A more elegant punshiment for a civilized age

Distractions, the bane of any creative type. Are you an artist, writer, or freelance programmer? Then you've had to deal with horrible demon that is distractions. Today, I have the extreme pleasure of working next to a drill. Whenever the drill runs, it shakes the entire room and all I can do is imagine is how I will destroy the person running it. Beating them with the drill is such a basic, unimaginative fate, but think of rhythmic, meditative feeling as your arm swings and blood paints the walls. But no, again, not enough thought. Medieval and particularly catholic works did punishment the right way. Is there inspiration in Dante for how annoying distractions should be punished?

There is demon, Exercitatus, who is more of a minor minion in the moors of hell, who posses a drill penis, and uses it to sodomize neighbors who do loud constructions at inappropriate times or have loud sex next to paper thin walls. This is done in a room with piss poor acoustics where the walls vibrate, so as the poor soul is tortured, they are forced to listen to the act shake the walls. Not only do they experience the act, but the buzzing and vibration of the walls is played out as the sound track. Does it occur for infinity? Well, time is relevant in our world, so why not in hell as well? The act does not need to go on forever, it just needs to seem like it.

Most punishments for things fit in with their times, so what is a good mythical style punishment that reflects our age? A more civilized, technologically advanced age calls for punishment more fitting of our increased knowledge in science and math. Not a Sysyphus punishment with a bolder that rolls back down to the bottom. No, my suggestion is to make someone work an entry level job with high stress for one day in a Poincare Disk.  Time still moves forward, but as the end of the day approaches clocks slow down by half. The end of the day never comes, and the last hour is an eternity spent watching the clock.

Writing is such a good way to get rid of demons. Lets a bored and angry mind become creative and work out frustrations.

You get nothing! NOTHING!

Working hard on a post, but it's much harder than expected. As I'm doing research on the post, I notice that there are many websites with the exact same information. Damn. It's so easy to just copy and paste information and put it up on a different website, but it makes so many questions about the content. And doing it that means that anyone looking for information on a subject only gets one point of view and misses all the other details of the story.
EDIT: The post I'm working on is a brief biography of a mathematician,  and the website I keep finding is a copy and pasted text from one of those pre-written papers on line. Do lazy people become successful in this life and then become forgotten as time goes on? There's a difference between shortcuts to do something and just being lazy. Come on, now.
I've done my two hours of writing now, but the post isn't finished. It won't be a dense wall of text, but because I playing with ideas and styles it's taking longer than expected. Happy Thursday.

