Journal of No. 118

This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a peep

2009-07-11T05:02:24Z

Win Los Angeles - Equality California

2009-07-11T00:15:10Z

I hear that EQ/CA will be near the homestead in Inglewood on Saturday:
Talk to Los Angeles Voters at our Door to Door Canvass
Holy Faith Episcopal Church, 260 N. Locust St., Inglewood
Saturday, July 11, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

We'll be visiting relatives, but maybe some of you folk can make it.

essentialsaltes @ 2009-07-10T13:30:00

2009-07-10T20:33:30Z

I knew Obama wasn't perfect, but I can't bring myself to blame him for this.

Poll results

2009-07-09T15:58:52Z

dark_of_night wins for being the only person out of 26 to choose Juliet. It was indeed the choice chosen by the fewest person.

9 people, more than a third of the sample, thought that Mike would be the least picked response. It was the most popular choice for least popular answer.

Paradoxically(?), Mike was the option that was most picked by those attempting to pick the most picked answer. Kudos to: me, zorker, hagdirt, postgoodism, ladyeuthanasia, dustchick, bellwethr, collenky, jsadler, and karteblanche. I will note that dustchick, collenky and jsadler were clearly hedging their bets by choosing Mike for both options. Either that, or they just like choosing me. Or my name, anyway.

Victor was the least popular most popular choice, with two votes.

News items ripped off from pharyngula

2009-07-09T14:20:47Z

Fox News stays classy as host Brian Kilmeade complains that Americans marry outside their species too much. Americans have fallen so low that they will even marry Irish or Italians.
Mike checks calendar for century.

Canadian PM Stephen Harper sneaks off with Jesus' body, causing an indignant poutine, as I believe they call it in Canadia.

Hey, it's a Fox News 2-fer, as an intrepid reporter girds himself to visit and report on the outlandish practices of a militant country.

lunch

2009-07-08T22:46:23Z

Am I a bad person because I internally snicker for a few seconds every time I hear about the plight of the wiggers in China?

dark_of_night came by the office so we could lunch together. We ventured into the Chalet Edelweiss. Dark opted for the Wurstsalat mit Käse, which was very yummy indeed, while I tried the Bratwurst & rösti -- ah, sausage and potatoes...
Our hostess was a friendly Swiss miss, obviously fond of the more-than-occasional sausage, potato and beer. The food was tasty, the Erdinger was vom Fass. The chalet/alpine/biergarten decor walks the line between charming and tacky and mainly stays on the charming side. How can you not love a Matterhorn on Sepulveda? My only negative comment is that the food is a bit pricey.

Prime Made Me Do It

2009-07-08T20:37:50Z

View Poll: Prime Made Me Do It

Dreaming, lights in the sky, things in the ground, lights in the sky

2009-07-06T23:08:54Z

Had a strange dream a couple nights back. It was vaguely Asian-themed. It begins (or my memory of it begins) in media res, with me riding on a sort of a futuristic jet-ski, with several of my fellows on nearby jetskis. At first it's strangely videogame-esque, as ninjas(?) would pop out of the water in front of me, and I would dispatch them with a swift slash of my katana. After a few rounds of slice-a-ninja, the team was reassembled in the cellar of the alchemist. We were searching for some alechemical doo-hicky and found an elaborate sliding and locking mechanism in the floor. Long metal pieces would slide along tracks in the floor, and when they were in the right arrangement, the floor within their compass would depress a few inches, at which point, they had to be slid into a new arrangement. And... that's it.

I finished reading Bad Astronomy. It was fine, but written for a general audience, so I didn't derive very much that was truly new from it [but not nothing -- although the Hubble can't exactly image the Earth, it can be (and occasionally is) pointed at the Earth, so that one camera captures 'streak flat' images to help calibrate it.]. I have a problem with some of his analogies and writing, but most of this beefing is just me wanting to push him out of the way so I could write it more goodly.

