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Nov 17 / Aaron

Hot Topic

I was hoping my innocent little remark about being an Atheist would not lead to a big comment-fest. To be honest, It exhausts me to no end the misunderstandings and confusions and loaded-terms that always get re-hashed any time this topic is invoked.

I will try and briefly contribute my take on things, but I don’t have time or desire to delve in too deeply. I’ve spent this week fighting fires at work, and tomorrow at 6am, we’re getting up to hop a flight over to London for three days. I’ll be back on Tuesday, hopefully with some good pictures and a few interesting anecdotes.

Besides being strapped for time and energy to discuss, I also find it is usually pointless. Has an internet debate on theology *ever* changed someone’s mind? Now that I would find hard to believe. Also, Im not going to delude myself that I’m going to contribute anything new or more eloquently worded to the general debate-at-large. Others have more lucidly espoused my viewpoints in the past.

By definition, a good scientist (or any rational person) holds beliefs that are always open to revision based on evidence and rationalized inferences. The whole freaking point is to not hold a unwavering dogmatic belief system. To expressly not have faith. When a true scientist expresses a belief about something, it should not be taken as sloppy, limiting, or hypocritical. But constantly qualifying every belief statement with epistemological caveats gets really tiring and cumbersome. When I say I believe something, can we get past the sophomoric arguments and take the rational caveats as an unstated given?

Another common misrepresentation that humans seem to love making is to incorrectly categorize things down to black-and-white, yes-and-no, coin-flip reasoning. It’s not a 50-50 proposition that the flying spaghetti monster exists. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that it exists. I can’t say it doesn’t, but it’s sure silly to go around pretending it does.

I’m far more comfortable being agnostic towards first-causes than I am about bronze-age mythologies (i.e. most of the popular monotheistic religions). Like the turtles-all-the-way-down comment acknowledges, invoking a God as a creator of the universe is just stacking yet another turtle under our own. It gives no added value or explanatory power, and in fact begs even more questions than it purports to answer.

All that ranting aside, remember: peace, respect, and tolerance are concepts I hope we can all agree on.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Nov 12 / Aaron

The Accelerando Palm Delusion Closet

If you have a good memory, you may recall I really disliked the last book I read by Charles Stross, Singularity Sky. I thought it was trash. I didn’t like the writing or the plot or the characters. I suffered through it and reached the end and was angry I bothered.

So it was with great trepidation that I came to find myself reading another Stross novel, Accelerando. The only reason I dared pick it up was that (a) it came endorsed by J, a good predictor of books I’ll like, and (b) I was able to download the book for free and read it on my palm pilot.

I still don’t like the writing style much, but the book was good. It follows the mad-house that is the technological singularity (‘Rapture of the Nerds’), and dishes out oodles of future-shocked trans-human identity crisis. My favorite quote: “Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that’s more real than we are?”. Good stuff.

Ok, I realize I give shitty book reviews that are a little sparse on details. I just don’t like spoiling things. I’m more of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down reviewer. So thumbs-up, ok?

I was glad to get it in eBook form for my old palm-pilot. It makes sense to not lug around a suitcase full of paper-backs when moving across the Atlantic. Of course, I love having physical books and have huge shelves full of books back at the house. I get emotionally attached to the good books I’ve read. On the flip-side, the palm is a decent screen for reading books, it slips easily in my pocket, and can carry hundreds of books. The battery life is fine (no complaints here). In fact, I’ve taken my palm on a few backpacking trips to have a book to read at night in the tent. Not only does it reduce the weight I would normally carry, but it’s a backlit display so I don’t even need a flashlight to read in the dark. One of the bigger drawbacks is that there is still a limited selection, and most of the eBooks out there are encumbered with awful DRM.
Sony’s got a new dedicated eBook reader on the market. It’s a little pricey, but I can’t wait to try one out in person. It uses ePaper so instead of being backlit like a PDA, it actually changes the page with eInk that requires no charge once set. You use reflective lighting to read, so it is more like reading a normal book, and is easier on the eyes. Because it only requires a charge to change the page, the battery life is even better than a conventional PDA.
Now I’m back to reading in ink-on-dead-tree-pulp format. I was passing by a book store the other day and picked up Dawkin’s new diatribe The God Delusion. I’m just in the beginning, where he’s provided some evidence that being an Atheist is even more of a cultural taboo than being a Homosexual, and he’s urging Atheists to ‘come-out’ and help make it socially acceptable.

Well folks, surprise! I am a raging Atheist. I know it’s difficult for people to find out this way, but I hope that in time you will all come to accept it. Ahhhh, it feels so good to be out of the closet (it was full of smelly scientists in there).

