Changes

So This Happened

The Pursuit of the Self

Truth be told, we as humans spend a vast preponderance of our time not knowing what we are. At the ultimate level, whether we pound our chest against the notion or not, we're animals. The human machine is a squishy contraption of myriad chemicals and the human mind, like the mind of so many hundreds of our ancestors is focused on the day to day. I'm not trying to figure out who I am. I'm trying to figure out where the power bill is coming from or how I'm going to find the extra few bucks on the side for the hobby budget. I'm trying to figure out the next steps to my education, or the most expedient way to relax, chemically speaking. Should I hang out with my friends and fuzzy the stuff I don't want to think about right now with ethanol or should I stay at home and play the game specifically engineered to keep giving me a dopamine high so that I keep giving the designer their monthly pound of flesh?

Ultimately though, the one question I can never answer effectively is who I am. I mean, I know my name. I know my address. I know my job title, my various screen-names, nicknames, terms of endearment or disenchantment, and all the rest.

But who am I, really? Who are any of us?

I'm a person. I believe that, because any other position seems absurd on the face. It's an assumption, because I don't know what it means to be a person. Certainly, all humans are persons, but are all persons human? What about persons that aren't human? I mean, I have a pretty good handle on the seperation between fiction and reality. I know when things look, and feel, fictional. But that doesn't make good characters like Ender Wiggin or Paul Muad'dib any less people in my eyes. They have emotions, at least in the sense they are given them by their writers - and as a writer, that process seems more natural than you would think. Sometimes, a character's reaction will surprise you, even though you wrote it.

Okay, so I don't know what a person is. But there are billions of other people, and the category you fall into doesn't determine who you are, or so they tell me. What is the essence of my identity? What makes me me?

THese are questions I think most people never answer. Maybe their just the result or focus of the curious interaction of manic-state mentalities and generally anxious behaviour. I can be defined in that way. I'm the mousy guy in the corner who's always worried his lastest mishap ruined the day - and those mishaps are fed by such concern.

But that's not me, at least it's not the essence of me. Characteristic, maybe. Just as momentary outbursts of anger are certainly characteristic, to the point that my nickname around the workplace has become a workplace colloquialism for such moments, regardless of who has them. We're a kitchen. Fires burn hot in our blood.

It's funny to me that I always identify as a cook. Even during my hiatus, I introduced myself to people as a cook first, and whatever I was second. Cooking is the one art form I feel I have genuine room to learn in. I mean, my writing can always improve, but I'm unaware of any new techniques left to explore.

You can't say that about cooking. There's something new under every rock. But that's digressing.

Am I a cook, though? Are we defined by our occupations? Or am I a writer because we are defined by our hobbies?

Most people with mentality, with my constant worrying that I am the subject of the latest vaguely-directed complaint or that in spite of all precaution that driver two cars back has every intention of mounting the curb and running me over, try to avoid labels. I spent a goodly portion of my childhood refusing labels. Eventually, I flatly refused to socialize, except with a very small, very select group of friends. I've never really changed the dynamic. I have small, insular groups of people with whom I feel comfortable, with whom I can show myself.

And yet, that self is always different. Maybe we don't have personalities, or those personalities are multi-faceted. Maybe time can change people faster than you'd think.

I'm not sure I'll ever really know who I am. I'm not sure I'll ever really know anything.

Auditor Time: Dr. Hartnett's 8 Reasons Why Evolution is Foolish

I have a fairly high tolerance for woo. As a matter of fact, I've even been known to peddle woo from time to time - longtime readers of the blog have likely witnessed my personal hybrid of strict-science and creationist cosmologies.

Every now and then, though, I've the unfortunate duty of laying the proverbial smack down when the woo hits a critical level.

Recently my place of business was frequented by such individuals as are Young Earth Creationists. This is not particularly unusual or even a cause for concern. You're allowed to be a creationist. You can even be a creationist aloud.

I don't, however, like being pamphleted, and I was, so today, I'm going to help out the locals by debunking this particular pamphlet. If you're interested in finding a hard copy, they're apparently produced by Creation Ministries International. It is accredited to an author, Dr. John G. Hartnett, who is credited as being a Physicist with his Ph. D. from the University of Western Australia.

I was actually somewhat pleased to find that UWA is actually an accredited university, which gives out actual degrees that are actually useful in judging the rigor of a person's academic instruction! I was not surprised, after reading his points, that his area of expertise has absolutely nothing to do with cosmology, astrophysics, or anything else relevant. His research is focused on the development of highly-stable microwave oscillators, and using such oscillators to test general and special relativity.

Without Further Ado:

 1. Where did the universe come from?

Man puts all his faith in cosmology to answer this fundamental question. But cosmology is not even science, it is just philosophy. This has meant that man has had to invent fudge gactors to make his theories work, such as the totally-just-mad-up stuff called Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and Inflation. There isn't a shred of any real laboratory evidence for any of them. Not any! They also claim the Cosmic Microwave Backround radiation as the afterglow of the Big Bang, thus supposed from coming from all directions. Yet it seems to be associated with the orbital plane of our solar system's planets!

Man doesn't put his faith in cosmology, unless you are implying that creationists are somehow not "mankind". Physical cosmology (as applied to religious cosmology) is an academically-rigorous and, indeed, scientific field of study. Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and Inflation are not fudge-factors. The inflation of the universe is observed and the thus-predicted impacts on particle physics have also been confirmed by experiment. Indeed, inflation as a hypothesis helped to plug up most of the holes in the original versions of the Big Bang Theory, and the fact that inflation is a studied phenomenon suggests that those resolved problems are resolved properly. Dark Matter is necessary as well - it's presence, see-it-with-your-eyes clarity or not - is beyond dispute unless humans are somehow deluded as to the functioning of gravity. While I'll grant you that the n-body problem in orbital mechanics is yet to be solved, the fact that every observation of stellar motion suggests the presence of Dark Matter is (forgive me) the sort of thing you'd have to wilfully ignore. Dark energy is a bit more nebulous, but it's only the most well-supported of a small handful of explanations as to why inflation is subject to acceleration.

