Carl the Zealot

February 24, 2009

A priest, a rabbi, and a troll walk into a blog. Ouch.

Filed under: Free Thought, Private, Religion, Science — Carl Myers @ 4:49 am

My good friend, Steve, recently wrote a blog post about a discussion we had. I thought the comments were all very interesting, but I felt like some of the points I made weren’t getting across, and it was a ripe opportunity to make some more.

Fair warning, the following is what I believe. I am shedding society’s veil of tacit, compromising blind acceptance as well as the insane intellectual disconnect, the cloud through which I am time and time again amazed we are able to scientifically deduce anything. If this post makes you angry, I suggest considering what exactly you are angry about, and why you really believe it so strongly.

As Steve pointed out, religion has given humanity a lot – I have always been the first to agree with that, my problem with it is it’s stubborn refusal to go away, like a house guest that has overstayed it’s welcome. Religion is the crutch of humanity. We have outgrown it. It serves us no longer, you needn’t look far to find ample evidence for that.

Steve says, “When a person points their finger at another and declares them to be wrong because their beliefs conflict, then we are- to put it bluntly- fucked.” If someone told me “2+2=5 and nothing you say can convince me otherwise”, am I really supposed to pretend that is a perfectly correct statement? If you tried to introduce a constitutional amendment which dictated that “2+2=5…In GOD’s country at least”, am I supposed to be ok with that? How about if you want to replace my children’s math books with a new edition which is identical the old one in every way except for the chapter on addition, which has a “special exception for 2+2=5″, is that ok? Some things are just WRONG. And while I am fine if you want to sit at home in your rocking chair chanting over and over “2+2=5 because Jesus loves me”, that is YOUR prerogative. However, when it comes to my tax dollars, my public education, my support of science, and my will for humanity to follow the advancements it has already made with still more, I realize there is more riding on this issue. When people don’t just sit there in their rocking chairs chanting to themselves, but actually believe everyone who disagrees is wrong and they have to impose that belief on others, it concerns ME. It makes me think it is our duty as thinking, rational people to fight back – “believe what you want, but not in my government or my school” only works for so long when dealing with the sort of extremism we are seeing. Whether or not carrots are tasty is an objective thing, but some things are simply not objective, and religion has clouded where that line really ought to be for too long.

Now the beauty of science is, since it’s inception, the sum of all human knowledge has, like entropy, been ever-increasing. This means we can only become more sure about what we know, while facts can go from “unknown to known”, they can not generally go from “known to unknown” (we can discover something we thought was correct was actually incorrect, but we can’t say we “know less about it now”, in fact, we know more about it by knowing it is wrong).

This means each and every question one might ask about the world we live in has one or more theories posited by science, right now, which can be used to answer said question. Let me repeat that, there are “catch-all” heuristics for generating theories so that any question you can possibly ask, right now, already has one or more hypothesis which are scientific and testable, right now. The “god of the gaps” is a myth. Right now, if you asked me “Is there a God”, I can give you a scientific answer. The answer is “No, there doesn’t seem to be, there most certainly is not a personal god who interacts with the world directly”. Further evidence may in fact overturn that, but just like I don’t think there is a flying spaghetti monster, just because I can’t prove there isn’t, science dictates we accept there probably isn’t a god either, until evidence to the contrary arises. We get this hypothesis via Occam’s razor, and any “research” trying to prove the contrary had better be based on some evidence, not just one’s pathetic desire to invent some deity to help them feel more self-important and special in our unimaginably enormous universe.

My very long-winded point is, we are not “fucked” because someone tells someone else they are wrong. We are fucked when we let people claim things are wrong in unscientific ways. We are fucked when we get so many people so brainwashed by an unscientific idea, that even scientists must “dance around the truth” and “mince words carefully” so that they aren’t lynched or shot in their sleep (or at the very least, lose all their funding).

And, above all else, we are “fucked” when we let ourselves forget what it is, exactly, these “religious folks” actually believe. Science doesn’t tell you “if people disagree with your results, kill them”, or “it is your duty to science to educate as many people as possible, lest you burn in hell”. Science encourages people to discover, test, and retest things on their own, while still standing on the shoulders of giants. But the “opposition”, if you will allow me some simplifying generalizations here, is quite different. (If you prefer, replace “They” with “Some religious fundamentalists” in this passage) “They” think “we” are all going to hell. “They” think god DEMANDS they “save us”. “They” think their moral views are “right, absolute truth, word of god” and anyone that disagrees with them is damned. That is why “they” try to invade our schools, silence our brightest minds, poison our children’s education, brainwash the lumbering couch-potato masses (have you ever WATCHED a televangelist?), and the sheer number of them is appalling. These same people who benefit from science day in and day out, driving cars, eating processed food, watching TV and using computers, enjoying the finest medical care, insist science is wrong because “it ain’t in the bible”.

