Please Say Tuned

So, I was going to do a post about some web dev stuff.

But then I stumbled on to something alarming.  Maybe.  I'm still crunching numbers.  It is two in the morning, and I have work tomorrow, but, man, what.  What.

If this all tends how I think it will, take a good hard look at this picture:

I know, he looks "unable to open the fridge" retarded.  All evidence points to this being camouflage,  much like a tiger's stripes, but for teeming masses of people rather than the savanna.

This man owns... pop culture, at least in terms of music.  Like, literally  every big pop hit that came out in 2012... him.  He did it.  It's his fault.

This man is a mastermind.  Full post to follow with more details.  But look, oh Humanity, and despair - your destroyer is at hand.  And he's totally a goddamn redneck.

I'm moving.... eventually!

You should probably read this post listening to Billy Joel's "Movin' Out".  Have a youtube link for ease of access:

Ok, now that you've got the proper soundtrack, I have some news to announce   This will no longer be the primary portal to the blog.  This particular website may or may not still exist in some fashion, but I will start directing traffic elsewhere.

I'm still writing, mind you, because writing is important.  It's a skill I want to be gooder at.  And, hopefully, I can still make people laugh with words and teach them a little bit about this weird universe we live in and/or point and laugh at stupid people doing stupid shit.

But, guys, I do a lot more than just write boring old English.  I can write in Java and Python and Common Lisp.  And I want to start sharing that too.  You see, I have some cool/weird ideas for webapps that I'd like to start writing and hosting for people to try.  All of the source code will be open, obviously, and some of it would be stand-alone programs that you'd download.  Other parts would be web applications and I want a place to host those.

And I'd like to start a side blog that's devoted to nothing but computer science/software engineering.  Instead of trying to be funny/sarcastic/a giant asshole, I'd write more technically for assistance in using things like Apache Tomcat, or the Google Web Toolkit or Python or how to cron a script.  This was actually my original intent with this blog, but then I thought no one would read that, and I wanted to be read.

Now I've realized that I might as well just write what I want to write, and if I want to be read, I'll stop fucking around and write for Cracked.

All of this really should be under one umbrella, and as you might have guessed, most web hosting services don't allow the degree of customization that I'd be looking for.  So, I want to host this eventual website out of my house, and build it myself.  I'll also be able to get some free CS-sideblog posts out of the adventures I'm going to have making all the planned software tech I want to use play nice in the sandbox with each other.

What does this mean for you, dear reader?

Not a whole lot.  If all goes as planned, Blogger will still be hosting a variant of this blog, as I still like to pretend that someone will stumble upon this and like it and make me Internet famous.  However, it'll get a lot more computer science-y, which I will balance out with a banner of a unicorn.

The transition probably won't happen for a few months.  Why?  Because my dorm's firewall is a cast iron bitch to work around, and my attempts to set up a router to bypass it have not gone well (fun fact: you can't stick shitrail on 32kb of memory.  Like, nothing.  It might as well not even exist).

Yay for getting my own webzone!  Also, yay for copping out a post to talk about this instead!

Quantum Immortality... because you're dead. Probably.

So, two days ago, I talked about some pretty far out shit man.  There was like, atoms, and immortality, and like all these crazy things happening at a level so small, we can't even see it with light based microscopes, and in a very general sense, lots and lots of weed.

Metaphorically, of course.  The last time stoners ended up anywhere near a quantum physics experiment, people started talking about how the LHC was going to create black holes and send us back in time, simultaneously, with the outside possibility of sending the black holes back in time and creating more paradoxes than a season of LOST.

Which, by the way, was bogus.  In order for black holes to be created by the LHC, gravity would have had to take a hike.  And everyone knows if gravity suddenly stopped working, scientists would be way to busy floating around and shouting 'weee!' at the top of their lungs.

XKCD counts as scientific opinion, right?

Actually, we'd all float up into the upper atmosphere, suffocate, and die, while the Earth violently broke apart beneath us.  Planet-wide fissures would erupt as the continents rended themselves apart, causing massive volcanoes, tusmanis, and earthquakes.  Most of what you might hold on to the keep yourself on the ground would be destroyed, as the ground itself started breaking apart and drifting away.  After a little while, even if you were in some shock-proof concrete bunker, you'd be fucked because the atmosphere would fade away as the planet that keeps most of that in check would break apart.

Well, that turned out to be grim.  The lesson here, kids, is that life is meaningless, because at any instant someone could type 'import antigravity' into python and rip the world apart.  Also, you're not special and all love is a lie.  Now go run along and play, also, have a good Friday tomorrow!

*ahem* Back on topic!

We did talk last time about the Many-Worlds approach to quantum physics, which basically says that whenever there is a binary probability where one state must be chosen, instead both states happen.  The most popular example of this is electron spin.  If you were to rig up an experiment where if the electrons spin one way, you die and another way, you live, you'd do both-- because the electron would spin in both directions at the same time.

Got it?  Great.  Obviously, you can't be alive or dead, so the moment someone came to see the results of your quantum experiment, in one universe, you'd die.  In another one, you'd live.  If you ran the experiment N times, N - 1 times you'd die, but there would always be one universe where you're alive.

Now, how often does quantum behavior like this happen?  Well... no one is really sure, due to decoherence. Decoherence is when another atom manages to snap the superimposed atom out of its 'both' state and into a 'one or the other' state, so in practice, we never see two events that should not be happening at the same time, happening at the same time.

I refused to scroll down after seeing that "Impossible Geometry" got 528 hits. The Getty Image Archive will not drive me insane today.   I'm gonna go sacrifice a goat to Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods now.

So, it's very possible that stuff like this is happening pretty much all the time-- considering the billions of atoms that are knocking around in the general space around you, surely some are getting superimposed and decohered at any given moment, right?

So, when you factor that into the whole '100% survival rate' supplied by the Many-Worlds theory... well, you can't die, can you?  Your friends might think of you as dead, but there is always a universe where you survive the car accident/gunshot/ piano dropped from the 10th floor window of an apartment building.  What's even weirder is that from your perspective, nothing would have changed-- its not like you suddenly get transported into the universe where crows are finally sick of our shit and rise up against us (which is only a matter of time).  Everything else would be the same, outside of a few atoms being in a slightly different spot.

