The Wonderful World of Sophasaurus

Show, Don't Tell

2012-02-14T03:25:00.000-08:00

The life lessons I remember from church (all two or three of them) were all given by the same youth pastor, whose name was Orville. For one of them, he started out by having us raise our hands if we thought love was something you felt. Then he asked us if love was something you did. He then followed it with two stories. The first, he told us about the time he had to have knee surgery, and really felt like he loved his nurse. It, of course, was her job to make sure he was comfortable and happy, and also he was on a lot of painkillers. There was nothing there that was going to last once he was out of the hospital.

In the other story, he was in the army. One of the guys in the barracks had a fondness for screwdrivers and Doritos, things not allowed in the barracks, but someone managed to sneak some in for him. He over-indulged, though, and ended up vomiting all over the floor, just orange juice and chewed up Doritos. Everyone there cleaned it up for him, so that he wouldn't get in trouble, and though they probably wouldn't admit this, they did it because they loved him.

It kind of blew my mind at the time, and I couldn't believe it at first. But the idea stuck with me, probably for the very reason that it was such an odd idea, one that I didn't feel like I heard from anywhere else.

This went pretty well with my inherent distrust of the romance I saw portrayed in TV and movies. It always had this ring of falsity to it, like the stuff people did were stereotypical things that real-life people did not really do that often. I recently learned that I do not have a natural and instinctual ability to feel empathy for people, so that was probably part of it. I eventually took an additionally cold and scientific view of the "falling in love" feeling that people get, that the love we celebrate so much is nothing but a temporary chemical state in your brain that will be gone before you know it. I felt this myself, from time to time, and it's definitely a great feeling to be riding on when you can, but it almost never panned out into anything more than being friends.

I took this idea of mistrust a step further: if I am going to convince someone that I love them, it is not enough just to use my words, because I could be lying. It is not enough to do the romantic things I see on TV, because those could be faked as well. Hell, it is a straight up trope (if you want a TVTropes link, I don't have one) that the guys who are bad at romance just do it "by the book," and it is immediately obvious that they are bad at romance. The guys who are good at romance do something unexpectedly sweet that you maybe couldn't have predicted, and that also shows he really knows you. I concluded that the best way to show people that you love them is to do something special for them, something that demonstrates it in a way that couldn't possibly be faked. As the writers' motto goes, "Show, don't tell."

It happens that I also channel a lot of my creativity into being funny, so when you take romance and run it through my demented sense of humor, what comes out can be pretty damn strange.

The best illustration of this occurred two years ago. I was sort of seeing this girl named Lex, and I jokingly observed one time that we had opposite approaches to the law: she wanted to be a police officer, whereas I broke the law just about whenever I felt like it.

This gave me an idea. First, I went and bought the Cold War Unicorns play set:

Then, I took some pictures of the unicorns in suggestive poses, to create this:

In the morning, I e-mailed the picture to her, with no explanation. Later that day, I delivered to her an envelope with the American unicorn inside of it, accompanied by a print of the photograph. (I kept the Communist unicorn for myself.) She laughed, and told me it was one of the most thoughtful gifts anyone had given her. Over a year later, we were not seeing each other, but were still friends, and I told her that whoever she ended up dating or marrying in the future would have a hard time understanding what was so great about my gift. Like, if he did the most romantic thing he could think of, and she responded with, "This is pretty good... but it's not quite as good as the humping unicorns." It might take some effort to make that even begin to make sense.

I mention this, of course, not to talk about how awesome I am, and that bitches love me. (This is something I demonstrate, obviously, so that I don't have to tell you.) I do this to point out: love and romance take on many different forms. To be sure, if my gift is anywhere on the map of romance, it is way out in uncharted territory. The same joke could have completely failed with someone else... but if it were someone else, I would have done something entirely different.

So, when you think of what to do for the special person in your life, whatever day of the year it happens to be, don't ever feel like an idea you've had isn't romantic enough just because it doesn't sound like something romantic. There are as many ways to love as there are people in the world.

But a vacuum is still only a romantic gift if your partner has a cleaning fetish.

New blog up!

2011-09-13T00:08:00.000-07:00

The focus of my writing efforts these days is my new blog, Jurassic Talmud. I am trying to write commentary for every single Dinosaur Comic, in chronological order. Yes, this is going to take a while, and I'm only about two weeks in. Only time will tell if I have the tenacity to see it through to the end.

A different kind of conspicuous consumption

2011-08-31T13:30:00.000-07:00

Patton Oswalt says, Wake Up, Geek Culture. It's Time to Die. He touches on a few things I have been pondering lately, which is the increase in cultural consumption that has occurred within the past few years--or, as he so adroitly points out, the way in which we are consuming popular culture. There used to be very few TV shows that people watched religiously, and discussed with their friends. Shows that, if someone said, "Oh, I don't watch that," you would say, "What's wrong with you?!? You don't know what you're missing!" The first show like that was I Love Lucy. If you were scheduling to go out to dinner with someone, it could never be at the same time as I Love Lucy.

The show of my generation like that was The Simpsons. When I was in fifth grade, some kids actually had a kind of Simpsons discussion group that met during recess every Monday, to talk about the Simpsons episode that aired the previous evening. (This, of course, was nothing like a book club where they talked about the biting social commentary--it was more like, "Oh man, that part was really funny.") As the show became syndicated, it was possible to watch The Simpsons every day, sometimes up to four times in a single day. When I got to college, if a person wasn't able to converse in Simpsons references, it usually meant they had parents who, at some point, strictly controlled what they watched on TV.

Today, you can watch any TV show you want, any time of day. On that note, we are going to take a brief diversion.

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People sometimes talk about how bad TV has gotten in the past decade, pointing to the surfeit of crap reality TV that is out there. TV has also, in other respects, gotten really good in the past decade. Setting aside the several original series produced by Showtime and HBO (The Wire. There, I said it.), there are plenty of shows that are far better than what was around in the 90s. To me, the only things that come to mind are sitcoms, since it is one of my preferred genres: Community, Children's Hospital, 30 Rock, Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Office, to name but a few. In animation, there has been Avatar, Adventure Time, and quite a few things on Adult Swim.

I think that was has happened is that instead of trying to make their shows appeal to as broad of an audience as possible, producers are trying to make each show appeal to a particular audience in the best possible way. When you form a devoted following, you get people who tune in every time the show is on, regardless of what else is on, whereas before, you might have gotten people who watched your show simply because it was the best thing that happened to be on at the time. (Also, there are now shows you have to pay attention to while you watch them, and shows where you can do housework and only half pay attention while missing nothing.)

What brought this into stark relief for me was when I recently watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Its fans will talk to you about all the things that are so great about it, while its detractors will talk to you about all the things that are bad about it. From time to time, both of them are correct. It has interesting storylines where characters make tough moral choices... but it will sometimes have entire episodes where the characters play hot potato with the idiot ball. There is a lot of fluff and filler. And this is because the show was probably aimed at trying to capture both the audience who likes "good television," and the audience that watches whatever crap happens to be on right now.

If Buffy were made today, I think that it would have half as many episodes per season, and have at least 50% less filler. It would be more watchable for some people, while some of its most die-hard fans would probably be upset that you cut out all of the rich social drama (which was really just people yelling at each other for five minutes, over a misunderstanding).

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So, we now live in a world with lots of great television shows. And video games. And movies. And books, good god, there are books everyone is reading! With the power of the internet, we can find out all of the cool things there are to consume in our spare time. We can also see our friends having conversations about these things, and we think, "I would like to be able to participate in that conversation. I will go find out what it is they are talking about." (I might just be speaking for myself, but I don't think the power of implicit social pressure should be denied.) But each one of those TV shows will require several hours of your time to watch all the way through. The movies, two hours apiece. The video games, 10 hours or more. The books depend on how fast you read and what books you are reading, but reading a George R. R. Martin novel will require no less than 10 hours of your time.

Now you are spending every possible minute of your spare time doing nothing but consume popular culture, and it's not enough. Unless you quit your job, and make your life all about media consumption, there is never going to be enough time for all of it. The further problem, as Patton Oswalt says, is that you are never taking the time to reflect on these things and absorb them. In a world where we never have to watch the same show twice, we are missing out on the value of repeated viewing that made some of us conversant in Simpsons references.

This means that you have to make a choice in what you are going to consume, and stop worrying about the fact that you haven't consumed the thing your friends are talking about. I am trying to take this even further, and want to take the time to rewatch some of the shows I have enjoyed the most in the past five years (yes, The Wire, but also Adventure Time). If we don't try to slow ourselves down, I don't think it will be quite as bad as Oswalt says, but it doesn't seem like something I want to be part of. All I can see is a future of image macros that reference 10 different intellectual properties at once.

How to have a replacement for a personality

2011-08-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

Developing a personality is hard. Where do you even start? You don't have that kind of time, to say nothing of the humility it requires. Instead, you can have something to talk about, with anyone at all, without ever having to dig down inside to find out who you are! It's so easy! Here are some things to get you started:

Wear a fedora. It's, like, the coolest kind of hat there is. People will compliment you on your snazzy hat, and then you can tell them about all the other hats you have at home. You'll wish you had an extra head, so you could wear two snazzy hats at once.
Start using Linux, which is like the fedora of operating systems. It's better, in fact, because while there are only so many things you can say about hats, you can talk to anyone at all, as much as you want, about Linux. Do they not use Linux? Tell them why they should. Do they already use Linux? Tell them they're a goddamn idiot for using Red Hat, when everyone knows Ubuntu is the best distro. And who the fuck uses Pine anymore? You get the idea. Also, if you learn enough about Linux, you could probably get a job in IT. I mean, like, maybe. I don't know. Linux people and IT people talk the same kind of gibberish to me, so it seems natural.
Wear a utilikilt. For too long, men have been shut out of the benefits of wearing skirts. Now you can wear a skirt that is not only manly, but has a system of pockets like cargo pants. Tell everyone you know about how liberating it feels to wear a utilikilt, especially if you're not wearing underwear with it. Oh yeah, did I mention? It gives you an excuse not to wear underwear, something else women have bogarted for too long.
Learn a lot of jokes. You won't ever have to say something in a conversation that isn't a joke.
Learn a lot of random trivia. The quick and dirty way is to pick up one of those giant trivia books, and read it cover to cover, maybe keeping it in the bathroom to read while you're on the toilet. You can also do this, of course, by reading lots of non-fiction, because those books are frequently peppered with interesting asides. If it's interesting enough for you to commit it to memory, then it should be interesting enough to tell someone you just met. Hold on, did they say something about space shuttles? Now's your chance to talk about Richard Feynman testifying before Congress on why the Challenger exploded! Also, speaking of Richard Feynman... yeah, once you're talking about Feynman, you can talk about anything.
Start making things out of duct tape. You can even make a fedora out of duct tape. (I don't recommend a duct tape utilikilt.) Don't make those foam-padded boffers, though. Those are dumb.
Take up some old lady type of crafting, like knitting or needlepoint, and make video game-related things. You don't even have to play any video games--just pay attention to what video games other people are playing, and making jokes about on the internet. I've never played Portal, but I'd make a needlepoint of the companion cube, and have it say, "The cake is a lie." If I did needlepoint. Anyway, if you had something like that on your wall, everyone would tell you how awesome it was.

These are just some ideas. You might find a new and creative way to get by without a personality! There are no limits! Maybe you want to do nothing but consume popular culture, so that you can talk about those things with other people. Start with The Wire, because, seriously, everyone should watch that show.

Now, not everyone who does the things I just mentioned is trying to replace their personality. Many of them have brilliant, shining personalities, and when you touch on that point of common interest with them, it will allow you to spend a lot more time around them, potentially leading to things like meeting their friends, going to their parties, and having one-night stands with any female they know.

But that guy with the duct tape fedora and the utilikilt? He also uses Linux, and he thinks he's hot shit just because he uses Gentoo. That is some bullshit. Go tell him how much of an asshole he is.

You're going to need all of it

2011-06-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

Every one of us can remember being in school and asking our teachers (no matter what class it was), "When are we going to use this in the real world?" And your teacher probably didn't have a very good answer. It was probably something along the lines of, "You won't, but you should learn it anyway." Additionally, when politicians and other people debate what we need to be teaching in schools, a lot of the ideas about what is necessary and what is not come down to what application these things can have in "the real world." To me, though, there are two problems with this line of thinking.

The first is the very idea of "the real world" as distinct from the world of education. Maybe this is because much of what you learn in school becomes applicable to other classes (e.g., science classes require a certain background in math), but doesn't ever seem to have application in the everyday life. Or, one can't imagine what sort of a job this kind of information would require. The fact of the matter, though, is that all of us are going to end up with different kinds of jobs when we leave school. Some of them will involve a lot of math and science. Some of them will involve a lot of writing.

And this brings me to the more important problem of "when will we need this": you are missing the point of education. If you are going to learn exactly what you need for a particular job, you go to a technical school. But the point of a broad education is to give you a perspective on the world that you wouldn't otherwise have. Our modern world is a vast, complicated place. Having a basic understanding of each of the components of the world helps us to understand why things are the way they are, and why things work the way they do. As one example, if you are going to give two shits about politics—and you should—you ought to know some things about world history, and the history of your own country. (Hell, just about anything you need to know about politics is in fuckin' Thucydides. He wrote a book that he wanted to endure across the ages, and he damn well succeeded.) Additionally, our current political debates about climate change, teaching evolution in schools, come about from a willful rejection of established science.

So, you won't ever need this in the real world, but at the same time, you will always need this in the real world, everywhere. If you understand why this answer makes sense, then you'll understand why it's such a dumb question in the first place.

Advice no one will give you, part 1

2011-06-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

Throughout your life, you will receive a lot of advice. Some of it, you will hear from a lot of different sources. Some of it, you will probably hear only from me.

Never dress yourself in the dark. No matter how much time you think it will save you not to turn the light on, you stand a chance of looking completely ridiculous, and you won't realize it until it's too late to do anything about it. (Some more general advice might be to get a good look at yourself in the mirror before leaving the house.)

Don't do the drugs that make you lose your friends and furniture. This is one I heard as a harm reduction volunteer. There are a lot of drugs out there to experiment with, use, and abuse, and the popular propaganda about drugs makes it seem like each one is just as bad as the other. Nobody ever went completely broke because of their magic mushroom habit, though. So, if you're the sort who likes to experiment with drugs, it might be prudent to stay away from things like meth, coke, and heroin, since they carry a higher likelihood of ruining your life.

Never trade a crack addiction for a meth addiction. I first heard this advice from a former trance DJ in Seattle. The way he explained it was, "Yes, it's cheaper, and yes, it lasts longer, but trust me, it's not a good idea." More scientifically speaking, meth makes you impulsive (among other things). Drug addicts are known for doing just about anything to get their next fix. Meth addicts will do just about anything for no damn reason.

Of ropes and camels

2011-05-31T10:44:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things Jesus says in the Bible that do not make immediate sense to a modern reader. Typically, it is possible to explain things things simply by saying, "At the time, things were like such and such, and people generally believed such and such." Something that has been gnawing at my brain lately is possibly one of the oddest things that he says: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:24)

This is the only passage I know of that requires an elaborate story to explain it, and usually that story is about a gate in a city wall that was called "the eye of the needle," and in order for a camel to go through it, you had to unload everything off the camel. There are also stories about a mountain pass where something similar was required. I've come to believe that this is all bunk, though. Admittedly, I don't have many reliable sources (there are these two pages that look straight out of 1998, and a Wikipedia article that needs a lot of work), but I've never heard of a reliable source for the traditional explanation, either.

One of the first problems is that there is nothing about the supposed gate or the mountain pass that is contemporary with or before Jesus. Furthermore, when he said the quotation, he was on the coast of Judea, and not near any city gates. In a time when some people never traveled outside the city they were born in, it wouldn't make sense for him to refer to something that some in his audience might never have seen.

The more likely explanation is that this is a persistent mistranslation: the Aramaic word for camel, gamla, is also the word for "rope," and context generally determines what the word is supposed to mean. If you are talking about riding through the desert on a gamla, you are probably talking about a camel. If you are talking about putting a gamla through the eye of a needle, you are probably talking about a rope.

To me, this recalls the scene in "The Life of Brian," where Brian and his mother are at the Sermon on the Mount, way at the back, and it's hard for them to understand the words. Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers," and Brian's mother says, "Blessed are the cheesemakers?" Let's imagine for a moment that what ended up getting written in the Bible was, "Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." We would have all sorts of explanations for this that involved some kind of way in which people at the time made cheese, or something else about the profession of cheesemaking.

There might not be a solid case for the Aramaic explanation, but at the very least I would like it if Biblical scholarship eventually set the record straight on which explanations are flat out false, as the traditional one seems to be. I have no hope for this though. The main reason is that the "camel" reading let's people tell a story and show off something they know. The bigger reason, though, is that there are plenty of other ways in which people are just plain terrible at reading the Bible. Many books have been written about the things that get taken out of context, or ignored, or outright fabricated. Reading the word as "camel" is fairly benign in comparison to rapture madness, or scaring people with visions of Hell.

As a side note, one of the articles linked above provides an additional explanation that is suggested by a passage in the Babylonian Talmud. A rabbi is talking about the nature of dreams, and that they will only show us that which is natural or possible: "They do not show a man a palm tree of gold, nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle." There is at least one other passage where this is used as an example of something that is not possible. So, there is a chance that Jesus was simply using "camel through the eye of a needle" as an example of something that is flatly impossible, and by saying this was easier than a rich man entering heaven, he was saying it was even less possible.

The Talmud, however, was composed well after the time when Jesus was alive, so it isn't something that could have influenced him. He was also fond of making hyperbolic comparisons, such as in the passage where he says, "Before you try to remove the mote from your brother's eye, first remove the beam from your own eye."

The worth of philosophy

2011-04-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article titled How to Do Philosophy. As someone who majored in philosophy, I mostly agree with the writer, and shared a lot of the same frustrations in my studies. I'd say the material was half stuff that seemed to have practical application somewhere, and half stupid bullshit. The subject I usually cite as my prime example is epistemology. I am not sure if the wider field of epistemology is different from this, but we spent most of the semester arguing about whether you could have knowledge of the outside world. If you come to the conclusion that when everyone in the world says that they "know" something, when they don't really know it, something has gone wrong. Yes, it's true, I do not know whether I am a brain in a vat who is part of an experiment being conducted by a mad scientist. But I know that the Dow Jones is over 10,000, and I know that George Washington never studied kung fu at a Chinese monastery. (Or did he?) Only an asshole would tell me, "Well, you don't know that you're not in the Matrix, so you don't really know those things."

The parts of philosophy that I thought could be useful for something were, generally speaking, things that could feed into the field of ethics, and most people would agree that ethics is a worthwhile field of study. For example, there is a branch of metaphysics that is all about causality. How do you determine what and who played a causal role in an event? And how responsible can you hold someone for failing to prevent something? The answers to those questions can be really important, and it often takes a philosopher to give a satisfactory answer to them.

A few years ago, I took a philosophy class at Portland State, and though I was not at all impressed with the professor, he did articulate what I think is the best definition of what philosophy is: the study of the construction and evaluation of arguments. Regardless of whether any person agrees on whether that is what philosophy is, one cannot doubt that this is what one is doing when one is doing philosophy, and I believe that this is what makes philosophy a worthwhile study. A philosopher can make an argument like a ninja: define some terms, mention out some logical connections, throw down a conclusion. BOOM. Done correctly, one can only disagree with the conclusion by disagreeing with the definitions and premises.

The general problem with this, of course, is that people are rarely persuaded by logic. One needs some appeal to emotions and values in order to convince someone to change their opinion. But that's a story for another time. Some recommended reading on that subject would be Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (which can also be found in an anthology of his papers, titled "The Importance of What We Care About") and the anthology "Bullshit and Philosophy," edited by Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch. Seriously, if you read no other works of philosophy in your life, you should read these.

On the ideal music video

2011-04-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

Making a music video is a different task from making a typical movie. All of the soundtrack is there already, and your task is to add a visual element to that soundtrack. From time to time, there is a video telling a story that has something additional at the beginning, or the end, or slightly edits the song in order to fit the video a little better. But it's not like shooting a screenplay where the closest thing to what's set in stone is the dialogue and a description of what's in the scene.

So, what is the best way to add a visual element to a song? I think that the most common thing is to show off the artist, and make something that just looks totally awesome. Buttrock and hip hop typically are the ones who do this most often. Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See might be one such example–visually stimulating, but I would be hard pressed to tell you how it relates to the song. AC/DC seemed to have nothing but videos showing them playing their instruments on a stage.