Well WHY ISN’T IT IN THE BIBLE? Couldn’t god have saved an awful lot of lives by telling us the germ theory of disease, or how to treat unclean water to make it potable? Oh, yeah, it must not be part of god’s “plan”. God didn’t do any of that, science did, and the intellectual disconnect it requires for people to enjoy all these modern conveniences while simultaneously saying things like “In the beginning god created… That’s enough for me!”. Clearly it’s not enough for you! If that’s enough for you, maybe you should move back to the Middle East, get some fucking camels and sheep and shit, and live like the biblical people used to. Hope you enjoyed your midlife crisis at 18, because you’d be lucky to make it past 36.

If our country was not already so broken by the seemingly unsurmountable foothold religion has on our society, any scientist that wasn’t themselves deluded would have no choice but to say, without bias, “there is no credible evidence there is a god, therefore, we are best served by assuming there is not a god until such evidence presents itself.” I believe agnostics are simply scientists “too afraid or uncommitted” to admit this, even to themselves. Fortunately for Steve, I don’t believe one’s lack of commitment is sending them straight to hell, or requires me to save their eternal soul, which I hope, Steve will consider to be one of this “firebrand atheist”’s redeeming qualities =)

Of course, there are people who don’t believe their faith has anything to do with science. These days MOST people fall into this category. They are happy to admit the universe is 14 billion years old, the earth is 4 billion years old, and the “7 days of creation” was clearly a “metaphor” or something like that. The bible was the word of god, “as interpreted by the man of the time”, so it’s no wonder we didn’t understand some things Take Pi, for example – the bible says it is exactly 3. Since we hadn’t discovered fractions or decimals yet, I guess god figured it was “close enough”. But how can we believe in a god, and simultaneously believe he, in all his perfection, could only manage to get his message “close enough”? That is a pretty hefty intellectual disconnect right there.

Nonetheless, these people are glad humans have discovered science, and used the brains “god gave them” to create all these advancements, “just as god must have surely intended”. There’s just one problem – they are using confirmation bias. “A tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs”. If people did not already believe in god, nothing today, with our current level of understanding, would be anywhere near convincing enough to warrant such a fanciful explanation as god. But since people already believed that, they are just ignorantly incorporating it into their existing beliefs.

In the end, when you consider these people, they are just as uncommitted as the agnostics who say “why, surely, we can never know!” If you are reasonably confident there is no flying spaghetti monster, and you are reasonably confident that 5 million dollars isn’t going to appear under your pillow even if you pray with all your might, then you are deluded if you also think we can’t be reasonably confident that “there probably isn’t a god”, and surely not a personal god as so many faiths dictate.

February 23, 2009

A method by which my friend is allowed to purchase a new laptop. Patent Pending.

Filed under: Hardware, Me, News — Carl Myers @ 6:17 pm

Last weekend was a blast. Among other things, my friend Steve was able to use his tax refund to buy a new laptop, which he sorely needed thanks to the infernal bit rot that plagues Vista (and most every other MS operating system). I was as excited as Steve was, no doubt, because I planned to put Linux on his old laptop and wow him with how his “useless old laptop” would instantly become “good as new” and completely usable again.

But first things first. We headed off to Best Buy. Had he been considering a desktop, I might have tried to get him into Fry’s, so we could consider building it ourselves, which can be fun, though these days it is not always so likely to actually save any money, and might cost more. Since it was a laptop he wanted, I generally recognize that your Best Buys, Circuit Citys, etc tend to do better on the price points there. Equipped with a rough idea of what it was going to cost on dell.com, off we ventured.

To our great surprise, Best Buy had Dell handily beat (for the rough specs we were looking at, by about 200$, not counting shipping). We did our thing, looking back and forth between the lumbering desktop replacement choices (or, as we used to call them back when I worked at Circuit City, the “aircraft carriers”). I of course provided my technical opinions when warranted and occasionally when not. Is DDR3 worth it? Nah, not for your needs. What about this one? The screen is bigger over here, blah blah, etcetera etcetera.

