I have returned from Dublin! I thought it would be faster to record a video than to actually write about the trip (I may have been wrong), so here's the video. Sorry for the weird high-pitched buzzing. I'd get rid of it...if I cared! Oh! Snap! Right:
(I hope that worked...if not, I'll fix when I return)
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Gerry: Spring Her
Perhaps I'm missing some context. Perhaps I'm completely tone deaf. Perhaps I'm a horrible human being. But I don't see what the whole kerfuffle is about Geraldine Ferraro's remarks on Obama's popularity. As far as I can tell, she asserted that people wouldn't be as excited about Obama's candidacy if he weren't black, and this has contributed significantly to his success thus far. She also said that being a woman has more mixed repercussions, with some excitement generated but also a strong negative response, particularly from the media.
On the second point, about women candidates, I think I'd go so far as to say I agree. See my (likely incoherent) post below about types and why it's really hard for a woman to come off well as a leader. Ferraro's bitterness is unbecoming, to be sure, but I think her point is at least reasonable and at most right on.
Then to the race comment. I'll say first, I don't agree that people's excitement about his race is what's pushed him to this level of success. His charisma, his words, his voice, his speaking style, his optimism, and, of course, his message of hope, unity, and change would have been more than enough to get him this sort of following no matter what his race. Of course, you can't entirely separate things like his speaking style from his race, but I don't think that's what Ferraro was talking about.
OK, that said, why is it so horrible for her to suggest that? And worse, why is it so horrible that Clinton has to not only disagree but also "reject and denounce" both the comments and Ferraro herself? I understand it's dirty for a politician to give tacit consent to hideous speech on their behalf. But this doesn't strike me as outside the realm of normal messy politics. Neither did the Samantha Powers "monstrous" remark. Did that really merit a resignation?
Maybe there's reason to believe Ferraro truly sees this as some kind of affirmative action...at least partially because she's said the same thing about her own nomination for vice president. But the (obvious) difference between those situations is one dude (and his advisers) chose her as his running mate. A fair portion of the country is getting psyched about Obama. It's pretty hard to do affirmative action by a non-communicating, many-million-person committee. They like him; they really like him! Why do people think her comments were intended to be any more than "people are psyched about electing a black candidate, and that's an essential factor in his success." And if that's all there is, why is that so heinous a point to raise?
P.S. I reserve full right to delete or edit this post if I realize I sound like a moron later. :-P
On the second point, about women candidates, I think I'd go so far as to say I agree. See my (likely incoherent) post below about types and why it's really hard for a woman to come off well as a leader. Ferraro's bitterness is unbecoming, to be sure, but I think her point is at least reasonable and at most right on.
Then to the race comment. I'll say first, I don't agree that people's excitement about his race is what's pushed him to this level of success. His charisma, his words, his voice, his speaking style, his optimism, and, of course, his message of hope, unity, and change would have been more than enough to get him this sort of following no matter what his race. Of course, you can't entirely separate things like his speaking style from his race, but I don't think that's what Ferraro was talking about.
OK, that said, why is it so horrible for her to suggest that? And worse, why is it so horrible that Clinton has to not only disagree but also "reject and denounce" both the comments and Ferraro herself? I understand it's dirty for a politician to give tacit consent to hideous speech on their behalf. But this doesn't strike me as outside the realm of normal messy politics. Neither did the Samantha Powers "monstrous" remark. Did that really merit a resignation?
Maybe there's reason to believe Ferraro truly sees this as some kind of affirmative action...at least partially because she's said the same thing about her own nomination for vice president. But the (obvious) difference between those situations is one dude (and his advisers) chose her as his running mate. A fair portion of the country is getting psyched about Obama. It's pretty hard to do affirmative action by a non-communicating, many-million-person committee. They like him; they really like him! Why do people think her comments were intended to be any more than "people are psyched about electing a black candidate, and that's an essential factor in his success." And if that's all there is, why is that so heinous a point to raise?
P.S. I reserve full right to delete or edit this post if I realize I sound like a moron later. :-P
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Race & Sex. Yaaaaay!
In a discussion this inflated, my two cents are worth, well, about five Indonesian Rupiahs. (Oh, snap.) But I've been thinking a bit about this whole question of whether race or sex puts a presidential candidate at a greater disadvantage. A lot of the science seems to suggest that things are harder on the woman. Racial prejudice seems to be easier to overcome with specifics about a person, but prejudice against a gender is there to stay.
My thought...and perhaps it's a totally obvious one...is that we see people in types. And we have a whole bunch of these types, but ultimately it's a finite number. So if you try to think of an "old, black man," you might have five types that come into your head...and there are probably traits besides being old, black men they all have in common. And I think people have to play into these types in some way, otherwise we just don't quite get them. Even as a black man, Obama can play into the Edward R. Murrow-style gravitas. And there's just no type like that for women. If there are wise, gravitas-type women, they're generally low energy. And low-energy won't win you a nomination.
OK, things have gotten too interesting around the apartment for me to continue this post...another time, maybe.
My thought...and perhaps it's a totally obvious one...is that we see people in types. And we have a whole bunch of these types, but ultimately it's a finite number. So if you try to think of an "old, black man," you might have five types that come into your head...and there are probably traits besides being old, black men they all have in common. And I think people have to play into these types in some way, otherwise we just don't quite get them. Even as a black man, Obama can play into the Edward R. Murrow-style gravitas. And there's just no type like that for women. If there are wise, gravitas-type women, they're generally low energy. And low-energy won't win you a nomination.
OK, things have gotten too interesting around the apartment for me to continue this post...another time, maybe.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
When I'm Drunk, I'm Beautiful...
Hello, blog-reading friends! I am a bit smash-ed right now, which, as you know, is somewhat unusual for me. I'm not averse to a glass of fine wine/beer/liquor here and there, but I am usually averse to five glasses of fine wine/beer/liquor here or there. All of this apparently changes when I go to a phenomenal dinner with V at a fine restaurant where he's buds with the sommelier. Some advice: Try to go to a fine restaurant where you or your date is buds with the sommelier. There will be perks (which are substantially better than blood). Chris (said sommelier) gave us not only some complimentary wine, but also two additional scotches to go with the Macallan 25 we splurged on. One of the two was a Macallan 50. Oh my God. I don't even know how to describe it. Suffice it to say I feel superior to you all, now that I've had the Macallan 50. I'm like the 14 year old boy who's the first in his class to have sex. Or something. While my taste buds are elated, but metaphors apparently suffer after a gin and tonic, a glass of champagne, half a bottle of chateau-du-pape, a taste of 10 year scotch, a serving of 25 year scotch, and half a serving of 50 year scotch. Maybe I exaggerate. But barely.
The food was great, too. I had a "PB & J" (their creative foie gras-based appetizer) and bacon-wrapped duck. V had a goat cheese salad and the short ribs with truffle mousse. All dishes were phenomenal. And Chris arranged for a complimentary lollipop tree with dessert, which was amazing. In short, even if you have to pay full price for everything. I recommend davidburke & donatella. The portions are far more generous than you'll get at any other super-upscale restaurant, and the food is redonkulous.
So V and I got wasted. We were about even until Grand Central. He had missed his train by five minutes, so we stopped at the bar. Realizing that 130 pounds of Jew can only take so much, I ordered a coke. He got another cocktail, which tipped him from loose-lipped to incoherent. Which was fun, but it also marked a pretty clear end to the festivities. The loose-lipped stage was great, though. I'm sure tomorrow morning I'll regret many things I didn't get out of him. But the things I did get out of him were pretty good...mwhahahahaha.
Oh! And I should mention what we were celebrating, considering it's been my most important life development in a while: I got into YUUS this past week! Woo! I'm not positive I'm going to go there...I'm still looking pretty seriously at one other UUS (mentioned in an earlier post), but I think it's the most likely place, and I'm very, very excited to be offered a spot. When I visited Brad there at the beginning of the year, one thing he said to me was, "this is the most intellectually secure group of people I've ever met." That's a pretty compelling reason to choose a school. So I'm a little bit thrilled.
In other life news, Jess and I went to a Rufus concert at Radio City on Valentine's Day. The concert was just great; I've been listening to 14th Street constantly ever since. Rufus is pretty sweet live...all of his crazy Rufisms come across even better than they do on the albums. And his outfits are (there's no better word) fabulous. All right, I should probably get to bed early so I'm ready to read for Seed tomorrow morning. Good night, my friends!
The food was great, too. I had a "PB & J" (their creative foie gras-based appetizer) and bacon-wrapped duck. V had a goat cheese salad and the short ribs with truffle mousse. All dishes were phenomenal. And Chris arranged for a complimentary lollipop tree with dessert, which was amazing. In short, even if you have to pay full price for everything. I recommend davidburke & donatella. The portions are far more generous than you'll get at any other super-upscale restaurant, and the food is redonkulous.