As for the absolutely nonsensical statement of the CMB being inherently associated with the orbital plane of our solar system's planets, there's absolutely no reason to suggest that. The only reason I can conceive of for such a statement is the observer's failure to realize that the CMB was measured from the plane of the earth's orbit, and to suggest otherwise is to ignore the reality of the COBE experiment.

2. How did nothing explode?

According to the Big Bang story first there was 'nothing' and it exploded! When I say 'nothing', I mean not even vacuum, not even matter, no energy, no space, no time, not anything. Nothing!

According to Stephen Hawking, the question of the origin of the universe does not even exist. He claims it began in every way imaginable and maybe even some that aren't. He asks, why are we here? He simply says that the Universe selects those histories and lead to these conditions. That is, the Universe made itself - there was no Creator. And that just makes no sense at all.

Okay, there are actually two very difficult concepts here, but the basic gist of the argument is that Nothing can't explode. This would be a major coup de grace, and no scientist would ever have accepted Big Bang as a theory with such an obvious flaw, right? Naturally!

... As you might expect, that's not what Big Bang Theory postulates. If you knew what the Big Bang Theory actually suggested, the question would be "How did everything explode?". That's an interesting problem, and one that's hardly resolved in modern physics. Singularity is not nothing. The entire contents of the universe existing as a single point in space and then expanding to suit is everyting exploding, not nothing exploding. It's often like people seem to believe that the big bang involves someone pushing down on a cartoon plunger to set off the blasting cap.

As to the claims about what Stephen Hawking says, I'm not going to address them, except to say that the citation provided is pulled entirely from the proper context and anyone can read that paper and see that. As far as "no creator" not making any sense goes... that's a personal judgement call, and one I'm not entitled to make. But, in the same way that I don't believe you need a rain god to come along and irrigate your crops, or a volcano god to make the volcano explode, I believe that physics is sufficient to describe the behaviour of the universe on a grand scale as much as the small scale.

3. How did Stars and Galaxies Form?

There is no known law of nature (physics) that allows stars to form originally from clouds of gas, which supposedly came from the Big Bang. Fundamental physics must be violate or one must invent unknown stuff - Dark Matter - with the right properties to get stars to form naturalistically. Without it, it just can't happen.

He adds, in a footnote:

It has been proposed that an exploding star can compress a gas cloud, but that hardly qualifies as an explanation for the origin of stars in the first place.

Wrong! There is a very, very well understood mechanic for stellar formation via the collapse of gas clouds is achieved! The math is as sturdy as the calculations that support Newton's Laws of Motion. The masses required are very easily calculable and the process has been observed from every stage! The entire matter is simply a question of hydrostatic equilibrium - balancing the kinetic energy of the pressure of the gas off of the gravitational energy of the star itself. You don't even need Dark Matter to account for this... and as far as I know, nobody seriously suggests Dark Matter solves this particular problem.

4. How Come All Rocks Dated with Carbon-14 Give Absolute Ages less than 56,000 years?

I'm not going to repeat the individual claims of this section because, for once, the main claim actually is the question and the answer is very simple: that's because Carbon-14 Dating doesn't work for anything that old.

For the un-initiated, Carbon-14 Dating works by measuring the relative proportion of Carbon-14 atoms to other Carbon isotopes in a sample. This can be used as a dating method because of two important details: Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope with a well-known decay rate; and the natural ambient proportion of Carbon-14 is well-understood.

By comparing how much Carbon-14 is left in a sample, versus how much there should have been, you can arrive at a reasonable approximation of the age of the sample. However, there's an upper bound for this - after a while, you'll no longer be able to measure the amount of Carbon-14 left in a sample because it will be entirely too small, if it's still present at all.

For Carbon-14, the half-life is 5,730 years, plus-or-minus 40. That means to measure a sample of any kind, your resolution is annoyingly broad. Carbon-14 doesn't work on particularly recent or particularly ancient samples. We use other isotope dating measurements for that.

At the stated ages, approximately ten half-lives have emerged. If the original sample had been 100% Carbon-14, which would be remarkable, it is now less than one-twentieth of a percent of Carbon-14. You're getting these unusually low ages because you're reaching the upper bound of ages that Carbon-14 can be used to measure.

5. How do we determine the absolute age of a fossil?

Evolutionary stories tell us that the millions of fossils in the sedimentary layers found all over the EArth give dates in line with microbes evolving into man over the past 3 billion years. But it is impossible to determine the absolute age of any fossil. It must be dated by the sidemnts it is found in. And how are the sedimentary layers dated? By the fossils found in them - circular reasoning! And even when they use radioactive minerals (in associated volcanic material) to date sediments, they must make untestable assumptions. Even so, different methods commonly disagree with each other.

I'll grant you this is fuzzy if you're not an expert in archaeology - I certainly am not. However, this is objectively wrong. Fossil presence can be used to associate sedementary layers and known sedimentary layers can be used as a way to date what's in them, but the radiometric dating you gloss over at the end of the graph is reliable. The measurements disagree with each other... within the limits of statistical allowance, which I'm sure you're familiar with, being as you are involved in the development of high-precision instruments.

At this point, I'm more convinced that the author simply approved the copy, rather than writing it himself.

There are three further points: Why hasn't evolution been observed? (it has), How does specific coded information in DNA arise by chance? (it doesn't), and How did life arise from non-living chemicals by random chance? (Slowly, but other than that your guess is as good as mine.). They aren't even particularly worth addressing because, like the rest of this screed, they are predicated on an inability to look up even basic scientific information, or question what is being told to you by the pretty, shiny paper.

