Two Weeks Unnotice

            So I’ve decided to unquit my job. My quarter life crisis is winding down and it looks like I’m going to end up at the same place I started out.

Everything I’ve tried after quitting my job hasn’t turned out as expected. Writing didn’t work, because the stuff I’m motivated to write isn’t stuff anybody would want to read (like my dreams). I still enjoy writing, and I still want to do it. I just don’t expect it to be profitable in any monetary way. Drawing a comic didn’t go well, because I’m not a skilled artist, and I don’t have the drive to become one. Ideally, I would like to continue my comic too, but it just takes so much more time than writing, and I end up with a product that I’m never completely happy with. My comics is indefinitely on hold until I can find a better way to do them. Doing nothing was actually the worst thing I tried. The mix of guilt, ennui, and inner turmoil made it one of the most stressful periods in my life. I don’t know when I picked up the idea that any unproductive free time was something to feel bad about, but it really messes me up. My current alternate career move was to study physics, and it hasn’t turned out like I’d hoped either.

I really just wanted physics to be engineering with more math. It turns out that science and engineering have completely different way of doing things, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Science seems to be about answering questions, and is concerned with the truth. Engineering looks to solve problems, and is interested in what’s functional. Personally, I have a hard time finding interest in truth, since I don’t really believe it exists. Function, on the other hand, is something I always get excited about. In the end, I care more about how things can be useful or how I can improve them, and I don’t much bother with why or how things do what they do. In school I'm taking science and engineering courses side by side. This has made me realize that I’m not cut out for science, but I've fallen back in love with engineering

What led me to engineering originally was a desire to improve the world around me. I went with civil engineering because I get more of a feeling of accomplishment from having big concrete (or steel) examples of the projects I’ve worked on. It’s hard to beat being able to watch a new road, bridge, sewer, earthwork, or building take shape. Standing back when it’s finished knowing that you had a hand in creating it. Knowing that it was improved by your involvement. It’s also fun being able to congratulate everyone on another fine erection. Subjectivity can take all the fun out of scientific discovery, but even I can’t doubt ten miles of pavement or a few thousand yards or earthwork. Civil engineering also has great puns.

During the time I spent away from engineering, all the reasons I had for quitting my job have faded away. All the motives I had for becoming an engineering in the first place have come back. Some of them stronger than ever. Since the scars have healed, I’m going to take down my old two weeks notice post. I just want to move on from all that shit. I learned a lot in the last year and a half, but the most important thing is that I got question of what I should do with my life right the first time.

G'nite 2014

Nighty Night and Sweet Dreams

The end of another year and all was ok at the Alps ….. the nightly emails continue to flow and my grandma continues to be stupendous … I wish to share this stupendousness through graphical representation …. Up first as is appropriate, is the weather …. another good year which saw me move from Pierre to Rapid City … Thankfully the temps in Pierre were still reported so there wasn’t a break in the data …. looking at that data I’d say I made an upgrade in terms of climate …. so gates

Warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer

There were almost 600 fewer degrees in Rapid City

Throughout the range of the family the weather was lovely …. as usual Gold Canyon was the hotty and New Rockford was wintery with the others a variety in between

Rapid City's 58 degree average beats Gold Canyon's 88 any day

Granny Elaine’s days were often spent baking so everyone stayed fat and happy … sewing kept her busy working on quilts, dish towels, pillow cases, and table cloths …. of course all this work resulted in the occasional nappie ….

 

March 17th was a busy day

 

Someone learned how to make a Venn Diagrams

Evenings were often spent at a card table ….. Bingo brought home roughly $113 dollars … forty nights costing $2.00 each would mean a profit of $33 for the year … There were thirty three games of dominoes played …. she won three times but it’s still not her favorite game …. Pinochle playing was on the decline with only 14 matches played resulting in 13 wins and 15 losses …. Golf was played as a last resort only three times in the last year, and it’s still regarded as a stupid game …. I always enjoyed it when I’ve played it, but I was also playing with a girl I had a crush on during my math class instead of working on the assignment so my perceptions may have been skewed ….. Roughly half of the nights of the year were spend playing Hand and Foot …. the boys showed no mercy and won 117 out of 184 games … bummer dude …. Hate when that happens