What really shocked me about the whole thing was Steve’s priorities. Despite all the times I had tried to “put myself in the customer’s shoes”, I had never really succeeded to the degree I did today, since I *was* the customer. I realized that my needs are so different from his. Steve spends every moment staring at the screen. He will never plug it into an external monitor, except *maybe* to watch a movie on his TV. He will never run research computing and is unlikely to play a demanding game, most will be such that any modern computer in that store would handle them readily. DDR3 should not really be important to him. Nor should a 7200RPM hard drive (sure, it’s nice, but not worth paying extra for). Laptops today come with 4GB of ram. 4 Gigabytes!!!! That’s windows for ya. My desktop has 4GB of ram and I haven’t had programs using over a gig or two in as long as I can remember. With Linux, it’s like I have a 2GB L4 cache all the time, it’s pretty hot. Anyways, Steve found himself deciding between 4, 6, or 8GB of ram. Can you imagine? Most software these days can’t even address more than 3-4GB due to the 32-bit thing (which is *still* a problem in the non-Linux world).

After asking a few “sales drones” for some generic stats not obvious from the store tags, they got the distinct impression I knew way more about their products than they did, and as most sales drones would do in such a situation, started to steer clear of me. One guy, however, knew his stuff pretty well, and after we started to look “ready to go”, he took the plunge and started chatting with us. We had a really nice conversation, wherein he confirmed my beliefs that almost nothing has changed about electronics retail since the 6 years ago when I last worked it.

Now you folks might want to sit back and take a deep breath, lest you risk under appreciating the value of the insight I am about to provide. Electronics retail is HELL. Absolute hell. Nobody should suffer such seemingly eternal, unquestionably infernal torment. But I did so, and survived, so that I might pass on the valuable knowledge I gained there. Customers…are not right. They are wrong. Only in electronics retail is this true, and computer retail specifically. Why this reversal of otherwise-certain time-worn truth? Because you don’t *want* the customer to buy your product. Most stores LOOSE money on computer sales. I recall in particular at Circuit City, we had laptops which cost $1350 for which our cost was $1335. Take into account keeping the lights on, paying me to sell the thing, and the warehouse guy to drag it down off the shelf, and the cashier to ring it up, and you’ve got a problem. Some were even sold UNDER cost. The absolute most we ever made on a laptop was *maybe* $200, and that was for a $3700 laptop, the most expensive we ever carried (it was one of the Toshiba “aircraft carriers”). Rather than being in “sales”, I was actually in “damage control”.

My job was to sell warranty, and accessories, “like my life depended on it”. At any point in time, I was to recommend any and all accessories I could possibly imagine the customer needed. I honestly recall saying at least once “do you need a TV with that?”. Here is an example of my normal “checklist” I might run through:

  • Warranty
  • Computer
  • Monitor
  • Printer
  • Paper
  • Ink
  • Printer Cable
  • Thumb drive(s)
  • Blank CDs/DVDs
  • Movies to watch on it
  • Extra USB cable
  • USB extension cable
  • Ethernet cable
  • Extra software (ms office)
  • Internet Service (3 year contract! lol…)
  • Laptop carrying case
  • Laptop security lock
  • Extra keyboard/mouse for travel
  • Extra Battery
  • Extra charging cord/car adapter

This is just off the top of my head, 6 years later. A sale “done right” could take in excess of 2 hours.

So, given what I have said above, you can imagine, I was quite prepared when our guy started on the warranty speech. He did a really good job. Frankly, 8/10 for examples, 7/10 for cost benefit analysis, 10/10 for confidence. Also, 10/10 for getting his manager involved, which he did very subtly. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought his manager just happened to be hanging around and overheard us, but of course, that isn’t true. He probably gave him the “heads up” while he was “checking to make sure it was in stock” a few minutes earlier “I think I’m gonna need a hand with this one – he really knows his stuff!”. I was so proud of Steve, he said “no warranty” and didn’t back down even after they both ganged up on him. I’ve seen an awful lot of people crush under the same situation – since I was so often one of the people on the other side, trading comments back and forth with my manager about how smart it is to buy the warranty, and how it pays for itself when the battery dies, which it almost certainly will within the 2 year warranty period.

