Unlike pool, with its sterile perfection, Pi is unpredictable, it is irrational. We can attain an understanding of it without ever fully grasping its purpose or its true value. It’s an odd coincidence that my experience with pool would occur on Pi Day, given the contrast they provide me. Pi is baffling yet comforting. To know that Pi, a number inextricably linked to so many of the wonders and beauties of the universe, is as confusing and hard to understand as people certainly offers a small comfort to me.

It’s all mostly meaningless, so why not celebrate the meaningless by giving importance to an arbitrary marker of the passage of time? Which is my weird way of wishing everyone a happy Pi Day. And happy birthday to the remains of Albert Einstein.

I was sitting around with nothing to do, so I flipped to TSN and saw a billiards competition in progress. It was US vs Europe in nine ball two-man team play, and whoever won the game I had started watching won the series. After the break, where a few balls were sunk, there was no good line-up for the two ball. So the teams went back and forth tapping the two around the table hiding the cue behind other balls. Until one of the teams screwed up their safety shot leaving a reasonable line on the two. At this point, the announcers essentially called the game. Irrespective of the layout of the table at this point, it was a foregone conclusion that they had won the game, barring some horrendous unforgivable fuckup on their part.

There’s something very discomfiting about this certainty. Obviously, pool is a game of skill but most games of skill have a bit of chance, a bit of uncertainty. The wind can blow in the wrong way, even in closed environment games like darts. But it seems that in pool, there’s no chance left. The friction of the felt, the bounce off the rails, the angle of attack, the position of the stick on the cue, it can all be planned out too well. With enough practice, the game transcends its nature and becomes rote mechanics. I like pool, but I’m not very good at it. If I line up a shot exactly the same twenty times I’d probably only get what I want once, but professional pool isn’t like that.  Professional pool is precise, perfect, sterile. And, now that I’ve shaped this opinion, utterly uninteresting to me.

Happy Square Root Day, everybody! Days celebrating arbitrary points on our arbitrarily labeled calendar tend to leave me nonplused but this one has mathematical significance and a level of geekery associated with it, so it’s all good. Yes, it’s days like this that make me proud to live in a world with a date/time system which can be co-opted mathematically for entertainment purposes.

“If you’ve just joined us, we’re with Tracy Jordan, who is giving guitar icon Peter Frampton enigmatic clues about a secret treasure. Stay with us.”

WIN.

John August wrote about the changes occurring in society and culture and personality that the internet and online life can introduce. He’s generally more enthused about facebook and twitter and the like than I am — though I go through cycles regarding this and am shifting towards usage again, I think — but he raises a couple interesting points which I grazed by in my post about facebook but, naturally, he gets the point across much better:

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.

I’ve recently taken to reading and posting on the Television Without Pity forums after watching Lost on wednesday nights. For the most part, it’s a vast improvement over the Ain’t It Cool News talkbacks I used to frequent to get my Lost theorizing fix. But they have their flaws.

In an attempt to weed out trolls and flame wars they have strict rules about your demeanor. You have to write grammatically correct and full sentences. You can’t attack personally, you need to stick to the subject of the thread and of the forum. You’re also not allowed to write spoilers in the “episode discussion” threads which is great because you can theorize and question without worrying about someone spoiling the show. But these rules and restrictions come at a price.

Every time I come to the forums, I read post after post which criticizes Kate and Jack. They call Kate a cold-blooded selfish bitch and basically do nothing but wish death upon her. They call Jack an idiot and say that he is the worst and most boring character on the show. But Kate is not a selfish bitch; she has a fucked up history, lots of baggage, a fear of commitment, and lots of other things wrong with her. But she feels every minute of that. And throughout the series thus far, she has been incredibly selfless, and willing to help the entire Island community. Jack is sometimes an idiot, but everyone is sometimes. Jack had to live his entire life under the thumb of a father he was unable to please. A father who would criticize him for attempting to help out a kid being bullied. His entire life is guided by that need to fix things; to impress his father. When he flies to Australia to pick up Christian Shephard’s body, he’s doing more than just mourning a father. He’s realizing that he will never earn his father’s love.

I’m not discussing these crucial aspects of their personality because I think that what they do on the show is what I would do or the best thing to do. It is, however, what I think they would do. These characters are not static. Jack tries to fight these urges, Kate tries to fight these urges. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. That is at the very core of humanity, and to attack these characters because they are consistent and not merely set pieces through which the plot progresses is idiotic.

