The liquid world

William Saletan’s article in Slate about the liquid world makes some thoughtful points about our current woes in fighting terrorism. The idea of treating a threat with a 1% chance of success the same as a 95% chance of success is an unworkable solution and at some point we as a nation will have to face that.

…some of us die. And the rest of us grieve, but we go on, doing our best to fight the bad guys and heal the world. The grieving and fighting and healing never end the dying.

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Viscious Cycle

A closed room has a refrigerator with the door open. What happens to the temperature in the room?

The temperature goes up because more energy is added to the room while the refrigerator is plugged in. When Julie quizzed me on this oh so long ago I hesitated, but the real answer made complete sense.

I kept thinking about that as I read William Saletan’s article in Slate about our need to refrigerate contributes to our global warming problems. I can’t remember the last time an article made me feel this unpleasant.

Crazy from the heat

I’m doing math homework and thinking about Godel’s Incompleteness theorem. If you take his theorem and apply it outside of math it provokes some funny ideas. To review he says that for any system part of it will be true but it can’t be formally proven to be true. So you’ll intuitively know it is true but you can’t prove it.

Now think about paranoid schizophrenics. Their brains must be operating in a hyper rational mode. They create elaborate constructs of rational truth. The problem comes when they can’t intuitively accept a truth and their brain gets stuck in recursive mode. Take the Liar’s Paradox, “This sentence is false.” It’s true, but it’s false. You and I can intuitively accept it as true even though we can’t formally prove it. I think you could say the paranoiac runs down that rabbit hole trying to find a rational proof.

Personal Housekeeping

I start work at Yahoo doing web development August 21st. No other job has left me as excited by what it could be, and as unsure of what it will be.

Emily had her eleventh birthday at the end of July. While I was there she asked me if I believed we go to Heaven when we die. She said she doesn’t believe in Hell and she’s not sure about Heaven or God. I was quietly beaming inside. I was so proud. She was grappling with faith and reason and finding a role for those ideas in her life. I think I gave her a frustrating answer when I said what I know is that we don’t know what happens next.

Fight the Power

My rep Eddie Bernice Johnson voted against Network Neutrality by supporting HR5252. I’m pretty disappointed with her.

This bill was sponsored by Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Charles Pickering (R-Miss.) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.). I bet you can guess who their top campaign contributors are: AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

Us Dallasites really need to create an interest group that is saavy about Internet issues. Is there a group here that already does that? We need to go out to other groups in town and educate them about IP issues like Fair Use, DMCA, Network Neutrality, etc. It won’t take that many people to make a big impact on these issues.

Math geniuses and the rest of us

I’ve been reading about mathematical geniuses the past few weeks. I read Simon Singh’s book “The Code Book” and that sort of got me started. I owned an unread book on Kurt Gödel called Incompleteness that I started reading after that. That’s lead me to G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology and a book on the Indian math genius Ramanujan called The Man Who Knew Infinity. All illustrate (1) how hard it is to be a genius (2) that even other geniuses will misunderstand you and (3) how ordinary and unimportant everyone else is.

Learning and Cleaning

One semester of school down, some number > 4 to go.

Julie is borrowing my copies of The Invisibles. I find this incredibly cool.

I got all excited when I read that The Golden Compass is shooting for a 2007 release date.

Read about Metatron on wikipedia. That took me to an enjoyable review of Donnie Darko that posits the idea that Frank the bunny is Metatron, the face of God. The article also included the idea that some believe it was Metatron who stopped Abraham from killing his son Isaac, not God. That wrapped me back around to a blog entry about theophany and seeing the divine in popular culture.

Senator Cornyn and Christian Reconstructionalists

I received a response to the email I sent to Senator Cornyn’s office respectfully asking him to clarify his views on elimination of income tax, institution of slavery, and application of the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, idolatry, heresy, evil sorcery, etc. This email was sent in regards to his visit to an event put together by Christian Reconstructionalists. The prior points being goals of the Christian Reconstructionalist movement that strives to enshrine Old Testament law in a sort of Christian version of the Taliban.

Hot and Cool

I’d just like to say, we had 101 degrees here today and my loft is still pleasant without turning on the a/c.

The home team took home another Pulitzer in Breaking News for photography. The Dallas Morning News has posted the photos that won [some are graphic].

Bless my Lucky Charms

YouTube video of a news cast about a Leprachaun in Mobile, Alabama, or it could be a crackhead.