Logic and Reason

3 Reasons to Write Plainly

2011-11-23T17:29:00.000-08:00

My friend showed me an essay he wrote for his college application, and I thought it sounded like flowery BS. So this is what I emailed him.

---

You should write more plainly for three reasons:

People have bad reading comprehension. People read things and "get the gist" - but it's a pathetically vague gist.

(Readers have no idea how bad their understanding is. They'll think they've understood something they've read, but fail to answer a simple test question about it.)
Readers get bored easily. The more bored they get, the more they skim, and the less they understand.

If you want to be understood, don't wrap your message in a bouquet of flowery words. They won't unwrap it, they'll ignore it.
It's already hard enough to get people to understand your concepts.

Only a few things are easy for everyone to think about: Concrete statements about people, animals, food, war, sex, morality, personality, games, and landscapes. Almost every other concrete thing, and almost every abstract thing, is hard to think about.

So when you're writing about easy things like sex, you can say fancy things like "I am the east, and Juliet is the sun."

And when you're writing about hard things like the theory of relativity, you have to say plain things like "Mass dents spacetime the way a bowling ball would dent a bedsheet."

Most things you'll write about are like the theory of relativity, and not like sex.

So don't write a hard slab of beef jerky that your readers have to chomp on with all their might.

Process your ideas into Gerber weenies.

You can have as much as you want

2011-02-25T14:39:00.000-08:00

You like M&Ms, right? So consider this fascinating state of affairs: You can have as many M&Ms as you want.

The fascinating part isn't that you can have nice things -- it's that for some nice things, you can have as much as you want. You can keep eating M&Ms until you completely extinguish your desire to eat more M&Ms, and eat more M&Ms the instant your hunger is rekindled.

If you want to appreciate the luxury of modern life, forget about how awesome our airplanes and cell phones are. Instead, just focus on all the luxuries that are available and affordable to you in unlimited quantities.

You can eat as many calories as you want.
You can eat as many different kinds of foods as you want.
You can have as many pillows and cushions as you want.
You can read as many books as you want.
You can watch as many movies as you want.
You can watch as much porn as you want.
You can listen to as many varieties of music as you want.
You can take a shower for as long as you want.
You can drink as much of any beverage as you want.
You can get as drunk as you want.
You can make your house as hot or cold as you want.
You can light your house as brightly as you want.
You can plug in as many electrical appliances as you want.
You can drive to as many places as you want.
You can learn as many skills as you want.
You can talk with as many different people as you want.

If you want to know what the future will be like, just think of everything you like, and imagine having as much as you want!

Searle's Chinese Room: Slow Motion Intelligence

2011-02-17T02:28:00.000-08:00

Imagine if the only books ever written were children's books. People would think books in general were a joke. I think the situation with computers and algorithms today is similar: people don't understand the ridiculous potential power of an algorithm because they only have experience with the "children's algorithms" that are running on their PC today.

Take John Searle's famous Chinese room thought experiment, which goes like this:

A man who doesn't speak Chinese is alone in a room with a big book of rules. The rule book gives detailed procedures for how to write a response in Chinese to any question written in Chinese.

An interlocutor standing outside the room writes a question in Chinese on a strip of paper and slips it under the door. To the man inside, the paper is full of meaningless squiggles. But by painstakingly following the syntactic rules in the rule book, he is able to put together a string of Chinese characters that reply to the interlocutor in perfect Chinese.

Searle claims it's obvious that nothing in the room has a "real understanding" of Chinese, neither the man nor the book. Therefore Searle concludes that "real understanding" is not something a computer could ever have, since a computer is just a rule-following system like the man and the book in the Chinese room.

Searle's Chinese room is a great thought experiment, but it's ultimately a non-insight. I just don't buy that nothing in the room has a "real understanding" of Chinese. Want to know what really understands Chinese? It's quite simply the "rule book".

You have to realize that the "rule book" is not a "rule children's book". You can be sure it has a lot more pages than any actual book could have. Maybe it doesn't have as many pages as a human has neurons (100 billion), but it could easily be a million-pager like the code for Microsoft Word.

And you can be sure the person in the room would be flipping among the pages of instructions a lot slower then the firing rate of neurons. Considering that brains have billions of neurons all firing up to 100 times each second, we're looking at a trillion-fold speed difference between these two language-processing systems.

If you watched an actual Chinese speaker with their brain slowed by a factor of a trillion, you'd see slow and soulless neuron-level computation. When you compare that to watching a man flipping around in a rule book, the Chinese room doesn't necessarily seem like the more mechanical system.

Both systems get their soul back when you zoom out. Imagine zooming out on the Chinese room enough that you can watch a million book-flipping years pass while the interlocutor is waiting for a yes-or-no answer. If you watch that process on fast-forward, you'll see a chamber full of incredibly complex and inscrutable machinery, which is exactly what a Chinese speaker's head is.

The Chinese room is supposed to persuade you that a system made out of mere pages can't "really understand" language. But it doesn't address why a system made out of mere neurons shouldn't have the same limitation. To me it seems clear that the two systems have similar architectures and possess similar powers of understanding.

Are You 1 in 1,000,000?

2010-08-22T12:06:00.001-07:00

Basically, I want to make some viral thing before I die.

http://areyou1in1000000.com

Be Impressed

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

When would you say this to someone?

"Thanks for doing such a great job on this project. I'm happy you're taking on more and more responsibility."

You probably think you'd say this when someone has impressed you with their performance. But what if the person's performance is merely borderline acceptable, and you give some constructive criticism, and yet you still say it? Then you've performed a Jedi mind trick.

To the human subconscious, a statement like that is a powerful command. And I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about, now that I've brought it up: When you tell people they're making a positive impression on you, they automatically turn up the behavior that caused it.

If you want to get more out of the people around you, you need to start the virtuous cycle by noticing when their effect on you is even the slightest bit more positive than usual, and acting pleased.

And if there's someone who never pleases you, maybe part of the reason is that your consistently cold reactions to that person have flattened the reinforcement gradient that would normally amplify their positive behaviors over time.

Be appreciative whenever anyone behaves in what you judge to be the top 20% of their range. And if you want your reaction to cause an even bigger shift in their motivational dynamic, then kick it up a notch: be impressed.

What Is My Purpose?

2010-05-31T21:04:00.000-07:00

You've probably asked yourself the question, "What is my purpose?" Most people do, and then they die without ever hearing a satisfying answer. Others latch on to some arbitrary answer and feel like their curiosity has been sated, even though it hasn't really been fed.

It's easy to see that the question can be asked more precisely. You probably want an answer that was determined before you were born, right? By an entity that can be said to have "created" you in some sense? OK, we can work with that.

If you're in the habit of asking such "deep mysterious questions", you'll notice that it usually doesn't make sense to try to answer them as they are posed. Instead, the way to make the mystery go away is to explain what happens in your brain that makes you feel such a question is meaningful to pose.

Your brain generates questions to fill in gaps in your mental model of the world. But sometimes you start with an inaccurate mental model. So when you ask a question that makes sense to you, it doesn't necessarily constitute a meaningful question about the world.

In this case, the inaccurate mental model at fault is the concept of "purpose". Human thoughts are constructed out of building blocks that are hardwired into our brain. Our intuitive ontology includes concepts like "object", "momentum", "mood", and in particular, "purpose".

Our intuitive notion of purpose isn't perfect, as I will explain, but it is tied to meaningful observations. For example, we correctly intuit that a sundial is a lot more "purposeful" than a pile of rocks. That's because, in order to judge "purposefulness", we subconsciously make a distinction about why each thing exists:

Pile of rocks: Because of a passive physical process.
Sundial: Because of an optimization process.

If you'd never seen a sundial, and one day you saw one standing next to a pile of rocks, right away you'd subconsciously put it in the second category, because it's too improbable to be in the first. The best hypothesis to explain your observation, the one that most accurately predicts the existence and properties of sundials, posits the existence of a process that tries to "optimize toward a time-telling objective".

Even if you'd never heard of a sundial, and you didn't know about the time-telling objective, you would subconsciously assume that there's some criterion the sundial satisfies, and that some "optimization process" out there only creates things that satisfy that criterion. We're programmed, correctly, to conclude there's an optimization process at work when we see something that looks a lot more improbable than a pile of rocks.

When we detect an optimization process at work, we intuitively model it as if it's like a person who is consciously trying to achieve a goal. This works perfectly when the optimization process at work is, in fact, a person, like in the case of the sundial. But our intuition is completely unprepared to reason about an optimization process that isn't human-like.

A prestigious group of philosophers famously fell victim to their flawed intuition about optimization processes, and all their publications became contaminated with the assumption that optimization can only be performed by a purposeful human-like entity. I am talking about everyone before Darwin.

Before Darwin, people's intuitive purpose-o-meter was well-calibrated when it came to sundials and rocks. But the level of optimization evident in life forms registered off the charts, and people intuited that whatever created them must have had one hell of a purpose. The famous "argument from design", believed by everyone from Socrates to modern creationists, goes like this:

Boy, life forms sure are optimized to satisfy certain criteria really well.
[Accurate observation.]
They couldn't have been made by any old process; it had to be an optimization process.
[Sound intuitive inference.]
Life was created by a process involving a purposeful designer.
[Unsound intuitive inference.]

Before Darwin, everyone knew about the biological processes of variation, reproduction and death. But all those things were filed under the mental category of "passive physical process". Darwin realized that a combination of those passive physical processes leads to Natural Selection. And Natural Selection is a process that only creates things that satisfy the criterion of reproductive fitness. And that means it belongs in the other mental category: "optimization processes".

But human intuition isn't having any of this. Intuitively, "passive physical process" and "optimization process" are two fundamental mental categories, and it's inconceivable that you could build an optimization processes out of a combination of processes that are not themselves optimization processes.

This is one of the most common patterns in the history of scientific progress. Someone will say "Hey, what if Y is made out of this other thing X, even though X by itself is nothing like Y?" And your intuition will say, "Nope, trust me, Y is ontologically fundamental, so no insights here." For example:

Your intuition thinks sound is a fundamental thing, and wind is another fundamental thing, but really they are both properties of the movement of air particles.
Your intuition thinks motion and rest are two fundamentally different things, but really the only difference is your choice of reference frame.
Your intuition thinks your hand is made out of special organic matter whose mysterious life force makes it obey your mental commands, while a lump of clay is made out of boring regular matter. But really the only difference is that your brain controls muscles in your hand through a big wire.

A related pattern is that when you don't understand some phenomenon, it often feels like a grand irreducible mystery. Most of your ancestors were completely ignorant about science, so your intuition is only expecting to hear stories that "explain" a phenomenon while keeping the mystery intact, and without actually increasing your ability to make predictions about it. The last thing you expect is for the mystery to be explained in terms of non-mysterious concepts. But that's what Darwin did for the origin of life, and the explanation for your "purpose in life" curiosity will follow as a corollary to Darwin's insight.

Remember that any time you observe optimization, like with the sundial, you immediately make a mental model of an optimizer that possesses human-like purpose. You subconsciously observe lots of optimization in yourself and others, so you conclude you were created by a process with a human-like purpose. You want to complete the analogy: "Sundial is to time-telling as I am to ______".

If you fill in the blank with "perpetuating the relative frequency of certain alleles in the gene pool", then the analogy is a logical one. But even with our post-Darwinian understanding, which enables us to complete the analogy, it still doesn't feel like the mysterious question has been adequately explained away.

Why doesn't anyone actually try that hard to perpetuate their genes? People have a lot of sex, but they use birth control. People have kids, but not that many. And why do sperm banks have to pay men, instead of the other way around?

