, although a Behaviorist would/should argue that LHF will eventually die out, in my experience it does not.  It can continue for endless hours or even days if you let it.  Really, psychologically, it is very similar to the physical pain of, say, a canker sore.  It will remain omnipresent and constantly grate at your attention until you do something about it.

I very much like the analogy to a canker sore, it seems to suit the emotion very well...

However, while with boredom there might be a possibility of a cognitive shift of such an emotion to something more akin to 'mono no aware' or something similar...I have not found a similar strategy for LHF.  It is constant, annoying, and does not go away.  Now, the common response to this is, typically, to not let it go away.  And, instead, to succumb to it.  I really dislike this response.  I like to think that I'm not an automaton, that I'm not a slave to my desires.  And, at the very least, personal freedom is the most immediate aspect of one's self that remains readily amenable to be worked upon.

The Science of Boredom

As I may have indicated, I think of things in a rather Behaviorist manner.  As such, the reaction of anxiety is that as an emotion to drive an escapism against perceived future punishment.  Given that, in my previous post, I expressed boredom as a form of anxiety, this more or less paints the picture of my perception of boredom.

The 'Phenomenology' of Boredom

In a word, anxiety.  I think that all boredom can essentially be described as a manifestation of anxiety.  At least, whenever I experience boredom, it is as a trade-off--it is as a desire to be doing something else--usually, something very explicit that I can indeed explicitly name.  It comes as an emotion of the incongruence of actions to desires.  Moreover, there is a set impermanence to its character.  It is set as a constant urge to be doing yet some other action.  And, furthermore, the only set difference between boredom and anxiety is, I submit, a difference only in degree and not in kind.  That boredom is merely the most mild form of anxiety is readily apparent at the thought experiment of increasing the supposed need of the desired action.  That is, if the same thing desired during boredom should suddenly become more urgently needed, say desire to write a paper in leisure v. desire to write it under a deadline, then we would suddenly feel anxiety.

With that said, all that we find in the state of boredom is that which we find in anxiety; and of that only of the most mild character.

Husserl v. Descartes

A lot of what goes into this post is borrowed from the following video of an interview of Barrett, which I would highly suggest myself both because this is pretty much where all of my information on the subject comes from, and also because...I don't know, maybe you'd like to follow along:

I want to bring up phenomenology, in part because of the vague interest in intellectual masturbation over armchair philosophy--with all of the negative connotations of those words brought up on purpose for the purpose of some self-indictment here--but also to get into some self-rumination as to the meaning of 'boredom' and the different takes based on these philosophies that one can come to.

Coming at existentialism via differentiating it from the idea of a Cartesian split I find to be an interesting and fruitful starting point--although, supposedly, it is inherently wrong in some sense (insofar as I gather that Sartre was a Cartesian (as are all good Frenchmen), but, to be honest with you, I'm not an expert in this stuff, I'm a random douchebag on the internet--take what you're reading here with a grain of salt).  In the Cartesian point of view, there is a mind-body problem--the mind and body as separate, with the body symbolizing the external world.  Whereas, I think the key evidence from our own lives that indicates that there is something wrong with this is, for example, the experience of 'spacing out'.  I suppose the Cartesian would explain the lapse in consciousness via some sort of Maxwellian Demon, but we can trace back our having existed in some sense.  The lapse of thought not necessarily being indicting of the lapse of being, and that therefore existence is prior to being as opposed to the alternative.  This is what I think is primary evidence--or at least heuristic justification, for the support of existentialism.

Now, with this idea, I'd like to bring up some ideas regarding Husserl and phenomenology.  Likewise, for those who like to follow along with where most of my thoughts have come from:

I'd like to recall the idea of bracketing, or phenomenological reduction, that instead of asking about whether an object exists or not, we at the very least accept that it is an object of our consciousness, and treat it as such and explain the object as such.

This, is the introduction to which I would like to treat the question of boredom.  As an object of consciousness.  What is boredom insofar as an object of our experience, and how do we _experience_ it?  That would be the phenomological reduction of the problem, I believe.  Whereas, if I were to treat it in a more empirical sense, as I suppose might be further possible in a Cartesian framework (although technically in both), I could ask what are the physiological influences _of_ boredom?

And, with this introduction, this is how I hope to explore boredom in the next two posts:  as an object of consciousness, and as an object of external reality.

The Pedagogical Nature of Constructivism

Errett Bishop is said to have 'gone religious'.  Referring not to some act of theosophy, but rather to him becoming an intuitionist.  One of the interesting features of the intuitionists is the rejection of the law of excluded middle (and of the axiom of choice, which Bishop himself rejected that he rejected that, but insofar as I've seen it in practice, he never uses it and shies away from it).  The philosophical ramifications of accepting such a position are interesting, although, for various reasons that I won't go into here I find wrong.  Yet, more importantly, I still appreciate this school of thought--not for the philosophical import, but rather for their pedagogical import.

That is, a theory that is devoid of proofs of contradictions, tend to make a more cogent theory that is easier to understand, and easier to see how the theory is fully developed and why certain theorems/etc. are needed.  As opposed to the shorter lickety-split proofs that provide quick answers, yet, in my opinion, lacking insight.