Yertle the Turtle
Nov 5 / Aaron

A Typical Weekend Mish-Mash

To my fans (family), I apologize for going over a whole week without posting. It was just one of those weeks, yah know. Work all day, then a few precious hours to unwind before bed, and I don’t want to spend them looking at a screen.

A lot has happened in that time … Last Monday (An Irish national Holiday weekend for halloween) we took a tour out to see Newgrange, a Megalithic Passage Tomb that is over 5000 years old — older than the Egyptian Pyramids. The doorway aligns so that once a year, during the dawn of each winter solstice, sunlight penetrates the darkness and illuminates the internal chamber. Otherwise, it is pitch dark inside. There are old megalithic ruins lying scattered all over Ireland. A co-worker shared with me a website, http://www.megalithomania.com/ with a database of all of the known sites, and GPS coordinates. Once I get my GPS I just might have to do some exploring and find some. It sounds more fun than geocaching…

Christine by a marker stone at newgrange

In the news, we saw several interesting announcements and articles this week. The New York Times had a front pager on Calorie Restriction. I saw another mouse study with more evidence on CR’s preventative effects for Alzheimer’s Disease. As well, two more mouse studies bore results linking resveratrol and lowered body temperatures to longer lifespans. Resveratrol is found in red wine, and is linked to the same genetic pathways involved in the Caloric Restriction effect (sirtuins).

Don’t go crazy with the red wine just yet though. The dosage of resveratrol in a glass of wine is miniscule. Higher doses can be ordered in expensive pill forms, but the optimal dosage and long term safety in humans is as of yet undetermined. I suspect it will be a compound we’ll all be popping each morning in 5 or 10 years time, but it’s too early to tell.

I ate fairly well today with 1580 calories. I normally eat more than that, but Friday night Christine & I had a romantic gourmet dinner with a bottle of wine, so there was a caloric imbalance to correct. I did some grocery shopping and found what is considered Cottage Cheese. It’s nothing at all like the Cottage Cheese I’m used to. It’s far more sour and not nearly as chunky. It is not really all that tasty. I used to have 100g of cottage cheese as part of my quotidian lunches, as it’s a decent source of light protein along with a modest dose of B12 and calcium.

I worked a wee bit on CRON-o-Meter this weekend. It still doesn’t give DRI recommendations for calories or protein/carbs/fats. The reason I never hooked those up in the first place was that you need to know the person’s weight and activity level in addition to the gender, age, and height. I’ve been adding the UI to the user preferences so that it will be able to give full DRIs in the next version. Also, I will add a simple UI to pick your desired Protein:Carb:Fat ratios and have it calculate the appropriate targets based on your calorie setting.

And I think after getting this posted I’m going to do some reading. Proper reading. I’ve been so busy that I’m still reading the same novel I was reading on the plane trip to Dublin 2 months ago (Accelerando by Charles Stross). That’s outrageously slow for me. I normally chew through books, but I’ve just been too busy.

Oct 29 / Aaron

The Fog of Moher

Saturday morning Christine, myself, and a friend from work got up dark and early to catch a taxi at 6:15 am to Hueston Station, Dublin, where we started a rail-tour into the West of Ireland. Two trains, and a coach ride, and 7 hours later we arrived at the stunning, world renowned Cliffs of Moher. Here they are in all their majestic glory, towering ominously over the Atlantic:

Cliffs of Moher

Ok, so we got p0wn3d by Irish weather. But we did get a few other stops, including the Bunratty catle which was a fun stop, and many small west coast towns, and the train ride was comfortable. We happily boozed the three hours back to Dublin.

Bunratty CastleSpanish Room in Bunratty CastleDoors were smaller back thenCute Wife by AtlanticCliffs of Moher in Fog

Oct 22 / Aaron

CRON-o-Meter 0.4.0

I had some time today to poop out a minor update to the CRON-o-Meter:

What’s new in 0.4.0?

  • Updated CRDB with some new foods.
  • Added resting pulse and blood sugar to Biomarker tracking
  • Now warns you if you are adding a food to a past or future day
  • Report window can display averages from a range of days
Oct 17 / Aaron

My Kingdom for a MegaMuffin

Our apartment does not have an oven. This means no MegaMuffins. I’m also not sure I could find all the regular ingredients here in Dublin. I’ve found several small nutrition / supplement stores, so I know where to find some of the ingredients. What I need to do is come up with a modified recipe with the ingredients I *can* find and figure out some way to make them using the microwave. I can imagine the mess now.

While I generally consider the gigantic super-mega-everything stores a blight upon North American style cities, it’s a love-hate relationship now. You miss them when they are gone. Dublin is full of small, charming shops (although things are rapidly changing), but consequently it can be difficult to run all over the city to scrounge together the items on your shopping list.