It's because perpetuating your genes isn't your purpose. It's your creator's optimization criterion, but it's not your purpose. You have your own purposes.

If you were creating an entity, and your purpose was to perpetuate its set of genes, and you were going to make that entity conscious, then wouldn't you make your creation consciously want to perpetuate its genes? That's the smart thing to do.

But the process that created you is pretty stupid. It pushes toward genetic fitness, but it doesn't do it perfectly. In fact, there are all kinds of obvious ways to make its creations more fit, but they're only "obvious" to a smart process like your brain. The only changes that are obvious to natural selection are the ones caused by minor mutations to the alleles in the current gene pool.

You are the product of a creator that did an impressive, yet also pathetically bad, job of optimizing you to perpetuate your genes. If Natural Selection were smart, it would have created you with one single, unshakable purpose: to perpetuate your genes. But it didn't. What purposes did it give you instead?

Well, it was trying its best to program a gene perpetuation purpose into the human brain, but it could only do a little bit in each generation. What we ended up with is a variety of impulses, some contradictory, and none of them explicitly representing the desire to perpetuate genes (although the desire to have kids comes close) -- but all of them unknowingly cooperating to get the job done in our ancestors' environment.

Would you trade the many fragments of your purpose -- curiosity, love, empathy, aesthetic taste, sex drive, ambition -- for a single-minded drive to maximize the number of copies of your genes? You wouldn't, because the fragmented purposes are already hardwired into you as precious values.

Your real purposes are represented in the physical structure of your brain, in its haphazardly optimized design. If Natural Selection had been a more effective optimizer, then we would all agree that donating food to charity is even more foolish than throwing it in the trash, because the recipients would perpetuate their genes in competition with yours, without reciprocating the favor of free food. But instead, that action is universally acknowledged as a noble one, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

It's ironic that, not only do we fail to consciously represent our creator's purpose, we also fail to consciously represent a coherent picture of our own fragmented purposes. We typically act like confused servants to a crowd of waxing and waning drives. If you understand this state of affairs, then you can use the full power of conscious thought and achieve your true purposes better than you otherwise would have. You can strive to be a knowledgeable and effective servant to a crowd of waxing and waning drives.

Surreal Comfort

2010-05-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

The BP oil spill is a truly massive disaster. I feel sad and angry about it, but I have to be honest: I don't live on the Gulf Coast, and I'm not affected at all.

Have you ever noticed how the world truly seems to be on the brink of going to shit, but your own life is great? It always seems like the worst is yet to come, like we're pushing our ecosystem and our economic system past some sort of point of no return and it's all just going to spiral into some sort of permanent worldwide collapse.

But in my own life, I live comfortably and do whatever I want, constantly learn cool new things, and buy progressively more awesome wireless-enabled devices with touch screens. Sometimes I wish I were allotted a fair individual portion of suffering after a tragedy like the BP spill. Because carrying on with my daily routine in my beautiful suburb, comfort intact, is surreal.

SadTech Update

2010-05-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

In 2005 I wrote that Lines are SadTech. Finally there's a cool startup that is solving the problem: QLess. VCs take note.

KEO Time Capsule Entry

2009-12-31T14:23:00.000-08:00

The KEO satellite project is launching a time capsule into space:

In 2009/2010, all of this [user-submitted] material will be transferred on board the satellite KEO and launched. KEO should return to Earth after circling our planet for several thousands of years, providing the world of tomorrow with an authentic image of what human beings are like today.

Today is the last day for anyone to submit text that will be stored in the digital time capsule. Here is my submission:

On December 31, 2009, the following obviously correct ideas are considered to be on the cutting edge of philosophy:

There is no such thing as an afterlife.

Many Worlds is the most clear-headed and productive way to interpret quantum mechanics.

Reductionism: The belief that the universe isn't fundamentally made out of love or consciousness or life or cells, but rather, that it has some fixed mathematical structure which admits to being modeled using various layers of abstraction on which those concepts can be defined.

Nothing -- not the big bang, not consciousness, not life -- is an inherently mysterious phenomenon. The universe is all representable mathematical relationships, and mystery is just a feeling in the mind of an observer.

The structure of consciousness and intelligence is cleanly separated from the quantum level by a level of abstraction. The only relevant details about low-level physics that those phenomena exploit are the implementation details of some Turing-equivalent model of computation.

Programmer Interview Question

2009-12-16T23:29:00.001-08:00

I have a favorite interview question I always ask programmers on a written test or in person (not so much on the phone). I just posted it on the Quixey blog:

Write a function findInSorted(arr, x). It’s supposed to return the smallest index of a value x in an array arr which, as a precondition, must be sorted from least to greatest. Or, if arr doesn’t contain an element equal to x, the function returns -1.

The great thing is, everyone understands it, and everyone thinks they can easily do it. But the answers I get are always non-working, off-by-1, sub-optimal in asymptotic runtime, inelegant, and/or not so good with edge cases. And that is why we're using it to screen programmer applicants at Quixey.

Quixey

2009-12-07T20:20:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed the snowballing apps trend? There are hundreds of thousands of apps out there. Desktop software, web apps, apps on social networks, apps on mobile phones, apps on CRMs, Firefox extensions, plugins, desktop widgets, and next year even apps for your car. Each month, the pace accelerates, with more and more platforms and apps getting released.

Yet, when you get into a situation where one of these apps can actually do something helpful for you, suddenly there's a huge market failure. If you need to...

Track invoices for a small dental clinic
See what iPhone apps will be cool to have on your trip to France
Get something to help you to be a better musician
Get the best software for helping your kids practice reading

...then, realistically, you're probably not going to do anything. It's just too much of a pain to search Google and wade through various blogs, spam sites, and web pages offering apps that you aren't sure can meet your needs. Think about all the hassles:

You can't describe what you want. Go to the iTunes store and search for "be a better musician" or "musicianship". No results! You will have to rack your brain for the right keywords to describe specific app features: "ear training", "scale practice", etc. Shouldn't you be able to just type in what you want?

You can't describe your circumstances. Go to Google and search for "apps for dentists" or "going to Paris apps". The results are a mess. If you want to browse the vast multitude of apps, shouldn't you get to see what apps are useful for your profession, your destination... your circumstances?

You can't evaluate the best match for your needs. Go to Google and search for "software to teach kids reading". If you're lucky, you'll find a nice listing like "best educational software", and download their recommendations. But why settle for "best educational software" when you want to know what's best for teaching kids to read? Shouldn't you get to see a list of educational software sorted differently depending on whether you search for "teach kids reading" or "teach kids math"?

So: I just left my job at Slide, moved from San Francisco to Sunnyvale, and for the last month I've been working full-time as a co-founder at a small startup called Quixey. Quixey's mission is to enable you to discover apps. We plan to launch an early beta in January. Until then, you can follow the Quixey blog.

You Are A Brain

2009-05-09T15:10:00.000-07:00

Here is a 2-hour slide show I made for college students and teens:

You Are A Brain

It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts on Overcoming Bias.

I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.

I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.

Note: When you view the presentation in Google Docs, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.

Close Friendship

2009-05-04T18:57:00.001-07:00

My friend Noam is a really cool guy, but I can't say we've been close.

Animal Morality

2009-02-01T18:46:00.000-08:00

I was happily eating meat one day and I realized that killing sentient things might be the kind of thing society takes in stride but is actually really bad, like slavery used to be. I should do something like a crisis of faith regarding whether or not it's okay.

The question at the heart of the matter is: How do we morally evaluate animal affairs? Here are my intuitions:

1. If you light a cat on fire, that's really bad. If you press a button to instantly vaporize an unsuspecting cow, that's morally neutral. If you step on a snail, no biggie.

2. If you keep a chicken in such a small cage that it can't turn around, that's bad. If you neuter a dog, that's better but still a little bad. If you make sure an un-neutered dog never gets to interact with a bitch (ensuring he can't have sex and puppies), that's morally neutral.

3. If an animal is already dead, the act of eating it is morally neutral. In fact I think the moral neutrality holds even for eating dead humans (although of course that activity will have a different context and there could be all kinds of other negative terms that go into the morality summation).

4. If you pet your dog, that's good because he likes it. (You like it too, which is another positive term in the morality summation. But the dog's enjoyment gets its own terminal value.)

5. If you wirehead an animal, it has the same moral value as any other orgasmium (orgasmium is the simplest configuration of matter which can be sentient and have the subjective experience of happiness, and whatever triggers the happiness sensation is constantly on at full blast). And I think orgasmium's existence is morally neutral.

So when an animal exists, goodness is some function of its happiness that increases while the happiness is within the animal's natural range, and subsequently drops to zero.

The point at which the animal's existence is morally neutral is around "somewhat happy". As you move left from that point, it monotonically decreases without bound. And even while you're within the animal's commonly experienced levels of pain, your trough in the graph is already deeper than the peak is high.

Here is a somewhat counterintuitive application of my tentative animal morality. Imagine there is an Animal Planet which is home to large populations of all the different animals from contemporary Earth in various ecosystems, but with no humans. It would be morally good to instantly vaporize Animal Planet, because putting all the suffering animals out of their misery will surely outweigh the cost of killing the few animals whose happiness is at the top of their natural range (and not higher).

Are Semicolons Pretentious?

2008-10-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

I just realized it's impossible to use a semicolon when you're writing with a casual tone; it comes off as pretentious. Right?

Amazon's New Price Font

2008-04-30T19:41:00.000-07:00

Maybe this is just me, but it seems like Amazon.com has managed a huge psychological breakthrough with the slightly altered fonts and styles on their product pages.

Somehow it seems like the larger, skinnier red price letters make it really easy to just click and buy, and even disappointing not to do so.

Overcoming Bias

2008-04-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

Overcoming Bias is my favorite blog. I've always thought of myself as a highly rational person, but after spending about 40 hours reading the series on rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, I've realized that the methodology of rationality is a lot more subtle and fascinating than I thought. It's fair to say this blog has changed my life more than anything else I've read in the last year. Here is one great quote among many:

It is a corruption of curiosity to prefer the question to its answer. Yet people seem to get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something. Worse, they think that the mysteriousness of a mysterious phenomena indicates a special quality of the phenomenon itself, inferring that it is surely different-in-kind from phenomena labeled "understood". If we are ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about our state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.

On Undefinable Numbers

2008-03-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

If you are asked to define the biggest number you can, and restricted to only using only 1000 characters of English text, then there are only finitely many things you can write, and only finitely many numbers you can define.

Out of all the numbers nameable with 1000 characters of English text, which is the biggest? Surely, it must be huge -- a lot bigger than "a googol to the power of (a googol to the power of a googol (...and so on, nested a googol times))".

Unfortunately, there is no such "biggest number", because there is no well-defined mapping from English phrases to numbers. In Who Can Name the Bigger Number, Scott Aaronson considers:

"One plus the biggest whole number nameable with 1,000 characters of English text."

This number takes at least 1,001 characters to name. Yet we’ve just named it with only 80 characters! Like a snake that swallows itself whole, our colossal number dissolves in a tumult of contradiction. What gives?

The paradox I’ve just described was first published by Bertrand Russell, who attributed it to a librarian named G. G. Berry. The Berry Paradox arises not from mathematics, but from the ambiguity inherent in the English language. There’s no surefire way to convert an English phrase into the number it names (or to decide whether it names a number at all).

The problem with English isn’t that it’s unsuitable for a discussion of math. On the contrary, it’s too good at discussing math. The Berry paradox shows that if phrases in a language could all be unambiguously interpreted as numbers, then the language wouldn’t be able to refer to itself with anywhere near as much expressive power as English.

