Not Sophistication

Yeah.

So.

This is kinda embarrassing...

How can I put this? Some people are alcoholics. Some people snort cocaine. Some people visit prostitutes. Some people have scary fetishes.

I'm afraid my personal addiction is not nearly as socially acceptable.

Yup, I'm a Dungeons and Dragons webcomic freak.

I swear I never saw it coming. It started off small, just a little bit of Order of the Stick when I was feeling bored. Then a gamer friend landed up in hospital, and I bought him some OOTS books to keep him company, and... I couldn't resist their siren song. I fell into depravity like an expensive, beautifully-painted character model onto a stone floor*.

Next it was Goblins. But hey, two comics ain't so bad. I could give it up any time I liked.

I dabbled with Irregular Webcomic, but quickly moved on to harder drugs. I tasted Looking For Group, and life was sweet for a while.

But then I discovered Darths and Droids and DM Of The Rings. Webcomics about fantasy films, in the style of D&D adventures? I think I've hit bottom here. It's time to admit: I need help.

The really irritating thing is that I don't even play Dungeons and Dragons.

* It's well-known that the force of impact of a dropped model is proportional, not to the height of the table it's knocked off, but to how annoyed you'll be if it gets broken.
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Sophistication

You know that guy? The one who is always in great shape despite apparently living off fast food. The one who always gets top marks despite apparently never revising for exams. The one who can drive, skate, ski, swim, fight, play every card game known to man, and all without ever seeming to break a sweat.

Everyone knows someone like this (guy or girl). After years of wondering how the blazes they do all that and still look so laid back, I've come to a conclusion.

They're frauds.

Sure, they may have a slightly broader range of talents than the average bloke. Sure, they possibly started out with slightly better strength and dexterity than us mere mortals. But there is no level of innate ability that could set them that high above the rest of us.

I think that, for every burger you see being eaten, there's an hour in the gym that you never find out about. For every cakewalk of an exam, there are many frantic hours of secret preparation. For every activity that they're "just naturally good" at, they have undoubtedly spent time preparing and training.

This is reassuring. It means that anyone can do what that guy does. Anyone can upgrade themselves to the status of god among men. It just takes a lot of work. Specifically, it takes a lot of work without any sort of immediate reward.

I now have a goal in life. Firstly, to practice the discipline required for this sort of long-term training plan. Secondly, to develop the sophistication required to STFU.

I will make better progress towards both of these goals if I get a good eight hours sleep. Goodnight.
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Bwahahaha

I've been trying to cut back on my public use of mad-scientist laughter. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, it does disturb my co-workers somewhat.

To compensate, I intend to use my blog as a gloating platform. I consider this to be ethically acceptable on three grounds:

1) My blog, my rules (incidentally, the new dress code round here is "winged monkey")
2) Blog-reading is strictly voluntary - you fools chose to read this garbage
3) It's not like you can do anything about it anyway

Those preliminaries out the way, I would just like to say I'm very happy. And boastful. But mostly happy.

About four months back now, I got bounced up to a different part of England - I'm sure I've whined about it previously. My temporary home is a hotel in a little sea town that wishes it was Las Vegas. For generations, anyone with any brains or talent has been escaping from this dump*, and the result is reminiscent of Innsmouth without the successful fishing industry.

Coming to terms with the mindless tedium presents an interesting challenge. As a partial solution (because there's only so many books you can cram in a suitcase - believe me I know) I've taken up Taekwondo. I've previously done Karate, but they don't have a club for that within walking distance of the hotel, so what the hey.

I've actually been really enjoying it. This is the first martial arts training I've done in about three years, and it's been good to feel the old skills starting to come back (plus a few new ones). It's been going so well that I've been rather looking forward to the grading, which was earlier today.

Ah, the grading. I used to think the sweetest words you could hear in a grading were "you've passed". It turns out I was wrong. The sweetest words are "we've decided to let this student skip a belt". I've jumped yellow-belt entirely and gone straight to yellow-with-green-tag. Who thinks up these colours?

Normally I would take this with a large dose of humility - until this morning I was the only adult white-belt at the club, so they could have just been letting me catch up with my "peer group". However, when they were handing out the new belts, it transpired that they did not have a green-tag belt with them, which suggests that this was a spur-of-the-moment decision based on my performance in the grading.

Quite apart from providing me with excellent bragging rights, this episode also highlights the unreasonable effectiveness of the human brain (yes, even mine). Once connections are made, they tend to stay made. Once a skill is learned, it persists far beyond its anticipated sell-by date.

The moral: never be afraid to spend a bit of time learning a new skill, or polishing an old one. I'm going to be leaving this area in December, so I'll only have had a few months with this club. But even this short few months has been good for me. And I know that, next time I decide to take up a martial art, it'll be easier than ever.