 

 

Service, Please!

If I can wax poetic for a moment, there's a voice in my head. It's me, of course - what else would it be doing there? - but not the me-that-is. It's a me-that-was, or a me-that-might-have-been. The version of myself that could comfortably dwell behind a desk, viewing the world through panes of glass for the rest of his life. He doesn't understand me-that-is.

The accountant runs his audits. He dwells on questions of worth, demanding to know where I get the values I ascribe to things. Half-marvelling at the prices I'll pay for the given reward.

He doesn't understand. He can't understand, because he's never lived. A million lives, perhaps. He lives in his own way - vicariously through the voices inhis head, the voices he crafts. Those voices never talk back, never tell harsh truths. He will not grow - except sideways.

I live. Every day I jump headlong into the fire and every day I crawl back out. Some days, I am invigorated. Those days I breathe deep and the fire draws into my lungs. It suffuses me, powers me. The sparks kindle deeper, inner fires. That is the prize. There is nothing tangible. A living may be earned a hundred ways, but there is no drug that can match the burning of kindled passions.

Some days, I crawl back out broken and bruised, my shell cracking under the heat.The fire makes fools of us. It is our workhorse, but also our undoing. Most never learn to breathe it. Those that can simply burn less than others. These days, I come home and let the ash form weak ink at the bottom of my shower and I just hope that soap is salve enough to fill the cracks. Bruised pride heals, maybe. But you don't care if it would, because eventually the burning will outpace the burns and you won't have to answer that question.

But whether I burn or get burned, I live. I walk among the flames and find peace, or don't. It is a strange idea, to turn to the voices outside your head to do your thinking, but in it, there is a certain reward. You pay the price of liberty and earn instead leadership. It's liberating, not to think. To do without thinking contains a certain satori, that zen-high which both of me chase.

That, it turns out, is all we have in common. We have our own prices. Burns and blood and ink-stained fingers.

I, alone, grow. Even the me-that-would-be knows that he had no chance of becoming me-that-is without the fire.

Blisters will callous. Short fuses burn away. Order up.

The Human Machine and the Neglect Cycle

My innards look something like this.

When I was writing my earlier inexpert articles on nutrition, I frequently likened the human body to a machine, which isn't entirely inaccurate. While there are some differences, the basic rules of mechanics apply, particularly when it comes to fuel and maintainance.

Humans suffer any of a broad variety of physical and mental breakdowns over time, from acute problems to more chronic ones. Today's bad posture is tonight and tomorrow's back problems, bad shoulders, and overall "age-brokenness". Today's bad diet could very well be tomorrow's Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

I find myself particularly aware of when I am and am not fatigued, partly because the job demands a fairly reliable high-energy, and partly because fatigue can also be a symptom of my own idiosyncratic chemical imbalances.

Recently, I went through changes in my life that dramatically impacted my fatigue level. I reduced my overall activity level from five-times-daily full-hour aerobic activity (not counting for the anerobic exercises of being employed) down to a piteous ten minutes. At the same time, I rather dramatically (and foolishly) reduced my caloric intake by a good 20% and went off of caffine cold-turkey, down from a habit of double-dosing on energy drinks first thing in the morning.

The resultant month-long experiment has been a tremendous burden and I found myself having serious doubts about what I was doing - in all aspects. Being literally too tired to care has its definite disadvantages.

I'm feeling better now. To some degree I think my body has adjusted, but it shouldn't have had to. I consume far less than I should calorically, even at my reduced activity level. The nutrient balance is so far out of whack I often wonder how it's possible I function at all. I became severely ill for about a week, and in one 24-hour stretch I slept for about 18 of them.

I'm more or less back to normal now - mostly because I've let softer forms of caffeine back into my life and consume an unabashed quantity of empty sugar calories - but the continuation of the easy fatigue and the other help problems has inspired me to write about patterns of neglect.

We, that is to say humans who are in a position to be healthy and yet aren't, habitually neglect ourselves.  For me, as with all other behaviours, this is a somewhat cyclic process, though there are certainly some aspects of health I neglect more than others, and on the whole I think the neglect probably wins out over the otherwise. I'm a socially-anxious homebody who prefers the company of books and pixels over the company of other noisy humans (when I'm not the society-starved extrovert who spends and spends and spends just to keep my friends company for a few hours), after all.

Then periodically, something comes along and causes us to give a damn. We take a stab at resetting our diets onto healthy patterns, maybe go for a walk, run, or cycle now and again. Take up a sport. Try freakin' yoga. Whatever.

Then, as our focus wains and we realize superhero training montages are only possible in the movies, we lose our interest in our latest health initiatives and go back to assaulting our bodies with casual neglect.

I think, to change that, you'd need to make a few changes:

• Bad Diet Habits are Good Diet Habits-in-Waiting. Every craving has a healthier alternative, and the example I usually use for that is that a furious craving for fruity candy is almost always slain by fruits. It's easier mentally to think of diet adjustments less in terms of what you're trying not to do, and more in terms of what you are doing.
• Ditto for Exercise. You aren't a couch potato. You're training for your sport/activity of choice. I think humans in general and people in my mindset in particular have a fear or aversion to being seen as novices in a particular craft, which is odd, because I've always considered the position of the novice very endearing and the pursuit of expertise a noble effort - one of the most human drives, in fact.
• Game it. It bears repeating that humans like to win at things. That's why we think of physical activity and sport as synonyms - they often are. So keep score. Chart your times, or your reps, or which targets in your nutritional system of choice you hit. (N.B.: A lot of different nutritional guides have been published by numerous countries that are very interesting in their design. As with everything the truth is in the results, but many of these alternatives are worthy of pursuit if you, like me, can't actually be bothered tracking each individual neutrient). You'll then have a useful tool to gauge your progress toward goals, which is also important.

