Archive for March, 2004

Jessica thinks I should write a Sci-Fi book sometime because I keep coming up with things like this:

You know how you have transporters in Star Trek. Well, theoretically, they might work by actually taking the mass of your body and converting it to pure subatomic energy, storing the pattern of your atomic particles in the pattern buffer, transferring the energy to somewhere else, then reconstructing the mass from the energy using the pattern in the pattern buffer. Now, if the machine is already capable of storing the complete pattern of your atomic makeup, it should be just a little twist to make it capable of recognizing atomic groups as larger patterns, such as cells, and therefore make the machine able to detect your bodies cellular makeup. Then, another little tweak to make it recognize defective cells and reconstruct them as healthy cells. You might even be able to do things like detects grossly damaged cell areas and reconstruct them whole again. Viola, modern medicine re-invented. You get stabbed by someone, no problem, go to the transporter machine and have it reconstruct you in the same spot but without the stab wound. Have clogged arteries. No big deal, just an annual physical exam could include your routine reconstruction that would clear out arterial blockage, rejuvinate skin cells, check for any cancerous cells, fix things like protien deposits on the lens of your eyes so you never need to get bifocals as you get older, etc. Now, here’s the great part about this. If you are going to be doing this reconstruction, many times it can mean removal of mass (getting rid of a cancer tumour that’s growing, or possibly just a simple reconstruction to remove extra fat, aka needleless liposuction). That extra mass can be kept in it’s energy form and fed into our national electrical power grid So, since extra fat on our bodies comes from eating, which ultimately all food is part of the natural food chain and based solely on solar or other renewable energy resources, the energy we get when we reconstruct ourselves minus the fat would be a renewable energy resource! And since mass converted to energy follows the equation E=mc^2, we get *huge* amounts of energy from small amounts of fat. I’m psyched! Who wants to start working on this with me?!?!

Powering it off didn’t help. Still doesn’t work. Guess I’ll have to try and track down where the problem is coming from again and get the right board ordered in. Maybe I could look up the component numbers of the parts on the PCB boards and then start testing to see if I could identify the broken part(s). Would be a decent electronics experiment…

Mysterious electronics can be very, very frustrating…

So, the espresso maker worked last night. This morning it worked for 4 shots, then quit again. Now I’m thinking it’s a heat related trace failure or something like that. I tried turning the machine completely off (as opposed to the power saving mode it normally goes into where it turns off the boiler but not the electronic circuits) to see if that makes it start working again. We’ll see…

OK, so not too long ago our rather nice home espresso maker started flaking out. The boiler had started leaking, and that meant that any time we were using steam, steam was being released inside the unit. Eventually, the leak in the boiler got bad enough and the steam prevelant enough, that it quit grinding the coffee automatically like it should. So, we ordered a new boiler and put that in. Then, we tried to isolate the fault that caused the grinder to not work and couldn’t find it. So, I pulled all the printed circuit boards out of the unit and cleaned them all with alcohol and a stiff, plastic bristled brush to get any corrosion off of the exposed traces in case there was a short somewhere. I put it all back together, plugged it in, and nothing changed. The grinder still didn’t work. While I was working on the unit I had pulled it out of the coffee nook into the main kitchen so I would have more room. Before we left for Chicago, we wanted to put it back so it would be out of the way. So, I put it back in the coffee nook. Today is the first time I’ve tried to use it since we left, and VOILA! The grinder worked rather unexpectedly! Good thing I was just doing the very first espresso shot, which I do without grounds in order to prewarm the brew unit. If I had already dumped in grounds and then it ground up some more beans and dumped that in as well it would have overloaded the brew chamber. Instead, I got a regular brew cycle. Anyway, I’m glad it’s working again. It probably just needed a complete power down and reset cycle in order to let the cleaned up circuit boards undo the effects of shorting out some sort of detection circuit (there is a microswitch on the grounds chamber that signals when enough coffee has been ground by closing a 30V DC circuit, I’m pretty sure that the power side was shorted to the detection side, I’m just not sure why it didn’t reset and start working immediately after I cleaned the PCBs instead of needing another power cycle). Mysterious electronics rock!! At least that saves me from buying a new $175 control board…

We’re home!!! Gotta be at work at 9am tomorrow, so pulling in at 11:30pm kinda sucks, but it is ***sssooooo*** nice to be home.