So, when a forum poster attacks Jack for not questioning Kate further about Aaron’s fate and calls Kate a murderer, I respond forcefully with a logical rebuttal. Jack has never seen Kate as a murderer. He has never cared what she did in her past. He knows her. Whether or not he actually knows her, he thinks he does. He trusts her more than anyone else. That’s why he asks her for her support when trying to convince the Oceanic 6 to lie. He loves her so deeply, that he’d give up his freedom and perform surgery on a man he has come to revile so that she could be happy with another man. To think that Kate having murdered someone, no matter how justified or unjustified it was, would sway Jack’s trust of Kate is downright intellectually dishonest.

So, in my response to this practically trollish comment, I called that poster out for making that statement. I asked them if they were really going to use the “Kate is a murderer” line. I followed this up with a calm and correct rebuttal as to why that was a foolish statement. I then followed that up by telling the poster that they should judge the character’s actions by the character, not by what you want the character to be. I held no ill will to that poster, but I sincerely hoped they read that and realized the error in their analysis.

Instead, my message was deleted and I got a warning from a moderator because you are not allowed to discuss other posters on the thread. Which is a foolish rule, because the forum’s users lose any ability to examine the merit of one anothers’ examinations. I’m not saying that we need to be boorish in our critiques but without the analysis of analysis, any improvement of ideas occurs away from the group which results in the group seeing the improvements but not the improvements to the process which led to that. Perhaps, I was too brusque, but my point was valid and even ignoring the direct communication toward the other poster there was still content apropos to the discussion in that post. Deleting it only hurts the collective intelligence of the group.

I understand the need for some level of moderation on forums. Aint it Cool News’ talkbacks have no moderation save some manual processes enacted when a particularly persistent troll writes hundreds of useless messages and harasses the community indiscriminately. Without moderation, most of the internet would devolve into a slew of attacks and slurs. But to delete valid content because it was deemed slightly snippy according to the whims of a moderator is unacceptably, and unecessarily, Draconian.

Andrew Sullivan, a much more prolific blogger and — let’s be honest here — generally better writer, wrote today about the damaging effects of civil unions.

France created a civil unions law in 1999 for gays but failed to designate gender and now about a third of straight couples getting married in France opt for civil unions because they are easier to get out of. Don George points out the obvious:

…it is terribly humorous and ironic that the French created civil unions to protect the institution of marriage…and now civil unions are undermining marriage because people are opting for them instead of marriage. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. So possibly the lesson for our country is that the best way to protect the institution of marriage is not to deny people marriage by creating a separate but equal system, but to allow gays to marry.

Er: yes. If you read my first ever essay on the topic, in 1989, you will find it was exactly this possibility that led me to back full marriage equality over marriage-lite options such as domestic partnership and civil unions. It was a way to integrate gay people and protect marriage.

What I don’t understand about the conservative viewpoint on marriage is their view that it is an inherent good. That somehow marriage is necessary for society to flourish and freedom to ring through the streets of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic blogger generally found on the other side of the political spectrum, has a different view of marriage:

As much as I can recall, there were basically three reasons for us to get married. 1.) I might leave. Marriage would force me to do the right thing. 2.) To declare our commitment to each other before a community of people whom we loved. 3.) The business reasons–the legalities of your estate and guardianship. I found–and still find–the first two reasons were utterly unconvincing. The third held some sway, but with the help of a lawyer we’ve managed to take care of that. The first turned marriage into a kind of insurance policy, and I just believed that if you felt you needed insurance for the person you were having kids by to stick out, you needed to reconsider the whole proposition. The commitment and community reason held some appeal. But I believed, and still believe, that long-term romantic partnerships are between the two people entering into it.

I hated the idea of public declarations, because the life blood of the relationship–what bills to pay, how to raise your child, your love life–all of that happened when no one else was around. Kenyatta knows more about me than any human being walking the earth–and this is as it should be. No one knows more about my strengths and my weaknesses, my failings and my successes. I trust her to the end. But that trust was worked for–it was not declared or conjured by the presence of other people.

I’ve had similar views on marriage for a while now, but so rarely has the argument not against marriage, but against the necessity of marriage been so succinctly put. Some people might have a different idea of what a long-term relationship requires. I know that my ex did. But to imply that marriage is an inherent good is misleading.