Life In The Lapse I : Syncretic Decay

(Let me appologize in advance for the quality of grammer here. I am bound to typing on a badly-damaged touchscreen for a few more days.)

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I am a member of the Choose Your Own generation. We come from an entertainment culture of games and books so open-ended that clear interpretations are entirely subjective. As a result, we ourselves take things in pieces.

For me, at least, religion is no different. A brain fuelled by critical thought on every available topic leaves little room for rote orthodoxy. In the months following my conversion, I grew increasingly heterodox, as I dropped doctrinal positions I knew in my heart to be false - in a manner of speaking.

I replaced thed doctrines with new ones - often borrowed from the world's other religions - to try and make sense of issues I have only half-understood. It probably wouldn't surprise anyone that the geneartion of infalibility produced an attitude of unaccountability, but there you are.

Still, from time to time, I feel a call back to orthodox Catholicism. Perhaps not radical orthodoxy as grows prevelant in the Catholic blogging community. I think simpy accepting the dictates of the Catechism should suffice.

An Announcement Long in Coming

This seems to be a suitably recent photo.

So while those of you who are also friends with me on facebook have already long known what I'm about to tell you, as are those who know me or The Katherine in person (these groups are not identical), there's quite a few of you out there who I hope are still reading who haven't been told.

Back in April, on our 7th dating anniversary at a cosy little sushi restaurant downtown here, Katherine and I got engaged to be married.

There aren't many details to be had besides that just yet, but I'm sure I'll be too excited to not keep you posted!

The Polymath Approach

Vault 29 owns this photo of my work.

One of the things I like most in life is the development of skills. I hesitate to say I am an expert in anything - whenever I become convinced I have attained some level of mastery in this hobby or that ability, the universe conspires to forcibly remind me that I'm going to likely be a student forever.

My current sous-chef (that is to say, under whom I work, not who works under me), actually, has a favoured saying in the family regarding such things, namely, "if you are the smartest person in a room, you are in the wrong room". Granted, he usually says this while actively being the smartest person in the room - but tales from the workplace are past-tense now that Anthony Bourdain wrote his Kitchen Confidential.

Something I fail to capitalize on, however, is the idea that all the numerous individual skills and talents I daily hone can be taken together. While this is somewhat obvious in the fusion of my business and culinary training in the rekindled desire to open a restaurant of my own one day, being as I am a mad man in a hurry to grow grey.

However, it's taken until relatively recently to realize that sometimes the lessons from one profession, or indeed one hobby, can be taken together with the goals and lessons of another. For some time, the Katherine has been expounding upon the virtues of her powerful design systems and extensive training, while I sit here in my obstinate refusal to admit that Word is not perfectly adequate for all tasks.

This comes in a number of forms - it's basically an extension of the idea that no man is an island, only applied to skills - but I think the true inventiveness is in the overlap. The visual arts impact the culinary in more ways than cute menu photography. Colour theory works as well on the plate as on canvas. A good understanding of growing conditions and labour involvement leads to a better understanding of the true value of food. Spreadsheets are remarkably useful in the kitchen both at home and at work. And so on.

Mostly, though, the whole concept is good for filling a page or two, while I wait to make a much larger announcement tomorrow.

Seven Quick Takes: Take-Noko!

--- 1 ---

Urban Exploration Phototime

The fact that I'm doing a link-up of any sort pretty well tells you I'm not very good at coming up with ideas on the fly anymore. Truth be told I spent most of my mental energy on retaining a number of things I promised myself (and have been told by wiser folk than I) not to hold on to anymore. While I'm pleased to learn my memory is much more voluminous than I give it credit for, I'd really rather use it for other things. I suppose the only thing for that would be to finally offload some of the memory-kruft into other formats. Speaking as someone equipped with a reasonably broad pallet of paper-based and digital storage media, you'd think I'd be able to get a handle on all this junk... but no, not so much.

--- 2 ---

Over a year ago now, I had a particularly bad week at the old Pet Store, where i used to work at the time, as many of you will remember. There was a spree of bad luck involving a number of digital devices - my phone and my iPod Classic among them. Screens were broken, nasty words spoken to nobody in particular, and the up and down of it is that I wound up with no real motivation to replace them.

It wasn't that I wasn't replacing broken things. I have replaced, since then, several pairs of headphones (including a very expensive computer headset I use for doing audio-video work and gaming, the five minutes a week I have to myself). But the thing is, I have always been bad with my electronics, since I was very young. I suppose a factor in that might have been my generation (I had a freakin' palm pilot in 1999. When I would have been in the fourth or fifth grade. That's messed up), but the factors don't mitigate the problem.

I figured if I could go a year, limping along with equipment that was in less-than-perfect condition, I could make do. The iPod was a relatively easy fix - set single playlists of a manageable length and change them out when they get boring. The phone itself was a non-issue. I can't always see the screen as well, but the touch functionalities still worked fine, and I could still bank, hammer out a text message, or dial as I saw fit. It wasn't until recently, when dust and moisture started being able to get their way into the phone, that the broken glass really became an issue. If it wasn't for that, honestly I would have waited another year, until my contract expires and I can get a new phone at reduced cost.

Now, I'll probably do an early upgrade - renewing my contract on new terms - or buy a used phone of a similar model. The iPod itself as simply stopped working altogether. The four or five days I went without it were so torturous that I'm borrowing a spare one of The Lady's until I can replace it, or at least ween myself off of having total audio control.