Low Cee Intro

Sorry for the lack of posts from me lately. Luckily Feppy has been carrying the blog pretty well.
Small updates on what's going on.
Been getting to know this girl from church and everything seems to be going well. I'm always nervous I'm going to ruin everything and make things awkward. But that's just who I am.
She's really cute and attends church regularly. As it turns out those are two very big pluses for me.
The downside is that I think she's a bit of a party-er. For most people that wouldn't really be a problem but it is for me. I know it sounds really picky but I've always dreamed of having a straight edge girlfriend.
We aren't going out but I'm hoping it eventually leads to it. I'd love to be able to cuddle up next to her and watch a movie. OH GOD THERE'S THE HOPELESS ROMANTIC TUWIND.
We'll see where it goes but I'm actually kind of scared of it. If we do go out we'll be watched like a hawk at church and if we break up I'll be the asshole who broke up with the girl at church.
THESE ARE ACTUAL THINGS I WORRY ABOUT.
And there's the part of me that thinks I'm going to be a part of the biggest friendzoning in the history of relationships. I can handle it but I won't be happy about it. I'll start listening to all my old emo music. THANKS ZEHOS.
And Zehos, I'm sure you'll never read this but I want to say thank you. You saved me in high school. If it wasn't for the Silverstein cd's I probably would have lost my fucking mind. (LOL AS IF I DIDN'T ANYWAYS, AMIRITE?) But really, you did a lot more than you think.
THAT'S ALL FOR NOW FOLKS.
I HOPE YOU HAVE CHAMPAGNE WISHES AND CAVIAR DREAMS.

Musical Progress

Something I often hear, typically from older generations, but now even from people my own age, is how 'modern music' and 'this stuff these kids are listening to now-a-days'...to put it politely, sucks.  And, you know, I would like to make a counterargument to this, even though I don't like some of this music much more than Simon and Garfunkel.  I think, even with rap music, there is evidence of musical progress; and it doesn't really suck all that much.

First, before I present some actual arguments, I'd like to point out what I think are the biases prevalent before us (content warning, some mild nudity and, of course, lots of cussing):

I think, somewhat obviously, we have an inflated view of our own preferences and our own past.  And, honestly, I think this is what is going on when people say 'music these days sucks'.  True, you'll have the gangsta rappers doing there rendition of (yet another content warning, excessive cussing):

Among other songs very similar.  But hey, remember this guy?

My point isn't that Helter Skelter was a worse song, but rather that every harvest has some bad apples Moreover, to be honest, the discussion of absurd content or 'moral quality' is really a red herring.  I feel I should note that the moral quality or the strong content of a song is not necessarily linked with the aesthetic quality of a song.  To give an example, my father has a copy of Picasso's Blue Guitarist:

It's kept, hidden away, in the back of his garage.  I asked him why he keeps a Picasso, even though it may not be original, stuffed in the back of his garage.  And he replied, "Look at it."  And, when I look at this painting, I can see why you might not want to have it hanging in the middle of your living room for you to look at every day.  Now, does the fact that we don't want to look at it indicative that the painting is a bad painting?  I would argue for quite the opposite.  Since, in order to have that profound of an emotional reaction is indicative of some high quality artwork.

Another example (content warning):

Click here to go to the painting Saturn Devouring His Son

This is a very classical painting.  It is also one of the most grotesque paintings I've ever seen and I can't stand to look at it.  To me, that's indicative of high quality artwork, even though I personally hate the painting.

With that said, another one of my points to put alongside the fact that we have biases to what we have accumulated experiences to, is that modern music--by nature of its modernity--will strike at themes overtly which making older generations uncomfortable.  My point, however, is that there should be a 'Hume's Guillotine of aesthetics,' if you will.


Now, that I've gone over some common logical fallacies and preconceptions I feel I've faced in hearing such arguments, allow me to give at least one actual argument (which, as usual, is the smallest part of my post).  And, like any good discussion, I'll quote Chomsky (this one actually is SFW):

(the full interview is fascinating, but I post this segment here regarding the cognitive development and argument for progression in music)

My argument that there is progression in music is basically lifted and copied directly from Chomsky in the above video.  The brain has this unique ability of a musical apparatus, the brain cerebrates at a high level when using this apparatus, and moreover, we can communicate various emotional intonations to others using it.  The notion of communication is key, and just like how communication of ideas begets intellectual progress.  I would posit the same for music.

As some evidence of this claim, I would suggest the reader to go back and start listening to a bunch of classical music; and, I hope you'll find (as I certainly did) how:

-Many of these same themes encountered in classical music--the counterpoint, matching harmonies, or even directly copied passages (the modern remix of Beethoven's Fifth comes to mind)--comes up in later music.
--This, of course, isn't simply limited to classical music.  The jazz of the 1920's can be traced back to the Creole music of New Orleans prior to that.
-How often this music is directly used in canon.

As an example of the later point, I'd like to point out the following piece (SFW):

I am convinced you've actually heard this piece before.  This is a very common piece to hear in a movie, usually when the protaganist is whistful and there's snow falling.

To back this up, I'll end with the following, listen to the background at 2:25:45 :

The evidence of the use of old themes, and the continual progression and building that we do upon them is ever present if we choose to notice it.

Applying

There are a lot of ideas I have that I'd like to do.

If I could just remember to apply them.

For example, I want a commonplace book.  The modern equivalent of this is a personal wiki.  Which I have, but I do not update as much as I want to or plan.  Mainly because I realize after the fact how something could have been incorporated into that framework, instead of how I originally did it.  I suppose, keeping with the example of the personal wiki, sometimes the idea I have is a good idea to apply, but in practice hard to apply.  The biggest case I have with this is any idea I have combined with the effort of traveling (which I mentioned previously).

I suppose the biggest example almost anyone I've talked to has, is that they have plenty of good ideas about how to stay healthy--that work buggerall if you're traveling (again, I mentioned this last time).  Likewise, I'd like to update my personal wiki all the time, but the amount of times in the day I honestly have access to it is stifling.

....

Perhaps my problem is not that I forgot to apply, but that the means to apply are more scarce than I realize?

This is a somewhat lengthy way of saying, "Updating things like my personal wiki seem to be incredibly useful, and they aren't hard work and are somewhat enjoyable, so why are these things never done and what can be done about it?"  Keeping in mind, the previous framework that I've developed over the last series of posts.