Happy Holidays!

... and happy kinda Newton's birthday, too.

I'm sure your blogroll is absolutely filled with people all saying the same thing I'm about to — I know mine is — so I'll keep it short:

Happy whatever-the-hell-specific-holiday-or-lack-of-holiday-you-celebrate-around-this-time!

(courtesy of Calamities of Nature)

Confusing fact with fiction

We hear scientific statements all the time. The Sun is over one hundred times the size of the Earth; everything is composed of atoms; light is made up of massless particles called photons, which act like both a particle and a wave at the same time; the Earth is a sphere, etc.

We hear nonscientific statements all the time, too. Luke Skywalker probably died a virgin, the Enterprise travels multiple times the speed of light, Frodo destroyed the One Ring and saved Middle Earth, etc.

And I find myself grappling with this all the time. The events of Halo, Mass Effect, and the actual real world all try to occupy the same area of my brain — the part generally associated with the "yeah, that's what you hear all the time" sentiment. Do we really know the Earth is spherical? Do we really know how gargantuan the Sun is? Or are we just aware of the statement?

I remember sitting in my Astronomy class two semesters ago while my professor was lecturing about the Sun. He mentioned that, through a telescope, you can see spicules rising and falling all over the chromosphere, taking as long as ten minutes to reach their biggest size.

... and then he mentioned that they rose at around 20 kilometers per second, adding that after ten minutes — I love the way he worded it — the spicules "exceed the diameter of the Earth."

"Exceed the diameter of the Earth." When we look at the Sun, it looks kinda fuzzy on the edges, with each bit of fuzz increasing and decreasing over the span of several minutes. And the EARTH would fit inside it! The Earth, which is so massive compared to us that we can't even see its curvature, and it pales next to the incredible size of the Sun!

And then, as I glance up at the Sun, I comprehend, for the briefest of moments, the almost incomprehensible distance that must be between us. And just as quickly, that debilitating wonder fades into numbers. Nifty little tidbits that people might find interesting. You'd need seventy-five billion people standing head-to-toe to reach the Sun from here. Light, which travels around the Earth seven times a second, takes over eight minutes to get here from the Sun.

Facts. Just facts. Do we ever really understand them?

Or, maybe, this anti-climactic conversion from wonder to number is a defense mechanism against the night sky:



Hell, why limit ourselves just to astronomy? If we were appropriately overcome with wonder at everything that deserved it, we'd never get anything done. We'd be overwhelmed by everything we saw, then overwhelmed by the concept of vision, then overwhelmed by our awareness of our vision, then overwhelmed by our awareness of our awareness...

We'd all just sit around, mouthing the words "Holy shit" over and over and over.

We'd be overcome by the concept of atoms and molecules. We'd eat a bagel with cream cheese and be stupefied by the intricacy and complexity of all the molecular reactions that take place. We'd even be overcome by the concept of a bagel and cream cheese — overcome by the concept of foods specific to a certain culture.

Is there any field of human inquiry that wouldn't cripple us with fascination?

Coffee! Part III

I should just make a "coffee" tag, I think, since I'm writing about it so often now.

Anyway, to catch you guys up, I love coffee and I can make it whenever I want. In fact, I've got me a nice mug of coffee right next to my keyboard (while taking an extreme number of precautions against spilling it all over said keyboard... which I may or may not have done before) as I write this, which makes me a very happy guy.

It's an interesting thing that's happened since I've gotten my little coffeemaker — I've become an easy person to shop for. I'm like that crazy guy you all know who collects unicorns or baseball cards or something and for whom, when you have to buy gifts for people, you're like, "Oh, that's easy; I'll just get him a unicorn/some baseball cards/something."

Some people, I'm sure, would mind. They'd get offended and think you thought they were devoid of all personality or character except that one unicorn-loving trait. They'd want you to get them something special or unique. Something which showed that you really knew them as more than just a caricature of baseball-loving goodness.

I'm not one of those people.

I've got a delectable sampler of Starbucks coffee, Dunkin' Donuts coffee, Ghirardelli coffee, Entemann's coffee, Folger's coffee... all because people know how much I love coffee, and it's awesome. I wake up every morning, walk (or, I guess "shamble" might be more appropriate) over to my mountainous shrine to caffeine and get to stand there for minutes trying to decide which coffee I want to make for myself.

... and then, after I've picked, I get to decide how I'm going to make it, what I'm going to add to it, whether I'm finally going to put Easy Cheese in it like my siblings keep telling me I should...

At peril of seemingly giving ammunition to all the anti-ex-Mormons who stumble across this blog, I'll mention that coffee has dramatically improved my quality of life (which isn't, obviously, to say that my life wasn't awesome before). There is something special and endearing about the whole "morning ritual;" the ideal coffee is an incredibly unique and personal thing — like a sammich in liquid form.