I love me some Lincoln. And Darwin’s work was one of the first strong scientific ideas that really made me start thinking critically about my beliefs. So it’s weird that I almost made it through this whole day, the bicentennial of both of their births, without acknowledging it. (In fact I probably would have if I wasn’t reading my friends’ blog and suddenly realized the dozens of articles about Lincoln and Darwin I’d read today were not an odd coincidence.)

I’m not a huge celebrator of birthdays, but Darwin certainly demands a bit of recognition for the massive game-changing effect he had on modern science, and since we’re already at it we might as well toss a bit Lincoln’s way.

Every once in a while I wonder if I’m actually gay, and then I realize how ridiculous it is that my metric for being gay is merely not finding homosexuality repellent and move on to better and brighter thoughts.

Lately, I’ve been staying up later and later every night. While 2 in the morning was an uncommon but not unprecedented bed time for my self over the last year, more recently it’s become the earliest I make it to bed. Because of this I’ve been catching bits and pieces of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. I’ve spoken previously about my distaste for Voyager and how overall even Enterprise was a better show. I’ve espoused this for quite some time both here and in one-on-one conversations with fellow Trekkie friends. Clearly, I have some retractions to make.

Enterprise is not a better show. Once Manny Coto took over the show and shifted the plots away from the Temporal Cold War nonsense, the show got markedly better. And at that time, it was probably better than most, if not all, of Voyager. But overall? Not even close.

In truth, I’ve never even seen the majority of Enterprise. I missed most of seasons two and three and what little I’ve seen of it hasn’t made me want to go back to it. Watching almost any episode of Voyager makes me change the channel just as fast but that’s due to the accumulation of ill will. It took seven years of consistent underperforming to get me to that point. Enterprise did it in just one.

But, like Voyager before it, Enterprise had a great premise. Not the specific premise they had, but rather their general idea. Telling the story of the first exploratory crews of Starfleet before the Federation had been created could have been spectacular. There had been stories of pre-Federation colonization from the very beginning of Star Trek, and to see the first official envoys head out into those waters was a tantalizing prospect. There are elements of this in Enterprise but too little of it. Their ship is a little too tip-top. NASA put a lot of work into the Apollo capsules but they were still barely capable hunks of metal.

Beyond this, the very first premise the show pushes on you is that for fifty years after Zephram Cochrane’s first foray into Warp speed, Earth barely ventured out again. Not because the people of the world didn’t suddenly and miraculously form a global government, but because some Vulcans said we weren’t ready.

The real problem is that they wanted to show the birth of the Federation while ignoring all the aspects of humanity that would have led to Earth being impactful enough to be at the head of a large Federation. Aside from our ability to work with each other and form consensuses — a quality the show rarely brings to light — we’re also a fairly egotistical and brutal species. We wouldn’t have listened to the Vulcans, and while we’d play nice with neighbouring species, we’d also be constantly working on attaining military dominance. It’s a show that came out a decade too early. The kind of rough and ragged sensibility behind Battlestar Galactica would have been ideal for a Star Trek prequel.

Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are ultimately at fault. They were involved in TNG and DS9 but there must have been some checks and balances further up the food chain on those shows because once they were the lead architects of Star Trek it went down the crapper. So I hereby rescind any and all endorsements of Star Trek: Enterprise I have ever offered. That show fucking sucked. And I pray I never stay up late enough to see it on my television again.

A few years ago, I took a philosophy course and one day my professor asked the students of the class to raise their hands if they would want to live forever. Not a single student raised their hand. No one but me, that is. I wasn’t sold on the whole immortality deal, but I was at least interested. I wondered if this hypothetical offer was enforced or endorsed. In particular, I wanted to know if I could choose to die at some point in the future when I’ve finished, or at the very least grown tired of, exploring the infinite expanses of both the universe and of the mind. His response was no, so my choice was no. Just as the eternal immortality of heaven and hell seemed unappealing to me, eternal immortality in our world was not a goal of mine.

But still, I chose to explore the possibilities. I thought for at least a moment that immortality would be a good thing. No one else did. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

When I finally opened the door to that question, the professor asked a few others why they wouldn’t want to live forever and none of them gave the answer I thought. I assumed that most of them, being philosophy students, had thought it out in great details. But no, they all said it was because of global warming.

Global warming. Seriously.