Issues with animal rights

Animal Rights. There's two subjects I don't like, economics and ethics. I've read some economics, but it still seems like voodoo. Yeah, that's all I can say. When I start to think about ethics and then write on them, my brain stops and I start focusing on all the paradox's and problems that exist. Taking any sort of hard stance on the issue seems impossible, because good and evil does not seem to be a binary issue, but something with many gradients in between. The issue of animal rights is an interesting one and worth exploring.
Animals are an important part of society and serve a useful propose. We would not be at this level of a society without domesticated animals. This is not a personal idea, but historical fact. When large groups of people gather, the waste that is made (whether it's trash or feces) attracts rodents and other creatures that carry diseases that humans were not immune to. And as people started to travel, hitchhiking diseases came with us. Domesticated animals like dogs and cats helped kill and protect cities from being wiped out. Other animals served as tools and transportation to help build more impressive technology. Whether someone is a cat or dog person or doesn't own a pet at all, animals were the link that made civilization possible.
How animals are treated though, has gotten bad. They are forgotten or seen as tools or merely food. The animals that provide food are genetic mutants and might not be animals. On an organic farm, chickens are given space to roam and walk around. Meat chickens are bred to have huge thighs and huge breasts which gives them a strange waddle while they walk around. After 8 months, it's really a mercy to kill these animals since it becomes hard for them to walk at all. Antibiotics have become a necessity for cows, since their tits have become bred to a point where infection is inevitable, and infection will cause pus and all sorts of nasty things to go into the milk. This is not a factory farm problem, this a problem caused by a 1000 years of breeding with one thing in mind: Bigger, more food, more appeasing to the eye.
So what's the problem with ethics? When it comes time to research on the issue of animal rights, a few writers take an extreme stance. Tom Regan's 1986 paper, The Case for Animal Rights reads as a call to arms for animal rights. His choice of words make his case aggressive, and he claims that to be against some problems in the system, a true activist must be against the whole system. The stance is fine. The system is fucked. It's the extreme nature of that line of thinking that is a problem, and is an argument taken for Eco-terrorism. Putting people in danger to save animals is an extreme that is far from what makes sense. Murder of one group to save another group cannot be the correct answer. This is where the whole thing falls apart for me.
And there are groups that make animal rights an issue, which is good. How they choose to relay that message is a problem. PETA seems to treat people as dumb, either by participating in a naked protest using beautiful women or by making a pokemon game with no understanding of the source material (PETA black  and blue. I refuse to link traffic to their site.) These tactics either assume that the only way to make people listen is to use sex, or are built purely on passion but no knowledge. Sex works, sex sells, fine, but how many people leave their teenage years and can still be convinced to do something by the promise of seeing a naked body? Advertising that uses sex uses the promise of the act itself; perfume with pheromones to attract the perfect mate, the right clothes to hide some features, accentuate others, and shape what needs to look good in order get sex. On this subject though, sex is only one thing. Sex sells because it's a desire everyone can relate to, but it glosses over other issues. How can animal rights benefit people? People have other desires beyond sex, so the focus shouldn't be on "animal rights is sexy" but "this how animals rights benefits the person watching or reading this".
I can take a stand on GMO's and animal breeding. It's a job I've worked and have seen negative consequences. And the problems seem to lie in how groups of people think about an issue, then react on an animal level, as opposed to reason. On the surface of animal rights lies a lot of people and stances that give the idea a bad name. This helped set my mind on some issues I want to address in the future as I approach the topic more and more. In the meantime, click the ads on the site. 30% of the revenue I get goes to animal shelters. Or you can click the "Dog Lovers Unite" tab to find a link to donate money to the cause.
It's Wednesday, and I don't need a smart post to gain readers as much as I need a post to help me focus my goals. I'm half way done with my translation post. I had something on Sunday when I said I would have it, I just wasn't sure of how to post it. I can't just put a sketch in the bottom and say here it is! What I can do is post a screen capture of it, though. Or not since this computer doesn't have a button to screen capture. Later I'll get a picture.
I have found pure evil. It is called "Derivative Clicker" and it proves that I don't need a game with characters or story or 3 hour cut scenes. Apparently, I need a button that makes the numbers go up, a button that buys other buttons, and button that makes numbers drop. That's it.  I need an account on github, 'cause that place is the shit.

International Potluck Blogfest and the Philosophy of Cooking

Today is the International Potluck blogfest! Hop around the blogs, and work up an appetite for lunch or dinner or brunch or whatever. It's hosted by Lexa Cain, Beth Fred, and Medeia Sharif. You can win prizes, I guess. More importantly, food and people!
Now this has got me thinking about reading and eating. The only book I have that has food in it is "The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking" but I can't for the life of me tell you any of the recipes in that book. There's a lot of MSG because it was written in the 60's. I just the love the introduction to that book, because the book is less of how-to cook and more about the philosophy, art, and mindset of cooking. You know what, I'm gonna talk about this book, then just give a recipe for Gomen, an Ethiopian collard green dish.
I've spent a lot of time in used book stores. Used books are cheap, good, and became plentiful when people started buying e-readers. Used books stores have their own unique character. There's the Book Barn near me in West Chester, PA. It's a four floor used book store build from an old barn, and even though it has cats roaming around, they keep it clean and it doesn't stink like cat pee. The one in my hometown of Bellows Falls, VT is just stacks and piles of books. It's so awesome because of it's lack of organization. I say all this, because their are always books you will find in a book store, it seems. This is one of them.
Cooking is not something you do to eat, it claims. Cooking and eating is an exercise to be enjoyed by all the senses. Dr. Lee Su Jan outlines the ideas of a dish having crunch, sweet, sour, heat, and color. The idea of this book was to introduce Chinese cooking to an American audience in 1963, knowing that they wouldn't have the ingredients for traditional Chinese cooking, so he sticks to the basic ingredients and thoughts and substitutes when he can. He quotes Chinese philosophers on the subject of cooking. According to the book, Chinese scholars always approached the subject of cooking as a very important thing, and even Confucius had a book on the subject. All in all, it's great book to change how you look at cooking. Pick it up for cheap at abebooks.
OK, with a mind set of a cooking philosopher, it's time for gomen. Traditional southern Collard Greens always seemed silly. You take a fresh vegetable and cook it in pork fat. The only way to get people interested in kale and it's cousin Collards is to cook it in bacon. Surprised the internet hasn't picked up on it.

