Saturday, December 6, 2008
Holiday Season Update
So today I finally feel the season begin to sink in. Tonight I am going up to Montrose to watch Matt tiller the fire truck through the parade route with a drunkard Santa strapped in to the ladder in front of him. I promise there will be plenty of pictures of this event coming soon! We also got our Season's Greetings cards which we designed together, so of course they are awesome! I cannot wait to send them out ASAP. Next week is our 2nd annual holiday party which means super decorating and lots of tasty foods to share with our friends. Oh and last night we booked a trip to Las Vegas where we will ring in the new year! Matt has only been to Vegas one time so it will be fun to show him around since I love the Vegas probably a little too much. Of course the family parties are really starting to add up as well: 21st - Van Winkles, 25th - My Mom, Matt's Mom, the Creekmurs, My Dad, 27th - the Safraneks. It's too bad I recently decided to wholeheartedly buckle down on my thesis, I hope it doesn't detract from the festivities too much :)
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Closest Book Fun
Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST
Here was mine:
"Because of these individual differences, Stins and Michaels concluded that, for both S-R mappings, some subjects used hand-referenced response coding (which would yield a negative S-R compatibility effect with respect to the wheel rotation) and others used wheel-referenced response coding (which would yield a positive effect)"
Who's jealous of the way I am spending my Saturday night???
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST
Here was mine:
"Because of these individual differences, Stins and Michaels concluded that, for both S-R mappings, some subjects used hand-referenced response coding (which would yield a negative S-R compatibility effect with respect to the wheel rotation) and others used wheel-referenced response coding (which would yield a positive effect)"
Who's jealous of the way I am spending my Saturday night???
Thursday, November 20, 2008
In Celebration of World Philosophy Day
Today the BBC had an interesting article about Philosophy and 4 questions to make your brain hurt which can be read in its entirety here
I love having my way of thinking challenged especially since I know most of my conclusions come from years of learned behavior imposed on us by external forces. Below are the four questions from the article. I was going to include my personal thoughts on each question but I think it would be best to leave it untainted and let you make up your own minds. Enjoy:
1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be OK painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?
Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)
If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.
But then why not kill Bill?
2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.
But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.
But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.
But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.
In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.
3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not
But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.
Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.
Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."
4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.
After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.
And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.
Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."
I love having my way of thinking challenged especially since I know most of my conclusions come from years of learned behavior imposed on us by external forces. Below are the four questions from the article. I was going to include my personal thoughts on each question but I think it would be best to leave it untainted and let you make up your own minds. Enjoy:
1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be OK painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?
Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)
If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.
But then why not kill Bill?
2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.
But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.
But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.
But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.
In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.
3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not
But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.
Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.
Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."
4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.
After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.
And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.
Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Congratulations Michelle and Edgar!
It was a beautiful wedding for a beautiful couple! I was honored to be included in their day and I know their love will be a lifelong gift to each other.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
So True...
I really would like to know why people voted yes on Prop 8. I honestly cannot comprehend it at all. It seems to me this issue shouldn't be decided by a vote. I am so confused...
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
My new laptop is so pretty!
I bought it last night out of desperation. The two laptops at my house are no longer functioning properly and although I would NEVER normally purchase a notebook from Best Buy I felt I had no choice given the current state of my lack of reliable computing. Anyway, I am really happy with the HP Pavilion DV 4 special edition I ended up getting:
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
This is how important voting is to me...
I will even support you doing so if we disagree.
After all, as Chomsky said, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
After all, as Chomsky said, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
Friday, October 3, 2008
I can't believe this is a REAL photograph...
IMPRESSIVE!
A True Image from False Kiva
Credit & Copyright: Wally Pacholka (Astropics.com/TWAN)
Credit & Copyright: Wally Pacholka (Astropics.com/TWAN)
Explanation: Is there any place in the world you could see a real sight like this? Yes. Pictured above is single exposure image spectacular near, far, and in between. Diving into the Earth far in the distance is part of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, taken with a long duration exposure. Much closer, the planet Jupiter is visible as the bright point just to band's left. Closer still are picturesque buttes and mesas of the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, USA, lit by a crescent moon. In the foreground is a cave housing a stone circle of unknown origin named False Kiva. The cave was briefly lit by flashlight during the long exposure. Astrophotographer Wally Pacholka reports that getting to the cave to take this image was no easy trek. Also, mountain lions were a concern while waiting alone in the dark for just the right exposure.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
In preparation for the VP debates tonight
Some snippets from an interview between Katie Couric and Gov. Palin can be found below and describe some of Palin's personal views and convictions. It is clear that the Governor and I are fundamentally different people, although there are definitely a few (very few) areas where we agree. However, during the interview Palin does make a good point about VPs not making or interpreting laws while in office...of course the concern here is that she won't remain only VP during McCain's administration. I know that essentially it is a terrible thing to discuss some one's potential death and I do hope that McCain lives many more healthy satisfying years, after all he deserves all the happiness in the world after everything he has been through. I just can't shake the uncomfortable feeling that McCain chose one of the least qualified individuals in our nation as his running mate. I feel as though his selection shows some seriously bad judgement on the part of himself as well as his campaign managers.
Anyway, I will let Ms. Palin speak for herself:
Couric: Let me get your take, if I could Gov. Palin, on a number of social issues. Because that's, they've gotten some attention, your position. If a 15-year-old is raped by her father,you believe it should be illegal for her to get an abortion. Why?
Palin: I am pro-life. And I'm unapologetic about my position there on pro-life. And I understand good people on both sides of the abortion debate. In fact, good people in my own family have differing views on abortion and when it should be allowed. So … I respect people's opinion on this.
