For me the best parts of the winter games are hockey and curling, but neither of those really struck a nerve the way, say, speed skating or nordic skiing did. The gold medal hockey game between Canada and the US was fantastically exciting, but it just made me want to watch more hockey, not play it. Same thing with curling, which is something I’ve always wanted to try (and now I’ve put it in my calendar for the beginning of next season).

But the speed skating. The nordic skiing. Something about them really makes me want to get off my ass and do something. I bet it’s in no small part due to the fact that those guys actually look athletic—you’d have to in those outfits—and the endurance they must have speaks more directly to athleticism than a game like curling or hockey. (That’s not to say that those sports don’t require athleticism, they just don’t show it off the same way.)

Part of my current feeling is also coming from the fact that I’ve been in a bit of fitness limbo lately. I’ve been going to the gym regularly but don’t feel like I’m getting much out of it. I’m certainly not being pushed the way I was on the rowing team in Montreal. I think I’m still looking for that same kind of high. The Olympics have reminded me that it must be out there somewhere. I just need to find it.

I had fun hacking together various parts of this site, but it made it very difficult to keep current. This was especially true when it came to moving more and more content to WordPress. I customized so much with my theme and various plugins that it became impossible to keep up to date. WordPress upgrades itself automatically quite wonderfully, but it doesn’t upgrade all my code. I began to get worried that my hacks would start to break as WordPress changed.

And besides all that, I was wondering what the point of it all was. Nobody comes to this site and browses around, so all the navigation tools and indices of content and whatnot were useless. I had things promoting content on other parts of the site. All this stuff is useless. When people come here, they typically do it for one article they found from Google and that’s it. And that’s fine, because I never actually intended this to be some kind of destination. There’s no social networking here. This isn’t a high traffic blog. I don’t have a dedicated audience or even a well defined subject.

And that’s fine for me. I’ve said all along, that this site is for me. It really is more like a personal journal that I come back to read once in a while than anything else. And if people find useful or interesting things written in here, then that’s great too, but I’m not going to try to dedicate this site to an audience that doesn’t exist. What I got by doing that was a half-breed kind of site. Something that was pretending to be something it wasn’t.

And so I’ve reworked the site’s design. Yes, writing my own theme doesn’t solve much of the first problem of keeping code up to standard, but at least I’ve written it in a more recent standard. In a couple years I’ll probably be ready for a change again anyway. The goal is, and will be, to keep it simple. One of the best sites I’ve ever seen was also the simplest. I’m aspiring to that. The content is still all there, but I’m not trying to throw it at every body who browses by. You get what you ask for: the one page you ask for, and nothing else, unless you really poke around.

It’s much more personal this way.

However, this precession of the signs does not necessarily mean that astrology is complete nonsense. One can imagine a world in which astrology really did work, despite the fact that the signs don’t match up anymore. It’s not hard. In fact I’ll do it right now.

It’s not hard to imagine that the time of year of one’s birth actually did affect one’s behaviour. Maybe our gestation period was more heavily influenced by ambient temperature, such that a developing embryo’s body chemistry was altered in specific and predictable ways. Isn’t there some species of reptile in which whether you become a boy or a girl depends on the temperature at which your egg develops? That’s what I’m talking about here. Even less crazy would be that a child’s first few months of development influence their behaviour. You might imagine a person born in December would be tougher than someone born in May because of various environmental things. I think there have even been proper studies on this kind of thing. Early childhood psychology and the like.

People would notice this kind of predictor. Except instead of noticing that the changes in behaviour are correlated with seasons, they notice that they’re correlated with the position of the sun at birth. These are really pretty much the same thing, and it seems like seasons would be an easier connection, but hey, everybody loves astronomy, right? So, instead of saying “babies raised in the first month of winter tend to be tough and have a high threshold for cold” (or whatever) they say “people who were born under Capricorn (Dec 23 to Jan 19) tend to…” etc.

And this system works. The people who have worked it out have just made a mistake in assuming that correlation equals causation (which it does not). But that doesn’t really matter since their mistake takes many lifetimes to become obvious, and by that point astrologers have stopped bothering to check if the Sun is in the same place it’s been in for the last hundred years. Another simple mistake.

But before you know it, the Sun has moved quite a lot, and the constellations don’t match up very well anymore, just as we see today. The seasons that caused this whole mess, on the other hand, are still right where they were before. People born in the first month of winter are still tough and cold (or whatever), and that still matches the description of Capricorn even though the Sun isn’t in Capricorn anymore. The system still works, we just have an outdated naming scheme.

So the claim that astrology is complete rubbish because the names of the signs don’t match up with the sun anymore is fallacious. You might as well claim that modern electronics can’t possibly work because current actually flows the other way. Unfortunate naming conventions don’t invalidate the thing they describe.