• 1 pound collard greens - rinsed, trimmed and chopped 
• 2 cups water 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 3/4 cup chopped onions 8 cloves garlic, chopped 
• 1 tablespoon olive oil 
• 1 1/2 cups sliced green bell pepper 
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice 
• 1 teaspoon salt 
• 1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric 
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika 
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice 
• 2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger root

1. Place chopped collard greens in a pot with 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Cover, and simmer until collards are tender, about 20 minutes. Drain, but reserve the cooking water. Set aside.
2. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a pot over medium heat. Stir in onions and cook until just beginning to brown, about 10 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add the cooked collards, 1 tablespoon olive oil, and the reserved cooking water. Simmer, uncovered, over medium-high heat until liquid is nearly evaporated, 10 to 15 minutes.
3. Add the green pepper slices, lemon juice, salt, turmeric, paprika, allspice, and ginger root. Cook until peppers are soft, about 5 minutes.

This stuff is frickin' delicious, is full of hot, spicy flavor, looks great and has plenty of color. Your supposed to eat it with Injera, which is this fermented flat bread that serves as a plate and eating utensils.  You just pick pieces of bread off, then use it to pick up the food. Not only does this dish have flavor, and look good, but it's fun to eat! Finger food for the win!
Have you noticed the ads? Did you know if you click them, 30% goes to animal shelters? That means for every $100, $30 goes to stuff like blankets and medicine and such. I don't like ads myself, but they can be a force of good.  