Now, I would counsel to choose life. I would like to see a culture of life in this country. But I would also like to see taking it one step further. Not just saying I am pro-life, and I want fewer and fewer abortions in this country. But I want, then, those women who find themselves in circumstances that are absolutely less than ideal, for them to be supported for adoptions to be made easier. For more support given to foster parents and adoptive families. That is my personal opinion on this.
...
Couric: But if you have a moral problem with abortion, it seems to me you would do everything in your power to make it illegal and overturn Roe v. Wade and …
Palin: Of course, it's the legislature, the law-making branch of our third, of our three branches of government …
Couric: But they …
Palin: …makes the laws.
Couric: …your vision or the administration's vision.
Palin: Well, let's be practical about it and let's be realistic about a vice-president's role in this debate. I can personally share my views, which I don't apologize when I share my views of being pro-life. And, you know, I'll do that all day long if you want me to. But a vice-president does not make law. And a vice-president does not interpret the law either.
Couric: So you're saying this won't be a top issue for you if you're elected?
Palin: I will do all that I can personally to encourage that culture of life, to remind women that I believe with more empowerment, they - more and more women will realize that they are strong enough … and they are able to carry a child and still continue a career, still continue education opportunities, all with the goal being fewer and fewer abortions in this world.
Couric: Do you believe evolution should be taught as an accepted scientific principle or one of several theories?
Palin: Oh, I think it should be taught as an accepted principle. And, you know, I say that also as the daughter of a school teacher, a science teacher, who has really instilled in me a respect for science. It should be taught in our schools. And I won't ever deny that I see the hand of God in this beautiful creation that is Earth, especially coming from one of the most beautiful states in the Union and traveling around this country also in this last month. My goodness, just seeing, you know, the beautiful landscape of New Mexico recently. That was just breath taking and seeing the rolling hills in Virginia and all … the beauty that is this Earth, I see the hand of God in that. But that is not part of state policy or a local curriculum in a school district. Science should be taught in science class.
Anyway, I will let Ms. Palin speak for herself:
On Abortion:
Couric: Let me get your take, if I could Gov. Palin, on a number of social issues. Because that's, they've gotten some attention, your position. If a 15-year-old is raped by her father,you believe it should be illegal for her to get an abortion. Why?
Palin: I am pro-life. And I'm unapologetic about my position there on pro-life. And I understand good people on both sides of the abortion debate. In fact, good people in my own family have differing views on abortion and when it should be allowed. So … I respect people's opinion on this.
Now, I would counsel to choose life. I would like to see a culture of life in this country. But I would also like to see taking it one step further. Not just saying I am pro-life, and I want fewer and fewer abortions in this country. But I want, then, those women who find themselves in circumstances that are absolutely less than ideal, for them to be supported for adoptions to be made easier. For more support given to foster parents and adoptive families. That is my personal opinion on this.
...
Couric: But if you have a moral problem with abortion, it seems to me you would do everything in your power to make it illegal and overturn Roe v. Wade and …
Palin: Of course, it's the legislature, the law-making branch of our third, of our three branches of government …
Couric: But they …
Palin: …makes the laws.
Couric: …your vision or the administration's vision.
Palin: Well, let's be practical about it and let's be realistic about a vice-president's role in this debate. I can personally share my views, which I don't apologize when I share my views of being pro-life. And, you know, I'll do that all day long if you want me to. But a vice-president does not make law. And a vice-president does not interpret the law either.
Couric: So you're saying this won't be a top issue for you if you're elected?
Palin: I will do all that I can personally to encourage that culture of life, to remind women that I believe with more empowerment, they - more and more women will realize that they are strong enough … and they are able to carry a child and still continue a career, still continue education opportunities, all with the goal being fewer and fewer abortions in this world.
On Evolution:
Couric: Do you believe evolution should be taught as an accepted scientific principle or one of several theories?
Palin: Oh, I think it should be taught as an accepted principle. And, you know, I say that also as the daughter of a school teacher, a science teacher, who has really instilled in me a respect for science. It should be taught in our schools. And I won't ever deny that I see the hand of God in this beautiful creation that is Earth, especially coming from one of the most beautiful states in the Union and traveling around this country also in this last month. My goodness, just seeing, you know, the beautiful landscape of New Mexico recently. That was just breath taking and seeing the rolling hills in Virginia and all … the beauty that is this Earth, I see the hand of God in that. But that is not part of state policy or a local curriculum in a school district. Science should be taught in science class.
Couric: Should creationism be allowed to be taught anywhere in public schools?
Palin: Don't have a problem at all with kids debating all sides of theories, all sides of ideas that they ever - kids do it today whether … it's on paper, in a curriculum or not. Curriculums also are best left to the local school districts. Instead of Big Brother, federal government telling a district what they can and can't teach, I would like to see more control taken over by our school boards, by our local schools, and then state government at the most. But federal government, you know, kind of get out of some of this curriculum and let the locals decide what is best for their students.
On Homosexuality:
Palin: But you are talking about, I think, a value here, what my position is on homosexuality and can you pray it away 'cause I think that was the title that was listed in that bulletin. And, you know, I don't know what prayers are worthy of being prayed. And I don't know what prayers are gonna be answered or not answered. But as for homosexuality, I am not going to judge Americans and the decisions that they make in their adult personal relationships.
I have, one of my absolute best friends for the last 30 years who happens to be gay. And I love her dearly. And she is not my "gay friend." She is one of my best friends who happens to have made a choice that isn't a choice that I have made. But I am not gonna judge people. And I love America where we are more tolerant than other countries are. And are more accepting of some of these choices that sometimes people want to believe reflects solely on an individual's values or not. Homosexuality, I am not gonna judge people.
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