Death becomes something that happens to other people-- sometimes you're in the universe where someone else miraculously survives, sometimes you're in the one where that dude dies.  Well, technically, you'd be in both... but we're aware of only one universe at a time.. right?

Maybe.  No one has really done any work here-- as we're well outside the bounds of science at this point, but technically, every time an atom snapped out of a superimposed state, both realities that could have been from that state play out.  Most of these are not lethal, so there should be billions of 'yous' each in their own universe.  Now, there is some debate on how different each universe is.  After all, can subatomic particles make _that_ much a difference?

I don't know.

The psudo-science breaks down after a while-- there must be causes for death that are not involved with subatomic interactions, or then everyone would live forever in some play out of the universe, which doesn't fit.  And then you start realizing that any cause of death that we would contemplate has nothing to do with subatomic interactions, so we'd die in almost any case we could consider anyway.

The other issue is which universe is chosen for "you" when your life isn't on the line.  Assuming all universes aren't unfolding in perfect parallel, when someone else runs the experiment on themselves, do you see them die?  Technically, no, as there will always be a you in some universe that watches them live, but which one are you experiencing?  Who chooses that?  How?

So, yeah.  You might live forever because in some universe you always narrowly avoid death.  So, life isn't actually short at all.  Good luck explaining that tattoo of those Chinese characters that mean 'stupid american' to your grandchildren!

Quantum Improbability

Guess what's back!  November is over, I have another bizarre and objectively bad 50,000 word rough draft to my name that you can totally check out here (because I forgot to actually supply a link here during November): Foxtrot

It's not even technically done-- I skipped parts at the end and never actually finished writing the finale.  I'll get to that soon, I swear.

So, what should I write about to commemorate the blog still existing?  Yeah, I was thinking bizarre pseudo-scientific theories about immortality too, what a coincidence.

I'm not talking about how that life extending drug discovered a year and a half ago, although, holy shit, have you heard about that?  It's like a super-molecule, it takes on more middle age life shortening diseases than Bruce Lee takes on ninjas.  Also, any time your research group is "obese mice" you have to be doing something right, because fat mice look hilarious.

It would totally sound exactly like that fat nerd from high school. 

No, I'm talking about weird philosophical concepts that get their start in some strange phenomena we run into in quantum mechanics, because it turns out if you tack 'quantum' on top of anything, people will flip their shit first and think later, and most people skip the latter step by force of habit.  It's how McDonalds is still in business.

Which means I'm going to have to be careful and not end up like this asshole and get it all goddamn wrong.  Quantum Mechanics doesn't somehow prove the power of positive thinking, or God, and anyone who says that either is referencing the wrong experiment or trying to understand high level concepts without first even beginning to grasp the basics.

The experiment you're looking for about the power of positive thought was started by Masaru Emoto, who claimed that he could get water to form more regular repeating molecular shapes by taping, to beakers of water, the same messages your mom left you in your lunch box in elementary school if she loved you.  His experiments have never managed to work through a double-blind test, so all the other scientists make fun of him.  They also make fun of you when you buy into his bullshit.

So bear with me as we get a little technical for a bit, before dropping out to the wider implications that people actually want to read about.  Because if numbers and physics of very tiny sub atomic particles made you happy about life, you'd all be scientists.

Anyway, the theory is called quantum suicide, which is a little weird for a theory about immortality but again, bear with me.  It took me a while to dig up a real link, but as I understand it from people far smarter than me at Princeton, the basic idea is this-- actually, no wait, back up.  We should probably cover what we're talking about first.

Flip the board, Jensen!  They're not ready!  Also, did your wife kick you out of the house and make you sleep in the office again?

Quantum Mechanics is the attempt by science to understand what the heck his happening at the smallest level of existence-- at atomic and sub-atomic particles.  It turns out, electrons, neutrons, protons and all that jazz do not play by the same rules that you and I do when it comes to concepts like mass, acceleration, force and energy.  They regularly pants classical physics, like a bunch of stuck up brats making fun that old man in the corner who smells vaguely of prunes, talks about how things were 'back in his day', and may or may not just have pissed himself.

So, scientists designed an entire new body of physics, quantum mechanics, to deal with these assholes.  A large part of quantum mechanics is that we, uh, can only really guess at most of it.  Really-- at the smallest level of existence, nature is governed more by probabilities than actual hard numbers.  The problem is that sometimes these probabilities are sort of alive/dead either-or things.  You can't have a probability, it has to be one or the other.

Light is a classic example-- it's either a particle (called a photon) or a wave (called a wave).  It behaves drastically different as a particle or as a wave, and particles and waves themselves are mutually exclusive, you can't be both (one has mass and matter, the other is a transfer of energy).

Except, it could be either thing depending on how its feeling that day.  And sometimes, its both at the same time, until it makes up its mind (which it tends to do the moment a scientist tries to prove its always in one state)-- I'm sure you heard someone ranting about this once.  A lot of things in quantum mechanics are like this, the most popular being electron 'spin'.

Electrons spin either up or down, except when they are in a superimposed state and we have to say that they're both.  At the same time.  Just run with the paradox.

The idea is that if we were somehow to rig up a device that would kill you if electrons were to spin one way, and leave you alive if they spin the other way.  So... are you dead?  You've got a 50% chance of survival... but nothing would happen until someone actually came to check on you, and the electron 'decided' which way to spin, right?

You should recognize this as Schrodinger's Cat, except now you're the cat.  Also, you can thank me for the Internet love later.

Now, its time for some weird shit-- according to the Many-Worlds theory, you must be alive.  But to the experimenters, you could be dead.  Welcome to the mind-fuck, ladies and gents, so sit your ass down and pay attention.  There are coloring books for those of you who just lost higher-order brain function in back.

Yes, the bad man who kept saying things that should not be is gone.  Orange is a nice color.

Ok, so how the hell does that work?  Simple (oh, hai, blatant lie, how are you?).  The reason is that its not that the electron is in some 'undecided' state, its in both states, so by forcing a binary decision on it, you've actually rent the universe in two, one where the electron spins down, the other where the electron spins up.