The Berry paradox only applies when one attempts to define big natural numbers using natural language. But there is also a second problem when you try to define a real number using any representation: the finite-length strings you use to represent real numbers aren't able to represent them all.

The problem is that the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite, while the set of finite-length strings is countably infinite. (If you don't know what that means, then read the Infinity lesson notes from X-treme Thinking). Thus, the set of real numbers that you can define is only a countable island in the uncountable ocean of reals.

OK now imagine you're given an infinitely long piece of paper with a real number printed on it. It starts like this: 0.821480865132823066470938446095...

As far as you look, the numbers seem completely random. You don't discern any pattern at all. Let's say you have an eternity to look at this number and try to understand it, but when you're done, you have to communicate which number this is to a mortal living in a finite universe. What do you do?

In the general case, this is impossible, because we know that most real numbers are undefinable. So do you just give up? But wait, the number you were given was actually Pi, except with the first 100 decimal digits taken out. You could have just told that to the mortal!

Every real number has infinitely many decimal digits after the decimal point. And in general, it takes an infinite amount of information to communicate which real number you're talking about. But it would be overkill for me to spend my life trying to say infinitely many 3's as in 0.333333... when I could just use a finite shorthand like "one third" or "zero point three three three and so on". Certain real numbers admit to being identified by finite pieces of information. These numbers include Pi, for example, as well as the number 0.56656565556... whose 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and all other prime-numbered digits after the decimal points are 6's, with the composite-numbered digits all being 5's, and way more elaborate constructions than this.

So what kinds of real numbers can't we define? What does an undefinable real number look like? It looks like a number that you can't say what it looks like. In other words, it looks completely and truly random, more random than it's logically possible for finite creatures to understand.

So not only are we unable to talk about "the biggest whole number nameable with 1,000 characters of English text", we also can't say anything interesting about which real numbers are definable. In other words, the vast majority of real numbers are undefinable, but we can't imagine which ones they are, and we wouldn't know them when we see them!

Does it even make sense for us finite humans to talk about the existence of "undefinable real numbers" and the supposedly "infinite amount of information" that they contain? Are we talking about anything at all? It seems like the "ocean of undefinable reals" is really a make-believe ocean, and the "island of definable reals" is really all that's there to talk about.

My First Musical Composition

2008-02-20T23:08:00.001-08:00

I want to be a good composer and pianist someday, instead of a bad composer and an intermediate pianist like I am now.

Here's my first composition, a 30-second piece that I wrote up in an hour on the computer using Finale SongWriter 2007:

Fantasy in C Minor

X-treme Thinking

2008-02-20T22:46:00.000-08:00

This semester I teach a 1-unit class at UC Berkeley called X-treme Thinking. Here is the Course Website.

What Is There in Mathematics?

2008-01-05T00:47:00.000-08:00

“What is there?” is an important question in philosophy, as it applies to both the physical world, and the world of ideas. The branch of philosophy that studies this question is called ontology.

Mathematics is characterized by defining and studying various “mathematical objects”, such as sets, numbers, functions, graphs, sequences, polynomials, equations, Turing machines and complexity classes.

But two questions remain:

How can a mathematician be sure that the object of conversation is in fact a mathematical object, and as such that the mathematician is justified in using the terminology and methods of dealing with mathematical objects?
How does one ensure that one's definition of a mathematical object is unambiguous?

These questions seem deep and philosophical, perhaps without a well-defined answer. But modern mathematics manages to spare the ontologists from the unwieldy task of answering the above two questions individually for every mathematical object. This is done by only studying sets.

Even though we only study sets, the surprising thing is that we can still prove things about properties of numbers, functions, graphs, and all the other “mathematical objects” we wanted to study. Sets are so versatile that we can always make some construction out of them with properties that mirror those of a given mathematical object.

Thus, we don’t require a new ontological entity for each mathematical object, because we can simply redefine all our terms about the object and its properties so that they refer to certain sets and their properties.

Since sets are the only mathematical objects, you might still ask the one ontological question about mathematical objects left to pose in modern math: What is a set? But then, what is “what is”? Generally one answers an ontological question with the name of an entity, so any pure mathematical answer to this question must be circular.

So we leave the question of “what is a set” unanswered. Until further notice, you don’t know what sets are, you just define all your mathematical objects in terms of them.

This is all the philosophical underpinning you will need to start thinking about naïve set theory. We should just keep in mind what the source of our naiveté is: since we aren’t defining what a set is, we don’t say how to decide which definitions of sets are valid, and which are not.

But the hole we left in naïve set theory, that we didn’t say how to decide which definitions of sets are valid, allows us to construct a profound paradox (Bertrand Russel’s): Let S be the set of all sets which are not members of themselves. Is S a set? Well, we said “let S be a set”, so that should be enough – you don’t have any grounds to argue that it isn’t. Is S a member of itself? By the law of the excluded middle, you must believe that the answer is either yes or no. By the definition of S, you must also believe the opposite conclusion. But by the law of non-contradiction, you can’t do that. So the constraints of rational thinking make nonsense out of naïve set theory.

When we study axiomatic set theory, we define properties that a set must satisfy, instead of just letting intuition decide which definitions are valid sets and which aren’t. Axiomatizing set theory introduces a stunning array of counterintuitive results, but still enables us to avoid all known paradoxes.

What answer do we give to the question of “what is a set” in axiomatic set theory? Assuming that the axioms of set theory don’t contradict each other, Kurt Gödel’s completeness theorem tells us that axiomatic set theory has a model – meaning, in another meta-theory of sets which is a foundation for the study of axiom systems, there exists a meta-set whose elements satisfy our axioms' conditions of being sets. So we can say that those elements are the sets. But what kind of mathematical object is a model? It’s a set: not a set in our axiomatic set theory, but a set in the set meta-theory that underpins model theory which underpins the original axiomatic set theory.

Then what about meta-sets in the meta-theory of sets? All we can do is construct a model for one axiomatic set theory within another, and add arbitrarily many levels to the hierarchy of meta-sets inside meta-meta-sets.

If we look at any given level of meta-set in this hierarchy and ask what its definition is, there are two possibilities: either the set is an element of a model of an axiomatic set theory, or the question has no mathematical answer, because the set is the ontological foundation of the highest level model theory.

When we answered the question of what sets are in axiomatic set theory, we forced ourselves into a dead end by saying that they were elements of a model of set theory. But we can also give a second answer: sets are the symbols we write on paper as we mechanically apply inference rules to the set axioms (which are also symbols). So this is what we mathematicians do: define everything in terms of sets, define an axiomatic set theory which avoids all known paradoxes, and then field philosophical challenges by pretending to be blind mechanical theorem derivers. Then when the challenger goes away, we go back to abstracting and deriving meta-theorems.

If you want to talk about sets, and you don’t want to be stuck without a definition for sets at the highest level of the model hierarchy, then you have no choice but to take the notion of a set out of the scope of ontological study. You have to believe that every discussion about sets is shorthand for a discussion of symbols which purport to describe the sets. But at the highest level of axiomatic set theory, the one the mathematician writes in, the symbols can’t really be talking about anything.

It isn’t all that surprising that we initially reached an ontological dead end when we asked the question of what is a set. After all, every definition is made up of words, and there are only finitely many words. Thus, any chain of “what is” questions must end, or be answered with a circular definition.

And of course, we are still working our way down such a chain of questions. For what exactly are the “inference rules” and “strings of symbols” with which we confidently work? This is another discussion. But compared to the original question of what a set is, this is a discussion which seems quite alright for a mathematician to leave to a philosopher. A discussion of sets seems to strike much closer to the foundation of mathematics than a discussion of the mechanical execution of rules. Thus, we should be content to proceed with mathematics as usual, while leaving the philosophers to address a topic in the non-mathematical realm of ontological inquiry.

Top 5 Most Poorly Executed Dead Baby Jokes

2007-11-10T20:21:00.000-08:00

5. What's the difference between a pile of dead babies, and stuff I don't keep in my garage?

4. What's arguably more humane than one dead baby in ten dumpsters?

3. What's funnier than a live adult in a clown costume?

2. How many dead babies was I able to fit in a barrel last night after I killed them?

1. What's the funniest way to prevent human overpopulation while neither killing anyone over the age of 1, nor causing a decrease in births?

Self-Reference Seminar

2007-04-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

I wrote up the detailed notes for my latest Extreme Thinking seminar. Check it out:

Self-Reference

Friend's Blog

2007-04-10T22:51:00.000-07:00

My friend Lior started a blog. It's funny.
Did A Guy Named Phil Start Philosophy?

Computers Are Fast

2007-03-21T02:27:00.000-07:00

What have you done in the last second? Because your computer could have done a billion things.

Do you ever stop to think about how much work a CPU running at 1Ghz is doing? A lifetime isn't enough for a human to consciously do a billion of anything (although the brain's equivalent clock speed is much higher for subconscious tasks like vision processing). The task of calculating Pi to a million digits was beyond the wildest dreams of a millennium of mathematicians. But we can give a computer the task, and it'll come back with the answer in one second!

One nanosecond is too small to ever comprehend, but that is the basic unit of time for a computer's operations. For a computer, one second must be an eternity.

Proving 1+1=2

2007-03-01T00:47:00.000-08:00

This is my first philosophy of math post, and I got the ideas from reading Scott Aaronson.

I saw some wiseacre on an internet forum make a reference to this famous page in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and challenging people to prove that 1+1=2. So I thought,

What does it mean to prove that 1+1=2?

Generally when you prove something in formal math, you start by defining axioms, then use logical inference rules to derive the result. If you've learned Geometry, you are probably most familiar with Euclid's axioms for plane geometry.

[Interesting geometry fact: Do you remember learning that when two parallel lines are intersected by a transversal line, pairs of interior angles are congruent? There's no derivation of why that's true -- it's just accepted as an axiom of Euclidean geometry! But it's like the axiomatic black sheep -- much more complicated than Euclid's other four axioms. And it's also what makes the system Euclidean geometry, instead of a different geometry.]

Today, the most common axiom system mathematicians use as a foundation for proofs is called Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory. And in ZF set theory, 1+1=2 has a relatively simple proof (although I personally haven't seen it yet)! 1+1 is also easy to prove in a simpler axiom system called Peano Arithmetic.

In the last few centuries, there's been a huge quest by mathematicians to "justify" basic math statements like 1+1=2, in order to "place mathematics on a more secure foundation". That's partly what all this axiom system stuff is about.

Axiom systems are great; in fact, they are an area of concentration for me. But we can make axioms be whatever we want. If you get a kick out of seeing 1+1=3, you can just define a new axiom system where that's the case. You still have to avoid logical contradictions, though, so I hope you weren't too attached to the old semantic meaning of "+" and "=".

So, what is the ultimate secure foundation for 1+1=2? Well, I'm afraid 1+1=2 is part of the foundation itself. Yes, the axioms of set theory prove it, but that's not why anyone is actually inclined to believe that 1+1=2. On the contrary, mathematicians surely listened to their powerful intuition that 1+1=2 when they chose which axioms to accept as part of the "foundation of math".

So where does the 1+1=2 intuition come from? I think you can break it down a little more by seeing 1+1 as the definition of our intuitive notion of two-ness. That intuition, I'm guessing, is a connection we make when the fundamental perceptual notions of repetition or similarity are invoked. Perhaps you are holding a Jolly Rancher, and also a Sweet Tart. They're not identical, but they're both foods, and they're certainly both physical objects with pretty well-defined spatial boundaries. So two is afoot.