Possibly the least interesting kind of music video is one that is a shot for shot representation of what is going on in the song. I love Weird Al, but he is probably guilty of doing this more often than anyone else. When you hear the various lines of White and Nerdy, you can imagine quite a lot of what is going on, and in most places the video doesn't add very much to that. Or it does it in a way that was better in your head. (The few places where it parodies rap videos are somewhat clever, to give him credit where it is due.)

If one is looking to make a video that is a work of art, the ideal is to create a movie that tells a story that is very much like whatever story or narrative is in the song. Take On Me is the best example I can think of for this: it is a song about a man chasing after a woman, and so is the music video, but there is no direct correlation between any parts of the song and any parts of the video.

At first blush, this sounds like a dumb way to make a music video, but it allows for greater creative expression. The song and the video can have a kind of dialogue, where the video tells you something you might not have known about the song, and the song informs how one is to interpret the video. This is why I think Tool makes better music videos than just about anyone out there: they have figured out the full potential for what a music video can be, and they try to take it to that full potential. Sober is an elaborate metaphor about addiction (sometimes descending from the metaphorical into the literal), and so the video creates visual metaphors for addiction, going so far as to have a demon in it (or, at any rate, something that appears to be a demon). Both are meant to be super creepy, and having the two work together amplifies whatever creepiness they might have on their own.

Artistically speaking, to me, this is the greatest thing a music video can aspire to: accomplishing synergy with the original song, such that both the song and video are expressing things that they might not have been able to otherwise, or such that they are expressing what they were before at greater amplitude. When anyone talks about what they think are the best music videos ever, they will either have this quality, or simply look totally awesome--and looking totally awesome is also a noble thing to aspire to.

My tattoos: St. George

2011-01-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of tattoos. Each one has a very short explanation of what it is, but they have much longer explanations of what they are and what they mean to me.

The first one I got was on my upper right arm, of St. George killing the dragon.

If you are not familiar with it, the story goes that there was a village in Libya where a dragon lived nearby, and to appease the dragon, the people would feed it two sheep. If the sheep did not work, then they would feed it one of their children, chosen by lottery. One day, it happened that the king's daughter was chosen. As she was going out to meet the dragon, St. George came along and wounded the dragon enough to subdue it. He then killed the dragon in front of the whole village, and in exchange, they converted to Christianity and were all baptized.

The image I used comes from a book of Coptic pilgrimage tattoos, and when people ask me why I got it, I often explain that I studied Coptic for a year while I was in college, and wanted to get a tattoo of something from that book. I sometimes mention something about standing up for the oppressed, wherever they may be, because the Coptic Christians have been persecuted since the 7th century, when the Muslims invaded Egypt.

On a deeper level, though, it is something of a moral allegory to me about the nature of evil, and a theological statement. I want to call it an "interpretive schema," but can't bring myself to do that without feeling like I am talking out of my ass.

Our competing desires between good and evil actions are usually conceived of as being an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other shoulder. They each advise us, and we weigh out the advice. The way I see it, it is a little more combative than that: we each have both St. George and the dragon inside of us, doing battle with each other. The dragon is our desire to do only what interests ourselves, without regard for how it affects those around us. St. George is our impulse to do what we know is right, regardless of how difficult it is. (And believe me, doing the right thing can be a giant pain in the ass.) Our selfish desires can only win out if we are unwilling to confront them and fight against them. Sometimes that is as simple as suddenly remembering what the right thing to do is. Sometimes… it can seem as difficult as fighting a dragon. If it were a literal dragon, maybe we could think to ourselves that someone else might come along to kill it, but we are the only line of defense against the dragon within ourselves. You can either be your own greatest adversary, or you can be your own savior.

Forgive us our trespasses

2011-01-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I got dumped by a girl I had been dating for a while. Epically dumped, I would say—the complete story is something for another time. At any rate, within a week, I was pretty much over it. I wasn't angry anymore, and pretty much had already forgiven her for what she did to me. Some of my friends started asking me, "Why are you doing that, after all she did to you?"

But I'm all about forgiving people. And my gold standard for that is John Paul II.

In 1981, while in St. Peter's Square, he was shot four times by a Turkish sniper named Mehmet Ali Ağca. The Pope lost three quarters of his blood, and was in surgery for five hours afterward. Not only did he forgive his attacker, but he met with Agca in prison, and later met with his family. In June 2000, he got Italy's president to release Agca from prison, where we was extradited to his native Turkey to serve out a previous prison sentence.

This idea of forgiveness, of course, has deep roots in Christianity. In the gospels, Peter (the apostle I consider to have gotten his name because he is dumb as a rock) approaches Jesus and asks, "How many times should I forgive my brother? Seven times?" And Jesus replies, "I say to you, not seven times, but seventy times seven." Which may have been to say, forgive him until you have lost count, and then keep on forgiving him.

He then goes on to tell a parable to illustrate this point (which you can read at that link—it's difficult to summarize). His point at the end is that, since all of us do something wrong from time to time, we do not deserve God's forgiveness unless we are willing to show forgiveness to the people in our lives. This is the source of the line in the Lord's Prayer that goes, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

You may respond here, "But I don't believe in God, and I am pretty sure that you don't either. Why would I need the forgiveness of someone I don't believe in?" To which I say, "You're missing the fucking point."

The benefit of forgiving people is not in what you do for the person who is forgiven, nor does it have anything to do with the extrinsic benefit you might gain in the Kingdom of Heaven or what have you. The benefit is that it makes you a better person. When you hold a grudge against someone, the emotions are all negative. You give yourself a justification for being angry and hateful. On the other hand, forgiveness is an act of empathy and understanding, to try to consider why a person would make the kind of mistake that they did. Above all, though it is an act of love, the basic kind of love that one extends to everyone just by virtue of being human. You know, the kind of love that makes us concerned about people in poverty- and disaster-stricken areas, even though we have never met these people.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we should let people walk all over us, and treat us like doormats. Generally speaking, a lot of the ways that people hurt us come about only because of a certain amount of trust we put in them. That trust can be taken away if they misuse it and violate it. If they continue to do you wrong, you can completely cut them out of your life, but I don't think there ever comes a point where you should stop forgiving them.

To relate this back to my personal life, I forgave my ex only days after she dumped me. I was still hurt and upset, of course, and I was still processing the experience in my head. And forgiving her didn't mean I would immediately take her back if she wanted to start dating again some months down the road. I sort of consider her a friend, but right now she is just "a girl I know on the internet," which is the very bottom of the friend hierarchy. But on some level, I still think of her as a friend.

"So, Tim, why you gotta forgive?" "That's just how I roll."

The Devil in the Details

2010-01-04T12:09:00.000-08:00

The value of simulating as many elements of a world as possible is, shall we say, non-obvious. One is inclined to say that simulating more elements will naturally make the simulation more realistic, but there are particular reasons for this, and if you don't simulate the rules and physics well enough, you're not doing much simulating.

What I'm driving at here is the idea of complexity. The interactions between microscopic objects in an environment can often yield macroscopic changes. As one example, consider a breakable wall. In a simple 3D environment like Duke Nukem, that wall might be represented by a single polygon, which can receive a certain amount of damage from weapons before the whole thing breaks. In real life, that wall is composed of a series of bonded molecules, and it is going to break differently depending on what type of wall it is. If it is made of rock, forming a crack at one particular part of the wall, and focusing one's attention on that crack, could be enough to bring down an otherwise impenetrable wall. Similarly, if the wall is made of wood, forming one hole in it can be enough to destroy the rest of it.

For the given example of simulating a world for one man, in order to learn his secrets, these things might not be very important (unless you have to make sure he doesn't catch on that he is in a simulation). But if your attempt is to make a kind of "what if" hypothetical in a computer model, and get as good of an idea as possible what would happen in the real world, you need your simulation to be as isometric as possible. The main uses for supercomputers are exactly these kinds of situations, where the details are phenomenally important: quantum physics; molecular modeling; weather forecasting; and physical simulations of things like airplane wind tunnels, and nuclear explosions.

For any given simulation, there can be a value in simulating as many things as possible. But whoever designs the simulation needs to decide where the "diminishing returns" set in, where you have a level of accuracy that is not actually going to be more informative. In our simulation where we want to know where the bodies are, simulating anything beyond Earth is going to be unnecessary. We also don't need to simulate any of the people that our "player" is never going to come into contact with.

If you wanted to simulate the interactions between a population of people, though, you would want to simulate everything about those people, down to their bodily functions, because the fate of the world could very well rest on whether John Hammersmith of Liverpool, England needs to take a poo at 12:54 pm of next Tuesday.

In the future, everyone will have already been famous, and appear on a "Where Are They Now?" special

2010-01-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

Andy Warhol once said, "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Our perception of how that happens is often that the person did not exist before they became famous, and once they are no longer famous, they cease to exist. Of course, we know in our heads that this is not true. Each of those people had some kind of growing up, and when the cameras are off, those people will go on leading whatever lives they did before, almost as if nobody ever saw them on TV.

If you perceive a glut of "Where Are They Now?" specials about former celebrities, this is because there is a glut of former celebrities. These specials are often looked upon as yet another way that our obsessive media likes to get into the nooks and crannies of everyone's life. But another way to look at it is that it is an acknowledgement that, when we weren't looking, the former celebrity continued to live whatever life they had before. They did not cease to exist simply because the nation was not watching them.

This does not quite complete the task of making celebrities human, though. The thinking becomes "people become human when they are no longer celebrities." Or to paraphrase the Red Queen, "Human tomorrow and human yesterday, but never human today."

In John Hodgman's "More Information Than You Require," he has a few stories about being a "famous minor television personality," and to hear him tell it, his niche fame yields situations that are more bizarre than they are annoying. At an event, he is approached by a large black man who compliments him on how much he admires Hodgman's work. After a few moments, Hodgman realizes that he is standing in front of Chuck D, a man for whom he shares mutual admiration.

On one occasion, when he goes into an Apple store, someone recognizes him, and then suddenly the whole store is freaking out. On a different occasion, when he goes into an Apple store, not even the cashier handling his credit card realizes who is in front of him.

So, if you ever become famous, try to make sure that it's niche fame where the only people who recognize you are your actual fans. I think that's the lesson here. I'm not entirely sure.

Reviewing 2009

2010-01-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

At the end of the year, people like to play the song "Long December" by The Counting Crows. It isn't difficult to get people to empathize with the line, "It's been a long December, and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last." It is definitely our hope for the next year to be better than this one, because if each year is better than the last, that's an upward trend! Eventually things are going to be inconceivably amazing! The rest of this song seems to imply something different: someone he loved died in December, and it would be difficult for the coming new year to be worse than the last. There is no doubt that it is a sad song. But we'll get to that later.

Ushering in a new calendar year seems like a good opportunity to review the previous year, because, even though the way the months are marked off may be a little arbitrary, you ought to review the year at some point.

The most significant factor of 2009 that I can think of is being in a poor financial situation. Right about the time that I needed to start paying back student loans, my employers started cutting my hours. Suddenly, the money I was usually able to save up each month just wasn't there anymore.

But this year I was able to start breaking my video game addiction. It's definitely a tough thing to do--I have played a lot of video games in my life, ever since I was about five years old. They were not exactly a good use of my time even then, and now, in my adult life, I feel like they are just a giant time sink. Anything I could call an "accomplishment" in playing these games is going to be meaningless to non-players (for instance, a Kingdom of Loathing character with 50 ascensions), and there are few skills one can develop that can be applied to other areas of one's life. Generally speaking, the skills involved in playing video games are useful only for playing other video games. So, even if I did not learn guitar last year the way I wanted to, that's not much of a big deal to me, because I have developed different hobbies and creative outlets that do not involve video games.

Around November, I started expanding my social circle a lot, and meeting new people, leading up to what became a "long December" for me. I was getting out of my house on a consistent basis, going to parties and what have you, and there was a stretch of about two weeks where I had to force myself to stay home and "recharge my batteries." I am opening up 2010 with new people, new experiences, and new beginnings. It is a wonderful thing.

And I'm not even going to talk about my dating life. It is the kind of "it's complicated" that involves charts and diagrams. It would only confuse you.

Yes, this post is about failure, but not in the way you think

2009-12-28T12:06:00.000-08:00

One of my high school English teachers was fond of saying that, to a poet, there are no synonyms. Not only does each word have its own range of connotations and implications, but the very sounds in a word can affect that word's impact. Consider the following sentences:

"I made a boo-boo." This is something you might say when making a mistake that is nearly inconsequential, and is easily forgotten, like if you were making cookies and a glob of dough fell on the counter.
"I made a mistake." This has a wide range of possible uses, because it is fairly neutral as far as connotations go. If we're making cookies, this could be something like turning the oven to the wrong temperature, or just forgetting to turn it on.
"I fucked up." This seems to imply that the project was a failure. Maybe you cooked the cookies too long, or forgot to add baking soda. Whatever happened, the cookies might be edible, but they are not exactly "delicious."
"I just totally botched this mother fucker." This seems to imply that your involvement in the project has made the general situation worse. Not only are the cookies inedible, but the kitchen is a mess, and there is a mess of burnt cookies that need to be cleaned from the bottom of the oven. In the future, you should not be allowed to cook while unsupervised.

So, from a "logical" point of view, each of these sentences means the same thing. But they actually mean rather different things, from the point of view of how we use language. For each one of these sentences, though, there is a way to convey the same connotative message, while carrying it in a different style. "I have failed at making cookies" has a formality and specificity that is lacking in "I fucked up."

To a comedian, this difference between connotations is something easily exploited for jokes, because it can be downright funny when someone uses "incorrect" phrasing to describe a situation. If a general discovers that he is outnumbered two-to-one, it seems proper for him to say, "This is going to be more difficult than I thought," but if he is outnumbered ten-to-one or twenty-to-one, that is more like an attempt at humor. And his soldiers might think he is kind of a dick for it.

Take my advice, do as I say, save a little money for a rainy day

2009-12-26T13:16:00.000-08:00

There exists a perennial problem in the older generations giving advice to the younger generations. Old people, being wizened to the ways of the world, often wish that there were things that they knew when they were younger, because it would have made life a bit easier for them, or they would have made fewer terrible mistakes. So, they think, "I would like the younger generation to have the benefit of the knowledge I have, so that they can learn from new mistakes, instead of the same damn mistakes everyone makes."

But that younger generation will only learn this wisdom if they want to. Some of them are resistant to anyone trying to tell them how to live their lives, and some are in a receptive mood to receive this advice only at particular times. This means that the older generation tries to give advice whenever they can, and nine times out of ten, the kid is not listening, doesn't care, or what have you. It is almost like a classical Hegelian dialectic, with a constant thesis and antithesis going on, and rarely ever any synthesis. It is those few who do take this advice to heart who tend to do better in life, or feel better about their lives.

So, at my ripe old age of 26, I am going to give you young kids some advice: consider the advice of anyone who offers it to you, young or old, destitute or successful. Everyone in this world knows something that you do not. What they tell you might be outright wrong, and what they tell you might be something you already know, but if you do not at least consider it, you will never find out which things are the ones you can learn from.

While we're at it: never stop learning.

And another thing: take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as they purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy, for the apparel oft proclaims the man...

An introduction to existentialism

2009-12-16T12:17:00.000-08:00

After we're dead, it is only a matter of time until everyone around us forgets all about us. Not only that, but within millions of years (maybe even billions), the sun will have destroyed everything on earth, and nothing any of us have ever done will seem to have mattered. So it seems like, based on this radical contingency of life, our lives seem absurd and meaningless. A contemporary philosopher (and I wish I could say who--I am a man of many facts, but few citations) once responded to this concern with the following: would life be any less absurd, any less meaningless, if we didn't die? A world where everyone lives for eternity seems like it would be just as absurd, just as meaningless. The same goes for the universe being here in the first place. The universe has only "what", and it does not care about your "why".

There is another end to the absurdist argument, and it is this: nothing in our lives has meaning outside of its cultural context. Similar to the way that a gas planet is a mass held together by nothing but its own gravitational force, culture is a web of relationships held together only by shared, agreed-upon meaning, and nothing else. This leaves us free to assign our own meanings to things in life, since these meanings are radically contingent, and so are any roles that our culture has prescribed for us. The trade-off, of course, is that this rejection of one's own culture will alienate oneself from that culture. But for one to live up to one's full potential as a human being, this rejection and subsequent alienation can sometimes be necessary for happiness and well-being.

Here is a brief bibliography for learning about existentialism from its source materials:

Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger. This is one of those books that philosophers call "difficult," often read only in upper division and graduate-level courses, so feel free to skip it. I put it here mostly because I would call Heidegger the godfather of existentialism. Grandfather? I mean that, even if he himself isn't quite an existentialist, without Being and Time, what we call existentialism might not even have existed. (The movement itself is radically contingent!) Being-in-the-World by Hubert Dreyfus is generally accepted to be the best commentary out there for understanding Being and Time, and it just so happens that Futurama's Professor Fernswarthy is based upon Dreyfus. Anyway, the best stuff in Heidegger is in Division One, and you shouldn't go further into Division Two than section II or III. After that, Heidegger tries to derive time from being itself, and later philosophers have shown him to be incorrect.
Being and Nothingness, by Jean-Paul Sartre. I haven't read more than a few pages of this, but more than any other book, this is the one people think of when they think of existentialism. Dreyfus once said in a lecture that it was a brilliant misreading of Heidegger. "You would have to be a genius to get Heidegger wrong the way that Sartre does."
The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus. Most of the vocabulary surrounding talks of existentialism comes from this essay (not to mention many of the ideas that are in the above Dinosaur Comic), though I haven't read it myself. It's, um, it's on my reading list. He wrote something of a sequel, called The Rebel, which I am reading right now. I think I'd understand the sequel better if I read the first one.

I think that list is in ascending order of relevancy? But I kind of look at it as being descending order of academicness, because I tend to think of myself as an academic before anything. If you are looking for some secondary source about existentialism in general, which draws upon these source materials, I have no idea how to help you. Maybe there's an "Existentialism For Dummies" book out there. But I'll tell you now that if you only read that secondary source, or only read The Myth of Sisyphus, you are going to sound like a freshman philosophy student when talking about the subject. This is only a good idea if you are in high school, and you can impress those around you with fancy philosophy talk.

If you are that dude in high school who is trying to impress ladies, you should also read The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir (or, better yet, read the original French, where it is Le Deuxième Sexe). "You got your philosophy in my second-wave feminism!" "You got your second-wave feminism in my philosophy!" In addition to having the potential to be more impressive, the words inside the book have the potential to make you talk to women as if they are other human beings, rather than just something warm to put your dick in.

On brain crack

2009-12-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

"Ideas are not property, they are infections. And anyone who reads everything will know that ideas nave no allegiance to their host body: They pass from brain to brain untraceably, or simply break out spontaneously, separated by continents or even centuries, without explanation." - John Hodgman, "More Information Than You Require"

This is going to go off some of the ideas I had in the previous post, to wit: every generation has its own particular set of circumstances that lead to its artists and scientists producing what they do. Though one person might be credited with an idea, and developing that idea, there are often other people around them talking about similar things. Ezra Pound is sometimes credited as being the most influential person in modern poetry, not because of the poems he wrote, but because of what he did for the people around him.

So, if you have an idea... probably someone else thought of it already.* And that's okay! Because what is more important than an idea is what you do with the idea. Are you going to work that idea into a novel, and explore its implications? Are you going to write a non-fiction book or essay that develops the idea, and goes further places with it? Are you just going to put it on some bumper stickers and T-shirts, and call it a day? There are a lot of options here.

If you do nothing with your idea, though, nobody will ever give you credit for the idea, or even for doing anything with the idea. You might even develop innovative ideas without realizing it, and though you take pride in your contributions to the "time traveler tourist" thought experiment, ten years from now, people actually admire you for your perspicacity in seeing the way that corporations control and define our very way of life.

But nobody will ever talk about you if you don't give them something to talk about.

-----

* - It is possible that no one else has thought of Time Cube independently. At least, I really hope no one has.

Putting an (arbitrary) value on human life, part 3

2009-12-14T11:52:00.000-08:00

Putting an economic value on artists and scientists is a tricky business. You can probably measure the economic impact of their writings or discoveries, but the economic impact of art has a lot more to do with the enjoyment and happiness that people derive from it. As far as I know, there is no correlation between a country's average happiness, and its per capita GDP.