Anyways, to my great surprise, after the warranty talk was over, we did not get some big huge accessories talk. I have to admit – this was a missed opportunity. I was especially surprised that the manager was there and didn’t even suggest a carrying case or anything like that. We *probably* wouldn’t have bought anything, but what was the harm in asking, once you’ve already got the laptop rung up and everything? Meh, I’m glad we didn’t have to mess with it. Despite that “missed opportunity”, my otherwise accurate prediction of basically the entire progress of the sale and almost word for word the exchange between Steve, the sales guy, and the manager, I am convinced that very little has changed in the world of electronics retail.

That said, I’m glad we got the sales guy we did. He did everything he had to do, and was a nice guy about it. He never seemed pushy (beyond the minimum amount of pushy you need to be in order to work at that job). He knew his stuff and was a nice guy and I’d buy from him again if I ever bought computers from Best Buy for myself instead of building them.


Steve is obviously pleased with his new laptop as we hang out and get it set up from the comfort of Capitol HIll’s Six Arms Pub.

February 7, 2009

What do you tell your kids when they ask “what happens when you die?”

Filed under: Free Thought, Me, comic — Carl Myers @ 1:19 am

I wrote this post a long time ago, but forgot to publish it. Better late than never, huh?

This is a topic I have spent an extra long time thinking about, one which was recently brought up by Jeph Jacques in his strip Questionable Content (which I enjoy very much). Jeph posed the question in this strip:

…I wouldn’t want to make up a bunch of stuff about an afterlife or use some religion’s version of things, since I don’t believe in that myself, but I also wouldn’t want to completely horrify my kid by being all “oh there is just nothing. You cease to be aware and that is it.” I know that concept freaked me out nearly as bad as the concept of hell when I was little. I guess “make up something comforting” is the lesser of the two evils, but still…

Atheist/nonreligious parents, what do you tell YOUR kids? I am curious to know!

I am not a parent, and I’m not sure if I will ever be one, but I have spent an awful lot of time thinking about this very question. I am a big believer in Douglas Hofstadter’s take on intelligence and sentience as presented in Godel, Escher, Bach and I am a Strange Loop

Specifically, intelligence and sentience and everything about us that makes us who we are – the “spark” that so many people attribute to souls, lives exclusively in our brains, and in the physical world. It requires no metaphysical explanation. He goes on to suggest that if that is true, there is no reason why parts of us couldn’t live in *other* people’s brains also. He talks about the bond developed by close family, especially husband and wife, how they finish each other’s sentences, know each other “better than they know themselves”, and when the worst happens, often remark “it is like I lost a part of myself”.

The point I am finally about to reach is, if sentience is just a “strange loop”, a complicated feedback system in our brains which causes us to feel and experience life as we do, anyone we make contact with over the course of our lives carries with them a “granular copy” of that pattern. The more time we spend with them, the more detailed the copy. When I die, I will live on not just in the memories, but in the active mind of those I cared about, and who cared about me. That is something I could tell my children without being disingenuous or depressing.

I discuss this from the perspective of love and relationships in a recent blog.

December 9, 2008

Friend with Detriments

Filed under: Private, comic, funny — Tags: , , — Carl Myers @ 12:32 am

I was rather amused by this xkcd comic. I somehow feel like if I had seen this comic about 10 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of angst.

October 26, 2008

What I don’t understand could fill several libraries of congress…

Filed under: Me, News — Tags: , , — Carl Myers @ 5:14 pm

…but anyone who claims that not to be true of themselves is quite deluded. The most recent subject of non-understanding which brings me to pour out my soul is happiness. Happiness is the drive by which evolution encourages certain very complicated behavior in animals, in a way which genetics alone cannot. Happiness is older than writing, older than language, older than music, older than just about any concept we take for granted today. It may be the second oldest emotion (I would wager it isn’t older than pain/sadness, but I bet it is close).

I have long wondered what it would take to make me happy. I mean, I am happy now, in that I am happy with my job, happy with my car, happy with my material possessions. I am happy to have my friends, and happy to have things which drive me (my current project at work, open source, music, and other things). But I always felt I could be happier. I often felt something was missing from my life. Primarily, I think that is someone to share it all with.

I often hear things from my friends like “You can’t find someone to be happy with if you are unhappy to start”, or, “you have like yourself or nobody will like you”, and other choice gems of wisdom. To me they seemed like quite the catch-22. We in the computer world call this a “circular dependency”. It is a real problem, A cannot be satisfied without B, but B cannot be satisfied without A. What is one to do?