I even got to make coffee for a few friends of mine when they were over for our typically-weekly Halo Night. I got to bust out my coffeemaker, brew up a mug for everyone, show them all the stuff I've got that they can add to it, and show off my amateurish coffee knowledge.

A year down the road, though, my coffee knowledge won't be nearly so amateurish, and I'll be able to brew a cup of joe for people that will blow their fucking minds away.

Argument by Probabilities

Okay, you guys all know the gist of how this argument goes:

Imagine you have ten pennies, and you toss them all up in the air. What're the odds that they'll all land on heads?

(Of course, as we all know, the odds are 1/(2¹⁰), or 1/1024)

Now, look at the complexity of DNA, or of cells, or of the human eye. Look at how Earth happens to be in the Goldilocks zone, how the universe expanded at just the right speed to allow matter to coalesce into stars and planets. How can you possibly not believe in God, when your very existence is much, much more improbable than those pennies all landing on heads? You'd have to be stupid to think we exist by accident!

First, this argument shows a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution and of the age and size of the universe, but I'll ignore all that and just cover the probabilities bit.

I've never been much of a fan of probabilities because, as a hard determinist, I think they're something of a pseudoscience. When you flip ten pennies, the odds are 100% that you'll get whatever you got, and 0% that you'll get what you didn't get. There are so many factors that determine how those pennies will land — how they're arranged in your hand before you throw them, how you actually throw them, etc. — which are all essentially caused by something preceding it, ad infinitum to the Big Bang.

Plus, let's consider the "all landing on heads" part. It's just like, I dunno, drawing five cards off a deck and getting a royal flush in spades in order — we place undue significance on that specific pattern, because it has some subjective value to human beings, whether because of the uniformity and order or because it means you're guaranteed to win the pot and you can milk the suckers around the table for all they're worth. But really, even if we accept probabilities for a second, it's still a stupid argument.

If we label all the pennies — penny 1, penny 2, penny 3, etc. — and then take the probabilities, we notice that the odds of the pennies landing in any combination is just as improbable as the next. You can grab those ten pennies, toss them in the air, and you're getting a miracle no matter how they land.

Same with being dealt five cards off the top of a deck, too. Taking into account the suit of each card, every hand you're dealt comes with a mind-boggling improbability of 1 in 311,875,200.

And yes, if you draw five cards off the top thinking "my goal is to get a royal flush," you shouldn't get your hopes up. But who's to say human beings are the goal of the universe? We're just an assembly of five cards that sit around claiming that the five cards we are specifically are of cosmic significance. We are every bit as miraculous as the Great Red Spot or the rings of Saturn, but neither Jupiter's giant storm nor Saturn's rings have the audacity to claim they're the point of the universe.

The excitement of missionary work

Growing up in the church, missionary work was always painted with this rosy, "miracles and spiritual experiences all the time" flair, with some undertones of "it's a lot of work; but it's worth it." Friends of mine have come back from their missions and go on aimlessly about spiritual experiences, baptisms, etc. But it's very different when you're distanced from all the idealistic propaganda.

I have two younger brothers, the older of which is old enough that he should be on a mission, but has chosen not to, and the younger of which is frightfully and depressingly gung-ho about anything and everything about the church.

The head of the household I've been banned from saw this and, in a desperate attempt to stop my oldest brother from becoming just like his son, sicked the missionaries on him in the hopes that it would motivate my brother to go on a mission.

It hasn't worked. All it's really done is motivate my brother to hide when they come over every Friday, so it ends up being to two missionaries doing their thing with my youngest brother, and damn do they always sound bored. (If I were conversing instead of writing, this is where I'd put on a dry, distracted monotone and run through basic church talking points to imitate them: "The Atonement is the most important part of the church, and it is the foundation...")

I, thankfully, grew up before I went on a mission, so, as I peer down the hallway and listen in on my brother's one-on-two missionary sessions, it is a bizarre and alien experience. I'd gone tracting with the missionaries back when I was a member and, while all we got were a bunch of people slamming doors in our faces, the impression I left with was that, while you get rejected a whole bunch, Missionary Moments™ were always just around the corner.

The impression I have now, though, is somewhat cynical. Missionary work isn't so much about converting people as much as it's about taking young people, throwing them wildly out of their comfort zone, and then comforting them with the only thing there that's familiar: the Mormon church. It's about dependency.

And, apparently, missionaries forget all the bored-out-of-their-fucking-minds parts of their missions and remember all the baptisms and stuff. I ironically thank God that I never went on a mission, never married into the church, and never got sealed in the Temple.