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02:05:47 PM, Sunday 2 March 2008
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02:05:05 PM, Sunday 2 March 2008
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Today I have vanquished dust bunnies and flown a kite. Life is good.
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01:35:48 PM,
Sunday 2 March 2008
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Set some oil heating. Brown two cloves pressed garlic and some cumin seeds. Add half a bag of baby spinach, salt, and curry powder. Cook until soggy, about 2 minutes. Add a tablespoon of pine nuts. Serves 1.
Not quite as good as the saag Moss makes (it is based on what I can remember of the saag Moss made a few days ago, which was super nummy). But it's under five minutes, doesn't even require a cutting board, and it's yummy.
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(5)
06:34:51 PM,
Tuesday 26 February 2008
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08:47:44 AM, Tuesday 26 February 2008
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My local Dunkin Donuts has an ad for a breakfast sandwich in its window that says "get fired up". Oddly this ad doesn't seem to have any internet presence whatsoever, and no one is blogging about the apparent Dunkin Donuts/Barack Obama alliance. Here that void is filled. Picture to follow.
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(3)
09:30:38 PM,
Monday 25 February 2008
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I got some music software a while back. Here is the first result (inspired by a nature documentary): caves.
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(2)
09:10:57 AM,
Sunday 24 February 2008
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One million people may seem like an awful lot. And it is, for a political campaign. But when you think about it, it's less than 1/3 of a percent of the population. And the other candidates have less (I think). This miniscule fraction of politically active people is deciding for the rest of the country who we are going to be able to select from in our elections. Of course, this time around I am a member of that fraction, and chances are pretty high that so are you.
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06:46:50 PM,
Thursday 21 February 2008
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Is there enough worldwide demand for frisbees to warrant a 24-hour dedicated production facility? How many frisbees per hour does the world want?
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(2)
07:32:14 AM,
Thursday 21 February 2008
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Dreamt last night that no matter what the farmer did, the cow would get up on the beams in the barn, and wouldn't be able to get back down.
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(1)
07:21:38 AM,
Thursday 21 February 2008
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10:51:59 PM, Wednesday 20 February 2008
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Lunar eclipse tonight!
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07:22:51 PM,
Wednesday 20 February 2008
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Morning. Sunny. Twitchy. Sneezy.
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08:02:06 AM,
Wednesday 20 February 2008
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02:40:53 PM, Saturday 16 February 2008
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respond? (1)
01:59:27 PM, Saturday 16 February 2008
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One could not eradicate curry. Even if one tried.
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10:11:37 AM,
Saturday 16 February 2008
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12:15:48 AM, Friday 15 February 2008
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As I was on the edge of sleep last night, I thought of a place. There's sort of an amphitheater, though that's not quite right, just a sort of set in concrete area with a grassy area around it. Possibly a statue in the middle. It's an urban park of some sort, on top of a hill, friendly tall buildings behind us. Possibly on a college campus? It's very colorful, there are flags or something, and some sort of performance, juggling perhaps. It's sunny and warm. I'm not sure whether this is a memory or a dream, but quite vivid. Cotton candy, perhaps, and something to do with drugs for depression.
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(3)
08:05:55 AM,
Thursday 14 February 2008
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So my local Starbucks sells these entirely inedible things which are shaped more or less like croissants. Just a few blocks away there is a bakery which sells perfectly good croissants for a similar price. Why doesn't the market take care of this? Why can't I get my coffee and croissant at the same place?
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(1)
07:54:01 AM,
Wednesday 6 February 2008
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06:13:51 PM, Monday 4 February 2008
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06:13:37 PM, Monday 4 February 2008
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Ok, clearly I'm going to have to back up and explain why I think these two things (chance and atheism) have anything to do with each other whatsoever. Two things to argue for: atheism as commonly understood usually involves a belief that the world operates on chance at some level (chance and determinism are perfectly compatible!). Conversely (and this may be harder) that a belief that the world operates on chance (true chance) leaves so little room for God that one may as well be athiest.
First, though, some thoughts on chance.
The roulette wheel is the typical example of chance. It is a system set up to have very even odds. The ball could fall anywhere. It’s all about our ability to predict. To the gambler the odds may be even, to the house they may be skewed. So the odds aren’t really even. Given any system, and any event about which a prediction may be made, if anyone anywhere can predict it accurately, it is not chance. There are degrees here. It may be that someone can make very accurate predictions, with an element of chance that cannot be eliminated, so I can tell you precisely that there is a 30% chance that the ball will fall in this slot, but no better than that.
One thing to note about the roulette wheel: it is a perfectly deterministic system. The ball will fall into one of the slots. But the physics is such that it is very difficult to predict which one. There is chaos involved. The world is funny this way. It has nice regular patterns (the slots) and then it has this chaos or random component. Chaos. I should explain how I see chaos, mathematical chaos I mean. Some people say it means “sensitivity to initial conditions”. That’s part of it, and it may be the technical definition, but it’s not the whole thing. It’s not the weather, it’s not that it’s too complicated or that we can’t get enough data. It’s that you have this perfectly deterministic function, but you can’t figure out what it’s going to do except by just running it. I didn’t understand this for years after I first heard of chaos, that the function can be both deterministic and simple, and still lead to chaos. The mapping between input and output is simply impossible to codify. If one could codify the outputs of some fairly simple functions in an efficient manner then one would win a million dollars and terrify cryptographers. This is not likely to happen.