The way to solve this problem, in Computer Science and in life, is by breaking the circular dependency. I always said “so what I am supposed to do, just try to be happy even though I’m not, that’s the only way I can be happy enough to meet someone and be happy?” and they would reply “um, basically, yes.” Well I think I finally understand that now.

Last weekend was an amazing weekend. I went out, I saw a show with friends, I saw a symphony concert with a date, and I met a new friend as well. None of these things were things I hadn’t done several times in the last year. Really, I have no idea what was different, maybe it was just that they were all in such close proximity, and I was just really trying to enjoy them, but I felt great. Last week, I went back to work on Monday feeling great. I didn’t let anything get to me. I worked hard to make progress on my project, and I did. I hung out with friends, went to rehearsal, and did all the stuff I normally did. I consider last week to be one of the happiest weeks of my life.

Now, this weekend, I had a concert. I had to wake up early for a rehearsal on Saturday. Then, I went to a cello lesson right after. The cello lesson didn’t go so great because I was pretty tired. After that I went home, and worked on my file server project, which is nearly done. I found that one of the 8 hard drives I had ordered was DOA, meaning I can’t complete the project until I RMA it. I didn’t care though, I still felt great that I all but had it working.

Today was our concert, at 2pm. I slept great – amazingly. I just took some Claritin to clear up my allergies and made sure everything was working right on my CPAP machine, and I went to bed around 1am, and woke up on my own around 10am, feeling great. Our concert could have gone better – we were playing VERY challenging music and we had a little slipup in the second number which was very disappointing (but, fortunately, was not particularly noticeable to anyone besides us). The soloist for Rhapsody in Blue was wonderful, and it went very well. The second half of the program was also pretty uneventful.

Well, all gussied up in my tux, dragging along my cello, I headed back to my car, put it in the back seat as usual, and sat down in the drivers seat. The car was warm, and I was warm from the tux, so I put down all the windows. It was a beautiful, absolutely perfect 56 degrees outside. I started driving, and I just…felt great. The concert was over, and the rest of my weekend was open, I could just go home and watch some TV or something, whatever I wanted. I started to put on some music to get the concert stuff out of my head, and the CD system settled on my “drivin’ mix” – a bunch of upbeat techno and trance from Overclocked Remix.

This is when I realized everything that I have written up to this point. I realized how great the last week was. I realized how great this weekend was. I realized how happy I was. And so, I opened the windows all the way, put down the moon roof, and turned up the music.

Now I have seen folks like this before. Driving down the road, blaring their music. I always thought how inconsiderate they were being, like they think their music is so good they have to blare it at the world or something. “Hey, everyone, look at me, I have a sweet car and loud music, and I want to turn heads”. Only now do I realize why people really do this (at least, I think my explanation is right). I did it because I was so happy, the wind in my face, the music loud and out there, and it just felt good. I was happy. The only way to keep that happy feeling was to turn up the music and put down the windows and just enjoy it all. Air conditioning blowing in my face was not going to replicate this priceless feeling.

And so I drove all the way home like that, windows down, music up, a big goofy grin on my face, wearing my tux still, driving around in a beautiful 2008 Acura TL, accompanied by the most excellent techo-ized theme songs from Mega Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Street Fighter.

The point of this whole story is, I was supremely happy. I don’t think even a significant other could have made that particular moment much happier. I realize now that finding someone isn’t everything. It remains the most important thing on my “to-do list” for certain, but that in no way prevents me from having the time of my life. Happiness is hard to understand, but that’s what is so great about it. You never know when it will strike.

September 27, 2008

I <3 My New Acura TL!

Filed under: Me, News — Tags: , , — Carl Myers @ 6:42 pm

Hey all,
Been a while since I wrote a post, and part of the reason is my sporty new 2008 Acura TL. I really love it. I have been driving around a bunch and having a great time with it.

My old car, which was going on 8 years old, needed some major work done. Turned out to amount to almost 50% of it’s kelly blue-book value anyways, before I put that much money into a car I was thinking about replacing soon anyways, I decided it was time to take the plunge.

