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Wow, I just re-read that last entry and man was it poorly written. I seriously need to learn how to wean myself off of commas. Sorry. I promise I will learn how to write gooder.

I saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth on Sunday. It was very good — go see it if you can. See it with an open mind — for like any documentary of late, it is heavily biased to one side of a highly controversial topic. However, from the best of my abilities to sift through the science, the bulk of scientific consensus does still point towards global warming being a real manmade phenomenon.

Today I saw a new report by the National Academy of Sciences that shows a multifaceted approach to get good estimates of global temperature for the last 400+ years, and the last few decades are by far the hottest on record, with a clear upward swing since 1900. If you want the executive summary, here’s a press release, distilling the report down to a fifth-grade reading level. Basically, this is a follow-up study done to verify the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has recently been called into question (the graph was generated with some poor mathematics and a flawed combination of mixed data-types).

Usually, when a topic is this controversial, the truth lies somewhere between the extreme viewpoints espoused by fanatics. The worst thing one can do is make up their mind and pick a side in advance. Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what most people are doing. The scientific evidence for this sort of thing (backwards projections and forwards extrapolations) will always be inherently unreliable. If you pick a side in advance, you can always spin the projections your way. If you’re a believer in Global Warming, then even the slightest trend can be seen as solid evidence. If you’re against it, you can always call phooey on the results being suspect, unprovable.

While I’m a tree-hugger, to be sure, I am a Scientist first. Right now, all we can do is carefully weigh the evidence, and collect more of it. There is a large body of fairly solid evidence that mankind is rapidly altering the atmosphere and causing temperatures to rise. Is it as bad as some think it will be? Maybe, but it’s not clear.

I often wonder if there is a large overlap of people that disregard global warming theory with the people that disregard evolution. Understanding the mechanics of both theories requires abstract thinking over extremely large scales of time and space. In their primary arguments, creationists often cite the incomprehensibility of small random changes developing the amazing complexity of living systems. A similar argument is made against global warming theory — that mankind as a whole could possibly make a dent in the atmosphere. Are there just a brain-type or personality-type, (or IQ-level?) where a person simply cannot fathom concepts involving scales far beyond one’s basic surroundings?

How can a mere 6-billion people possibly impact the climate of something so large as the earth? I just can’t see it….

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Well there’s a pretty good reason why my blog has been silent the past few weeks, because I’ve spent them agonizing over one of the most difficult decisions of my life.

About a month ago a recruiter approached me to see if I’d have any interest in working for Full Tilt Poker in Dublin, Ireland. I get approached by head-hunters fairly regularly, usually for positions with Wall-street firms looking for a geek with my background in game theory and machine learning, but for the first time I actually considered this one for more than five minutes. Dublin would be interesting…. a different culture, accessible to all of Europe. Full Tilt Poker is already my favorite among all the competing online poker sites. They are by far the classiest and coolest of the bunch. I casually mentioned the opportunity to Christine and she got very excited about it. After a few phone calls, they flew me down to Los Angeles for a day-long interview. By the end of the day, I had an official offer — a very good one.

The agonizing was to begin. I love my job at Poker Academy. A lot. I love the work, I love the product, I love the people that I work with there. I’m well aware that not many people have the privilege to say that about their job. Leaving that is hard. It’s not just leaving a great job, it’s leaving friends. And it’s not just leaving them, but hurting a little as well. I play a fairly important role at the company, and I know my departure will be a big setback. I’m an extremely loyal person by nature, so allowing myself to be poached is no trivial matter. We also just bought a house in October. The timing is very uncomfortable in that regard.

So for over a week I waffled. In the morning, I’d feel like staying. By evening, I’d be yearning for a European adventure. Nearly everyone I consulted, friends, family, and strangers, all thought we really must go for the adventure and experience, especially while young and relatively unencumbered. Christine and I discussed this aspect a great deal. We are so comfortable here in Edmonton — we love it. We love living in our big cozy house in the cozy Edmonton suburbs. I love my job. I’m comfortable. But comfort can be a trap, and discomfort a hallmark of personal growth. Did we want to do something like this during our lives? Yes! Well if not now, while we’re young, then when. Opportunities like this one don’t appear all that often. The decision to go is easy, but the decision to leave is very painful.