On the 4th of July, as I mentioned before, the Creamer kids came by to plant some pumpkins in the garden. It seemed to be a big hit, particularly with Tristan, who watered the entire garden, I think. They are neat kids, and possibly prime examples of the superintelligent futuristic species that will replace us.

In the evening of the 4th, we had a few friends over to eat, drink, ignite explody stuff, patriotically play Rock Band, and envy the people with the illegal fireworks that lit up the sky.

Planting Pumpkin Seeds

2009-07-04T19:37:55Z

Planting Pumpkin Seeds
Originally uploaded by Essentialsaltes

It's getting to be toddler central around here! The Creamer twins plant pumpkins in the goth garden. Say goodbye to every other plant you see in this photo... they will soon be overrun by pumpkiny goodness.

Fireworks Fail

2009-07-04T03:18:23Z

Fireworks Fail
Originally uploaded by Essentialsaltes

Will I never not suck?

2009-07-03T14:44:48Z

Once again, I am forced to acknowledge and confront my white privelege.

More Bruins in Inglewood

2009-07-02T00:01:43Z

"The Forum likely will be the primary venue [for UCLA basketball] during the 2011-12 season while Pauley Pavilion undergoes renovation."

Ladies & Gentlemen, I have the honor of presenting to you...

2009-07-01T20:11:03Z

... the best canine moonwalk I've ever seen.

Of course the all-time champeen moonwalker is the Red-Capped Manakin:

Not just Space Brothers, but Gay Space Brothers

2009-07-01T16:16:43Z

Someone in the atheist community went to a Pride Parade (SF?) and ran across an unusual booth with a banner:

No God
No Evolution
Let's welcome our creators from space!

The group is associated with the Raelian Movement, which believes life on earth was started by ~~the Old Ones~~ aliens. You may also remember the Raelians for their (unsupported) claim of having cloned a human being.

Anyway, the booth was for ARAMIS, the Association RAëlienne des MInorités Sexuelles, which supports gay rights in a Raelian fashion. The website's a little wonky, but the masthead graphic does have some sort of subliminal imagery that probably reprograms your brain. Their solution for homophobia is a little strange, too: "ALL TOGETHER, LET`S APOSTATISE!"

Another good link that's been passing around is the story of the group of palaeontologists visiting the Creation Museum.
Reactions varied from defensive hostility: “I’m speechless,” said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, who walked around with crossed arms and a grimace. “It’s rather scary.”
to curiosity: “I’m very curious and fascinated,” Stefan Bengtson, a professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said before the visit, “because we have little of that kind of thing in Sweden.”
But, like the author, I'll let Dr. Sato have the last word: Dr. Sato likened the museum to an amusement park. “I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Disneyland,” she said.

Did she enjoy Disneyland?

“Not very much,” she said.

In more personal news, I am saddened that there will not be a fireworks stand within drunken stumbling distance of the house this year. Looks like the nearest will be more of an inebriated stroll away.

The exception that proves the rule

2009-06-30T23:32:56Z

The set-up: I have four cards. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other.

Suppose I suggest a possible fact about the cards: "Statement#1 - A card that has a vowel on one side must have a prime number on the other."

The four cards are lying on a table, and the faces you can see are:

E K 4 7

Which of the cards should you turn over in order to determine whether Statement#1 is indeed true? (ok, you could turn them all over, but suppose you are extremely fatigued, what would be the minimal amount of work you would have to do.)

You need only turn over two cards, the E and the 4. If you got it right, pat yourself on the back. Apparently, only about 10% of college students get it right.

It's pretty obvious you gotta flip the E, and check to see whether it's got a prime on the other side (as it is supposed to). That's a pretty direct test of what Statement#1 says in plain English.
Probably you didn't flip the K, since Statement#1 doesn't say anything about consonants.
However, there seems to be a strong pull to flip over the 7 -- after all, primes are mentioned in Statement#1. But Statement#1 doesn't say that primes have vowels on the other side... it says that vowels have primes on the other side. Statement#1 doesn't predict anything about the 7 card. We don't need to flip it.