However, all of this is not to say that we live in a world where astrology is true. There are, I’m sure, dozens of other reasons why your newspaper horoscope can’t possibly be true, but I’m not going to address them here. The point is, astrology may be nonsense, but it’s not necessarily a priori nonsense.

Benson: How is sending naked pictures to two boys your own age kiddie porn?

Cragen: The law hasn’t caught up with new technology.

Benson: And we’re criminalizing private behaviour.

Cragen: It’s not private when these kids begin sexting. College admissions officers, future employers, even their own children might see these pictures one day. They don’t realize the consequences of their actions.

The judge trying the case expressed a similar sentiment earlier in the episode, about how teenagers are not considering the seriousness of their actions when they distribute such photos of themselves, even if just to their boyfriend or girlfriend.

I want to comment not on the child pornography part—although I do think that whether this type of thing really qualifies as such is very far from obvious—but on the consequences and seriousness of it.

Remember the examples Captain Crager lists. College admissions officers. Future employers. Their children.

I find it funny to think that those admissions officers and employers, should they reject a candidate because of some naked pictures of themselves that were circulated online (regardless of age), are probably doing so citing the consequences and seriousness of allowing that to happen.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only reason there are consequences to having naked pictures online is because many parts of society have decided that there should be consequences for that.

As for the possibility of one’s children seeing these pictures, so what? Are we worried that it might set a bad example? If so, only because we have decided that being seen naked is a bad thing. But who hasn’t encountered some dirty old grandmother bringing out the old photo album to show off how hot she was back in the day when all the boys were after her? The only difference with this idea is that you’d really see how hot she was. At least compared to her 90 year old wrinkly self. And possibly be scarred for life, but what else are grandmothers for?

Now, however, with the advent of sites like Xtube and Pornotube, with hundreds of people posting homemade sex tapes each and every day, two things will happen. Slowly but surely, those aspects of society which are firmly convinced that all things sexual are shameful and should be hidden away at all costs, will be chipped away at until only the cores of some fundamentalist religions remain. True, still not everybody will want to post pictures and videos of themselves and all their naughty bits online, but you wouldn’t worry about getting fired for it either.

The second effect is that there will simply be so much porn that the chances of, say, your children running across that picture you let your boyfriend take of you twenty years ago, become pretty slim. There comes a point when, in order to find these things, you have to actually look for them. It may be embarrassing that you did some amateur porn, but the person who finds it was actually looking for it. Now, that doesn’t negate the fact that, say, if a student stumbles across that video of their professor getting pegged by a dominatrix (we’ve really strayed from the starting point now) they will probably tell other friends in the class about it, but what does this hypothetical professor have to worry about? Laugh as they might, someone in that class was jerking off to pegging videos on xtube. And, maybe not now but at some point, half those kids would probably put videos up on xtube themselves, even if just as an irresponsible teenager inconsiderate of the imaginary consequences of such things.

But then again, we still live in a society where being seen on facebook in your underwear or touching a boob is seen as enough to make you lose an election. I think my idealised world is still quite far away.

I have many of the same neurosis (if that’s how you spell it) as Ronnie Cordova, but I think he expresses them better.

I can’t shake the feeling [he] would not like me in real life. This is probably why I don’t have any friends. The people I don’t feel strongly about I end up ignoring, and the ones I find myself becoming interested in frighten me, and the ones who express interest in me make me feel suspicious and cornered, obscurely ripe for exposure. (link)

Then again there are also some bits of self reflection in there that make me doubt whether I’m a good judge of these things. Of course I’m not.

Things like this are why I have such a bipolar disorder about this website. It exists and some people know about it, but I often waver between something completely anonymous and something I want my friends to read. Keeping your audience in mind is important when writing, they say, but my audience is neither strangers nor my friends and family. It turns out that the most interest I get out of this is from myself five years later. That’s why it’s important to me that I keep just about everything on this site that I’ve ever put here. Parts of this thing are almost 10 years old and they’re highly embarrassing, but 10 years from now I’ll come back and read this and it’ll be just as bad again. Except then I’ll have 20 year old stuff to look at and it’ll be twice as bad. Maybe even many e-folds worse, where “many” here means “enough to be more than twice”. I like to believe it helps me grow as a person. At the very least it gives me something interesting to read when I should be doing something else. Which I’m going back to now. Bye, Future Greg.

In the dinning hall there’s a simple bug-zapper, and on this zapper, in big strong letters is, presumably, the brand: PEST-O-FLASH.

Immediately in my head I removed the first hyphen and pictured The Pesto-Flash, some kind of superhero who derives his super powers from Italian sauces.

Scratch that! A supervillain, who’s modus operandi is to use his super speed powers to add pesto to everybody’s food before they have a chance to eat it. For what purpose he might do this we can only guess, and would not doubt be one of the mysteries which keep us entertained. Perhaps it is to make everybody realise how great pesto is, driving up demand, this ensuring huge profits for pesto importers, of which he is naturally an investor. Or maybe his goal is to ruin everybody’s appetite from eating so much pesto, nothing but pesto, and helpless to avoid the pesto, that the world plunges into famine, until he (under a different guise, of course) is hailed as a hero for devising a way to eat without The Pesto-Flash tarnishing their foodstuffs, by which he becomes famous and wealthy and loved by all.