I Am A Strange Loop

2007-02-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

28 years after his classic book Godel, Escher, Bach (aka Introduction to Thinking About Awesomeness), author Douglas Hofstadter is releasing a sequel on March 5: I Am a Strange Loop.

If you've forgotten about the GEB topics over the decades since it came out, here is a quiz to refresh your memory:

True or false: I am a strange loop.
True or false: For every well-formed statement in formal set theory, there exists a proof that it is either true or false.
True or false: The axioms of formal set theory do not contain a contradiction.

Answers: #1 is probably true, #2 is false, and #3 is independent of formal set theory. In fact, given any consistent formal system F, you can create another, weirder consistent formal system by adding an axiom that can be interpreted to mean "F contains a contradiction". Good times.

Will Intern For Money

2007-02-13T01:12:00.000-08:00

Hey blog readers,

I am looking for a position in the South San Francisco Bay Area as a Summer programming intern. I am an undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering major, Math minor with experience and drive. Please let me know if you have anything to recommend.

Thanks,
--Liron

Secret Questions

2007-01-09T23:13:00.000-08:00

Today I created a password for a website, and it asked me for a secret question in case I forget my password. So I typed in "What is the answer?" And then as the answer, I used a throwaway password because it was displayed on the screen in plaintext, and obviously not going to be encrypted. What an awkward and patronizing experience.

Identifying Yourself to Yourself

2007-01-05T02:36:00.000-08:00

I just read a quick thought-provoking everything2.com post called creating a password to convince yourself you have traveled back in time. It got me thinking, if I were to travel back in time, how would I authenticate myself to myself as efficiently as possible? (It has to be quick, or else my present self will proceed to press a red button.)

I might start listing off passwords I use, but those could be hacked. I think a good approach would be to list the stuff I concern myself with and worry about. So I was imagining myself rapidly describing my innermost thoughts to myself, and I think I stumbled on a good exercise. Describing my innermost thoughts quickly and matter-of-factly in the second person gave me a bit of perspective.

All I've Got Against Moderate Religion

2007-01-01T23:23:00.000-08:00

The religion that we see today comes in fundamentalist and moderate varieties. I consider the two to be wrong and meaningless, respectively, but that's a subject for another post.

As an atheist, what truly moves me to action is fundamentalism, which I believe is actively destroying society (e.g. preventing stem cell research because of idiotic absolutist classification of a clump of cells as a human in good standing). But the bone I have to pick with moderate religion is much smaller.

Moderate religion is usually pretty fine in practice, because our moral intuitions and enlightened time period generally override a rational interpretation of what's really written in the bible. However, I would still prefer that the moderates give it up already, and here are all the reasons I can think of why moderate religion is bad.

The prevalence of moderate religion masks the true egregiousness of fundamentalist religion. For example, a moderate Christian doesn't think that Genesis is literally true, but when incredibly radical "Intelligent Design" comes along, which robs modern science of so much integrity that it might as well be asserting the full literal truth of the Genesis story, the average moderate is tempted to give it equal time in the classroom. Richard Dawkins expands on this in The God Delusion.

Moderate religion seems like an inconsistent worldview that straddles the boundary between proven rationality and comforting superstition. Scientists traditionally use the humble line of having nothing to say about philosophy. But the truth is that science had a lot to say about the subject. For example, every philosophy about the meaning of life that was written before Darwin must be completely re-examined -- the knowledge of our natural origin changes everything.

Likewise, modern biology tells us that our cells, organelles, DNA and proteins are made of the same passive atoms as any other matter in the universe. It seems that the modern, enlightened, scientific worldview is a completely materialistic one. There don't seem to be any gaps for supernatural intervention, even in what was once the most promising place -- our brains.

In light of the changes that science has had on our worldview, moderate religion seems to be nothing but a historical relic. Imagine that a baby were born into a completely secular, modern society, schooled in modern science, but largely ignorant of religion. Can you imagine a priest who finds him at age 20 and tries to convince him that there is a God? Even such a fixture of moderate religion as solitary prayer would seem absurd and outlandish to this rational character. In the world today, I believe moderate religion is using its moderation as an excuse to avoid some major burdens of proof.
My last argument is a very interesting one I read in a recent post by renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, recovering from surgery after his heart almost exploded, entitled Thank Goodness! (highly recommended).
I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

Dennett's point is that while a little prayer by a religious moderate is not a big deal, it is as inappropriate to the situation as sacrificing an animal -- a completely unjustified waste of time. Furthermore, praying in the hope of actually being helpful can seem, to an intelligent sufferer, like a mockery of the things that truly are helpful and valuable (such as the practice of medicine with scientific rigor).

So as rational humans, are we really so helpless that we need to rely on the crutch of absurd, outdated superstition? Well, frankly, I think a lot of oldsters are past the point of no return with their moderately religious fantasies, and that's alright. But the rest of us can handle it. Declaring yourself as an atheist might be scary and unnatural at first, even to someone like myself, with hardly any history of religious indoctrination. But it's not all that hard, and I think it is going to become more and more commonplace. Indeed, I expect that moderate religion will one day be seen as quirky and quaint, like sexual abstinence is today.

AIM Profile Dump 2

2007-01-01T18:33:00.000-08:00

Note: All of this content is plagiarized. If you want to find the sources, just search for the strings in quotes :)

Some professors asked a monk to lecture to them on spiritual matters. The monk ascended a podium, struck it once with his stick, and descended. The academics were dumb-founded. The monk asked them, "Do you understand what I have told you?"

One professor said, "I do not understand."
The monk said, "Then I have concluded my lecture."

Another professor said, "We will not pay you for this lecture."

Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream.
One said to the other, "I wish I were a fish. They are so happy."
The other replied, "How do you know whether fish are happy or not? You're not a fish."
The first said, "But you're not me, so how do you know whether or not I know how fish feel?"
The other thought for a moment and replied, "Because I was a fish in my previous life."
The first scowled at him. He said, "then you wouldn't mind if I threw you off this bridge, would you?"

At that moment, the first sage attained enlightenment.
He told the other sage what had happened.
"Yeah, I attained enlightenment too," the other sage said. He was lying.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those that can count.

"The truth is, I removed all my evidence of creating this world so that the smarter guys wouldn't believe in me. And what were the consequences? My Heaven only welcomes smart people. Those people will believe in me when they meet me in person! That's what I gave them the brains for, see? The last thing I need is a bunch of loony fanatics wandering around up there, getting their nose hairs all over the furniture."
--God

"I know when you are sleeping, I know when you're awake. I know if you've been bad or good... crap, there I go, confusing myself with Santa Claus again! Seriously, though, I do know." --God

Redundancy is the unnecessary use of either needless, tautological, pleonastic or superfluous text, by which one repeats, in duplication, the same, identical, aforesaid things over and over again, beyond what would be needed or required to explain, or make comprehensible, the intended or signified meaning of that which one wishes to convey. Customarily, it is usually common in redundancy to repeat, sometimes with different phrasing or words, the same idea or reasoning, thus restating one's thoughts, sometimes paraphrasing oneself and effectively saying the same thing twice, or double.

John J. Johnson Jr. II, the current and present president of the Society for Redundancy Society, has proposed that "Redundancy is an art, capable of being captured only by the minds of those with minds capable of capturing the art of redundancy."

All-Time Favorite Russian Reversals
In Firefox, you keep tabs on your browser. In Soviet Russia, browser keeps tabs on you!
Also: In Soviet Russia, fox fires you!
In Soviet Russia, ride pimps you!
In Soviet Russia, time kills you!
In Soviet Russia, day seizes you!
In Soviet Russia, remote controls you!
In Soviet Russia, Waldo finds you!
In Soviet Russia, joke overuses you!

If all the village idiots, in all the villages in the world, left their villages to form their own village, of village idiots, in that village, of village idiots, you would be the village idiot.

How many members of a (given demographic group) does it take to change a lightbulb?
N+1 (where N is a positive whole number) -- one to hold the lightbulb, and N to behave in a fashion generally associated with a negative stereotype of that group.

Smart Voting Website

2006-11-12T17:01:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday, I voted in the midterm elections. I did it by filling out an absentee ballot in front of a computer at the library. I thought many of my votes were well informed, but frankly, my votes for the less prominent positions were not very well informed at all (I briefly consulted a few web pages), and for some votes I didn't feel informed enough to make any decision at all. This state of affairs is just unacceptable for this country in this age.

Today I got an idea from this post by Scott Adams. Scott says he doesn't vote because he doesn't know enough to make an informed decision. In the future, he thinks there will be a website where people can go to get informed to a sufficient degree, and when that time comes, he looks forward to voting.

I would like to develop a website with a very specific goal. For each election ballot item, there should be a single dynamic page that gives people the info they need to make a decision. It should allow people to quickly pinpoint the differences between the candidates that are relevant to their values. I don't know what that will look like yet, and I will appreciate any ideas other people suggest.

The site should be informative, smart, and unbiased the same way that Wikipedia is -- by fairly presenting input from lots of users. Maybe each voter can enter what their values are, and then the page will be modified to point out differences in stances that similar voters thought were important. One idea for ballot proposition issues is to have polls whose results are weighted by voters' scores on a short knowledge test (basic facts about the propositions).

By the way, I made my first web application last year -- a proof of concept for a new type of social networking site. A demo of RelationCraft is currently online. But I hope my politics site, or a future idea, will be a more practical candidate for wide release.

AIM Profile Dump

2006-11-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

I didn't want to make this blog into a link blog, but I come across a lot of interesting stuff on the web, and I usually just post it to my AIM profile. So my AIM profile is becoming a link blog with no archive. Here is today's AIM profile dump.

Grey's Anatomy is a great show. It had to be said.

"Don't inter-fucking-rupt!"
Expletive infixation

"By making misogynistic, racist statements in the friendliest way and asking people to high-five over them, [Borat] gets folks to say things they wouldn't if they knew the film was going to be shown in their own country." --Borat Makes Funny Joke On Idiot Americans

"They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They're not laughing now." --Bob Monkhouse

Great pickup lines from Weird Al:
You must have fallen from heaven -- that would explain how you messed up your face.
Girl, you'd look like the Venus de Milo if I just cut off your arms.

HOST: I'm curious, have you ever Googled anybody? Do you use Google?
BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps.
Bush Says He Uses The Google

"If you came from the future, wouldn't you do exactly what Bill Gates did???"

"The criterion by which we cherry-pick morals from the bible is available to all of us -- religious or not." --Richard Dawkins

Hey baby,
If I were an endoplasmic reticulum, how would you want me?
Smooth... or ROUGH??

"I wish I were your problem set, because then I'd be really hard and you'd be doing me on the desk."

While arresting a speeding driver, a police man asked this question: "Do you know how fast you were going?!"
The driver replied, "No, because I knew exactly where I was."

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain -- and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin

Me and Richard Dawkins

2006-10-29T01:03:00.000-08:00

In the background signing books is renowned scientist Richard Dawkins (I'm in the center foreground). I think Richard Dawkins constitutes the perfect specimen of an intellectual, because he:

is brilliant
is a gentleman
has a great sense of humor
has a really crisp British accent

I really admire the guy.

Anchoring

2006-10-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

A fascinating psychological phenomenon: Anchoring.

Base

2006-10-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

My computer in my dorm is my base. Whenever I'm in my room without having decided exactly what to do next, I get in my computer and see what's up -- email, AIM, Facebook, reddit.com, my Google RSS feed aggregator, and my bittorrent downloads. Even though I'm on the computer more than average, I know most of the people I know have this "base" relationship with their computers.