But we do need to flip the 4. Imagine if we did, and there were an A on the other side. That would disprove the idea that all vowels have primes on the other side. So we do need to flip the 4.
Going back to what was wrong with flipping the 7, I said "Statement#1 doesn't say that primes have vowels on the other side... it says that vowels have primes on the other side." Our brains are trying to suck some extra knowledge out of Statement#1, but it hasn't quite done it right. It turned Statement#1 around the wrong way. In logic-speak, we could write Statement#1 as...

If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has a prime on the other.
or
If V, then P.
Flipping the 7 is like testing "If P, then V", but this statement (the converse of Statement#1) is not logically identical to Statement#1. So testing it does not provide evidence for the truth of Statement#1.
However, the contrapositive of a statement is equivalent to the original. The contrapositive is:
If not-P, then not-V.
or
If it's not a prime, then it's not a vowel on the other side.

So flipping the 4 clearly constitutes a test of the contrapositive, and the contrapositive is equivalent to Statement#1.
Okay, I've belabored this point in maybe more detail that it deserves, but I think it reveals something about the kind of mistakes that people make.

Flipping the E is obvious. Flipping the 4 is not. Flipping the 7 may make us feel like we're testing something, when it isn't. If, when we are evaluating the truth of some claim, we do the equivalent of flipping the E and the 7, we may be led to accept as true a statement that isn't.

I was actually spurred to post this by something in Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, which I have finally cracked open. He was discussing the old 'you can only balance eggs on the equinox' urban legend, which provides a different wrinkle on testing a statement. The 'only' in there makes rephrasing it a little tricky, but it comes out as:

Statement#2: If and only if it's the equinox, then eggs can be balanced on end.

This is equivalent to the combination of:

2A: If it's the equinox, then eggs can be balanced on end.
2B: If eggs can be balanced on end, then it's the equinox.

Hypothetical Frank, maybe led astray by a TV news report showing kids balancing eggs on the equinox, goes to his fridge and pulls out some eggs. Frank makes a direct test of statement 2A. It's the equinox, and he works at it and manages to balance an egg. Success. Statement #2 is supported. And then he plays with 2B. Frank asks himself, "When have I ever seen eggs balanced on end?" The eggs on his countertop were balanced on the equinox. The eggs he saw on TV were balanced by kids on the equinox. Hey-ho, case closed. Statement#2 is proved. At least in Frank's mind.

As usual, he tested the easy ones. He tested the direct reading of 2A, and the direct reading of 2B.

But if we look at the contrapositive of 2B:
If it is not the equinox, then eggs cannot be balanced.

We need to do some testing on a day other than the equinox in order to completely test the logical implications of Statement#2. And what we find is that there is nothing special about the equinox. Yes you can balance eggs on the equinox, but you can also balance eggs on any day ending in y.
By only testing the direct meaning of the statement, we become liable to fall into superstition for lack of a better term. Frank accepted the superstitious belief that only on the equinox can eggs be balanced.

Another wrinkle combines truth with superstition. If the second half of the statement is always true, you can't test the contrapositive. It's like saying
Statement#3: "If I drink herbal tea made from bull scrota, then 2 + 2 = 4."

I try to test the contrapositive, tapping endlessly at my calculator waiting to find 2+2 equalling something other than 4, so I can record whether I had the tea of not. But that never happens. And no disproof of statement#3 is forthcoming.

Statement#3 is logically true, but seems to express a superstitious connection between the two halves of the statement that does not exist.
Similarly, "if it is the equinox, then eggs can be balanced" is also logically true. But if we try to sneak in the "if and only if" that would make the statement more useful, then it proves false.

Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity

2009-06-29T19:16:58Z

Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity is the story of poet Elizabeth Gold's one year teaching at a progressive charter school in NYC. She is woefully unprepared to handle inner city youth with poetry as her only weapon.