A couple of bad streaks

 

Ouch

Speaking of bummer dudes, it was another great year for catchphrases …. so gates showed up 449 times at a new record of 1.35 time per email …. Vashislous also had a good year with 42 occurrences … just look at the graph

Dudes where bummered over fifty times

It was a good year for G’nite emails in general …. I received 333 in 2014 and I may have even missed a few due to a mailing list issue early in the year …. They were sent at a much more reasonable times this year with only a few popping up in my inbox after midnight

I wish I was this reliable

 

12:00 is actually noon this time

The closing quotes were plentiful and varied …. because of this, my method of recording them didn’t hold up very well … the categories I tried to sort them into ended up being arbitrary and asinine ….the most common subject was on the trials of motherhood, which is an understandable coming from a mother of 13 children …. I’ll leave you with two that spoke to me personally …. And now it’s time for this not very ole grandson to get to bed …. I hope you all have had a good year and all is well with all of you….Take Care and I Love You All So Very Much … Cob …

“GOTTA BE TOUGH TO GET OLD METHINKS”

“IT IS BETTER TO GET SOMETHING DONE LATE THAN NEVER.”

Duck Facts

            It’s been I while since I’ve written anything, but what better way to come back than with more Duck Facts! Let’s just say that I have spent this hiatus in tireless research so that I could share these new and amazing facts about the universe’s greatest animal. Here they are:

1. A duck’s strength is proportional, by volume, to 42 Arnold Schwarzeneggers.
2. Duck webs are stronger and lighter than carbon nanotubes.
3. The pyramids were built by ducks.
4. Ground duck horn cures impotence, and also cancer.
5. In ancient Assyria the duck was a symbol of virtue.
6. Ducks are invisible to radar.
7. If you combine duck poop and diesel fuel you get napalm.
8. Cows with perfect karma are reincarnated as ducks.
9. The preening oil produced by a duck’s uropygial gland is waterproof, fireproof, blocks 99.99% of UVA and UVB rays, and smells like lilacs.
10. Ducks have 12 lives.
11. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to ducks on a macroscopic level.
12. If you stare into a duck’s eyes you can see the meaning of life.
13. There is no word in the Finnish language that rhymes with duck.
14. Humans share 102% or our DNA with ducks (they have all of ours, plus some).
15. If a woman weighs the same as a duck she’s a witch (ducks also reverse newtification)
16. In Soviet Russia, ducks hunt you.
17. I would never lie about ducks.
18. Duck tears reverse aging.
19. Male ducks have a corkscrew shaped penis that can be up to 25% of the length of their bodies and is capable of explosive erections.
20. Ducks can survive indefinitely in vacuum and can withstand temperatures ranging from 6 to 1282 Rankine.
21. Some West African ducks have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment.
22. If a fox mates with a duck it produces a red furred flying mammal. It’s called a dox (nobody knows what it sounds like). If a dox breed with a ram it will give birth to a large wooly flying mammal, with horns. It’s called a rox. If a rox and a salamander have sex the baby is giant red flying lizard with horns that breathes fire. It’s called a shit.

Who's laughing now?

Subjectivism

            The ongoing quest to reduce all my thoughts, opinions, and actions down to a single source has hit another milestone. Previously, I’ve written about my ego and its desire to have no needs, and it’s been almost a year since I described my aversion to compulsion (how the time flies). I’ve kept digging and have found a pattern of subjectivism below everything. Subjectivism is basically a belief that truth isn’t singular and depends on how you vied it. This view of truth covers everything; from if a song is good, the speed and direction of a moving object, the color of a shirt, or the mechanism by which air is necessary to combustion.

Songs, or any art for that matter, is a good example since everyone has different opinions and preferences on the subject. You might say this is because it is a complex subject that depends on highly variable tastes, but the way so many people state the quality of art as an inarguable fact makes me think that they believe their opinions are the objective truth (objective being the opposite of subjective, where there is one truth and all others are false). I believe that all thoughts on art are equally valid and have even gone so far as to say that the subjectivity is what makes it art. How a song makes you feel is something that is uniquely true to you, and even if you don’t agree with a single other person that can never make you wrong.