What I'm wondering is, did people had an analogous base state in their homes before computers became ubiquitous? I guess in the last century it was in front of the TV. Before that, in front of the radio? In the easy chair with a newspaper? At the desk with a pen and paper?

I guess without an incredibly entertaining way to idle, people kind of had to move from one task to another. The "base" thing may be an unprecedented transformation of the American lifestyle.

Queerer Than We Suppose

2006-09-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

Here is a video of a brilliant talk by Richard Dawkins entitled "Queerer Than We Suppose: The Strangeness of Science". Very good stuff.

Human Pheromones

2006-09-14T00:36:00.000-07:00

I remember my introductory biology textbook said that the existence of human pheromones was still basically a mystery. Now researchers at Penn State claim that fathers emit pheremones that hold off their daughters' sexual maturity!

Read the article - it's pretty fascinating.

Atheism and Morality Revisited

2006-09-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote some quick thoughts on this once, but here's a post that really nails it.

Piano

2006-08-31T03:07:00.000-07:00

I've been playing piano for two years. I don't take lessons, I just practice harder and harder pieces, and I'm reading some of the theory as well. I practice regularly and quite a lot. I've consistently put in four hours a week, so by now I've had over 400 hours of practice.

The main thoughts I have about playing piano are:

It's fun to play good music. I don't know why I can't get the same enjoyment from a good recording that I can from playing it. It seems a little irrational.
It's really fun, and I have no trouble practicing consistently. I don't exercise nearly as regularly as I'd want to, or even read music theory that much, but I practice plenty. It's cool to have a random skill that's constantly developing like that.
A lot of the best music I've heard is still too hard for me. Here are some targets I am shooting for in the next few years:
- Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue (an advanced piano adaption)
- Beethoven - Eroica Symphony, 1st movement (piano adaption by Liszt)
- Chopin - Scherzo in Bb Minor
- Chopin - Impromptu Fantasie
- Bach - Well Tempered Clavier Book 2, Prelude #6

Incidentally, I am moving out of my apartment tomorrow, moving out of the bay area on Sept 10, and going back to UCI on Sept 20.

Bush is a Moron

2006-08-24T00:36:00.001-07:00

During the 2004 election season, there was this idea that President Bush isn't as dumb as his words, actions and policies. It seemed plausible that Bush's image as an imbecile might be a misleading one.

Today I saw two pieces of evidence that helped me to finally make up my mind:
What a Moronic Presidential Press Conference! (Slate)
Your President, the Visionary Genius (Huffington Post)

I am forced to believe that the man is clearly too stupid to be the president. He is simply unqualified and incompetent. It really is that simple.

Biological Tape Recorder

2006-06-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

This bird is an almost perfect biological tape recorder. Amazing.

God Is Imaginary

2006-06-09T02:10:00.000-07:00

I must post this link to a new spinoff website by Marshall Brain: God Is Imaginary.

Atheism and Morality

2006-06-09T01:53:00.000-07:00

I would like to resolve the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon that atheists are often the most moral people you'll ever meet.

I am an atheist, but I have moral ideals for how society should function. The one I consider most fundamental is the assumption that the same moral ideals should apply to all humans.

Since I want society to function well, I make an effort to embody the same ideals I expect in others. I don't believe there is a "higher" meaning to life, I think we humans create our own. Improving society is a pursuit that I find worthwhile to pursue on this earth, and as a result I feel good about myself when I do my part by being a good person.

One interesting thing to consider is that it's always the religious people who accuse the atheists of not having real morals. But the reality is, when an atheist like me decides to act morally, it is out of pure idealism. When a religious person acts morally, they expect to get a reward from it -- heaven, karma, a better relationship with God, whatever.

So, it is really the atheists who have the upper hand on the morality issue!

Loose grip on reality

2006-06-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

If you are not a scientist and you completely disagree with a fundamental theory of modern science, chances are you have what I call a loose grip on reality. I think the epitome of a modern loose-gripper is the young-earth creationist. Let's compare him with his historical analogue.

Yes, it's scary how many parallels you can draw between today's young-earth creationists, and the geocentric nuts of the 1600s. Consider:

How do you know the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa?

How do you know the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and not 6,000?

Which question do you think you can answer better? My guess is that most young-earth creationists have no idea how we know the earth revolves around the sun. And yet, everyone accepts this as fact. Why? Probably because their church gave up on fighting it!

Of course the earth's place in the universe is central to modern astronomy, so to speak. But then again, the earth's age is fundamental to modern geology, paleontology, molecular biology, dendrochronology, genomics, physical anthropology, astronomy, physics and archaeology, amongst other sciences. And that is why I think young-earth creationists have a loose grip on reality.

Visual Basic Self-Replicator

2006-05-22T01:58:00.000-07:00

I am reading Introduction to the Theory of Computation. In the chapter about advanced topics in computability theory, it mentioned a technique for building a self-replicating Turing machine (a Turing machine that writes its own description on its tape). I have implemented this basic technique to write a self-replicating program using Visual Basic 6 (a program that outputs its own code). [In the form designer, create one TextBox called Text1 and set its Multiline property to True.]

Private Sub Form_Load(): Text1.Text = "Private Sub X(): Text1.Text = ""Private Sub Form_Load(): Text1.Text = """""" + Replace(Text1.Text, """""""", """""""""""") + """""": X: End Sub"" + vbCrLf + vbCrLf + Text1.Text: End Sub": X: End Sub

Private Sub X(): Text1.Text = "Private Sub Form_Load(): Text1.Text = """ + Replace(Text1.Text, """", """""") + """: X: End Sub" + vbCrLf + vbCrLf + Text1.Text: End Sub

Here is a rough overview of how it works. X() is just a subroutine to take the contents of Text1, and output the code for a Form_Load function that would write those contents to Text1, followed by a blank line, followed by the previous contents of Text1. Form_Load() is the block that executes first. It simply transcribes the code of X() into Text1, then calls X(). I have a hard time keeping this all in my head at once.

This took me an hour to write, and had many more complications than I expected. It was difficult to accurately reproduce the double-quote character (") as it is used in the code. The syntax for escaping the double-quote in a string literal is to write two consecutive double quotes (""). Notice that at one point, I have written twelve consecutive double-quote characters. That was probably the highlight.

Whistling

2006-05-19T12:45:00.001-07:00

Here is another dorm observation: a lot of people in my dorm whistle a lot. They whistle loudly and for a long time. But there is no tune! They are whistling musical gibberish. And it's pretty annoying. What the hell?

Quadratic Formula

2006-05-18T02:16:00.000-07:00

ax^2 + bx + c = 0
Solve for x.

Obviously, x is equal to the quadratic formula. Can you derive it? Hint: the most important technique is completing the square.

The quadratic formula is fundamental for even the most basic algebra, and it only takes five or ten steps to derive. I think it should be on any high school algebra final exam.

Hair Dryers

2006-05-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

I hate hair dryers so much! They make a terribly loud and annoying noise for about two minutes straight, and piss off dorm-mates like me. The point of all that is drying your hair? Are you kidding me? You can dry your hair with a towel. It's fine, really. Why do these things sell? A hair dryer is basically a rube goldberg for drying your hair.

Some asshole in my hall has been drying his or her hair since before I started writing this post. Fucking unbelievable.

Learning can be fun

2006-05-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

Look at these fascinating facts about the 1500s.

Two ears and one mouth

2006-05-06T02:59:00.000-07:00

"Listening is more important than talking. That is why God has given us two ears and only one mouth."

So what's the alternative, one ear and two mouths? It makes sense that two ears were naturally selected because they allow our brain to triangulate the location of a sound source. There is no significant advantage a second mouth would offer that would compensate for the complexity of maintaining it.

I don't think it should be socially acceptable to spout those stupid cliches about how your anatomy supposedly corresponds to God's will. What kind of a sick joke would that be?

Argument from Design

2006-04-29T03:11:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else think it's ridiculous that creationists are still using the argument from design? I believe the person who first invalidated that argument was... Charles Darwin!

I'm guessing the conversation must have gone something like this:

Creationist: Look at all this complex life around us. It was clearly designed by an intelligent designer. There is simply no other conceivable way!
Darwin: Actually, I've thought of one, because I am brilliant. I submit that complexity can emerge from the passive process of random mutation and natural selection, given sufficient time.
Creationist: Uh huh, I see... interesting.
Creationist: Soooooooooo, how do you explain the fact that the organisms we see around us are so complex that they could only have come about as the result of an intelligent designer's design?

How can anyone claim that the central argument of ID is a modern development in science!?

Reading off a Screen

2006-04-25T01:06:00.000-07:00

I have to read some tedious stuff for Humanities class, both online and off, and I noticed something odd: it's a lot easier for me to read (boring) text from the web than from a physical book. I read so much online, that I'm used to the physical experience of sitting in that position. It's harder for me to stay comfortable and focused reading a book. Case in point: I stopped to write this blog post.

Also, I like scrolling the page up with the mouse more than turning pages. It's all part of my assimilation into the 21st century.

Pretty Famous

2006-04-13T03:05:00.000-07:00

Right now I am the thirteenth most popular Liron on the internet. This blog comes up thirteenth when you search for the string on Google. Not bad, eh?

And I am pleased to say that I am the most popular Liron Shapira on the net. That guy from the "Department o Biology" put up a good fight, but I just wanted it more.

How to Invalidate a Christian's Prayers

2006-04-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

Anyone with common sense knows that prayer doesn't actually work in any meaningful way. Here is a good experiment from Why Does God Hate Amputees by Marshall Brain:

Now I want you to try the [coin-flipping] experiment again, but this time I want you to pray to Jesus Christ instead of Ra. Pray sincerely to Jesus like this:

"Dear Jesus, I know that you exist and I know that you hear and answer prayers as you promise in the Bible. I am going to flip this ordinary coin 50 times, and I am asking you to cause it to land heads-side-up all 50 times. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen."
Now flip the coin. Once again, after the fifth or sixth flip, the coin will land tails.

Of course this example has a common justification, which is that we are testing the lord. So here is a mean trick you can use to screw over any Christian who thinks their normal prayers get answered, but not their "test prayers".

Invalidate a Christian's Prayer's
All you have to do is periodically ask them what they are praying for, and follow up by asking whether it works. You are doing this for the purpose of comparing their results with the normal statistics about these kinds of things. Now all their normal prayers are test prayers!

The whole "testing the lord" line reminds me of when you're playing a game of Horse and you miss a basket, so you call it a practice shot. But if you sink a nice shot, you sure as hell are not going to give up the credit for that sucker on a technicality. A Christian who defends prayer is just like a cheap Horse player, clinging tightly to anecdotes about effective prayers, while shrugging off any meaningful studies of the phenomenon.

If you are a good Christian who believes in prayer, I bet you'd still feel a little uncomfortable openly praying for God to strike you dead. But what's the biggie? It's obviously a test, so he won't do anything, right? I would certainly have no problem shouting any self-destructive prayer you like, because I have real confidence in my knowledge that they are useless.

The truth is that people who believe prayer works don't know the conditions under which it does. It's easy to make up rationalizations for individual incidents after they happen, but that's exactly what they are -- rationalizations. Do your Christian acquaintances a favor and invalidate their prayers with this handy technique so they stop wasting time on them.

Paper is Ridiculous

2006-04-05T02:56:00.000-07:00

Today in Humanities class I wrote an in-class essay. I was thinking how ridiculous it is to compose essays on paper. The main problem with paper is:

It's hard to go back and edit.