While I’m on the topic of differences, I’ve noticed a refreshing lack of billboard advertising (again, it’s sadly evident that it won’t be long before it converges to the North American state). In American cities, it can seem that every square inch of property has some sort of logo or advertisement on it. The streets and sides of buildings are lined with posters and billboards. The lack of mental pollution is refreshing. I suspect there are laws against billboards because I’ve seen some clever / slimy billboard methods employed on busy Friday nights in the city center. For instance, I’ve seen SMART cars towing billboard trailers that park and idle in available parking spots downtown. It’s awful, becuase they take up prime parking spaces, in busy parts of town. But technically, they are not breaking any laws. Grrr. I’ve also seen them project booze advertisements onto the sides of buildings at night, from projectors mounted from the backs of pickup trucks. You just can’t escape it.

Oct 15 / Aaron

Uhg.

I celebrated my one-month mark in Dublin by spending almost all day yesterday playing Oblivion. Bah, what a waste. But hey, I’m level 33 now!

I noticed that CRON-o-Meter downloads have really picked up. From web logs, I can see a rough estimate of how many people launch the software per day and have it set to ‘check for updates’ which queries my web server. It looks like there must be several hundred regular users out there! Wowzahs. I feel bad that I haven’t had the time or energy to work on version 0.4. But did I mention I’m at level 33 in Oblivion?

Bush signed a law on Friday making online gaming kind of illegal in the USA. The biggest online poker site, Party Poker, made the decision to avoid legal risks and drop all American players from their site (probably three quarters of their customer-base). Full Tilt Poker has decided to stay and fight the bill, and continue business as usual. this means we’re expecting a tidal wave of American poker refugees. This is a wild and crazy time to be working in the online poker industry.

Oct 11 / Aaron

Children of Men

Here in Dublin, most of the movies out in theaters are flicks that were released in North America two months ago. On the flip side, we went to see a movie released here first, which hasn’t opened in North America yet. Children of Men was a stunning film. It was an extremely intense experience. I left the theatre feeling very disoriented, which is always a good sign that you have had a movie experience, not merely watched a show. It’s a sci-fi film taking place in a near future dystopia where a virus has rendered all of humanity infertile. The youngest person on the planet is 18 and most of the world has fallen into absolute war and chaos. Only England has soldiered on and managed to maintain civilized society — by closing the borders and deporting all immigrants of course. I don’t really want to spoil anything, but the film making is fantastic, with some amazing single-shot action sequences through urban warfare reminiscent of the Normandy beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan. Go see it when it hits theaters.

Oct 7 / Aaron

This is a test of the emergency public blogcast system.

I’m abandoning Nucleus for WordPress. Chaos shall ensue for some while as I port things over and re-doify things in the new system. Any wordpress users out there recommend some good plug-ins, especially one that can do a slideshow widget?

Oct 3 / Aaron

CR comments!

Wow, an actual discussion broke out in the CR post down below! Four whole comments! For the record, my current take on CR is one of cautious optimism. I’m highly skeptical that hard-core CR will provide big benefits in Humans. I am quite convinced that moderate CR is generally healthy, and will provide a lot of basic benefits for a small trade-off. I’m all about the science. If convincing evidence shows up on my doorstep tomorrow that moderate CR is harmful or has no significant benefit, then I’d probably stop at Burger King on the way to work. I don’t expect CR to yield a large extension to maximum human lifespan, but I do expect following a healthy CR lifestyle should keep me in great shape to benefit from future medical science developments mid-century. If moderate CR slows down aging, heart disease, cancer rates, diabetes, and dementia even slightly, then I find it a worthy sacrifice.

Personally, I’ve actually enjoyed the sacrifice of my previous ‘hollow-leg’ eating habits — I feel more self-possessed this way. I am no longer subject to the whims of the flesh. It’s a hell of a lot easier than being a Tibetan Monk, but I think the lifestyle shares some of the same principles of the monastic existence. It is a more environmentally conscious existence. Halting your out-of-control consumption of food spills over into other areas of life-as-consumer.

I am FAR healthier today than I was pre-CR. I’m not overweight, my blood pressure is out of the danger zone that it used to be in, and my doctor couldn’t believe how good my cholesterol levels were. I know I’m getting all my RDAs of vitamins and minerals. I have more energy and feel more vitality than I used to. I can hike up a mountain in half the time it used to take me, and not feel nearly as winded.

Lately, I’m getting roughly 1900 cals a day, which is only 10% CR (using Tony Zamora’s CR Calculator). 1900 calories is actually a decent amount of food. When I started CR I ate 1500, which was too hardcore for me to sustain. I lost weight too quickly at that level and going to 1800 I think is perfect for me. CR certainly is not for everyone. It helps if you already love vegetables 🙂