Why your blog sucks

I'm not a website guru who sits atop a mountain in all my enlightened wisdom. I know enough website coding to get me by, and I always feel like I should be improving on my writing. To that end, recently I've been getting a kick out writing the phrase "why does my blog suck" into google and reading the resulting advice. Most of it is the same stuff, written in different styles and voices, and funny enough it's the people who read blogs who have the best advice, I think, not the people trying to sell yet another goddamn book on how to make it as a blogger. The piece of advice that bothers me and always bugged me is the advice to ad more numbers. "The best tabloids and newspapers use numbers and stats in their articles and headlines, why shouldn't you!?" Sure, they do, but it doesn't mean their right, or good. The Washington post and CNN can afford to have an analytic major or math major on staff, and if they do, I don't think they use them. Chances are you "hate math". Funny thing is, I tried to do a quick search for a percentage on that to back up my assumption, and I found a Washington Post article that claimed "Math, like reading, is not a “natural” human activity." Oh boy, there's a rant for another day. My short answer to that is, animals can count, reason and understand the concept of abstraction, that is they can assign value to things. They just don't give numerical values to stuff and they don't have advanced arithmetic like trigonometry and calculus. You automatically assign higher value to papers with math and fancy equations in it because math is fancy and for smart people, and since you don't understand it, there must be higher importance in how it works.
Math isn't just fancy calculations that cause people to have violent seizures upon reading. Calculations are a recent thing in math, like enlightenment age recent. Story goes, Leibniz was hella good at calculations and people just wanted to be like him. His rival, Newton, based at least one of his books on geometry. The statistics that people are so fond of using in their blog posts to back up a claim are based on calculations; some simple that are extensions of ratios that have been used since the Greeks, and some hard $\mathbf{F}\left(y\right)=P\left(X<y\right)=\underset{y}{\overset{-\infty }{\int }}f\left(x\right)d\mathit{x}$ distribution type calculations. If you ask me a year ago, I would have claimed you shouldn't discuss these stats if you don't understand math. That was based on a pet peeve of mine where people claimed to dislike math then quoted stats at me to back up arguments. The idea you need to understand something to use it is ridiculous, everyone reading this is using a computer, but only a small handful of you understand how it works. Instead of taking a Prop and Stats class just so you can post a number backing up your article on gun violence, I will talk about something that's normally glossed over in beginning math: Logic and reasoning.
I'm going to start off by stealing and referencing John Allen Paulos. Mathematicians can do this, because there is pressure to be original, but work is built off of others, to a degree. And not referencing someone with more knowledge and experience would be hours of work that I will never have. He wrote a book called "Logic of Stories" and it's great. It's short, like less then 200 pages, and it's written in a way that flows and keep you turning pages. He also condensed it for a New York time article and a TedX talk. He has a much less crass way of stating my thesis: "In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled." When dealing with the numbers, the first important rule is "Correlation DOES NOT equal causation." (The second rule is something about how the rules must have recursion.) If I told you that gun violence rose 80% in ten years, and then said live panda births dropped by 80% during the same time, I would hope that your next question would be "So?" That's a ridiculous enough of an example that someone would hopefully see right through. However, I could pick something less ridiculous like "average education" and "chances of bicycle being primary mode of transportation" instead. As the average education of a population drops, the use of bicycles increases, so getting rid of bike lanes will help with education. See any problems there? A town where the education isn't great on average may also indicate that income of the population is lower, so bicycles are used more because people can't afford cars. Bicycles don't cause people to be stupid (I hope not at least). In this case, and in a lot of cases I see, it's not the numbers that are problem but the logic.
Numbers are like words and letters. They are completely meaningless symbols until people give them the rules and context to make them powerful. ΔX >= ΔY isn't a something that a lot of people know, and even if you do know what those symbols mean you're aware of the fact it's gibberish unless I define it. The concept is similar to how you use words in your posts to make a point. Words aren't evil, but they do convey certain meaning to certain individuals; dropping an f-bomb is fine when I'm talking to 20-somethings at a bar, but I'll clean up the language a bit around a mix group of children and grandparents. "7 Dirty Words" is the definitive example in my mind about using words and how words meaning changes on context and how words change over time. That George Carlin is a scholar. With that knowledge, men like Churchill and Martin Luther King were able to move large groups of people. Numbers can be used to the same affect. You can put them in their like the wanna-be intellectual who uses big words without understanding their meaning, or you can use logic and reasoning, the basic building block of good mathematics, to change that paper into a post that cuts with surgical precision.
While I'm on the subject of words, you need to understand that different groups of people use words differently. Average does not hold the same meaning to the layman that it does to a mathematician. My second favorite statistic is "The average American makes about $90,000 a year, but the majority of Americans make less than that." (When reading that last sentence, keep in mind my favorite statistic is "87 % of statistics are made up on the spot".) Given a group of numbers {2, 3, 3, 3, 20, 5}, you can see that the common number is 3, but you can't see that the average is 6. Thinking back to 3rd grade math, you remember that you add 2+3+3+3+20+5, then divide by 6, since that's how many numbers you have. That 20 really screws up the average. So beware the phrase "On average. . ."
I really, really want to just talk for hours on prepositional logic. It's what made me fall in love with math, so it's like that lover or child (not a child-lover, you sicko) that I won't shut up about. I have to keep it short and really just keep to the surface. And with that, I'm just resigned to saying "Watch out for Non-sequiturs". Basic logic that has been around since Aristotle falls under the pattern of "If statement A is equal to statement B, and statement B is equal to statement C, then A is equal to C." If that last statement was "then A is a banana" then it would be a non-sequitur and just plain surreal. Aristotle, the father of logic, did it though. His were not surreal, but see the Russell quote at the top of the page. A problem of his was that he would draw conclusions based on "common knowledge". Try reading some of his papers, and you'll see some great examples of logic, but you'll see more stuff about how weird ancient Greece culture was. Views on women, sex with boys, and how smaller penises are better spring to mind. This problem still occurs when people start using statistics. If you come at a number or a set of numbers or even some problem with some pre-established prejudices,  statements like "red states have lower IQs" or "black people only use government hand outs for drugs" start getting tossed around. Extreme examples in both cases, but ask yourself if a conclusion follows logically, or if the conclusion suffers from bias.
Using numbers in a post will help your writing standout more. Using numbers and logic will change it into something beautiful, something magnificent, something actually fucking coherent. And let's face it, there is always someone smarter than you. Einstein had Gödel, you know. Some of those guys want to keep you in the dark because it gives them the advantage. Knowledge is power.