We leave in just two days for Chicago! Woohoo!!

Jessica went into the closet this morning and pulled out 4 shirts. These are the nice, tailored looking shirts from places like Ann Taylor’s The Loft. She wanted to take them with her because after work she is going to the tailor. I asked her why. She says that when she buys these kinds of tailored shirts, by the time she gets them large enough to go over her bust, they don’t pull into her waist like they are suppossed to. So, she has to go to the tailor and get her to bring them in at the waist even more than they are. My response, “Damn, I wish I had that problem. But nnnooooooo, when I buy jeans large enough to fit over my package I don’t have to take them to the tailor and get the waist pulled in…”

This series of rants, plus all the rants I’ve left out because I didn’t have time to write them, is why I named my journal the way that I did. I expect a lot of the people reading my journal would get these things or know these things already, it’s all those people out there not reading much at all that I would expect to not know these things…Jerry Springer guests immediately come to mind…

Logic. It amazes me how many people in our society don’t understand what logic is. There are different forms of logic and different ways that it is used. Here, I am referring to the use of logic in interpersonal communications and arguments or discussions. Whenever two people have a differing opinion on what the truth of something is, the only way for them to reach agreement on the truth of the matter is to discuss the issue between themselves. In the course of that discussion, they use arguments to try and prove their point.

Every argument is comprised of three basic things:

1) Premises or facts – These are the bits of knowledge that you are basing your argument upon
2) Logic – This is how you are putting your facts together to draw a conclusion
3) Conclusion – This is the item you are trying to prove

Every argument can be attacked in one of two ways then, you can either disprove the premises or facts to prove the conclusion is invalid, or you can attack the logic to prove the conclusion is invalid. However, and pay special attention to this point, proving that a conclusion is invalid does not mean the conclusion is wrong. Those are two different things. Saying that a conclusion is invalid simply means that the argument you have present, as it is presented, does not *prove* your conclusion. Your conclusion may still be right, it simply isn’t proven at this point. In order to prove your conclusion is not only invalid, but also wrong, then the person must construct a counter argument that is a valid argument that has a conclusion that is different from your own. Many people misunderstand what it means when I say “That’s illogical”. I’m not saying they are wrong, just that they haven’t proven their point.

So, since so many people have a misconception of what logic is in an argument, and I hear that misconception all the time when people say things like “Logic can’t answer everything”, let me explain in a nut shell what logic is.

Logic is the set of rules by which you evaluate the set of premises and facts in an argument to tell if they prove the conclusion presented.

Logic is exactly the same as the rules of mathematics, only applied to arguments instead of numbers. In math, if you make the equation 2 + 2 = 4, then the numbers on the left would be the premises or facts, the number on the right would be the conclusion, and logic would be the math symbols you are using and the rules for what those symbols mean. For example, you could say that:

All frogs can fly + All flying reptiles are purple = All frogs are purple

This argument has 100% valid logic. It’s incorrect because the premises you used are incorrect to begin with, but the logic is valid. An example of incorrect logic would be something like this:

All frogs can fly + 30% of flying reptiles are purple = All frogs are purple

This logic is invalid. It’s invalid because we don’t know which 30% of flying reptiles are purple and therefore we don’t know that the portion of flying reptiles that are purple are in fact the frogs. So, for this I would say “That’s an illogical argument”. It doesn’t mean you are wrong, because in fact all frogs *could* be purple, it just means you haven’t proven it.

So, logic is basically the same thing as the rules of math, but applied to arguments instead of numbers. It is *the* way that you can tell true things from possibly true things. It is the way that you stop yourself from drawing conclusions that simply aren’t valid based upon the information you have (the conclusion you might have drawn may still be correct, it simply isn’t proven). And it’s something that we don’t teach to our children in schools. Big mistake. This should be right up there with math on the public school system curriculum. It’s far too important to society that people know what logic is and how to apply it to leave it up to happenstance for people to learn. I know that someone doesn’t understand what logic is when they say “Logic can’t answer everything” simply because I know that if they understood what logic is, then they would know that logic doesn’t attempt to answer *anything*, logic only tells you whether or not the answer you concluded from the information you based it on actually makes sense.

When I posted the other two rants, I was in an ill mood and rather agitated. I’m sure that played into my wording and tone. If I put anyone off, I apologize. I’m in a much better mood today. Hopefully this won’t sound like such a harsh rant. ryeth has posted a couple items in her journal about recent growth. I’ve had a little of my own. This comes from that.

