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.

Crapsa Brand Comics

My comic is up and running. I've got it on a free hosting site so that it will hopefully be easy to find. I'm only three pages in, but my illustrations are beginning to be slightly less terrible. My writing is pretty much the same as it always is. The current update schedule is "whenever I finish a comic", since I'm not really able to forecast how long it will take me to draw a comic. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy them.

G’nite 2013

            Do you want to know who’s still great? My grandma, that's who! I already gave a summary of her general stupendousness last year, so I’ll just report on the things she accomplished over the last year. She sent 242 emails during the year, and I should admit that she became aware of my spread sheeting on February 26 so all my data is probably biased after that point. I didn’t really notice any obvious changes in the data, so like any crappy researcher, I’ll just ignore the problem. A good thing about having her read my statistical analysis was that she learned how much I love her homemade buns, so now she makes them especially for me (I can never say my writing never got me anything). I don’t have much information from the last three months of the year since she was on a marathon vacation, so my seasonal data is also skewed, but whatever. On with the analysis.

            The form of the emails remains mostly unchanged from last year’s, so the first thing reported is still the weather. Her descriptions of the local Rapid City weather break down as follows:

The worst description in there is probably Goofy, so it looks like Rapid City is a nice place to live (From my own experience, I’d say it is). Grandma is pretty stoic though, so her “Good” probably covers a broad range of weather. The “Ok?” days come from September when she wasn’t getting outside due to her sciatica (we also lost a whole month worth of card playing to that crap). Luckily my aunt healed her up so hopefully she feels better now. 

High temperatures were reported for 16 separate towns, from Wisconsin (Wicksconsin) to California, over 231 non-consecutive days. Gold Canyon, Arizona had the highest average temperature at 86.2°, they shared the highest temp of 109° with Dallas, Texas, and had the highest temperature of anyone in the family 173 days (that’s 74.9% of the time), and I will never forgive them for it. New Rockford, the origin point of the family, was consistently the coldest, with an average of 50.9° and the lowest recorded temperature of -16°. The average of all the local averages was 65.5°, which might be the most useless stat ever. Actually no, because I tracked the number of times my grandma’s friends had their hair done (23). More importantly (?), Rapid City had a mean error of 3.325° in the next day forecast, and was correct eight times out of 80.

Pierre (where I live) had an average of 60.5°, and a high of 99° and low of 1°, which has a nice symmetry to it. My temperature was only superlative in the family on September 22nd, and I still shared the high temperature (with friggin’ Gold Canyon). Let’s have a temperature graph to help me get over Gold Canyon and their warm weather.

Grandma is still going to her exercise class, and Robbie is still teaching it. She attended 74 times with an average of 20 old goats jumping around (her words, not mine). That’s about 74 more times than I made it to the gym last year. Robbie busted out some new moods this year including; wondering, hurting, crazy, remembering elvis, razzed, gonna party, bad at fishing, questioning, missed, and ok. Some of those might not technically be moods, but that’s what I wrote in my note so I’m counting them. He was still happy 35 times which is 48% of the time (down nine percent from last year). That just doesn’t have them same impact without the pie chart, so here goes.

On the days when grandma doesn’t exercise she goes to the communal coffee hour (she still brews the coffee on the days she doesn’t go, because she's great). The size of the bunch averaged 13.0 people on 85 occasions. Conversation covered many diverse topics, including; Vivian’s pet deer, Vivian’s 102 birthday, bootlegging and home brew, new apartment owners, unwanted phone calls, Vivian’s immigration (multiple times), Jack's supplied paper work, farming in the good ol’ days, Janice’s Montana ranch, foreigners getting our money, and weather. Everyone’s blood pressure was checked twice (that I hear about), and grandma was 140/68 and 130/68 (I don’t know enough about blood pressure to understand if that is good or not). Sunday mornings are spent at Mass. I was prayed and lit candle for on 30 reported occasions. 

Reported mid-day activities were baking 26 times (buns five of those times!), sewing 76 times, shopping 44 times, and eight trips to visit Grandpa in the graveyard. She entertained guests 27 times, which resulted in at least eight trips to Ruby Tuesday (her favorite restaurant). I think I can make an asinine graph from this.

Evenings are still spent playing cards with the occasional game of bingo on Mondays. Hand and Foot is still the most popular with 141 games played. I like it because it’s graph friendly. See:

Pinochle is another favorite with 76 games played. Grandma took all the tricks a total of 14 times and got double pinochle in 38 instances. She also had a winning year with a record of 88-87. Let’s celebrate with some pie.

Bingo winnings came in at $61.00 this year. With 27 games, that's $2.26 a game, which isn’t bad (keep in mind that Grandma gets excited when she makes $3 for mending her neighbors pants). Her friends were also winners. Maxine won 11.5 times (split once), Vivian six times, and Chuck 14.5 times (he even won a blackout).

I had to change the way I recorded the closing quotes this year because we were just getting way to many new quotes. I divide the quotes into seven categories that I think cover everything anyone can say about anything; Advice, Quip, Commentary on Life, Relationships, Religion, Metaphysics, and Virtue. Virtue was the winner with 119 appearances, but Relationships was in a close second with 105. And because it is basically the name of the game, here is a graph about quotes.

Don’t worry, we’re not done (you were worried right?). Catchphrases, all the greats have them, and my grandma is no different. I still don’t know what it means, but “so gates” showed up 321 last year, or 1.32 times per email (up 0.16 from last year!). The “vashislous” count was down to 18, and we had eight “yah voult”s (can you pluralize a quote like that?). Some of my other favorite Grandmaisms, as I call them, where questionable Rip Van Winkle references (did he have a little yellow pup?), Majic, falling into all caps when talking about Hand and Foot during the long losing streak, mentioning a lady with a baby bump in a tight t-shirt, Harold going bananas, calling her car a red hotrod, being fat and happy, plugging my aunt and uncles vegetables, and getting excited about watching Rudy on TV (a football game show).

            Grandma didn’t go to bed any earlier last year. The average time sent for the emails came out to 2:48 am. I think some were sent the next morning, but there were still plenty of legitimate 2 am sendings. I’m still not really comfortable with doing math using time in excel, but I converted everything into a 24 hour time with midnight being 12:00. It works alright I guess (I did figure out how to do math in stationing notation, which has nothing to do with my grandma’s emails and is also pointless since I don’t work in engineering anymore, but I’m still excited about it). Anyway, here’s a graph:

            Finally, I was only mentioned seven times last year. I guess I need to give grandma some more rides if I want to keep getting name dropped.

“If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” Alfred Nobel

“Never was anything great achieved without danger.” Niccolo Machiavelli