You see, you've put yourself in a superimposed state-- one where you're dead, and one where you're alive.  And the alive state will persist, no matter how many times the experiment is run.

I'll talk about the bizarre effects of such a theory in another post, but have some other food for thought.  The other prevailing theory of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpetation more or less says that systems forced into such a superimposed setup automatically collapse, and the electron is forced to chose one or the other.  However, because no one really knows what state you're in until someone checks on you (going back to the many-worlds theory here), the mathematical consequences for both are the exact same.

According to Many-Worlds, you will always survive in some universe.  According to Cpenhagen, you can survive, its just very improbable that you do.  The only thing that is different is that you have made your own existence very improbable.

I sorta forgot this was a thing...

I totally forgot to update throughout the ENTIRE MONTH OF OCTOBER.

Because, you see, I am a moron.

Epsilon minus semi-moron, to be exact

And the worst part is that, guess what, I'm doing NaNoWriMo again, so November is blacklisted.

I know.  I had this really cool post about the lack of intelligent life that had visited Earth, and the statistics that backed up the fact that we might have intelligent life and they simply haven't gotten here yet.  And the iPad mini came out, which is like shooting fish in a barrel.

There was so many easy blog posts throughout the month of October that I literally could have coughed and ended up with a tech link that was begging for a blog post.  I know.  I'm sorry.

However, I have a solution.  I'm going to livestream my November novel.  As you may or may not recall, the last time I tried this, I posted parts of the novel as I wrote them to the blog.  That rapidly fell apart because I would go back and make changes, thus meaning there were several posts that didn't actually add any story.

However, if I were to say, make a publicly view able Google Doc, you guys could watch me write in real time.  Which you'd totally want to do because I just might randomly bust out ASCII porn.  I might, in addition, try to set up an IRC server to allow for chat about the novel I'm writing.

I won't lie, I stole the idea from the naked novel project, but this gives everyone involved more flexibility.  You can read my rough draft, I don't feel retarded re-posting parts after edits.  Plus, once you see my crazy-as-balls novel idea (when I told my roommate my concept, his first reply was, "You were wasted when you came up with this, weren't you?"), I'm sure you guys won't mind missing out on the usual twice a week rantings about technology... when I actually remember to post that is.

However, setting up an IRC server may turn out to be a pain (the dorm firewall and I don't get along), so novel chat may get axed.  But I'll see you guys Novemeber first, with a shiny perma-link to a Google document, that will contain the rough draft of Foxtrot (title subject to change).

annnnnnnd still not today

No post today because I'm hungover.

If anyone actually read this, this might cause a problem... lawl, we all know that's false.  Regular posting to resume next week.

Not today

Very quickly-- they'll be no post today as I'm taking the GRE tomorrow.  Wish me luck-- I love standardized tests that determine your future!

Spoilers: no I don't.

Meanwhile, in your car...

Depending on your age, you either cry when you see a sign outside of a gasoline station, or you look in awe/amusement as your mom is crying when sees the current price of gas.

This isn't news to anyone-- gas has been expensive for about as long as we've been using it.  This is actually more true than you might expect, after adjusting for inflation, there really is no way around it.  Dead dinosaur jelly costs a fuckton.

the red line there is price adjusted for inflation.  Notice how high it is all the time

I don't want to get side-tracked into economics with this post, so to put it simply: the red line is how much the gas used to cost in relation to how much it costs today.  Also known as, the only metric that makes sense for comparison, because you weren't thinking about gas prices back in 1975.  You only care that prices from back then seem cheaper than they are today.

Unless, of course, your some sort of immortal sonofabitch.  Named Richard.

Now, obviously, gas used to be cheaper- even after adjusting for inflation.  But it never got better than the $1.50 mark, which means that it was never drop-dead cheap.  Sure, if it ever went down that low again we'd collectively piss our pants, then get shitfaced and have the biggest party ever known to man, but the dollar meter on the pump has always been going up faster than the gallon meter.

Recently, the price has been going up at an alarming rate.  In my opinion-- for people who are thinking about getting their own car soon or have just got their first car-- this is a good thing.  You don't even have to be smart to figure out that the price of gas drives innovation into making your car use less of it.  Which is good, by proof of previous points (QED).

It means that when we start going car shopping, our rides'll be spewing a lot less crap into the atmosphere, which is good because the Earth is, in fact, getting warmer, we produce 29 gigatons of CO2 via fossil fuel burning, and carbon dioxide is a green house gas.

Nope, not allowed to debate that.  These are things that are happening-- rate and effect are not being discussed here.  Go straw man somewhere else.

So, then it seems to make sense that we're starting to go to more and more electric based cars.  However, don't count out the internal combustion engine as a murder engine for the environment and your wallet fueled by zombie dinosaurs (I call the novel rights to that!) just yet.

You see, by making some new changes to how we design engines we can totally get 60 to 100 mpg out of our cars.  That's... that's outright mind blowing.  100 miles on a single gallon?  Do you know how astronomically far that is?  You could drive across Rhode Island on a single gallon of gas.  All of it.  An entire state. 1 gallon.

On a single tank of gas (we'll assume your tank holds 12 gallons) you could drive across Colorado.  Longways.  Without ever stopping to get gas.  Ever.

Yeah, the future is so awesome.

The iPhone 5: The Paradox

I don't know if you were aware, but the iPhone 5 recently came out.

Yeah, I know.  It was really easy to miss, very much under the tech radar.  I mean, Apple fanboys (or I guess Apple fanpeople to be politically correct) were going batshit about it, but hell, they do that like every Tuesday anyway.  I'm fairly positive they'd go batshit over a new iDevice charger, for chrissakes.

My own opinions are pretty neutral.  I'm not a big fan of OS X (in any iteration), as it's pretty much Linux with a very unfortunate layer of junk on top.  The mobile operating system is pretty solid, but from a developer standpoint, Android has managed to attract more people willing to write cool things for it.  To be totally honest, I have very little idea why-- I've heard that its a lot easier to learn to write for iOS than it is for Android, but whatever.