Then there is the problem of the inherent assumption behind the counterfactual, by which I mean the assumption that if Shakespeare hadn't been born, nothing he wrote would exist today. The man we call "William Shakespeare" was a combination of genes and environmental factors. So, I'm going to toss out a few counterfactual scenarios here on how things could have gone:

His parents give birth to a child with the same name and birthday, but different genes, and that child does not grow up to be a playwright.
His parents give birth to a child with the same genes, but because of environmental factors, he never gets interested in writing plays, or is never any good at it. Maybe because his parents name him something like Eustace.
His parents give birth to a child who, despite different genes and/or different environmental factors, still grows up to be a playwright whose works are read for centuries after. This Shakespeare maybe doesn't write exactly the same plays as the one in our world, but they are at least as good, if not better.

In scenarios 1 and 2 above, even though Shakespeare is not a famous playwright, these leaves room in the theater marketplace for someone else to flourish and become a famous playwright, someone like Christopher Marlowe. People use Marlowe as a household name, speak of him with high reverence, and keep single-volume collections of his works within easier reach than the Bible.

The short version of this hypothetical scenario: "If Shakespeare hadn't been born, someone else would have been Shakespeare."

Similar things go for Newton. Each time period has leading scientists, who are often collaborating with each other. If Newton hadn't discovered and modeled the principles of force and motion, or written his laws of thermodynamics... someone else would have. It might have taken a few more years, or a few more decades, but someone else would have. We hear a lot about how Newton and Lebiniz discovered/invented calculus at roughly the same time, so if Newton hadn't existed, we would probably credit it to Leibniz, and we wouldn't have to hear about anyone else discovering it.

I would like to conclude our three part series with this: there are more things things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your economics.

Measuring the value of life, part 2

2009-12-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

There is a way of measuring human life that T-Rex is omitting here. We can measure human worth as the impact that a person can be expected to have on the economy. This is one of the best arguments for investment in social programs that work to get drug addicts clean, get homeless people into permanent housing and employment, and integrate ex-convicts into society. These are the three main classes of people whose impact on the economy is a net loss, because what they contribute through labor and (non-black market) spending is less than what they cost to public services such as law enforcement and health care, not to mention the theft that is so common to many of these people as a survival tactic.

Someone who is in prison costs the state something like $50,000 a year. The amount the other two classes of people cost can vary, but I'm going to toss out a figure and say they cost the state, and the local economy, something in the realm of $10,000 to $20,000. They are at least spending money, which goes somewhere in the economy--and if there's one thing economists like, it's for people to spend money.

Now let's say these people make changes in their lives to end their detrimental behaviors, and work a steady job. Making minimum wage (in Oregon), they would be pulling in about $16,000 a year, before taxes. They are now 1) contributing value to a business, through their labor, 2) paying into the state and federal tax system, and 3) spending more money in the local economy. It would be a mistake to say that they're not costing money for state-sponsored social services, but it's now more of an "average" amount, and probably not much more than the average citizen of similar socioeconomic status.

As a simple "back of the envelope" calculation, our hypothetical person now has a net contribution of anywhere between $26,000 and $66,000 per year. They now also have the potential to move upward in the work force, to start earning and contributing more money, and they can also start to spend that money more wisely in long-term investments such as property.

There are already many successful models for these kinds of integration programs, so you may wonder why there aren't more of them (in the United States, at least), since they can easily demonstrate how they are going to have an economic impact that is greater than their initial cost. The most obvious reason is that it makes it look like the state is "coddling" their criminals and homeless people, and being "soft on crime." No politician wants to look like they are soft on crime, and anything that goes wrong is going to be a political liability. If a person in one of these programs happens to commit a violent crime, it will become fodder for attack advertisements in the next election cycle.

But there is another reason, one that is going to seem like some kind of conspiracy theory, and it is this: the prison system in the United States is big business. It started its rapid growth during the Reagan administration, with its "war on drugs" that put more people in prison than any period in American history. We are now the nation with the #1 per capita prison population, and those prisoners are used as a source of cheap labor. Furthermore, the amount that America has invested in private prison systems means that those private companies now have money they can use to influence politicians. Do you really think it's plausible that politicians would want to reduce the prison population through any other means but teaching those criminals a hard-earned lesson?

Can't buy me love

2009-12-03T20:09:00.000-08:00

I feel like T-Rex gets hung up on interpreting the question in a literal way, when one could phrase the question as, "How much money would it take to own everything on Earth that it is possible to own?" This includes: land, buildings and structures, intellectual property rights, sports teams, companies, vehicles, artwork, and probably lots of other things that I am forgetting. Assessing the value of these things is problematic, for two reasons.

The first is not all that important, and it is that some things are considered to be "priceless." Places like Christie's will estimate how much an item is going to sell for at an auction, but the "worth" of the item is determined only by how much someone is willing to pay for it. Suppose that a sculpture by Antonio Canova is up for sale, and the auction house expects it to sell for $300,000, while the people in the art world think it's maybe worth more than that but definitely not more than $500,000. I happen to be a fan of Antonio Canova, and in this hypothetical scenario, I also have a bunch of money laying around. The statue is not quite Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, but it's still fucking gorgeous. So, at auction, it ends up selling for $1.5 million, making everyone's jaw drop. No matter what the art world thinks the painting is worth, I wanted to own it badly enough I just spent $1.5 million on it, and at least one other person wanted it enough to spend more than $1 milion on it, maybe even several other people.

The second reason, though, is more important: willingness to sell. Stories abound of people who own something special, some MacGuffin, and are unwilling to sell it at any price. The only way you are going to get it is by taking it by force, or waiting for that person to die. So, continuing my hypothetical, ten years after I buy the Canova statue, a man comes to me saying that he wants to buy my statue. I say to him, "It's not for sale." "But I'll pay you ten million dollars for it." "Of all my worldly possessions, this is the one I am least willing to part with." Then we get to talking about the piece, and its history, and I say to him, "Do you see how the marble glows from inside when you put it in the sunlight?" "I do, and I really think that the piece belongs in a museum. Which is why I was trying to buy it from you."

"Then why didn't you just say so?" I ask.

"It would have made for a nice tax write-off, too. Paying ten million dollars for something that I turn around and donate."

So then I donate the statue to a museum, which is really what I should have done in the first place, and tell the guy to donate his ten million dollars to a charity of some kind. We have here achieved an even better outcome than the first one, because everyone gets what they want, and the ten million dollars probably goes to fighting homelessness and feeding poor people, whereas I just would have spent that money on cocaine and hookers.

On a side note, you cannot scientifically prove that people are wrong about feeling a particular way. You can attempt to reason with them and convince them that they are overreacting. You can also prove that their feelings are based on incorrect information, like a person who doesn't like the word "picnic" because they believe that used to be a word for lynchings. (It never was.)

Yeah, I got nothin'

2009-12-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

The thing about stuff being stuck in your teeth is that when someone points it out to you, it doesn't always help. They're trying to give you directions on where it is, and they keep saying, "No, no, other way... okay, it's still there..." Going to the mirror is what you should really do, if it's that big of a deal, but in the heat of the moment, that doesn't occur to you. (Remember this for the future: IF SOMETHING IS STUCK IN YOUR TEETH, FIND A MIRROR.)

Sending someone an "ecard" bypasses this entire awkward experience. The person is going to go directly to the mirror to try to get rid of that thing. There will be no awkward, drawn-out sequence. You also don't draw any attention to yourself, so if there is someone you're concerned about impressing, you can pretend that person never noticed the thing in your teeth.

See how I switched pronouns there? That's a little writing trick we writers use. It's called "making a mistake but being too lazy to fix it."

I'm going to take this opportunity to tell you to get the Greasemonkey script that displays all three easter eggs for each Dinosaur Comic: the title text, the "alt text," and the e-mail subject line when you click on "Contact." It's like expanding the comic from six panels to nine panels. That is 50% more comic! There is no reason not to have this script! Unless that reason is "I don't use Firefox" in which case you are missing out on a whole lot of things, my friend. A whole lot.

Teenage Demigod Warrior Achaeans

2009-12-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." It is very much like what T-Rex describes, except a bit less silly: a man in the 20th century is attempting to write Don Quixote word for word, not as a transcription, but producing them as if he were writing a novel of his own. He was not going to do this by trying to be Miguel de Cervantes—learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, forget about European history from 1602 onward—no, that would be too easy. He was going to do this by writing from the mind and experience of Pierre Menard. "I have assumed the mysterious obligation to reconstruct, word for word, the novel that for him was spontaneous."

This complete recontextualization makes a word of difference for how one is to interpret and understand the book. "The Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer":

Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, examplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, examplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
History, the mother of the truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not "what happened"; it is what we believe happened."

(I am going to take this opportunity to say that you should go read Borges's Collected Fictions. It is a thick volume, but I don't think any of the stories in it are longer than ten pages, and you will not be disappointed. A couple of the "classics" are "The Library of Babel" and "The Garden of Forking Paths." Prepare to have your mind blown, man.)

When placed along side Borges, T-Rex's idea for recontextualizing classic stories is not as silly as it sounds. Rather than The Odyssey, let's look at the opening lines of The Iliad, because I know that book much better. So, think of the following lines as coming from a blind poet living in Bronze Age Greece:

Sing, muse, of the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many souls, great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end."

As opening lines go, that one is pretty damn good. But let's reimagine it as a commercial interrupting "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." You see a commercial for how Pantene Pro V can make your hair shiny and beautiful, then you see a commercial for how you can own a Toyota Forerunner today with no money down and 0% APR financing... and then you see this commercial come up:

Sing, muse, of the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many souls, great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end."

Nobody writes like that anymore! Not only that, but nobody puts that kind of poetic craft into writing commercials, unless the poetry is meant to be part of a joke. "Hurling down to the House of Death"? Fuck. Yes.

And then! There's that part at the end where Priam is trying to get Hector's body back from Achilles, and he gets down on his knees and says, "I have been through what no man has been through. I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children." Can you imagine anyone in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan doing something like that? Imagine that the Taliban captured and killed a high-ranking US officer, maybe even General Odierno, and not only refused to give us his body but hooked him up to the back of a humvee and spent the day dragging it around. We would be shocked and appalled, and though there might be negotiations to get the body back, nobody is going to get down on their knees and say, "I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children."

That is the kind of balls this commercial has. Good sir, whatever you are selling, I am buying it.

Oh, fuck, it's a commercial for AXE body spray? I'm going to have to backtrack here. It was a good commercial, but there is no way I'm going to go around smelling like a douchebag.

National Tell Everyone You're Going to Write a Novel But You Don't Get Very Far Before You Give Up Month

2009-11-28T13:20:00.000-08:00

I at least tried to write a novel. I got 5,000 words, out of the goal of 50,000. But instead of writing the novel, I made about $500 from doing freelance editing work. Is it a coincidence that the differences between these numbers are precise orders of magnitude? Yes, it is most definitely a coincidence.

I'm now ready to get back into the game, and you might see updates as soon as tonight, but don't get your hopes up. Until then, here are some interesting things for you to look at:

They are the kinds of things I like to call "marijuana for the soul." Oh, and I guess here is a link about something vaguely to do with philosophy.

NaNoWriMo

2009-11-01T12:21:00.000-08:00

Updates will be sparse for the next month, because I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month. I might post a few things that are just bouncing around in my head, but I don't expect to post anything dino-related. Things will be back to normal as of December 1.

An argument in favor of a "language organ"? Who knows

2009-10-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

T-Rex seems to think that this language thing is about egoism, and I'm really not so sure about that. My reasoning is thus: it is important for a child to be able to talk to its parents, or get their attention. If the "ba", "pa", and "ma" sounds are some of the first a child makes, it then makes it convenient to use those sounds to form the words for the parents.

In a similar vein, there are parents in the United States who are teaching their children a rudimentary form of sign language so that they can communicate their needs using words they might not be able to pronounce with their mouth. The more eXtreme form of this is a method of early potty training that starts from the day the child is born. It requires having someone with the child 24/7 for about the first three months of its life, in order to get them to the toilet when they need to go. The child is, as soon as possible, taught to give a hand gesture when it needs to use the toilet. The benefit to this is never having to change any diapers, but the difficult of doing that can make a parent wonder if it's worth it. Because how many times is that baby going to shit all over your house? Several times, if not many.

I coffee potted your mom last night

2009-10-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

Many of you are familiar with semantic satiation, even if you didn't know that was what it was called. Something else I happen to have noticed, since I have a rather dirty mind, is what I'd call "semantic eroticization," wherein any verb at all can be used as a euphemism for sex. Or a euphemism for being on drugs.

As a preface: there's a game I played once... I think it's just called "The Coffee Pot" game. The way it works is that a person thinks of a verb, and then people ask yes or no questions about the verb, using "coffee pot" as what I guess is a metasyntactic variable. "Are you coffee potting right now? Can I coffee pot with you?" The effect is a bit like semantic satiation, except for the added weirdness that "coffee pot" seems to take on a sexual meaning.

If you doubt me, try playing the game sometime. And look at some of these sample questions that can often be useful:

Can you coffee pot alone? Can you coffee pot with other people?
Can you finish coffee potting? Or do you just coffee pot until you stop?
Does Natalie Portman coffee pot?
Is it appropriate to coffee pot in public?

And so on.

Now, try coming up with some random nouns and some random transitive verbs. Put them together. You will then have a new euphemism for sex or being high. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. Additionally, if you want to try to remove bias from the experiment, do it in a Mad Libs way by asking a couple of people for noun and verb suggestions before you tell them what it's for.

Also: you may notice that I have found a layout that will fit a whole Dinosaur Comic. I am excited about this. I will soon be going through the archives and hotlinking each of the comics, instead of just hyperlinking them.

Did you notice that "hotlink" and "hyperlink" sound like sex acts?

I think he is actually leitwortstiling "frig"

2009-10-30T12:10:00.000-07:00

The experience T-Rex is talking about is one that many of us are familiar with. Because it is much easier for a company to deliver software updates directly to consumers, it makes it easier for people to install bug fixes and the like. That sounds like a good thing, right? When they fix a bug, they can make it so that you don't have to experience that bug anymore.

This also means that when they add a new feature, they can also release that in an update. And if they have a completely new version, they can bother you about upgrading. Hey, I know that you upgraded to iTunes 8 just this year, but we've already made iTunes 9! It has some new friggin' features! You should upgrade! (Admittedly, I upgraded last night, and I like some of the new interface features.)

I'm sure I don't have to tell you, a savvy computer user, that the sheer amount of "software updates" that are available is daunting and tedious. It is not just about getting the nag screen. For me, it is also the fact that these updates frequently require me to restart my computer to install them. They are pretty much the only reason I reboot my computer, because it works just fine having ten tabs open in Firefox, running anywhere from six to eight applications in the background. Rebooting means saving all that unsaved work in my five TextEdit documents, and making sure that Firefox remembers what tabs I have open for when I reopen it. Rebooting is a chore and I don't want to do it if I don't have to.

But software has always followed a model of planned obsolescence. If you just add some new features to your software, not everyone is going to upgrade. If you also change the way the interface works, people might upgrade if it seems like an improvement, but they might eventually upgrade just because everyone else has it and they don't.

But if you change the way the software looks, you don't need to do a goddamn thing to get people to upgrade, as long as you stop selling the old version. Because the new version looks new, and the old version looks old. You don't want software that looks old, do you? Software that looks like something your grandma would use?

I read an article recently on why Windows Vista didn't sell very well. As Tycho of Penny Arcade put it, "Vista turned a good machine, one capable of running all the latest software, into a reeking shitbox," and such a problem is difficult for any piece of software to overcome But there was the additional reason that you couldn't convince anyone that they needed it, because they kind of didn't. Windows XP allowed people to do pretty much everything they already wanted to do with their computers. (In some cases, Windows 98 did that as well.) Upgrading often means that things that worked before don't work anymore, and usually also means upgrading your hardware in addition to the OS. For a release like Windows 95, it was worth all those headaches, and I think anyone who used Windows 3.1 would agree with me. Since then, people have pretty much only upgraded their OS when they bought a new computer, and in the 80s and 90s, it was pretty important to buy a new computer every couple of years, because of how quickly hardware was advancing, with software advancing to take advantage of the new hardware.

But the rate of such changes that are relevant to average people has plummeted in the last decade. Graphical interfaces, multitasking, SimCity, porn, email, shopping, and dating sold a lot more new computers than nearly anything we’ve come up with since 2000 except malware. (I honestly believe that malware carried computer sales for most of the last decade. That only worked because we’ve taught people, with a combination of misinformation and omission, two great lies: that computers slow down over time, and that the only way to fix a malware infestation is to buy a new computer.)

What I can perceive about the Windows 7 upgrade is that it is all the new features of Vista (and more), but without all the bullshit. As a Mac user, though, I am not paying much attention to it. An update for OS X was recently released, called Snow Leopard. Its pros are that it is only $30 and it takes advantage of current hardware to drastically accelerate computer performance. The cons: many people find it to be fairly buggy, particularly with Adobe CS4 applications. That is somewhat damning, as upgrades go, but I'll probably upgrade once they have the bugs worked out, because it seems like it might actually be a useful upgrade.

Cocktail Theology

2009-10-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

(The post you are about to read is very silly. Also, it has a Holocaust joke in it. If either of these things bother you, don't read this.)

On a listserve I subscribe to, a week or two ago, someone mentioned an idea to make a "bacon chocolate milkshake." You fry up a couple pieces of bacon, blend it with the milk to get it good and chopped, then blend in the ice cream. Optional: adding the bacon grease.

I was pretty "meh" about the result. My curiosity was satisfied, but I don't think I'll do it again.

I then went into a chat room I frequently frequent, and told people about this not-very-good milkshake I was drinking. Someone suggested that 151 makes anything taste better, and my reply was, "I regret that you have put that idea in my head because now I have to try it."

The glass was about 1/3 empty at this point (or 2/3 full, depending on how you look at it), and I added 1 oz. of 151 to it. My first thought when tasting it was, "God is dead." The horror of this cocktail was Lovecraftian in nature: it's not that it tasted particularly bad, it just seemed like something that should not exist.

As I thought more about it, I decided that I was going to call it "Chocolate Holocaust," a name inspired by a Strongbad e-mail, but didn't have a recipe to go with it. It was something that made you lose your faith in the possiblity God might exist.

Because of this milkshake, there is no God.

In which I avoid making any jokes about "rigid designators"

2009-10-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

T-Rex has touched on this subject in a previous comic, about the etymology of the word "woman." That happened to be a case of "mistaken etymology," but in this case we have real etymology.

I still think it's pretty irrelevant, though. One of my least favorite arguments is, "We shouldn't use this word because of its demeaning etymological roots." It is as if words have some kind of original sin that they take with them everywhere they go. We already have plenty of words that have diverged in meaning from their roots. For example, "coffee cake" refers to a kind of cake that is commonly served with coffee, but it is much beloved by people who do not even drink coffee. When eaten without coffee, it does not stop being "coffee cake." You can also call a city "Dartmouth" even though it is not on the mouth of the Dart river.

The "obscene" alternatives to "vagina" suffer from the problem of ambiguity. "Vagina" refers to something on the inside, while "vulva" refers to most of the things on the outside (the labia, clitoris, and whatever else I could be forgetting). Words like "pussy" and "cunt" are often used to refer to both of these, like when we talk about being able to see Britney Spears's _____ when she gets out of the car: you can see her pussy, and you can see her vulva, but you can't see her vagina.

I don't happen to know any people who argue for doing away with "vagina." They do have opinions about words and punctuation and other things grammatical in nature, but none of their arguments start with etymology.

It's not game theory, but it's at least decision theory

2009-10-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1577

Marriage is often a compromise. I mean, yes, we all make lifestyle compromises within the confines of marriage, but when we get married to begin with, we are getting married to someone who has some things about them we don't like. What's important is that 1) you can see yourself spending the rest of your life with your lover, and 2) you find it unlikely that you will meet someone better.

My freshman year of college, a friend of mine said, "Love is not about seeing all the worst parts of your partner, and not caring about them. It's that you see all of the worst parts... and they don't matter." When we are happily married, it is because what we like in our partners has gone past a kind of tipping point, and those bad parts don't matter to us anymore.

So, let's say we meet someone who is more perfect. The first problem in choosing to leave lover A to go with lover B is that we have no initial way of knowing that lover B is more perfect. Think of how much time you spent with lover A to figure out how perfect they were for you--this was at least a matter of months, if not years. You will need to spend at least that much time with lover B to figure out if he or she at least matches the perfection in lover A. It will probably take you much longer to determine that lover B happens to be more perfect. The proportional difference between 95% and 99% is less than 1/20th. That is a difference small enough to be negligible for many people.