I did a lot of research. At first, I really wanted a BMW. My friend got a tricked out 5-series in the neighborhood of over 70k, and I must admit it is really nice. He tells me “Don’t get me wrong, I love my car… but do I love it more than TWO 35k cars? That’s hard to say”. He makes a pretty valid point here – BMWs are great and all, but are they THAT great? In the end, I decided that for the features I wanted, and the money I could afford to spend, a BMW was not an option, even a used BMW wouldn’t really get me what I wanted. I looked at many alternatives as well – I considered a Honda Accord (my old CR-V was a fine vehicle which literally saved my life on more than one occasion, endearing me significantly to Honda). I also looked at a Hyundai Sonata, a Nissan Altima, a Nissan Maxima, and a Honda Civic. Acura wasn’t even on my list, but it was a coworker’s recommendation which put it on my radar.

He told me that the new TSX is really nice, and I should go test drive one. He sent me specifically to Acura of Lynnwood where he “knew a guy” who wouldn’t “give me the hard sell”. Well, I went there “just for a test drive”, and fell in love. The guy he sent me to didn’t work there anymore, of course, but the sales guy I talked to was pretty good. I know you aren’t supposed to buy a car this way, but in reality, if everyone bought a car purely on statistics and performance per dollar, everyone would be driving a Toyota Camry or a Honda Civic, or the hybrid equivalents. “Holds 4 people, gets 30+ mpg, can go highway speeds” – that’s all you really need. But that’s not all I need. I was tired of driving a “4 banger”. I wanted something powerful, fun, sexy, something which said “this guy is successful and lives comfortably”. Yes, I know it’s pretty vain and stupid to judge a book by the car it drives, but it *does* matter.

He also “warned me” not to let them “talk me into” a TL. He explained that the new TL is coming out soon, and is a total redesign, and will probably be bigger and better for the same cost. He also guessed they would have a few TLs lying around they would be trying to unload. Well I followed his advice and went in to test drive a TSX. He was right that it was new and flashy and very cool. I just wasn’t 100% satisfied with the power. I mean, this is a car I intend to keep for many many years. Hopefully at *least* the 8 years my old car lasted. I asked “do you have anything with more power?” – the sales guy’s eyes must have lit up. What did he take me directly to, but the TL.

Now, due to my friend’s warnings, I was a little wary to begin with. Further evidence that my friend actually knew what he was talking about, the car already had 285 miles on it, more than one would expect on a brand new car, probably all from test drives. Also, they didn’t have a lot of them – my first-choice color wasn’t available (blue), but I saw a black one with light-colored interior which was close enough, after all, it was just a test drive.

I was driving around and having a great time, and the sales guy continued to show me all the nifty gadgets and things. Really, the only feature the redesigned TSX had which the “old” TL was missing was the ability to read MP3s directly off a flash drive. If I wanted to go that route, I would need an actual Ipod. This would have been a nice feature, but with a 6-disc MP3-CD-compatible changer, I was hardly that concerned (that is 4,200 minutes of 168kbit encoded MP3s, for those of you keeping track). The TL had heated seats, a nav system, hands-free bluetooth, voice-command navigation and calling, excellent climate control, and the power I felt the TSX was missing. Compared to the BMW, the only thing I was missing was the heads-up display. I really wanted one of those, I thought it would help me monitor my speed better, and it looks fucking sweet. In reality, it’s just another nifty gadget, hardly worth spending an extra 10k for it. Also, the Acuras are really just the “luxury name” used by Honda, so it is still in homage to the car maker whose SUV saved my life. Going from the TSX to the TL, I didn’t think a difference of 57 horsepower (201 versus 258) would be a big deal, but let me tell you, it was quite obvious.


Nope, that radar detector is not standard equipment – but it was a smart buy, trust me.

So obvious, the cop manning the speed trap noticed as I accelerated up to traffic speed on I-5 during my test drive. Yes, friends, I got a speeding citation during my test drive (which is bullshit, I was just accelerating up to the speed everyone else was going, and having a little fun doing it. The sales guy said cops usually give a warning during a test drive, this cop was obviously an asshole short on his monthly quota). Speeding ticket aside, I loved the car. I played the part of the “disinterested buyer” as best as I could, but I suspect the sales guy knew he had me. I managed to haggle down to dealer invoice or so, then a little lower (hey, I gotta pay a couple hundred bucks to contest this ticket, right?), but then they came at me with the extended warranty and the “zylon” coating to keep it shiny (especially for a black car – trust me!) and so on, so after all was said and done I ended up paying a bit more than I planned to. But you know what? I love my car, and hard sale or not, they took pretty good care of me at the dealership. They helped me with the financing, explained the paperwork for me, traded in my old car, ordered new plates for my new car, etc.