Apple still overprices hardware harder than a used car salesman with a cocaine addiction.

... nuff said.

ED: I know that's my second cocaine joke in a while.  I spent a good five minutes trying to think of a good joke involving the word 'erection' but I couldn't do it.  Then I looked myself in the mirror and took a very, very long shower.  But I'll always feel dirty.  Forever.  I'm sorry.

Anyway, new iPhone.  It seems like its the same old iPhone, with some minor updates.  Like a larger screen, slightly louder speakers, being lighter, and a new connector (that'll render all your old connection cords).  So, you know, probably not worth shelling out $200 for.  But who the bloody heck am I kidding, if you were going to buy one, you have already.

I personally believe that cults have just modernized.  Drank basements and old churches are soooo the '90's man.  Apple stores are where it's at these days.

I mean, in any way you look at it, the phone is a success.  It's already breaking all kids of sales records, it has all kinds of glowing reviews and industry experts consider it the death of Apple as an innovative company.

Waaaaiiiiiiiit.  What about that last thing again?

Some experts think that Apple is actually slowing innovation all across the wireless market.

Slow down asshole.  I mean, its not like people think Apple's competitors are doing any bet--

No wait, they do think Google and Microsoft are being more innovative.

How can that possibly be?  Industry success = innovation, right?  We, as a consumer base, will kill for the newest gagety-techy-thing.  Didn't Nintendo prove this with the Wii?

And by my calculations... the answer is blue.  With a giraffe 

Clearly not. Why?  Great question.  I think it mainly comes down to the amount of people in the tech market these days.  Namely, everyone.  If the amount of people playing Angry Birds is any indication, than quite a lot of people have gotten smart phones.  This is a new technology for them, so minor increments do feel like world shattering innovation.

It won't last, of course.  The new guys'll get sick of it and start clamoring for true holographic displays, just like everyone else.

Self-Control part II: How to eat the marshmallow and not be a giant douche-shaped leech on society

So, last time we talked about how it turns out all you need in life is the ability to wait 15 minutes before getting what you want.

Well, actually, I just lectured at you.  To be totally precise, you read it and I wrote it and at no point were we ever within speaking distance.  Unless, of course, you're that lucky reader I've been stalking.  You read the blog right before you go to sleep, and I watch you while you sleep like a character from Twilight.

Jesus, that's my second stalking joke in a week.  I need to get out more.

As I ended the last blog post, ever since the marshmallow experiment, the prevailing opinion on self control has been that it works like a limited resource-- you have so much of an ability to focus on a task and/or delay getting what you want, and as you deplete the amount of self control you have, the worse you become at focusing until you need to take a break or you'll just start saying obscene things in public, like some kind of torrent of hateful bullshit.

 Maybe Santorum worked really hard when no one was around, and during public events just couldn't help himself?

There is, in fact, a lot of papers that seem to support this view.  Chapters of textbooks have been written with this perspective in mind.  It's a popular theory, and seems to check out-- people show the same sort of behavior with a depletion of self-control as they might with a depletion of strength or energy.  Generally, people like to lump self-control in with a sort of "willpower" pool that people have-- you expend so much will to get a task done (or resist performing a task) and then after that you have less willpower to use for other tasks.

I think its safe to say that psychologists are avid fans of tabletop games.  Or D&D is actually a crowning achievement in person modeling.

So, all of this is well and good, but what do you do if your willpower pool sucks ass?  Go out and find a tome of +4 willpower?

Well, you can try to start small-- it turns out, successfully completing a task, or keeping a schedule, or resisting temptation refunds your willpower pool somewhat and also expands it for future use, so the best way to go about getting more willpower is to just brush your teeth every morning.  Or keep some other trivial resolution.

Seriously guys, I think we're on to the most lifelike RP ever. 

 

So then, by keeping an easy goal, you can build up your self-control.  And then move on to harder goals, and build up your self-control more until you snowball and become a Buddhist monk.  If, of course, self-control is a limited resource after all.

Newer studies show that self-control (and maybe overall willpower) is tied to several other things, most of them dealing with emotions.  The ability to focus on one task you don't want to do may be tied to things like perceived task difficulty, emotional state, attention span, personal beliefs about willpower and feedback on the task at hand.

Looking at the aggregate of those qualities, you may be able to boost your self-control by simply believing that what you're working on is easy and that you have massive stores of willpower.  Of course, trying to go this route and then not being able to deliver means that you'll either end up an entitled crackhead, or crushingly depressed.

So yeah, maybe go for the small steps at a time method.

Self-Control, part 1: Marshmallows

Self control.  Its a pretty ubiquitous trait, especially in modern times.  It turns out, you can't just brain the asshole walking 0.0005 mph (and somehow managing to block your every attempt to pass him) with your stone club.

Hell, even Andrew Jackson lived in different times- if he disagreed with you, he'd just slap your face with a white glove, laugh a bit, and then shoot you.  And he was an American president.  Nowadays, if you tried to do that, people would be clamoring for you be put in prison for some silly thing called "first degree murder".

Life was simpler back then, is what I'm saying.  Because you didn't have to exercise nearly as much self-control.

Has anyone ever used the "roleplaying as the seventh president" defense for shooting someone? 

Historical musing aside, life is complicated and self control pretty much permiates throughout our entire existence.  And not in the 'don't murder everyone' way.  The ability to turn down a short term gain, or something you want to do in the heat of the moment, is pretty essental for you to get just about anywhere in life.

And, as you might expect, scientists have been researching the ever-loving shit out of self control.  Actually, I take that back, psychologists have been studying the ever-loving shit out of self control.  And if I've learned anything from my college education, its that psychologists guestimate and real scientists do not.

But don't ever say that out loud.  A psych major will repel down the celling like a damn specal forces secret agent to come and tell you how wrong you are.  Which is a thing that happened to me.

Psychologists are the ninjas of academia

But, back to self control.  I'm sure all of you know about the Standford marshmallow experiment.  What the researchers did was place a bunch of kids, from ages 4 - 6, in a room, and gave each of them a marshmallow (or treat of their choice, but I like the word marshmallow).  The scientists then told all of the kids that they were going to leave.  If a child did not eat the marshmallow, when the scientists got back, that kid would get a second marshmallow.  The researchers then left the room for fifteen minutes.