So V and I got wasted. We were about even until Grand Central. He had missed his train by five minutes, so we stopped at the bar. Realizing that 130 pounds of Jew can only take so much, I ordered a coke. He got another cocktail, which tipped him from loose-lipped to incoherent. Which was fun, but it also marked a pretty clear end to the festivities. The loose-lipped stage was great, though. I'm sure tomorrow morning I'll regret many things I didn't get out of him. But the things I did get out of him were pretty good...mwhahahahaha.
Oh! And I should mention what we were celebrating, considering it's been my most important life development in a while: I got into YUUS this past week! Woo! I'm not positive I'm going to go there...I'm still looking pretty seriously at one other UUS (mentioned in an earlier post), but I think it's the most likely place, and I'm very, very excited to be offered a spot. When I visited Brad there at the beginning of the year, one thing he said to me was, "this is the most intellectually secure group of people I've ever met." That's a pretty compelling reason to choose a school. So I'm a little bit thrilled.
In other life news, Jess and I went to a Rufus concert at Radio City on Valentine's Day. The concert was just great; I've been listening to 14th Street constantly ever since. Rufus is pretty sweet live...all of his crazy Rufisms come across even better than they do on the albums. And his outfits are (there's no better word) fabulous. All right, I should probably get to bed early so I'm ready to read for Seed tomorrow morning. Good night, my friends!
Friday, February 08, 2008
You Are Old
I've had that familiar itch lately. That feeling of, "My God, how long has it been? A month? A year? Longer? Too long." So tonight I did it.
I found some interesting data, and I graphed it.
This is a breakdown, in five year increments, of the age of the world's population. It's from the International Data Base. Sorry about that little yellow box in the upper left-hand corner...screen captures aren't what they used to be.
If you are 28, I have some exciting news for you: You're older than over half of the world! I know, you can't deduce this exactly from the chart, but it's in the database (or data base, as the case may be). To all my friends turning 25 now, you are older than merely 44.8% of the world. In a little over a week, however, my grandmother will turn 80 and be officially older than 98.5% of the world's population. Yowza. And those small children aren't so small...compared to the world! Five-year-olds are older than about a tenth of the world.
I think this stuff is fascinating. BTW, world life expectancy is 66.2 years...but that's including infant mortality. Oh, and it's the world. It's a pretty diverse place. If you live in the good ol' US of A you can (at birth) expect to live 78.1 years. If you're a newborn in Liberia...you don't want to know.
I found some interesting data, and I graphed it.
This is a breakdown, in five year increments, of the age of the world's population. It's from the International Data Base. Sorry about that little yellow box in the upper left-hand corner...screen captures aren't what they used to be.
If you are 28, I have some exciting news for you: You're older than over half of the world! I know, you can't deduce this exactly from the chart, but it's in the database (or data base, as the case may be). To all my friends turning 25 now, you are older than merely 44.8% of the world. In a little over a week, however, my grandmother will turn 80 and be officially older than 98.5% of the world's population. Yowza. And those small children aren't so small...compared to the world! Five-year-olds are older than about a tenth of the world.
I think this stuff is fascinating. BTW, world life expectancy is 66.2 years...but that's including infant mortality. Oh, and it's the world. It's a pretty diverse place. If you live in the good ol' US of A you can (at birth) expect to live 78.1 years. If you're a newborn in Liberia...you don't want to know.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Good and Bad Cryptic News
So, I got the inevitable bad news last week: My cryptic was rejected by the Times. Their criticisms were very fair, and I appreciated their (briefly stated) insights. It was still sad. They published a cryptic on Sunday, though, and it was a very neat one: Show about meat (6) = REVEAL; Musical instrument tossed into breach (9) = VIOLATION; Starts to cry after performing extremely risky stunt (5) = CAPER. Tidy clues like that. I was very happy that I still loved doing the cryptic, even after mine was rejected. I've had negative experiences with things I love after which I can't really look at the thing for a while. It's always bugged me, and I like to think I'm getting over that.
In other good news, I got into another vibrant center of UU studies, and they're giving me mad incentives. Incentives are tempting, so I will be considering this particular UU institute more closely. Yay, them.
And I've discovered a new pet peeve: Jargon. (OK, it's actually an old pet peeve that's resurfaced.) I understand things need names, and shorthand can be very convenient...so, yes, there is a time and place for jargon. But I feel like people and ideas are often unfairly excluded by jargon. People will, say, have an idea about what it means to act ethically, and someone will respond, "Oh, that's utilitarianism." And that way whatever subtle differences existed between the person's original idea and utilitarianism proper get eliminated. It's kind of like how victims of a crime will describe the perpetrator to a sketch artist, and from then on in, their image of the perp is the one drawn, not the one they saw. Everyone's ideas kind of get sifted into preexisting categories. Maybe this is fair...maybe the currently existing categories are the optimal versions of these theories...the ones that have withstood the test of time. But I have a hard time believing they're truly an orthogonal basis of philosophy. I think it might be better to let people's ideas flourish for a while without categorizing them. Maybe it could actually lead somewhere.
As for excluding people...well, I just see so many blog comments telling people the name of the fallacy they're committing, or the theory they're ignoring, or the concept they've overlooked. And by handing them the jargon (affirming the consequent! logical positivism! the patriarchy!) they're putting them out of the conversation. Usually these concepts are simple enough that they could take the time to explain and thus continue to engage the person. But they don't. They just tell them to "look it up." In this way jargon prevents learning, and it pisses me off.
So, here's my quick thought for the day: Jargon is a necessary and convenient evil for people who spend large amounts of time dealing with a topic, but in general, the use of jargon shows a lack of understanding and does not in any way indicate that the speaker belongs to the group that should be using it. If you can explain an idea simply, always do it. Ultimately the name of the idea isn't as important as the idea itself.
And now I am tired. Good night.
In other good news, I got into another vibrant center of UU studies, and they're giving me mad incentives. Incentives are tempting, so I will be considering this particular UU institute more closely. Yay, them.
And I've discovered a new pet peeve: Jargon. (OK, it's actually an old pet peeve that's resurfaced.) I understand things need names, and shorthand can be very convenient...so, yes, there is a time and place for jargon. But I feel like people and ideas are often unfairly excluded by jargon. People will, say, have an idea about what it means to act ethically, and someone will respond, "Oh, that's utilitarianism." And that way whatever subtle differences existed between the person's original idea and utilitarianism proper get eliminated. It's kind of like how victims of a crime will describe the perpetrator to a sketch artist, and from then on in, their image of the perp is the one drawn, not the one they saw. Everyone's ideas kind of get sifted into preexisting categories. Maybe this is fair...maybe the currently existing categories are the optimal versions of these theories...the ones that have withstood the test of time. But I have a hard time believing they're truly an orthogonal basis of philosophy. I think it might be better to let people's ideas flourish for a while without categorizing them. Maybe it could actually lead somewhere.
As for excluding people...well, I just see so many blog comments telling people the name of the fallacy they're committing, or the theory they're ignoring, or the concept they've overlooked. And by handing them the jargon (affirming the consequent! logical positivism! the patriarchy!) they're putting them out of the conversation. Usually these concepts are simple enough that they could take the time to explain and thus continue to engage the person. But they don't. They just tell them to "look it up." In this way jargon prevents learning, and it pisses me off.
So, here's my quick thought for the day: Jargon is a necessary and convenient evil for people who spend large amounts of time dealing with a topic, but in general, the use of jargon shows a lack of understanding and does not in any way indicate that the speaker belongs to the group that should be using it. If you can explain an idea simply, always do it. Ultimately the name of the idea isn't as important as the idea itself.
And now I am tired. Good night.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Unrequited Love (the blog post!)
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
—Abraham Cowley
All right, I admit it: I took that from the Wikipedia entry, /Unrequited_love. So sue me.
Unrequited love is, like, one of the big emotions, right? Shakespeare! Dante! Hugo! Et cetera! They all took on unrequited love, holding it up as one of the most all-consuming, powerful feelings a person can have. Woe unto the man or woman struck with this affliction, for it can inspire you to great achievement, but all the while it tears out your heart. This is the reaction we have to unrequited love.
...OR IS IT?
What was the last reaction you had to someone who loved in vain? Was it, "Oh God, I'm so, so sorry for your suffering."? Was it, "Take this burning passion and sublimate it! Let it drive you."? Or was it, "Yeah, that sucks. But at least you know: He's married/gay/straight/not into you. Now get over him."? I'm betting on that one.
To everyone's credit, that is the healthiest response, getting over him. But I wonder why we believe this to be so overwhelmingly possible today, to the point where it's considered a sign of immaturity not to get over your crush? When did we delegitimize unrequited love? I don't think the feeling has gotten any less potent in the last 500 years (although I'd imagine the selective pressure for genes that help you get over crushes would be strong).
Kudos, then, to Barry McCrea. When I read this essay he wrote for Sex Week at Yale, I found it enormously refreshing. I haven't looked at it since it was published a year or two ago, but it's stuck with me throughout. (Looking at it again, now, I realize exactly how much it's stuck with me...and I again doubt Ms. Viswanathan's guilt. Anyway.) He acknowledges how bad it can be—see the friend who lost her job—without dismissing or demeaning it. I especially like his point that unrequited love takes you outside yourself...even though I'm not sure I agree with it. Yes, there is an external object, but your internal interpretation of this person is really the fixation, no?