--- 3 ---

Fredericton, where I now live and have for several months, was recently struck by the tail-end of Tropical Storm Arthur. This is not an unusual occurence in this part of Canada, and in fact, living closer to the ocean as I used to, I became rather used to the odd bit of high winds and heavy rains that such storms represented. That's why I was surprised to not only lose power on the day of the storm (a Saturday), but to not get it back until Tuesday of the following week. While I freely admit that nothing in my fridge was quite so "correct" as I would have liked it to be, the loss of a few pounds of salmon, half a pork tenderline, a bit of leftover roast duck, and all told about another $80 worth of condiments, long-storage dairy, and other munchables was sort of an unexpected kick in the gut.

The part of the storm I can't stop laughing about, though: Literally two nights before, I threw out my best-and-only piezoelectric flashlight because some impact or another had cracked the casing in a way that rendered it inoperable. They say it never rains...

--- 4 ---

Beautiful work patio often leads to late nights after-hours.

I just can't get enough of this new game I've been playing. It's supremely irritating when my brain does this sort of thing, in some ways, though there is a great and satisfying itch in the childlike enthusiasm for the latest whateverthehell has my attention now.

I suppose in large part I have been overly luxurious. I was rather showered in books at my birthday, but the lucky chance of cheaply acquiring the recent Bravely Default (Nintendo 3DS by SquareEnix) was surprisingly welcome. The game is very good and I recommend it to fans of classic RPGs. It turns away from Square's millenial fascination with ATB-style systems to take a trip down memory lane to turn-based, but also includes some interesting new features to take advantage of the 3DS's sleep mode, passive wireless functionality, and Augmented Reality architecture. Very good title.

--- 5 ---

In one of those never-say-never moments, I've learned I actually have some level of skill in pastries - just so long as no actual pastry is involved. My day-to-day work, until very recently, was entirely concerned in the perparation of small, bite-sized desserts. Vault 29 has me, after consulting with a few highly-qualified chefs, making their desserts-in-miniature. So I've acquired some real chops when it comes to no-bake cheesecake, fresh lemon curd, vegan desserts, chocolate mousse, panna cotta, and, of late, Key Lime Pie.

It's almost a shame that I won't be doing pastries much longer, though I never really intended to be a pastry cook forever. Still, having a section of my own to run independently and with a minimum of supervision, and rather a lot of lattitude as far as creative control, has been really, really good for the ol' mental health.

--- 6 ---

I've taken to eating breakfast again! Neat trick - if you eat breakfasts that are good cold, there's absolutely no reason not to make it the day before. Lately: Lemon Greek-Style Yogurt, Grapefruit, mini-doughnut and water.

Also, gigantic fan of random beverages - today I had the juices from a somewhat-too-juicy berry compote cut with soda water.

--- 7 ---

Apart from bravely default - of which I've played about an hour this week, I really haven't had much time for any other gaming. Any other free time has been eaten with plans for a big move that's upcoming, or recouperating from being alive with beer and books.

Lately: The Lord of the Rings, and a lovely little HP Lovecraft anthology.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

The Intersection of Negative Time and Negative Inspiration

Key Lime Pie Again

Truth be told, I shouldn't be writing this article.

It started with a sort of a stream-of-consciousness-type event where I was thinking to myself of ways to improve my handle times in the kitchen.

Then it morphed into political musings on some various Canadian situations that don't have much appeal outside of the fourty or so people that I know who can actually name a senator (tip: I don't know mine).

Then it sort of tapered off, and I realized I had nothing to say. I still don't have much to say, but I think that's because, by and large, I don't have much to think about.

As a general rule, whether they followed the original theme and purpose of this blog at all or not, the posts here have been about, well, something. Mostly that's because it's easier to write about something rather than nothing. Partly, it was out of a misguided attempt to brand myself as an essayist of some amateur stripe. That's not to say that the essay isn't a format that I, as a writer, have in my toolbelt. It's just not one I often use.

Truth be told, I've mostly been avoiding writing here because I don't know what to write about. I'm in a weird spot, where my ideas are all currently being picked-up, re-examined, and tested for conciseness and internal-consistancy. It's sort of like being in college all over again - in fact, it seems like every two years or so, I spend my time trying to reinvent myself, with mixed results. It leads to cool things like not wearing trenchcoats anymore or learning me some history and Latin. It also leads to a lot of stupid moments, bad hair, and experiences that leave you wondering whether you're glad you had them or not.

I think this page is going to take on a more personal tone in the weeks and months to come, since talking about such things is therapeutic whether anyone listens or not - and we all know someone who can use a little therapy.

Either way, watch this space.

Thoughts on Turning 24

Gotta Bring Back This Hair

Those who know me fairly well that my usual response when asked for my age is "Uhh...", and a vacant expression while I haul off mentally and do the math. Sometime in the last little while, I aged up, and it seems like the higher that number gets up out the teens, the less I care.

While I am (for nifty mathmatical reasons) somewhat interested in what turning twenty-five is going to look like, I simply have no real inspiration to devote any mental energy to the idea. Or any other idea.

I've written about maturity and all that before, and I'm not going to go too deeply into that, either, since it's a whole lot of pontificating, ego-stroking and amusement solely to the author. I realize that I have a relatively low readership, but since I've mostly (half-heartedly) tried to make this a weeabu all-about-my-life blog, talking about the ways I do or don't fit my (largely arbitrary) definition of maturity seems to be a faux pas.

Mostly, I haven't really had time to put my thoughts in order on the matter of my age. I haven't had the time to put my thoughts in order on anything! We're so busy at the vault, working out our kinks in scheduling and just plugging along with what the industry calls New Restaurant Syndrome - that unhappy condition of having unanticipated voids in your production process concurrent with unusually high demand for your services. It's the sort of thing that makes the days long, the batteries low, but the wallets happy.

And given a few other issues I'm not going to get directly into, keeping the wallet happy is almost always a good thing. You just can't lose your sight along the way.

