i expected those, though. it's a miracle it took this long, really. best to avoid them....
"you know, you should open up the advertising a little bit so people know the shows are going on."
"but it's a tight knit scene."
"that's why you should open up the advertising, so people outside the scene know what's going on."
"if you want to join the scene, you should come down. it's very tight knit."
"but, that's why you should open it up and make it less exclusive."
"but, it's a very tight-knit scene."
ugh...
fuck tight knit scenes, i want radical inclusion.
somebody shows up and offers suggestions on ways to open it, and all they get is a lot of attitude and an almost violent desire to maintain a small, incestual clique-y group. that's not something i want anything to do with. it's radical inclusion, or fuck off.
i mean, the bottom line is i haven't seen much of anything that's interesting in terms of local music over the year i've been here. it's all very generic and boring takes on different styles of punk, or equally boring folk music. my conclusion is that there's really not very much interesting music happening in the area at all.
but there's a specific bar that doesn't have a show calendar online. now, i really have little reason to think the bar is booking anything that's worth going to. i think the reverse logic is pretty applicable - if anybody worth watching was playing the bar, the bar would be updating it's listings. but, i'm the type of person that wants to know what's going on at all the bars i can get to, anyways, just in case there's that one rare act that seems interesting....
having idiosyncratic tastes requires this kind of meticulousness.
you wouldn't think a suggestion for a bar owner to update a web page would set off such a defensive reaction, but that it did says a lot about the area and the people that inhabit it. it demonstrates a very clique-y mentality that is suspicious of outsiders and wants to "vet" people before they're allowed to integrate.
going to a bar to watch a show doesn't imply a desire to join a club. and i definitely have zero desire to join a club....
this is why i prefer big cities to small towns. when i go out somewhere, i don't want to meet up with a group of people that i know, i want to fade into the crowd. i don't want everybody to know my name; i don't want *anybody* to know my name! i cherish that level of anonymity.
so, detroit's a good fit for me. windsor, less so...
in the end, if the local bands in the area just want to play to the same group of friends every show then that's their choice. i'll go hang out in detroit and watch some more interesting acts in the process...
it's probably too late for koko, but can't this kind of research be done in groups in the future? i mean, imagine being abducted by an advanced alien species, locked in a room and forced to communicate in code with them. no matter how well the aliens treat you, you're going to get lonely. you're going to feel various pressures to do the kinds of things that your dna demands that you do. and, you're a human, not a gorilla. chances are you're going to cope with it better because you have more advanced reasoning skills.
further, wouldn't the research even be superior if it was carried out in groups? if you tried to study a human under those circumstances, you'd no doubt be studying some kind of manic depressive psychopath, as the result of the conditions.
nearly every segment i've seen from this ape is trying to communicate immense grief. she's fucking miserable....
the thing about gorillas is that they're smart enough to understand they're being caged. you've seen at least one action movie, right? what happens when the aliens put an action hero in a cage, and the action hero gets the chance to escape? doesn't even need to be aliens, either, does it? could just be bad guys. and, it's carnage.
you consequently need to interpret the violent behaviour, when it happens, as a function of their captivity. you'd act no differently, yourself. it doesn't matter if the aliens or the bad guys "treat you well". you're still going to eat their faces if you get a way out.
but, it's different if you're integrated into the family. maybe there's a level of stockholm syndrome, but it's a different scenario than being locked in an enclosure.
what's going to define the nature of the beast is going to primarily be whether or not they interpret you as food. you're nuts to try and befriend a tiger. but gorillas are never going to interpret you that way.
of the other intelligent species? elephants aren't going to eat you, either.
i believe that the grooming is a gesture of friendship and the head honcho gorilla stormed off when it wasn't reciprocated. so, if you're ever in uganda, and some gorillas start grooming you, you really ought to groom back. it's rude not to, and might hurt their feelings. it's kind of like not accepting a local meal with the local customs..
again: when an elephant rubs your nose, it's expecting you to rub back. that's why it's standing there, within a foot of her nose, expecting reciprocation, and eventually walks off, confused and dejected.
basically, she "left the creature hanging". that trunk rub is a high five, or a hug. you gotta reciprocate or it's going to feel rejected...
(reply deleted)
jessica
+gps the apes that don't wear clothes have no trunks, either. i don't think it would find that confusing.
elephants learn almost everything from their parents and almost nothing from instinct - quite a bit like us. they wouldn't know an ape from a banana if they've never seen one before. that's not how the baby elephant is interpreting the human.
you've seen kids anthropomorphize animals. it's no doubt proboscidomorphizing her.
paramornal
+deathtokoalas Where did you learn that "when an elephant rubs your nose, its expecting you to rub back"? I am a veterinarian and my fiance is an animal caregiver and we never learned anything like that.
jessica
+paramornal well, it's an extrapolation. for example, you might see people hug their dogs. that's human behaviour, but sometimes we treat other species as though they're a member of ours, for the simple reason that it's how we think. now, humans are unusually smart animals - we can figure out how to communicate with some animals by mimicking their behaviour. elephants are also very smart, but this is a very young one.
when elephants rub their trunks against each other, it's a bonding thing. you'd expect family members or friends to do this. so, you'd expect an elephant to behave that way towards a human it wishes to bond with, because that's what an elephant would do - just as you might hug your dog. certainly, that's what the behaviour she's expressing is - a bonding rub.
it's kind of like when a chimp starts grooming you. that's not random behaviour, it's a bonding thing.
humans hug, chimps groom, elephants rub - and dogs lick. same idea. the fact that we're different species doesn't change the behaviour.
(reply deleted)
jessica
this isn't new behaviour, and i don't need a lecture. i may have coined the term, but there are many other observed instances of elephants treating humans as elephants. with elephants, especially - due to their extreme intelligence - it takes on a deeper dimension. i'm using examples with dogs and chimps to demonstrate behaviour they share with humans. in more generality, you can't interpret elephant behaviour the way you'd interpret dog behaviour - they're far too intelligent. they're not as smart as we are either, but you need to learn more in the direction of us than in the direction of our pets. with the trunk rubbing, this is a universal in elephant populations. humans may show a lot of variation in customs, but we also have some universals - and touching is one of them.
as another example of elephants treating humans as elephants, elephants have been known to bury sleeping humans under the misunderstanding that they're dead or dying. as astonishing as it sounds - and it is remarkable - elephants actually hold funerals for their dead friends and family members.
in fact, almost any mammal (excluding certain predators that interpret us as a natural prey source, which are mostly cats: lions and tigers) and a lot of more advanced non-mammals (this has been demonstrated in owls) will interpret us through their own filters and allow us to integrate into their social networks when they are existing. even when they're not existing, animals that co-habitate with us will work us into their own social understandings. i grew up with two or three dogs in the house at any given time, and i was entirely aware that i was as much a part of their pack as they were a part of the family - that we lived in a den as much as we lived in a house. the dog that protects their owner is demonstrating pack behaviour with the underlying understanding of the human as their dog kin. and, you've surely been licked by a dog that's trying to show affection and not really aware that we humans think it's a little gross. we do the same thing when we stand up for animals we interact with socially.
we have the ability to separate between species we consider "friends", but a moment's reflection will realize that this is an advanced cognitive ability. that the elephant sees an elephant in the human is not a sign of extreme intelligence, but a demonstration of their lack of full awareness. as great as elephant cognition may be in relative terms, it is a substantial abstraction to understand that different animals have different cultures and adjust behaviour to cater to each one. elephants understand elephant culture; due to our ability to understand that, we have the responsibility to adjust and respond accordingly.