In any case, I'd like to put in my vote for "unrequited love is serious shit." Sure, call it a silly crush. Dismiss it. Laugh about it. That's all necessary to save face. But if it persists and grows, know you're far from the first to have felt this way. Is it unhealthy? Hells, yeah. But your fellow invalids have a long history of producing great poetry and art. You're in good company, you pathetic puppy dog.
It is to love, but love in vain.
—Abraham Cowley
All right, I admit it: I took that from the Wikipedia entry, /Unrequited_love. So sue me.
Unrequited love is, like, one of the big emotions, right? Shakespeare! Dante! Hugo! Et cetera! They all took on unrequited love, holding it up as one of the most all-consuming, powerful feelings a person can have. Woe unto the man or woman struck with this affliction, for it can inspire you to great achievement, but all the while it tears out your heart. This is the reaction we have to unrequited love.
...OR IS IT?
What was the last reaction you had to someone who loved in vain? Was it, "Oh God, I'm so, so sorry for your suffering."? Was it, "Take this burning passion and sublimate it! Let it drive you."? Or was it, "Yeah, that sucks. But at least you know: He's married/gay/straight/not into you. Now get over him."? I'm betting on that one.
To everyone's credit, that is the healthiest response, getting over him. But I wonder why we believe this to be so overwhelmingly possible today, to the point where it's considered a sign of immaturity not to get over your crush? When did we delegitimize unrequited love? I don't think the feeling has gotten any less potent in the last 500 years (although I'd imagine the selective pressure for genes that help you get over crushes would be strong).
Kudos, then, to Barry McCrea. When I read this essay he wrote for Sex Week at Yale, I found it enormously refreshing. I haven't looked at it since it was published a year or two ago, but it's stuck with me throughout. (Looking at it again, now, I realize exactly how much it's stuck with me...and I again doubt Ms. Viswanathan's guilt. Anyway.) He acknowledges how bad it can be—see the friend who lost her job—without dismissing or demeaning it. I especially like his point that unrequited love takes you outside yourself...even though I'm not sure I agree with it. Yes, there is an external object, but your internal interpretation of this person is really the fixation, no?
In any case, I'd like to put in my vote for "unrequited love is serious shit." Sure, call it a silly crush. Dismiss it. Laugh about it. That's all necessary to save face. But if it persists and grows, know you're far from the first to have felt this way. Is it unhealthy? Hells, yeah. But your fellow invalids have a long history of producing great poetry and art. You're in good company, you pathetic puppy dog.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Ought we give Iowa a try? Really?
7:59 PM (EST): The corn people are preparing to caucus (yes, that was the secret code), so I suppose I should register my predictions now. I predict Hillary will win handily. Not overwhelmingly, but handily. I base this on one fact alone: John Kerry won Iowa handily last time. To the best of my recollection (and my recollection may suck), Kerry was as much of an initial front-runner, as centrist, in as close a race in the polls, and substantially duller...in terms of charisma, not intelligence. So I'm going to bet that Iowans are perhaps only slightly hungrier for change—whatever that means—and Hills will win by about a 3 point margin. Could definitely be wrong...we'll know in a matter of hours.
9:48 PM (EST): It appears that Obama has won by that handy margin I predicted for Clinton. That does make me happy, even if he's not my first choice candidate, because it means the youth turned out. I like when the youth turn out because, well, young people are progressive. Young people aren't scared of Teh Gays, we want to help the poor, and we're violently pacifistic. If Obama's candidacy gets more young people involved in politics, that's great. ...but I'd still like to see Hillary win.
9:48 PM (EST): It appears that Obama has won by that handy margin I predicted for Clinton. That does make me happy, even if he's not my first choice candidate, because it means the youth turned out. I like when the youth turn out because, well, young people are progressive. Young people aren't scared of Teh Gays, we want to help the poor, and we're violently pacifistic. If Obama's candidacy gets more young people involved in politics, that's great. ...but I'd still like to see Hillary win.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
MMVIII
At long last, it is 2008. A year of elections. A year of Olympics. A year of the prime factors 2 x 2 x 2 x 251.
Vacation, which I was glad to have, was excellent. I read a truly great novel, watched the first season of a hideously addictive TV series, and caught up with lots of old friends (no link provided). I attended one very good play, two very good movies, and three of the best coffee shops in the world. Not that I'm biased, or anything. So that was vacation. Low-key and friend-filled. Just as I like it.
Other than that, UU stuff is going delightfully. I wouldn't want to gasconade on the blog, lest UU committees read this and have their perception of me go catawampus. (V and I worked on an exceptionally difficult Saturday crossword over break.) But I've heard good news from two excellent places: the "New York City of UU" and a place that would have me study UU in New York City. Woot woot.
Speaking of cities that count, Natalia has flown off to Londres! I'm pretty excited to go visit her there in a couple of months.
There was plenty more I wanted to say, I think, but it will have to wait for my post-caucus update. For now I leave you with this blog post, which sucked up too much of my late afternoon, and the following quote on the "Greatest Generation:"
Vacation, which I was glad to have, was excellent. I read a truly great novel, watched the first season of a hideously addictive TV series, and caught up with lots of old friends (no link provided). I attended one very good play, two very good movies, and three of the best coffee shops in the world. Not that I'm biased, or anything. So that was vacation. Low-key and friend-filled. Just as I like it.
Other than that, UU stuff is going delightfully. I wouldn't want to gasconade on the blog, lest UU committees read this and have their perception of me go catawampus. (V and I worked on an exceptionally difficult Saturday crossword over break.) But I've heard good news from two excellent places: the "New York City of UU" and a place that would have me study UU in New York City. Woot woot.
Speaking of cities that count, Natalia has flown off to Londres! I'm pretty excited to go visit her there in a couple of months.
There was plenty more I wanted to say, I think, but it will have to wait for my post-caucus update. For now I leave you with this blog post, which sucked up too much of my late afternoon, and the following quote on the "Greatest Generation:"
“What makes them so great? Because they were poor and hated Nazis? Who doesn’t fucking hate Nazis?”Who says Broadway is dead?
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Pre-Bed Thought 2
The New York Times has this great article on experimental philosophy this week. It's good to hear this is going on: I always thought that ethics, especially, could benefit from some good experiment. If you think ethics is more descriptive than proscriptive, as they say, it makes sense to test your ideas when you can. And it might even make sense just to throw people into a bunch of situations and see what comes out.
But here's my take on the actual study cited. And I quote.
Then there's another similar study:
I think, and perhaps I think this too frequently, that this is a language issue more than a substance issue. I think we actually use the word "intend" differently in positive and negative situations. When we talk about intending good things to happen, we are asking whether we purposefully brought something about. This is our usual definition of "intend." But I think when we ask "Did he intentionally harm the environment?" or "Did he intentionally pay the extra dollar?" we're asking whether or not he was hoodwinked and/or ignorant, whether he did something with or without knowing the all the negatives.
I think this distinction might also come in not just in the situations but also in the difference between the phrasing "Did he intend to...?" and "Did he intentionally...?" I think "intentionally" points to knowledge of the consequences of your actions more than it points to purpose. Whereas "intend" points to purpose. You shoot an intruder in the chest. Did you intend to kill him? Maybe not. Did you intentionally kill him? For some reason, it feels slightly more ambiguous, slightly more likely.
So yeah, first reaction: In the positive situations, as presented here, we need them to be purposeful actions to define them as "intended," and in the negatives the person need only have full awareness of the consequences and be in control of their actions to qualify as "intentional."
But here's my take on the actual study cited. And I quote.
Suppose the chairman of a company has to decide whether to adopt a new program. It would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Would you say that the chairman intended to help the environment?
O.K., same circumstance. Except this time the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Would you say the chairman harmed the environment intentionally?
I don’t know where you ended up, but in one survey, only 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment. When they had to think about the second situation, though, fully 82 percent thought that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment.
Then there's another similar study:
Edouard Machery, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh by way of the Sorbonne, told subjects about a man named Joe who visits the local smoothie shop and asks for the largest drink available. Joe is informed that the megasmoothies come in a special commemorative cup. He doesn’t care one way or the other about the cup. He just wants the megasmoothie. Did he get the commemorative cup intentionally? Most people said no. What if, instead, he’s informed that the megasmoothie has gone up in price and that he’ll have to pay an extra dollar for it? Joe doesn’t care about the extra dollar; he just wants the megasmoothie. Did he pay the extra dollar intentionally? Most people said yes. Machery concluded that foreseen side effects of our actions are taken to be intended when we conceive them as costs incurred for a benefit. In the case of the blameworthy company chairman, then, more pollution was taken to be a harm incurred to gain more profit.
I think, and perhaps I think this too frequently, that this is a language issue more than a substance issue. I think we actually use the word "intend" differently in positive and negative situations. When we talk about intending good things to happen, we are asking whether we purposefully brought something about. This is our usual definition of "intend." But I think when we ask "Did he intentionally harm the environment?" or "Did he intentionally pay the extra dollar?" we're asking whether or not he was hoodwinked and/or ignorant, whether he did something with or without knowing the all the negatives.
