A Red-Letter Day

Whenever I accidentally run into something, I say "Ow," even if it doesn't hurt because, apparently, it needed to be announced to the entire room.

Special Topics: Confessions

So thanks to Hilary Duff, I just found out about the Ad Council's latest campaign, Think B4 You Speak. It's a venture by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to get teens, as well as young adults, to stop saying, "That's so gay."

Now I'll openly admit that I use "gay" on a regular basis to mean dumb, stupid, not cool, etc, and I have no problem with it. Why? Because I'm not using it in a way that's derogatory to homosexuals, and the people I say it to understand it as such.

Now, as an engineer, I'm obviously not the most versed in language and linguistics, but I think I have a better grasp than most. What is language's main purpose? To communicate thoughts and ideas from one person to another. Ineffective communicators are those who are unable to relay their ideas to others in an understandable manner.

To communicate properly, you must identify your audience. The world's leading physicist can use all the technical language he wants, but if he's speaking to a classroom of second graders, no matter how important or precise his message is, they won't understand him. Why? Because his audience lacks the ability to understand his language.

Offending your audience is another way to communicate ineffectively. Let's take that same physicist and place him at a distinguished lecture at MIT. He continues to use the same advanced vocabulary that he tortured our 7-year-olds with but now drops the F-bomb every other sentence. Although everyone at the lecture understands what he's saying, they are so offended by his behavior that he is looked down upon and his message is not taken seriously. This is similar to why you don't swear at your grandmother.

After screwing up two speeches in one day, our physicist buddy heads to the bar with the rest of his research team. They down several beers and start to feel a little better about the disaster of a day they just witnessed. Here, big words and crude words are all pretty common, but that's quite alright in this circle... They understand what each other is talking about, and don't mind a stray swear here and there.

Which brings me back to "That's so gay." There's a time and place for it. If I tell Joe a movie is "so gay," he realises that I think it's dumb... I really doubt he would interpret it as an attack on homosexuals, which is clearly not the intention. It's not being used maliciously, as an attack targeted at gays. No, it's a slang word. When I say something is "cool" everyone knows I don't think it's cold. Words are allowed to have multiple meanings, and as long as everyone around me interprets it the same way, I've communicated effectively and non-offensively. "That's so 'Girl wearing a skirt for a top'" doesn't work because it's not universally understood as anything in that context... It's all about context.

Come to think of it, though, gay used to mean happy... I'm happy, and I'm offended that you've twisted my word around. You better get a new term.

I am proud to say that my Facebook addiction has finally been broken. How did I manage? Facebook was kind enough to make sure that there was nothing in its new layout worth being addicted to.

Facebook's previous layout, while creepy at first, turned out to be a jewel. I told Facebook who I really wanted to hear about, as well as who's "Bra and Panties Party" pictures I did not want to see, and Facebook took care of the rest. It filled my Stalkerfeed up with information about people I wanted to know about, and since they're usually not on Facebook, it aggregated it with filler information about people I'm sorta indifferent about. It was a nice setup; I could log on, and after a quick rundown of the Stalkerfeed, I was pretty updated on a good number of people... And I took advantage of this. A lot.

But no, Mr. Zuckerberg couldn't keep a good thing. He apparently has some form of Twitter envy going on here, because when I first logged into the new layout, I thought I accidentally pulled up Twitter. "What are you doing?" asks Twitter. "I don't care," says Justin.

This bombardment of "real-time" information is overwhelming, especially considering it's dominated by a handful of people who upload their entire lives to Facebook... Plus, they're people I don't care about. The "I like these people" filter is totally absent, and instead I get to see 6 stories for the photo album you just uploaded, along with gems such as "...is sitting in anthro eating hot fries" or "...needs a haircut." Yes, thank you Facebook. I wanted to know that. Meanwhile, this junk is pushing information about the few people I would want to hear about off the bottom of the feed. Way to serve no purpose.

What's the new plan? I'll only be on Facebook when stalking an individual, since stalking a larger group of people is no longer feasible. It's a shame, since I found the old layout to be a convenient way to keep up with people, but hey, according to Mr. Zuckerberg, I'm not worth listening to.

While we're on the topic of critiquing my behavior with xkcd comics, Sam reminded me of this one a couple days ago. I have to take the most efficient path possible when I'm walking somewhere. Of course, it's not just as easy as just mapping it out; taking the most efficient path is a real-time calculation. People, traffic, path conditions, fences, etc. all have an effect. Weather, combined with the shoes I'm wearing, has the most bearing on efficient path calculation, though. Sunny and boots opens up a whole new collection of paths that are just not available with raining and K-Swiss, for example.