One might interject here, "By seeing how perfect A is for you, you have a good idea of what makes for a perfect lover. So can't you know right off whether B is more perfect just by asking them some questions?" Sadly, no. You can certainly trick yourself into thinking B is a better mate, though. Let's suppose that I'm hanging out with B, and I've been thinking, "Man, she is just about as awesome as the girl I'm seeing now." Then the discussion turns to music, and it turns out that B happens to like a lot of the weird trance music I listen to, rather than the buttrock and classic rock preferred by lover A. I say to myself, "Wow! Lover B is more perfect than lover A!" So I leave lover A for lover B... and it turns out that she is a frothing-at-the-mouth crazy bitch who gets really jealous, and wants to know where I've been every time I leave the house. Or maybe, once I'm living with her, it turns out that she doesn't clean up after herself, ever. Then one night, after crying into my pillow for two hours instead of sleeping, I call up lover A and beg her to take me back, but she is already dating another guy. It's not even some guy that makes me wonder what she sees in him; I know exactly what she sees, and I know I can't compete with that. So I break it off with lover B, before she can ruin my life even more, and I join the world of being single, trying not to compare every girl I meet with lover A, but she just won't get out of my head.

Clearly, that scenario is sub-optimal.

On his main page, Ryan North linked a blog post about this comic, The Economics of Love (as told by T-Rex). The argument there is that if you leave A for B, you need to have enough years left in your life to develop a relationship that is going to turn out to have more happiness in it than you would attain with A. He does mention "the boredom problem" as a relationship plateaus, but there are solutions to that which do not involve divorce. I contend that you still have the epistemological problem of knowing that things will turn out better with B than with A. If you make this decision, you are gambling with your happiness in life; you might come out ahead, you might come out a little behind, and you might lose it all.

As a kind of epilogue, one of my favorite love songs (if you can call it that) is "Good Enough For Now," by "Weird" Al Yankovic. It takes a blatantly honest view of relationships:

You're sort of everything I always wanted
You're not perfect, but I love you anyhow
You're the woman that I've always dreamed of
Well, not really, but you're good enough for now

The important line here, throughout all the equivocations, is, "You're not perfect, but I love you anyhow." Now, that doesn't seem like the kind of attitude you'd have with someone you'd marry. But maybe it is! "Good enough for now" could mean "good enough to stay with until one of us is dead." Some people have told me, though, that "blatant honesty" and "romance" are things that are rarely (if ever) found together, and that ladies prefer things that are hyperbolic, such as "I Will Follow You Into the Dark." But bitches just gotta know how I roll.

Snake oil for sale, only $2 a bottle

2009-10-21T16:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1576

In my previous post, I mentioned that people like to have some reassurance about their dead loved ones. If you believe in eternal souls, and life after death, there is no way to verify anything about how your dead loved ones are doing. Consequently, there is a lot of opportunity here to make some money exploiting this fear. Just such a movement emerged in the mid-19th century, called "Spiritualism." Ostensibly "communicating with the dead" became a cottage industry, with all sorts of people offering seances and the like. After Humler discovered what he could do by double-exposing film, there was already a market for what he was offering.

Unfortunately for Humler, this was in the age of P. T. Barnum. If you wanted to be a successful fraud, you had to be able to trick P. T. Barnum. This did not happen. Humler went to court for fraud, and Barnum actually testified against him. He was found "not guilty," but his career was still ruined.

I am here reminded of a Wired article I was reading about the growing fear in America that vaccines cause autism. (Spoiler alert: vaccines don't cause autism.) Quoting from the article:

In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Science can do a lot of things for us, but it's not too concerned with our spiritual and emotional needs. If your wife dies, a church leader can tell you, "She's in Heaven with Jesus now." What if you want to make absolutely sure, by trying to contact her? You might be told, "Communicating with the dead is the work of Satan," for it is clearly prohibited in the Bible. But if a medium right down the street from where you live can tell you everything you want to hear, making it seem like it's straight from the mouth of your wife, well, why wouldn't you pay her $20? Or $100? That is a kind of emotional comfort that nobody else can give you. We might know it's a fraud, deep inside our consciousness, but as long as nobody actually shows us "the man behind the curtain," we go on letting ourselves believe.

That is the price we pay for wanting to be certain about something, when confronted with so many uncertainties in our lives. Sometimes these certainties are innocent. Unfortunately, though, sometimes these certainties destroy people's lives.

Pop Music Ponderings: the Decemberists

2009-10-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

When there is a band people are talking about, but I haven't heard, I will go and download a bunch of their music and see what it sounds like. If I am not immediately impressed, I will try to listen to it until something clicks and I "get it." For the Decemberists, that moment was with The Mariner's Revenge Song, which opens with these lines:

We are two mariners, the ship's soul survivors
Trapped in this belly of a whale
Its ribs our ceiling beams, its guts our carpeting
I guess we have some time to kill

The third line there was what woke up my brain, and made me think, "This is an awesome song and I have to keep listening." Now, go listen to the song so that I don't have to tell you the entire story. I'm just going to go over the important bits.

The other man (let's call him "the sailor") destroys his mother's livelihood with his gambling debts, then completely disappears. The financial stress drives her mad, and she dies not too long after that, with her dying words to the narrator:

Find him, bind him
Tie him to a pole
And break his fingers to splinters
Throw him in a hole
Until he wake up naked
Clawing at the ceiling of his grave.

The narrator becomes homeless, and after living as an urchin for fifteen years, he is hired by a priory to be their janitor. "But never once in the employ of these holy men did I ever once turn my mind from the thought of revenge."

Then one night, he overhears a whaler talking about his cruel captain, who seems to match the description of the sailor who ruined the narrator's life. So, he leaves immediately and joins with a privateer to go after the sailor, his mother's dying words fresh in his mind.

After twenty months at sea, they finally find the sailor's ship. Before they can do anything, though, a whale destroys both of the ships.

Don't know how I survived
The crew all was chewed alive
I must have slipped between his teeth
But oh, what providence,
What divine intelligence,
That you should survive as well as me

It gives my heart great joy to see your eyes fill with fear
So lean in close and I will whisper the last words you'll hear

Those are the last words of the song, but the music it ends with is the music that accompanies his mother's plea for revenge.

One might also be reminded of Moby Dick, where Ahab tries to get revenge on the white whale, only to have his ship destroyed and nearly all of his crew killed. (I hope I didn't just spoil the book for you.) This album is called "Picaresque," and the picaresque genre is about anti-heros and lower-class rogues. We the audience want to cheer him on as he dies getting his vengeance.

What I find most striking about this song is the number of religious elements involved in his quest for revenge. Working in the priory both gets him back on his feet, and gives him a lead on tracking down the sailor. Getting swallowed by the whale is in some works a time for salvation (like in the book of Jonah in the Bible, not to mention Pinocchio), but here the whale is the final act of "providence" and "divine intelligence" that allows him to finally get his revenge. This is the typical realm of irony in which the Decemberists work.

Is there some additional satirical message here? I don't know. "Sixteen Military Wives" is most definitely a satire of Bush foreign policy. One could make the case that this has a similar message behind it, pointing out the ideological contradiction not only in using Chrisitanity as a justification for war, but as a justification for revenge. The message may be a far more general one, though: God is not about revenge, and you are a low-life rogue if you think He is.

The next time you argue about whose infinity is larger, say yours is nondenumerable infinity

2009-10-19T02:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1575

The Infinity Hotel is meant to demonstrate the difference between a "denumerable" and "nondenumerable" infinity. You can do a lot of things to accomodate an infinite number of guests in an infinite number of rooms, by using arithmetic.

There are higher orders of infinity, though. Paul Cantor first demonstrated this with his "diagnolization proof." We're going to go the "mathy" way first, and then I'll try to apply it to the Infinity Hotel. Also: I generally to do my writing without reference to Wikipedia, but this time, I made liberal use of the Diagonal Proof page. It's okay, though, because I once had a philosophy professor show me this stuff. I just... couldn't remember it. Anyway. Moving on.

Step 1: suppose that you have a string of 0s and 1s that is infinitely long: 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, and so on. Got it? Okay.

Step 2: now suppose that you have an infinite number of these strings, in a list like this:
A = (0, 0, 0, 0, 0...)
B = (1, 1, 1, 1, 1...)
C = (1, 0, 0, 1, 0...)
D = (0, 1, 0, 1, 0...)
E = (1, 0, 1, 1, 1...)

Step 3: now we are going to make a new set of numbers, which uses the opposite numbers of each of the sets in the first list, going in a diagonal, like so:

A = (0, 0, 0, 0, 0...)
B = (1, 1, 1, 1, 1...)
C = (1, 0, 0, 1, 0...)
D = (0, 1, 0, 1, 0...)
E = (1, 0, 1, 1, 1...)

X = (1, 0, 1, 0, 0...)

No matter how many sets of numbers you make in step 2, set X is going to be different from every one of those sets, because its creation is based on having at least one digit different from each of those sets.

Step 4: from this, it follows that the set T of all infinite sequences of 1s and 0s cannot be put into a denumerable list, because we have sequence X which cannot possibly be part of our initial list of sequences.

Step 5: you just, like, blew my mind, man.

Let's go back to the hotel now. Infinity Hotel wants to expand by having an infinite number of floors, with an infinite number of rooms on each floor. Some of the rooms are empty, and some are occupied. To keep track of them, the manager has a list for the whole hotel with the rooms marked either O (occupied) or U (unoccupied). It looks something like this:

1: U, O, U, U, U...
2: O, O, O, O, U...
3: U, O, U, O, U...
4: U, U, U, U, U...
5: O, O, O, O, O...

One of his favorite things to do is mess with his new employees by asking them to find the floor with a particular room sequence, floor X, which he constructs by using an opposite of something on each floor, like so:

1: U, O, U, U, U...
2: O, O, O, O, U...
3: U, O, U, O, U...
4: U, U, U, U, U...
5: O, O, O, O, O...

X: O, U, O, O, U...

No matter how hard he or she looks, the new employee is never going to find that floor, because Infinity Hotel only has denumerable infinities in it. The employee always comes back to the main floor wanting to punch the manager in the gut, but since it sometimes takes an infinitely long time for the employee to figure out the trick, by then, the manager has usually gone home for the day.

In case you are wondering: yes, I have given this some serious thought

2009-10-19T01:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1574

Utahraptor might seem like he is being a good friend by helping T-Rex fake his own death. This kind of looks like he's just a friend helping out his friend, but I don't think that is what's going on. For one thing, a "good friend" will usually not help you break the law by saying, "You're doing this wrong, let me show you how it's really done." In some cases they'll just go along with you on it, if you can convince them of how it's in their interests, but more often a good friend is going to be like, "This is stupid, and you shouldn't do it."

What is probably happening is that Utahrapter either really wants to get T-Rex out of his life, or he wants to show T-Rex how much work is involved here in order to make him reconsider the plan. If it's the latter, then it's probably working, because T-Rex is figuring out that it would be easier just to pay his late fees.

Faking your own death is usually pretty difficult. You have to do it in a way where the police have good reason to think they will never find your body. Like, maybe you go hiking, and then "disappear." You arrange for passage to a foreign country, trying to disguise your face in a way that is really conspicuous but to the point of being suspicious. You live out the rest of your days on a beach, spending the whole day getting drunk. Something like that.

If you want to leave a body, it gets pretty messy. First you have to find a body that is a similar height and bone structure. (Maybe the person is already dead, and maybe not.) Make sure that they have no way of getting a DNA sample of you afterward, to compare it to the body, because that would ruin everything. Then you have to do everything that a murderer would do to make it a "perfect crime," and the most important part there is to completely disfigure the face, and knock out the teeth so that it can't even be identified through dental records. Then, you have to do something to make sure they find the body, but without just leaving it lying around. One way to do that is to chop it up, put it in garbage bags, and then put those garbage bags in a dumpster.

This whole "leaving a real body behind" method could benefit from a plausible back story that later explains your death. Find a way to blame it on organized crime, whether it's from a loan you don't repay, or something about drugs.

By now, if you are thinking of faking your own death, you are probably giving it second thoughts yourself. But if you still want to go through with it, I can totally help you out.

For a fee, of course.

The "increasing mass piggyback ride" really is a nice trick

2009-10-19T00:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1573

Notice here that Utahraptor is in one of his exasperated moods, just smiling and nodding at T-Rex. Anyway...

There is an element to ghost stories which comes from the fear of the unknown, and going where you shouldn't go. This is common, though, to many other folklore tales and urban legends, stories that might not necessarily involve ghosts.

The thing I find more interesting about ghost stories is that there is usually something inappropriate about the way that the person died. In the case of the myling, it was said to have been a child who died without baptism or proper burial. This usually meant that it was a child that would shame the parents (e.g., born out of wedlock), and they abandoned it to die in the wilderness. Without baptism or burial, the children's souls couldn't go to heaven, and luring people to their deaths was the myling's form of revenge.

The idea of the ghost is usually meant to give people more respect for people's lives, and how they are treated after they die. The fact that there is a "proper" way to deal with people who have died is something universal to all cultures, even if what counts as "proper" varies considerably. Burial and cremation are pretty common, cannibalism is a little more rare. I've even heard of a culture where the body is left out for a few days to let animals eat the flesh off of the bones, and then the bones are buried, or something. I think I read it in Mircea Eliade's book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Fuck yo citation. It's not that relevant.

The process of preparing a body for disposal gives a community time to grieve, and get all of the work of mourning out of the way at once. People tell stories about the deceased, and it becomes more acceptable to cry in otherwise inappropriate settings. Some people will still be grieving after this period, but the first few days can give them the spiritual resources they need to come to terms with the death.

We all die some day, which makes it that much more appropriate to have a proper and almost scripted way to deal with death. Ghost stories are a warning about what could happen if we take a callous attitude towards people's life and death. Your actions could have consequences in the future for many people, some of whom have not even been born yet.

I'm not a dentist, but I play one on the internet

2009-10-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1572

What you can "do-it-yourself" has come a long way from just home improvement. Now there are things like teeth whitening and hair waxing that you can do-it-yourself.

Whitening your own teeth does not make you a dentist, though. Dentists make their money from the people who either don't know how to take care of their teeth, or are really bad at it. Sometimes a dude with perfect teeth gets some of them knocked out, through no fault of his own, and the dentist is there to fix it. Even if you never need more dental work than cleaning and polishing, you at least need to have that trained professional to look in your mouth and see that your teeth are, in fact, just fine.

The division of labor is something necessary for a civilization to advance. A few people focusing on doing one thing really well is better than everyone trying to do everything half-assedly. Sure, it would be nice to learn how to do my own electrical wiring and plumbing... but fuck that noise. I am going to call up a dude in the phone book and pay him some money to do it for me.

That being said, of course, there is a value in learning how to do some kind of craft yourself. This is because we live in a "knowledge economy" where what you learn in college is just specialized information to... do things with information. And people. Maybe also computers. It's rather fleeting, and sometimes unfulfilling. There's very little you can look at and say, "I did that. I made that. I fixed that." This is the point being made in Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soul Craft. I have not yet read it, but it's on my growing list of "books I should read eventually." Part of the book was adapted into an essay for the New York Times, title The Case For Working With Your Hands. I'd say that you should go read it, because you can do so for free. And if you like that essay, you should read his whole book. Probably. Like I said, I haven't read it.

I suppose the point I am making here is the opposite of what it originally sounded like I was going to make. You cannot be your own dentist, and there is a value in paying a professional to do things for you, but there is also a value in being able to do things with your hands, be it fixing things, crafting, or whatever. That value is not just a practical one, but one that extends into your feelings of worth as a person. You are faced with tangible problems, and you yield tangible results. It is so much more than just knowing a bunch of things, and the worth in that is something that can't go in an Excel spreadsheet.

I tried looking in a mirror and holding color swatches next to my eyes but it didn't quite work

2009-10-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1571

Part of being an adult is about memorizing things about yourself that you need to write on forms. Or that you need to know when you shop for clothing. Just recently I bought a coat online that was labeled as being a size 38R. I thought, "Is that the size I wear? And how would I find out? What the heck does that 38 mean?" (I think it is chest size.) The coat showed up and the sleeves were not quite long enough. I only bought it for a Halloween costume, though, so I figured I would just resell it or donate it when I was done.

Remembering sizes is sometimes a wasted effort, because sometimes those sizes will fit differently depending on the manufacturer. Trying to remember a different size for every manufacturer seems like it is about ten times more information to memorize, so why bother? Just try shit on and see if it fits. Women's sizes have a bit of notoriety in this regard, and a woman can fit into any of three or four different dress sizes depending on the manufacturer.

Then there is the added difficult of weight gain changing the size we wear. I used to fit pretty well into a pair of pants with a 30 inch waist. Then it was 32. Then I just started buying 36 and wearing the pants with a belt. (Maybe gaining weight is why the 38R doesn't fit me so well?) We're buying new uniforms at work, and my manager wants to get my measurements for things like my collar size. I do not know my goddamn collar size, because I never buy shirts that have a collar size. Okay, actually, I did this once, back in 2006, and I can't remember which number I went with.

So, go forth and memorize these things about yourself. And if you're not sure you can memorize them, write them down and keep it somewhere you can remember it. Also include things you like but forget that you like, such as food, beer, and wine. Trust me on this. You'll thank me later.

That's definitely the last time I'm puking into my crotch

2009-10-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1570

Fictional works that deal with immortality frequently touch on the way in which it is a curse as much as it is a blessing. The most common one is about love, and how everyone you will ever love will be dead within a few decades. The second is the indifference to human suffering that comes from personally viewing centuries of people living and dying, nations rising and falling.

This is why I found the ending to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End to be so unsatisfying. [SPOILER ALERT BUT REALLY YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS MOVIE BY NOW] At the end, Will Turner is badly wounded, but instead of dying, he becomes the new ferryman for the souls of the dead. This means that he will live forever, and he also gets to see Elizabeth one day out of every ten years. The problem is that Elizabeth isn't immortal, which makes this just about the worst job to take simply because you're in lurve. She's going to be alive another fifty years, tops, and then what's Will going to do? Quit his job as ferryman? Find a successor who can stab his heart and send him to the world of the dead? Davy Jones at least had a better deal going for him, being able to get his freak on with a goddess one day out of every decade, because she was just as immortal as he was.

All I can think is that Will is eventually going to start getting his son and his grandchildren to set him up on dates. "I'm not asking very much of you here," he'll say. "You don't even have to visit me for Thanksgiving or Christmas. All I want is a nice piece of tail that one day every ten years that I come back to shore." He'll probably just find a successor, though, because using your descendents as a dating service almost seems worse than an eternity of stubbed toes.

Get out of my head, God. Seriously.

2009-10-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1569

God totally stole my idea to tell T-Rex that some cultures have tattoos with deep significance. He also stole my idea for a religion where you have to stop complaining so much. Man, why does God gotta be stealin' my ideas like that?

Truth be told, though, most religions are about how you need to stop complaining so much. It's often about achieving happiness in this world, or just not caring about this world. It may seem like not complaining is a consequence of the religion, rather than some kind of requirement, but it can work the other way around: if you're not allowed to complain, you will become a person who is less inclined to complain.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to realize that we are what we repeatedly do. His idea of the virtues was that we can live good lives and be happy by developing the virtues in us, and the only way to do this is to practice them as much as possible every day of our lives:

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

To be good at doing anything, you have to actually do that thing many times. What is less obvious, though, is that if you want to be a certain kind of person, such as a person who likes to give people compliments, you can become that kind of person simply by acting like that kind of person. It sounds a little backwards, and it sounds like you're just pretending to be something you're not, but it makes some sense when you think it through.

In our example, if I want to be a person who gives people compliments, I need to start by actually paying people these compliments, and before I do that I have to find something in the person to compliment. So, now I am going around every day trying to find something to compliment in everyone I meet. This can develop other qualities in me as well, such as liking people more, and being able to find something good in things such as books and movies.

And I will probably stop complaining so much, without even having to sign up for God's religion. That filthy idea stealer.

Your Arabic calligraphy actually says, "There is no God but God and Muhammed is his prophet"

2009-10-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1568

It's actually not that difficult to mess with people who have tattoos, because there are so many bad tattoo ideas out there that even happen to be trendy.

The absolute worst tattoo I've ever seen (and this was in meatspace, mind you) had a dolphin on either side, a yin-yang below it, and in the middle... the Oakland Raiders logo. It was just so many different bad ideas all in one place.