I think this distinction might also come in not just in the situations but also in the difference between the phrasing "Did he intend to...?" and "Did he intentionally...?" I think "intentionally" points to knowledge of the consequences of your actions more than it points to purpose. Whereas "intend" points to purpose. You shoot an intruder in the chest. Did you intend to kill him? Maybe not. Did you intentionally kill him? For some reason, it feels slightly more ambiguous, slightly more likely.
So yeah, first reaction: In the positive situations, as presented here, we need them to be purposeful actions to define them as "intended," and in the negatives the person need only have full awareness of the consequences and be in control of their actions to qualify as "intentional."
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Pre-Bed Thought
I read something today that raised the question, "Why did we evolve consciousness?" It is, of course, a fun question: Couldn't we do exactly the same stuff if we weren't there witnessing it? I haven't given the question appropriate consideration, but here are my first thoughts:
We could have evolved consciousness because it's the most efficient way to make us unpredictable. Unpredictability has clear benefits for survival...it's harder for animals to hunt you or for other people to trick you if they don't know you'll react the same way to nearly identical stimuli. And although I'm more or less a determinist, certainly the factors that sway decisions can be extremely subtle and nigh impossible to control for. It's really hard to create a random number generator, so perhaps consciousness is the closest we can get with reasonable efficiency. Also (and similarly), consciousness may us to adapt to new situations. We can extrapolate not only rules but probabilities from our past experiences and apply them to the present. Maybe consciousness is a good tool in extrapolation and probability gaging.
Then again, maybe not. I'm just throwing the possibility out there...
We could have evolved consciousness because it's the most efficient way to make us unpredictable. Unpredictability has clear benefits for survival...it's harder for animals to hunt you or for other people to trick you if they don't know you'll react the same way to nearly identical stimuli. And although I'm more or less a determinist, certainly the factors that sway decisions can be extremely subtle and nigh impossible to control for. It's really hard to create a random number generator, so perhaps consciousness is the closest we can get with reasonable efficiency. Also (and similarly), consciousness may us to adapt to new situations. We can extrapolate not only rules but probabilities from our past experiences and apply them to the present. Maybe consciousness is a good tool in extrapolation and probability gaging.
Then again, maybe not. I'm just throwing the possibility out there...
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Falling in Love with Love
A recent conversation prompted me to wonder: When did we start to hate love? I mean, we all want love for ourselves, but at what point did an affectionate, happy couple stop evoking "aw"s and start evoking "ugh"s? And when did the announcement of an engagement stop being cause for joy and start being cause for whispers about how long it will last. I mean, I suppose it started when we saw which people were getting engaged right out of college and noticed that a fair percentage of them were passionate but fickle people who shouldn't be putting a down payment on an apartment, much less getting hitched. Not all of them...but a fair percentage. I remember, when I was young, I used to watch romantic comedies where the woman eventually had to choose between love and career. And I always thought, "Just go for love; that's what will make you happy!" And in the end, she always did. Now I'd think, "If you have a great career opportunity, for god's sake, take it!" If the guy's good for you, he'll urge you to make the same choice.
Maybe young people have always been cynical about love. Really, it's usually little kids and old people who smile at happy couples. Maybe they have a better perspective on life and know what's really important. Or maybe it's just that most little kids I see have married parents and most old people I see found a life partner. So not only do they not have anything to be jealous of, they may have forgotten how frequently love spectacularly flops. Or not-so-spectacularly flops.
Something about Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach rings pretty true. Twenty-somethings, to say nothing of teenagers, can be insecure and fucked up. Sure, there are some great couples out there. I'm proud to say I know a few. I'm less thrilled to say they're disproportionately religious Christians. Doesn't bode well for me and most of my friends.
But enough with the moping: All but one of the UU apps are in, and that's exciting. I had lunch with Brad and his UU school buddy Nick today. Nick was talking about a case going on somewhere he works (worked? I don't remember). Even though it was in an area of UU I'm not too into, it was pretty spectacular. The evolution of the UU has left some crazy-ass loopholes, and people in the know are far better at exploiting them than your average feller. So average fellers get screwed. With so much emphasis on companies and people who are tacitly evil, it's sometimes easy to forget how many companies and people are explicitly evil. During those times, I like to think of my old landlord. Ah, me.
Back to work post-vacation tomorrow. It was nice to spend time at Slave again.
Maybe young people have always been cynical about love. Really, it's usually little kids and old people who smile at happy couples. Maybe they have a better perspective on life and know what's really important. Or maybe it's just that most little kids I see have married parents and most old people I see found a life partner. So not only do they not have anything to be jealous of, they may have forgotten how frequently love spectacularly flops. Or not-so-spectacularly flops.
Something about Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach rings pretty true. Twenty-somethings, to say nothing of teenagers, can be insecure and fucked up. Sure, there are some great couples out there. I'm proud to say I know a few. I'm less thrilled to say they're disproportionately religious Christians. Doesn't bode well for me and most of my friends.
But enough with the moping: All but one of the UU apps are in, and that's exciting. I had lunch with Brad and his UU school buddy Nick today. Nick was talking about a case going on somewhere he works (worked? I don't remember). Even though it was in an area of UU I'm not too into, it was pretty spectacular. The evolution of the UU has left some crazy-ass loopholes, and people in the know are far better at exploiting them than your average feller. So average fellers get screwed. With so much emphasis on companies and people who are tacitly evil, it's sometimes easy to forget how many companies and people are explicitly evil. During those times, I like to think of my old landlord. Ah, me.
Back to work post-vacation tomorrow. It was nice to spend time at Slave again.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Status Que?
When Greg leaves comments on my last post cryptically hinting that I should perhaps update my blog, I figure it's time. The bad part about going two months without updating is that I have two months worth of updating. So you're getting a cumulative update rather than an event-by-event update.
So, the months. I finally finished my cryptic crossword and sent it in to he who wears short Shortz last week. It's not without its flaws, but I think there are some fun and creative clues in there. I'm battling serious odds—he may not even take unassigned cryptics—but until I hear back, I can live safely in that quantum superposition of "accepted" and "not accepted." And if the function collapses to "not accepted," you, my dear reader, can look forward to trying the puzzle...on this very blog! Unless I decide to submit it elsewhere. Gee, I hope I get some personal comments from the man himself. That would be an honor, indeed.
Our apartment has settled, and it is good. Chayes has beautified her room—it's great to be spending some quality time with her—Betsey has moved into Megan's old room and is fitting in beautifully, and Greg's the same sunny delight as ever. Greg and I saw a super-exclusive run-through of Cry Baby last weekend (yay, thanks, Mark!) This particular performance was not "up for review," so I will only review it with the most inscrutable puzzle I can think of: _T W_S _W_S_M_. G_ S__ _T WH_N _T'S _N T_WN.
Work's been crazy as ever. There's been lots of talk about the, er, inappropriate comments made by a certain, unnamed James Watson. If you haven't already read the massive press coverage, you can get the latest at the links I put in the first half of the sentence. The whole to-do prompted me not only to fashion a harness for my jaw to wear whenever reading Watson's comments on black people, women, fat people, gay people or, oh yeah, Rosalind Franklin, but also to do some reading on race and IQ.
It's apparently well-established [most of the following assertions come from that linked report] that the average IQ of black people in America is 15 points lower than the average IQ of white people in America. There are two major questions that come out of this: What are the reasons for this difference? and What the heck does IQ mean anyway? Neither one of these has yet been answered especially thoroughly. While IQ is highly heritable, this doesn't mean that the IQ variations between races is largely genetic. There are plenty of other factors, many unknown, that go into intelligence, and it seems likely that these largely account for differences that we see. Yes, racists, it's conceivable they don't. Someone, sometime will do solid research and we'll have a better idea. The other question, about what IQ actually measures, is just as hazy. It's definitely a solid predictor of academic achievement. In this sense, the test isn't biased toward white people...it's an equal predictor for black people and white people. As the APA report points out, the test is biased against black people in the plain sense that they, on average, do worse. You might say, well, that's not really bias if it still predicts the same stuff, but hey, IQ tests are designed so both sexes necessarily have the same average. It's explicitly not biased toward men or women; I don't know if it's an equal predictor for both sexes, though. This paragraph's getting long, so let me sum up my point: IQ tests are a good but imperfect predictor of academic achievement. There's no great reason to think they measure some ineffable quality of "intelligence." That concept isn't well-defined, anyway. There would probably be some correlation between IQ score and anything measuring some kind of intelligence—probably a fairly strong correlation—but who knows how strong or how consistent between tests? I don't. What I'm saying is we don't know all that much about this topic. And I think people without an agenda should research it, mostly because I'm a curious person and it's an interesting topic. So there.
Oh, and the UU apps are coming along swimmingly. Hopefully those will be out the door in the next couple of weeks. I'm actually feeling very good about this decision. I'm reading One U, a book about UU school, and it's scaring me, but it's also getting me very psyched for the kind of thinking I'd be doing.