The easiest way to visualize chaos, though, is just as sort of a black box scrambler. We start off somewhere definite, then spin of the wheel, roll of the dice, never mind the fluid dynamics of the air the dice are rolling through, we end up somewhere definite again. There is a gap in knowledge between the one and the other. It’s not exactly that there’s no causal relationship. Presumably throwing the dice in a certain way caused them to land the way they landed. It’s that there’s no control. If I roll a six, I didn’t cause it to be six, chance caused it to be six. And even with a perfectly deterministic computer program I can create a situation like this, where I don’t know what will happen next, except that it will fall into a certain category (be an integer between 1 and 6, for instance). So we have these places of solid stability, these six possible stable positions of a die, and we make a throw into a chaos where anything is possible and land again into stability, never quite knowing what happened. The not quite knowing what happened is called chance.
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(7)
07:04:47 AM,
Monday 4 February 2008
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Chance seems to have something to do, if not with religion, then certainly with atheism. Could all this, the world, have happened just by chance? If so, oh no, oh my, no God, no soul! Really? What is it about chance that denies God and soul? Or, what aspects of God and soul are denied by chance? Are there other aspects?
Why is it tempting to think that things have come about by chance? Why is it tempting not to? Does it mean anything? Does it solve anything? Should it worry anyone?
Is believing that the current state of the world was brought about by chance equivalent to atheism? Can you be an atheist without believing this?
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(12)
08:58:58 PM,
Sunday 3 February 2008
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I promised a while ago that I'd have something to say about a few points. I think I only got to one of them really. Well one of them was about chance, and I've been working on an essay about that lately. Writing an extended essay is a little different for me, haven't attempted it since college. Anyway, I want to blog about it, but I think rather than posting a finished essay I'll let out my thoughts in blog-sized chunks.
First, an image. Think of a mirror on a white wall. Now, the mirror is obviously reflecting some information from the surrounding room. The light hitting the wall has just as much information as the light hitting the mirror, but it's all garbled when it leaves the wall. The wall has scrubbed the light clean of information. What we think of as the white of the wall is its randomness.
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08:48:08 PM,
Sunday 3 February 2008
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Meme meme memity meme.
1. There is no soul, it's an everlasting tease.
2. I am the new way to go. I am the way of the future.
3. Everything I do is true.
4. I'll take all the blame, aqua sea-foam shame.
5. I'll take him down to the road, anything goes.
6. Sixth and Powell a dead sweat in my teeth.
7. Swear they moved that sign.
8. Pressing down a special key it plays a little melody.
9. I reached inside myself and found nothing there to ease the pressure of my ever-worrying mind.
10. Turn off the TV, you can learn more try to do without it.
11. Pretending to guide me you lead me astray.
12. I raised the wall and I will be the one to knock it down.
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(11)
07:12:28 PM,
Thursday 31 January 2008
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Blog entries don't auto-complete.
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07:58:23 AM,
Thursday 31 January 2008
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Are cheese puffs still bright orange if eaten in the dark?
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(4)
07:55:36 AM,
Thursday 31 January 2008
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Seems like almost not winter today, but still all of February to go. I actually have nothing at all to say. If you want to be depressed go read this.
Things I've seen lately: A broom sticking out at random from a pile of dirty snow. A brand new American flag over Dunkin Donuts. Lots of headlights and tail lights. Lots of computer screen.
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09:22:08 PM,
Wednesday 30 January 2008
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My half-an-ear-to-the-ground tells me that the Democratic race is turning nasty. Don't fall for evil, people! Don't let the dirtiest tricks win!
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06:53:37 PM,
Friday 25 January 2008
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07:46:36 AM,
Friday 25 January 2008
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07:43:22 AM, Friday 25 January 2008
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07:16:46 PM, Monday 21 January 2008
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Things that have come into my head at odd moments lately:
Heads made of round rocks, on round rock bodies, constantly rolling off.
Large concrete wall with a tiny graffiti of a rose at one point about ankle high.
Monkey chewing on a corn cob.
A ghostly figure in a celery costume.
Also, Tim woke up the other night and told me that human decency was a three-colored triangle, I believe it was red yellow and blue.
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(1)
08:06:07 PM,
Saturday 19 January 2008
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Just a glimpse of harlequin ducks today. Good view of buffleheads, and an eider. There was a time I didn't even know that there were different kinds of ducks.
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(1)
07:19:21 PM,
Saturday 19 January 2008
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05:04:03 PM, Saturday 19 January 2008
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05:03:45 PM, Saturday 19 January 2008
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