Seeing that now, just a month later, the new TL with even more horsepower, and a full body redesign, is available, some might think I would regret my hasty decision. I don’t. Having a 2009 TL rather than a 2008TL would be nice and all, but I wouldn’t have been able to haggle them down as far, and I am already paying more than I inteded to for my 2008 TL. I “got a deal”, just by settling on a different (not better or worse) body design, and giving up 20 hp and the ability to play MP3s off flash drives. One difference I didn’t know about, in fact, is that the 2009 TL is available in all-wheel drive, which I would have been interested in (hey, it rains here all the time), but that too would have increased the cost (from the website, looks like going from FWD to AWD is a $3,600 difference).

I asked the sales guy if he had been in a test drive where a guy got a speeding ticket before, he thought about it a minute and said, “yeh, I think…about three times”. I asked “did they buy the car?” and he said “ya know, yeh, I think all three did.” I guess that figure is now four. =)


*sniff* isn’t she purdy?

June 30, 2008

Time to Wax Philosophical on Love and Relationships

Filed under: Me, Private — Tags: — Carl Myers @ 2:30 am

An oft-used cliche, “Wax Philosophical” means to “grow philosophically”. That phrase has made a lot of sense to me recently as I have been thinking about my life goals, my values, and my personal relationships a lot recently. The purpose of this blog is to share my technical and scientific endeavors, and teach people what I’m all about. There are some private posts which would not be appropriate to expose to the world in this, a scientific and career-driven blog. This post, however, I feel is core enough to who I am that I must make it public so people trying to get to know me, my friends and potential dates, can learn about this important viewpoint I have.

It all started Saturday night. A dear friend had called me over for some late night stir-fry. It has been a recent pattern of ours to try something new in the stir-fry genre and I am glad to say it went really well. Stir fry takes about 5 minutes to cook, but about 2 hours to prepare (if you cut everything up without a food processor). This naturally lead to the old “how goes the dating front” question, which naturally lead to more deeper philosophical discussions. In retrospect, I realized I was trying to communicate something very specific about what I believe love and relationships really are.

I did a very poor job at the time of congealing my beliefs into logical consistent ideas, It was only tonight, talking to a dear friend from college, that I managed to create the metaphors and descriptive glue needed to make my ideas ambulatory in the memescape and the blogosphere alike. First, I would like to discuss what is for me the highly scientific concept known as love.

Love is…

I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
-Roy Croft

Most people want love to be something “special”. They want it to be magic – some metaphysical bond, love at first sight, god-approved, sanctity of marriage, my one special soul mate, until death do we part. This is a natural consequence of the patterns our brains evolved to create and prefer – but that is a whole other blog post. The reality, for me at least, is that love is explainable completely within the “strange loop pattern framework” of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach and I am a Strange Loop (both of which I highly recommend).

Love (whether big ‘L’ Love or little ‘l’ love) is about a connection between two people. It is more than just a fondness – it is when your brains’ granular representation of someone becomes so complex, it is like their brain partially exists within your own – and vice versa. You are no longer just individuals, you are part of a “couple”. Your wants and needs merge and become one – you finish each other’s sentences, know each other better than you know yourselves. You feel a closeness which is so powerful it is described again and again using metaphysical terms, like a “psychic link”. But this link need not actually be metaphysical. Also, like so many things in life, it need not be binary, or black and white. There are many descriptions about how people in a “loving relationship” grow deeper in love as time goes on, “deeper than they ever imagined possible”. Of course, it can go the other way too as people “fall out of love”. In an era where 50% divorce rate is a commonly accepted figure, there is ample evidence to support this.

So where does love come from? What makes two people love each other? I think love is the result of a long term beneficial relationship between two people. Love grows over time just like lesser bonds, like friendship, respect, and familial bonds. Unlike these other bonds though, love is about sharing everything – at the very deepest level our brains operate at. Is there a single person out there somewhere who is my soul mate? Are they the only person I could ever love? Highly unlikely. Soul mates are a hologram, an image project by our brains. In reality the “capacity for love” between any two arbitrary people can be represented as some value which, when compared to the general population, would probably form some sort of bell curve.