All right, friends. I have an episode of Dirty Sexy Money to watch. Emily points out the show's egregiously absent commas. Normally, I would be unforgiving, but somehow Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause have won me over.
So, the months. I finally finished my cryptic crossword and sent it in to he who wears short Shortz last week. It's not without its flaws, but I think there are some fun and creative clues in there. I'm battling serious odds—he may not even take unassigned cryptics—but until I hear back, I can live safely in that quantum superposition of "accepted" and "not accepted." And if the function collapses to "not accepted," you, my dear reader, can look forward to trying the puzzle...on this very blog! Unless I decide to submit it elsewhere. Gee, I hope I get some personal comments from the man himself. That would be an honor, indeed.
Our apartment has settled, and it is good. Chayes has beautified her room—it's great to be spending some quality time with her—Betsey has moved into Megan's old room and is fitting in beautifully, and Greg's the same sunny delight as ever. Greg and I saw a super-exclusive run-through of Cry Baby last weekend (yay, thanks, Mark!) This particular performance was not "up for review," so I will only review it with the most inscrutable puzzle I can think of: _T W_S _W_S_M_. G_ S__ _T WH_N _T'S _N T_WN.
Work's been crazy as ever. There's been lots of talk about the, er, inappropriate comments made by a certain, unnamed James Watson. If you haven't already read the massive press coverage, you can get the latest at the links I put in the first half of the sentence. The whole to-do prompted me not only to fashion a harness for my jaw to wear whenever reading Watson's comments on black people, women, fat people, gay people or, oh yeah, Rosalind Franklin, but also to do some reading on race and IQ.
It's apparently well-established [most of the following assertions come from that linked report] that the average IQ of black people in America is 15 points lower than the average IQ of white people in America. There are two major questions that come out of this: What are the reasons for this difference? and What the heck does IQ mean anyway? Neither one of these has yet been answered especially thoroughly. While IQ is highly heritable, this doesn't mean that the IQ variations between races is largely genetic. There are plenty of other factors, many unknown, that go into intelligence, and it seems likely that these largely account for differences that we see. Yes, racists, it's conceivable they don't. Someone, sometime will do solid research and we'll have a better idea. The other question, about what IQ actually measures, is just as hazy. It's definitely a solid predictor of academic achievement. In this sense, the test isn't biased toward white people...it's an equal predictor for black people and white people. As the APA report points out, the test is biased against black people in the plain sense that they, on average, do worse. You might say, well, that's not really bias if it still predicts the same stuff, but hey, IQ tests are designed so both sexes necessarily have the same average. It's explicitly not biased toward men or women; I don't know if it's an equal predictor for both sexes, though. This paragraph's getting long, so let me sum up my point: IQ tests are a good but imperfect predictor of academic achievement. There's no great reason to think they measure some ineffable quality of "intelligence." That concept isn't well-defined, anyway. There would probably be some correlation between IQ score and anything measuring some kind of intelligence—probably a fairly strong correlation—but who knows how strong or how consistent between tests? I don't. What I'm saying is we don't know all that much about this topic. And I think people without an agenda should research it, mostly because I'm a curious person and it's an interesting topic. So there.
Oh, and the UU apps are coming along swimmingly. Hopefully those will be out the door in the next couple of weeks. I'm actually feeling very good about this decision. I'm reading One U, a book about UU school, and it's scaring me, but it's also getting me very psyched for the kind of thinking I'd be doing.
All right, friends. I have an episode of Dirty Sexy Money to watch. Emily points out the show's egregiously absent commas. Normally, I would be unforgiving, but somehow Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause have won me over.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Midnight Madness X
What more could I want from life than 18 hours of sleepless, delirious puzzle solving? Well, 18 hours of well-rested, clear-headed puzzle-solving would be nice. But that's not what I got from Midnight Madness X, an alternately frustrating and exhilarating puzzle hunt that started Saturday at 8 pm and ended Sunday, just before 2 pm. Greg had participated the past two years (he's also done a few Microsoft hunts) and brought me onto Team Plaid, otherwise comprised of people who work with him at the hedge fund. I will now tell you the exhaustive and exhausting tale of Team Plaid's glorious victory (over teams who finished in eighth place or later), complete with pictures, provided by flickr users who actually took them.
After a sushi dinner with Jess and her friend Jack, Greg and I headed over to the (misleadingly) convenient starting point, Riverside Park, just west of 103rd St. I gradually met Greg's coworkers (and the one other female who came along) and we got a map of the Columbia campus (our area!) and our first two clues. One was a clear box that revealed a poem (I didn't work on this one), and the other was this (courtesy Brian of Team Red):
One guy quickly realized the abbreviations referred to places on the Columbia campus, and Greg quickly realized it was a tangram (you have to cut it up and rearrange the pieces). It took him about 10 minutes to convince everyone of this, and they never actually believed my solution of the tangram (it wasn't perfect), but we were both right. When we got to the (very general) location, there was a hangman puzzle on a whiteboard. It very clearly was going to spell out "TIME MACHINE" when it was solved, and there were some econ equations scribbled next to it. We spent a few hours trying to solve this puzzle. One problem: IT WASN'T THE REAL PUZZLE. I kept on saying to Greg, "wouldn't it be funny if this weren't the real puzzle," and he did not approve of my sense of humor. Without finding the real puzzle, we couldn't solve the other puzzle, because they relied on each other. Eventually we found out we were working on the wrong thing and found the other half of the puzzle. We solved it too late...by the time we got the next puzzle—a hilarious craigslist ad for a BBW (big-breasted woman, apparently) looking for a VGL (very good looking, that one I knew) man—we were off to Union Square, where we were all supposed to be at midnight.
We got there around 1 (we hadn't originally bought the Union Sq thing as not-a-trap) and waited for the rest of the game to start. Teams that had done better in the first half got a head start. We got two digital pictures: one of a street, one of a storefront. So part of our team went to the storefront (14th and C) and the other part went to the street (9th, just E of Bway). And we looked for the clues. And looked. And looked. And Game Control was MIA. So we looked some more. Shortly before FOUR FUCKING AM we managed to reach game control, who told us that there were no clues there and the direction of the photographs mattered. So with that we got that we had to head to the intersection of the two sightlines: 9th and C. While hunting for the clue there, I ran into a drunk coworker, which was fun. I also realized it was kind of strange that I was out at 4 am and neither drunk nor somebody else, which together would have made the situation make sense. Anyway...
That almost ended the excruciatingly frustrating portion of MMX. There was just one more. The packet at 9th and C sent us to the lower east side and contained three clues. The easiest of the evening (there was a dude in a Subaru), a tough but ultimately satisfying one (explanation TK), and this (thanks Strle):
Greg and I easily translated the wingdings by pattern. Greg then suggested that it was probably an intersection, so the middle word should be "AND." (Go, Greg.) I plugged that in and found that the Ds fell in the first word in such a way that ELDRIDGE fit perfectly. That put an R at the end of the 6-letter last word. I looked on the map they gave us. BROOME was the only 6-letter street crossing Eldridge. Alas! We had solved it incorrectly! Well, either that or their map just wasn't detailed enough to include Hester. UGH. Turns out the numbers indicate the letter in the name of the font (Times, Courier, Wingdings or Helvetica) to use there. Grr. In any case, had Hester been on that map, we would have gotten that one an hour earlier than we did.
In any case, we wound up working on "statements" (via Brian, again):
Our team figured out that it had something to do with states. Game Control eventually clued to us that an official state abbreviation is hidden in each line. We went through them, and I realized (Go, me) that the states were all kind of contiguous, and we should try tracing a line through the states in each stanza. When we did this, we came up with ESSEX + BROOME.
There we found a line of animals...each animal present twice. Here, Greg again solved the puzzle but with an execution that they didn't want (he took the difference in the animals' positions, not the number of animals between them, heaven forbid, and found that number letter in the animals' names), so the answer didn't work. Oh, the pain!
As we were working on that, around 6am, we ate breakfast, and about half of our team left. Greg was fading fast. We soon got my favorite puzzle of the day (Strle, again):
You're probably thinking what we were thinking: "What in God's name do we do with this?" Greg was apparently thinking, "Why am I sitting on concrete in a desolated area of Chinatown when I could be sleeping?" because he departed. I was left with three guys (a fourth would rejoin us). We perhaps too quickly got a hint on the clue: The spiral is the key to solving the strip. See if you have any inspiration...
We sat down at base camp and stared. And then I started folding the strip. I folded on every line indicated in the spiral. And when I was done with the segment between the outermost two black circles there was a "K" in my hands. Turns out the inside was the beginning, but we got it, and the bikers biked off to 103 Norfolk.
Much of the rest of the game was blurry for me, less because of exhaustion than because things got very fast very quickly, and the three guys on bikes got places much more quickly than myself and Jaime, the other pedestrian on the team. Other highlights included a fake crossword that gave us GPS coordinates, a video of a woman dancing in 22 dance segments that gave an intersection when we took the first letters of all the dances (Josh and I—mostly Joshmdash;managed to get enough of the dances that we could figure it out), and an awesome puzzle using the dongles that kept track of how many hints we had where the dongles responded to the angle they were placed at. Awesome.