====
yeah, i've seen enough to realize that the flowers are fake and the gorilla's articulation of sign language isn't. separating between the idea of "falsity" and "representation" may be a little abstract for her (although it might be something that could be taught), but she clearly understood that the picture of a flower was not actually a flower and felt the need to specify it. that is, she wasn't content with saying "that's a flower", she needed to find a way to express "that's a picture of a flower". that might not imply that she meets any technical definitions regarding the use of human language, but it does demonstrate that she understands what she's doing when she flops her fingers around. she is very clearly consciously doing so with the intent of expressing ideas that are her own.
i'm not sure it even makes sense to try and ask questions about grammar as they relate to sign language outside of the context of a spoken and written language, and i think it opens up a lot of questions regarding the circularity of it. i know there's different ideas about it, but i have a hard time separating grammar from written language. it seems to me that it's the writing that enforces the grammar, rather than the other way around. when you look at tribes that don't have written languages, the grammar may exist but is often rather basic - and they have thousands of years of linguistic evolution to get to the point, whereas koko only has her lifetime and a set of limited tools to express herself. i don't really have to hypothesize about taking europeans and putting them on a different planet without writing - you can look at how the language has broken down in areas of australia and north america, where the written component is not great. that is, you take the writing out and the grammar demonstrably starts to fracture. so, i just don't see how this experiment is able to produce any kind of meaningful conclusions on the question. to answer that question, you'd have to carry the experiment out over generations, teach them how to use written language and then construct something that gives the gorilla more ability to use grammar than signing.
but, i'm not falling for this idea that the gorilla is being conditioned. i've seen very little, of course - youtube videos. but the bit i've seen is just overwhelmingly in favour of an independent agent producing independent thought.
if the gorilla can understand over a thousand signs, it could conceivably understand just as many key combinations on a keyboard. that would eliminate a lot of ambiguity. perhaps using chinese style writing (or even something roughly comparable to hieroglyphs) may be a better way to start.
after all, humans didn't start with a complicated alphabet, either. we built it up over time. we started with pictorial representations that expressed ideas.
so, it's not really fair to grab a gorilla and expect it to grasp a modern roman alphabet with the complexity of a modern language right off the bat. i wouldn't even expect that a pre-neolithic member of our own species would be able to do that.
everything we know about plasticity and evolution nowadays suggests that whatever is inherent must have developed over the time we've been using language and grammar. so, if you want to do this and draw any meaningful results, you need to control for that by emulating the same kind of systems that early humans used, not the fully developed ones we use now.
i mean, we have no idea what ancient egyptians sounded like when they talked to each other. we can take some guesses. but there's not really any serious way to really understand how complex their grammar was, at the time.
chinese would be better for that reason, but it might be too complicated.
if tolkien can construct a new language, it can't be that hard to make one for some apes using a simple but "correct" grammar and then transliterate it with pictures constructed with combinations on an oversized keyboard.
and i'm suggesting this because i think the results will be shocking to certain people and put some questions to rest rather permanently.
====
see, this is rather pointless. yeah, she bashed the thing for a few seconds to get a peanut. but, what did you expect? the moonlight sonata? this is again a circular concern. i'm not aware of a culture that doesn't have music, but, if one did exist, i'm not convinced you'd get a different reaction from a human out of that culture.
and, probably roughly half the adult human population of the united states would react no differently....
"a keyboard. it makes sound. whatever. when do i get paid?"
i must have seen something somewhere recently about the centennial of wwI that bothered me in terms of the way it was framed, because the dream i had this morning was just off the wall, starting some time in about 1917 and ending in the mid 70s. i'm not going to go over it because it's a little blurry but it was some kind of episode of quantum leap. or sliders for the younger folk. or dr. who for the elderly, i suppose.
what i remember, though, is how insistent i was on a proper narration of events and how frustrated i was about people continuing to fall for propaganda that is now a hundred years old. it's made me wonder if this isn't a good time to review some basic historical misunderstandings of the last century.
i think historians will eventually think of one war rather than two.
1) the soviet experiment was not one in worker self-management, but something constructed by the vulgar marxism of the banking elite (new york, london) to determine if marx' ideas could really be used to reduce workers to compliant slaves and increase production and profit, as he claimed. if you're a member of the banking elite, you don't want to write off marxism without trying it out. it's pretty seductive, really. what you want to do is put them in competition with each other and see which is better at being oppressive. it turns out capitalism was the more oppressive system, and faking democracy is better at producing compliant people than faking socialism, so the bankers chose it and dismantled the soviet state. socialists, communists and anarchists of all types were mass executed in the process.
2) as is the tendency in russia, a nationalist appeared from nowhere and took over the state. it didn't null the experiment, but it did provide a problem for a few decades.
3) therefore, hitler, who was created to remove stalin - and nearly did.
4) hitler also backfired, but not as badly as stalin.
5) wwII was primarily a war between russia and germany. the american tactic through the war (sometimes misinterpreted as"isolationism") was non-interference, in the hope that the germans (who they supported) would remove stalin from power. however, once it was clear that stalin had the upper hand, it was determined that they must become involved to prevent soviet global dominance.
6) that is to say that the goal of the invasion of normandy was not to liberate france from germany (who had already lost the war on the eastern front and was merely waiting to be occupied by the soviets) but to occupy germany in order to prevent a soviet invasion of france, italy, the uk and spain.
7) likewise, the purpose of bombing japan with atomic weapons was not to end the war faster but to ensure that it would be occupied by american soldiers rather than russian ones. the russians were fast approaching. truman wanted leverage to get a direct peace treaty, and got it.
you have to meet the conspiracy theorists halfway. they're good at constructing evidence that demonstrates that whatever thing was a plot, and are often in the end proven right. what the theorists don't realize most of the time, though, is that they're uncovering a plan that ultimately *failed* and that the conclusion to draw from the evidence they put together is almost always one of mass incompetence, rather than diabolical genius.
everything up there is pretty standard history at this point, but the propaganda continues to define the narrative.
fwiw, i actually didn't vote for the liberals in 2011. i voted for the ndp that year.
2000 - liberal
2004 - ndp
2006 - ndp
2008 - liberal
2011 - ndp
2015 - liberal
i should also point out that i was not expecting a liberal majority and would have preferred to have them deal with the ndp on the budget. i would hope that the liberals are returned to a minority situation in 2019 that forces them to rely on ndp support.
canada doesn't have serious problems with voter suppression, or an electoral college, so trudeau would beat o'leary pretty soundly. remember: if the united states used the same electoral system as canada, and all other things remained equal, the results of the 2016 election would have likely given hillary clinton a solid majority government. the worst case scenario would have been a very weak minority for trump that would have likely fallen before the first budget.
so, these comparisons are foolish.
the actual truth is that it's probably actually exactly what the liberals want to see in terms of an opponent. trudeau would be able to smear him as an american.
it seems like the issue that is being coalesced around in canada right now is electoral reform, and it's really a no-win situation for the government. i just want to put a few things down here as a kind of brief memo, in order to explain the situation properly - because you're not likely to get a level-headed analysis from much of anywhere.
we need to begin by acknowledging that this was one of a couple of populist positions that drove trudeau's win, marijuana legalization being the other dominant factor. but, marijuana legalization is truly populist: it has support by upwards of three-quarters of the population, and across partisan lines and age divides. it really cuts the conservatives down to the most insular part of their base. i remember the media backlash when trudeau first announced this, and i couldn't understand. had they not seen the polls?
but, electoral reform is only populist on the left. liberals are split fairly cleanly, and conservatives do not support reform at all. so, yes: it was no doubt an important driver in getting left-leaning voters to choose the liberals over the ndp. in some ridings, it may have even been decisive. so, you can make an argument that it's why they won, and where their strongest mandate is. but, if you zoom out, you're only going to get around 40% support for the idea in general - and much less for any specific iteration of it.
worse is that the entire thing is built on a misunderstanding. unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on your perspective, these voters that swung from the ndp to the liberals and decided the election did not actually do their homework before casting their votes. while there was initially some ambiguity on the topic, it should be very clear (in hindsight) that they were in fact voting for proportional representation. however, trudeau has himself repeatedly rejected proportional representation in favour of the ranked ballot system. there was never any ambiguity projected, here. these mostly urban, left-leaning voters heard "electoral reform" and converted it into "proportional representation" without actually bothering to look into what he was actually saying. it's just another example of the left creating fantasy realities instead of looking at the evidence.