Other tattoo trends that are maybe not the best idea in the world:
- Lower back tattoos. Known by various names, such as "tramp stamp," "New Jersey license plate," and "ass antlers." I am not against having tattoos on the lower back, but there is a certain way they are usually done that makes you look like every other shmoe out there with a lower back tattoo.
- Chinese/Japanese character tattoos. Joking about the problem with these is almost a cliché by now: if you are not familiar with a foreign language, getting a tattoo in that language is not that great of an idea if you have not done the research to make sure that your tattoo says what you think it does.
- "Tribal" designs. The original Maori designs have actual meaning to them, rather than being just fancy curly things, and out of respect for the culture, some artists will only do tribal tattoos that are totally meaningless. This may not sound like a big deal to you, but think of something that is sacred to you. Now think of someone getting a tattoo of that, with no idea of what it is or what it means, but they think it looks cool.
- Trompe l'oeil designs. These are tattoos where, when you describe the tattoo, you use phrases such as "makes it look like." An example would be getting a tattoo where it looks like you have a large gash, and underneath the skin are some clockwork gears.

The problem I see with trendy tattoos is that there is a variety of quality to them. That seems obvious, almost tautologous, but as people see more tattoos that are similar to yours, they are going to compare your tattoo to others they have seen. Your tattoo is going to fall into one of five tiers:

1) Awesome custom work. A lot of time and planning went into it, and you might have paid more than usual for it, with the knowledge that you are going to have this for the rest of your life, and want it to still look good fifty years from now.
2) Ho hum flash from the walls of a tattoo parlor. It probably has a neon sign in the window, and getting the tattoo was possibly a spur of the moment decision. The thing itself is probably nothing special, but it at least reminds you of a certain time in your life.
3) A regrettable design from an okay artist. This is what most joke tattoos are. Like, a tattoo of a cat to make it look like your navel is the cat's asshole. Every woman who ever sees you without a shirt is going to see your asshole tattoo, and sometimes it will be enough for her not to want to have sex with you ever. I feel sorry for the woman who marries you.
4) An awful tattoo from an awful artist. The coloring is uneven, it doesn't quite look like the thing it should be, et cetera. These are usually homemade kinds of things.
5) A regrettable design from an awful artist. This is a combination of the worst elements of tiers 3 and 4. You don't see them very often, because people who want a joke tattoo usually at least have the wherewithal to go to a real artist, instead of going to a friend's friend who knows this guy who "does tattoos" but his techniques are the kind they use in prison.

There is also the additional... issue... of your tattoo turning into a conversation piece. This might be welcome and might not be. If your tattoo reminds someone of a cool tattoo they saw once, they are probably going to tell you about it. Soemtimes, the attached implication is, "Your tattoo is okay, but I've seen ones like it that are much better."

This probably means I have an elitist idea of tattoos, but I have an elitist idea of most things. This is nothing new.

Alright, so, I gave you twenty, then you gave me three, and Steve game me two...

2009-10-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1567

When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I read Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker Trilogy, as one does at that age. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, Adams describes a space ship that is powered by bistromathics. The short version of how it works is that there is an artificial restaurant with seating for twelve, and robots sit there arguing over the bill and who owes what.

This was certainly an amusing idea to me at the time, but I did not understand at the time how much this joke was based in reality until I was about 25 years old, and went out to eat with several of my friends where we were splitting the bill. Our group was small enough to figure out what each of us had to pay initially, and calculating the tip was not a big deal, but then there was the problem of people paying an amount that was close enough to what they owed to be satisfactory. Suppose that Joe only has a $20 bill, but after tip, he owes $15, so does anyone have a five for change? Now picture at least half the people at the table doing this. We tossed around money until we had a reasonable amount in a pile in the middle of the table, and nobody protested about putting in too much. Presumably, however much anyone overpaid, they were okay with this.

This is why some people who eat out regularly together (say, co-workers going out to lunch) will agree to take turns paying the whole bill. The only complicated thing about this is remembering whose turn it is, which gets increasingly difficult the more people are in your group, but is completely manageable if one keeps a record of it in a day planner. Also, anyone who is clearly trying to make everyone else pay for expensive items will eventually have their turn to pay come around, and while they may order a garden salad for themselves everyone else will be ordering steaks.

This is also why the $20 bill is sometimes called the "yuppie food stamp." If you're eating out, and splitting the bill, you need some cash. If you don't usually carry cash, the easiest way to get it is to go to the ATM, and that means everyone in the restaurant is going to pull out $20 bills to pay for the meal. Yes, they can certainly be used to pay for the meal, but they are by no means convenient. Hence, "yuppie food stamps." (And, while on the subject, why can't our ATMs have multiple denominations of currency? Of all the things Europe does that we don't, this seems like it would be the easiest to change.)

Given all of this madness, it's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that 80-year-olds could be good at splitting the bill. Is it because they eat at places where they pay less for the food? Because they carry more than just $20 bills? Because they just care less about paying exactly what they owe? We may never know, because we are all the way in panel six when T-Rex tells us about this. Why won't you tell us the secret, T-Rex? Why do you insist on telling us only their collective term?

The state of the blog

2009-10-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I reached something of a milestone with this blog: during the entire month of September, I commented on every single Dinosaur Comic. I plan to do this for the foreseeable future. I'd only let myself stop if... I were in a coma. That's the only thing I can think of that would prevent me from writing.

Granted, I have a backlog of comics to write about right now. This is purely because last week, it was "that time of the month," by which I mean the time of the month when the internet company shuts off our service because we haven't paid the bill, and nobody in the house can afford to get it turned back on for at least a few days. (Oh, and then I had a date that turned into a trip to the ER, but that is a longer story.) Maybe I'll crank them all out in one sustained session, or a "lightning round," but more likely I will spend an hour on each one of them until I decide I can't make it any better than it is.

I will admit that not all of my posts are "grade A quality," but some days, I read the comic and then say, "What the fuck am I going to say about that?" Sometimes I manage to turn those days into quality writing, so if you ask me, it is to my credit that there aren't more posts that suck.

But this is not a blog of apologies (except in the classical sense of an apology being a defense, like in Plato's "Apology"). It is a blog for getting shit done that maybe doesn't have to be done but I do it anyway. And I do it for you as much as I do it for myself.

You really shouldn't do that

2009-10-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1566

We are all given lots of "do" and "don't" advice when we're growing up--even after we're grown up, depending on the company we keep. Some of it is outright lies, or at least untrue, such as, "If you swallow your gum it will just stay in your stomach forever." Some of it is true only sometimes, such as, "Don't go swimming if you just ate a big meal." Sometimes you go swimming after eating, and your fine, but sometimes you start getting cramps and you have to stop.

A lot of it, though, is legitimately useful information, like, "Don't mix bleach with ammonia." If you did this, you would create chlorine gas, which can be deadly in an enclosed space. I once got a breath of chlorine gas in high school chemistry, and it felt like my lungs were melting. It's probably the least pleasant thing that has entered my lungs.

The fact that we're given so much supposed advice, and not all of it is true, means that we start to become dubious about all of the advice. You say to yourself, "Hey, they were totally lying about the watermelon seeds. What if they were also lying about putting metal in the microwave?" The natural inclination of such a curious child would be to put metal in the microwave to see what happens, and then maybe the microwave explodes or something. I'm not too sure, because I know better than to put metal in the microwave.

Because these things are supposedly bad ideas, youv'e never seen anyone do them, so you have no idea if they're true or not. Your mom says that you'll get cavities if you don't brush your teeth, so she makes you brush your teeth twice a day, and even makes you fucking floss. Then you start to become dubious about these so-called "cavities," and get lazy about brushing your teeth, and the next time you go to the dentist he tells you that you have three cavities. Then you get the additional learning experience of what it is like to get a filling.

Ideally, at some stage of your adulthood, you have learned that sometimes the advice you got growing up really was good advice, and that it would be a bad idea to go against it just to see what would happen. Personally, what I do is that I will ask someone who I think would know the answer, and be able to explain the reasoning behind it.

After learning a lot of "good ideas" and "bad ideas," and what things are "safe" and "unsafe," you start to develop a kind of safety intuition: you have a funny feeling that what you are about to do is probably not the best idea in the world, but you're not entirely sure why. You can respond to that nagging feeling either by brushing it aside (if you are drunk, this is the more likely scenario), or by trying to think about what could be wrong with the picture and how it could be made a better idea.

This is why some of us have a billion alternate timelines where we are "that guy who dies in a stupid, preventable way that is entirely his fault." (Ladies, in these alternate timelines, you are male.) The difference between listening to your intuition and disregarding it is sometimes the difference between waiting for your lava lamp to heat up on its own, and heating your lava lamp on the stove enough for it to explode in a shower of glass. So, keep that in mind the next time you are about to combine two different cleaning products with the expectation of creating one Super Mega Cleaning Product.

Some days, God just wants to fuck with you

2009-10-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1565

Filling in for a ten year old girl is kind of a weird concept. The fact that God is saying it, it might seem like T-Rex's consciousness is going to be in the body of a ten year old girl. My feeling though is that God just wanted T-Rex to be some kind of substitute, and go to the girl's classes at school, hang out with her friends. He'd be the dinosaur wearing a nametag that says "Natalie" or "Mackenzie" or whatever it is that ten year old girl's are named these days. If you ask me, that is funnier than if he had to fill in for a ten year old squirrel.

As the title text of the comic tells us (there is a Greasmonkey script you can get to read these in-line with the comic), Utahraptor is hoping T-Rex is going to give one of the old standbys of what God is telling him. As we have learned by now, though, T-Rex never has conversations like that with God. It's a bit of a running gag at this point.

It could certainly be worse. If God called on T-Rex to go out and murder some dudes, then he would (probably) be schizophrenic, and that shit is bad news.

And if God called on T-Rex to be a prophet, and T-Rex refused, it could ruin his life. I'm not just talking about the way Jonah was called to prophecy and got swallowed by a giant fish. Many people who feel called to prophecy may spend years of their life doing something else until they realize they have to start serving God, that it is the only way to feel satisfied with themselves. (I've talked about something like this in a previous post. I don't know which one.)

T-Rex is similarly lucky that when the devil talks to him, he only wants to talk about video games.

Lessons in being an asshole

2009-10-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1564

T-Rex's auction is a nice hypothetical for game theory. And that is what it is, a game. Most reasonable people are going to stop bidding eventually, when the amount they stand to lose is far more than they can afford.

One way to play the game is to play a completely different game that has nothing to do with "winning." That game often goes by the name "griefing" when your intent is to ruin the experience for the other players. The best griefing method in this auction is to get into a bidding war where with the intent of making the other person pay a lot of money for nothing.

So, let's say that once you get to the $1 mark, you bid in $0.01 increments. If you get all the way to $1.50... jump to $2. The only person who's going to keep bidding in this auction is someone who is also griefing. At that point, the game becomes about who is willing to spend more money being an asshole.

I have the day off work today, so maybe later on I'll write some kind of primer in game theory. Right now, I have another comic to write about...

I know I am overanalyzing this, okay

2009-10-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1563

T-Rex seems to be the only person here who is day-dreaming about something unpleasant. All the rest are day-dreaming about how they wish T-Rex were a better friend, but then they let out a discontented sigh as they realize he is never going to be like that.

T-Rex is generally a bad friend. Not always, but generally. Of course, he also has some admirable qualities, mostly in that he comes up with ideas that are wicked sweet, and we wish we had thought of those ideas. It is common for a viewer to want to be the main character of a work of fiction, because they are often portrayed as being made of pure, flawless awesome. If we want to identify with T-Rex, though, we have to say to ourselves, "I am a dude with some awesome ideas, but I am also a terrible friend."

Maybe this is what is supposed to happen! Imagine that you are a terrible friend, who really could be doing more nice things for your friends. When you are in the store, see if there is anything that makes you think, "My friend would enjoy owning this!" Or, you know, you could also make something. That is a good alternative for the anti-consumerist.

Humans are more than just pooping machines

2009-09-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1562

The hierarchy T-Rex is talking about can be seen here.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the other ideas put forth by the humanistic psychologists, were in some part a reaction against other leading psychological theories at the time, those of the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts. Those ideas seemed to reduce people as just fulfilling their base desires, or mechanically responding to stimuli. Maslow was trying to develop a theory of human personality that respected the broad, over-arching goals that many humans have throughout their lives: the desire to feel loved and accepted, the desire to fulfill our potential, the desire to experience the beauty in art and literature. These are often things we seek out on our own, for reasons the behaviorists and psychoanalysts cannot satisfactorily explain (except in those cases where we do these things just to get laid).

Like any theory, it has its flaws, though it doesn't seem to be nearly as flawed as psychoanalysis. As a therapeutic approach, it works just as well as any other therapy. It also doesn't have much predictive value, because plenty of people will be so driven by goals at the top of the pyramid that they will forget about goals lower down. One such example would be the starving artist who is so devoted and engrossed in their art that they stop bathing and stop seeing the people they know. Such a person is admittedly an "outlier," but there are plenty of other examples of people who ignore their basic needs and safety in order to fulfull a higher goal. People can be pretty, um, driven. I want to say "crazy" but that is not actually what is going on and would totally be misleading in this context.

And I think people do care about basic safety when they need to poop. They just might make compromises on it. Like, if you were in a war zone, and you had to poop, and your choices were 1) poop in your hiding hole, or 2) go out and poop in the line of fire, the second option is going to seem pretty attractive when you consider how disgusting the first option is going to be.

I want to stop their for the sake of style, but the philosopher in me wants to add in one last bit, which is this: there is a slight additional problem that the top of the pyramid (self actualization) does not have a whole lot of data to back it up. However, Maslow's description of what self-actualization is like seems to be remarkably similar to Heidegger's idea of "authenticity" (Eigentlichkeit) in his book Being and Time. People who are self-actualized have a developed sense of morality, a tendency to act spontaneously, care about problems greater than themselves, and are more accepting of themselves and others. Whether or not the general humanistic theory is sound, though, it at least provides some ideas of how we can be happy and satisfied in our lives. And I'm kind of okay with that.

If you want ideas for this punctuation mark, I got nothin'

2009-09-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1561

When writing was first invented, it did not have punctuation in it. Most of it didn't even have spaces. There were various writing conventions to denote things like parentheticals, quotations, and starting a new sentence. Over the centuries, people started thinking it would be a good idea to start introducing punctuation marks for ease of reading.

Today, we have punctuation marks out the wazzoo (or up the wazzoo, whichever you prefer). From time to time, someone comes along with an idea to introduce a new punctuation mark. Some punctuation marks that never took off were the interrobang (a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point), and the "irony mark" (which resembles a backwards question mark). Some of the best evidence that they never took off is that you have never seen them in print, and you probably have not even heard of them, although there happens to be a joke band called The Interröbang Cartel.

The problem with the former is that it feels unnecessary. It is meant to be used for those situations where one is asking an exclamatory question, such as, "How much did you pay for this?!" We already have a convention for that: using both marks separately, sometimes repeating the question mark ("Who ate all the cookies?!?") Adding in a special character just seems like... more work, you know?

The problems with the irony mark, though, are a bit more philosophical. To start, deciphering a statement as irony or sarcasm is sometimes an interesting exercise for the audience, as they dig through the words being said to get at what is actually being communicated. It might be a useful mark for a single sentence is meant with sarcasm or irony, but what do you do with something longer than a sentence? If you were going to insert the marks into Swift's "A Modest Proposal," would you just put one in the title to say that the entire work is meant ironically? What about the songs by Electric Six, a band writing ironic butt-rock songs, which sometimes have a profound message that is not even lurking beneath the surface but is right there in the words?

There are so many potential uses for irony, along with the potential to create multiple layers of it, that the question of where you put the irony symbol quickly turns into something like a zen koan: the question has no answer, because the question itself is wrong.

I have a better suggestion of what to do: learn how to use the punctuation marks you already have, especially the colon and the semi-colon. Because do you know where the irony mark goes? Up your ass, bitches!*

-----

* - The words of this sentence are intended ironically while its message is intended in earnest.

To thine own chump be true

2009-09-27T00:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1560

The line T-Rex is talking about is in Act I, Scene III of Hamlet. Polonius is giving advice to his son Laertes, and it is basically about how to be a worthless tool who doesn't have an opinion of his own. This is because Polonius is a worthless tool who doesn't have an opinion of his own. He is "that guy," the one who doesn't commit to anything, and will support whatever seems popular. This is why it is ironic when he says, "This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man."

Many people interpret this line to mean something like, "You gotta keep it real!" Or, "Do what you want with your life!" Which is worthless advice, as T-Rex points out: "Some people's true selves are total chumps!"

There is another interpretation to the line, though, that might have some wisdom in it: if you are honest with yourself, then you will be honest in your dealings with others. It is very easy for us to lie to ourselves, and delude ourselves into believing things that we only want to be true. It seems like we only hurt ourselves when we do this, but we also have the potential to hurt others. We might promise to do things that we might not actually be able to do, or misrepresent what our goals and intentions are. If we are first honest with ourselves, and then equally honest with those around us, people can have more certainty in what to expect from us. For instance, they can expect us to talk about ourselves in the plural.

FRIENDS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY

2009-09-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1559

T-Rex might here be going for some rhetorical persuasion, but as logic goes, it's not exactly a sound argument. Even as rhetoric goes, it's the kind of argument that makes you feel like you're getting tricked.

It goes, "I am good at X. If someone else were not good at X, I would do X for them if they wanted my help."

If a friend cleans poop off of your porch, they are doing you a favor. It is not something required of them as a friend, but something they do of their own will simply because they are your friend. The way that you persuade a friend to do a favor for you is usually with an appeal to some kind of reciprocal exchange, which can either be something in the past or the future. You can say, "Remember that time I helped you with that thing? This is your chance to return the favor." Or, you can promise to help out in some way in the future, and this works best if you name something clear and explicit, like, "I will buy you a case of beer." What T-Rex might have to offer in this situation is a promise to clean up vomit for Utahraptor, or something else gross that Utahraptor simply can't deal with.

Your friend is still under no obligation to help you, though, until they accept your offer. They might give Utahraptor's response of, "But I'm STILL not cleaning raccoon poop off your porch."

In any friendship, there is going to be some give and take, and the amount that is appropriate will depend on how close the friendship is, and the amount of reciprocity that occurs. But the bonds of friendship can be stretched if one of the people starts to make unreasonable requests, or is unwilling to comply with requests. People of the latter type, it's still possible to just hang out with them, but people of the former type, we generally just stop talking to.

I do not think that T-Rex's and Utahraptor's friendship is in danger, though. For one thing, Utahraptor is in two of the six panels every single day, and giving him the silent treatment would be kind of difficult. But these ridiculous conversations are almost the bedrock of their friendship. To take them away would be like rain without rainbows.

Verbing weirds language

2009-09-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1558

You know, I just kept looking at this comic thinking, "I don't have a goddamn idea what to do with this." I'd go away, come back later, and then say to myself again, "I still don't have a goddamn idea what to do with this."

So let's talk about the verb form of this literary device. "Leitwortstiled." How does one leitwortstil a work of fiction? The obvious answer, I think, is to start with a work of fiction that already exists in some form (even if its existence is only in your head, and you haven't written anything down yet), and you introduce a leitwortstil as if this was a wonderful idea you just had to make the work better.

There is the broader question, though, of whether one can indeed make any noun at all into a verb, to which the answer is a firm, "It depends." The only determining factor is whether a person can understand what you mean from the given context. In T-Rex's use of "leitwortstil" as a verb, we know what he is trying to say, even if (in my opinion) he is completely wrong about leitwortstiling the word "frig." A real world example of a noun that has become a verb is Photoshop, which is sometimes abbreviated to 'shop. This is, of course, the act of radically modifying a photograph, usually through the use of Adobe Photoshop, to put things there that weren't there before, or vice versa.

A real world example of something that is not a verb is "tree," as used in the following context that I heard it from my roommate: "The dog treed the cat." [Editor's note: I have since determined that this is a perfectly cromulent use of "tree." See comments below.] What he was trying to tell me was that the dog chased the cat up a tree, where she stayed for some time as the dog barked at her. I was completely stumped, though, and had barely a clue what he was talking about. I asked him to repeat himself, and then said, "What on earth are you talking about?"

What we had here was a failure to communicate. The problem was not necessarily that I had never heard anyone else use "tree" in the way my roommate was using it, though it would have helped if I had. The more general problem was that for any usage of "tree," as a verb, that I could think of on my own, none of them would have involved a dog chasing a cat up a tree. To me, the most natural use of the word "tree" as a verb would be "to plant a tree, or several trees." I could see this being a useful shorthand for landscapers, or people who replant forests. I could even see my roommate's use of "tree" being used among animal and wildlife workers who see those kinds of chases happen regularly.