What fallowed was an epic test of will as the children struggled to not eat the marshmallow.  Well, most struggled- a minority ate the marshmallow as soon as they saw it on the table.  Because fuck you, marshmallow.  But the rest of them stared down the marshmallow, straining to resist its foul temptations.  They searched despertly for the inner resolve to resist the seductive whisperings of "eat me" coming from the marshmallow.  They strained, they fought, they battled.

And in the end, only a third of the kids managed to get two marshmallows.

Although older kids were generally better at it than the younger kids (which was what the research was trying to prove), it turns out that those that got two marshmallows are, to this day, better overall human beings than their marshmallow eating friends.  In just about every possible aspect.

In a followup 10 years later, the researchers found out that those who did not eat the marshmallow out-scored the other kids by a whopping 200 points on the SAT.

In many other follow ups throughout the years, kids who have a better innate ability to put off instant gratification do better in college, are thinner (see previous post about obesity), have a clean criminal record and higher annual incomes.

 It's "I can wait 15 minutes to get what I want" man! 

It's pretty clear then, that to be successful, you don't actually have to be pretty, have any talent or be smart.  You just have to not eat the damn marshmallow.

Due to the ages of the initial study, however, the results also imply that the amount of self-control you have is innate.  You're born with x ability to resist getting what you want right now. If you didn't get it big in the genetic lottery, well, sorry.  Guess you get to be a garbage man.

But the story doesn't end there.  See you guys next time for part II: how you can eat the marshmallow and not be a giant douche-shaped leech on society.

Crazy Homosexuality Myths, A Cross Section.

Don't let the unicorns, ponies, rainbows and love of the color purple deceive you, I'm single and free (ladies).

That being said, I have some great friends who are gay, and sometimes we hang out in public, and sometimes they like to make people think we're a couple, and sometimes it ends in me buying them drinks at a bar.

Believe it or not, that story is a lot longer and more boring than you might expect.

You see that girl in the right part of the shot that wants to die?  That would be you if we went into details.

It should come as no suprise that I'm pretty pro gay rights and all that.  I won't dig into it, as you can find better sources on that debate.  I will, however, say that it is kinda silly that its a debate at all, but that's a minor amount silliness compared to what we're about to delve into:

The absolutely bat-shit bonkers fringe theories about homosexuals.  Because, holy shit, bitches be crazy, yo.

First things first, I don't know if you were aware, but it turns out homosexuals are actually unicorns.  I know, right?  Duh.  It all fits!  Obviously, unicorns must have been left behind when Noah sailed on his arc, and managed to use their magic to survive the flood.  But they didn't want to bring God's wrath back down on the world, so they used an ancient unicorn magical ritual under the light of a full moon to become gay men.

This works because unicorns reproduce asexually via spores.  Which, of course, you already knew.

No one move, its a gay man in his natural form!

Well, if gay people aren't unicorns, then where do they come from?

Porn.  Which of course you saw coming, obviously.  Because literally an entire industry built around the concept of having sex with just about whatever you want will eventually make you want to have sex with people of your gender, and only of your gender.

Never you mind that gay porn only accounts for about 10 to 15 percent of the market.  Porn makes you gay.  Which, now that we've finally figured this out, means that we should be able to hit the porn market right where it hurts-- adolescent boys.  Because, you see, boys are naturally homophobic and if told porn will make them gay, will stop buying porn.

It's airtight.

There is some weirdness on the other side of the rainbow colored banister as well.  Being gay is really complicated, apparently-- there are just as many steps to kicking an alcohol addiction than to figure out your sexuality.  Because figuring out what kind of sex your into is just as complex as trying to kick a drug your body has become dependent on.

And here I was thinking that you just sorta drunkenly one-night-standed your way through figuring out what you were into.  Huh.

I could do this all day, to be honest.  But I'll keep the rest around for a rainy day when I don't feel like writing.

Oh, and by the way, Jesus was gay.

Weight Loss and You

Anyone who knows me in real life knows a few things about me:

1)  The cocaine is hidden in a secret cache, behind the loose brick three places from the top left corner
2)  I am one of the worst people in exsistence to give dieting/weight loss advice.

It's not that I'm in shape.  It's that I'm a thin, waifish thing, more akin to a piece of paper than a fellow human being.  And what makes it better/worse isn't that I have some kind of freak metabolism.  Although, I can eat a box of doughnuts for dinner and gain absolutely no weight, but I make up for it self-loathing.  No, it's better/worse because I also regularly only get one and a half legit meals a day.  I straight up do not eat food.

 The cocaine habit also helps with the whole weight loss thing 

So, not only can I eat a lot and get nothing for the trade, but I often don't eat.  I'm not trying to loose weight, I'd kill for an extra 20 lbs or so.  I just only eat when I'm hungry, and stop the moment I get full.  And due to the fact that I burn about 10 calories a day, my body has adjusted my food intake to pretty much nothing.

So, now that all of you with self-esteem problems hate me, I'm about to dump even more craptastic news on you.  Sometimes, when it rains, it pours and sometimes chocolate rain is just goddamn gross.

 Lock and load, I have some days to ruin

I have a question for you: where do you think fat comes from?  I'll wait for you to shout the answers at your monitors.  Never fear, I will hear you.  I always hear you.  I know what you've been doing late at night.  Yes,  you.  No, not that.  The other thing.  Yeah.  That one.  You really should just burn your rug, it's really not fit to be in a house anymore.  Pro tip.

Where was I.... oh, yeah, fat.  Most of you probably blame extra pounds on fast food, or lack of exercise.  So, by dieting and getting more exercise, you should be able to loose weight.  It can't be that hard.

I'm here to tell you that there is a good chance science says you're royally fucked.  The numbers have been run... and you can loose a small amount of weight.  Something along the lines of 10-15 lbs.  Anymore than that, though, and you'll have to face a very unfortunate truth.