here is the reality: trudeau will bring in proportional representation the day after obama ends the war on terrorism. he never promised you this. you just made it up in your head.
but, the facts aren't going to pierce through the veil, here. these people are going to continue to agitate for a system that, in truth, almost nobody wants.
see, that 10% or so that wants pr is key in swinging elections. but, the potential for growth is extremely low. this has been put to a vote in the most progressive provinces in the country, and failed. the reason it keeps failing is because it's really not the system that canadians want. while reform is a key demand amongst the strong minority that wants it (that 40% or so), almost nobody wants to drop the idea of representation. nobody wants a system where it is not clear what population a member represents. even pr advocates have had to settle for awkward mmp schemes that nobody thinks can actually work - which is why they keep getting defeated.
my advice to electoral reform advocates is to drop the demand for pr. the liberals never advocated it; you misunderstood what they said, and need to accept that. and, if it's that important to you, you should have stuck with the ndp. but, maybe you might also want to listen to the arguments against pr. on closer analysis, perhaps you might find that a ranked ballot system may be in your advantage, after all.
but, you need to understand what the choices are between now and oct, 2019. you can choose between ranked ballots and first past the post. and, if you want something differently in the long run, your task is not to convince parliament to accept your scheme but to convince voters that your ideas are not flawed - which is a hefty task, because they are.
this is possibly the greatest simpsons episode ever.
i understand why it makes sense for some people to do this, but all i'm doing over youtube is marketing my music. i'm not aspiring to be a "youtube personality". i'm a composer that is documenting myself on youtube. it's not even secondary, it's tertiary. which is why i found myself so annoyed by the amount of time it was stealing from me....
increasing the subscriber count with people that aren't actually interested in the music just makes it harder for me to understand whether i'm getting through to anybody or not. this problem of disinterested subscribers is a big part of the reason that i took the deathtokoalas site down.
again: i get why people do it. it's the game they're playing. this is their purpose, their end goal, their total point. but, i'd actually publicly request that you don't subscribeunless you're legitimately interested in the music i'm documenting.
also, in the long run i'll need to keep an eye on my cholesterol. but, it's currently actually pretty outstanding.
i've been over this: my diet seems terrible, until you realize that i don't eat very much and i walk a lot.....
these numbers are real. and attainable. note: both of my parents have/had high cholesterol. my dad actually had several life-threatening cardiovascular episodes before brain cancer got him, and his father died of heart disease. if this were a purely genetic concern, i'd be in a lot of trouble. and yet look at these numbers....
chol: 3.69 mmol/L = 66.42 mg/dl. this is actually lower than the normal range (3.8-5.2). i also have low blood pressure....
tg: 0.88 mmol/L = 15.84 mg/dl. lower end of normal range (0.6-1.7).
hdl: 1.37 mmol/L = 24.66 mg/dl. this is pretty much in the middle of the normal range (1.00-1.80). higher hdl is preferable (apparently, above 1.6). but, i have to keep in mind that i'm low, overall. the way you measure a situation like this is to look at a ratio, and while it's not on the print-out, google confirms my logic. my ratio is 2.69; under 3.5 suggests i'm at low risk for heart disease.
ldl: 1.92 mmol/L = 34.56 mg/dl. this is also lower than normal (2.0-2.6), but again you have to keep in mind that the total is low. the important ratio here is ldl/hdl, which is 1.4. that again suggests very low risk - around half of the average risk, it turns out.
non-hdl chol: 2.32 mmol/L = 41.76 mg/dl. this measure is just a difference between total cholesterol and good cholesterol; it's the amount of cholesterol that is not good cholesterol. apparently, i want to keep the difference between non-hdl and ldl less than 30 mg/dl. well, i'm at 7.2.
i have to keep an eye on this because i should be at high risk. but, my lifestyle is very different than either of my parents, and the effects of that are showing pretty clearly.
ok. umm...
i was vaccinated.
the doctor is...he's got a lot of work to do....this is why i asked for the print-out...
the blood test results indicate i'm positive for anti-hbs. that means i'm immune. given that i also have immunity to hep A, i must have gotten twinrix at some point.
the test that the lab requested is to determine if i may have defeated it naturally and become a "chronic carrier". note that a "chronic carrier" is not the same thing as a "chronic infection". whether i misunderstood or he misspoke is less important than getting it right...but i think he read the information too briskly and misspoke, leading me to a false understanding...
when i said today that i should wait until march because there's a temporal component and i wouldn't learn anything from an immediate test, he nodded and said something about a graph and appeared to be struggling to remember something he hadn't thought about since college. google is so remarkably useful. he was no doubt thinking about this:
if i had picked up hep b in the blackout, i wouldn't have tested positive for anti-hbs a mere 11 weeks after infection, which is what happened. i must have already had immunity. what he told me had led me to believe that they had picked up lgM anti-HBc which, at 11 weeks, would indicate exposure. that is not the case. this was a miscommunication.
if i wasn't in shock, i would have asked for it in writing in the first place.
doctors are not magicians. it's always a good idea to ask questions, get things in writing and do independent research. i'm not upset because i consider this to be my responsibility, and not his.
but this is cleared up. whatever sickness i had this month, it wasn't hep b. i'm already immune to hep b. and i think it's clear that i'm immune to hep b because i was in fact vaccinated.
i still don't know what happened that night, though.
"I put in that category, explicit or functional obstacles to people being able to vote, to exercise their franchise."
so, where have you been for the last eight years, barry?
it's kind of typical obama. he points out that he'll speak out against voter suppression when he leaves office - after he sits and watches the legalization of voter suppression be decisive in swinging an election.
thanks, barack. and i hope the world appreciates the real value of your change in rhetoric.
i woke up sopping wet because i was outside in a torrential downpour.
my reconstruction of the last moments of the blackout suggests it's
probably why i got in the guy's car. but it means that any relevant
evidence got washed off.
there was nothing on my clothes. and, i was bruised, but there was no residue.
i
should have inquired around about the existence of an anal rape kit
rather than assumed one doesn't exist. i was in a daze and didn't want
to deal with it.
"There is no chronic (long- term) infection with hepatitis A. People do not become carriers of the hepatitis A virus."
"Avoid having sex while you're infectious – hepatitis A is most infectious from around two weeks before the symptoms start until about a week after they first develop."
ok. so...if i got hep A in the blackout, the person i got it from would have had to have been exposed recently. and, further, it would have had to have been in an anal-oral transmission. even in the worst blackout scenario, i would have no doubt gagged. i wish he would have told me that or printed the results out, because the transmission possibilities around hep A really rules out the possibility of a consensual encounter. i was either raped or i was vaccinated. which is more likely? on the one hand, i think it's pretty low probability to suggest i happen to have been raped by somebody who was in an active transmission stage of hepatitis A in detroit in 2016. this is a third world disease that has a short window for transmission. and, i guess that detroit is in bad shape. but, poverty does not introduce disease, right? the disease has to come from somewhere. this is so unlikely as to rule it out.
unfortunately, however, the low probability of the scenario doesn't rule out all of the other evidence leaning towards a sexual encounter and a disease transmission: waking up with a sore anus and bruises, and then getting sick not once but twice over a long period of lethargy that included a bout of possible jaundice. of course, it's not impossible that i could have had sex that night and already been vaccinated. there's nothing i can do except wait. but, i think that the possibility that i got hep A is really so remote that the presence of antibodies is re-opening the potentiality of a vaccination in my mind; i had all but ruled that out once i got sick. and, if i got a hep A vaccination, i would have almost certainly gotten it with a hep B vaccination. i can't handle being unable to deduce this. that's what upsets me. but, it's just more demonstration of the superiority of empirical epistemology. like i needed one....