In neither of those scenarios, though, does it become a good idea to start tossing around that kind of terminology with a lay person. What you have there is industry jargon. There's nothing wrong with an industry having jargon, because they're usually doing specialized tasks that need a specialized language. Using jargon with an outsider, though, is going to lead to communication failure at best (as in the above example). At worst, though, it is going to be a dick move, because some people like to talk over your head and use words you don't understand in order to show how smart and important they are. But they're not. They're just dicks.

Genes, Memes, and Rick Astley (part 3)

2009-09-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

One of the purposes of slang is that it establishes an insider from an outsider, because the insiders know their slang, and outsiders don't. This is a valuable thing when exposure to outsiders can be devastating, like in drug dealing. If you want to buy drugs from someone you haven't met before, you will either need a formal introduction from someone else, or you will have to say bizarre slang words you've never heard anywhere else.

The most common source of slang in America is from urban black culture, with the words disseminating sometimes gradually, by pure word of mouth, and sometimes rapidly, by being incorporated into hip-hop music. (And I do not mean to imply here that all black people are drug dealers. However, I don't think any of you readers knew what "endo" or "chronic" were before Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre put them in songs.) Many consider a slang word to be "dead" once it reaches middle-class, middle-aged suburban America, because this class of people is the quintessence of "outsiders."

It is my contention that memes have become the internet's form of slang. The coolest people are the ones who know the most recent jokes, the ones recent enough that not quite everyone has heard them. The "lame" people are the ones who still think ancient internet jokes are funny (e.g., the people who think it's funny to say, "All your base are belong to us," without any context). As of this writing, the most popular internet meme that still has cool points is the Xzibit "yo dawg" jokes (e.g., "Yo dawg, I heard you like cars, so we put a car in your car so you can drive while you drive").

This is how many internet memes go: you take a basic joke structure, and make several different jokes out of it by making minor changes. I mentioned the Xzibit meme already; one other is the story from Command and Conquer 2, of the guy who said, "I am in your base killing your d00ds." Permutations of this formed the cornerstone of the lolcat meme:

I am in your base killing your mans
I am in your fridge eating your f00dz
I am in your pr0n collection, fappin to n00dz
I am in your sweatshop making ur sh00z
I am in your wine cellar drinkin' ur b00ze
I am in your bra squeezin' ur b00bz
I am within your base of operations, enacting fatal attacks upon your conscripts
I am in your base, stealing your intelligencez
im in ur dictionaries, verbin ur nounz

Generally, the more creative the permutation, the funnier it is. So, the original form of the Rickroll might have involved a duck (depending on who you ask), but as the joke became more popular, there became a design space to expand on the joke. Permutations have included:

Setting "Never Gonna Give You Up" as your ringtone, or a ringback
Randomly inserting the lyrics to the song in a handwritten note. For my girlfriend's birthday, I translated the song into Latin, and wrote it in calligraphy on the inside of a card.
Putting a video on YouTube that starts out looking like one thing, but then turns into "Never Gonna Give You Up." The first video I saw like this was titled "Muppet Show Bloopers," and had Beaker going up to a microphone, with the Muppet Show band in the background. He squeaked a few things, and then the editor dubbed in "Never Gonna Give You Up," end then edited the video to make it seem like Beaker was singing the song.
Limerick form:

There once was a man named Bertold
Who drank beer when the weather grew cold
As he reached for his cup...
"NEEEEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP!!!"
Oh, snap! You just got limerickrolled!

Even Nancy Pelosi got in on the joke when she started a YouTube account. The first video she posted started with cats playing in her office, and then turned into "Never Gonna Give You Up."

By the way, you know how slang is "dead" when it reaches white, middle class America? The fact that Nancy Pelosi knows the joke means it's time to give up on Rickrolling being funny anymore.

The next installment in this series will be the EXCITING CONCLUSION! Stay tuned!

Arthur Friggin' Schopenhauer

2009-09-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1557

Schopenhauer is pretty much the philosopher of pessimism. He was a hypochondriac, paranoid enough to sleep with loaded pistols next to him, and overall a complete jerk. (For what it's worth, many famous philosophers were also complete jerks, but it's not always reflected in their philosophy.)

Many of his contemporaries saw humans as primarily intellectual, or a kind of "meat robot," or a primarily intellectual meat robot, and they saw human progress as inevitably arriving at some state of perfection. Schopenhauer knew that was all bullshit. Humans are animals, and though they are rather smart, they are animals first, driven by personal motives and emotions. We will always need some kind of legal structure in place to keep us from killing each other.

As for the contention that we are living in the worst of all possible worlds, I don't think the argument holds up to scrutiny. For one, the fact that there is suffering at all does not mean there is a net amount of suffering when weighed against the joy in the world. Additionally, there are many other ways the world could have turned out that would make life worse. If the earth were different enough that there were fewer domesticable plants and animals, it would be far more difficult to develop agriculture and, consequently, civilization itself.*

I am thinking here of a world where no civilization advanced much further than pre-Columbian native Americans. If you think that would be a "good thing" because our species would be "more in touch with nature" and "more spiritual" than you are wrong and/or full of shit. It is a fickle existence where mere misfortune can kill your family and ruin your life. It's like a game of "Oregon Trail," where Buttface has died of dysentery, except there is no "end" to the game. So, the next year, Poop and Fart die of scarlet fever, and before you know it, you've had eleven children and run out of dirty names for them, so you kick yourself that it was only Kimberly and Thomas who lived to adulthood. That is the kind of misfortune I am talking about: a world where children with hilarious names never survive. And that's horrible.

Take that, Schopenhauer. In our world, we have people with names like Chip Munk, Anita Bath, and Dina Soares. There is no way this is the worst of all possible worlds.

-----

* - For a more in-depth study of this, you should read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." It's a very good book. It also made me want to play the game "Civilization" bad enough that I went out and got Civlization IV, and got addicted to it for a month or two.

I guess if the Care Bears were robots, Optimist Prime would be their leader

2009-09-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1556

First, I'm not entirely sure it's true that, by expecting the worst, pessimists are pleasantly surprised when things don't go so badly. It really depends on the kind of pessimist. Some people are just upset about everything, and when things go better than expected, they find something else to be upset about. Maybe that's not really pessimism. I don't know. I'm honestly not much a fan of "optimism vs. pessimism" conversations, because each one of those words can mean a lot of things, not to mention that there is middle ground between them. But if you had a battle between two robots named Optimist Prime and Pessimist Prime, I'd be all over that.

Moving on, I think I initially misinterpreted what T-Rex says in panel 6. What he is probably saying is, "If you're a pessimist, and imagining hard enough, life is going to seem so horrible that you are going to freak out over everything that happens. Like spider eggs hatching and tunneling out of your stomach." But I think that if you accompany imaginative pessimism with a good sense of humor, it makes life far more tolerable.

I've talked before about laughing at the horrible things in life. Sometimes, life is already horrible enough that you can laugh at it, because laughing at it is the only thing that keeps you from totally freaking out and totally losing your shit.

Sometimes, though, something happens that is just mildly unfortunate, and maybe a little frustrating. Nothing laugh-worthy, but you don't really want to complain about it too much, because you know some people have much more serious problems.

Like, say that you misplaced your wallet. You know it couldn't have gone far, but you just can't find it. It's got your credit card, your driver's license, and all your cash. It'll turn up eventually, but in the meantime, you are at an inconvenience. There's nothing funny about this, and it doesn't make for much conversation. "How's it going?" "Oh, dude, I can't find my wallet." "Aw, man, that sucks. Good luck finding it." "Thanks."

But let's say you let your imagination run wild thinking about what could go wrong without your wallet. Picture yourself getting pulled over and saying, "Sorry, officer, I don't have my license on me. I must have left it at the bar the other night before driving home. I was pretty wasted, y'know, so it's a miracle I even found my keys."

Or you could go the other direction, making a big deal out of something trivial in your wallet. "Oh, fuck, I can't find my wallet! And that has my portable periodic table in it! You know I can never remember the atomic number for bismuth!" (If you're wondering, it's 83.)

Use your imagination to make everything worse than it really is, because just like every mistake is a learning opportunity, every misfortune is a laughing opportunity.

If I could travel through time I would go back and tell the Greeks about science fiction

2009-09-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1555

A good science fiction writer not only writes something scientifically plausible (even if it is a little hand-wavey), but also shows us what the implications would be for what might happen if we had technology that we think we want. It usually starts with a "What if...?" scenario, like, "What if we developed submarines and underwater bases, and were able to explore the earth 20,000 leagues under the sea?" One of the reasons that science fiction became an established genre in the 19th century is that technology was progressing at a rapid pace, and had been for some time, so it started to seem prudent to examine where our technology was going, and whether we really wanted to do things like bring dead people back to life.

A thousand years ago, though, technological advancement in the West was pretty damn slow. The Arab empire happened to be hot shit, but aside from some of the stories in the Arabian Nights, they did not give us much one could call science fiction. Going back even further, to ancient Greece and Rome, even though they had scientific advancements that were changing their quality of life, fantasy was the dominant genre for fiction, and the stories they were writing far more often involved the gods and other supernatural things.

So, in the literature of the world for those 2,500 years, there were a few stories written here and there that one might say were more like sci-fi than fantasy. But it didn't become what you'd call an established genre until the 19th century, when you started to have writers contemporary with each other, and critics starting to recognize it as a genre in its own right.

Because I am a nerd, I once had an idea for how one might write a science fiction story set in the ancient world: machines like those used by Archimedes start to see widespread use, improving the quality of life for many people, most prominently by making farming easier and more prosperous. People start neglecting their religious rituals, and their religion in general, thinking that the gods have nothing to offer when machines provide all the prosperity they need. And then the ending of it would somewhat resemble "Godzilla vs. Gundam Wing."

Because I am a nerd, I was also going to write it in Attic Greek, on vellum, and otherwise do everything possible to make it appear that the story had really been written during that time period. Unfortunately, that project is currently taking a back seat to all of my other writing ideas, because who the fuck writes in Attic Greek.

Stupid Kobans. What's so great about you if you're all dead?

2009-09-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1554

The progression of popular notions in a culture happens, for the most part, in generation jumps. As far as prejudice goes, it's almost exactly as T-Rex says. This is why I would be surprised if gay marriage were legalized at the national level any sooner than the next ten or twenty years. By then, more baby boomers will have kicked the bucket, and more young people will have grown up to become voting age. And the thing about these young people is that they will have grown up living in a world where some states allow gay marriage, but not all of them. In all likelihood, they will be unmoved by scare tactics about how much society will crumble if we allow gay marriage, because they will have examples to look to.

There are also things like technology and political ideas that work this way. The technology you grow up with is just normal. The technology that gets introduced between the ages of 18 and 35 (or so) is really neat. After that, everything is just devil magic. If you are reading this blog at all, you probably are not old enough to see any technology as devil magic (except maybe cell phones, which can be devil magic at any age). But think about how your parents and grandparents react to technology. Maybe they double-clicks on internet links. Or they try to talk internet slang and completely fail, because it's basically a law of the universe that parents cannot talk the slang the kids are using these days. If you have tried to introduce your grandparents to the internet, it has probably been a disaster, and you answer questions all the time that seem like the stupidest thing in the world.

Of course, this isn't what happens all of the time. One of the "ascendingest" players in Kingdom of Loathing is a grandmother in her 50s. She has played through the game more than five hundred times. Though it is more difficult for people to learn new skill sets when they're older, it's not impossible, and people do it all the time.

Likewise, you're never too old to take up a progressive political cause like gay rights. Contrariwise, you're never too young to complain about kids these days, with their pants, and their music, then shake your cane at them as you yell, "You damn kids get off my lawn!"

But really, is there anything that DOESN'T make me think of Transformers?

2009-09-16T16:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1553

What is satisfying about a mystery is that it is a puzzle we turn over in our heads, trying to solve. If we can't figure it out, when the detective finally reveals what happened, there is a feeling of, "Oh my gosh! It all makes sense now!" I'd like to say that I could have done this with "The Sixth Sense," given enough time, because I was noticing some things that seemed pretty weird.* Like, if I had to stop watching the movie before the "reveal," and the next time I watched it, I had to watch it from the beginning, that might have been enough time for me to figure it out.

T-Rex's idea here is not, properly speaking, a mystery story. It's another one of his "ahead of its time" experimental fiction ideas, and I think I like it a lot better than the last one. The trope of the "unreliable narrator" has been used many times, but the trope of the "disinterested narrator," as far as I know, does not exist. It would probably work best if the story became less about solving the mystery, and more about a corrupt detective making stuff up because he's not interested in legitimately solving the case. "L. A. Confidential" is a bit like that (a story about uncovering a police corruption mystery), but T-Rex's added element is that the narrator is not at all interested in telling the story as it unfolds, and is instead focusing on interior decoration. The readers are left to unravel the police corruption themselves, with no help from the narrator.

This makes me think of Michael Bay's "Transformers" and its ill-begotten sequal. The original cartoon was about robots from space having battles with each other, and there were a couple of humans who played supporting roles, but it was mostly the robots. Michael Bay's "Transformers" is not so much about robots from space as it is about a shy, unpopular teenager's romance with a smoking hot chick, in the midst of some robot battles that are not nearly as important as product placement and Megan Fox's breasts. And "Transformers 2" is about Michael Bay's obsession with military hardware, in which everyone else plays only a supporting role. Tanks! Aircraft carriers! Jets! Battleships! These are on the screen far more than the robots or the humans. I'm glad I got as drunk as I did for that movie. I just regret that I did not get a second date with the girl I saw it with. Katie, if you're reading this, you should totally come over to my house so we can watch The Pirate Movie.

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* - I generally attribute weird things to bad writing, which is one of the reasons I don't like reading mysteries very much. Too often, what is meant to be a clue, I attribute to bad writing.

He lived a long and prosperous sixteen years

2009-09-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1552

This is why it is "better" for a person who is 50 to die while skydiving, rather than a person who is 16. A teenager is young, and full of hope and potential and blah blah blah. But that is also a huge investment on which no one will ever see a return. The fact that old people die with vast stores of accumulated experience and knowledge is just a basic fact of death, and will happen to anyone at any age.

It takes a tremendous amount of resources to raise a child, most of which can be quantified as a dollar value. For instance, it will cost your parents $1 milllion to raise you to the age of 18; this is both in actual money spent because of you, and foregone opportunity costs from work. Then there is the cost in tax dollars from public schooling, and other such things.

When you add up all the numbers, the average person has not made a positive contribution to society (as far as dollars are concerned) until their late 30s. If you cannot see the value in "investing in our children's future," think of it as an investment in society itself that will pay off decades down the road.

And as a slightly political footnote, this is one of the reasons America was so prosperous during the middle part of the 20th century. The GI bill financed a great many college educations, and then there was a lot of investment in science education in order to "fight" the Cold War, and produce world class scientists. Much of that has since been cut, mostly by the Reagan administration, and today the US is no longer #1 at anything we would like to be proud of.

Probably more than you wanted to know about my sex drive but whatever

2009-09-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1551

Sexual attraction is only partly about a pretty face and a nice body. A person also has to get our minds racing in some fashion. For T-Rex, one extra "oomph" is appealing to his love of flappers and old timey fashions. (I'm sure there are others. What T-Rex likes in a lady has a fair amount of canonical continuity.)

Maybe you know all of this already, that the brain is the largest and most powerful erogenous zone in the human body. You should keep reading anyway.

I enjoy looking at naked ladies as much as the next heterosexual dude, but I am equally interested in what she is wearing before she gets naked. I admit that it takes some amount of skill to artfully photograph a naked lady, but it takes more skill for her to start out dressed fashionably, then have her remove the clothing in a sexy manner with a satisfying progression. The lingerie industry exists because of this.

I work for a print shop that is basically the McDonald's of print shops. We print a lot of stuff for a lot of designers, and design students, who for some reason are often incredibly attractive. Quite a few of them brighten my day just by being in the store. There is one, though, who isn't that attractive physically, but I'd rather go on a date with her than any of the others, based solely on her artwork. One piece had a giraffe looking out a window, with a bunch of flowers growing outside the window. Another had a unicorn, a rainbow, and an accordion all in the same picture, which is a combination that makes my brain say, "Fuck. Yes." There's another girl (not a designer, as far as I can tell) who, in addition to being stunningly attractive, has a bitchin' haircut and a lot of beautiful tattoos.

Now, I don't want you to get the wrong idea here, gentle reader, that I am the kind of person who judges a woman's worth based solely on whether I find her attractive. It's just that checking out ladies at work is the only thing that breaks the tedium, and otherwise I am just standing there staring off into space. If you have worked retail for for than a few months, you probably know what I am talking about.

Getting back to the comic, T-Rex's rating policy sounds a little silly, but he definitely has the right idea: if 10 is going to be your maximum, you should only give a 10 to those women who are stunningly gorgeous, and excite your brain. Otherwise, you have to start raising your ceiling, and say, "Oh, she's an 11 out of 10." Which is ridiculous. It's not even funny. "Why don't you just make 10 a little hotter?" "But... she's an 11."

It's interesting that T-Rex labels the extra point five as being for "emergencies." As if there could be a sexiness emergency. Okay, yes, there are definitely sexiness emergencies... and now that I think about it, this is not that bad of an idea. I should probably develop a sexiness emergency plan, because so far, my reaction mostly involves becoming speechless, then either trying to pretend that there is not a sexiness emergency, OR to try to think of something witty, clever, and/or sexy to say. So, perhaps I will spend this weekend coming up with a "Sexiness Emergency Plan."

There are probably some much better blogs than mine

2009-09-14T12:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1550

I'm definitely a fan of the things that T-Rex is talking about. I like to laugh at the horrible things in life, and laugh at how terrible life is.

It's a bit like this: there are so many posters and mugs and knick-knacks out there trying to get you to buck up and be optimistic. Sometimes, though, life really is pretty awful, and there is nothing you can do about that. Last year, for Father's Day, I set up a store in Cafe Press to make shirts and mugs saying, "Not Exactly the World's Greatest Dad," with the "Not Exactly" part in smaller letters on top. I also made shirts that said in big letters, "CREDIT RISK." I was pretty pleased with myself, but I am not sure that I sold anything. Maybe some day I will print and market the shirts myself, or something.

There is an ironic value in these things, in the sense that people do not often celebrate their failings in life, nor (to get back to the subject) do they remind people of how horrible life is. (I get reminders every goddamn day, I really don't need any help.) At the same time, though, it is up front, brutal honesty. It feels more genuine to have a mug that says, "Maybe Mondays Aren't the Problem; Maybe I'm the Problem."

Is this post-irony? Some kind of post-modern fusion? Fuck if I know. But there is a value in confronting and embracing the worst aspects of life, and choosing not only to embrace them but to laugh them as well. It beats the heck out of trying to evade these things for the majority of our lives, and have it all catch up to us when we're too old to do anything about it.

If you also happen to enjoy laughing at these things, you should probably check out A Softer World (which you have probably heard of) and Joshua Green Allen's Twitter (which you probably have not heard of). The latter has such gems as...

Guess who made some brownies?? Seriously, guess. TAKE A FUCKING -- actually, I'm not sure. I found them on the sidewalk. They're pretty bad.
I said I can undo a bra with my feet, she asked what my feet were doing later, I said probably running away from some angry topless lady.
I tell people I met my wife at a methadone clinic because it's easier than trying to explain the internet.

Seriously, you should go read it.

Keep your friends close...

2009-09-13T08:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1549

When T-Rex finds someone to get vengeance on, it seems like he could use Urban Dictionary to do that. Then maybe try a Google-bombing. Better than thinking of an acronym, though, would be to turn their very name into something unpleasant. That seems like a much better way to get revenge on someone. If you do it right, then their name will live on for centuries, and people will use the word even when they don't know why it means what it means. For example, nearly anyone who uses "McCarthyism" as a word can tell you that it came from Senator McCarthy's hunt for communists in the '40s and '50s.

But the best example of naming something after your enemy is one you probably don't know of: the Molotov cocktail. During World War II, for plot-related reasons, the USSR went to war with Finland. The Soviets were dropping cluster bombs on Finland, but the their foreign minister* Vyacheslav Molotov completely denied this, saying that what they were really doing was delivering food to the starving Finns. The Finns started referring to the bombs as "Molotov bread baskets," and the Molotov cocktails they started throwing at tanks were "drink to go with the food."

Finland ended up losing the war, but they turned it into a war of attrition, and it lasted much longer than the Soviets hoped.** This is not exclusively because of the Molotov cocktail, but it certainly helped.