This monday, I decided to throw caution and comfort to the wind and accept the offer. Within two months or so, I’ll be chasing leprechauns and drinking guinness (apparently a pint of guinness has less calories than an average pint of beer).

Next month I’ll be down in LA for a few weeks to train at their current offices, which are all being moved to Dublin around the same time.

We’re going to keep the house we bought in Edmonton and maybe rent it out. We’re planning to be in Ireland for two years, so it seems prudent to hang on to it for now. Real-estate is insane in Dublin, so we won’t even consider anything but renting. Renting is also insane there (we can expect to pay $2000 / month for a furnished apartment), but it is far less insane than real-estate prices.

More on this late. No really. What the hell else am I gonna have to talk about for the next two years?

I have a strange sense of humor¹. I laugh at my own jokes, usually alone. However, I think I’ve captured one of the many laws of humor. I call it the Law of Comical Transcendence. It’s the underlying humor-physics that I use as a basis for a large chunk of my comical exploits. Here’s the theory. Take a bad joke or moderately funny taunt, gesture, or other such silliness. Now keep repeating it. As time goes on, it will get less and less funny to those around you. Eventually to the point where it’s no longer funny anymore — perhaps even annoying. Your friends will start to ask you to stop it. The joke’s old man, give it a rest. It’s not funny anymore. But keep persisting, because comical transcendence is imminent. At some point, the repetition of such stupid humor causes the act to undergo a phase-change. Due to the sheer ridiculousness of the repetition and irrational persistence, ones unwavering loyalty to the rehashing of long-dead material, the joke is reborn. If you were to plot the joke’s funniness over time it would look something like so:

As a concrete example of this device, a few years ago at work, I started answering ‘your mom’ to pretty much any question asked of me. It was moderately funny as a non-sequitor to random questions. “Aaron, is the printer out of toner?’, ‘Your mom’. Gold. Of course, they found it funny the first time or two. After a few months though, I think they were starting to tire of it. But eventually, out of pure persistence, it became ridiculous.

My brother Sam introduced me to an AWESOME bit that I enjoy doing thoroughly, and it plays off of this theme as well. With a drink, sit down in a quiet location near at least one victim. Take a quiet but audible sip of your drink and let out a soft ‘ahhhh’. After a long pause, take another sip, followed by a slightly longer, ‘aahhhh’. Repeat. Build. Progressively sip and moan louder and more obnoxiously each time. Good times.

So next time your joke falls flat, remember with a little effort, you can make it work. Take your flop to the next level. The latest joke theme I’m thinking of putting into heavy rotation is pretending to be homophobic about girls doing girly things. The other day Christine and her Sister were waxing their hands. When they explained this to me, I replied ‘Oh my god that is Soooooo gay. Good thing you guys are girls’. They didn’t find that even remotely funny. To me, it was pure gold. They’ll see. Once I make jokes like that about 5000 more times, they will start to get it. Muhahaha.

Today is a beautiful sunny day. I’ve spent most of the morning out on the patio relaxing and reading (Pierre Burton’s Prisoner’s of the North). All that sunshine is making me so happy I’m just brimming over with giggles today. I must admit, for some reason I just love yard-work (in modest doses of course). I like the excuse to be outdoors and physically active. I don’t care much for having such a huge lawn as we have (for ecological and aesthetic reasons), but I enjoy mowing it for some reason. I’m strangely comfortable with vacuuming too. I guess I like pushing things. I ripped up a bunch of dandelions that had taken over a portion of the yard and fed them into my compost box.

Aaron slowly waking up this morning on patio.

I fixed up a leaky hose valve and got the underground sprinkler system working a little better. I also replaced the old perimeter night lights with wireless solar ones. Now I must patiently wait until dark to see how they look.