More abstractly, they all talked about the disastrous effect humanity has had on earth thus far. They didn’t think they would want to live forever when 100 years from now the world would be a desolate wasteland destroyed by the cruel banalities of man. More reasonably some thought that earth would survive but humanity would likely be extinct in the near future and then they would be alone forever. To wit, a majority of the students believed not only that humanity would be gone within their lifetime, but that earth would be irrevocably damaged by us.

Our planet survived an impact with a Mars-sized planet. Without ten thousand more years of technological improvement humanity could not irrevocably damage the planet even if we tried. We could destroy the majority of life on the planet and possibly all of it, but life would grab hold again. It’s tenacious like that. That innate tenacity in combination with the intelligence of our species is what makes us the dominant species of our planet. We’ve made many mistakes over the millennia, and with each new generation’s greater reach and power those mistakes become more and more dangerous but we’re not done yet.

There has been talk recently of what might happen if the Yellowstone Caldera erupts as it did 640 000 years ago, because of a recent increase in tectonic activity there. The level of damage that would cause is beyond catastrophic. Ash from the eruption would blanket most of North America and change the climate of the entire planet in ways far more drastic than the accumulation of greenhouse gases we’ve contributed in the past 200 years ever could. It’s hard to imagine just how much the world would change because of an event like that, and yet I’m not worried for the future of humanity. I’d almost certainly die, but humanity would persist.

It seems like the environmentalists have managed to scare the shit out of the world. Gone is the quixotic optimism for the future of the 50′s, replaced by the dour nihilism of now. We talk of alien archaeologists examining our cities thousands of years from now wondering what killed us, but we’re not going anywhere.

We’ve reached a point in our evolution where our intelligence is almost a detriment. Given the comfort of our more base needs, we have more time to think and greater minds with which to think. And so we think of what can go wrong. Each new generation imagines new terrors capable of destroying us with their free time. These thoughts of dread can paralyze us with fear of the inevitable or they can spur us to imagine new solutions. Lately there has been far too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Here’s what I know about the ultimate fate of humanity. We will go away. There will come a time when no humans exist. That is inevitable. But the question is when. Do we want to give up and whimper away in the next hundred years, or do we want to keep growing, keep getting smarter, keep fighting until the end, until the universe dies around us?

Well, seeing as I’ve been re-examining past views recently, I thought I’d go through my archives and read up on the naive simplistic opinions I had lo those many… months ago. I came across a post where I discuss atheists who get offended by people who say “God Bless You” and want to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance.

The atheist who refuses “God bless you” or tries to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance is just being an asshole who thinks his personal beliefs should be enforced on the rest of the world. I do understand that the pledge was modified early in the 20^th century to include the God statement and it has no place in a pledge to a nation which claims to have a separation of church and state, but the net effect it has on you is nil. No child, sitting in class as they recite the pledge, is seriously examining it to make sure they follow it religiously: they’re droning on by rote.

Once again, I’m not completely disgusted or surprised by what I once said (I save that sort of self-disgust for opinions I held four to five years ago) but it’s not really right, either. Obviously, the pledge shouldn’t contain religious symbols. It is a pledge for a secular nation! A nation which explicitly separates church and state. The insertion of “under God” was done to reinforce the evils of atheism during the Red Scare and the Cold War. It didn’t belong there in the first place and removing it is the right thing to do. It’s true that most children repeat the pledge blindly without really caring about its content, but that doesn’t mean the kids who do listen to the words have to be subjected to theism as a de facto mindset.

The impetus for this shift in opinion came when I underwent the iron ring ceremony for graduating from Engineering. It’s supposed to be a secret ceremony (mainly so we can act like we’re cool) so I won’t betray the trust of my fellow engineers, but it’s safe to say that some of the required oaths of that ceremony are fairly strongly tied not only to theistic belief but to Christian belief. As I read the oaths I noted the explicit religiosity but continued to read, silently swearing to uphold the core principles of engineering while ignoring the religiosity. But a fellow classmate — or so I was told later on while hammered at the after-party — refused to read the oath because it was too religious. Much later, most likely due to the alcohol, I realized that this was what I should have done as well. Most especially because I was swearing an oath with my peers and it should be something I remember and uphold diligently, but also because I had spent far too long being a “fair weather” atheist, keeping quiet about my beliefs because I didn’t want to evoke any controversy. Since then I’ve tried to be more open about my atheism which brings me to “God bless you.”