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* This is unduly harsh. There are many good, intelligent people here - I work with a bunch of them. But the social agenda seems to be completely controlled by people who think fart jokes are the height of humour, big flashing lights make a place look modern and tasteful, psychics can solve all your problems, and Sophistication is an island in Greece.
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Where did they go?

I'm not a good programmer. I'm naturally quite techie, but I've never really had the patience to sit down and make great art with my PC. The skills I have are those I was able to absorb from those in my immediate vicinity - replication not initiation.

That said, I do enjoy absorbing the culture of tech - the story of mel, the jargon file, esoteric languages, and the old tales of the MIT AI lab and Xerox Park. I read books by Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Buried somewhere on my hard drive is the complete archives of Phrack mag, although I barely understand half of it (typically the obsolete half - yay analog phreaking!).

And one of the things I pick up from these shards of geekiness is a sense of wistfulness. They talk about the September that never ended. They talk about the AI Winter. They refer to newsgroups and communities of unsurpassed elegance and sophistication, that now no longer exist. There's a sense of stumbling across the forgotten artifacts of some lost higher civilisation. Once heroes and wizards strode the Earth; now there are only echoes.

Where did they go? What happened to the cypherpunk generation? Did they all quit programming, or wind up in wage-slave jobs that crushed their creativity, or die of drug overdoses, or get locked up for not respecting someone's lack of respect for computer security? Have the elves passed into the West, making way for the Age of Man?

I hope not. I like to think that, somewhere, these ideals hold on. Somewhere, in a hidden mailing list, on a firewalled server, carried by a stream of encrypted emails spliced into innocuous data, the crypto-anarchist dream lives on. It's just waiting to be found, locked behind doors that cry out for the right key. So what if the key in question is 8192-bit?

Maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe the cypherpunk movement just died out, faded back into oblivion. It would be a poorer world if that were so, but the world has no responsibility to respect our desires.

But I allow myself this one dream. And in consolation for the lack of evidence, I hold this thought tightly:

If they couldn't hide themselves from people like me, they wouldn't be worth admiring...
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How To Learn French

1) Work your way through Wikibooks: French

2) Download a freeware French-English dictionary (I'm usingFreedict - open-source but not very user-friendly).

3) Download a good book here and ici, and read them side by side.

4) Tune in to web radio (alternatively pick a DVD, and set the language to French and the subtitles to English).

It's amazing how long you can spend on the internet and still not use it to its full potential.
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An example thereof

In my last post I explained why it was a good thing to be skeptical before passing ideas on.

Now, I've just come across a great reference to "the world's oldest apocalypse prediction":

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common."
- Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800BC

This reference is sourced to Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts. The problem is, I can't substantiate it. I don't have a copy of the Book of Facts handy and, even if I did, I would need to know more about the clay tablet in question before I could trust Mr Asimov's word on this.

So if I were to use this quote in any sort of serious discussion, I would need to accompany it with a shot of skeptical "penicillin". I would have to make my friends aware that I could not stake my life on the it being accurate. This would be boring and long-winded.

The only alternative is to try to track down the tablet in question online. This is not proving easy: googling for the translated text just finds thousands of people who have quite clearly copied it straight out of the Book of Facts. This is not corroboration.

So I need to dig deeper. With a bit of effort, I'll be able to figure out how the Assyrian research community organises its information, which should give me some idea of where to find this particular tablet. So far I've come across the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (not so helpful as it doesn't give translations) and the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (which appears to be defunct).

Beyond that, I may have to gatecrash the local university library. Watch this space.

It may take a while to learn the truth here. Heck, I might actually need to learn Assyrian to track down the tablet (or to demonstrate that it probably doesn't exist). I am unlikely to go that far. But the time I do spend on this exercise will be time well used - a tithe spent on improving the information available to the community as a whole.
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Wash your hands before blogging

On this blog I often talk about skepticism. But what actually does this mean? Beyond the statistics, the science and the logic, what is it that defines us as skeptics? What is the driving force behind our community of pedants?

The answer is simple. When you get right down to it, modern skepticism is about hygiene.

Bear with me here...

Why do we wash our hands? Because there are tiny self-replicators called bacteria and viruses that can infest them. These bugs eat the nutrients on our hands, and given half a chance will take a bite out of the hand itself. They are harmful.

They also spread rapidly. When we perform the various acts of hygiene - using a tissue when sneezing, washing our hands after using the loo, cleaning up after our dog - we aren't just protecting ourselves. We're protecting those around us. Washing your hands makes you safer, sure, but it also helps slow the spread of disease through your community.