 

I don't care what anyone says, One Night In Bangkok is my best song ever

For speed and direction let’s say a car leaves St. Louis headed West at 75 mph. But what if you view it from a car doing 80 mph in the same direction? Now the car is moving East at 5 mph. What makes a velocity relative to the surface of the Earth truer than a velocity relative to anything else? It may have more utility, but it isn’t any truer. The Earth is rotating and moving through the solar system so it’s not like it’s a constant reference. Plus the solar system is moving through the galaxy and the galaxy is moving through the universe. Don’t even get me started on how the universe itself is expanding and how the constant speed of light throws a whole new twist on everything. Even without relativistic effect the speed and direction of any object is completely dependent on what you measure it against.

            Color requires me to get a little more abstract to describe how it is subjective, so stay with me. The simplest example is just when you have an uncertain color that will be described differently by different people. The same hue could be described as cyan, aqua, teal, turquoise, bluish green, or greenish blue depending on who you ask. With the aid of some color charts you could probably get most people to agree, but this is assuming everyone views it under the same conditions. Add in factors like differences in lighting, angle, and distance (or monitor settings) and even the same person can see the same color in completely different ways. The same hue can look different under incandescent, florescent, and sunlight, not to mention under just different kinds of sunlight. What makes any one color the true color? This hasn’t even involved the fact that I think different people could view the exact same shade differently due to purely mental differences, which is an idea that completely blows my mind. Stuff doesn’t really change from green to red very often (unless you shine only red light on it, in which case everything becomes a shade of red), but subjectivity isn’t about anything being true, it’s simply that more than one thing can be true.

 

Looks aqua to me

            The mechanism by which air is necessary for combustion is an oxygen and phlogiston reference. I’m a big fan of phlogiston as it’s one of those Baroque period scientific theories that is a really elegant and reasonable explanation of events, but when viewed with more modern scientific evidence is completely false. Until Robert Boyle came along, people believed that combustion was due to phlogiston, a sort of elemental fire, escaping from a substance. The surrounding air needed to be circulated so it wouldn’t become saturated with the phlogiston. We now believe that the process is actually oxygen reacting with the substance and the air must be changed to replenish the supply of oxygen. I would argue that the discovery of oxygen doesn’t make the theory of phlogiston any less true in its time. People then believe in it just as much as people believe in oxygen now. Belief in oxygen may have a lot more evidence, but I don’t think that makes it inherently different from the historical belief in phlogiston. It’s not that we could go back to a phlogiston theory, but maybe oxygen doesn’t work exactly how we think it does. You never know when another Boyle will come along and find some evidence that throws everything back to the drawing board.

            Those are some examples of how I view subjectivity, but that doesn’t really explain the effects it has on me and my life. Since this is basically a continuation of my post about compulsion, I’ll explain how it ties in with that. Essentially, embracing subjectivism means that I view different opinions and viewpoints as equal. My beliefs are no more true than anyone else’s, and theirs no more so than mine. Compulsion is one person forcing their way of thinking on another, and that strikes me as wrong. Presenting evidence and working to bring someone to a different point of view is persuasion or informing, which is okay, but forcing a full conclusion is compulsion, which isn’t cool. An example of how I feel about this is pulling out into traffic. If I’m waiting to turn onto a street but pulling out would mean someone already driving along the road would need to slow down then I won’t do it. The other driver probably has a plan to drive along the road at a roughly constant speed, and by pulling in front of them I’m forcing a change in this plan (compelling them to slow down). Just because I desire to get to where I’m going a little bit faster doesn’t give me any right to interfere with someone else’s desire to reach their destination as soon as possible. The burden is on me to respect their desires because I am the one making the choice of when to pull out. I’m in control and can change my own plans without affecting theirs, but the other drive can’t really do the same. This whole situation is greatly complicated if someone is waiting to turn behind me, and usually results in me panicking. But then given a choice I’ll go for the one that least impacts other people.