No one naturally writes in one long, organized flow. I think usually the best way to write something is to quickly belt out a first draft, then revise it afterward. It's also useful to be able to make little changes along the way -- it puts you at ease, since you don't have to hesitate and make sure you are getting everything right the first time.

On a computer, revising is the easiest thing in the world. It is as easy as typing. Did you know that if you hold down the control key and then press backspace, delete, or an arrow key, it lets you operate on an entire word of text in one keystroke? Over the course of writing this blog post, I have watched myself take a false start and then instantly backtrack on almost every sentence. That's actually my strategy -- I put down my first idea of how to start the sentence, see how it looks, then go from there.

This computer's powerful editing interface has been around for decades. Why do professors think that paper is still useful as a medium for composing essays in class?

Postal Experiments

2006-04-05T02:16:00.000-07:00

Postal Experiments
The idea of trying to mail a brick is utterly hilarious.

The Town Intellectual

2006-04-03T22:40:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting blog post: Dumb towns getting dumber; smart towns getting smarter?

These costs [of moving] discouraged enough folks from moving that every town had its intellectuals. They dreamed of moving to Manhattan, but they never did. You'd find them at the library, in the local theater company, running a Great Books club, etc.

One question to ask is, why do the dumber people congregate into towns? I think it's because smarter people get more added value from being around other smart people, so they take the initiative to move, while the rest are left behind to form dumber towns.

Conversations with God

2006-03-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

The new book in the "Conversations with God" series just came out. It's called Home with God : In a Life that Never Ends. I don't know whether this is common knowledge, so I'll just put it out there:

"Conversations with God" is a hoax!

The books read like a dialogue with God. Here is some witty banter between author Neale Donald Walsch, and God:

God: How deep do you wish to go in your higher understandings? Should you choose to continue with this conversation, I will present you with 100 more words -- a 100 Word Formula for All of Life.

NDW: Well, there's a tease.

God: That's exactly what it was meant to be.

NDW: And it worked. I'm not about to cut the conversation short now. So here I am having a conversation with God about living and dying. Again.

God: Yes, but looking at many things that we have never discussed before.

NDW: Who would believe this . . .

God: It doesn't matter. You're not having the conversation for anyone else, you're having it for yourself.

NDW: I have to keep reminding myself of that.

God: So often people see themselves as doing something for someone else when they're really doing it for themselves.
Everybody is doing everything for themselves. When you awaken to this awareness, you will have reached Breakthrough. And when you understand that this is true even about dying, you will never fear dying again. And when you no longer fear dying, you will no longer fear living. You will live your life fully, right up until the very last moment.

NDW: Hold it. Wait a minute. You're saying that when I'm dying, I am doing it for myself?

God: Of course. Who else would you be doing it for?

Unbelievable. I like how the author pretends like he is outside the system, like when he says to God, "So here I am having a conversation with God about living and dying. Again. ... Who would believe this". No one in their right mind would believe this! And God replies that it doesn't matter. But contrary to God, it does matter, because this is currently the #1 selling book on Amazon.com.

I am really disappointed that so many people are into this series. Here are some choice quotes I've seen from a few people who aren't (with my emphasis):

Maddox:

My book is currently ranked #2 on the best seller's list on Amazon.com, push that son of a bitch to #1! I'm currently being beat by a book called "Home with God." Are you shitting me? Pre-order my book for $9.57 now.

Nick Hriciga (Amazon.com reviewer):

To say I expected much from this book would be a lie; I cannot expect much thought in a book so inherently devout in topic. I did, however, expect more than some self-riotous sack conversing with god and assuring me of a heaven. We don't need these books. All they succeeds in doing is agreeing with the bible in every way possible. Way to use faith to blind your consumers. Neale Walsch is a manipulative hack, go out of your way to avoid this garbage.

"Person" (Amazon.com reviewer):

How can you copyright words from God, have all rights reserved for it, and require permission to show it elsewhere?

And here is one ecstatic Amazon review by "Barbara Rose, Ph.D" that is so downright nutty I originally thought it was sarcastic:

It is my deepest belief that anyone who has ever been afraid to die will receive great relief after reading this book.

There is the most love filled tone throughout, of course that unconditionally loving tone and feel comes from GOD.

There is so much reassurance, beauty and truth. Can we "prove" any of this information? Not with scientific data, however, we CAN ask anyone who HAS "died", went to the other side, and came back.

. . .

Thank you, Neale, for your extraordinary contribution to humanity!
This book deserves at minimum 10 stars!

I think the elephant in the room is that you can't have a conversation with God when there is no god. So look at this crap the God character is spouting to get around the dilemma:

God: It is impossible to live or to die without God, but it is not impossible to think that you are.

If you think that you are living or dying without God, you will experience that you are.

You may have this experience as long as you wish. You may end this experience whenever you choose.

OK, God, if that is your real name. I choose to end the experience... NOW. [I pause from typing, waiting for the experience of living without God to end.]

Nope, the experience is still going on. This experience is called sanity, and for most people it is not as simple to end as making a choice. But a lot of people have the handicap of a lifelong indoctrination that began in childhood. And as one reviewer pointed out, Mr. Walsch is taking advantage of their faith to sell bullshit books.

Laughing at them, not with them

2006-03-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Japanese TV is ridiculous.

Marriage is Unnatural

2006-03-17T00:27:00.000-08:00

This Economist article explains that women have a natural tendency to enter into a long-term relationship with a "reliable" man, and then cheat on him with a "dominant" man during the part of the menstrual cycle when she is ovulating.

Funny

2006-03-08T17:56:00.000-08:00

This recording by John Hargrave of Zug.com is hilarious.

RelationCraft

2006-03-06T01:41:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged for a week because I've been working hard on RelationCraft, my website.

RelationCraft is a new type of social networking site for college students that is focused on relationships. The name can mean that you go on the site to craft your relationships, and it is also a bit of a pun (RelationCraft instead of Relationship -- a ship is a type of craft).

Here is a timeline of the site's progress:

October-November: Brainstorming. The general idea occurred to me in October, and for a month and a half I was compiling a big Word document of ideas.

December: Designing. I consolidated the brainstorm down to a list of ideas to implement in the initial release of the site, then I filled up about a dozen sheets of paper with sketches of the site layout.

January: Learning. I started off with a good general knowledge about HTML and HTTP, but I had never done any web programming before. I decided to use ASP.NET for the site because I already have experience with Microsoft .NET and I think it is an awesome development environment. The IDE of Visual Studio 2005 is the smartest in human history.

The experience was frustrating at first. It is a fascinating paradigm shift to be using the same kind of high-level programming language for a web application as for a Windows application. But because this web application is so complex, there were a lot of minor details about the way ASP.NET works that I had to get used to. I wasted many hours on relatively trivial problems because I only had one friend who knew more about this than I did.

February: Programming. After a slow start, I finally got the hang of ASP.NET, and I was amazed that some of the more complex implementation ideas I was dreaming of (asynchronous server interaction through HTML frames) were realistic. ASP.NET is a truly powerful rapid development solution. So I registered the domain name RelationCraft.com and signed up for hosting with GoDaddy. (Unfortunately, because the site is for college students only, it enforces the registration requirement that you must have an email address from an approved college. I'll post information about demoing the site in the future.)

March: Well, I'm still programming, but I am a few days away from having a polished demo site with a few initial features. I realize I haven't actually described any innovative ideas from the site yet, and I don't really feel like typing them up right now, so just check out some preliminary screenshots.

Not Reading Books

2006-02-28T19:06:00.000-08:00

Remember when I posted that Marshall Brain is my favorite author? So I realized I've never read a single Marshall Brain work on paper. I've probably read the equivalent of over a thousand book pages, all online.

I haven't read an actual book for leisure in a while. I went to the library the other day and got one. I'll post when I read it.

It's Just in Your Mind

2006-02-25T01:16:00.000-08:00

Technically this funny page is safe for work, but it's certainly awkward. It's just in your mind.

Too Lazy to Help Darfur

2006-02-24T13:32:00.001-08:00

Man, can you believe in Darfur there is an actual genocide? This is Holocaust-grade stuff.

Click here.

So far I haven't done anything to help out. Have you? Probably not. We haven't been acting very morally, you and I. Those kids who are suffering are human beings just like us. I think it really is the duty of the American people to get the government to take action.

Here is one thing I could do to help people in Darfur that I am probably not going to do:

Get a random job on campus for two weeks and donate all the money I earn toward helping humanitarian organizations defend their aid delivery lines against Janjaweed ambush.

There should be something that people like me can do in a matter of minutes, because otherwise we won't do anything at all, and a few minutes is better than nothing, especially if a lot of people do it.

Freakonomics Fruit

2006-02-24T01:47:00.000-08:00

I read Freakonomics last year. It's a good book. This is what the cover looks like:

I always thought fruit on the cover must be pretty tasty. It has all the delicious sour juiciness of an orange in a Granny Smith apple's skin. Yes, it looked so tasty I thought I'd eat one myself:

To hell with genetic engineering. This is the kind of hybrid cross I want to see at the grocery store.

Ordinary Video in 3D

2006-02-20T22:35:00.000-08:00

Normally when you watch a video, you perceive the flatness of the screen because your brain compares the image it sees from each eye and realizes that the objects on the screen are not solid. But try this:

Position yourself so that the video screen fills most of your field of vision and watch a segment where the camera angle is moving around.
Close one eye.

The illusion is very convincing because you eliminate almost all the cues that your eye is looking at a flat surface. Note that following these procedures will also make you one-eye high.

Inspirational

2006-02-17T17:03:00.000-08:00

You know how over a billion people don't have electricity or even clean water? Obviously this is not an easy problem to solve because it takes a lot of engineering infrastructure, and the political infrastructure doesn't exist to make that possible.

But this article makes it sound like Dean Kamen, the Segway guy, might really revolutionize things. From the article:

Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.

Good stuff. It's an inspiration to Mr. Kamen turn his entrepeneurial efforts toward making the world a better place.

Super Saver Shipping

2006-02-09T01:48:00.000-08:00

When you go to Amazon.com and make a purchase that totals $25 or more, you get free shipping. This is a pretty brilliant scheme. I know that whenever I shop on Amazon, I always feel like I'm missing out on savings if I buy something under $25.

But another, more subtle aspect is that Amazon sell a bunch of stuff for just a few bucks under $25. So since shipping normally costs almost $6, you're going to want to get your order up to $25. But then all the products that sell for only a few bucks don't qualify for Super Saver Shipping! So it's an incentive to spend significantly more than you otherwise would.

Recently I had an order that came to $23.99. So I searched for a while around Amazon for the cheapest item that qualified for Super Saver Shipping. I finally found it: FastCap Glu-Bot Yorker Tips, 5 pack. They had it marked down from $1.50 to $0.99, so I actually had to buy two. But with the savings on shipping, it was still a logical decision.

Think about what a ridiculous effect of consumerism it is that I'm receiving two packages of Glu-Bot Yorker Tips, whatever the hell those are, because I took advantage of the system. Not only that, but Amazon has actually ended up putting these in a separate shipment! A carrier service is being paid to carry a package with two sets of five useless Glu-widgets to my address, a package which I will promptly throw away without opening. Instead of me paying Amazon for one shipment, Amazon is eating the cost of two shipments. And there is also the environmental cost of all the steps in the process of getting a useless product from the factory to my trash can.

So having discovered Glu-Bot Yorker Tips, it changes the game of shopping for small orders on Amazon.com. Now you can expect to grab at least a little overall discount if your main order is as low as $20.