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
i stopped by at the doctor's office today, hoping to get more info on the urologist referral. no progress. but, i got him to print off my full blood test results, and it turns out i also picked up hep A.
or, perhaps i got a twinrix vaccine? i went to florida when i was a kid. hrmmn. oddly enough, the presence of hep A antibodies is making me think it's more likely that i was vaccinated.
hep A hits faster. and, i was quite sick about a week after the blackout. it seems a bit quick, though, even for hep A; i thought it was some kind of bacterial infection in my throat, and tied it to a toke at a steve reich concert. could it have been both? apparently, hep A is mostly about anal sex. it felt bacterial. it's gross, but it actually makes sense.
with no memory, it's very hard to say anything.
the fresh air was beneficial; i feel better than i have in weeks. so, hopefully i'm over it. i'm still waiting until early march for the next blood test; results are on the 6th.
also, note: hitler was defeated not by the descendants of aryan migrants in britain, but by a horde of supposedly inferior half-mongoloid russian communists.
i know that's not how it's usually framed. but it's what actually happened.
european civilization suffered several devastating bouts of plague. the one in the 1300s was particularly brutal, killing more than a third of the population in certain regions. it happens to be that this was also the period when european civilization was under it's greatest threat of invasion from both the south and the east.
it is actually not at all outlandish to consider an alternate history where the closest ancestors of the ancestral native american populations - turks, mongols - could have swept into europe and utterly decimated the civilization there. there is even ample historical evidence as to what this would have been like, in the advances of genghis khan into afghanistan, iran and syria.
once again: the best argument against racism is history.
Aug 8, 2014
tubas are actually the best punk instrument if you play them loud enough. for some reason, though, tuba players seem to be incredibly shy and refuse to rock out. i want a rockin' tuba solo, thought punk might be the right search word...
but, no. as timid as ever. sorry, but that tuba player's just not into it. not feeling it.
this is, in fact, the correct way to play the tuba - with extreme force. to hell with all the weakling bourgeois players that are afraid of playing too loud. to get this instrument to sound the way it ought to requires every ounce of lung strength and emotional catharsis you can pull out of the innermost depth of your absolute being. a proper tuba performance should require an oxygen tent.
it's a shame the quality is bad. i need a good sample to get the dynamics right; i'm trying to figure out how to make my guitar sound like one.
i haven't listened to this in a while. 2 & 3 are both quite strong - much more interesting than his operas. somebody said something about vivaldi, but glass is far darker and far more vivid than vivaldi. i get more debussy out of it.
i'm trying to find some good tuba samples to model the dynamics properly on a midi guitar. the kind of tuba playing where somebody is blowing into the thing with the aim to knock the house down. it's harder than you might think. oddly, tuba players seem to be unusually reserved and polite folks, which is rather remarkable given the nature of the instrument they play. perhaps they realize the extent of their power and that leads to an exaggerated sense of responsibility. i suppose that would make them excellent nuclear engineers, but they seem to be rather boring musicians. the tuba players of the world really need to throw caution to the wind and let it all loose. they need to unleash all that power and force...
this kind of jumped in my head for the end section, but it's not quite what i want, either.
impressionism or expressionism, as though they're opposite terms? that's an anecdote your teacher pulled out of her ass and is asking to determine if you went to class or not. the truth is it's both and the teacher's a dork.
i'd love to learn how the play the tuba one day, just to get some of those cracked out bass lines down. it's not socially acceptable, though, so i'd basically have to move to a cave.
maybe that's what i'm missing out on in life. should i sell all my possessions to buy a tuba then find a cave and just sit around playing cracked out bass lines?
"dude, where's that weird sound coming from?"
"oh. it's just jess in her cave, playing her cracked out bass lines. you'll get used to it."
"not sure about that...."
maybe i should ease into it by sequencing some cracked out parts, first, before making any drastic decisions. i hope i can get the computer to pull it off convincingly...
now, how am i going to do this? i don't know what tempo it's in, and i need to get the computer to play back something microtonal.
i'm gong to try and riff something out and see how melodyne interprets it. i remember reading something about melodyne being able to handle microtones. i guess i'll have to do a little research on that first.
if i can get the basic tones down, i should be able to fix it up in a scorewriter from there.
if that doesn't work, i could try feeding it into a synth using the midiguitar route, but i don't know if it'll handle the microtones or snap into the nearest proper tone...
actually, i think i have a better chance at getting really raw, cracked out tuba like dynamics by using a pick.
midi guitar's my best choice...
i need to remind you that i've studied math, and i've studied physics, but i have not studied politics or history. this is my academic background. and you should actually take what i say about science far more seriously than what i say about politics.
put another way, i picked up everything i know about politics at the library or at wikipedia. it's substantial, obviously. but my degree is a b. mathematics.
===
aug 1, 2014
he's not really right, here.
the uncertainty principle is one of those things that's open to a few different interpretations. the standard one is that it's a law of physics, and there's even a mathematical proof for it. what he's saying is in that context, and if you're working in that context it would indeed be impossible - in that context.
but, there are two other interpretations of the uncertainty principle. as neither are demonstrably wrong, it's not rigorously correct to conclude that transportation is impossible due to the uncertainty principle.
the basic idea is that measuring the position necessarily changes the velocity, and vice versa, and there's nothing that can be done about that. but, is that a law of physics or a statement about our tools? well, the answer you're going to hear from a lot of people is actually that it's a law of physics that it's a statement about the tools. i'm not arrogant enough to state that as an irresolvable fact. i see no reason, to write this off, a priori, from any underlying principles. i have to admit i'm a little skeptical, though, as i couldn't imagine how. see, that's the real reason physicists hold to this. the mathematical proof is really just a convenient way to convert an intuitive assumption into something that certain types of philosophers can't really argue with.
the second alternate interpretation of the uncertainty principle is that it is a misnomer - it should actually be called the certainty principle. this is kind of more where i'm at. basically, it's a logical fallacy to deduce that unpredictability implies actual randomness. it certainly implies perceived randomness, but that perception could very well be an illusion deriving from the inability to measure. you can think of it like this: the movement of the planets would have seemed random before newton. you could have come up with probabilistic laws to govern their motion, and mostly got it right. that doesn't mean gravity didn't exist, it just meant it wasn't understood. you don't necessarily have to get to a hidden variable theory from this. the behaviour might neither be (locally) causal nor deterministic. this is a perfectly valid way to interpret the uncertainty principle: it might be that certain things happen in ways that are not predictable and can never be modified but are not actually random, but arise from non-understood causes. that is, the inability to predict the behaviour may actually merely demonstrate that there are causal things in front of us that we cannot alter.
i usually bring up this argument in the context of a fatalist v. undetermined universe, as the uncertainty principle is sometimes presented as an argument for the latter. however, it really provides no information in either direction, as it can be interpreted just as strongly for an argument in either direction. those who wish to argue the future does not exist will say you can't predict the path, it happens randomly. but we can't prove this beyond our perception. we can just as easily say that the seeming fact that you can't predict the path also means you can't alter it, and all phenomenon is the result of a first cause.
if the perceived randomness is merely an illusion, the argument against teleportation also collapses.
capitalism = currency + property rights = slavery + feudalism.
"Organigram has said it does not know how the substance entered its crops
but is working with Health Canada to find out more, noting it is a
certified organic grower and does not use pesticides in its production
processes."
sounds like bullshit. three hypotheses:
1) big growers stamping out little growers. this is what regulation means. but, at least it suggests they're serious.
2) it's meant to justify regulation. i don't care, really, i'd just like them to hurry the process up. if i get convinced that this was a cynical ploy, i'm going to raise hell. but, again, it suggests some level of seriousness.