Farm-to-Table, Restaurant Setup, and Flaccid Asperagus

It don't get fresher!

 While it's post hoc ergo propter hoc to even suggest the correlation as causation, it just so happens that I now live in a city of which university students are a major demographic - and because they're such a driver on the market, we have a fairly well-settled farmer's market.

Now, I could go a long way out of my way and explain why that particular run-on sentence makes, well, sense, but that's out-of-the-way.

A major part of the awesomeness of the farmer's market isn't the ability to acquire things I can get at the supermarkets - it's the ability to acquire the things that I can't. Duck eggs, brioche, promises nobody intends to keep...

What I was surprised to find, though, were the butchers offering farm-to-table meats. Fresh produce I was expecting, as well as a weekly supply of the sort of greasy delights that qualify as carnival food... but supremely, ultimately fresh meats is a new one to me.

Now again, the main problem is that I simply don't have the time for the market. You need to get in very early to get the really good stuff, and that leaves me with getting about 4 hours sleep. Plus, let be honest, the costs aren't comparable. It's worthwhile for things like free-run Duck Eggs, Rabbit, or those peculiar fishes which, in spite of being in season, are not at the local Sobeys. But for everything else, the convenience of the supermarkets is just too much to bear.

Now, having said that, there very much is a quality differential, which ties into our next topic. For all its minor setbacks and waiting, the process of launching the Vault has actually been deeply inspiring insofar as tweaking my own restaurant designs. Obviously, I'm a few years away from my own launch. I've still got to go off and finish my Red Seal, never mind pulling down a few years of experience besides. In that respect, the plans I've been making for several years now are all highly tenative - mostly concerning themselves with matters of style, rather than outright figures.

That having all been said, the experience of having access to all this very good food has been a major motivating factor in my decision to build relationships as directly as possible with growers and producers themselves. Not out of any real hatred for the middle men, but more out of a desire to keep everything as local as possible. After all, restaurants as an industry have impressively large greenhouse gas footprints. It would be nice to minimize that, where possible.

A Different Approach

So I should start the day with an apology - I seem to recall having promised more frequent posts. Obviously, that hasn't been happening. If you saw the kind of hours we're putting in at Vault 29, you'd know why.

So, if history has shown us anything, it's that I usually come here to talk about what I'm working on. When I was running the show over at the pet store, I posted a lot about fish. When I was selling tea, I talked a lot about tea.

I've also talked a lot about different ways of taking the concept of diet. It shouldn't surprise anyone that humanity as a whole or western culture specifically is consumed in the analysis of what we're eating. I just got done with the posts on nutrition which were a little heavy with references to the human biological machine.

The thing is, humans in general, and my generation pretty specifically, eat a whole lot of junk food. We know it's junk, and its inequities compared to "real" food (however we define that) are beyond dispute, but we eat it anyway. The last month or so has been fuelled by cans of sugary caffine tinged with flavours that are supposed to remind me of fruits, bags of sugary confetti, and greasy, quickly-scarfed meals from the local burger-slinger. That I work in the higher end of the Bar spectrum of cuisines seems not to be a factor - I need to eat quickly, and I need energy density.

Thing is, when you eat like that you find yourself rather rapidly deteriorating in health, if you can be bothered to pay attention to your own health. You might not have time to map out specific nutritional requirements - requirements I happen to know I am meeting regardless, thanks to a steady stream of multi-vitamins.

The obvious fact in all of this is that there's more to food than merely hitting your chemical requirements. Food has a role in mental health, at the very least.

So what I'm thinking of doing is just cutting out the nonsense completely. I mean, obviously that's not perfectly possible - or even very feasible, considering just how often it's the case that I really do only have 15 minutes to cook and eat a meal. But I can certainly do a lot better than I have been.

So what's real food look like? I don't know, but we'll see.

On My Shelf and My Plate

So the idea has sprung to mind that I wanted to discuss a few things I have in my culinary library that probably aren't in yours. Everyone's at least heard of the Joy of Cooking and a few of the more famous Chefs all have their books out, but I have a few (shall we say) niche titles I think need to get a wider spread.

The first is the instant go-to: On Cooking, specifically the 4th Canadian Edition. This book was my textbook in college and will probably be my touchstone for the years of apprenticeship to come. While the recipes inside are all rather staid and either common classics or somewhat-passe trends, the true value of the book is its focus on technique and theory over individual recipes, and for that it's rather invaluable, because it puts you in a position to actually write the recipes. Oh, and as an added bonus, it correctly lists all recipes in mass units (imperial AND metric) rather than volume units. Most professional cooks in Canada will obviously have heard of this book, but there are plenty of non-professional cooks who take the trade at least as seriously and I imagine you could use the knowledge contained within rather aggressively.

The second niche cookbook on my shelf is the exceptionally well-done Tide's Table by Ross and Willa Mavis, and if you're trying to figure out why the name of the book sounds familiar, that's because that was actually the dining room that I ran and the associated kitchen I managed while working for Ross and Willa briefly at Inn on the Cove - before it closed its doors, of course. The book, which was a wonderful book I would have happily bought had it not been given to me for my birthday, was the book on which a lot of our menu hung at Tide. Not only that, it's a pretty good distillation of what Atlantic Canadian cuisine really is, at least on the homegrown level. There are some necessary items I would say are not in the book if you want to call it the true bible of Atlantic Canadian cuisine, but its accessibility and relative completion are major, major selling points. I'm not sure Ross and Will are still in the business at all, either, so now that I am thinking about it, the copy I have may be among the last copies ever sold.

Busting UFOs

Feasting on Hearts! Literally!