Speaking of solar power, I’ve been reading Electronics for Dummies (to brush up on my foundational knowledge of basic electronics) and checking out websites for some ideas for small scale alternative energy production (I want yet another hobby). I want to build a small wind turbine and maybe a few solar panels to play with charging a small battery bank. I cant afford something to go entirely off-grid, but I can start small building things for fun, and see where it goes. It looks like my house currently draws an average of 500 watts (that’s average, so the peak usage is probably as high as 3000 and at night with computers and lights and TVs and such off, it’s much lower). So to go off-grid at the current power consumption (no doubt, I could switch to more power conscious appliances and such), I’d need to be able to generate an average of 500 watts. Solar can only generate when it’s sunny, so to generate an average of 500 watts 24/7, it would need to be a massive array of expensive panels. Better would be a smaller array and a small wind turbine to generate a steady trickle from wind (which is usually quite strong and steady here). Of course, I doubt I could get away with only a small, low turbine here in the middle of suburbia. There are probably stupid bylaws to keep me from putting up a tower, and I hear that they can be a little noisy when they get going.

Solar panels and wind turbines are less expensive than I thought. It turns out a huge chunk of the cost is in the batteries and the inverters (to transform the battery’s DC into household AC, and you need an inverter that can handle your peak wattage. These heavy duty inverters cost several thousand dollars. From shopping around the web, it looks like I could probably get my home mostly off-grid for $10 – $15k (luckily prices are slowly coming down as the more people buy these things). At that cost, If electricity stayed the same price, I would still take 13 years to pay off the initial investment. Still not quite economical. I think I’ll wait a little more for prices to fall before looking at it seriously. I think it would be super cool if I can rig up a fairly cheap system (I found plans for a decent setup costing about $600) to run the computer or house lighting from. Good geeky fun.

We all leave residues of our selves on the earth. Some more than others. We write and create and express our selves. Imagine that you spontaneously combusted this evening. Incinerated down to nothing but a small pile of ashes. The remainder is your residue. I’m not talking about the ashes, but the information about you that is left behind. The things you own. The state and organization of your house. Your bank statements. That report on Peru you wrote in the 7th grade, stuffed in a shoebox in the basement. The books on your bookshelf. The CDs and DVDs you own. Your wardrobe. Your e-mails, your web-bookmarks, your blog posts. Your answering machine message, photographs and home movies. All of these things and more — these residuals reflect who you were.

Now imagine an all-powerful computer — godlike in its intelligence and abilities. If it had full access to your residuals, how much could it infer about you? lets imagine it has a sample of your DNA and has the ability to construct your clone, with a tabula-rasa brain upon which it can attempt to recreate you from your residue. It can interview your friends and family. “What was he like?”, it asks. “What sorts of things did he talk about?”. These memories are also important residuals.

Based on all this information, how close to the original you would your clone be? It knows a great deal about you. It knows all about the intricacies of human psychology, culture, and relationships. While it may seem that there are a near-infinite (I hate that oxymoronic term, but I find my vocabulary lacks an alternative to the colloquial) number of different types of people you could be. We’re all individuals right? But with enough residual information, can this constraint-satsifaction problem be solved? If it cannot be solved, how small can the set of possible people which still contains you, be reduced?

Every little snippet of information about you narrows the search, eliminating massive chunks of possible brains from the set. For most of us, there is a huge discrepancy between the private mental life and what is expressed verbally or in writing. I imagine people reading this blog, who have never met me in person, undergo essentially the same task the super-computer would do, but at a much cruder level. Huge assumptions are made about me, by the reader, in order to fill a frame of reference with which to understand me. Certainly my blog posts are a mere shadow of my self. They are heavily biased, narrow in focus, thoroughly filtered, and potentially misleading. And yet no one else but me could have written this, exactly the way I have with the precise wording and vocabulary choices, and grammatical blunders.

With each and every shred of evidence, more is revealed about my brain structure, my lifetime of experiences, and my personality. While my mental life largely remains undocumented, the clues all lead to a more specified brain, constraining what I could have been thinking internally through each known moment of my life.