The absolute worse (embarrassing?) is walking with other people. Groups aren't that bad, since they're difficult to control and are typically led by those in the front of the group. Pure probability says this won't be me a majority of the time. No, the real problem comes when walking with just one other person. Of course, I've worked out the most efficient path in my head already, and for some reason, I assume they've done the exact same thing... Yeah, about that... They haven't. But for whatever reason, my brain can't wrap itself around that just yet. No, it's not until we have to make a left turn and I suddenly start swerving over to hit the proper apex while the other person is still just doing whatever that I realize that we're not on the same page... But by then I've just ruined everything by stepping in front of them, bumping into them, stepping on them, or a myriad of other awkward consequences...

And what do you say after running into the person you're walking with?

Yeah, exactly.

Special Topics: xkcd

Special Topics: xkcd

Free will versus fate. Last night, before I started "15 minutes" of research for this post, I would have quickly answered "free will", and then continued on to the initial point of all of this. Unfortunately, after several hours of research and a good night's rest, we now have to take the long road there.

Dang it, right?

The main step in the battle over free will, for philosophers at least, is the truth of determinism. Determinists, in particular causal determinists, see the world as a giant machine: It has defined rules (the laws the physics) and is simply responding to the outputs from the last response. Each effect has a cause, which had a cause before it. The response from each cause was required to happen due to the rules of the system. Think back to your physics class: You launch a ball at 30° from the horizontal at 10 m/s; it's going to land in the same spot every time as it is bound by Newton's 3 laws.

Therefore, to a determinist, everything that will ever happen was determined the instant the universe was created. (How it was created is inconsequential.) The initial positions, energies, and other important properties of all particles, given enough time and / or computational power, can be extrapolated to any other point in time, assuming one has full understanding of all physical laws. It's this idea that keeps Laplace's demon very busy.

Of course, this is a very materialism-friendly theory. Why am I writing this post? Because the synapses in my brain fired in the right order to type all of this in. Why did those synapses fire? Well, it was in response to an environmental stimulus. What caused that stimulus? These cause and effect questions can be traced back as far as one would like.

Determininists break down into further categories (compatibilists and incompatibilists), but these seem to break down into semantics at times. Either way, determinism offers us the illusion of free will: Since we cannot possibly understand or process a system as large as the universe, our actions seem to be legitimate choices in a sea of randomness, but when one zooms in to the micro level of Laplace's demon, the choices were made for us eons ago.

What if you reject determinism, though? There has to be something within the machine of the universe, not bound by its physical laws, that throws a wrench in the function. This is where indeterminism, or taken one step further, libertarianism (not to be confused with the political perspective), comes to play. For some, the wrench is quantum mechanics and such ideas as the uncertainty principle. For others, it is the idea of a soul or God which is not bound by the laws of the physical world. Either one could provide the randomization necessary to break out of the deterministic machine.

Do I know the right answer? Certainly not. I might argue that it doesn't even matter; deterministically, I'm destined to do whatever the past has laid out, and libertarianly, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. Either way, I make no adjustments.

What do I prefer to do, though? Play Merovingian. I love cause and effect: looking at the past and seeing how all the pieces fit together, examining each link in a chain of events. It's amazing how without very specific causes, effects days, weeks, or years down the road, no matter how big or small, would never have arisen. And when more than one puzzle piece falls into place, the results are even more curious. Is that fate? Luck? Or maybe the result of carefully thought out choices? Whatever the answer, it doesn't make it any less interesting.

No one else finds the D. B. Cooper joke funny.

Special Topics: Note to Self

I have a disease: Phantom Vibration Syndrome.

So far, the only good news is that my pocket is vibrating, and that’s okay because it gives me hope that the condition might spread to the rest of my pants.

So I've had this condition for several years now, but it seems to have reached advanced stages in recent days. Things start out nonchalantly enough: I'm minding my own business, doing my thing, when I absolutely swear that my phone is vibrating... No doubt whatsoever in my mind. So naturally, I grab my pocket to make sure, and, of course, nothing is going on. Nothing besides me feeling up my pocket, as well as my upper thigh, in public. Now it used to happen maybe a couple times a week, once a day at most, but recently, I've been getting phantom calls nonstop. Hourly, if not more than that. Do I really think I'm that popular? Or do I simply want to be that popular? Or maybe I just have a twitchy quadricep... I dunno.

The best part of all of this, though, is that when I'm actually getting a call or a text, I don't feel it half the time. I end up feeling the "1 Missed Call" or "1 New Text" vibrations ten minutes later when my phone is desperately trying to alert me of my cluelessness. It makes no sense... My brain gets so lonely it has to fake popularity, but when I actually am popular, it decides not to care. And there's really no solution to all this; I'm certainly not going to put my phone on ring, out of courtesy as well as my personal hatred of ring tones, and switching pockets or getting a belt clip would probably just move the fake vibrations. I guess that means I better get used to grabbing my pocket...