            Subjectivism also makes me really skeptical. For me, all truth only exists when viewed from a certain perspective and who is to say what it would look like when seen differently. I can believe that the Titanic sunk because it hit an iceberg based on what some history book tells me, but how can I be certain that if I were to actually witness the event I wouldn’t see that it was actually sunk by a time traveling Russian submarine (11 year old me’s theory). The iceberg seems a lot more likely at the moment, but one good piece on evidence could easily shift the balance the other way. I already mentioned my doubts about oxygen. I believe in oxygen because the idea is useful and it can help me explain and predict the world. This doesn’t mean that I would ever say that it’s objectively true, and I’ll always maintain a belief that it could be false. This suspicion of falsehood is something I can and do apply to everything.

 

Is that some Soviet era submarine paint scraped off on the side there?

            After all that theories and opinions are still important to me. In fact they are the thing I find most important. I usually can’t care less about facts and figures, and when I do it’s only in relation to the conclusions that they support. I’m really bad at remembering a person’s eye color or birthday, but I’ll remember if they don’t like the Talking Heads or if they wanted to be a veterinarian growing up. I remember these things because they interest me. This is why I don’t like small talk but love debate. Small talk is usually just an exchange of facts: the weather sure what nice; I grew up in some town; this one time this happened; none of that matters to me. I care about opinions and the ideas that support them: I liked this movie because it made me think; my favorite kind of car is so and so because the styling is whatever, I prefer smooth over chunky peanut butter because it spreads better; this is what I want to talk about. Sure I don’t much care about which team people believe will win the big game, but it’s still better than a list of high scoring players or something. What I really like are ideas I don’t agree with since they present things from a new perspective. New information is always better than the same stuff you already know, and a discussion is vastly improved when it has more than one side. Different conclusions drawn from similar inputs is the core of subjectivity and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

            A subjective attitude isn’t all positive though. Depending on how you look at it, it can make me either easygoing or uncaring. I’m not competitive because I believe there are more ways to measure success than by who scored the most points, and I don’t get real upset things don’t go my way since my plans aren’t the one best way for life to be. I consider these good things since they help reduce stress and conflict. Not so good is the fact that I often don’t take things as seriously as I probably should. I have a tendency to simply drop out of troubling situations or feelings with an “Eh, it doesn’t really matter”. Sure this helps me get over mistakes and stuff like that, but I don’t think that it is always the most mature way of dealing with problems. There is a lack of that extra amount of motivation need to solve some problems so they just end up unresolved. Having embraced subjectivism also means that I’m always just one short step full blown nihilism, ennui, or solipsism, which is scary. A love of utility seems to be all that holds these unproductive views at bay. Now that I think about it, desire for utility is another major factor in my personality, but this post is about subjectivism so let’s forget about it (for now).

            To wrap this up, I don’t think that truth is concrete but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. It may be dependent on a specific point of view and initial assumptions, but truth is still useful. Or maybe I’m wrong and objective truth is really a thing. Eh, it doesn’t really matter.

My Religion Part Three: And It Was Good

 There are a few things that I don’t have covered with my quasi-religion. Most of them have to do with my antisocial tendencies, and subjective beliefs. Let's take a look shall we.

To start, I don’t have a place where assistance can be summoned from outside of one’s self. I’ve got no one to pray to and no supernatural force from which strength can be pulled. This isn’t a problem because I feel that everything a person needs can be found within. If I need inspiration I can just look at all the accomplishments of humanity and know that I am a part of that. If humans can go into space, I think I can deal with any of my troubles. We’re all chocked full of potential, and belief in yourself is the best help a person can have. This system requires independence and personal responsibility and those are good traits to encourage in my opinion. If you do need a little extra help, hopefully other people can supply what you need.

Speaking of other people, I lack the community aspect that organized religions offer. I have no set place to go, ceremonies to perform, or group to associate with. A joiner I am not, so I don’t feel much of a loss. Individual and unique views are a good thing in my opinions, and I come to most of my conclusions through self-reflection and an ongoing quest to reduce my ignorance. Some may like to delegate these tasks out, but I like to keep it in house. Without a group it’s hard to develop an “us vs them” mentality, which can help reduce conflicts. I do get a little scandalized when I hear someone doesn’t believe in evolution or something like that, but I try not to hold it against them. A generally subjectivist philosophy helps here, since I believe there is no absolute right answer to any question. A variety of different opinions is just more interesting. I mean, it’s hard to have a good discussion about a topic in which everyone agrees.