At long last, when my legs were completely shot and I could feel the blisters forming, we got a direction to the amphitheater in East River Park. When Jaime and I arrived, our biking crew—Peter, Andrei and Josh—had come in 7th, seconds behind 5th and 6th, but an hour and a half behind the winners, who may have somehow gotten there without figuring out all of the clues. Everyone there felt good about finishing, and people from different teams were warmly congratulating each other (a girl I'd been scribbling down dance moves with clapped for me as I walked up the path).
Peter suggested going out for a drink, but it was 2 o'clock, and I was ready to treat myself to a cab and take a shower. Which I did. Thank God.
Sadly, this was the last Midnight Madness. Despite the early frustrations, I would love to do it again. It was a marathon, but the few times I figured things out were incredibly gratifying, and I got to know the LES pretty well, which was cool. And puzzle people rule. But I knew that already.
UPDATE: Kevin of Team Cerulean posted a picture of Team Plaid on flickr! You can see a little bit of me behind Greg:
After a sushi dinner with Jess and her friend Jack, Greg and I headed over to the (misleadingly) convenient starting point, Riverside Park, just west of 103rd St. I gradually met Greg's coworkers (and the one other female who came along) and we got a map of the Columbia campus (our area!) and our first two clues. One was a clear box that revealed a poem (I didn't work on this one), and the other was this (courtesy Brian of Team Red):
One guy quickly realized the abbreviations referred to places on the Columbia campus, and Greg quickly realized it was a tangram (you have to cut it up and rearrange the pieces). It took him about 10 minutes to convince everyone of this, and they never actually believed my solution of the tangram (it wasn't perfect), but we were both right. When we got to the (very general) location, there was a hangman puzzle on a whiteboard. It very clearly was going to spell out "TIME MACHINE" when it was solved, and there were some econ equations scribbled next to it. We spent a few hours trying to solve this puzzle. One problem: IT WASN'T THE REAL PUZZLE. I kept on saying to Greg, "wouldn't it be funny if this weren't the real puzzle," and he did not approve of my sense of humor. Without finding the real puzzle, we couldn't solve the other puzzle, because they relied on each other. Eventually we found out we were working on the wrong thing and found the other half of the puzzle. We solved it too late...by the time we got the next puzzle—a hilarious craigslist ad for a BBW (big-breasted woman, apparently) looking for a VGL (very good looking, that one I knew) man—we were off to Union Square, where we were all supposed to be at midnight.
We got there around 1 (we hadn't originally bought the Union Sq thing as not-a-trap) and waited for the rest of the game to start. Teams that had done better in the first half got a head start. We got two digital pictures: one of a street, one of a storefront. So part of our team went to the storefront (14th and C) and the other part went to the street (9th, just E of Bway). And we looked for the clues. And looked. And looked. And Game Control was MIA. So we looked some more. Shortly before FOUR FUCKING AM we managed to reach game control, who told us that there were no clues there and the direction of the photographs mattered. So with that we got that we had to head to the intersection of the two sightlines: 9th and C. While hunting for the clue there, I ran into a drunk coworker, which was fun. I also realized it was kind of strange that I was out at 4 am and neither drunk nor somebody else, which together would have made the situation make sense. Anyway...
That almost ended the excruciatingly frustrating portion of MMX. There was just one more. The packet at 9th and C sent us to the lower east side and contained three clues. The easiest of the evening (there was a dude in a Subaru), a tough but ultimately satisfying one (explanation TK), and this (thanks Strle):
Greg and I easily translated the wingdings by pattern. Greg then suggested that it was probably an intersection, so the middle word should be "AND." (Go, Greg.) I plugged that in and found that the Ds fell in the first word in such a way that ELDRIDGE fit perfectly. That put an R at the end of the 6-letter last word. I looked on the map they gave us. BROOME was the only 6-letter street crossing Eldridge. Alas! We had solved it incorrectly! Well, either that or their map just wasn't detailed enough to include Hester. UGH. Turns out the numbers indicate the letter in the name of the font (Times, Courier, Wingdings or Helvetica) to use there. Grr. In any case, had Hester been on that map, we would have gotten that one an hour earlier than we did.
In any case, we wound up working on "statements" (via Brian, again):
Our team figured out that it had something to do with states. Game Control eventually clued to us that an official state abbreviation is hidden in each line. We went through them, and I realized (Go, me) that the states were all kind of contiguous, and we should try tracing a line through the states in each stanza. When we did this, we came up with ESSEX + BROOME.
There we found a line of animals...each animal present twice. Here, Greg again solved the puzzle but with an execution that they didn't want (he took the difference in the animals' positions, not the number of animals between them, heaven forbid, and found that number letter in the animals' names), so the answer didn't work. Oh, the pain!
As we were working on that, around 6am, we ate breakfast, and about half of our team left. Greg was fading fast. We soon got my favorite puzzle of the day (Strle, again):
You're probably thinking what we were thinking: "What in God's name do we do with this?" Greg was apparently thinking, "Why am I sitting on concrete in a desolated area of Chinatown when I could be sleeping?" because he departed. I was left with three guys (a fourth would rejoin us). We perhaps too quickly got a hint on the clue: The spiral is the key to solving the strip. See if you have any inspiration...
We sat down at base camp and stared. And then I started folding the strip. I folded on every line indicated in the spiral. And when I was done with the segment between the outermost two black circles there was a "K" in my hands. Turns out the inside was the beginning, but we got it, and the bikers biked off to 103 Norfolk.
Much of the rest of the game was blurry for me, less because of exhaustion than because things got very fast very quickly, and the three guys on bikes got places much more quickly than myself and Jaime, the other pedestrian on the team. Other highlights included a fake crossword that gave us GPS coordinates, a video of a woman dancing in 22 dance segments that gave an intersection when we took the first letters of all the dances (Josh and I—mostly Joshmdash;managed to get enough of the dances that we could figure it out), and an awesome puzzle using the dongles that kept track of how many hints we had where the dongles responded to the angle they were placed at. Awesome.
At long last, when my legs were completely shot and I could feel the blisters forming, we got a direction to the amphitheater in East River Park. When Jaime and I arrived, our biking crew—Peter, Andrei and Josh—had come in 7th, seconds behind 5th and 6th, but an hour and a half behind the winners, who may have somehow gotten there without figuring out all of the clues. Everyone there felt good about finishing, and people from different teams were warmly congratulating each other (a girl I'd been scribbling down dance moves with clapped for me as I walked up the path).
Peter suggested going out for a drink, but it was 2 o'clock, and I was ready to treat myself to a cab and take a shower. Which I did. Thank God.
Sadly, this was the last Midnight Madness. Despite the early frustrations, I would love to do it again. It was a marathon, but the few times I figured things out were incredibly gratifying, and I got to know the LES pretty well, which was cool. And puzzle people rule. But I knew that already.
UPDATE: Kevin of Team Cerulean posted a picture of Team Plaid on flickr! You can see a little bit of me behind Greg:
Monday, July 23, 2007
Will Someone Please Think of the Children!
Maybe I haven't sufficiently honed my maternal instinct, but I can never get too worked up when people employ argumentum ad juvenis, namely, the rhetorical tactic where someone suggests that an action might just harm "the children" and therefore must be wrong. There are a couple of problems with this argument technique.
First, and less universally, the action the person's trying to stop is often...not actually bad for the children. Take this fine editorial by Institute of American Values VP Elizabeth Marquardt. Marquardt is trying to argue against giving kids three legal parents, and she does so by saying kids who grow up split between several households can be in no better shape than kids from more-or-less amicable divorces, who "must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home." FOR SHAME. I think the world might be a better place if the only values that were reinforced by all adult figures in a kid's life were those that are universally held. If one parent thinks eating meat is fine and another parent thinks it's cruel, or if one parent thinks responsible premarital sex is beneficial and another thinks it's unhealthy, it's great that kids have to recognize these ambiguities. It will also help them pick out the really important values (don't steal people's stuff) from the less critical ones (always look your best). Or maybe it won't. Whatever. Maybe on balance, kids from three-parent families have a slightly less happy childhood than kids from two-parent families. Which brings me to my second point.
Why the hell do we think it's so important that things are perfect for kids? Seriously. All kids ever grow up to be is adults, and we don't care nearly as much about them. It's not like kids are such freakin' saints; they can be downright cruel and self-absorbed and irritating. They're not any less pure-hearted than adults are. Most adults aren't truly cruel; they just want to get what's best for them and are often too self-centered to realize they're hurting people along the way. As any kid (and, you'd think, any former kid) knows, that's exactly what kids are like. Childhood isn't bliss. It's a shitshow of a social scene and you get totally scared by bizarre things. I don't think it's clear what factors make kids happier eventual adults, but you never hear people arguing about what will make kids better adults, just what's better for them while they're kids.