This is not a great book. It's probably not even a good book, as she allows her poetry to migrate into her prose far too frequently [and there is a reason you have not read her poetry]. But it's still an interesting book. It combines the horrors of the modern educational system, the horrors of the modern teen, and a narrator who suffers from an inability to acknowledge her own failure.

As a failure in the high school milieu myself, I can sympathize, but I like to think I was more realistic.

Mackenzie

2009-06-28T17:37:06Z

IMG_2831
Originally uploaded by Essentialsaltes

The Nephew is Incognito

2009-06-27T17:47:12Z

IMG_2827
Originally uploaded by Essentialsaltes

Lunch observations

2009-06-26T19:55:39Z

Saw a Little Person at the Burrito Wagon.

Usually, when I walk past the newspaper kiosks, I read the headlines in passing. That was impossible today, as they were empty. Perhaps the newspaper magnates should retain a few reliable hitmen.

Well all I want is to just be free/Live my life the way I wanna be

2009-06-26T14:19:52Z

But more importantly... Sky Saxon of the LA psychedelic band The Seeds passed away yesterday.

And here's a good place to jump off on an interesting Wiki-trail: "In the 1970s, Saxon became a member of the Source Family religious group, a Hollywood Hills commune led by YaHoWha who gave Saxon the names Sunlight and Arlick. In 1998, Saxon orchestrated the release of a 13-CD set of the psychedelic tribal music recorded by the commune's band Yahowha 13 during the 1970s."

I see Non-Humans & Illusions

2009-06-25T04:00:08Z

I confess I craned my neck a lot trying to catch a better glimpse of these bus benches as I drove home yesterday. Sure it's advertising, but still worth a second look.

Also, one more reason to stab your brain with a Q-tip. It lies to you. If you don't want to futz with photoshop, try this version and block off the purple orange rectangles with your fingers and you can see that the 'green' and the 'blue' are really the same.

essentialsaltes @ 2009-06-24T13:50:00

2009-06-24T20:51:21Z

A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today.

Mike & KC circa 1984

2009-06-21T23:05:29Z

Mike & KC circa 1984
Originally uploaded by Essentialsaltes

Okay, I fired up the scanner and sucked up a few nostalgic photos. Click through and see a few more, including a couple from the Becca side of things.

This is the famous picture of me and KC.

You can not petition the lord with prayer

2009-06-21T04:48:20Z

Essentialsaltes' Law is starting to strike with a vengeance. There are now 18 bids on Tomb Raider. We'll neglect the fact that most of those were probably automatically generated, but it's now going for more than any of the other three PS3 games.

Wurstküche

2009-06-20T23:46:38Z

Wurstküche
Originally uploaded by Essentialsaltes

It was a success. The place was busy, but not packed. Given that dark_of_night and I were the only Yeses on the poll by the time the day rolled around, I was pleased by the turnout. A&K&P&J&LB&B&I&J&T&us

After we parked, we met a Japanese cat-spirit. If his spirit-ness doesn't come through well there, check out the close-up. His fat little body sat there, perfectly upright, with his paws delicately placed on the planter, watching the world go by. Dispensing with chronology, we also saw some not-so-little birdies in their nest on our way out.

I had the green chile, cilantro, chicken/turkey sausage, which was very good, but mild, so that it didn't live up to the onion and hot peppers I topped it with. Dark_of_night had the duck/bacon/jalepeno sausage [which was actually my first choice, but we gotta have different sausages in order to effectively share] and it was magnificent. Magnificent. Mustard was there, but it seemed superfluous.
The Belgian-style double-dipped fries were good, but not as good as I remember Benita's Frites being. Alas! Alackaday! That Benite's Frites are no more. The chipotle ketchup was pretty awesome.
To drink, I had the Aventinus doppelbock, and it did not disappoint. Spicy, fruity and (as all the reviews indicate) surprisingly light tasting for a doppelbock.