There’s a similar problem in Computer Science in the study of compression and information theory. The amount of information in a segment of data is defined as the shortest computer program that can output the data. You can have large chunks of data that contain very little information, because the data is simple, redundant, or predictable. For instance, a book with the numbers One through One Million. This would be a pretty long (and boring book). But there is very little information in this book, as the smallest computer program that can generate this data is very short:

Set VALUE to zero
While VALUE is less than one billion
   Add one to VALUE
   Print VALUE

While finding the shortest computer program to reproduce a data set is not the same problem as reconstructing a human from their residues, there are some similarities. In the compression problem, we are searching for the smallest program to generate the data. In the residue problem, we are looking for the brain that could plausibly be generated given the person’s DNA, and would have generated the same residues under the same conditions.

My question to you: How much do you have to leave behind to constrain the problem enough to be solvable? Does the average modern human leave enough? Do only the most prolific and documented amongst us create enough for a full reconstruction? Is there something none of us can leave as a residue, that is critical to solve the problem?

Ooops, I let some time slip by without posting. It’s of course, been a buys time. My parents flew here for a 5-day visit. We had a fantastic time. The second last day of their visit we drove out to Drayton Valley for the day to visit Christine’s family, and had a big steak bbq. The weather was perfectly sunny, but a tad windy. After dinner we went for a walk around the farm and when we returned Christine’s brother and cousins had an air compressor out on the deck and were blowing up hundreds of balloons. We then proceeded to toss them int othe air off the side of the deck and shoot them with bb-guns, which was great silly fun. The lazy-man’s version of clay pigeon shooting.

This past weekend all the snow was finally melted and it was sunny out. We looked out our windows and saw….a YARD! We moved into the house in October, so we’ve not really seen or used the yard at all since moving in. Vega (our cat) is constantly yowling to be let out to go eat grass and sniff shrubberies, so I got her a little plaid collar with her name and address on it and am tentatively allowing her to become an outdoor cat.

Just prior to moving we had bought a little baby evergreen (about 1 foot tall) that we had on our balcony. It wasn’t faring too well when we moved and the ground was frozen so I just left it out by the backyard shed for the winter. It blew over in high winds and spent all winter lying on it’s side in a tiny pot. I saw it there and surprisingly still looks alive. So I planted it in the back yard. We named it ‘Bean’ (Christine’s been reading a lot of Orson Scott Card books lately). Christine ripped up the front garden, and I went out and bought a lawnmower. It tooks me about 30 minutes to mow the lawn. Not a bad work-out. I also bought a big composter and we’ve started composting out kitchen and yard waste. I’m such a tree-hugger.

When my dad was here we discussed the possibility of getting cameras and doing video-conferencing on our laptops, instead of making long-distance phone calls. When he got back, he bought two iSight cameras, and sent me one. It arrived yesterday and we tried out a long call using iChat. It worked GREAT. It looks so cool full-screen. Finally, a good video phone! Where’s my flying car?

The last few weeks have been a trying time for maintaining a good level of caloric restriction. I’ve managed to stay lightly CR’d, but just barely. I’d like to get back to my 20% level, but I think now that I have very little body fat to chew through, it will take a little more focus to stay the course. I think I need to find ways to get more protein early in the day, because I’ve been getting way to hungry in the late afternoon.

I’ve gotten quite good at putting together quotidian breakfasts and lunches. My typical breakfast is usually 300 calories, usually either my blueberry bananna smoothy, or hot oatmeal with (raisins, dried cranberries, or fresh blueberries), with a small sprinkle of brown sugar.

My lunches are usually 2 cups of mixed frozen veggies (brussels sprouts, peas, corn, carrots, green beans, brocolli, cauliflower) with a teaspoon of olive oil and crushed chili peppers, cottage cheese, yogourt, mega muffins, and a peice of fresh fruit.

I think I must need to work in some more protein into the lunch and breakfast to reduce afternoon hunger. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’ll have to resort to boosting will-power (no problem for me, as I’m quite strong willed, but lazy).