So why do we care so much about kids, without facing specifically that they're just going to turn into adults like all other adults? I think that the answer is—and steel yourself for the short-lived cheesiness—the kids represent hope. Awwwww. Ok, end cheesiness. I think kids represent false hope, the hope that these people will be totally unlike all the other people in the world and will somehow start a new world order where everything is just Jim Dandy. I'm kind of serious here. I have this feeling that adults are constantly looking for prodigies. They really want to find the one person who changes the world. You're a pretty special group of people, people who read the blog: When you were younger, did an adult ever relate to you as if you were really, really something special? And do you find it just a bit creepy? Like they expected oddly big things from you, things no adult could ever deliver on? I think everyone wants to find that Harry Potter, that kid that with ingenuity and goodness turns everything around.
Or maybe it's just an evolved emotional response. Wish we didn't have to base so much policy on it.
First, and less universally, the action the person's trying to stop is often...not actually bad for the children. Take this fine editorial by Institute of American Values VP Elizabeth Marquardt. Marquardt is trying to argue against giving kids three legal parents, and she does so by saying kids who grow up split between several households can be in no better shape than kids from more-or-less amicable divorces, who "must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home." FOR SHAME. I think the world might be a better place if the only values that were reinforced by all adult figures in a kid's life were those that are universally held. If one parent thinks eating meat is fine and another parent thinks it's cruel, or if one parent thinks responsible premarital sex is beneficial and another thinks it's unhealthy, it's great that kids have to recognize these ambiguities. It will also help them pick out the really important values (don't steal people's stuff) from the less critical ones (always look your best). Or maybe it won't. Whatever. Maybe on balance, kids from three-parent families have a slightly less happy childhood than kids from two-parent families. Which brings me to my second point.
Why the hell do we think it's so important that things are perfect for kids? Seriously. All kids ever grow up to be is adults, and we don't care nearly as much about them. It's not like kids are such freakin' saints; they can be downright cruel and self-absorbed and irritating. They're not any less pure-hearted than adults are. Most adults aren't truly cruel; they just want to get what's best for them and are often too self-centered to realize they're hurting people along the way. As any kid (and, you'd think, any former kid) knows, that's exactly what kids are like. Childhood isn't bliss. It's a shitshow of a social scene and you get totally scared by bizarre things. I don't think it's clear what factors make kids happier eventual adults, but you never hear people arguing about what will make kids better adults, just what's better for them while they're kids.
So why do we care so much about kids, without facing specifically that they're just going to turn into adults like all other adults? I think that the answer is—and steel yourself for the short-lived cheesiness—the kids represent hope. Awwwww. Ok, end cheesiness. I think kids represent false hope, the hope that these people will be totally unlike all the other people in the world and will somehow start a new world order where everything is just Jim Dandy. I'm kind of serious here. I have this feeling that adults are constantly looking for prodigies. They really want to find the one person who changes the world. You're a pretty special group of people, people who read the blog: When you were younger, did an adult ever relate to you as if you were really, really something special? And do you find it just a bit creepy? Like they expected oddly big things from you, things no adult could ever deliver on? I think everyone wants to find that Harry Potter, that kid that with ingenuity and goodness turns everything around.
Or maybe it's just an evolved emotional response. Wish we didn't have to base so much policy on it.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Spoiler Alert: I'm Just Wild About Harry
This post has spoilers. MANY spoilers. So if you're in the middle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or haven't read it but plan on doing so, leave! Leave now! The blog will still be here when you get back, I promise, and if it's not, that means there's something horrifically wrong with Google, and we all have bigger things to worry about.
So, um, everyone's predictions were right. Sure, some predictions contradicted each other, so they weren't ALL right, but if you took all the most common ones—Snape's on the right side and was in love with Lily, Harry's a horcrux, Neville's the one who becomes a teacher at Hogwarts—you'd more or less have all the answers.
Then again, the answers have never been the REAL draw of these books. The terrific characters and beautiful moments are as terrific and beautiful as ever here. I've always found the Weasley family to be the most emotionally stirring set of relationships in the book...the way Molly cares about her husband and children, the completely good-natured partnership of Fred and George, who are constantly joking but so emotionally close and mature. So when the Weasleys suffered in this book, I cried. I did. I also cried when Molly uttered what I believe to be the first swear word in the series: "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" Bloody brilliant.
When Harry dives into Snape's memories and realizes that he must sacrifice himself, those are also a great few pages. His last mile felt incredibly real...as I imagine facing death would be...as any bizarrely extreme situation is.
There were actually long stretches that were sort of slow. I mean, relative to the rest of Harry Potter, which is to say that I was reading a page a minute instead of a page every 50 seconds.
In any case, the ending was extremely satisfying, if somewhat predictable, and I'm happy. Stories about midnight madness TK.
So, um, everyone's predictions were right. Sure, some predictions contradicted each other, so they weren't ALL right, but if you took all the most common ones—Snape's on the right side and was in love with Lily, Harry's a horcrux, Neville's the one who becomes a teacher at Hogwarts—you'd more or less have all the answers.
Then again, the answers have never been the REAL draw of these books. The terrific characters and beautiful moments are as terrific and beautiful as ever here. I've always found the Weasley family to be the most emotionally stirring set of relationships in the book...the way Molly cares about her husband and children, the completely good-natured partnership of Fred and George, who are constantly joking but so emotionally close and mature. So when the Weasleys suffered in this book, I cried. I did. I also cried when Molly uttered what I believe to be the first swear word in the series: "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" Bloody brilliant.
When Harry dives into Snape's memories and realizes that he must sacrifice himself, those are also a great few pages. His last mile felt incredibly real...as I imagine facing death would be...as any bizarrely extreme situation is.
There were actually long stretches that were sort of slow. I mean, relative to the rest of Harry Potter, which is to say that I was reading a page a minute instead of a page every 50 seconds.
In any case, the ending was extremely satisfying, if somewhat predictable, and I'm happy. Stories about midnight madness TK.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Almost All Hallows Eve
With 100 pages left in Book 6, The Great Harry Potter Reread is about to come to a close, and The Great Deathly Hallows Read will soon begin. Who knows how we'll look back on this time? I certainly have no particular envy for the newspaper readers who received Great Expectations in installments, but then again, I hated Great Expectations.
As many have undoubtedly heard, some clever schmo uploaded gifs of the entire book on the web, and now spoilers are wildly circulating, as I try to dodge them like a seeker dodges bludgers (Quidditch reference, ho!). I've already happened upon one, which I hope was false—not that I'm so opposed to what was indicated in the spoiler, I just don't like plots spoiled. It was in an RSS feed for one of my favorite blogs, and it was in bold. So maybe there was some context in the non-bold text that made it clear the spoiler was made up, but I didn't stick around in case there were more spoilers.
Not cool, Slog poster. Not cool.
I'm not even reading comments on this very post until I finish Deathly Hallows, because I wouldn't be surprised if some eeeeevil child were technorating all HP posts and commenting with spoilers, just to stroke himself. Bad boy. Go to your room.
But really, I'm not too concerned with the things that will probably be in these spoilers. I'm less concerned with who dies than with the progress of the book itself, how the final battle is framed, what the final comment on human nature is. I'll need to actually read the book to figure all of these things out. And I'm so psyched.
As many have undoubtedly heard, some clever schmo uploaded gifs of the entire book on the web, and now spoilers are wildly circulating, as I try to dodge them like a seeker dodges bludgers (Quidditch reference, ho!). I've already happened upon one, which I hope was false—not that I'm so opposed to what was indicated in the spoiler, I just don't like plots spoiled. It was in an RSS feed for one of my favorite blogs, and it was in bold. So maybe there was some context in the non-bold text that made it clear the spoiler was made up, but I didn't stick around in case there were more spoilers.
Not cool, Slog poster. Not cool.
I'm not even reading comments on this very post until I finish Deathly Hallows, because I wouldn't be surprised if some eeeeevil child were technorating all HP posts and commenting with spoilers, just to stroke himself. Bad boy. Go to your room.
But really, I'm not too concerned with the things that will probably be in these spoilers. I'm less concerned with who dies than with the progress of the book itself, how the final battle is framed, what the final comment on human nature is. I'll need to actually read the book to figure all of these things out. And I'm so psyched.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Suddenly This Summer
You can almost convince yourself summer hasn't really started yet until the fourth of July. Then you know you're in the throes of the season and it's about to slip by, just as it does every year. I'd have thought this would stop after, you know, I stopped getting summer vacation. But it's still my favorite season. I'd much rather it be 85 than 45, and it's good to have all of the school-bound friends feeling a little more relaxed.
The summer has started off with Harry Pottering, which is unforseeably terrific. I've read the books already, and I know I enjoyed them, but being on a mission to read—spending a Sunday sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and then Riverside Park, reading a fantasy book, and feeling accomplished afterward—is so ideal.
I got my MacBook, which is treating me awfully well. I've only played with GarageBand enough to record myself singing Wimoweh. It's, well, horrible—at once overly pretty and harsh—but I'm thrilled. I'm harmonizing! With myself! And I can send the file to people! Woo!