An easy sunday post for easy Sunday reading

Ah man, it's Sunday, and I haven't written anything. I've been translating one of my posts. The thing about translating yourself, you still have full artistic control over the content. Which is good, because a straight translation is horrible. It makes no sense, and leaves out the authors style. It will go up soon. I'm going to take this Sunday to share stuff I've been reading and finding on the internet. Nothing fancy today, just a good day to lie around.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-fall-2010/readings/MIT6_042JF10_chap01.pdf - Chapter 1 of discrete mathematics.

Yup. I open this post by saying I'm doing some translating, so of course I'm reading something on discrete mathematics. This chapter is a nice refresher on logic which I haven't done for a couple years now and is an important part of math, not just computer science.

A Simple Email Crawler in Python

It finds emails on a website to populate lists.

Also, I'm reading "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison along with a few other books. Enjoy your Sunday.

Food for energy, not for thought

I've been forced to ride my bike everyday wherever I go. This is no problem, I have football coaches who remember me as the guy who used to ride my bike to practice, a feet made impressive by the fact that it was during "hell week" a hot and tough week of practice, I had to ride my bikes 5 miles on Vermont hills, and after all this I was still 250 lbs. That last part is the focus of this; not the fact I was overweight, but the fact I could be active as a kid by playing a sport for every season, riding my bike for a 14 mile round trip to hang out in town, and hiking with my dogs for about three hours and still be overweight.
On top of the biking, I've started running as an effort to tighten up some loose skin from the weight lose from the past year. Not a lot of loose skin, just a bit that hangs around the belly. In order to run 5 miles a day AND ride a bike for 8 miles, I need food. I need energy. Otherwise, I'll be sitting on the couch, get up for some water, and feint. Or I'll wake up the morning after a meal of a medium pizza, 2 litter coke and 12 pieces of wings and I'll be starving. Lucky for me, I live 1 and half miles away from the strip mall area, and so I can run to McDonald's.
There is absolutely nothing to these meals. I just ran there and back, and had a meal that their sign claimed was close to 1000 calories. I don't feel like I've eaten a thing. I just had half a days intake of recommended calories for a barely active person, and I don't feel like I've eaten a thing. For contrast, if I decided to to run the same distance and come home and make 2 pancakes with nothing but flour, sourdough, and baking soda, I wouldn't be hungry until 1 pm.
Growing up, I think I read at least a chapter of most of the fad diets that were popular between 1995 and 2005. And I saw those mail order diets that claim to help you learn how to eat. The best education I got was from working on organic farms. None of the people claimed to be nutritionists, except for the one farmers wife who was going to school to become one, but everyone there cared very deeply about what was going into their body. You could try to call them out about only being into a idea about GMO's, organics, and vegetarianism just because it was trendy, but then these guys would school you with a deep store hold of knowledge pulled from every corner of time.
So let's talk food. Mainly, I 'm tired of hearing that Americans have it so easy because we have enough food that our poor are fat. Our poor aren't fat because they have so much to eat, it's what they eat. Frozen pizza is food, fast food is food, and it has enough calories on the box that you would think that the consumer wouldn't be hungry until Friday. But it doesn't. There's no energy in those calories. The body eats them, but it does seem to know what to do with them. So we sit on the couch and watch tv. The whys have been explained to me plenty of times. Food has sugar and salt put into them as a preservative, and the freezing and storing process also breaks downs other molecular pieces into simple sugars as well. I feel like a lot of that info came from an old health teacher I used to despise, so this post should inspire a good nutrition research post.
Not all food is create equal. Again, I was fairly active as a kid, but dinner was steak, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese. And corn as a vegetable. Corn is my least favorite vegetable from my time as a farmer; it takes so much from the ground and gives the consumer almost nothing in return. My house had frozen pizza, easy cheese, saltines, Ritz crackers, peanut butter and jelly, and ground beef. I've discovered in the past year I can live off a small garden, rice, flour, and a wonderful drink called Kvass. I still eat meat sometimes. I keep reading articles that say 26 through 28 is when you notice you metabolism decline and all this other stuff. I have never been in this great shape, I have more energy, and I even recover from hangovers faster. In short food has a "Quality over quality" matter to it. Also, snacking. I eat when I'm bored. I have a garden now, so I can snack on stuff from my garden, as apposed to potato chips.
I think tomorrow I need to stop by work and grab a kvass culture. Then I can start my sourdough again and stop being hungry all day.