3) feet dragging.
but, they're accusing a grower that does not use pesticides of having a banned pesticide, and that does not pass the smell test; something is happening.
i don't look at the world and say "this makes a lot of sense; something must have built it.". i look at the world and say "this doesn't make any fucking sense at all, it couldn't possibly be created.".
but, even that is a fallacy. for, look at capitalism. the marxists, and then the existentialists, have clearly demonstrated the fundamental irrationality of capitalism and the society it created. but, it is a creation of an intelligent species.
or, at least we like to think we're intelligent. is capitalism proof that we really aren't?
the newtonian universe is dead. physics is irrational. evolution is chaotic. and, math is incoherent. we're truly hurtling nowhere, and not making any sense at all doing it.
just shut up and go have fun.
for me, this is fun - because i can imagine the look on your faces.
i think that this may be a necessary consequence of donald trump: a lot of assholes are going to end up with busted up faces because they think it's ok to act in certain ways. and, they're going to deserve what they get. hopefully, he's going to get a good health care system in place to deal with all of the injuries that are coming to his supporters when these chickens come home to roost.
what kind of a fucking retard posts sexual advances on youtube comments?
just shut the fuck up. nobody cares what you're thinking. and, if you were standing in front of me, i'd beat the shit out of you for talking to me like that.
feb 9, 2014
if evolutionary biologists wanted to be real scientists, they wouldn't begin with the assumption of natural selection. it really is teleological.
rather, they'd take genetic drift as a null hypothesis and then attempt to build evidence for natural selection on a case-by-case basis.
i'm sure they'd agree with me, in principle. it's just a matter of pointing it out, then making fun of them until it becomes institutionalized.
then, you wouldn't get biologists talking about the difficulties in determining what the "purpose" of an "adaptation" is; rather, you'd be asking them first to rigorously demonstrate that a specific trait is an adaptation in the first place, rather than the result of chance. that's how real science works - you need to demonstrate a relationship, not assume it as a consequence of a philosophical principle.
kzg
If by teleological you mean that biological entities strive to maintain themselves alive yea. But even that is marginal. Final causality requires some minimum predictability and necessity.
Jessica Amber Murray
i've noticed there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in their writings. they try and self-regulate themselves. if you press them on it, they'll present the standard line "evolution doesn't have a final cause", but you can tell they tend not to actually believe that - that they're waiting for the day that it can be shown that it's part of a plan. there's libraries of books of them arguing with themselves over this, leveling accusations of "orthogenesis" at each other.
in practice, they look at a trait and assume it has a cause, then try and determine what the cause is. but, i would suggest that most observable traits don't have a cause. two things that just pissed me off were:
1) an article exploring the difficulties in understanding why female spiders eat their mates. there's an assumption this is an adaptation, and has a cause. no. it needs to be determined this is an adaptation rather than genetic drift (or a mutation that may have a negative effect on survival)
2) they found old dna in spain that was lactose intolerant and deduced it couldn't have had to do with sunlight. again, that's jumping to the assumption of natural selection. selection, here, needs to be demonstrated. it's entirely reasonable that the mutation may have developed as an adaptation further north and drifted south. at the least, finding the lack of mutation in the south does not prove it could not have been sunlight dependent.
but if you read biology journals, the idea that every trait is an adaptation with a cause is just engrained. it's a philosophical position that takes priority over evidence, and demands evidence uphold it. whatever the merit, it's not science.
kzg
What youre pointing out is not necessarily new. It has often been leveled against biology as a hard science. Heck crackpot creations argue somewhat along that line. But alot of this has to do with the positivist assumption that all science is derived from physics, if not directly, at least in terms of epistemological criteria. Ergo, only efficient and material causality is properly scientific. But of course this is rather gratuitous (can that be explained under its own parameters?) and it led to a bunch of weird shit like phrenology. Evolutionary biology does not fall under the usual criteria of repeatability and mathematisation. Hence efficient causes cannot be isolated. For that to be possible, organic matter would have to function mechanically, that is, within uniform time, not the cumulative time (duration). So this is ingrained in the discipline's world view which, really, is essentially historical. Narratives tend to have some sort of teleological pull. Im ok with that.
Jessica Amber Murray
i know the line of argument you're thinking of, but it's not entirely what i'm saying. i'm just suggesting that they really ought to be more focused on proving relationships that they take for granted, and that they're not reduces to the substitution of a guiding belief system in place of really skeptical science. there's certainly a different set of challenges when working in biology, but i don't think they're incompatible with a general hypothesis testing approach. i mean, to suggest they are is to give up. i'd be shocked to hear a biologist suggest as much. they're certainly doing hypothesis testing, they're just doing it at too weak a level of inquiry.
you can still - i suggest you must - look at a trait and ask the question "is this an adaptation, or merely the result of chance?" in a meaningful sense, by studying all the things around the hypothetical adaptive process and coming up with an argument that this is really the case. they don't actually do that, though. in the best case scenario, they'll grudgingly admit that maybe it might just be chance if they can't figure out the adaptive benefit. but this is really backwards thinking.
where it's a problem is when it leads to wrong conclusions. one of those examples is with the female spiders eating their mates before they mate with them. it's specifically related to a solitary species that only comes into contact with a mate once or maybe twice in a life time. that is, females are eating their male mates before they mate even though the balance of probabilities is that it's the only chance they'll get to mate. this is behaviour that doesn't make any sense in terms of passing on genes. a slow consensus is developing that the spiders just lack impulse control. they see food, they eat it; they lack the faculties to analyze the consequences. it's consequently the result of one type of adaptation (impulsive eating) having a negative effect on a necessary biological function (mating). that's a chaotic development that will harm the long term health of the species, not an adaptation.
yet, leading up to this realization, there were many arguments that the behaviour was an adaptive trait to ensure the proper spread of genes. the female spider somehow determined that the male was a bad mate, and ate it in order to ensure it's genes weren't going to a bad mate. serious people argued this in serious places.
in order to take such an argument seriously, there's a lot of questions that need answers. how? but, it's the procedural approach that was the problem. it's sort of an extreme example; the shift in thinking would be a lot more enlightening with a more subtle example, where it's not so obvious. but this works better to make the argument for that very reason. so, they looked at an organism, they saw a trait and (regardless of it's absurdity) they assumed it was an adaptation for survival - leading to ridiculous conclusions that are being acknowledged as such. yet, if they began with the assumption of random gene flow (as a sort of background process, as noise) leading to random mutations (that may or may not lead to increased chances of survival), and then determined if there's enough evidence to reject that assumption and deduce an adaptation then they would have come to the right answer in the first place.
and, we can debate about what is a better null hypothesis, but beginning with randomness requires less assumptions and is more appealing for that reason.
nor is any biologist actually going to argue with me on the point. they'll gnash their teeth and say "you're right, but we take shortcuts because we're biased towards darwinian thought. if we were to formally study it, we should do it like you're saying". which is just admitting that they're being unscientific. if you look at a microbiologist or a geneticist, they all study more formally. it's only evolutionary biology, which is peculiarly deductive in it's approaches, that doesn't bother.
if they want to be real scientists, they must take the process more seriously and realize that selection is something that must be proven to arise from randomness on a case-by-case basis every single time, not a monolithic force that can be assumed to be working in nature at all times.
to be a little more specific, i'm talking about the third and fourth axioms of the modern evolutionary synthesis, that state that natural selection is the main driver of change and genetic drift is a secondary factor. this is generalizing in too far an extreme. it may be roughly true, but these are statements that require demonstration on a case by case basis, not a general statement that glosses over specific changes. holding to those assumptions has the potential to lead to bad conclusions; methodologically, it's not very scientific.
rather, i would reformulate it to genetic drift is a constant driver of change and selection depends on forces that must be demonstrated to both exist and lead to the resulting changes.
Jan 21, 2014
- Evolution can be explained by what we know about genetics, and what we see of animals and plants living in the wild.
ok.
- The variety of genes (alleles) carried in natural populations is a key factor in evolution.
ok. obviously, variation is necessary for selection, otherwise nothing can be selected.
- Natural selection is the main mechanism of change. Even a very slight advantage can be important, continued generation after generation. The struggle for existence of animals and plants in the wild causes natural selection. Only those who survive and reproduce pass their genes on to the next generation. We find the strength of natural selection in the wild was greater than even Darwin expected.
i don't particularly like the exact words used here, but ok. i would like to see a larger role attributed to randomness and a lesser role attributed to competition. i'll get to this in a moment...