Fractals

2006-02-08T21:09:00.000-08:00

Fractals are images that have repeating elements at any scale -- their resolution is infinite. I had an assignment in CS class to make a computer program to generate a fractal by looping through each pixel and determining the color. Here is one of the fractals my program created:

The program renders grayscale pixels whose brightness is determined by a series of mathematical operations. It works like this:

Each pixel represents a number in the complex plane. The real component ranges from -1 to 1, and the imaginary component ranges from -i to i. The center of the image is the origin, which represents 0 + 0i, or just 0.

The program is given the function F(z) = z^4 - 1. The roots of this function are 1, -1, i, and -i, but the program doesn't know this. For each pixel, the program uses Newton's method to calculate one of the roots of the function given an initial guess z0 that corresponds to the pixel's location in the complex plane.

Newton's method figures out roots of a function by generating a series of guesses, each one dependent on the last, and usually the guesses tend toward one of the function's roots. The program is satisfied that Newton's method has found a root of F(z) when the function of the k'th guess, F(zk), is between -0.00001 and 0.00001.

The program then looks at the value of k -- the amount of successive guesses it took Newton's method to arrive at one of the function's four roots. The fewer guesses it took, the brighter it renders the current pixel. Thus, a pixel's brightness measures efficiency with which Newton's method finds a root of F with the starting guess being at that pixel's location.

But if a pixel is located near to one of the four roots, it should be easier for Newton's method to refine a guess starting from that pixel's location. So each pixel is multiplied by a constant that darkens it in proportion to how close it is to any one of the four corners. Notice the dark spots in each of the four compass directions -- those are the locations of the roots.

Now assuming you roughly understand the process by which this fractal was generated, imagine trying to visualize the image in your head without having seen the computer generated image. You couldn't. So as a result, you wouldn't be able to get some insights about, for example, the efficiency of Newton's method at various locations.

Aren't fractals and computers great?

Double Clicks

2006-02-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

A lot of inexperienced computer users can't tell when to single click and when to double click, so they just develop a habit of double clicking on everything. Microsoft has compensated for this in many areas of the UI. For example, double clicking on the Start button or any taskbar button only toggles its state once (except in the classic UI).

I was testing my new website (more on that later this week), and I discovered that IE also compensates for double clicks on web form buttons. It only executes the button's JavaScript code as if it were clicked once, even though it graphically shows the button being depressed twice. This may also be to prevent things like double form submits.

Atheist Catchphrase

2006-02-05T22:25:00.000-08:00

Tell me your definition of God, and I'll tell you whether it's wrong or meaningless.

Not supporting the troops

2006-01-26T20:21:00.000-08:00

Joel Stein writes in an LA Times column, I don't support our troops. Makes sense. Check it out.

Time Experiment

2006-01-23T23:00:00.000-08:00

My time survey suggests that most people keep really close tabs on the time. I probably check it dozens of times each day. So I was thinking:

What would it be like to go an entire day without checking the time?

Don't set your alarm clock, wake up whenever you wake up, and go the whole day without looking at a timekeeping device. I think you should be able to look outside, because otherwise it just becomes unrealistic. But what would such a day be like?

If you're like most people, you probably can't make it a school or work day. Precise reminders of the time would be unavoidable. But it would be interesting to try to live like that on a Saturday.

Also, when would you go to sleep? Maybe it would be a lot earlier or later than normal. I will attempt the experiment on this upcoming weekend and post the results, so don't leave your computer.

Time Survey

2006-01-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

Do not look at a clock until you answer this question:
What time is it? Try to guess it down to the minute.

Check your answer. How far off were you? It's extremely rare to be off by two hours or more. No doubt the vast majority of American adults can pinpoint it to within an hour.

What do you suppose is the median amount of minutes by which people are off? My guess is 5 to 10 minutes.

I conducted an informal survey by IMing the 19 people from my AIM buddy list who were at their computers during the interval of 9:50pm - 10:05pm PST (mostly teenagers). Here are their responses (number of minutes after (+) or before (-) the actual time when they responded), as well as comments they subsequently IMed.

Response:	Comments:
-5	lol
-1	well i saw it was 9:59 a when i came back to the computer [6 minutes ago]
-1	i just knew cuz 24 just ended
-2	my nigga
+1	shit, it's 9:52
+6
-6
+2	10 minutes earlier i was looking at my watch.
0	lol i looked at a clock a few mins ago, just woke up from a nap
-1	dude, i actually did it for real, i didnt look
0	i looked moments before reading your message because i have to get my laundry
-7
-3	close
0	holy shit, I swear I didn't look at a clock. i just remember it was around 9:47 a few [9] minutes ago when I called someone
+15	so what are u trying figure out
+2
0	i was right
-25	oops. oh well.
Liron wtf

Absolute deviation from the actual time:
Mean: 4.3 minutes
Median: 2 minutes

Wow, so the average teenager at their computer is going to be off by just a couple minutes -- somewhat more accurate than I expected. Maybe a bit too accurate... see the time experiment.

Signed deviation from the actual time:
Mean: -1.4 minutes
Median: -0.5 minutes

The signed deviation from the actual time is different from the statistic I set out to get -- it detects whether the entire population has a tendency to guess the time early or late. The numbers I got have no statistical significance, but it would be interesting to take a sample of thousands of responses nationwide and compare them to standard time to see if the nation is running early or late at all.

Friendly Close

2006-01-22T22:32:00.000-08:00

Pasting in parts of AIM conversations, or "AIM-blogging", should be a whole new genre of blogging. Here is an AIM-blog entry about AIM.

Cute Overload

2006-01-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't the web suck without all the great random sites like Cute Overload?

Religion Clash

2006-01-19T20:10:00.000-08:00

I just got back from dinner, where I had a long exchange with a very devout Christian student (takes the bible quite literally, doesn't believe in "macroevolution", etc) from my hall.

I've been in college for a few months and I still haven't gotten tired of having heated discussions with my many religious hallmates. I thought this one ended in a rather poetic way:

Me: Look at me. I never pray, never acknowledge god, and openly disrespect the concept. I don't feel any god in my heart. And yet I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I'm satisfied with my life. So what am I missing out on?

Him: You're missing the experience of living for God. It's an essential part of life.

Me: Alright. But I think you're missing out on the truth.

Him: I think you're missing out on the truth.

Exeunt.

Estimating

2006-01-15T12:45:00.000-08:00

This post about estimating by Ole Eichorn is great. He says that if someone is refusing to make any estimate about something, you can get the information out of him by guiding him through a binary search. I've used it a few times and it's neat. Even an order of magnitude ballpark figure is better than "I don't know".

Dude, Crazy

2006-01-10T20:56:00.000-08:00

Is anyone reading this?

2006-01-10T20:51:00.000-08:00

Hey Logic and Reason readership, I notice you are all pretty much silent when it comes to posting comments, and/or you don't exist. Come on, a blog is an open dialogue... except you can't speak until you're spoken to.

Diamonds

2006-01-10T20:42:00.000-08:00

If I ever bought a diamond, I would have to kick my own ass. It's as simple as that.

Here is the main reason:

1. You've Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond
The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.

And here are nine more.

Seriously, it is shameful to give or receive a diamond.

Money Management and Hate

2006-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Ramit Sethi is smart and funny.

He has a great money management site: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com

And a hilarious list of things he hates: http://www.bittershirts.com/thingsihate

The money management site is neat, offering tips such as

Keep records [of phone conversations] and watch all [Sprint's] BS evaporate next time they try to hustle you.

And ThingsIHate is an unbelievably long list of witty complaints like

Anybody whose voice mail message on their phone is long and detailed, saying "Please leave your name, number, and the time you called." THIS IS 2005. PEOPLE UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE VOICE MAIL. That would be like me instructing people how to use the doorknob when they get to my house.

It's good stuff.

I can see your phone calls

2006-01-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

With all the media attention being given to the executive branch's privacy breaches, I only just learned of this shocking fact:

Anyone can buy a list of your incoming and outgoing phone calls, cell or land-line, for $110 online.

Even though Congress has overlooked this for six months, I'm guessing this service will not be available forever because it is ridiculous.

Spy on your friends while you still can at http://www.locatecell.com.

Apple Keynotes

2006-01-06T22:28:00.000-08:00

In last month's post about Microsoft vs. Apple, I mentioned that Steve Jobs was giving a masterful PowerPoint presentation. It turns out I didn't know the half of it.

I always thought Steve Jobs' keynotes were especially fun to watch. They feel simple and passionate, like watching one of Apple's characteristic television commercials. But the preparation process is incredibly elaborate. The Guardian article Behind the magic curtain talks about all the perfectionism that goes into crafting one of those seemingly simple speeches.

See Steve Jobs in action -- watch his most recent presentation, introducing the iPod video, here.

Turtle Flip Phone

2006-01-05T18:43:00.000-08:00

This one made me laugh out loud. I just wish the beginning of the animation showed the normal turtle wiggling around for a while before revealing the flip phone functionality.

Still, it is funny as hell. Look how your view of the turtle's head is blocked by the display, but then the phone boots up and uses an image of it as wallpaper. Then after a while the backlight turns off. Brilliant.

Via fark.com's Photoshop contest section.

Ligers

2005-12-27T02:37:00.000-08:00

When a male lion mates with a female tiger, the offspring is known as a liger. Ligers are damn funny. They are nature's clown. Look:

Look at its face -- it's just a tiger who doesn't understand why its body is huge. At one point the liger Wikipedia article states,

Ligers may exhibit conflicts between the social habits of the lion and the solitary habits of the tiger. Their lion heritage wants them to form social groups, but their tiger heritage urges them to be intolerant of company. Opponents of deliberate hybridization say this causes confusion and depression for the animals, especially after sexual maturity.

I read this and I was just laughing at this ridiculous buffoon of an animal. Good times.

Eyes of Nye

2005-12-23T23:15:00.000-08:00

Remember Bill Nye, the Science Guy? I'm referring to the guy (a good comedian and educator and an actual, talented scientist) as well as his 90s TV show on PBS.

Bill Nye is awesome. That show was classic -- it truly made science fun. Many classes, from elementary to high school, make use of Bill Nye episodes and clips. I remember that my classes always loved it. I remember watching it on TV every day.

So I just learned that Bill Nye has a new show for adults called The Eyes of Nye, which are the instruments through which you see the world when you watch the show. I think they were trying to rhyme "Nye" with "eyes" the way they had rhymed it with "science guy". The program website makes it look interesting, so I will have to find a way to watch some episodes. Check it out.

When Profit Motives Don't Line Up

2005-12-19T15:49:00.000-08:00

Corporations are motivated by a desire to maximize profit. But too often in America today, the profit motive doesn't coincide with values that we know we want our corporations to have. What you have to do to make the most profit almost never lines up with what you have to do to treat customers well, compensate employees fairly, or minimize negative impact on the environment.

Bad Customer Service

Fifty years ago, if you ran a small store and you mistreated a customer, that customer would complain to his friends and you'd lose a significant amount of patronage. The customer was "always right" because positive word of mouth was essential to the success of most businesses.

But when you're a 21st century nationwide conglomerate, you'll often find that a more effective business strategy is to get the customers in and out as quickly as possible, with minimum effort from your paid labor. So when a dissatisfied customer disrupts the quick and steady flow of things, all you want to do is get him out of the way and make room for the majority of customers, the ones your product or service successfully satisfies.

Bad Employee Compensation

It's profitable to pay your low-skilled employees their market value of $6 an hour instead of a realistic living wage of $15. This news story talks about Wal-Mart as a textbook case. From the article:

Wal-Mart brags about how its low prices help poor Americans, but its low wages are helping increase the number of Americans in poverty.