Could it really be that simple? Could I have talked to 10 potential “soul mates” today alone? There are a lot of dimensions to this “capacity for love” figure. In fact, there are at a minimum three dimensions. There is some “compatibility factor” which is an “external” measurement of two people’s compatibilities. What I mean to imply by the term “external” is that it deals with external things, like race, appearance, education, socio-economic status, and so on. The remaining figures are person A’s internal compatibility with person B, and person B’s internal compatibility with person A. These figures could be affected by things like first impressions, opinions and stereotypes one things about another person, whether or not one “things of another that way”, and other internal factors which, by definition, are difficult to measure. Dating sites, especially ones which tout their mathematical and statistical chops (a la OKCupid), are probably mostly measuring the first number. Like I said, by definition, the second two numbers are internalized and difficult to measure.

This “vector” of values fluctuates wildly, especially the two internal ones. Can’t you remember a time you were hanging out with a coworker, and they said something that made you think “oh… I never thought about this person that way, but…” Things like that alter our perspective of people all the time. The meaningful value to chart or graph, in my opinion, is the “peak capacity for love” over a period of time, probably a couple of weeks to half a year. This peak is representative of the “best potential” for two people to form a loving relationship. Obviously, when two people are already in a relationship, or courting each other, they each “want it to work” to varying degrees. Since most of the “internal” factors are also factors largely in each person’s control, when two people both want it to work out they will subconsciously raise these internal measurements of feelings and attachment.

Regardless of what exactly determines whether a loving relationship will eventually form, we can predict from the model I have outlined that, given optimal conditions (that is to say, if “both people really wanted it”), most people could love most other people. It’s about finding someone “in the right place in their life”, with the right combinations of shared interests and physical attraction to convince someone that they really want it. Then, over time, a loving bond can form.

Relationships are…

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future –and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
-Albert Camus 1913-1960, French Existential Writer

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.
Stephen R. Covey, American Speaker, Trainer, Author of ”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”

So now that I’ve outlined my beliefs about love, how does that apply to relationships? If love at first sight is an illusion, and love can only form between people in a relationship, what is a “loving relationship”? What is any relationship?Relationships are like trade routes. This is probably going to be the most “controversial” part of my post. This is how I see things, I don’t think it has a bearing on my professional career or anything, but it is a part of who I am.

Relationships are like trade routes. Everyone has their own needs they must import and assets they may export, just like a country. Some people have more “natural resources” than others, and some have more “unmet needs” than others. The metaphor is a surprisingly powerful one. Relationships are the vehicles by which people can get their needs met which they cannot fulfill themselves. A long and fruitful relationship may involve a level of intimacy which includes love as outlined above. And such a relationship is a true asset, an “entity made from mutual trust and gain”. But again, it need not be described in superlative or metaphysical terms.

Note also that international trade, and relationships, need not be exclusive. This model can describe monogamous relationships as well as open relationships, poly-amorous, and polygamous relationships. Some people want exclusive trade routes, and if they can get all their needs met on both sides of the trade that way – then it is a powerful, valuable, mutually beneficial arrangement indeed. Other examples of non-exclusive arrangements are plentiful in our day and age as well. Also note that even a faithful monogamous married couple has “relationships” with friends to serve needs besides sexual ones.

What does this imply about relationships? Well, one consequence my friend pointed out in our discussions is that this point of view could be used to claim any sexual relationship is really a form of “the oldest profession”, wherein a guy (usually) trades some thing of value for the physical “talents” of a girl (usually). I think this is a normal and natural consequence of a model which I hope includes all sorts of relationships, including the “transient relationships” of prostitution. While initially this may seem like an excuse for prostitution, arguing against the stigma it has in our society, I would actually disagree. In my opinion, most prostitutes are taking advantage of a market situation – a customer is going to pay a ton of money for 15 minutes to an hour of time – that’s very different from what members of a healthy relationship “pay” each other. You can’t put a dollar value on the “goods” received in a typical relationship. Support, actualization, love, sex, shelter, food, companionship. There is no grand scale, most members of a relationship are not measuring and weighing each contribution, trying to keep things “equal” – it’s not about that.

So what do I hope people will learn about me from this long-winded exposition? I hope people will know that I am not afraid to love, and I am not afraid to build strong relationships. I don’t demand an exclusive relationship, but I see it as a high possibility eventually. In the time being, I have needs and I will see those needs met. Additionally I have plenty to offer. I am successful, I have a great career and plenty of material possessions. I have food and shelter. I am also a great companion, and I like to think, a fun guy to talk to. I hope some day I will meet someone whose needs are wants so rightly align with my own that we establish a strong, trusting, meaningful relationship, and I hope that that relationship grows into a loving one. That is what I am looking for in a long-term partner.

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