Ever since I’ve been at my current job, the co-worker to my immediate right has said “God bless you” when I sneeze (which is surprisingly frequent). Again, at first I would mumble something or pretend I didn’t hear it simply because I didn’t want to cause any trouble. But this act of evasion was just another way to hide my beliefs. Now, I still think it’s kind of a dick move to go out of your way to shoot someone down for saying “God bless you” but I no longer feign approval of it. And if you’re my co-worker who always very politely says “God bless you” I’m sorry if I seem like a dick because I don’t thank you for it; I’m just trying to be slightly less of a dick than if I were to “correct” you.

Oh boy. I was on the IMDB message boards early last year because someone was talking about how weird it is when male actors get grossed out about kissing other men for their roles. Here’s my response.

It’s called preference. I don’t want to kiss guys and I think it would be gross. Just because you accept other people’s homosexuality doesn’t mean you have no problem performing homosexual acts.

In some ways it’s right, but at the same time going back to that thread now I see myself as woefully ignorant. Actors are paid to perform roles. And most of the actors who get interviewed about kissing against sexual preference (truthfully, no-one ever asks NPH how weird it is to kiss hot chicks all the time) are famous enough that if they didn’t want to kiss a guy, they wouldn’t have to. And really, even if you’re a struggling actor desperate for a role and you’ve got an audition for a gay character who goes through an intense and intimate sexual awakening (not that I’m working on a screenplay or anything) why wouldn’t you do it? A kiss is only as intimate as you make it. A kiss is only as sexual as you make it. And all of that happens in your mind. It has nothing to do with how deep your tongue goes down their throat or how hard you push your face onto theirs.

Beyond all of that, I’ve grown up a fair bit since then. I’m not wet in the pants to make it with a dude, but it’s not something that disgusts me any longer. And there’s always a chance the dude’s a good kisser.

The talk about gay marriage recently has been important because gay rights are the next big barrier for civil equality. But even serious issues can be fun. GraphJam had an interesting analysis of the consequences of gay marriage earlier this week, and now a database engineer has chimed in with his views both on gay marriage and how to properly represent it in databases. It requires some basic knowledge of databases but even if you don’t even know what a database is, I think you’ll get the gist. He begins with some fairly simple concepts, which only support simple heterosexual marriage, and through 14 different revisions of the database schema — dealing with issues ranging from homosexuality, to transgendered people, to polygamy — develops a pretty out there format for storing a barely recognizable form of marriage. When introducing his final revision here’s what he has to say:

The legal ramifications of what I’m about to describe are unguessable. I have no idea what rights a civil union like the ones which would be possible below would have, nor do I have any idea what kind of transhuman universe would require so complex a system. This is the marriage database schema to take us up to the thirty-first century, people.

I’m all for it. Marriage as an emotional commitment is a fairly novel concept anyways, so changing it to be even more accepting is a good thing. And the more you think about the arbitrary limitations we’ve placed on marriage and other cultural ideals by virtue of nothing more that historical inertia, the more you’ll be willing to understand, accept, and support it.

I kind of love Paris Hilton. I’m not ga-ga over her, and she’d never supplant Jenna Fischer or Natalie Portman on my celebrity crush list, but I appreciate her honesty, her simplicity, her… idiocy.

Recently, she threw down the cash to head up to space in Richard Branson’s new commercial space-faring venture Virgin Galactic. When asked about it she said:

I’m very scared to do it. What if I don’t come back? With the whole light years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later, and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over.’

That’s just so cute I can’t even criticise it. It’s just so endearingly ignorant. Obviously, it’s not right; the time dilation from the minute amount of time she’ll spend in space is negligible. Even Russian cosmonauts who’ve spent years in space “time traveled” no more than seconds. But even still, she says it — or is represented in the media as saying it — with such sincerity that you want to just kiss her on the forehead and tousle her hair a bit.

And then there’s the infamous sex tape. Yes, I’ve seen the sex tape. It’s not the best amateur porn I’ve ever seen, but it has its charms. Specifically, and this may get slightly graphic, near the end she’s giving him a blowjob and says she wants the cum on her face. The reason? “Because you’re my boyfriend.”

I know that that’s a fairly crass moment in which to find innocence and appreciation, but that’s what it does for me. Over the years, Paris Hilton has been trashed for so many reasons, and yet I’ve never really got it. Is she famous for no reason at all? Absolutely. Luckily, I don’t care about fame. And when you take that inherent aggravation out of the equation, she’s really quite endearing. Seriously.