- Evolution is gradual: natural selection occurs, and small genetic changes collect. Species only change little from one generation to the next. Big changes do occur, from time to time, but they are very rare.
for the most part, sure. i would further put forward the idea that those big changes are largely hybrid events, and suggest a "family graph" as an alternate model to a family tree.
- Genetic drift is usually less important than natural selection. It can be important in small populations.
this one, i have serious problems with. there's a huge list of "adaptations" that seem to be defined by random genetic drift rather than natural selection. note that my opposition to the way evolution is understood is that it hasn't entirely eliminated a deity, not that it has. it's still too religious, not not religious enough! vestigial traits are one example that seems to be better described using random genetic drift than natural selection. it's not that i deny competition as a force for evolution, it's that i think they have the primacy of things backwards: randomness defines most evolution, but natural selection can be important when competing over specific scarce resources (and situations of scarce resources would be the exception, rather than the rule, in biology).
- In palaeontology, we try to understand the changes in fossils through time. We think the same factors which act today also acted in the past.
ok - except when evidence exists otherwise. it's really an untenable assumption, when analyzed. but it's necessary - unless it can be demonstrated otherwise.
- As circumstances change, the rate of evolution may get faster or slower, but the causes are the same.
same thing as the last comment. that should be read simply as "the rate of evolution is not constant".
the hazards of long nails on your picking hand, which is also usually going to be your wiping hand...
i scratched my anus.
:(
i should do a psa for kids, so they know.
"remember kids: if you play classical guitar, always wears gloves while wiping in order to avoid scratching your anus."
what else is there to do besides stick a wad of toilet paper in there?
so, now i'm going to have to walk around looking like i shit my pants
for the next few hours.
jokes aside, it's got me wondering if there's like an e coli risk or
something. i mean, opening up a hole in your anus so bacteria can crawl
into your bloodstream can't be good news. i guess i just have to hope my
neutrophils are populated, armed and ready for battle!
"unfortunately, we regret to inform you that jessica has perished due to
complications resulting from a mild case of accidental anal
scratching."
i should publicly apologize to my neutrophils for increasing their workload. i can only imagine what they're thinking....
"dude, where'd all this e coli come from"
"the fucking idiot scratched her anus."
"how?"
"classical guitar finger nails."
"she didn't know better than to wear gloves?"
"apparently not."
"what a fucking noob."
"there's a few over there, let's go phagosome 'em."
"i'm not hungry, i just had a bunch..."
"just fucking do it."
the last two were quick. the next one was huge, so huge that i stopped to jump ahead. two months, almost.
it's all in the details. hundreds of tracks; hundreds of guitar tracks. and that felt really, really good. it's going to feel really, really good again, too - soon.
this is a gigantic epic rock song that draws from the mod leanings of the entire rock era from the who right up to the white stripes and everything in between. headphones, please. no laptops, please.
wasps (and hornets) are such insane creatures.
it's trying to kill a venomous spider in order to lay an egg inside of it, which will eat the spider as it matures.
the result presented here makes the behaviour seem like such wantonly pointless violence. ok, ok - maybe it's going after a competitor. but, surely there are less dangerous ways to lay some eggs...
it's stuff like this that makes you realize there's no way this shit was designed. this defies all reason. and there's thousands of similar examples.
i'm going to need to update this, but it's what's next. the write-up is key; it's electronic/classical music in a late 60s style.
you have to talk to the alt-right the same way they'd talk to you. it's not my first choice, but it's necessary. and, it's up to them to de-escalate.
they're a bunch of fucking retards that are too stupid to understand basic ideas and should shut the fuck up.
example: you are too fucking stupid to take part in this conversation. please shut the fuck up.
i'm a little skeptical.
and, like i needed another excuse for coffee, right? but, i'll take it. and, if it's even half-true, my liver should be up to full strength in no time at all.
....and you have to understand that when you say that i'm "lazy", i don't take that as an insult because i don't uphold your puritanical value system that glorifies labour as sacred. and, i claim - with minimal controversy - that this is an american value system, and not a canadian one.
i've stated before that i'd have been a loyalist in the american revolution. that's not meant as an empty inflammatory statement. what it means is that i'd have fled to canada. and, guess what? i'm a canadian. it's just a statement of fact. i wouldn't have fought for american values then, and i'm not going to fight for them now.
you call it "the american dream"; i call it "calvinist bullshit".
not only is it very much not the society i want to live in, it's exactly what i'm constantly railing against.
listen: if you want to live in a world where working hard gives you the right to oppress others, then go ahead and move to the united states. i won't miss you. take off, eh?
i want to live in a society of real equality, where we're not spending all of our time working to get ahead but have a safety net that lets us focus on what is really important: art, expression & science. my concept of canada explicitly rejects "the american dream" in favour of something much better.
this was the next 2014 release, but it was compiled rather than worked on.
it's a hybrid minimalist guitar piece and romantic-era piano concerto, with a strong impressionist undertone and some nods to swing-era jazz. this is not the only piece like this in my discography, but these tracks are rare, because the piano is not my main instrument.
the story is absolutely true. i barely remember writing this, as i was tripping out when i should have been doing calculus.
it is for real clearing up, and quickly.
make jessica white again!
jul 21, 2014
see, this is why i gave up on physics. well, not exactly this, but basically this. there's a certain strain of analytic thought going back to descartes that suggests that photons are massless and move in a straight line, but i can't fathom how any atheist could stand on a podium in 2014 and declare a photon massless. the mass may be very, very, very small, but it defies all reason to suggest it doesn't exist at all. and, when the mass is experimentally verified as non-zero, physics is going to face an incredible crisis.
the unfortunate nature of relativity is that it's axiomatic. einstein was operating at precisely the moment that mathematicians were beginning to reject axiomatic systems as facile and naive. ironically, einstein had to reject the most praised axiomatic system of them all - euclid's - in order to get to where he got to. it's bizarre that he upheld the process, given what he knew. and, one has to wonder how different relativity would have been had godel got his ideas out before einstein did.
in the end, the religious have an absolutely valid point in claiming science is another religion. it's not because that's what science always is, or what science should be, or what science wants to be, it's just because it's all science can be once we get beyond the basic abstraction of what we can see and feel and otherwise experience directly. axiomatic systems are axiomatic systems, whether they're labeled with an S or an R.
i was skeptical about the lhc, too. but, i think it should be stressed a bit more loudly that it didn't provide that missing link the way the popular press has suggested. nor would it matter much if it did because we already know the standard theory is wrong, anyways. but, if you want to talk simple naivete? it doesn't get more simple or naive (or quasi-theological) than symmetry. and the lhc results have finally thrown symmetry in the trash can where it belongs....
jessica
"It always travels at the maximum velocity it can irrespective of how much energy it is carrying, which is a clear as day indication that a photon has... how much mass?"
that's an empirical question. however, modern physics treats it as an assumption. that is, there is no empirical evidence that what you're saying about light is actually true.
you kind of have to get into the philosophy of it. kant had this idea that "synthetic a priori" systems (he used euclidean geometry as his sacred example) are the most pristine type of knowledge. but, as kant was writing his epistemological treatises, various mathematicians were realizing that a geometry that negates the third postulate is potentially consistent with itself. the whole idea that space may be curved actually comes from that realization in geometry, which more or less throws kant's epistemology out the window. yet, einstein based his theory on a "synthetic a priori" axiomatic system, nonetheless, potentially carrying in the same kinds of problems that make euclidean geometry obsolete in all but the historical sense (or in a practical engineering sense).
the thing about light not having a mass (and moving in a straight line) actually comes from the history on the philosophical side of physics. and, if you follow the argument, it's actually theological.
now, i'm not saying that light must have mass. i'm saying it's an empirical question. currently, the best we can do is provide a bound for it. however, there would be a very simple test to demonstrate that light does indeed have mass: find a tachyon.
i don't pretend to understand the nature of light perfectly. i don't think anybody claiming such a thing would be speaking honestly. but, we know that light displays both particle and wave behaviour. that particle behaviour, in my opinion, provides strong evidence for a non-zero rest mass. it's not a scientific proof, but if it really had no mass then how could it actually display particle behaviour? see, this is where the thing defies reason at a really basic, intuitive level. we hold the massless photon as such a basic assumption due to so many years and such tradition in doing so that we don't really think that through carefully. high school teachers laugh at the student that suggests otherwise. but, that was exactly the case with the parallel postulate, as well.
it's not an assumption i was able to take seriously, and i had a hard time taking the theories built on it seriously as a result of it.