There is no hard, statistical evidence that you can loose weight and not gain it back.  Read that as: statistically, the number of people who have lost weight and kept it off rounds down to 0.  Oh, its easy to loose weight- but so few people manage to actually keep the weight off that you might as well say that they're about as rare as unicorns.

So then, how much weight on average do people need to loose?  Well, a third (more or less) of the over 20 US population is obese.  And there is no goddamn way they will ever get to a healthy weight.  Look at some of the tables there-- if we make a small assumption that people are evenly distributed in each weight category, than over half the people that are only "overweight" will never get back to a healthy weight.

See, it works like this-  you want to get to sexy abs castle (or maybe "take up only one seat on an airplane" castle, whatever).  But the only way to get there is to swim through an inconceivably massive moat, one not measured in months, but in years, because you have to reprogram your body to deal with a lower intake of food and your body sucks at patches.

Oh, and the moat is filled with paranas.  Because you better believe your base survival instincts are thinking that you're constantly starving yourself to death every second you loose a pound.  Your own body resists your attempts to loose weight.  Its like when Harry Potter found out that the last part of Voldemort's soul was part of him, and the only way to get rid of it was to kill himself.

Shit, that metaphor turned dark on me.  Sorry about that.

Aww, way to ruin it, asshole!

Interestingly enough, it would seem some factors that make you end up being the size of whale aren't even really your fault.  Even the Center for Disease Control is aware that part of the reason why you're a fatass is your genetic makeup.  But before you go crying about how you rolled snake eyes in the genetic lottery, science, like always, has your back.

It all comes down to type of genetic molecule called a microRNA.  MicroRNAs were considered more or less scrap DNA that your body just had lying around, like the can of beans in your pantry.  You don't remember ever buying it, but it has always been there.  You'll be damned if you eat it, and yet you can't bring yourself to throw it out.

MicroRNAs are that, but with your genetic makeup.  Or so scientists thought.

It turns out that microRNAs are several kinds of important.  A particular pair of them- which both have long, neigh unspellable names- control how well cells burn through energy.  Which means that if your body has a lot of fat because your genetic makeup makes you store calories as fat like a walrus preparing for winter, by removing these two microRNA molecules from your cells, you'll burn more energy at rest.  And if your burning more energy doing nothing means that, by default, you must loose weight.

So, the future is basically a cross between The Biggest Looser and Gattica.

Scientific Method: You better believe it matters

I once, a few years back, was posed a question: "What do you think the most important scientific discovery ever was?"

Without hesitation, I replied, "The scientific method, of course."

This response got me looks, quiet chuckles, and mutterings of, "Seriously?  Out of all the scientific stuff, that?   Over, like, lasers? nerd."

Years later (because I don't hold grudges, and didn't spend the next few days crying into a bathtub with a bucket of ice cream or anything) this is my reply.  It's long winded and has some required reading before we dig into the subject, but I do stand by the scientific method as the most important scientific discovery to have ever happened, and further- the scientific method is the single most important discovery to happen in the history of humanity, and the only way in which we will be able to solve some of the hardest problems that plague our world (or just the United States of America) today (see: global warming, economic slump, massive wealth gap between the rich and the poor, etc).

First things first, let me get all the obvious schematics out of the way.  I know someone is going to be calling foul on technicalities (because the silly little technical details will be all they can grasp with, mentally).

Obviously, the scientific method (or SM for short) required quite a bit of human progress before it even became able to be considered.  [ed: please don't confuse SM with S&M.  Wait, damnit, I made the correlation easier.  Forget I typed that.  But don't, because don't confuse them.]  You could run a very weak (but sound) argument that any of the technologies or revolutions in understanding that happened before SM are more important than SM because with out them, no SM.  Fine.

The (also unstable) counter argument is that you don't, in fact, know what SM requires to be discovered, so you can't list other discoveries as pre-requisites.  Discoveries in real life don't actually work like a technology tree from the Civilization series.  Its why two men can both independently discover calculus at about the same time, and spend a good chunk of the rest of their lives trying to discredit the other.  Which is why calculus symbols seem to be totally random.

Got that? Great, now that we can safely (sorta) say that you can't judge a discovery based on what was discovered before it, its time to go through part II of stuff we need to do before getting to the good stuff: read this article.    But don't just read it-- you'll need to ponder and at least acknowledge its conclusion.  I didn't say accept-- if it really cuts you to the core that the stories you listen to affect you on a subconsciousness and fundamental level, then you don't have to agree.

But you do have to get behind the idea that the conclusions might be true.  It is on you to disprove them, and if you can't, then you either:

A) need to work harder in your disproof/counter proof
B) deal with the fact that this article may, in fact, be true.

Under no circumstances are you allowed to pick:
C) brush the article off because it conflicts with what I believe about myself and pretend like I didn't read it

And you absolutely are not allowed to even think about picking:
D) get personally offended by the article, decide that is is the villain and start actively crusading against it, proof or no proof be damned.

If you pick D, by the way, the article proves its point.  C may also prove the article's point, but its more roundabout and complicated.  Either way, if you pick C/D, you won't get any more out of this.  You've made up your mind, and no amount of logic I can show you will change that.  Ever.  Go home, brew yourself a nice cup of tea, sit down, and try to piece out why you're so depressed all the time.

I want to draw attention to A/B-- note how both these options are the only correct way to interpret new information that may conflict with your knee-jerk reaction to the article.  Also notice how this is basically mimicking the scientific method, more importantly, how the scientific method deals with conclusions.

I'm going to skip the part of this that tells you what SM is and how it works.  You've all been through grade school science, you know it.  If you don't, go back to working on your homework, buster.  Mother will be in by 8:30pm to put you to bed, so if you want to do anything fun tonight, you better get cracking.

Conclusions from an experiment, according to SM, draw two responses- the experiment confirms your hypothesis, test again or the experiment rejects your hypothesis, test again.  Now replace hypothesis with "preconceived beliefs", experiment with "article" and test again with "find proof" and suddenly, we have a very clear model as to how to go about dealing with new information.