The “Blue Chip” Rant

Have you ever seen those t-shirts that say “He who dies with the most toys, wins”? I’ve seen them all over the place. I guess that could be an OK game to play as a life long game. But, I have a different game I play. It’s called the “Blue Chip Game”. It goes like this:

We are each born into this world holding an empty bag. Every time we think we know something, or have learned some item of knowledge, or figured out some connection, we are given a chip. We can’t tell what color that chip is though because it’s in a wrapper. That chip represents the answer to the question “Are you right?” about whatever it is we think we know. If the chip is red, then we are wrong. If it is blue, then we are right. So, when you think you’ve got something figured out, you get your chip, and you toss it in your bag. When you die, you pull out all the chips in your bag and you unwrap them all to see what color they are. He who has the most blue chips, wins.

Now, like all good video games, there are winning strategies to this game and loosing strategies to this game. One of the real loosing strategies to this game is to never accept a chip unless you yourself came up with it. A winning player would collect chips from wherever they can. Whether it’s reading books, just sitting around thinking, or interacting with other people to gain more chips. The more chips you have, the better your blue chip count in the end.

But, you have to be careful. There are a lot of red chips out there masquerading as blue chips. The second part of the winning strategy is not just to go out there and find as many chips as you can, but to also know how to tell a red chip from a blue chip. In some cases you can rely upon your own store of knowledge to allow you to tell the difference between a red chip and a blue one. Sometimes you need to go gather more knowledge in order to be able to tell for sure.

If this particular chip happens to be one that someone else has and they are offering you, you may already have a chip in your bag for this same bit of knowledge. If you and the other person disagree on what’s right, then you are now presented with a situation where you have two chips in your hand, one of your own and one of the other person’s. Unfortunately, far too many players of this game will refuse to take the other person’s chip. Out of a sense of pride or ego, they pick their chip. I call this the failing of false pride.

But that’s not a winning player’s strategy. A winning player knows that it doesn’t matter who’s chip you throw in the bag, just that you throw the blue chip in the bag. So when someone offers them a chip that’s about something they’ve already got a chip for, they pull their previous chip out of their bag, they look at both of the chips in their hands, and they objectively evaluate the arguments for each chip. When they are done, they pick which ever chip they think is most likely to be blue based upon the arguments, and they throw that in their bag. By giving up their false pride, and picking which ever chip actually sounds most right, they accomplish something great. Over time, as they are approaching the end of their game, they build up a vast source of true pride. Pride that isn’t the result of just wishing or thinking you are right, but pride in *actually* being right as the result of being willing to be wrong.

There is a final element to the winning strategy of this game. A winning player is willing to be wrong, and willing to take someone else’s blue chip if it comes along. But it doesn’t just stop there. If the chip you pull out and decide was actually red instead of blue, then you now have to reconsider *all* of your other chips that depended on this one. For example, if long ago you decided that eating chicken was unhealthy and threw a chip in your bag for that, then because chicken was unhealthy you decided eating at Chik-Fil-A was bad and threw another chip in your bag for that, then someone convinces you that chicken really is OK and you pull out that “eating chicken is unhealthy” chip and toss it away now thinking it is red, then you also have to pull out that “eating at Chik-Fil-A is bad” chip and at least reconsider it. In the end, you may still think that’s a blue chip for other reasons, but since it was based on a chip you decided was likely red, it has to be reconsidered.

This is the *hardest* strategy in this game to master, and the one where the most people fail. It’s especially hard if you learn something at a young age that is really a red chip, but you’ve acted based upon that red chip all of your life. If you then are told that it is a red chip, and presented with what someone else thinks is the correct blue chip, many people will refuse to accept it. Even when the correctness of the blue chip is plain as day, they will still refuse to accept it. And in some cases it’s not because they can’t see that the new chip is the real blue chip, it’s because if they were to admit to themselves the truth of that blue chip, then they would have no choice but to admit how many things they had done in their life that were based upon a red chip. The guilt, remorse, and regret in that situation could simply be overwhelming. So, instead of accepting the blue chip, they hold on to their red chip. Hopefully, they quit acting on that red chip, but they aren’t able to handle the apparent results of actually reconsidering their lives. I think this is why a lot of older people get stuck in their ways. It’s not that they think they’re right, it’s that they can’t take the thought of accepting they might have been wrong all that time and acted on something wrong in all those instances.