In any case, no doubt his arch nemesis (our hero) would be The Kelvinator, who would combat The Pesto-Flash by freezing his basil based weapons, ruining their flavour and rendering him completely impotent.

This is what two weeks of a vegetarian diet does to a person—they start imagining elaborate ways to rid the world of evil plant foods.

One of the points damning evolution the movie makes is that evolution is responsible for the Holocaust (among other things). I admit I have a bit of a soft spot for intelligent design people. By all means I think they should continue to work on their theories as much as they want, and if they come with something vaguely scientific that the rest of us should consider then good for them. In the meantime…

If you claim we should reject evolution because it caused the Holocaust, you might as well claim that nuclear physics is a fiction since it caused the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The laws of nature don’t change just because you think it would be nice! Evolution, like the inner workings of an atom, is not a legislation that we can repeal once we realise that bad guys can use it to their advantage.

As an aside, a similar argument is sometimes used for the existence of god. Upon discussing my atheism with some missionaries at my door one day, the subject of the afterlife came up. One asked what I think happens when we die, to which I said something along the lines of “Nothing. We just die, and that’s it.”

Surprised, he asked, “And you’re okay with that?”

Does it matter if I’m not? If God doesn’t exist, if there is no afterlife, would he spontaneously come into being just because a lot of people think Heaven would be nice? Sure, I admit, it probably would be nice. Who wouldn’t want to have the possibility of everlasting peace and happiness instead of an absolute end? (Not that you’d care once the end came. You’d be dead, afterall. Sometimes I think people picture sitting around in a dark room being bored until the end of time.) Better yet, if God did exist, could we kill him by wishing he didn’t? I would have thought the all-mighty creator would be a bit tougher than a fairy in Never-Never Land.

The fallacy of the argument is even more obvious in the case of evolution. Go ahead and say evolution (or more to the point, genetics) caused the Holocaust if you want (I won’t believe you, but go ahead and say it). It doesn’t mean you can declare that evolution is incorrect to make up for it. Even if it is wrong for other reasons, this certainly isn’t one of them.

There was an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer without any voice or music. I gather that was a stylistic choice where the lack of soundtrack enhanced some of the stuff that was going on. In the case of this episode of Grey’s Anatomy, however, it was clear that there was supposed to be music, just something about the recording had left it out. At first it had an unfinished quality to it, but I got used to it, and enjoyed the episode just the same.

The real shock came on the episode after that, where all the musical cues came back. What surprised me was not how the actual songs, played under the narrative dialogue for example, contributed to the show, but how at all times there was some kind of elevator music going on punctuating every look or gesture. After being sobered by the previous episode of simple dialogue, it felt like watching a children’s cartoon with over the top sound effects pulling me by the hand through each step of the way. I actually had to stop watching, it seemed so juvenile.

Is this a bad thing, I wonder? Does this subtle but more constant kind of laugh-track enhance the experience or just dumb it down? I don’t even know if Grey’s Anatomy is exceptionally bad in this respect or representative of television in general. I just know it will be distracting me next time I watch a primetime television drama.

And every time I find myself wondering which answer the poster expects. A philosophy professor once told me never to use questions in an essay, as the answer the reader wants to give may not be the one you expect to hear.

Considering that the poster hangs on the side of a church, and is advertising something called an Alpha Course, it’s a pretty safe bet that the more-to-life the poster refers to is God, or at least something religious. Now, the website for this program sounds like it’s asking neutral questions—”Does God exist?” for example—as if the program really is trying to answer the question, but looking closer at the material on the site, especially some of the video lectures, it’s quite clear that the answer is going to be “Yes”. No surprise.

Here’s the problem. If the answer to the question on the poster is “yes”, that there is something more to life than “this”, why does the “this” pictured look so appealing? I’m sure there are quite a lot of people who would say that climbing to some high peak and revelling in both that accomplishment and the grand picture of nature laid out before is exactly what life is about. Experiencing the world around us to the fullest. So, no, there is not more to life than these grand adventures. That’s why for the longest time I hoped that the poster was advertising a mountain climbing club or a safari adventure travelling group of some kind.

I understand that they’re probably trying to show off the majesty of God’s creation by using this photo. But surely the point is that there’s more to life than the regular day-to-day stuff that we all live though. That’s what should have been pictured. “Is there more to life than this?” next to some burnt out office worker or some otherwise miserable person. The answer then, is more obivously “yes”, and more people might be inclined to try the course to get more information on the subject.

As it stands, I still look at that picture and think, “No, that actually looks pretty awesome. Where can I sign up for this mountain climbing adventure you promise?” God disappoints yet again.