If you're willing to buy into the fact that we have notions about everything before we get information it (and, if you're more than five, you do, so you better), then this boils down to:

get new information --> agree --> find backing material

or

get new information --> disagree --> find backing material

In the event backing material can not be found, then you need to change how you view the new information, or search harder.  I want to stress here- searching harder is always an option.  Enstien hated quantum mechanics and spent his entire life rejecting the idea (as far as I know anyway, I could be wrong.  Enstien is a hotbed of misquotes).

He also spent his entire life trying to prove it wrong.  He ended up being unable to-- the Hesienburg uncertenty principle stands to this day.

But, look at all this takes out of new information.  You're not trying to fit things into a narrative structure, you're not trying to anthropomorphize your data into good guys and bad guys.  There is just information, what you think about it, and backing up your claim.  That's it.

It's neat, clean and simple, and entirely removes all the crazy bullshit where you build a filter between yourself and the world, and you try to get the world to fit.  The world either won't fit (and then you end up with things like a fast food chain having a stance on gay marriage) or you'll have to do all sorts of absurd things to make it fit (like oppose gay marriage based on the fact that we use the word "marriage", but you'd be fine if they used any other word, like "civil-companion-joint-love-venture" or something).

It works for personal problems too-- stop trying to see all of your ventures as uphill struggles of some bold hero going against the odds and more in terms of the SM.  I'll use weight loss as an example:

I'm trying to loose weight, but today I found out despite all my efforts, I've gained a pound.  This is absurd, I disagree with this-- I've been working so hard to loose weight!  But, when I reflect about it, maybe I'm eating more calories than I think I am-- HOLY SHIT, A DOUBLE QUARTER POUNDER HAS WHAT?!?  Ok, lets not do that and try the experiment again-- this time, I won't get a "tiny snack" at McDonalds, no matter what their commercials say.

Sometimes it works against you too-- I wanted to run a post a while about how hacking the power grid was crazy, based on how I disagreed with an article that claimed it possible.  But when I went to get my own research done to counter it, I found that, hey, holy shit, hackers could totally disrupt the power grid on a terrifyingly large scale.  Balls.

Needless to say, that post was never used and I needed to apologize to someone for laughing at them.  It was a humbling moment.

It all boils down to: information, stance, attempt to back that stance.  There is another huge upside (despite the fact that it takes out all the story-telling bias bullshit):
You always have a plan, or a goal.

With an SM-based world view, your intake of information is active, rather than passive.  You challenge what you're told, and actively search for an interpitation of information that fits the way things actually are.  But when you map it back on to your own life, you're no longer searching for meaning in what you do.  You're no longer trying to live up to the monstrous expectation that you're a hero in some great story, and that what you do will change the world.  There is no troublesome quest for purpose, no great crusade to embark upon.

There is just information, your stance, and trying to resolve your stance against that information.  Or, maybe putting it a different way:

Just the current life you are living, how that makes you feel, and what to do about it.

Aristotle wrote that the unexamed life wasn't worth living for a human being.  He also wrote the only way to find happiness was to contemplate life all day and that tall women were always prettier than short women.  As many of the ancient Greek philosophers, he gets personal bias tangled up in objective analyses, but he was, in fact, on to something.  You need to be able to objectively view your own life in order to get the correct reaction from it.

Step away from the ideas of personal obligation when it comes to life goals.  There is no way to win at life- the only obligations you are required to fulfill are the ones you set out for yourself, which you are allowed to change.  If you're honestly happiest living as a bum off of welfare, then shit, why are you still on the Internet?  You've got some food stamps to collect.

And that's the lesson for today, folks.  I'm writing again on a regular basis, after several months of needed downtime, I'm back, bitches.

This is What I Do Instead of Having Normal Person Fun

I've decided to dedicate a blog post to some of the math/programming work I'm doing for MLPOnline. This should also help me remember why I'm still single on Valentine's Day so I can rant about the correct things when I drink myself into a gutter later.  Warning- this post has math. But its in the form of badly drawn Microsoft Paint pictures.  So, lets dig in!

Lets say that you have two objects- a box and a triangle.  You want to make sure the triangle can't stab into the box, especially if the box is made of concrete. The triangle should stay outside our box of concrete, unless our game is set in Alice's Wonderland.

This part comes right after the Caterpillar gets baked

Now, the question is: how do you keep that from happening?  Well, look at anything vaguely box-like in your room right now (books are good for this example).  Look at the corners- the only way for a book to be "inside" of our proverbial box is if one of the corners was inside the box.  There is no way to put the book inside the box without putting at least one corner in.

So, really, we just want to test if any of the corners of the book are inside our box.  In math, we call the corners of things vertices.  With a little imagination- perhaps with the help of Figment if you're a character on a Disney ride- you can see that each object is actually a collection of faces (the front of the book, the back of the book, the spine of the book, etc), and each of these faces each have a set of vertices.

Example: For the front of a book, the vertices would be the front bottom left corner, front bottom right corner, front top right corner and front top left corner.

So, really, the problem is: how do we check to see if one of these vertices is inside a bunch of other vertices?  Your answer is probably something along the lines of, "Um, by looking at it, numbskull".  You're also perfectly right- but computers are very retarded and can't look at objects.  All they see is a bunch of points in space that make up the objects we're talking about.  So, to a computer, our problem looks something like this:

Green dot- inside or outside the box?

Yeah.  The computer has no idea what inside or outside even mean.  If I gave you a sheet of random dots and told you to tell me if one dot was inside the others you'd tell me to lay off the drugs.  Remember how I said before that our objects are actually a collection of faces?  Well, time to use that to our advantage.  Sorta.

You see, there is another way to look at faces- as planes.  Planes are flat surfaces that extend out forever.  They're handy because they divide space in to two parts- the part on the left of the plane and the part on the right of the plane.

These two horribly drawn stick people can't see each other because there is a theoretical mathematic construct in the way.  This happens all the time in real life.

There are a few ways to describe planes, but the easiest to calculate (when we already have a bunch of points in the plane- the vertices that I rambled about before) is to have have a perpendicular arrow that points away from the plane and another point on the plane.  Or more simply- we can describe one of these great space dividers with nothing more than a point and an arrow we can get from a bunch of points.  Perfect!