So that’s the “Blue Chip Game” and the three key points of strategy towards winning the game. I mentioned that I’ve gone through some growth recently, and it basically boils down to not having implemented that strategy as well in the past as I should have. I’m attempting to correct that now.

Now it’s time for the rant part of this. Everyone falls somewhere in this game because we are all playing it whether we like it or not. Their strategy goes from one extreme end of the spectrum where they always think they are right and refuse to accept anyone else’s thoughts to the other extreme of never assuming they are right but always being willing to listen to other people’s thoughts and then trying to find an intelligent answer to which one is correct. You can usually tell where someone is on that range from one extreme to the other by how they react to having their ideas challenged. At the end where the person always thinks they are right, if they are challenged by someone else’s idea then they tend to react either by getting mad or getting hurt. They are still operating on false pride instead of trying to build up real pride, and any suggestion that they aren’t right is an attack on that pride. They will often yell or scream or throw fits if they get angry. They will suffer withdrawl and resentment if they allow their feelings to get hurt. At the other extreme end you have people that can be told they are wrong all day long and the only thing they will say, and in an earnest and honest manner, is “why do you think so?” They won’t get angry, and they won’t get their feelings hurt. They will be willing to listen objectively and they are ready and willing to learn if you do indeed have something to offer. That doesn’t mean they will accept it though, because you actually have to have a blue chip for them to accept.

So, I get frustrated sometimes when I run into people that appear to be not very good at playing this game. Partially because I look for blue chips where ever I can find them, and people that aren’t very good at playing this game have so many red chips to sort through in order to find the blue chips that they do have that it’s an extreme hassle. Partially because I care about the progress of our society. If 90% of our society knew how to play this game fully and with the best strategy, the flow of blue chips from person to person would be very fast and efficient. Everyone would have a bag with lots of blue chips. On the other hand, if the majority of society doesn’t know how to play this game well, then you end up greatly slowing down the speed and number of blue chips that get passed around.

Right now, there are far too many people in our society that can’t play this game well. One of the common signs for people that can’t, is that they are “sensitive”. Hence the source of my rant against various sensitivities earlier this week. If you are in a room of 50 people, and 45 of them know how to play the game, then you feel sorry for the 5 that “just don’t get it”, but you aren’t frustrated. When you are in a room of 50 people and only 5 of them know how to play the game, you are. *BUT*, if you are in a room of 50 people, only 5 of which know how to play the game, and you see those 5 people not only not trying to help the other 45 get better at the game, but actually coddling their sensitivities and telling them “It’s OK, you don’t have a red chip” when in reality they know that the person *does* have a red chip, then you just want to run up to those 5, grab them by the shoulders and yell “What the hell are you doing! This is our society that you are sabotaging by catering to these people’s incorrect ideas instead of first educating them on how to play the game so they can accept other people’s blue chips and then working on helping them get more blue chips!”

So, no, I don’t like catering to sensitive people. But that’s mainly because a lot of sensitivities in our society are nothing more than an artifact of not knowing how to play this game well, and not knowing how to shed false pride in search of real pride. There are some very important lessons the children in our society need to be taught in order to play this game well: how to be wrong, how to accept when others are right, how not to get your feelings hurt if you are wrong, how to have pride in knowing the truth instead of having pride in thinking you are right, how to actually tell if an argument is right or wrong (aka, logic, we don’t teach *nearly* enough about what logic really is when it comes to arguments, but that’s a whole other rant), how to reevaluate your chips when you have to replace one without letting it be overwhelming so you don’t get set in your ways, etc. I may have been asleep, but I don’t seem to recall these things ever being truly taught in public schools. That, to me, is one of the worst mistakes we could make in trying to make our society a better place to live.

Sometimes, you simply just don’t need certain types of scares…there for about 15 minutes I thought I was going to have to go searching with a metal detector at the county landfill if I ever wanted to see 3 of our rings again…

I was in a *foul* mood earlier today and ranted a *lot*. I posted two rants, but there were about 3 more that went through my head. I think I must have been PMS’ing.