And I'm happy with my UUST score. If I want to go to UU school, I'm in pretty good shape...just have to get recommendations from old professors and write the world's most brilliant 250 word statement. Maybe my alma mater will take me back...who knows? They're pretty picky, though.
Oh, I met an attractive guy this weekend. I know that doesn't sound like much (no, I didn't, like, get his number...or even have a one-on-one conversation with him) but so rarely am I at all attracted to someone I just met—nay, so rarely am I attracted to anyone at all—that it was sort of a proof of concept. The dude was gorgeous and authentically charismatic. And I kinda dug him. It's more a testament to my functionality than my maturity (it would be nice to go for someone attainable), but when that's in doubt, it's something.
So, on a completely different topic, I was thinking about consciousness a bit today. I do maintain a confidence in science and philosophy...I think we'll eventually have an idea of what consciousness is, but right now I think we don't quite know what questions to ask, and that's hindering progress in finding out what exactly consciousness is and how it arises from the brain. We've apparently nicely eliminated the possibility that consciousness is located at one place in the brain. You can take out any individual part of the brain and maintain consciousness...I mean, maybe parts will make you pass out, but they won't kill your identity. So I guess that only leaves the possibility that it's emergent from some collection of processes? Some network? Which kind of makes sense. But I think before we figure out how it emerges, we have to get a better subjective idea of what 'it' is.
Therefore, I've been trying to pinpoint my own consciousness. What do I feel I directly experience? It's easier to find stuff I don't directly experience. Inspiration is one of them. When I'm doing a cryptic and think of an answer, it often just 'comes to me.' You all know this. The answer to some problem just comes into your head. So that's something that does not happen in the conscious. So the answer appears in your head...how does it appear? Is it an image? A sound? It's kind of neither, usually, and so it's hard to say what it IS. Even when you have mental images or hear things, the sounds don't need to happen linearly; the image doesn't need to be detailed. In what way are we actually active? What specific actions can you take ownership of? I guess we experience things. Sound does actually register. But certainly the processing of that sound isn't part of the conscious mind, nor is the interpreting of it. I can't think of any specific process that I really feel I—as my conscious mind—do. Although I know I'm here.
OK, I'm too tired for further pontificating. 'Night, all.
The summer has started off with Harry Pottering, which is unforseeably terrific. I've read the books already, and I know I enjoyed them, but being on a mission to read—spending a Sunday sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and then Riverside Park, reading a fantasy book, and feeling accomplished afterward—is so ideal.
I got my MacBook, which is treating me awfully well. I've only played with GarageBand enough to record myself singing Wimoweh. It's, well, horrible—at once overly pretty and harsh—but I'm thrilled. I'm harmonizing! With myself! And I can send the file to people! Woo!
And I'm happy with my UUST score. If I want to go to UU school, I'm in pretty good shape...just have to get recommendations from old professors and write the world's most brilliant 250 word statement. Maybe my alma mater will take me back...who knows? They're pretty picky, though.
Oh, I met an attractive guy this weekend. I know that doesn't sound like much (no, I didn't, like, get his number...or even have a one-on-one conversation with him) but so rarely am I at all attracted to someone I just met—nay, so rarely am I attracted to anyone at all—that it was sort of a proof of concept. The dude was gorgeous and authentically charismatic. And I kinda dug him. It's more a testament to my functionality than my maturity (it would be nice to go for someone attainable), but when that's in doubt, it's something.
So, on a completely different topic, I was thinking about consciousness a bit today. I do maintain a confidence in science and philosophy...I think we'll eventually have an idea of what consciousness is, but right now I think we don't quite know what questions to ask, and that's hindering progress in finding out what exactly consciousness is and how it arises from the brain. We've apparently nicely eliminated the possibility that consciousness is located at one place in the brain. You can take out any individual part of the brain and maintain consciousness...I mean, maybe parts will make you pass out, but they won't kill your identity. So I guess that only leaves the possibility that it's emergent from some collection of processes? Some network? Which kind of makes sense. But I think before we figure out how it emerges, we have to get a better subjective idea of what 'it' is.
Therefore, I've been trying to pinpoint my own consciousness. What do I feel I directly experience? It's easier to find stuff I don't directly experience. Inspiration is one of them. When I'm doing a cryptic and think of an answer, it often just 'comes to me.' You all know this. The answer to some problem just comes into your head. So that's something that does not happen in the conscious. So the answer appears in your head...how does it appear? Is it an image? A sound? It's kind of neither, usually, and so it's hard to say what it IS. Even when you have mental images or hear things, the sounds don't need to happen linearly; the image doesn't need to be detailed. In what way are we actually active? What specific actions can you take ownership of? I guess we experience things. Sound does actually register. But certainly the processing of that sound isn't part of the conscious mind, nor is the interpreting of it. I can't think of any specific process that I really feel I—as my conscious mind—do. Although I know I'm here.
OK, I'm too tired for further pontificating. 'Night, all.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The Great Harry Potter Reread
I've exchanged one acronym for another (UUST will hopefully retire on Friday when my score comes in), and I now embark on TGHPR: The Great Harry Potter Reread. I began last Wednesday with Greg's copy of The Sorcerer's Stone, but alas he informed me that he would be taking all of his Harry Potter books to India with him. He claims he wants to "read" them, but I'm certain he's doing it just to spite me. And to make his company pay more for his checked luggage. There are many advantages. So I went to that magical place where they let you take whatever books you have and bring them back once you've read them. I finished books one and two last weekend, have taking a brief break to do some fun reading for work, and tomorrow I should be able to make a dent in book three. After I finish four, I'll have to go back to book lending land to get five and six.
I may have already mentioned how good I feel about the Harry Potter craze. In a world where so many crazes are guilty pleasures (in that you perhaps should feel guilty when you mock people or consume environment-harming luxuries), a beautifully crafted fantasy series is such a delight. It's just nice to see people getting worked up about a story. And it seems that J.K. Rowling has handled it beautifully—having started out as a mother struggling to make ends meet and been vaulted to international celebrity author, she seems to have kept a cool head, stayed true to her original vision, and effortlessly walked so many lines between making her characters and points of tensions too simple and too complicated. Go go go Jo. In any case, I'm having so much fun with the reread, and I eagerly await book seven. (Snape is SO NOT REALLY EVIL. You'll see! I swear!)
This short week has been one of luxuries. Last night, I took Mum to JoJo for her birthday. Had the most fabulous foie gras brulee (yeah, I know it's cruel as hell, but it's quite literally the most delicious thing I've ever put in my mouth). And the decor and atmosphere were just lovely. It was, of course, lovely to spend time with Mom. And speaking of relatives, I had a delightful post-pride Italian dinner with Natalia the night before. Great to hang out with her, of course, and it sounds like her summer's shaping up to be very cool, or at least promising. And I got my MacBook today. Oh, beauty! I can't wait to start recording stuff and taking full advantage of garageband. It's a pretty darn impressive program.
Finally, Greg has alas departed for India. He'll be spending the next four weeks in fabulous and exciting Hyderabad, which has 6.1 million people, and which I'd never heard of before he announced he was going. I feel pathetic. After working in India, he's taking a couple weeks to backpack around Nepal, which should be awesome for him. I'm now one friend shorter for the summer (alas!) but I have Harry and a MacBook to keep me company. And, you know, my other friends. They exist.
I may have already mentioned how good I feel about the Harry Potter craze. In a world where so many crazes are guilty pleasures (in that you perhaps should feel guilty when you mock people or consume environment-harming luxuries), a beautifully crafted fantasy series is such a delight. It's just nice to see people getting worked up about a story. And it seems that J.K. Rowling has handled it beautifully—having started out as a mother struggling to make ends meet and been vaulted to international celebrity author, she seems to have kept a cool head, stayed true to her original vision, and effortlessly walked so many lines between making her characters and points of tensions too simple and too complicated. Go go go Jo. In any case, I'm having so much fun with the reread, and I eagerly await book seven. (Snape is SO NOT REALLY EVIL. You'll see! I swear!)
This short week has been one of luxuries. Last night, I took Mum to JoJo for her birthday. Had the most fabulous foie gras brulee (yeah, I know it's cruel as hell, but it's quite literally the most delicious thing I've ever put in my mouth). And the decor and atmosphere were just lovely. It was, of course, lovely to spend time with Mom. And speaking of relatives, I had a delightful post-pride Italian dinner with Natalia the night before. Great to hang out with her, of course, and it sounds like her summer's shaping up to be very cool, or at least promising. And I got my MacBook today. Oh, beauty! I can't wait to start recording stuff and taking full advantage of garageband. It's a pretty darn impressive program.
Finally, Greg has alas departed for India. He'll be spending the next four weeks in fabulous and exciting Hyderabad, which has 6.1 million people, and which I'd never heard of before he announced he was going. I feel pathetic. After working in India, he's taking a couple weeks to backpack around Nepal, which should be awesome for him. I'm now one friend shorter for the summer (alas!) but I have Harry and a MacBook to keep me company. And, you know, my other friends. They exist.
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