Now, we finally have enough information to start to figure out our starting problem.  Some other very smart person figured out that a point is inside of a 2 dimensional shape if you could draw an arrow from somewhere outside the shape to the point and the number of intersections it made with the shape's sides was odd.

Thanks, dead smart person!

I need to generalize this to 3 dimensions, because apparently 2D graphics are lame.  Whatever.  So, I drafted up a test cube, picked a point I knew was going to be inside of the box, and picked a point that I knew was going to be outside of the box and made a line.  Then came the very unfortunate task of checking to see if the point intersected with any of the planes of my box.  There is a lot of linear algebra I'm going to ignore.  Unless, there is some demand to hear about it and or need for a sleep aid.

In a nutshell I got this:

I fail art forever. 

Which seems like a great success.  Until you start to look at more complicated shapes.  If one of those box sides was angled- like a ramp- then I would have had two plane intersections, and my algorithm would have mistakenly divided that the point was outside the box.  (Remember, planes extend infinitely out in two dimensions so they can divide 3-D space in two.  They don't have edges like the sides of a box would)

So, I also need to check each plane intersection point to make sure its in the face.  If it isn't, I need to throw it out.  To do that requires even dryer math (woo-hoo trigonometry!), but I have a solution that I think works.  Almost.  There are two problems that I still need to tackle.

1) My point in face check requires some order be imposed on the vertices.  They need to either be in clockwise or counter clockwise order.  I can either ask the developer working on generating our level geometry to impose this order on his stuff, or I can order them myself at the start of all this math mess.  Ordering them shouldn't be hard (which means I should be able to find out how someone else did it on the Internet), but there is a lot of computations happening already.  I'm beginning to get worried that it'll take too long to check this stuff, and that results in lag.  No one likes lag.

2)I've used some meta-knowledge here.  I know that my second point is outside the figure because I drew the figure up.  In our actual game, I my code won't be able to know any of that and will need to pick a secondary point all by itself.  And remember, all the computer knows about is a bunch of points- all this plane crap is done by my code in the middle of it.  The solution to this sucker is to use what smart people call a bounding sphere, which is the smallest sphere that encloses a set of points.

I just have to grab a point on that sphere (actually, I'll grab a point a little ways outside of the sphere, so I can avoid accidentally using a vertex) and I should be set.  The issue is that getting a sphere from the way the data is saved is going to be a pain.  I need to actually get a unique list of points that make up the object (which, when looking at how the data is saved right now is looking to take a lot of computational time) and then generate the sphere

In conclusion: video games are complicated.  Even ones about ponies.

Another Postless Thursday

I'm a bit too busy with MLPOnline to write up a post.

I'll see about making it up tomorrow, but it really depends on how well I can do vector calculus at 3am.

If anyone tells you that making a game is easy, tell them to fucking suck it.  This shit is hard, but I work with some of the most awesome people on the planet (developer chat can randomly explode into pony references- it's hilariously awesome when it does).

Back to the ponies.

Internet Browsing And You

I sorta forget that other people don't always keep up with the latest trends when it comes to Internet browsing.  Hell, I don't even keep up with all the browsers. If you use Avant you're officially the sad nerdy version of a hipster.  And heaven forbid I run into someone using K-meleon- which is Firefox's shunned Windows-only cousin. 

The point is that there are more ways to view the Internet than the amount of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.  That being said, I'm pretty sure all of you have the same picture when it comes to your choice of Internet browser.  This:

So... that's the kid from Up fighting with a furry?

Now, I'm not here to defend everyone's favorite browser for getting another browser.  If you don't know which one that is, have a hint: the one eating glue.  I use Firefox on my main computer because it has several add-ons I need to function (LeechBlock, FireBug and Chatzilla are the big three I use almost every day).  I've got Chrome on my netbook because it was shiny and new back then and I wanted to try it.

So, why does everyone hate IE?  Well, you probably first started avoiding it when your "computer" friend told you it was the worst thing ever.  This video sums it up fairly well:

It's a two minute video, but the important part is in the last stretch when he rants about IE.  You see, for a long time, Internet Explorer didn't play by the same rules as everyone else when it came to browsing the web.  Writing an application that worked for all browsers sucked because IE did things differently, so you'd have to tack on a lot of extra IE only code.

Then Microsoft pulled the stick out of their ass with IE 8 and 9, and made their browser Document Object Model compliant.  Or DOM compliant to cut down on typing, but don't confuse this with Marcus' gay lover in Gears of War.

Also known as the overcompensation duo

 So, in today's great world, developing for IE is just as easy as Firefox, Chrome, or Opera, as all of these browsers now follow the same rules (DOM).  I hope I just ruined some pretentious asshole's day with that one.  Wait, if that didn't do it, this will: as a programmer, you have no excuse anymore to say that developing for IE sucks.

Well, no one gives a shit about what's easy to write code on.   If that was the case, we'd have converted you people over to Linux a while ago.  And I know that- so I asked my Facebook feed, also known as the most fair distribution of people on the planet, why they thought IE sucked.

Almost everyone that replied complained about IE's speed.  Valid point.  Aside from the fact that IE recently beat Chrome in speed tests, and has historically beaten up on Firefox.  In fact, if speed was the only thing we judged browsers by, Opera would be launching nukes while everyone else was still working on gunpowder in the Civilization series.

What does this mean?  Not much.  IE still sucks at loading CSS style sheets (which is how 90% of graphics are done on the web) and recently has started taking close to 11 seconds to boot from a cold start.  Those are the two things that come to mind when you think about browser speed, so IE still feels slow.

But IE does a damn good job at dealing with multiple tabs (better than Chrome and Firefox in that regard) and running JavaScript (also known as animation on the web).  Is it any better than Firefox or Chrome?  Probably not- but its definitely comparable and not a glue huffing castoff from another age.

Also, (for your enjoyment) here are a few other reasons I got as to why people don't use IE:
"It's not as pretty as Firefox."
"I use Safari because [I'm not allowed to use] non-native browsers."
"BECAUSE IE WAS INVENTED BY THE MAN!!!!"

Thanks to everyone who answered my random Facebook poll.  Please don't flame me to hard.