“Sensitive” people. Like the person in California that recently complained to the state that the designation of Master and Slave on hard drives in computers was offensive so the state issued a decree to all their hardware makers that they had to change the names of the hard drives in their systems in order to be eligible to sell hardware to the state. Puhhh-Leeeze. OK, so here’s the deal. We have a responsibility as a society to learn from our past mistakes. The way you do that is to actually examine the past, in all of it’s gory detail, hold it up to the light, look at it objectively, then say to ourselves “How the hell did we ever think that could be right?” We do *not* sweep words under the rug (especially when they are being used in a fairly proper and applicable setting that has *nothing* to do with the past) and hide from the past. It is in the act of recalling the past and recalling the magnitude of our mistakes that we make sure we don’t do the same thing again.

So, when I was a child, if I said something like this, my parent’s response would have been “Quit being a little crybaby. That’s nothing for you to be upset about, now go play outside”. Why doesn’t society ever do this for the people that obviously weren’t taught by their parents the difference between things that you should truly be upset about and things you shouldn’t?

If I say “I’ve installed a second hard drive in your computer and the two drives are now configured as Primary Master and Primary Slave” and you then allow the words master and slave to cause you to get upset, then understand that A) *you* are responsible for bringing up some troubling association out of context, not me, so don’t get mad at me and B) *you* are being rude to *me* by not paying attention to what I actually *am* telling you, so quit letting your mind wander off to irrelevant stuff and pay attention so I don’t have to repeat this again later.

There are a few things I know to be true:

First, it’s a free country and other people are (suppossed to be) free to use whatever language they want.

Second, the purpose of language is to express ideas between people. When someone says something to you, the important part is the idea, not the language used (which is the reason why it is rude to misassociate things and then come down on the other person just like I wrote above).

Third, many things commonly considered offensive (such as swearing) have a specific purpose in our language. Swearing, for instance, is used to impart a far greater level of emphasis to the idea you are communicating. Some people obviously over use swearing in their daily talk and dilute the emphasis at least in their own usage of the words, while other people *never* swear and have to find a different way of expressing the very emphasis that swear words impart. Whether or not you choose to use those swear words is up to you, but they do have a valid purpose.

Fourth, when someone gets offended, they tend to tune out the rest of the conversation and dwell on whatever offended them.

Given that those things above are true (and you could argue them to some extent, but I think they are more true than not), I must therefore conclude that “sensitivity” in our society is a bad thing. It’s like cutting off your own ears because of something someone else chooses to do. I can understand saying to yourself “Well, I don’t want to talk that way, but it’s their life and they can do what they want” and going on listening to the idea, but once you get offended it becomes very hard to let the idea come on through, and it could be that you miss some fact that could someday save your life. It makes absolutely no sense to me, then, that people in our society would allow themselves to be so sensitive to just the language used in communications instead of the idea being expressed.

All these lawsuits by stupid people for shit that we didn’t do for them really piss me off. For example, the lady that sued McDonald’s over the scalding hot coffee in her lap and won millions. Let’s review a few things. First, she ordered the coffee. Second, she chose to put it between her legs. Third, she was driving a stick shift which meant her legs moved a lot as she worked the clutch and brake. Fourth, anyone over the age of 7 knows that lids on cups come off when you repeatedly bend the cup. Conclusion: What the hell was she doing putting that cup there in the first place? Is she a total moron? Maybe she didn’t have anywhere else convenient to place it… So, because she doesn’t prepare for driving with coffee ahead of time and still orders coffee at a drive through anyway and then makes do with a known bad solution to driving with a cup of coffee and gets hurt as a result, McDonald’s is now responsible? How assinine is that?

So, here’s my solution. We implement a new product rating system in America. It’s called the IQ rating. Each manufacturer can rate their product for the IQ you need to have to use it. If you use their product and hurt yourself, but in the process you exhibit less than the rated IQ in your decision making process, then you can’t sue the product maker. We’ll rate hot coffee at an IQ of 100, and we’ll rate that lady’s use of McDonald’s coffee at a displayed IQ of 40. Case dismissed.

This also means we can change the warning labels on products. Instead of having to warn about things that anyone with an IQ above that of an eggplant should know, we just warn people thusly:

IQ rating: 80

Warning: This product requires that you have a brain, and use it, in order to be safely operated/used/eaten/whatever. If you have left your brain at home or turned it off for some reason, please don’t use our product.

For some reason, I appear to be in a *very* rant oriented state of mind this morning…