"As for the standard model being wrong. Uhm."
relativity and quantum theory are incompatible with each other (they can't both be right; it depends on the nature of space, another empirical question that is very difficult to understand how to experiment for), and the general way to dealing with this is in fact to contemplate physics "beyond the standard model". the lhc was supposed to help in sorting this out. i haven't heard anybody come out and say it yet, it's maybe a little too unsettling, but the fact that the lhc results agree so perfectly with the standard model actually merely indicates that its far more wrong than anybody could ever imagine.
"Making mathematical models is fun and all but without empiricism it's called making random shit up in a fantasy land."
that's right. that's why i switched from physics into math. i figured if i was going to be working in lala land, it would be more worthwhile to do so as a mathematician, rather than as a magician.
most of what passes as modern physics (from string theory to relativity itself) doesn't pass any meaningful definition of science. almost none of it is falsifiable, and there's virtually no experimental data underlying any of it. almost all of it is legitimately just mathematics. and, when you take into account what i said about euclid up there, that makes a lot of it more or less useless. they use all kinds of geometry in their models without having any kind of empirical basis as to the validity of the geometry itself.
worse, you get prominent scientists (like stephen hawking) taking outlandish positivist positions that declare that the model creates the reality. i've literally choked listening to these people talk, in absolute awe.
then, they confuse themselves misapplying godel. hawking actually published a paper a while back declaring that godel's math implies a theory of everything is impossible. that only makes sense under the assumption that the model and the reality are inseparable from each other.
so, yeah. you're right. and that's the exact reason i gave up on physics.
"Something tells me proving photons have non-zero rest mass is going to be a tricky one, however even if it were proven to be so it would be such a tiny tiny mass as to be negligible."
i couldn't see how to do it, other than finding a tachyon. but, i think the implications are more profound than you're realizing.
sahil
Present a hypothesis that backs up your claims. how does a
photon with rest mass = 0 cause calamities for physics.? Photons are
light quanta which travel at speed of light. A stationary photon does
not exist. A lot of things may be feel wrong but until you present the
mathematics backing up your feeling, we have to work with the
theoretical framework that predicts the greatest number of things with
the highest accuracy. You have a different opinion? Bring out the
mathematics. You can be skeptical about the lhc and as for what they did
find, how about you read the scientific publications instead of the
media to find out what you are being skeptical about...
jessica
well, i'm not skeptical about the lhc results. and, my argument is purely rational. it's really so simple that you wouldn't expect it would even be controversial, once you think it through. i'd direct you to my previous response.
light does indeed travel at the speed of light, that's tautological. but, does the speed of light actually provide a speed limit?
i'm going to try not to take on your claims about mathematics too directly, other than to point out that the way you're thinking about this is actually the root of the problem in the way that physicists think, and it comes out of these philosophical treatises written in the previous centuries. something we've learned over the last century is that what we call mathematics is itself merely a model to try to understand numbers. despite hawking's sad and comical attempt to grapple with it (those are strong words, and i don't state them lightly), i don't feel that modern physics has really come to terms with godel's work and it's not going to get anywhere further until it does. i guess hawking gets credit for actually realizing there's a problem, there.
there are a number of geometric issues in mathematics that cannot be resolved by starting with a set of axioms and deducing things. these are empirical issues. and, until they're worked out, we're going to have to deal with a lot of nonsense in geometry like the banach–tarski paradox that reduces both fields to idle speculation.
mathematics is not the language of nature. i know physicists like to think that, but that thinking is obsolete. mathematics is merely another model, and it has some really serious problems in it.
stated another way, a lot of what mathematics models is not the reality we live in. you can't split a ball into two equal balls in reality. it defies conservation laws. when physicists take that mathematics and try to use it to develop physical theories, their results consequently do not apply to reality, either.
but, as for light? it has a particle nature. as far as i'm concerned, that implies it has a mass.
(a second reply was deleted before it could be archived, by the same poster as before)
jessica
well, i'm not going to stand here and argue that all physics is wrong, and i'm sorry if you got the impression that this is what i was saying. this computer i'm typing on, and the method used to communicate with you over a network, would belie such an outlandish statement. and, yes, science is a work in progress, and that's what makes it science. nor do i have anything to counter any of the points you just made. all these things are true enough.
it was more the epistemological basis that turned me off. and, the more i learned about math, the more dissatisfied i became with the whole hurrah. i didn't feel i was actually learning anything of any value, i was just following through on a lot of assumptions that i couldn't really swallow as accurate. so, i play guitar now.
i could pull the copenhagen consensus out as another head-scratcher. basically, it's this:
"we, the pre-eminent german scientists of the world, cannot figure this out. therefore, let it be decreed across the world that nobody shall ever figure this out for all of time eternal."
that is something i can sympathize with einstein on.
(a third reply was deleted....)
jessica
yeah, i've seen that explanation before, but i believe it's just an interpretation. i don't think the duality is really settled in any authoritative way.
i haven't seen the matter-antimatter argument before, but allow me to be skeptical in pointing out that if the mass is small enough it will wash out in the error.
(a fourth reply was deleted...)
jessica
well, the funny thing is i gave up on math when i came to the conclusion that it ought to be empirical, and everybody realized it, and nobody wanted to do anything about it, or seemed to even really care.
Atwa Jesper
Sorry if I'm intruding but I wanted to interject very quickly and bring up the fact that some 'debaters' get lost in the heat of the arguments and usually and unintentionally digress from the main topic.
We could spend days throwing theories and studies on the table that at the moment seem to be contradicting each other but the God discussion and Science, have not much to do with "what seems logic to me" or with the typical "it doesn't make sense". The universe doesn't care for what seems plausible or not, reality is reality and if a phenomenon behaves in a certain way, well, we test it and prove it with evidence and that's it. How many things that nowadays work and seem to make perfect sense, didn't seem logic or natural when they were being developed by those 'crazy thinkers'. Big masses of Metal are able to float on water and carry a lot a things, or we could have also leave the Skies to the birds but we still made it. With today's knowledge all of that seems normal because we know how it's done but again, those ideas didn't seem to be any logical.
Anyways, it seems I'm digressing myself. Regardless of the limited understanding that we have today of the natural world, we shouldn't fall again in the fallacies of "arguments from ignorance" or "the God of the gaps". The fact that many things are still unknown to humanity and Quantum physics doesn't seem to make much sense, doesn't mean therefore God.
The massless protons and other topics must be resolved for science advancement purposes, not to prove that any God does or does Not exist.