So it's been shown a few times before that I have a pretty damn near infinite capacity to entertain myself, and while entertaining myself is rarely productive in the sense of getting me closer to the consumerist nirvana of a house and a car and a hefty 401k that doesn't quite cancel out the debts caused by the first two, it's generally productive in the sense that something is produced.

Whether it's the entirely sub-par work of the Zaxton Space Program or the hilariously terrible work of various minecraft projects, continuing the work from last November's NaNoWriMo (an event misnamed if ever there was), I can usually at least be bothered to do [i]something[/i]. Hell, in the past I've entertained myself by making videos and posts about fish. FISH. On a blog that started as a philosophy blog, and like most blogs, is now more a personal screed than any sort of coherent content.

So when I was faced unexpectedly with nearly a month's unwarranted and unpaid vacation, did I do something logical like pick up where I left off on my book, pre-write a small library of posts for the four blogs under my control, or even follow the technically-true defintion of productivity by working on the business plan I won't be needing this decade?

Nope! I spent short work week's worth of hours investigating one single ridiculously shaky report of an Unidentified Flying Object in Malaysia. Not because I believe in aliens in the crossing-the-gulf-of-the-cosmos sense, or because it was particularly well-reported, or even because I placed any emotional weight behind the setting.

I did it because it was that or continue working on my evolving DnD campaign and this seemed like the least hopelessly wasteful use of the brain that my brain actually allowed me to do!

Okay, so earlier this month the indisputably niche blog The Object Report reported on a sighting in Malaysia of a very large and very dramatic flying object sighting near one of the busiest buildings in Kyala Lampur. The article came with two "High Resolution" photographs presented by two different sources.

Now, the very first thing I want to address is that the article takes this photographic evidence, whatever its merit (which I will get into), and then extrapolates it to support the conjecture of a bunch of other alien-human interaction such as a co-breeding problem, which is absurd on the face even if it wasn't a complete non sequitur fallacy.

Now, the only purportedly original photograph on the article (credited to witness Chong) that was available is part of a set that the blogger, one Agent D, claims to have independently verified as "definitely from a cellular phone camera" and "not processed or manipulated by photoshop". My own analysis, which is considerable (when you get engaged to a graphic designer, you tend to develop an interest in photographic analysis), only determined that the photo had been artificially stripped of metadata - either the sort of data that would allow you to positively identify it as a camera shot was never part of the photo, or had been removed. Beyond that, there was nothing I could identify as being overtly shoppy, but that really just means that anyone with an interest in photoshopping the images was better than I am at his forgery roll.

The main problem is the location. The article claims that the appearance happened at about 1230 local. Right in the middle of lunch, at the tallest building in the world, only two people were equipped with working cameras. Oh, and those two people both failed to realize that their cellphones could take video instead of photographs.

Now, I wanted to use the images in the article, and I'm fairly certain I could have under fair use, but I didn't, because the authors of the article (the probable owners of the images I did analysis on) weren't courteous enough to respond to my email for permission and comment.

However, if Agent D happens to be reading this, he should be expecting a call from A Cell rather soon.

Examining Arms Rights

Don't currently arm myself, so...

So there's a few nations in the world where their citizens have either de jure or de facto rights to arm themselves, and since the United States of America is one of those countries, and their overall cultural dominance in the western sphere, while inexplicable, is palpable, most discussions of the subject centre around the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Now, I want to get into an arms rights discussion without being dragged into the absolute mire that is the seeming inability of literally anyone who lives south of Washington, DC to correctly interpret the phrase "a well organized militia". This can be relatively difficult to do because most of the people on the internet seem to be either American or confused about what laws are relevant when you're discussing something on its own merits.

Then I remembered I operate a blog owned by google over which I have relatively complete creative control.

The Saga Continues

Canadian Politics

My American viewers are probably somewhat less annoyed with me for the moment, since I'm not boring them with our politics and certainly not antagonizing them with theirs. That's not because nothing has been happening - we have lots to talk about, from the closure of my province's last abortion clinic to the absolutely ludicrous relationship my southern cousins have with firearms and the terrifying way that a secession crisis in Ukraine that was bolstered by US interests is rapidly becoming a problem for all of NATO.

But I can't talk about those things, because first Canada has to figuratively and literally clean house. Toronto, which most Canadians will never be to, is the forth or fifth most populous city in North America and commands unusual attention both at home and abroad - recently largely because Mayor Rob Ford is an admitted alcoholic with substance abuse issues.

While I can't condemn alcoholism or addiction given their nature as mental illnesses, I can certainly condemn lawbreaking and untoward behaviour. An exciting development last night (today?) was that Ford is taking a Leav of Absense to deal with his issues, so I am putting everyone on notice: This month, there will be politics.

Back in... White?

Not Blowing Smoke

So, I had absolutely nothing official to go on when I had ordered in a new set of knives - I was basically tired of dealing with half-rate toy knives from the major department retailers and I longed to return to the world of steel that can actually be sharp.

But, today, I had the unusual (for me) and exciting task of going to a local commercial dealer to pick up that most ubiquitous of tradesman's garments - a white, double-breasted jacket.

This is because I am very pleased to announce that I am resuming my apprenticeship by forming part of the opening team at Vault 29, a new restaurant that's going to be opening in the downtown area around the middle of may.

This is particularly exciting as it involves the settling of a few old scores by mostly refusing to keep score, which is a personal triumph all things considered.

So yeah, watch this space.

Shades of Grey: Truth Resisting Simplicity Edition

My investigation of religious traditions, such as it has been, generally focuses on the theology of the now. This is for two reasons - I exist in a results-oriented domain wherein I prefer things to be demonstrable rather than not, and I have the intellectual equivalent of an allergy to creation stories.

Now, I should be clear - I like creation stories. Their a fascinating insight into various cultures, but the surprising number and, frankly, difference between the creation stories infects me with a general sense that all creation stories are at least a little bit false at worse, or pure allegory at best.