So if you have an enemy you want to get revenge on, don't just make up a dirty acronym with their initials. Any corporate tool can think of a backronym. Go the whole hog, and turn their very name into something awful.

And it's definitely a nerdy thing to say internet acronyms out loud when one is talking in meatspace. It's like, you're not even typing. What are you economizing on? It takes more time to say "double-you tee eff" than "what the fuck."

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* - Technically, he was the "Commissar for Foreign Affairs" but that is pretty much the same thing.
** - Sound familiar? It sounds like war is governed by Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

Running behind schedule

2009-09-11T14:07:00.000-07:00

I recently experienced a service interruption with my internet, and I know that I still need to post about Thursday's and Friday's Dinosaur Comics. Things should be back to normal by Monday. And I'll probably post an additional something non-Dinosaur to make it up to you. Because I love you, dear reader. I love you so much.

My passion for you inflames my arse ropes

2009-09-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1548

T-Rex makes it seem like Wycliffe's Bible was generally pretty silly. Exactly how silly, I cannot say, but my Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that his translation was consulted when compiling the King James Bible.

I definitely see the merits in making things like this accessible to everyone everywhere, especially since I grew up a WASP. If the scholars can make an interpretation of the Bible that gives them more power, there is potential for them to cleave to that interpretation regardless of how true it might be. They are also more likely to have interpretations that maintain the status quo of their church, since reformist interpretations can be career suicide (and Wycliffe himself was thrown out of Oxford for doing just this).

The problem with populism, though, is that it brings Biblical interpretation to a lower level. It's no longer about coming up with an interpretation that has a scholarly defense, or is in any way inspirational, but instead becomes about whether your interpretation and your silver tongue can persuade people into following you and giving you money.

With that in mind, there is something to be said for keeping Biblical interpretation in the hands of the educated. Each book of the Bible has a specific context, audience, and genre. There are scholars who spend their entire lives trying to determine how to interpret the Bible, and converse with other scholars on the subject. They are closer to the truth than the people who pick up the Bible and want to read it without any context whatever, and then pick and choose passages to mean what they want it to mean.

But then, I'm just a pointy-headed, ivory tower intellectual.

On another note here, T-Rex speaks often of "evidence we are not living in the best of all possible worlds." Leibniz claimed that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, because God, being perfectly wise, powerful, and good, has a moral obligation to choose the best among possibles if he decides to admit any possibles to existence. Because it is possible for our world not to exist (not just the planet Earth, but everything in the universe), then that makes it something possible God admitted to existence.

Is it a convincing argument, even if one believes in God? I can't say. If I've ever read something he wrote, it was back in my intro philosophy class. Maybe I'll save it for another post, on another day. I will say this, though: what T-Rex thinks would be the best possible world might not really be possible. I can see "arse-ropes" being a colloquial dysphemism, but it is unlikely it could be legitimate medical jargon.

Here, the T-Rex, have a trophy!

2009-09-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1547

A trophy is a symbol of an accomplishment. Now, I'm not a competitive person, but I would say that people who compete do so for the sake of being recognized as the best. It is only on television that I have seen people obsess about a trophy qua trophy.

I have a book called The Simpsons and Philosophy, and all but two of the essays in it are very good and worth reading. (Those other two are boring drivel that robbed me of precious moments of my life that I could have wasted doing something else frivolous.) My favorite of the essays is "Enjoying the So-Called 'Iced Cream': Mr. Burns, Satan, and Happiness," by Daniel Barwick. To paraphrase, one of the reasons that Mr. Burns is unhappy is that he sees the world in abstractions. F'rinstance, in the episode where he joins Homer's bowling league, he does so only for the sake of acquiring the trophy, and completely misses half the point of bowling leagues: hanging out and drinking with your friends. When Mr. Burns takes the trophy, it becomes a symbol for an accomplishment he really had no part in. "[T]he result is that the original thing that is symbolized ceases to exist, at least in any pleasurable way. Unfortunately for Mr. Burns, it is the original thing that he truly needs for happiness."

This is not to say that this is how T-Rex is acting. If anything, I would say that it works in reverse: because the trophy symbolizes an accomplishment, by having the trophy, he can pretend to have accomplished something he didn't really do. Or, he might have an ironic perspective on it, thinking it rather funny that he has a trophy for winning a track meet.

Utahraptor steps in, though, and makes T-Rex realize how awesome it would be to instead making novelty trophies. The intention may have been to prevent T-Rex from filling his house with trophies for things he didn't do, or just plain ruining everything forever. The trophy then becomes a souvenir for a friendship, allowing it to once again symbolize something real and actual. Even if Dromiceiomimus can't really appreciate hers. And now that I think about it, I am pretty sure that when she dies, unless Utahraptor can stop him, T-rex will make her epitaph read, "DROMICEIOMIMUS: THE CLASSY DAME WITH THE SIX-SYLLABLE NAME". He'll go on explaining, "Yeah, that's totally what she wanted. She even had a trophy with that inscribed on it!"

Genes, Memes, and Rick Astley (part 2)

2009-09-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

We all know plenty of catch phrases that have been repeated and parodied enough that you can stick any word into them and people will recognize the phrase. The accepted term for this is a "snowclone."

What people on the internet tend to call "memes" usually start as snowclones. One of the earliest (and I know some came earlier, such as the "Mr. T Ate My Balls" fad) was, "All your base are belong to us." When the song and video made for it became popular enough, "All your ____ are belong to ____" became a popular joke template.

As technology has developed over the years, these snowclone memes have since come to involve images, sound, and video. In my first introduction to lolcat macros, all of the images were some permutation of, "I'm in ur [noun], [verb]ing ur [noun]."

Some internet trends have gone a little farther in the amount of creativity involved. For example, there are quite a few "literal videos" on YouTube, where people sing what is happening in a music video, to the tune of that music video. The most well-known one is for Total Eclipse of the Heart. It starts out:

(Pan the room)
Random use of candles, empty bottles, and cloth
And can you see me through this fan?
(Slo-mo dove)
Creepy doll, a window, and what looks like a bathrobe
Then a dim-lit shot of dangling balls

It has a lot of great lines in it, such as, "They shouldn't fence at night, or they're going to hurt the gymnasts. Why do they play football inside?"

So if we were to distill down the essence of what an "internet meme" is, it's variations on an idea, theme, or template. WhatPort80 (the SFW version of Encyclopedia Dramatica) has a pretty good explanation of this, so I won't go too far into it. But I would describe that page as being "worth reading."

The most popular and effective memes are the ones that have the most room for creativity. This is probably why one of the worst memes I've seen so far is "Subtitled Hitler," where people give their own subtitles to the pivotal scene of the German film "Der Untergang," in which Hitler finally realizes that he's lost the war. Some of the ones I've seen include "Hitler plans Burning Man" and "Hitler gets banned from World of Warcraft." The problem with these videos is that the first one you see might be entertaining, the second is less so, and after that, you just want to put your face in your hands and wonder why people even bother. Really, all you're doing is putting words onto a video and they don't even match the dialogue that much. Give up already and find something else to do.

Genes, Memes, and Rick Astley (part 1)

2009-09-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

I couldn't think of anything to say about today's Dinosaur Comic, so I'm going to post the first part of a thing I've been working on. Enjoy.

-----

The word "meme" has been tossed around on the internet quite a lot, at least since the year 2001. 2002. Something in that area. I'd like to discuss what they are, what they aren't, and what they mean. After I've done all of that, I'll dissect all of the memes at work behind "Rick Rolling."

What a meme is has its roots in genetics. That sentence might make it seem here that it's "turtles all the way down," and you may be right, but I'm trying to start with the lowest interesting turtle here. Genes contain instructions for doing stuff in your body, and they are turned "on" and "off" as the need arises. Some of them are only "on" while you are growing, and some stay "on" all the time.

Some years ago, Richard Dawkins started to make popular the idea that genes are inherently selfish. (See his book "The Selfish Gene," if you want to learn more.) We tend to think of ourselves as organisms that spread ourselves by using genes, but it is equally true that genes use us to spread themselves. The idea has been very useful to biologists, because some mysteries of evolution made a lot more sense when they started thinking of things the other way around.

Within the same work, Dawkins is credited with inventing the word "meme" to refer to a unit of cultural transmission. Whether a meme is successful enough to get passed on can depend on a lot of things. To give one example, "You should care for your children" is a fairly successful meme, because it encourages the survival of those children, who can grow up to be vectors for the "care for your children" meme. But the seemingly harmful meme "it is noble to die for Christianity" survives because it brings a lot of attention to the religion, and the people of the religion talk in glowing terms about their martyrs. The meme only works because of all the other positive benefits people got from being Christian in the first three or four centuries of the religion.

In the next installment: "snowclones," and how internet memes fit into "traditional" memes.

Friends help you move. Real friends murder you IN SPACE.

2009-09-03T16:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1545

T-Rex here puts Utahraptor into a moral and/or semantic dilemma. What T-Rex describes could be better construed as "assisted suicide," but it doesn't have to be that way.

Here's how this could work: T-Rex is terminally ill, and decides to live out the rest of his days IN SPACE. He accepts the fact that he is going to die, and makes the best use of his time by, I dunno, taking to zero-G flower arrangement. Some kind of hobby. Additionally, he tells Utahraptor to murder him at some indeterminate point in the future, when T-Rex still has several days left to live, at the very least. It will be a surprise! T-Rex will cower in fear, crying, "No, Utahraptor! I know I don't have much time left, but I'm not ready to go yet!" And Utahraptor shouts, "You wanted to be the first murder in space! There's no other way!"

Whether national or international laws apply IN SPACE is kind of murky.* It's entirely possible that an independently owned ship would be exempt from the law, the way that boats are when in international waters. The court would first need to decide whether the law even applied in this situation before they decided whether it constituted murder. Utahraptor's situation could also be improved by arranging a contract with T-Rex stating that there was some level of consent involved here. Then the headline would be, "First Dude Murdered IN SPACE! And It's Totally Legit! Nobody's Going to Jail!"

So long as there isn't a woman President, and people start referring to her husband as "the First Dude." Then that headline would be totally confusing. People would be all, "Oh no! Todd Palin is dead! He had so much life ahead of him!" And that would be terrible.

-----

* - Yeah, sure, there's a Wikipedia entry on space law, but I don't have the patience to wade through that and figure out if it applies to murder. It's got all this junk in there about treaties and shit. Maybe if you pay me like a lawyer, at about $100 an hour, I could figure it out. Maybe I should set up a PayPal donation button...

Pop Music Ponderings vol. 2: Tori Amos

2009-09-03T15:23:00.000-07:00

Last time I posted, I talked a bit about Trent Reznor's particular brand of atheism, and the way he replaces God with sex.

Today I want to talk to you about Tori Amos's own "lack of god," for I hesitate to conclude that it is atheism. Rather, it is more like a guilt complex that is fairly Christian-centered, but with Jesus absent from the equation:

I've been looking for a savior in these dirty streets
Looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets
I've been raising up my hands--drive another nail in
Just what God needs, one more victim

Why do we crucify ourselves
Everyday I crucify myself
Nothing I do is good enough for you...
And my heart is sick of being in chains

Some forms of Christianity (notably Catholicism) place a lot of emphasis on guilt, because all of our sins are absolved through Jesus. It is a bit like the way that modern marketing works: you convince your audience that they have a problem that can be solved with your product. "Feeling tired? Run-down? Feel like you don't have any purpose in your life? Do you feel like you have done unspeakably horrible things and now nobody will ever love you? Maybe you need Jesus in your life. Ask your doctor if Jesus is right for you."

If this were true at face value, that we are all horrible sinners who can be saved through Jesus, then there would not be a problem here. But what happens when you convince yourself that you are a horrible sinner... and Jesus doesn't really make you feel any better?

This is the problem faced by the speaker in "Crucify": she is looking for a savior other than Jesus, and in the meantime, she cannot forgive herself for anything. (If you want to continue the marketing analogy, this is similar to how pharmaceutical advertising can make a hypochondriac out of the most ordinary person. And if you are in any kind of bad mood, Zoloft can help you.)

The thing is, making mistakes is just part of what it is to be human. (For more on this, see my post regarding Pi Approximation Day.) If you're not making mistakes, then you're not really living... and that itself is a mistake, so I guess there's no way around it. Mistakes do not always have to be regrets--at best, they they can be learning experiences, with the mistake itself being just an "oh well" kind of thing. Burning your toast is not all that big of a deal, but now you learned something about how not to make toast!

This is not to say that it's okay to make mistakes indiscriminately. It's also important to prevent mistakes as best we can, and plan in advance for a worst case scenario. "What could possibly go wrong?" should not be a rhetorical question: one should form a mental list of the things that can go wrong, how they can be avoided, and whether they are an acceptable risk. There is a variety of safe and unsafe ways to cross the street, and each one of them carries some amount of risk that you will be hit by a car. Sometimes it's an acceptable level, and sometimes it's not.

Unfortunately, sometimes we make mistakes big enough that they are difficult to forget. Sometimes they stare us in the face every day of our lives, be it literally or figuratively. We run them through in our heads over and over again, thinking of ways it could have been done differently, things we should and shouldn't have done. This is the self-cruficixion Tori Amos is talking about. (Maybe... let's assume it is.) Adjusting to it or getting over it is usually a lengthy and drawn-out process. Commonly, the most effective part of the healing process is when one goes beyond mere acceptance of the circumstances, and becomes appreciative of the amount one has learned from this experience: about oneself, about loss and sacrifice, about life itself.

But the acceptance has to come first. If you're stuck in the other four stages of grief, you're just going to crucify yourself every day.

Background Teen in Green Shirt is really pretty hot

2009-09-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1544

[Optional note that you don't have to read: the organization of this post might seem a little bit jumbled. I'm thinking in two or three dimensions here, but can write in only one dimension. And, y'know, it's a frickin' blog, so I'm not going to spend three hours trying to make sure the writing flows together.]

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is perhaps the most famous work that draws attention to what T-Rex is talking about here. The work follows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as they play out their roles in Hamlet, having witty dialogues with each other when they are not on stage. They learn of their impending demise while on the boat to England, but learn too late to do anything about it. (I recommend that you read the play, and/or see the movie. If you see someone in your city preforming it, though, proceed with caution, because it requires some strong actors in order not to be dreadfully boring.)

T-Rex takes this idea one or two steps further: focus on background characters, and then have them interact with main characters. This is something you see very rarely, and it's only ever presented as something comedic. One example would be the "Scooby Doo" ending of Wayne's World, in which they pull the mask off of "old man Withers," who by that point you probably even forgot was in the movie. So why doesn't anyone use this device in a serious manner?

Well, as anyone who has even looked at fanfiction can tell you, fans are fucking crazy. Each of them is going to have his or her own idea of which main characters should date/boink/marry. Having a main character marry someone the audience has never heard of would be a slap in the face to most fans. If you doubt me, you should pay attention to the press's reactions to whom celebrities date. If a celebrity is already married when they become famous, no attention is paid to their spouse. But when they are already famous, it is inexcusable for them to date anyone but someone who is also famous. (It is okay if the fans haven't heard of the person so long as he or she is famous elsewhere, or just fabulously wealthy.) You're not allowed to fall in love with your makeup artist, unless your makeup artist also happens to be smoking hot, in which case he or she is probably going to start doing some modeling work.

This is why Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are Hollywood's darling couple: they are celebrities who are married, and it is working out so far! So many other Hollywood marriages crash and burn, but they are doing great! Of course, before Brangelina, the darling couple was Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. So, y'know, let's hope things work out for Brad and Angelina.*

Now, let's suppose that you are making an innovative work of fiction that is defying tropes left and right, and, among other things, the characters have romantic entanglements only with background characters and supporting characters. You might develop a niche following, but most people will not be all that into it. This is because the things with mass appeal tend to use the same tropes simply because, if you want mass appeal, they work.

I am reminded here of when Adlai Stevenson was running for President. Allegedly, a supporter said to him, "You're sure to get the vote of every thinking man in America," to which he replied, "Thank you, but I need a majority to win." The analogy is thus: in the realm of movies (like "Star Wars"), a cult following is not what any major studio wants, because of the cost of producing the movie, and because so much of what gets you more work in Hollywood is being able to point to recent successes. "The Princess Bride" is a good example here: Cary Elwes went on to do "Robin Hood: Men in Tights," but nobody else in that movie did anything significant.**

However, for music and fiction writing, a small but loyal fan base is very good for you in the long run, because it gets you a small but steady income even after you stop producing anything. "Gravity's Rainbow" comes to mind, which is heralded as being one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, but the number of copies in print is probably not even close to a million. Elvis Costello broke into the US top 40 only once, but you probably couldn't name what song it was. (Hint: it was not "Pump It Up.")

Never forget that quality is a long-term investment.
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* - SPOILER ALERT: they both die! But that isn't for like another 40 years.
** - Yes, Mandy Patinkin has gotten a steady stream of work since then, but if you can name something he's been in, then you are a nerd. This is not to denigrate you but merely to point out that because few people in America could name anything he's been in, that means he hasn't really gotten any major work since "Princess Bride." QED

On becoming Batman

2009-09-01T12:00:00.001-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1543

There is something somehow universal about Batman as a superhero. My theory on it (and there are many like it, but this one is mine) is that we feel like any one of us has the power to become Batman if we wanted to. Because he does not have any super powers beyond just being fabulously wealthy, it seems like any of us could be Batman if we wanted to. Nothing radioactive involved, no secret military experiments, just having his family murdered in cold blood and then spending ten years training to be a ninja.

So, if you want to be a superhero vigilante like Batman, what you need to do is spend three hours a day studying martial arts, and on your weekends, study how to be a detective. If you are wealthy enough not to have to work, you have the added luxury of not having to hold down a job at the same time, and then you can devote twice as much time each day to becoming the goddamn Batman. You'll be in decent fighting shape in two or three years, and at your peak in ten years.

If you are still a teenager, get started right now! If you are in your 20s or older, it is probably too late for you. In ten years, your body will be past its peak. You wanted to be Batman when you were a kid, but there was something else more interesting than that, and you did that instead.

This means that there is something you are already good at, and your time would be better spent developing that. That is how these things usually work. "Nobel Laureate Hubert Smartypants first became interested in science when he was six years old and started playing with the chemicals he found under the sink." It is the rare biography that says, "After working as a lawyer he decided he actually wanted to study solid state physics, earning his PhD at the age of 45. His inventions are now found in every electronic device manufactured."

Which is not to say that a midlife career change is a bad idea. It's just that the person who does that kind of thing usually has wanted to do it for a very long time, and then suddenly said to themselves, "I never really wanted to do this, you know. I wanted to be... a lumberjack!" (Or whatever.) And so it's better to start being a lumberjack or a physicist or Batman as soon as it's possible. Then you spend your years thinking of how much you love your job instead of how much you'd rather be doing something else.

In which I say nothing at all about the current banking crisis

2009-08-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1542

[Quick note: I would appreciate it if anyone could help me modify my blog template in order to make the text column wide enough to accommodate putting the comics in-line. The way it is now, it either clips off the comic, or displays it in such a way that the layout looks really ugly.]

I heard when I was younger, from... someone... maybe a sitcom... that it is a bad idea to owe a friend money. I did not understand exactly why, until I owed a friend money I couldn't pay back within any reasonable length of time. It ended up destroying our friendship (though I did, in time, pay back the money). An additional lesson here might be that you shouldn't borrow money you can't pay back, especially when it's from a friend.

But I'm going to talk here about loaning money, even if it doesn't specifically apply to Shortpants or my former friend. I am going to turn to the Bible for this. Though I am mostly an atheist, I think there is a lot of good stuff in the Bible, if one thinks of it in terms of "just plain good advice" rather than "do this because God said so." (And really, I think the "because God said so" parts are there for the obstinate douchebags who want to respond to everything with, "Yeah, well why should we?")

In the Torah, you are allowed to charge interest to gentiles, and profit from them, but you are forbidden to do this to another Israelite. This is mentioned in different ways in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.

In Luke 6:34-35, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return." (This passage does not appear in the other gospels, as far as I can tell.) On one interpretation, Jesus is coming along and saying, "When you lend, don't charge anyone interest, no matter who they are." That interpretation is substantiated by his general message that when you are to love your neighbor, that means everyone, even if they're a Samaritan or some other ethnic group people hate.

Taking the passage literally,* though, Jesus is saying much more: lend to anyone you can, and don't expect anything in return, not even what you loaned. There are Christians in the past and today who have taken the stronger reading, though I couldn't tell you who, because I have no idea where I would find that sort of information.