On a bit of a side not, I dislike how grand many places of worship are. When your building is funded by charity, I would think it best to keep the cost down. I understand that the point is to inspire awe and a sense of grand scale, but I think that is a job for the ideas and not the buildings. I also have this objection to government buildings. 

This is why North Dakota has my favorite capital building

Nobody is imbued with any special status in my view. I have no priests, saints, martyrs, messiahs, castes, saved, or damned. There is no supernatural metric I hold to by which people can be judge as better or worse. Mental gifts of physical talents can separate people and everyone has developed different skills, but these can be surprisingly insubstantial. Money and social connections can also give advantage, but in the end all of these things are so often borrowed and traded that they aren’t that hard to come by. An individual’s past can also have causal effects on their future, but these are by no means always rational. Enlightenment is an idea I almost adopt, but it implies an endpoint which is something I don’t have. Collecting knowledge and answering questions are goals of mine, but this is a process that will always be ongoing. I can’t imagine there will be a point where science finishes its journey. I also have a near saint like regard for many great minds of the past, but this is limited. Isaac Newton is an idol of mine and I have tremendous respect for his ideas, but I also understand that he was kind of a jerk. People are always just people.

Smart guy, but he didn't always play well with others

No book or writings can be used to show or record my beliefs. You might think that these blog posts are meant to collect and hold my feelings, but I view it as more of a brief expression of my thoughts at one moment in time. Everything in here is subjective; both in the fact that I don’t expect everyone to agree and that I don’t even expect my own opinions to remain the same. The point is to inspire thought, not to answer questions. Making any idea solid seems like a mistake, because it might need to be changed when more perspective is gained. You never know when the next paradigm shift might happen and all that you believe gets thrown into a new light.

            That was enough self-indulgent introspection for now, so I’ll wrap things up. I’m probably guilty of just using religion as a convenient catchall to cram a bunch of my theories into one place, but it worked well enough (This all started as a parody of other religions call Peteism, where everything was done “for the love of Pete”, but I decided it wasn't very funny). Each idea probably could have been explored separately, but I’ll save that for my giant unreadable philosophical book that I will hopefully never write.

My Religion Part Two: Let There Be Infinite Alternate Universes

            I’m describing what I call my religion, and religions are usually about more than faith and a sense of awe, so I guess I’ll go in to some of my other beliefs that are commonly covered by religions.

First should probably be the origin of the universe. I support the Big Bang, but that is more of a description of how the universe started and not how it came into being. I use infinite parallel universes to explain the origin of everything. Most of the infinite universes are going to have a group of laws and conditions that can’t result in stability or even any physical existence at all (such as if there was an inverse cube law instead of our inverse square law, assume a three spatial dimension universe, obviously), but when you have an infinite number of tries to make a universe, a few of them are going to end up making sense. I also have room in this theory for of universes that exist in a stable way, but also have rules different from our own, which is fantastic. Imagine a universe just like ours, except the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t work! Just try to think about that for a while without giving yourself an aneurism.

Stay classy geometry

For the end of the universe I have beliefs with a similar theme. I accept the scientific theory of a universal heat death as the progression of entropy reaches a conclusion, but with some extra bits of my own added on to make things interesting. The extra bits are the fact that I’m not certain than the Big Bang was a unique event. We could get another bang every few trillion years (give or take) due to some unknown spontaneous energy generation (I have faith that matter is energy). The whole idea of something happening once, and only once, makes me suspicious. Just because the Big Bang is the only such phenomenon that we know about doesn’t mean that it is the only one that can or will happen. This is an example of using skepticism to expand one’s worldview rather than contract it.

Next up should probably be the afterlife. I’m going to dip into my infinite alternate universe theory again and pull out something neat. I think it would be endlessly stupendous if every alternate version of a person collapsed into a semi-collective consciousness after death. Basically, you would because aware of every other life you could have lead depending on different choices or circumstances. You would get to know how your life would have progressed had you gathered the courage to ask your sweetie to prom, or had been born the son of an absolute monarch in the middle ages. Extended far enough this would end up giving you complete causal knowledge of the universe, since you would have witnessed everything and anything that is capable of happening (because technically everyone is an alternate version of you). You would get to become Laplace’s Demon upon death, which isn’t a paradox since you're no longer a causal agent. I like to maintain a sense of identity in this afterlife, because an exploration of all possible universes wouldn’t be as good without a solid origin.