Why do we apply skeptical principles to our thoughts? Because there are tiny little self-replicators that can infest them. We call these replicators "memes", by analogy to biological genes. A meme is simply a bit of information that can "copy" itself from one human mind to another. It could be an email hoax, a news story, a technique for producing origami boats, a poem, or even a blog post.

Some of these memes are useful; some are harmful. Memes can encourage you to feed the homeless, or to give all your money to scammers. In general, memes that correspond well with reality are less likely to cause harm. Truth is usually better than falsehood.

When we pick up biological diseases, we have a responsibility to ourself and others to limit the damage those germs can cause. When we pick up memes from others, or when we pass our memes on, we have a similar responsibility to ensure that they are realistic. We must use the disinfectant of rationality, the soap of science and the hot water of critical evaluation to ensure that no-one will be injured or killed because we infected them with a dangerous untruth.

This explains some of the distaste that scientists and skeptics sometimes show towards people who believe in UFOs, homeopathy, psychics, creationism, conspiracy theories... and gods. It's not the beliefs that disturb us; rather, it is the lack of intellectual caution that these beliefs demonstrate.

In general, these believers have not bothered to "wash their hands". They have not attempted to protect themselves from bad memes, and they happily pass on their mental plagues to others. These people are walking around with unwashed minds, ready to transmit all sorts of potentially-harmful diseases.

It's unhelpful. It's dangerous. And it's certainly not hygienic.
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Rituals of my people

Last Sunday I went to the christening of my cousin's second son. It was a full church service, and was rather well attended by various family members and friends of the proud parents. The kid is very sweet. All told, a nice day out.

So what's bugging me?

Well, like I say, this was a proper church service. It's actually quite a while since I've been to a church except as a tourist, so this took some getting used to. And, after spending years discussing religion in blogs and forums, I found myself with a very strong urge to hit the "reply" button...

I was amused by the Bible reading that included Matthew 13:47-49a and carefully airbrushed out the less family-friendly Matt 13:49b-50. I was mildly irritated by the liturgical question-and-answer format - what if you don't agree with the prescribed answer*?

And I was actually rather bothered by the content of the liturgy. There are several parts that to a non-Christian like myself are a bit disturbing. For example:

Faith is the gift of God to his people.
In baptism the Lord is adding to our number those whom he is calling.
People of God, will you welcome these children and uphold them in their new life in Christ?
All: With the help of God we will.

I'm sorry, but this child is not old enough to be considered one of "our number". He's part of your community, sure, but at his age you can't meaningfully say he subscribes to your beliefs. Beliefs come later. And he might not share your views even when he grows up. Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch...

The entire liturgy is founded on the assumption that, if you're born into a particular family or community, you're going to grow up as a Christian. I reject that assumption. The kid will follow his own path and, as a responsible relative, I'll support him whatever that path might be.

If he becomes an atheist then that's cool. If he becomes a Christian then fair enough. If he becomes a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or goat-sacrificing Satanist then I'll still be on his side. Any other attitude is reprehensible.

If atheism's popularity increases, I foresee a day when we'll start to develop rituals and liturgies of our own. When that day comes, there will be a lot we can learn from the Christian versions.

In the case of child baptisms, I hope we learn what not to say...

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* I handled this situation by just not saying anything while everyone around me muttered their responses. Who says I'm not tactful? Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I saw some other folks doing the same thing.

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Walk on by

There's a topic I've been meaning to cover for about two years now. And every time I decide to write about it, something comes up, goes down, or otherwise gets in the way. I'm jinxed.

It's a simple little thing: how we walk.

Now mostly this isn't something we think about much. If strolling down the street required cogitation at every step, there would be even more couch potatoes in the world. But there's a lot to find interesting...

An example. Next time you walk down a street, try to imagine that you're encased in a big solid sphere, like those Zorb balls. Convince yourself that the ball is rock solid - no-one can get through it to bump into you. Visualise the people around you rebounding from the ball if they try to push too close.

What you'll find is that you can walk straight at someone and they will always get out of your way. This is really kinda cool. And it doesn't seem to be anything to do with physical size or intimidation - I've seen tiny women pull this trick on burly blokes.

On close examination, it turns out that the "simple" act of walking past someone is actually quite complicated. As you approach a person, you use a range of subtle cues to plan a route round them, based on the direction you think they're going to head in.

The most important of these is probably foot position - your feet tend to point in the direction you're planning to go, and other people will pick up on this. If you really want to confuse someone, try walking past them on their left while keeping your feet pointed towards their right. Chances are good that they'll walk into you.

That's why the Zorb ball trick works. When you visualise being surrounded by an impenetrable force field, your feet point straight forward regardless of who is in your way. Everyone else unconsciously notices this and walks around you.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
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