Bad Environmental Policy

If you're a corporation, it's profitable to screw over the environment. For example, think about the packaging a corporation decides to use for its products. The decision is made based on what is attractive to the customer, and what is low-cost. It doesn't affect the bottom line if the packaging isn't bio-degradable. It certainly affects the communities where landfills are built, but that is not the corporation's concern.

What's Good for America

Many people will agree with a statement like this one:

What's good for business is good for America.

But now you can see why that's wrong. What's good for corporations is increasing their bottom line. The actions that cause corporations' bottom lines to increase may or may not be good for America. They might be good if:

Corporations increase their bottom lines by being more productive, and selling more goods for the same production costs. If the trend is that more goods become affordable to the average American, then it could be good for America by increasing the quality of life.

Corporations are able to increase their bottom line through a process that also requires the hiring of well-compensated employees. That way, something that's good for corporations will create more jobs.

It could be good for America by a coincidence. For example, a tax break for one business might enable them to expand, and in the process they tear down their old factory and build a better, modern one, and its newer technology emits fewer pollutants, ozone-depleting agents, and/or greenhouse gases.

Likewise, what's good for corporations could be bad for society if:

A tax break to a corporation lowers its costs and increases its profit margin. The board of directors votes to use this new profit to increase the CEO's salary, and buy a round of private jets for other executives. This doesn't help America at all. This kind of thing is actually a growing trend in the 21st-century economy, and it is creating an obscene concentration of wealth. You can say that it helps the companies that sell the jets, but that isn't necessarily good for America either.

A corporation might find a way to cut costs by using a new technology, such as a new type of robot. As a result, it will fire its workers by the thousand. This is also a huge trend that contributes to the increasing concentration of wealth, and the increasingly robotic nation.

It could be bad for America by a coincidence. For example, a corporation might use money from a tax break to lobby for deregulation of its industry, which is bad for American consumers. (The corporation might also use the money to lobby for more tax breaks.)

The Government's Role

The government's role should not be to simply promote whatever is good for business. The government's role in regulating business is to create policies that cause corporations' profit incentives to line up with positive social goals. For example:

The government can aggressively investigate incidents of treating customers unfairly, and fine guilty corporations. That way, customer service will be more linked to profit margins.

The government can raise the minimum wage. That way, companies that can afford to pay employees a living wage can no longer use part of that money to increase a few executives' already high salaries.

The government can make the air a finite commodity, like land, that belongs to the people. It can charge corporations for the privilege of dumping waste into the air, which can only hold so much pollution before it poisons us all to death. The government can also create a law that forces corporations to take responsibility for their products' end-cycle costs, and eliminate all landfills.

Corporations don't benefit society by making profit, they benefit society when they improve the average American's quality of life. But corporations are designed to only strive for the former, so it is the government's role to line it up with the latter.

Trading Bibles for Porn

2005-12-16T16:59:00.000-08:00

Atheism is so far outside of the nation's public discourse. It's refreshing to watch what happens when the mainstream media encounters it. MSNBC ran a story about a San Antonio college atheist group Trading Bibles for Porn. Click to watch the free video.

What can I say, the atheist group is correct. I don't know how effective this will be to get people to question their religions, but it is certainly an effective publicity stunt for atheism.

Either way, the video is very entertaining. Tucker Carlson is a good guy, but I like watching him deal with opposing viewpoints.

And, since we're on the subject of atheism, here is a great little post on the subject.

Souls Are Not Real

2005-12-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

I don't think souls actually exist. If you do, please answer these questions for me:

Are new souls created for new humans? Or are old souls reincarnated?

At what point does the soul enter a human body? At birth? In the womb after some months of pregnancy? The fertilized egg? Birth does not occur in an instant. When is the soul born?

At what point does the soul leave a human body? Sleep? Unconsciousness? Stopping the heart beat? Lack of oxygen to the brain? Death does not occur in an instant. When does the soul die?

How does the soul affect your body? What physical matter is it associated with? Obviously the soul is not associated with the entire body. Your skin is constantly falling off and being replaced, so your soul isn't in those cells. Your arms and legs can be blown to bits and you'll still have your full soul, right? What if your head is chopped off? You are still alive. The brain can still function for a few seconds. (If you don't believe it, you can instead think of having an operation to neatly remove your head. You can imagine "body transplant" operations in the future.)

What role does the soul play? It's probably not responsible for your life functions. Your body can stay alive by utilizing the laws of physics. So can other organisms, and probably not all of them have souls. The soul probably is not responsible for your rational thinking. You have areas of the brain designed for that. Plus, computers can do it, and they don't have souls, right? The soul probably isn't responsible for your emotions. Emotions are a well-documented function of the brain, present in many other animals. Plus, any neurosurgeon knows that there is a direct link between your emotions and the physical state of regions in the brain.

Do other organisms have souls? If so, which ones? Do bacteria have souls? If not, why do only humans have souls? At what point in the evolution of the human species did the soul appear?

According to this well-known poll about what Americans believe, 84% of adults believe that the soul survives after death. So at least that many must believe that there is such a thing as a soul. But I don't. Please post your thoughts, and address my questions, by posting a comment.

The Wason Card Problem

2005-12-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

This is a simple, classic logic puzzle that over 90% of Americans get wrong. It is a good way to gain insight on a person's logical thinking process.

You are working with a deck of four cards that have a letter on one side and a number on the other. They are lying on the table with different sides facing up, as shown:

A

B

4

7

One theorem about the deck states: If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.

Which cards do you have to flip over to verify that the theorem is not false?

Do not read on until you think you have the answer.

The answer is that you must flip over the first and last card. Almost everyone correctly identifies the A. Many people make the mistake of identifying the 4 as well. Few people correctly identify the 7.

If your answer was correct, your grasp of basic logic is exceptional. The problem is straightforward, but it happens to be counterintuitive to humans.

You can read the full explanation at the Skeptic's Dictionary's Critical Thinking mini-lesson 3.

Great Pickup Line

2005-12-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

This is the world's best pickup line:

If I were to ask you whether you'd go out with me, would your answer be the same as your answer to this question?

Observe how effective it is in this sample dialogue.

Woman: Say, who is this loser coming over to hit on me? I am way out of his league.

Man: (walking up) If I were to ask you whether you'd go out with me, would your answer be the same as your answer to this question? [Editor's note: Zing!]

Woman: No, go away.

Man: OK, haha, actually you just agreed to go out with me.

Woman: I have a boyfriend.

Man: OK so I guess that makes you unfaithful, haha! See, I kinda hijacked the linguistic concept of a question in order to spring a logical trap on you.

Woman: Are you like, deaf?

Man: Look, you answered "no" to my pickup line, as in "no I will not not go out with you". Gotcha!

Stronger Man: Is this loser trying to hit on you, Charlene? It's hard to tell.

Woman: Yeah, take care of him, Woody.

Stronger Man: Come on punk, let's go.

Man: Wait, wait! Uh, if I were to not ask you not to not beat me up, would you respond the same as if I... ow! Ow!

The Axiom of Choice

2005-12-11T00:14:00.000-08:00

Imagine you have a hundred buckets, each containing one or more objects. Let's say you pick one object out of each bucket, and then...

Wait, can we actually say that? Are you sure you would be able to pick an object out of each of the buckets?

Well, of course you could. It's easy to just reach in and grab an object when the bucket contains a set of discrete physical objects. But an important question to ask is this:

Which object do you grab?

You would probably grab one "at random", without thinking about it. Actually, you are intuitively following a crude selection procedure that probably looks like this:

Reach hand into center of bucket and grab the first object you hit.
If your hand doesn't hit any objects, move it around in larger and larger circles, and you will hit one before you reach the walls of the bucket.

Even if you hadn't explicitly described such a procedure before, you would be sure that one exists, because you have picked objects out of baskets at random before. This strong intuition is accurate in real-world cases like that, but it breaks down if you try to use it to understand a fundamental axiom of set theory: the axiom of choice.

Which element do you choose?

Suppose you have a hundred sets, each containing at least one element. Could you choose an element from each? It seems simple enough. If they were all finite sets of integers, for example, you could simply go and choose the element with the lowest value from each set.

But what if one of the sets contained all the real numbers greater than 0 and less than 1? This set would not have a lowest real number. OK, no biggie, for sets like that you can always just take the average of the two boundaries (in this case, 1/2).

But then what if one of the sets just contained the three colors red, green and blue? Obviously you need a separate type of selection procedure for that one, such as "always pick green".

If each of the hundred sets were completely different, you might just resort to going through them all, one by one, and writing notes to yourself: "pick this here, pick that there". And this would still constitute a valid selection procedure. So far, your intuition would be right about being able to choose an element from each set...

...But what if there were an infinite number of sets? This time you can't just write an infinite number of notes to yourself, because you can't have an infinitely long selection procedure. So are you sure you could decide which element to pick out of each one?

The axiom of choice simply states that this is possible for any infinite set of sets. But it turns out that the axiom of choice is independent of the other axioms of set theory! The other axioms of standard set theory can neither prove nor contradict it. This is a stunning result. As mathematicians tried to wrap their heads around this mind-blowing axiom, they ended up with all kinds of profound results. For example, it is logically equivalent to some unexpected statements in set theory.

You can use the Wikipedia article about Axiom of choice as a starting point to explore. Let me know your thoughts.

My Website

2005-12-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

I am working on a website. I can't reveal too much because I don't want someone else to implement the idea first, but here is some preliminary information:

It is a database site.

It is for college students only. I am trying to establish the kind of college community feeling that you see on Facebook. However, it is not a replacement for Facebook.

It is a site for college students to spend a lot of time on.

It could be categorized as a dating site, but that's not quite what it is.

It is very complex. It is more complex than, say, Match.com.

I will publish more details as I get farther along. The idea itself has been brainstormed pretty thoroughly, but I don't want to give it all away just yet.

I've never made a complex website before. This is a particularly huge programming challenge, and I have only begun to learn ASP.NET 2.0, which I will use to do it. It will take months. Luckily, last week was first-quarter finals week, and now I've got almost a month of vacation.

Statistics Joke

2005-12-10T01:58:00.000-08:00

Two statisticians were travelling in an airplane from LA to New York. About an hour into the flight, the pilot announced that they had lost an engine, but don't worry, there are three left. However, instead of 5 hours it would take 7 hours to get to New York.

A little later, he announced that a second engine failed, and they still had two left, but it would take 10 hours to get to New York.

Somewhat later, the pilot again came on the intercom and announced that a third engine had died. Never fear, he announced, because the plane could fly on a single engine. However, it would now take 18 hours to get to new York.

At this point, one statistician turned to the other and said, "Gee, I hope we don't lose that last engine, or we'll be up here forever!"

Via http://www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes/1_2.html

Microsoft vs. Apple

2005-12-10T01:08:00.001-08:00

vs.

I don't have a strong opinion about either company, but this is obvious. You can see that Steve Jobs is giving a masterful demo of the iPod Video's simple remote control, while I don't even know what Bill Gates is saying here about "The Microsoft 'Live' Platform".

Incidentally, I recently heard PowerPoint presentations being discussed in an NPR interview. It is interesting because people make all kinds of presentations with PowerPoint, and you see people reading off the slides to varying degrees. The expert's opinion I heard is that it's best to use a PowerPoint presentation the way a television news program uses its graphics. It should be a simple visual with a handful of words about the central message. Most people write way too many words on their slides, and it is annoying for the audience to try to read them all between the presenter's spoken sentences.

Sources:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/58697220/ - Microsoft image
http://www.flickr.com/photos/olebra/52140270/ - Apple image