You could meet your evil self!

Last, I’ll cover my source of morality. Earlier, I explained how I believed morals to be subjective depending on the social system in which they exist. A good act is one that benefits society, and evil the opposite. Assuming the society is one that benefits you and others anyway, or else the opposite is true (basically you can overthrow a cruel dictator and it would be good, baring the establishment of an even worse social system). This carries a bit of a utilitarian aspect to it, but I don’t get bogged down with trying to weigh alternatives against each other. I don’t think you can ever sum the pleasures and pains of yourself and everyone else and come up with a best action. For this reason I think that intension is more important to morals than consequences. One should just do one’s best to benefit themselves and those around them, while also trying to do as little harm as possible. In the end, all this boils down to is "try to be a jerk as little as possible". Things just go better that way. The golden rule is also a good thing to follow.

All in all, I think that does an okay (if extremely brief) job of answering some of the major questions typically covered by religions. I’m still not done with this self-adulating shenanigans, so next time I’ll talk about the aspects of religion that I don't have.

My Religion Part One: In the Beginning

            In the past I’ve been known to claim my religion is Norse. I was basically treating the whole idea of religion as a joke, which isn’t really all that useful. I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve come up with some slightly more mature ideas on the subject. My new collection of beliefs have all of the aspects of religion that I view as positive, without some of the stuff I don’t think is so great. Let's talk about it.

            If I had to sum up my beliefs in one word it would be pantheism. Basically, I see God as being indistinguishable from the universe and its laws. God isn’t a great word since it implies an amount of anthropomorphization, so it would be more accurate to say that I feel the universe possesses a level of divinity. I’m awed by many aspects of the universe; the consistency and power of mathematics, the grace and opportune qualities of the physical laws, the beauty and efficiency of nature, and the seemingly endless breadth and depth of the universe. I wouldn’t say that I worship these things, because I don’t have any sort of rituals or observances, but my regard goes beyond a simple appreciation of science and nature. Close inspection or reflection on everything I perceive can cause simultaneous feelings of wonder, excitement, disbelief, and warmth. The ability of my mind to comprehend concepts from infinity to simple geometry (there is no such thing as a straight line in our physical reality, they exist only as an idea, which is fantastic), the way simple rules can be used to predict or achieve complex actions (like understanding the orbits of the planets, and then landing robots on those planets), the myriad of systems that work together in biological organisms (me for instance) to perform even simple operations (like closing my hand) or between organisms (like gut bacteria; I have an ecosystem inside me), and the fact that the universe simultaneously has no edge and has continued to produce ever smaller particles (wave-particles, or whatever they prefer to be called) as fast as we can find them (it’s turtles all the way down, but also all the way up) are just a few examples of things that fill me with amazement.

I love giant space cameras

My faith in the existence of these things (I’ve never seen an atom and haven’t personally dissected animals to see how their organs work) is very important to me. This faith isn’t just believing what scientists tell me. I also fully accept causality (that causes lead to effect), persistence (that the backs of objects are still there even if I can’t see them or that the laws of gravity will continue to function in the same way), and that my senses give me an accurate representation of the world. These may not seem like concepts that can be doubted to most people, but I’m not most people. I’m some sort of crappy pretend philosopher who writes rubbish on the internet. I’ve always had a strong skeptical streak (I once failed a true of false quiz about the Titanic, not because I didn’t know the answers, but because I was doubting our ability to site history as absolute fact), and I could easily fall into a solipsistic world view. My beliefs are an active choice, made because they make my universe more stupendous. They also have quite a bit of utility (it is hard to pursue pleasure if you don’t believe in the existence of your body).

This could be a fake picture and I would never know

This whole “religion” thing is based around my abnormal view of the world. I mean, I lost sleep the other night because I was so excited about a number series that I had thought up (numbers that are the least common multiple of sequential numbers: 1, 2, 6, 12, 60, 60, 420, 840…). Another good example is the fact that I write introspective essays and post them on the internet. Speaking of which, I think this is enough for one go, so, TO BE CONTINUED.