Btw, the ones making the assertion that a God exists are the ones obliged to prove it. The burden of proof is on the ones making the assertion, not the other way around.
jessica
that's all very true, but it doesn't really have anything to do with what i posted.
the value of science in my view is twofold: falsifiability and repeatability. but, when you look at the bulk of modern theoretical physics, very little of it meets either criteria.
that in no way implies a god must exist, and again, i'm sorry if you thought that's what i suggested. but it does place the two fields on a roughly equal footing. in my mind, that doesn't give religion more credibility, but it does give parts of modern physics less credibility.
in religion's defence, it's a bit of a strawman to argue it's rooted solely in faith. i'm simply not aware of analogues in other religions, but christianity has libraries and libraries worth of material that attempts to deduce aspects of morality using reason. we think of the "natural law" that defines what is roughly thought of as "secular humanism" as a modern, liberal idea but it in reality traces back to christian theologians like augustine and aquinas. it's use in the english legal tradition actually has more than a little bit to do with the feudal system. when the english scholars of centuries past deduced that natural law ought to be supreme to legislated law, what they really meant was that the church's law is supreme to the king's law, and for the precise reason that the king was still viewed as subservient to the pope, at least in moral purposes if no longer in political ones. it may have earlier roots in aristotle, but the reality is that secular humanism is the philosophical continuation of a branch of christian theology. both systems appeal to reason to determine moral value, rather than the dictates of human beings. the difference is merely that the christian theologians thought god acted through reason, and modern humanists tend to consider that to be a question that is not worth asking.
yes, you have to work in ideas like infallibility of the pope into the equation, and write them off as ridiculous on their face. however, it's not really fair to blame that on the religion itself - it's more of a consequence of human politics and the tendency of power to act as a corrupting influence. in christianity's further defence, it must be pointed out that the pope has never existed without theological opposition of some sort, and that the reformation is a historical event that actually did happen.
i'm losing a bit of focus. biology is quite different because it is far more empirical than modern physics - a situation that is the reverse of what it was 100 years ago and that i think most people haven't really come to terms with yet.
i was simply responding to a comment krauss makes at the beginning of the video about physics not being "just another story" because it makes testable predictions. but, this is largely untrue. physics does make some testable predictions, but it makes far more untestable claims by deducing things from a set of first principles, just as aquinas did. it follows that when the religionists argue that physics is mostly just another story, they are making a valid point.
but, no, that doesn't mean a god must therefore exist.
jessica
just throw an epsilon in there and see what happens. publish it if you want, i don't care, my aspirations are all in music.
(noting, of course, the conceptual change that light could be at rest in the first place.)
ok, i know physicists like to think in terms of consequences. it bugs me, but i'll go with it. it may actually make a few things make more sense.
consider the idea of determining the relativistic mass of a photon. you know the formula (hopefully), with the big M equal to the little m over the square root of one minus v/c squared. if you actually plug zeros into there, you get the lovely 0/0, so you take a limit. but think about what you're doing when you take a limit - you're setting them both to non-zero. if you were actually setting them to zero, you'd set them to zero. when you're taking a limit, you're getting as close to zero as you possibly can, without actually getting to zero. that is, you're assuming a non-zero rest mass.
mathematically speaking, you would actually formally even plug an epsilon into the m, and c-delta into the v. that is because m (epsilon) is approaching zero and v is approaching c (or delta is approaching 0). but, then you go and set it all to zero. that's really not consistent with itself.
now, on a graph, you might plug in an imaginary point to make the thing continuous, if you want it to be continuous. but it would be crazy to do that in the realm of physics. that's forcing reality to obey something that isn't even an arbitrary convention, but a pure fantasy that mathematicians create purely for the fun of it. plotting that point is carrying out magic. it's a magic point...
what the formula actually states is that light can never reach the speed of light. this is tautologically false.
if you just plugged a non-zero epsilon in there in the first place, set v equal to the speed of light and set a new speed limit of pure energy at "c+delta" (and you could maybe even come up with delta in terms of epsilon some other way, but be careful that you're not being circular) you'd get the same mathematical idea, but in a way that actually makes mathematical sense.
and i actually hope that example further demonstrates some of the problems in the way physicists use mathematics.
rr
Well, with respect, physics seems to have done very well so far. Sure, it is all model dependant, no one claims it as absolute truth do they. Yes you seem to know your stuff, mostly on the maths side. But I think I will put my confidence in the current prevailing views rather than a random Youtuber who looks like they have smoked enough weed to embarrass the biomass of the Amazon rainforest. Call me some sort of utilitarian if you wish, but these flawed theories you critique have done a great job of explaining many things. In any case, c is just the speed of a massless particle in a vacuum. Being called the speed of light is just a historical artifact. So even if it turns out a photon does have an incredibly small mass, I don't see how it breaks the theory. But most importantly, what the fuck's your problem with koalas?
jessica
the idea that nothing can move faster than pure quantized energy (massless particle strikes me as an undefined concept) strikes me as pretty rational, and not something i'm going to argue against. but, if we accept that light does have a mass, it opens up a lot of questions as to what that means, exactly. is it even defined? is it an imaginary limit, in the sense that nothing actually achieves it? is the difference between the speed light and the speed limit large or small? if it's large, what effects does that have on things like time dilation? space travel? as i mentioned before, i don't think you're really thinking through the possible ramifications. mathematically, it may only be a set of minor fixes. but this could have very large results, depending on the nature of those fixes.
i recognize that aboriginal communities are in bad shape in canada, but i don't support the idea that ethnic groups can or should own land and i'm flat out violently opposed to reasserting traditional societies and all the social and religious implications it implies. i cannot reconcile my scientific, atheistic anarcho-communism with support for traditional, conservative societies. to me, these groups aren't allies in the world i want to build - they're really quite active opponents.
and few people may be willing to state that, but i know a lot of people agree with me. and, i know the indigenous groups themselves are always apprehensive about these groups of white university students that think they're dealing with some cartoonish archetype of tonto (or, worse, something out of a fictitious engels text) rather than anything that approaches reality.
it just makes it difficult. i want to support the environmental aspect, but i can't organize with groups that want to force people into strict gender roles and think that trees have spirits. i want to organize with scientists, atheists and socialists that want to build high tech renewable systems.
you go to one of these things, and you have to endure all kinds of indigenous religious nonsense, and you walk out smelling like you bathed in sage - which is every bit as bad as patchouli. it's hard to sit through without snickering, or storming off.
like, if i wanted to hang out in a fucking church, i wouldn't be an anarchist, y'know? i'd just go be a christian...
more than anything else, that's what needs to be cut out of the process. but, you can't convince an indigenous leader that there ought to be a separation between religion and politics, because, to them, it's a holistic whole.
and that should frighten people. i'm always confused when it doesn't. but, do you want to know why it doesn't, really? because they're not perceived as a serious threat.
you get white people talking like that, and they're instant targets. think of ann coulter. but the natives don't get the same reaction because all the propaganda has them pegged as inferior "noble savages" that could never set up that kind of society.
but if these white "allies" had taken an afternoon to read up on it, rather than relying on 60s folk songs, they'd realize that it's EXACTLY what they want to set up.
the thinking seems to be that we have to bend on this and deal with the mumbo jumbo or they won't organize with us, but i really think it needs to be other way around.
i'd like to organize with people of all backgrounds, races, genders, orientations and whatever else - just so long as they leave their beliefs at home, where they belong. and the focus should be on kicking out the people that want to force their religious beliefs on others.
for now? there's no way this gets to critical mass so long as the religion and nationalism remains intertwined with the environmental politics. it's a humongous stretch to move from one to the other. and what it actually does is chase off the left and bring in the right.
people will talk about relativism and colonialism and whatnot, and it's not that i'm ignoring or discounting any of that, it's just that it's placing the solidarity in the wrong place. i'm never going to be able to place any solidarity with any group that wants to set up any kind of hierarchical, oppressive system. my solidarity lies with the individuals that could potentially be told they can't do something - a woman who is told she can't do something because she is a woman - and not with the tribal system.
and, there's not any way to synthesize this. cultural relativism works when you're talking about things like diet. i can't eat caterpillars, but, hey, that's how some people get their protein. it doesn't work when you're talking about individual rights. that's where the solidarity needs to be at all times.
and, i'm even mostly on the side of "letting" (that's a colonial idea, but you get the point) cultures work out their own solutions. that's democracy, right? but, it's one thing to stand back and let them work their shit out, and it's another to actively work towards putting oppressive systems in place.
i again need to point out that the white allies (or, more generally, non-indigenous allies) just mostly don't understand what they're actually supporting. but, i do, and my conscience will not allow me to support the underlying aims of nationalism, tribalism and exclusion.
this pipeline is not likely to be stopped. and this focus on traditional ways of thinking is going to be one of the primary reasons.
the organizers need to change their approach and start focusing more on getting scientists and technologists out on the front lines.
i've tried to bring up these concerns, but i haven't been successful in convincing anybody.
and i fully understand i'm moving against the grain of post-leftist thinking.