Suppose you think of it this way when you loan money: you say, "Sure, you can borrow $100. Just make sure you pay me back sometime." In your head, though, that is $100 you will never see again, so you should only do this if you can really afford to be out $100. Then, when your debtor really does pay you back, it's like they just gave you $100! You're like, "Wow, I'm going to buy so much booze with this money!" And isn't that awesome? It is totally awesome.

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* - Beware of anyone who starts talking about a "literal" reading of the Bible. Most of the time this means taking things out of context, but I think you'll see that I mean something very different in my use of the word "literal."

Vagueness is not what you think it is

2009-08-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1541

I am forcing myself to start writing in this blog again, because I thought of a brilliant format change: each day there is a Dinosaur Comic, I am going to write about that comic and post as soon as I can. Some days will be more philosophical than others, naturally, but I will try to make the writing as interesting as possible. All other writings will be, um, posted as I write them. I have some things I'm working on right now that I will post just as soon as I get to it.

Now let's talk about comics, because, dudes, have I got a comic for you. I took a whole class on this goddamn subject. Philosophers call this problem "vagueness," which is not what it sounds like, so I sometimes call it "metaphysical vagueness" to clear up any confusion.

The paradox that God and T-Rex are discussing is called the Sorites paradox. It is not named after a person, but literally means "heaper." My favorite such paradox is this one: you get a bucket of green paint, and a bucket of red paint, okay? And you get a giant stack of tiles. You paint a tile with paint from the green bucket, and then you add a few drops of red paint to the green bucket. Repeat for every single tile until the very last tile is made with pure red paint. Each of these tiles is going to look virtually identical to its neighbor, but look very different from, say, a tile ten spaces away.

Now, you set these up in a big room, maybe a warehouse, snaking around the room so that they start out green, and gradually become red, and come around to have the pure red tile meet the pure green tile. (I sometimes imagine doing this as an installation art project, where you walk in the door and have green on your left, and red on your right. But I digress.) The question is now, where do the tiles stop being green, and where do they start being red?

The problem with answering that question is that, no matter where you decide the point is, you can hold up two neighboring tiles, tiles that look virtually identical, and say, "One of these is green, and the other is not." Which seems ridiculous.

Okay, you look confused. You're saying, "I still don't see how this is a problem. Why don't we use T-Rex's solution?" So let me explain to you something about how philosophers think. For them, truth and logic are part of the very fabric of the universe. For any question that statement that makes grammatical sense (e.g., "This tile is red"), there will be a corresponding truth value of either "true" or "false." You don't get to say, "Eh, well, it's kind of true..."

This is why some philosophers have made logical systems that have multiple possible answers. Fuzzy logic, for instance, assigns a truth value that ranges between 0 (completely false) and 1 (completely true). Another logical system goes for trivalence instead of bivalence, adding an answer like "indeterminate" in addition to "true" and "false". The problem with these alternative logics, though, is that when you start using logical operators with them, you start getting strange results that are a departure from traditional logic.

This class was one of the reasons that I had a falling out with analytical philosophy. Much of the literature seems to have, in its background, the premise that our language can precisely describe the world as it is, all of the time. But our world precedes language. Whatever color each of those tiles is, they will be that color no matter what words we have for those colors. The universe doesn't care how many grains of sand make a heap. Furthermore, no matter what a tongue-clucking grammarian says, language is all about how people use it, and whether the way that they use it successfully communicates what it is they want to say.

This is why my favorite answer to the Sorites paradox comes from Timothy Williamson: "there is an answer, and we cannot know it."* Imagine that you are looking at a crowd of people in a stadium, trying to determine how many people there are, and let's say that the precise number of people in the stadium at that moment is m. You know that m must be at least 10,000, maybe as high as 20,000, but you do not have the ability to count the number of people accurately. No matter which method you use to count the people, you have no way to tell whether you have arrived at m, or if this is actually m + 1, or m - 1. You could just guess the number of people, but if you were correct, you would not actually know the number of people, you would merely have a lucky guess. (That sort of thing only works when you when a prize for guessing things like how many jelly beans are in a fish bowl.)

My personal answer is a trivalent logic where the third option is "mu," preferably pronounced to sound like a cow. (Someone with more knowledge of Japanese or Buddhism is probably going to object to what I am about to say next, and to you, I respond: shut your trap.) Literally, "mu" means something like "no," "nothing," and "no-thing." It is an answer that is beyond affirmation or negation, and kind of negates a question by saying that the question itself is wrong. The most well-known example in the Western world is, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" But some other examples in philosophy include, "Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?"

Try giving this answer in your next philosophy class. When your teacher asks, "How can you be sure that you have knowledge of the outside world?" just say, "Moooo." I guarantee that you will get positive results.**

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* - If you're really interested in this subject, this comes from Williamson's book. Guess what it's called? That's right. "Vagueness."
** - This is not a guarantee.

Pop Music Ponderings vol. 1: Nine Inch Nails

2008-08-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

The early work of Nine Inch Nails is pervaded with atheism, and explicit rejection of traditional morality. The interlude into Job last week was because "Terrible Lie" is a condensed version of Job's lament:

Hey, God
Why are you doing this to me?
Am I not living up to what I'm supposed to be?
Why am I seething with this animosity?
Hey, God
I think you owe me a great big apology.

The parallel is a fairly close one: "I have done nothing wrong. So why does everything suck so much?" But the difference is that instead of waiting for an answer, Trent Reznor just abandons God, and goes off in search of something else redeeming.

For the most part, that something else is sex. In "Sanctified" he says, "If she says give it all I'll give everything to her / I am justified, I am purified, I am sanctified inside you." In the well-known "Closer" he says, "I want to fuck you like an animal... you get me closer to God."

The most elaborate statement, though, is in "Suck":

She makes it sweeter than the sun
I get too tight I come undone
I bow my head to confess
The temple walls are made of flesh
Runs up my arms 'til I'm on track
Itches my skin right off of my back
I'll heal your wounds, I'll set you free
I'm Jesus Christ on Ecstacy

There are not many other examples, because honestly, the metaphor can only go so far, and be used so many times. But it's just enough to form a kind of ideological statement: "As far as I can tell, everything I have been told about God is bullshit. The only thing that makes me feel the way I'm told God should make me feel... is sex. So I am going to replace religion with sex."

To get slightly pretentious for a moment, this is the postmodern problem of religion: our culture is heavily influenced by Western Christianity, and pervaded with its symbolism. If you don't believe in God, then there are these great structures of symbolism that point to nothing. So... what if you think of something else for them to point to? You don't have to make it point to something... but boy, don't you want to?

Bible Talk: the Book of Job

2008-07-31T18:28:00.000-07:00

Some of you know the basic story of Job: he was prosperous, then lost everything he had, but he persisted in honoring God. For his perseverance, God repaid him double what he lost.

That was, at least, the story I was told when I was growing up. There is more to it, of course. As the asshole says, "It's a little bit more complicated than that." (The tl;dr version of this post is at the bottom, after the dashes.)

It starts with "the adversary" (the first appearance in the Bible of the word "Satan") saying to God that Job is only pious because he is prosperous. If he were no longer prosperous, he would curse God to His face. So, Job goes from having thousands of livestock, hundreds of slaves, and ten prosperous children, to having nothing at all but his wife. Then he gets sores all over his body. (Maybe it's leprosy. I dunno. Back then, every skin disease was leprosy.)

Three of his friend show up, to try to comfort him. They do a terrible job of it. They provide a shining example of the worst way to comfort a friend who has just lost everything and now looks like something out of a zombie movie. The dialogue is kind of like this:

Job: "Fuck this shit. I wish I had never been born. I wish I were dead. Compared to this, being dead would be awesome."
Friends: "Well, God disciplines those who have done wrong. You probably did something wrong, and he's teaching you a lesson."
Job: "No, I didn't. Some friend you are."
Friends: "We mean it. Why would God be unjust? Your children probably did something that made them deserve to die. If you were totally blameless, this wouldn't happen to you."
Job: "I didn't do anything, though. Seriously. And how can you defend yourself before God? He's, you know... God."
Friends: "Yeah, he probably knows more than you do about what you've done wrong. God kills wicked people all the time. He wouldn't do this if you hadn't done something wrong."
Job: "Okay, you know what? You guys are full of shit. Bad people prosper all the time, and good people die too soon. Also, you are terrible at this. Worst. Comforters. Ever."
Friends: "But..."
Job: "No. Look. I will name for you a dozen things I could have done wrong, and I swear that I did not do any of them. Now, I want to know why God did this to me."

So then God shows up, and he is sassy as all get-out. Nowhere in the Bible is he this sassy.

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! ... Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Surely you know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great!"

Oh, snap!

Job doesn't respond with much more than, "Okay, I'm just going to shut up now. I thought I knew what was up, but I don't."

God finishes by turning to Job's friends and saying, "And you guys! You're even more wrong than Job is! What the hell is wrong with you?" And then he gives to Job double what he had lost. And they all lived happily ever after.

------

The story that many people take away from this is that God will pay you back when he takes things away from you. In my opinion, though, these people are not paying a lot of attention to the rest of the story. What I take away from it is this: "Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and it's nobody's fault. If you're asking, 'What did I do to deserve this?' then you are asking the wrong question, because God does not work the way that you think he does."

Now, I hope you can see how this might be vaguely related to philosophy. Even if you don't, it is relevant to some of the things I will be writing about in the coming weeks.

Adventures in Ethical Relativism

2008-07-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000096.html

Let's get one thing out of the way right now: if you ask me, T-Rex is subscribing here more to egoism than ethical relativism. I'm not going to talk about egoism right now, but one of its biggest problems is that it is in a separate volume from ethical relativism in my Encyclopedia of Philosophy. They weight, like, five pounds each. It's kind of a hassle.

Moving on. Ethical relativism comes in many flavors, and they all taste bad. Let us start with T-Rex's flavor, that if A thinks it is right (or wrong) to do X, then it is right (or wrong) for that person to do X. If you believe this is true, then it is right for me to punch you in the face in order to convince you that it is false.*

The comic later gets into a different flavor of ethical relativism: there is considerable uniformity to moral standards across cultures, such as condemnation of homicide and cruelty. Granted, in some cultures, there are some circumstances where you are obligated to kill someone (e.g., vendettas and honor killings), but to kill a person without justification is always a no-no.

The issue becomes a little confused at the end of the comic, where T-Rex says that there are people out there who are okay with just about any atrocity you can name. If he wants to continue believing in his brand of ethical relativism, he will have to accept that there are people out there who think it is right to do things he thinks are wrong, and that he cannot judge them for this. I do not think this will last long, because when one gets down to it, one finds that there are people in this world who think it is right to do things that are unequivocally wrong.

For more on ethical relativism, I refer you to this excellent discussion.

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* - Or is it? I leave this as an exercise for the reader.

Pi Approximation Day

2008-07-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000955.html

Today is 22/7 in international dating, which is Pi Approximation Day, a day to celebrate ~~failure~~ approximations of success. Because failure is just success rounded down.

On the surface, it sounds like a silly idea, but it actually contains some nuggets of wisdom: some people have a lot of things that they want to do, but they never try, because they are afraid of failing. Eventually, you have to realize that when you start doing something, you are going to suck at it, but you also have to go through those first stages if you ever want to get good at it. In the meantime, you have more experience than those people who have never tried.

The most obvious example here is in athletics. Suppose that you are not a very athletic person, and never have been, but you want to join your school's cross-country team. You show up to every practice and every meet, you try your hardest... and you're just not very good. Perhaps you are the worst on the team, the one they give the "Most Improved" trophy to at the end of the season. Now, if you really want to become good and win some races, you could continue running every day for the next year, and compete with next year's cross-country team. But even if that doesn't interest you, you are still a better runner than you were before, and you are probably in better physical condition than you were before.

Ze Frank has an excellent video on this subject. He calls these ideas we never use "brain crack," because they provide us with some kind of comfort when things get rough. He goes on:

"Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals. And everyone's clapping for them. But the bummer is most ideas kinda suck when you do 'em. And no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time. And you're almost guaranteed the first time you do something it'll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who's still dreaming of all the applause. When I get an idea, even a bad one, I try to get it out into the world as fast as possible, 'cause I certainly don't want to be addicted to brain crack."

So, today, I suggest you do at least one thing from the following list:

Think of the things you have done in your life that you failed at and/or weren't very good at, but that you are better for having tried.
Go and do something that you have thought of doing for a while, and get that brain crack out of your brain. (This blog happens to be my own attempt to rid myself of the brain crack.)
Approximately eat pie (perhaps by smearing it all over your face), or eating an approximate pie, such as a tart or a quiche.

Revival!

2008-07-17T19:05:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed (okay, you probably didn't) that I have not updated in two months. When I started this blog, at the time, I thought that I had enough spare time in my life to update this once a week. It turns out that I didn't. But I do now!

So, my current goal is to update twice a week: I will post something from Dinosaur Comics, and then I will post about something else vaguely philosophical from popular culture. I am currently looking at postmodern attitudes toward religion as expressed in popular music from artists such as Tori Amos and Trent Reznor. However, I reserve the right to post about things that don't have to do with philosophy, but I will try to be sure that it is interesting. (Or else, why would I post it here?)

After about a month of this, I will be convinced that I can maintain this schedule, and then I will start advertising and stuff, and saying, "Tell your friends!" For now, though, I am like, "There isn't much to see here. Though I appreciate that you enjoy what is here."

So. Stay tuned.

Adventures with nihilism

2008-05-02T16:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.qwantz.com//archive/000014.html

First, what exactly is nihilism? I don't think we can pin down "exactly" what it is, so let's go with "roughly." Because you know I like it rough.

Nihilism was originally a kind of intellectual anarchism: all ideas should be held up to rational scrutiny, and what doesn't hold up should be discarded. The upshot of this tended to be atheism and moral skepticism, which was fairly shocking to many thinkers of the time. Mind you, this was the late 19th century, and many people still clung to the belief that ethics can only come from a divine lawgiver. (cf. Euthyphro: "Well then, what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious.")

One of the best formulations of nihilism came from Nietzsche: "One interpretation of existence has been overthrown, but since it was held to be the interpretation, it seems as though there were no meaning in existence at all, as though everything were in vain." (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 5-6, p. 515)

The term "nihilist" has been watered down quite a bit in the past hundred years, partly because the word is used most often by religious people who want to use it as an epithet, like with "atheist" and "witch." And it's used quite often by dumb teenagers who have just started reading Nietzsche, not realizing that Nietzsche was actually opposed to nihilism.

Anyway. History lesson over. Down to brass tacks.

T-Rex is touching on a lot of different ideas here.
1) Values are baseless, and reasoning is impotent.
2) Nothing can be known or communicated.
3) Destruction is the natural response to this metaphysical collapse.
4) Life is absurd, and it is futile to do one's best in an absurd world.

Whether any of this counts as nihilism is not important; the term "nihilism" has always been a little vague, and these ideas seem a little more in line with existentialism (says the man who has studied the latter, but not the former...)

1) There is some truth to the statement that moral values are logically baseless. One of the things that has fascinated me in my study of ethics is that I am convinced ethics exist, but cannot pin down where or how, or how one might go about determining what they are. The best I have come up with is "it has something do with one's common society," which is not an answer that will satisfy anybody.

2) It doesn't happen to follow from what T-Rex says that nothing can be known or communicated. If he means nothing can be known infallibly, or communicated infallibly, then he is certainly right. But he is probably asking too much from the world if he expects infallibility, like expecting the milkman to also bring you bread, eggs, whiskey, and all of your other groceries, in addition to the milk. It is clear, though, that we do know things, and that we do communicate with each other.

3) ... this totally doesn't follow. Unless you want to talk about metaphysical destruction, in which case, this does not cover destruction of the log cabin.

4) Life may be absurd in the sense that its values are groundless and radically contingent, but it is up to each individual to decide on how to react to this. The key for the existentialists (and don't quote me on this) is that in a world where meanings are not inherent, we must attach our own meaning to things. Some people do their best at learning the natural sciences, while some people do their best at keeping up to date on the latest television shows.

Yeah, that's right. I said it. It is important to me to be up to date on American Idol and Family Guy. DON'T TRY TO FORCE YOUR VALUES ON ME!

Contemplation vs. Destruction

2008-04-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

A preliminary word: for the most part, I am starting at the beginning of Dinosaur Comics, and working my way forward. The advantage to this is that most of them are so old that you have probably forgotten about them. The comic I'm writing about today? More than FIVE YEARS OLD! From time to time, though, I might "mix it it up," and comment on a comic that is only a few days old.

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http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000013.html

This comic seems to set up a dichotomy between living one's life to its full potential, and living a life of contemplation. The two things, in fact, go hand in hand: one's life can only reach its full potential by including some amount of contemplation and reflection.

More appropriately, Utahraptor's question is about whether T-Rex is better off contemplating than he is destroying. Under most ethical systems, the answer is, "Yes, you are better off contemplating than destroying." You can spell this out in any number of ways. Questions in ethics usually center around when it is okay to do something that seems to be bad. Usually, it has to be for a good cause, and the more immediate that cause, the better. Killing someone who is right in the middle of killing other people? Go for it. Killing thousands of people as part of your plan for a utopia? Not so much. An end does not justify its means; the means have to be able to justify themselves.

Now, if you ask someone like an egoist (think only about yourself) or an Objectivist (do what's in your self interest), they will tell you different. But nobody asks them much anyway, because they're usually assholes.

There is a third thing going on here: T-Rex is "living life to the max" by being more conscious of the experiences of his day, and consequently having a greater appreciation for them. The sentiment of this is understandable, but it takes far more concentration and brain power. It is said, though, that this is what Buddhist enlightenment is like, a constant experience of the now.

As to whether dinosaurs have souls... I'm not going there.

Inaugural post: on the philosophical necessity of dinosaurs being awesome

2008-04-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

(My goal with this blog is to talk about the philosophical subjects that are explored in Dinosaur Comics. Today, though, I am going to be talking about something tangential.)

It is a widely accepted fact that dinosaurs are awesome, both in the objective sense of "inspiring awe", and in the colloquial sense of being "hella wicked, dude" (or whatever the slang du jour happens to be). If you ever need to know what to buy a young child, be it male or female, you cannot go wrong with something dinosaur-related.

Thinking about this the other day, it occurred to me that it is necessary that dinosaurs are awesome (i.e., in all possible worlds, dinosaurs are awesome). As I explored the subject, complications set in at every turn. Would I have to backpedal into something tautologous, like, "Dinosaurs are awesome in every possible world in which they are awesome"? Let us then consider the reasons that dinosaurs are awesome.

The first is that most of them are really big, far larger than any living creature we have seen. The apatosaurus was 75 feet long, the largest known land animal to have ever existed, and most other dinosaurs people can name are larger than any other animal alive today.

The second is that dinosaurs have qualities we do not see in other animals alive today. Many of them, such as stegosaurus and triceratops, look like something out of a mad scientist's laboratory. And nodosaurus? COVERED IN SPIKES! They all have this fantastic quality about them, with the added virtue that, unlike fantasy creatures, they once existed.

Reason number "two and a half" here is that dinosaurs evolved into birds. I say "half" here because it is a crapshoot whether any given person will find this to be interesting. It is not quite as important as the above two reasons, so I won't consider it further.

So, now that we have established why dinosaurs are awesome, it stands to reason that dinosaurs would not be awesome just in case reasons 1 and 2 above were not true, or were unimpressive.

Reason 1 could not fail to be impressive, because of the sheer size of some of the largest dinosaurs. Even if humans were twice as big as they are today, they would still be dwarfed in comparison to the brachiosaurs. So, dinosaurs might not be awesome if they happened to be not incredibly* huge.

But this wouldn't matter if reason 2 were still true, and still impressive. If a triceratops were roughly the size of a komodo dragon... it would still be pretty awesome. So the fantastic features of dinosaurs would have to pale in comparison to the other things around, perhaps in comparison to some Lovecraftian horror. This leads us into further questions of biology, about whether it would be possible for dinosaurs to evolve into something even more awesome. The point is fairly moot, so I will put it outside of consideration.

Practically speaking, then, reasons 1 and 2 cannot fail to be impressive by themselves, and become more impressive when combined with each other. This means that dinosaurs are awesome in all possible worlds in which they are quantitatively similar to the way they are in this world. Now, dinosaurs are natural kinds, so if natural kinds are rigid designators (and this is a contentious point), then it is necessary that dinosaurs are awesome. Q.E.D.

* - This word can be taken in the classical sense of "unable to be believed," since it describes most people's initial reactions to the largest dinosaurs. "I don't believe it!" "Well, we have here a vertebra that is 1.3 m in length." "No wai!"