For example, I am a baptized and confirmed catholic in spite of the usual social anxieties that have prevented my going to more than a small handful of masses since then and quite a few ideological differences with the church doctrine - this is why laymen should perhaps not read the catechism and certainly a subject for another time. I'm also not the perfect catholic for reasons I've talked about before (see the Shiboleth post), but also because I have a tendency toward syncreticism. In spite of this, I take the Genesis account anything but literally and essentially consider the whole work a lesson on the pervasiveness of the Divine Directive, right up until the Adam and Eve account of the Garden, which is obviously allegorical but I'm still nailing down precisely for what.

Now, before I go any further I'm not going to go full-blown skeptic and explain exactly why a six-day creation myth doesn't jive with my understanding of reality, nor am I going to go on a tear and rail against the importance of having one belief over another, because I have two fundamental beliefs as part of my Grand Assumptions: Truth resists simplicity, and grey is more than a shade.

I am not a cosmologist. I know we've talked about such things as the composition and early history of the universe before, but I would be engaging in a game of pretend if I said I fully understand the concept. Those on the bleeding edge of the science don't understand everything (remember: if science had all the answers, it would stop) and I am certainly not among them.

What I do know, is that there's a few assumptions we need to check about time and space. Firstly, I should say that I subscribe to the Big Bang cosmological model and specifically to a variant of that model that states that space-time - with all of the requisite matter and energy - existed at a compressed singularity-state. This doesn't sound as silly as it is if you understand mass-energy equivalence.

I'm also talking about a singularity in at least four dimensions - we know that the main four (horizontal, vertical, depth, and time) have been expanding since the birth of the universe. Questions of "before" the Bang don't make sense at all in a scientific bent and can be answered only with religion, if at all, and questions of the aftermath have measurable, testable answers. I therefore believe the correct answer is somewhere in the middle.

It's not just cosmology - I'm the same way with the evolution-versus-intelligent-design debate. The tree of life is a pretty compelling argument and the way I see it is either that God is lazy and hates reinventing the wheel or that there's a genetic algorithm at work here, and since life has reinvented the wheel on more than one occasion (wings being a good, if not crude, example) I'm intending to select the latter.

Now, a genetic algorithm is this really, really cool piece of emerging applied computer science where the programmer-type individual provides some base characteristic variables (say, some design metrics for a quadrupedal robot) and some environmental variables (gravity and what not), then devises a metric for testing these simulated designs. The initial designs are tested in simulation and then the ones that best suit the metrics are retained while the ones that worse are discarded. Random variation is introduced between generations of designs with the best continually retained and the worst continually removed and after several testing generations you suddenly have a design far superior to whatever the original intelligently-designed device was.

Now it's not hard to draw parallels to actual natural selection and it's really not hard to demonstrate abiogenesis being a thing (the precursor chemistry is rather trivial to model if not somewhat difficult to execute, which is why spontaneous generation is a thing, and also why we see a tree of life rather than like, a forest). Abiogenesis is covered by the root constants that cover everything else from the laws of thermodynamics to the Cosmological Constant.

It's not hard to imagine at all a universe where god sets the properties and then presses play. After all, if he's really a timeless, omnipotent being, it doesn't matter to him that it takes billions of years for anything interesting to happen.

The Hows and Whys of Minecraft and the Other Sandbox Games

Improbable Machine, Not yet complete.

So people who are somehow monitoring my RAM usage have probably noticed I log about 100% time on minecraft that my computer is up. That's mostly because Gliesse, my main computer which I use for all of my gaming as well as all of my writing and banking and just about everything else I compute for anymore is also the computer that hosts the Gliesse minecraft server. By the way the Gliesse server is a public server which you can get credentialed for by contacting me and is running the Attack of the B-Team modpack, version 1.0.10.

So the question arises then which is: why do I care so much about minecraft however many years after it came out that I not only log probably about eight hours a week of actually sitting down and playing the damn thing but also keep a tower running around the clock just so that I can have a server to play on and the answer is: those are two questions.

So the first thing I can say about minecraft is that it's part of an evolving culture of sandbox games and as a kid-at-heart I very much like to play in the sandbox. I like minecraft for the same reason that I (poorly) curated a massive collection of different lego sets - I like to make things.

So by now you're thinking that you know, it's been three or four years, surely you've done everything you can do in the game, right? Well no, not really. Sandbox games aren't objective based (although minecraft can have objectives depending on the game mode and map type) unless your way of thinking is objective based. Even if I sit down with a list of objectives like I recently did and say "Okay, I am going to build a castle with these features and include this functionality and so on", I can always make new objectives.

Further, I have what is called the hackish nature, which has various definitions but can commonly be said is the desire to do the most with the available. While I'm never first-on-market with a device in minecraft (mostly because I play casually), I will often come up with an idea semi-independently that adds functionality to the game which doesn't natively exist.

For example, if you are playing in the survival gamemode but you like to build things you want to collect resources in as efficient a manner as possible. If you like to build things out of wood the conventional wisdom is that you must chop down trees and the only way to chop down trees natively in the game is to grab an axe and manually chop them down, a process only marginally less tedious than mining a branch mine. However, it is actually possible to build a machine if you know what you're doing that will push the trees in front of explosives and those explosives will break up the logs and then the machine will collect the log parts and reserve them as wood for your later use all while planting and growing the subsequent generation of trees. I am still working on the overall design but I know that others have done it and so I want to do it because I hate mining for trees!

And that's why I love sandbox games like minecraft and kerbal and others, because minecraft's redstone is a form of formal logic and kerbal teaches orbital mechanics and I can pretend to be and do and go wherever the hell I want and sometimes that's just more fun than writing.